EP 121: Ayurvedic Wisdom: Nourishing Body and Mind | Dr. John Douillard

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. I'm your host, Fleet Mole, and I'm really happy today to share with you a conversation I had with Dr. John Douillard who shares his wisdom on living in sync and harmony with the seasons and life's natural cycles. Dr. Douillard is an amazing Ayurvedic physician who's been incredibly helpful to me personally. And in this podcast we talk about the three body types according to Ayurveda and the ideal diet for each one. We talk about the three season diet, how to really adjust our diet to be in season with the cycles of the year and the types of food that are available to us normally. And about the fact that our physiology and our gut, our biome is really set up to have the, the, the right bugs and the right enzymes and so forth to digest the food that's in season. So when we're eating out of season, we get our body all out of whack. So eating local, not only locally, but eating in season. His three season diet. We'll also talk about why processed foods can be so damaging to our, our health and why they really confuse our digestive process. So I don't know of anybody that has a deeper understanding of the human body from both a Western and Eastern perspective than Dr. John Douillard. So I know you're really going to enjoy this. You're going to learn a lot. So please do enjoy.

How are you, Dr. John?

I'm great. Good to be here. Thank you.

And we're here on this day focused on health and well being and, and couldn't have a more perfect guest to be interviewing. So I want to tell our audience just a little bit about you and then we'll jump right into the conversation. So Dr. John Duyard, DCCAP. So a doctor of chiropractory and a certified Ayurvedic practitioner, is globally recognized leader in the fields of natural health, Ayurveda and sports medicine. He's the creator of Lifespa.com, the leading Ayurvedic health and wellness resource center on the web. With 10 million views on YouTube and more than 130,000 newsletter subscribers, LifeSpa.com is evolving the way Ayurveda is understood around the world with thousands of articles and videos joining ancient wisdom with modern Science. John is the former director of player development for the New Jersey Nets NBA team, author of seven health books, including his newest Amazon bestseller, Eat Wheat, a Repeat guest on Dr. Oz, and newly released Yoga Journal video course Ayurveda 2001 on Ayurvedic psychology. He directs the Lifestyle Ayurvedic Clinic and the 2013 Holistic Wellness, which was the 2013 Holistic Wellness center of the Year in Boulder, Colorado. And I'm sure there are many more accolades. And do you have a more recent book than the one I just mentioned?

No, it reads the most recent.

Yeah, I remember that was pretty controversial when it came out for me. I don't know how it played out in the field because we're all, must all be gluten intolerant. We all got to get gluten free. And then you're saying, no, we're supposed to be able to digest gluten.

Yeah, I mean, it was contrarian for sure. And that was the whole point. I felt like we were going down such a crazy road telling people that weed is the cause of, you know, all their problems when we've been eating it for three and a half million years. So no one was looking at the upstream cause of that, which is a broken down digestive system, wasn't allowed to eat, break down the gluten properly. And all that undigested protein and fat, for that matter, ends up in your gut, ends up in your lymph and creates all these lymphy things like brain fog, skin reactions, bloating, food comas, all this stuff, which are so clearly, from the ayurvedic perspective, a digestive issue, not a wheat issue. So it was, I thought, important to write that book and let people, you know, because here's the problem, Fleet. If you just say, oh, I don't eat wheat and I feel so much better. Well, all you've done is kick the real problem down the road. You've never really solved the problem. So then, you know, now all of a sudden you realize that your intestinal integrity, your respiratory skin lining are intimately important for your immune response. And so if you can't digest wheat and dairy and nuts and seeds and grains, legumes and lectins, you probably have an underlying digestive problem that's making the intestinal lining your first protective barrier for immunity is broken down and you kick a can down the road. And then now all of a sudden we have Covid and people are having all these problems with their immune system. It starts in the, in the intestinal Skin and the respiratory skin. So we can't just continue to pretend like the problems, like I stop eating weed, my problems are solved. And that's why I wrote the book is give people strategies to troubleshoot their digestion and fix the real problem and not be, you know, under the weather when something comes around like Covid or a virus or the latest next infection.

Well, that's great. And we're going to go deep into all that. I still actually haven't figured out how to eat bread and not gain weight. So I'm not eating bread not because of the gluten, but just because it seems like when I eat bread I gain more weight. But there's probably underlying causes to that and something I'm kicking down the road, I'm sure.

Yeah, well, it's supposed to make you gain weight. That's why you get harvest. That's why it's harvested in the fall before winter. Because everything, the fruit and the grains are harvested at a time of year where we want to prepare our body for a long winter for insulation and stored reserve fuel. The enzyme to help digest starch called amylase, is circadian. It increases in your body and mind in the fall when we actually digest or harvest wheat, and decreases in the spring where you can't find any wheat if you wanted to because there's no grains harvested at that point in time. So it's a beautiful thing to sort of look at, oh wow, I should be more carb dominant in the fall and you know, kind of carb sparing in the, in the, in the spring. And our microbes change dramatically from one season to the next, showing that we should digest fat and fiber in the, in the spring and carbs in the summer. Our bugs change dramatically that way. And when you eat food from the ground organically in season, you're actually in helping to inoculate your bugs at the right time of the year to give you immunity in the winter and decongestion in the spring and help dissipate heat in the summer. These are all, this is all emerging science. It's just beginning to come out now. But it's something that Ayurveda talked about thousands of years ago, which is why, you know, I love the idea that this ancient wisdom is so profound and they have so much science to back it up. And that's why I think people, I think why it's worth looking at. When you have something that's been around for thousands of years and now we have science to prove it, we should at least look at that, you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of the things I love about your work, is your integration of the ancient sciences and modern science. And I think you're really just a leader in that integration. And, you know, essentially what you're pointing to is the whole movement around eating local and eating seasonal. And, you know, we moved away from that, think we can have whatever we want any time of year, eating food from all over the world. And this idea of moving back to being more in touch with the cycles of the seasons, the cycles within our own body seems to be really at the heart of Ayurveda. And this idea of three different body types. There isn't a one size fits all diet for anyone. So could you tell us a little bit about just a little background of some of the basic principles of Ayurveda? I know it's a big subject, but if you could just kind of give us a thumbnail sketch and maybe focus a little bit on those three body types and what that means.

Yeah, you know, the beautiful thing about Ayurveda, it's the study of nature, right? So you're looking at winter, which is cold and dry, right. We all know that. So there's people who are constantly cold and constantly dry. Their intestinal tract dries out, their joints dry out. And that's vata, which means air, which is predominant in the winter. The wind blows and it dries everything out. So we have people who have more of those winter properties constitutionally, and they're called the vata body type, more winter body type. And then we have people who are more like summer, called pitta, who are hot and aggressive and competitive and driven. And they don't wear jackets or coats and they throw off the covers and they have this driven constitution. But they also tend to be hot and can inflame. And they're called pitta and they have more summer in their natural body type. So the idea is that if you're a hot summer body type pitta, and you're eating spicy food and wine and cheese and beer and all these things that are fermented with lactic acid fermentation, so that heats things up. You end up having a hot body type, eating hot things in a hot season, and you can overheat and inflame. And that's the message. It's like, oh, in the summertime, nature doesn't give you those things. You get, you get, if you think about it yet, you know, fruits and vegetables which are cooling for the body, right. In the springtime, it's a very rainy, muddy allergy. C call it kapha, which means cough to can be congested. And if you're a kapha body type, heavier set, easier going, have more earth and water and phlegm is chic tendencies and tends to gain weight more. You tend to be a little bit more on the heavier, lethargic side, more on the congested side. Easily gain weight if you're eating, you know, if you're a kapha spring body type in the kapha season, eating Mac and cheese and pizza, which doesn't exist in nature in the spring, you don't get any of those grains at that time. So now you're aggravating or overwhelming or stacking kapha. So nature says, I got this covered. I'm going to give you foods in season to antidote kapha. So think about what's harvested in the spring in kapha season, allergy season, you know, sprouts and some berries and some roots. All the austere, astringent, detoxifying foods are available. We fast during that time of the year. That's all the, you know, the religious fast at that time in nature. You're sort of fasting because you're waiting for the food to come out of the ground and it's the end of winter and the beginning of spring and you're, you're barely making it. And that's how humans did it for, you know, for thousands of years, millions of years, really. They barely made it in the spring. So we have these three body types. Bata, pitta, kapha, winter, summer and spring. And nature gives us the antidote to keep us in sync in rhythm and circadian rhythm, really, by giving us, you know, warm sweets and nuts and nuts and seeds in the winter, high protein, high fat in the winter, a very austere diet in the spring and a very high carb. Carb carbohydrate diet in the summertime. And we should change dramatically from one season to the next because like we said, the bugs in your gut change. They're supposed to change, but we eat the same processed foods with them preserved, that has no bugs in it. So we don't inoculate our system the way we should. And what happens is the microbiome starts to become less and less diverse and very, very vulnerable and very fragile because it loses all of its diversity. And nature had a way of making sure we had not only diversity, lots of different kinds of bugs. We had this ability to change dramatically to antidote the extreme of each season. Cold and immunity in the winter and heat in the summer and congestion in the spring.

Wow, that's fascinating. And so from what you're saying, it sounds like these religious traditions of fasting, like Ramadan, the Lenten season, may have pre liturgical or pre theological roots in human beings. It's understanding that's a good time of year to fast.

And part of that was because, you know, there was no food to eat. So people would, you know, we'd pray, hopefully pray for food.

Right. So it makes sense too. Yeah.

And when you do fast, you burn fat, which is stable fuel, which is way more spiritual than the highs and lows of sugar. So it all made perfect sense.

And you do that Colorado cleanse in the springtime, right? Kind of. You organize a group cohort that goes through that.

We do that. Yeah. Spring and fall. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So here we are in this pandemic, and we're all concerned or need to be concerned about our immune system and our immune response. So you've already been kind of pointing to that. Shifting our lifestyle to be more in tune with the earth and with the seasons and these cycles would probably help a lot. But is there any other directions you would point us in in terms of we're in the world of biohacking today. So what's the shortest, quickest route to boosting our immune system to. To really protect ourselves from COVID 19?

Well, there's a couple. You know, the big biohack is your circadian clock. You want to make sure that you turn on and off your biological clocks in every cell of your body at the right time. And that has to do with two substances, vitamin D. The sun we should have ample amounts of. Because your immune system is dependent on a storage of vitamin D, the killer T cells. In one study don't even engage in an immune fight or an immune battle unless they have 100% full tank of gas of vitamin D. Half a tank, three quarters a tank, they didn't engage. So vitamin D is critical, and that's the daytime vitamin. You have the sun and you want to take your vitamin D in the morning with the sunshine, start your day that way. Then in the evening, we have the circadian molecule called melatonin. Not a hormone, it's a molecule because it doesn't suppress the natural production of your own. It's in many, many foods. I've written many articles about the food sources. You can get it or you can take what I like to call low dose melatonin. Very, very small amount has been shown to be as effective as a High amount. But melatonin has been proven. I mean, there's very few things that have been proven to fight against Covid, and melatonin is one of them, particularly even COVID 19. It's a powerful antiviral agent. So you take a little melatonin at night, it doesn't help. Yes, it's for sleep, but the reason I prescribe it is to help so people get to sleep so then the janitors can come and do their job. Detox, rebuild, repair. And so melatonin is in charge of the nighttime rebuild and restore gets ready for the next day. So that's an important piece of the puzzle to know about. And I've written a lot about the science there. The other thing is, we walk around all day long talking to people, not these days, but historically, eating different things, exposing our airways to many, many different viruses and bacteria. Then you go to sleep at night. And when you go to sleep, traditional cultures in India and Asian Native Americans, they all train their kids and their people to close their mouths when they go to sleep at night. And they breathe through their nose at night. Well, there's a gas right here in the paranasal sinuses called nitric oxide. Won the Nobel Prize in 1998 as the Panacea molecule. It cures everything. Turns out that this gas is the most powerful antiviral gas. So if you're lying in bed after a long day of exposing yourself to all kinds of bugs, your respiratory tract exposure, and you open up your mouth, you're just. You make zero nitric oxide gas. If you close your mouth when you breathe, you produce 100% nitric gas, nitric oxide gas that's bathing your whole respiratory tract for 8 to 9 hours solid doing an antiviral repair, detox, and rejuvenation. So nature had a way to make sure we didn't get infected, right? But you start breaking the rules, snoring with your mouth wide open, and all this stuff, big bad things begin to happen. So those are some really simple things. And then there's the big piece in the ayurvedic world, like we mentioned, is the integrity of the intestinal respiratory skin. Recent research fleet has shown that the gut brain relationship. Gut, brain, brain, gut relationship is actually very much alive in the respiratory tract, too. There's a respiratory tract brain relationship, vice versa, and a respiratory gut microbiome relationship that are intimate. You screw up your gut, you screw up your respiratory bugs, screw up your respiratory bugs, screw up your gut. They all work together in this incredible kind of in concert way. So it's very important that the skin, the lining, your barriers, your skin on the outside important, but the skin on the inside more important. And if they're not happy and healthy, and they're like the three little bears, are they too dry or too wet, too constipated or too loose in your stools, your respiratory tract is too dry, so you cough or you produce too much phlegm. Those mucous membranes have to be perfect. And if they're not perfect, you have an opportunistic environment for bacteria and viruses to infiltrate. So Ayurveda had all kinds of ways to do it. Herbs like neem actually protect the viruses from implanting themselves into the lining of your respiratory and intestinal tract.

Powerfully. So turmeric does the same thing. Ashwagandha and triphala, herbs that act as immunomodulators to make sure that your immune response isn't overzealous or out of balance, where you have a cytokine response. And these are all studies done on these herbs which are really, really powerful. So when you think about Ayurveda, you should think that, which is why, as we talked about was so important, 85% of all disease comes from a weak digestion. Weak digestion affect and cause weak respiratory immunity as well as gut immunity, which is 70% of your immune response. You take care of those babies. You. You got the lion's share of immune response right there. And because you know you can. You can deliver your melatonin from the foods you eat, you can get the vitamin D more efficiently and deliver it from your liver. Everything works better when your digestion is working good. So I think that's the key piece of the puzzle. And the key piece of digestion is the integrity of the intestinal skin, aligning the epithelium. That's not right. You got to get it right. And that's done by taking care of the intestinal lining. And how is that done? Again, historically, the change of the food, the change of the microbial guard, the change of the intestinal response to the environment.

So one of the things that I'm sure our audience is already picking up on this, that I really loved about your work, is the way you integrate the ancient sciences, Ayurveda, and other traditions with modern science. And I've watched so many of your videos, and I don't think I ever met anyone that had such an encyclopedic, deep knowledge of the human body and how it all works together.

At the same time. You know, there are so many different systems out there and approaches. I remember when I was young, living down in South America. I was macrobiotic for a while and then I was doing the food combining. I think, is it fit for life or something like that model for a while. And there's all these different models and sometimes they're very contradictory. What they say is good for you or not good for you. There are even certain vegetables. They never eat those vegetables and somebody else does eat those vegetables, you know. And so how do you kind of make sense? How do you. What guides your integration so that you're, you know, you.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, I think, you know, so much as you said, you know, if I can find some ancient wisdom and some modern science and blend them, I feel pretty safe in that department. There's a lot of extremes out there. Those bestselling diets really just give a symptomatic relief for the, for what the previous diet left us craving, right? So they don't really solve the real problem. They just swing the pendulum the other way and you feel good for a while and they go, this is not working. Then you swing it back with another extreme diet. So, and I think what I also love, I just look at the ancient cultures and the centenarian, centenarian cultures around the planet that we live on today. What do they eat? Well, they eat a diet that's about 10% animal protein and they eat a lot of vegetables, a lot of fiber, you know, very little meat, but they eat some. And I think if you're going to be a vegan or vegetarian, you got to be careful. You probably do need to supplement with B12, Omega 3s, you know, some of the minerals, iron.

And other things, vitamin D for example, as well, where a little bit of animal protein, which is sort of the Ayurvedic diet, they had a very small amount of animal protein. Most of it was dairy and cow. But you still get the omega 3s and you get your vitamin D and your vitamin K2. All these things happen from that little bit of dairy that you get.

And so I think that's the diet that I think could be a, you know, a majority 90% plant based diet with 10% animal protein. Make sure you eat no.

Processed or refined food. And the key ingredient there is the cooked vegetable oils that they use to preserve foods, the bleach, boiled deodorized canola, safflower, sunflower oils, any oil really for that matter. You got to be careful when you put it in the oven, it can go rancid and become hard to digest. And you got to remember, you put oil in a loaf of bread. Loaf of bread never gets hard. And you and I were kids. Bread got hard in the day, and that's why we had bakeries there. And every. Every little village had a bakery, right? And you put oil in that bread. Now, the bread never gets hard. Why? Because the bugs eat oil. The microbes on the counter eat oil, but they don't eat oil in that bread because it's highly processed. So now the bread stays squishy forever. You take that bread and put inside of you the oil that was in that bread that the bugs inside of your gut should eat. They don't want to eat that oil either, because it's highly processed. They don't even recognize it as food. So where do the indigestible oils go directly? They don't pass go. They don't get their 200 bucks. They go right to your liver. And your liver goes, I don't know what to do with all this stuff. It's so congesting. We don't know how to process this. So it creates something called bile sludge, which is a medical term the number one elective abdominal surgery in America today, getting your gallbladder removed. And when you look at the function of your liver and gallbladder, it's the key kingpin for digestive strength. Bile makes you poop. No bile, no bowel movements. Bile is a buffer for the acid in your stomach. No bile flow, no acid in your stomach, or the acid stays in your stomach and gives you heartburn. So if you're trying to eat wheat or grains or nuts or seeds or hard to digest things that give you allergies and you don't have a strong stomach acid, well, that's one of your protective barriers for. Against. For immune response. For an immune response. So. So when you look at what we did back in the 60s when they said cholesterol is bad, and here's these new highly processed polyunsaturated fatty acids that are going to lower your cholesterol, which they did, but they raised heart disease. That was a problem. And then we ended up eating, putting that in everything. And now we have more heart disease than we ever had before, and we're still eating those oils, thinking they're good. The only oil that I recommend that people eat is a high quality olive oil that you can cook with, believe it or not. You can put it on everything. You can use it any way you want. I did a podcast with a olive oil researcher from Brown University and her research was just amazing. Now, Ayurveda, we use ghee, it's true, but it's a saturated fat. And if you have heart issues and cholesterol issues, you have to be careful about that. So the only one that gives you, across the board, you know, green card, goes the olive oil. And if you're taking saturated fats, which is a high concentrated fuel with a bunch of processed bread and bakery goods and sweets and things, which are also fuel, you just have way too much fuel. Right. So you have to be careful when you're on a diet. If you're on a keto diet, well, you have no carbs, so you've taken, you're only on one of the fuels. If you're on a high carb, low fat diet, you're only getting one of the fuels. That's okay. A lot of people live in the middle. They get their sweets and their carbs and they get their fats and their meat. And, and, and that's just a terrible place to be. You got to choose one or let nature do it for you and give you the fats in this in the winter and the carbs in the summer. And that's how we were, that's how we got here.

Yeah, I probably dated myself talking about macrobiotic and fit for life because today we'd be talking about paleo diet or keto diet and, and all of that. And I've been kind of experimenting with all those. I don't know with how much wisdom, but I've always. I mean, it's just a tremendous. I mean, what I feel from you, Dr. John, is this common sense approach. You really look at the science, both the ancient science and the modern science, and just take kind of a common sense approach. And it really does make a lot of sense. So maybe you could just spell one myth for me around oils, because I had heard that, that olive oil, obviously great olive oil is great and good quality olive oil, but cooking with it can be problematic at heat. And I think in Sicily and some parts of Italy, they tend to cook food and then add olive oil at the end. But. And I've heard that it's better if you're going to cook, cook with something like grapeseed oil or something like that. It handles the high temperature better. So is that accurate or is that.

I think grapeseed oil is good. You know, A study at UC Davis showed that 82% of all the olive oil on the market was adulterated. So in the early days, I'm talking About in the last decade or two, all the research on olive oil was, hey, go down and grab 3 gallons of olive oil from the grocery store and we're going to do some research on it. Well, that was most likely adulterated. 82% of it was adulterated. So they weren't doing research on olive oil. They were doing research on olive oil mixed with sunflower oil, which was highly processed. So now re studies are emerging and they've come out that show that when you actually use real olive oil for your studies, that it actually is incredibly tolerant to heat. As so many antioxidants, it actually delivers antioxidant benefits. If you're eating meat, for example, actually delivers and helps to antidote some of the acrylamonides and all the kind of the caramelizing of the sugars in the meat that actually cause a lot of problems. Anyway, olive oil helps to neutralize many of these things when you even cook. So you can cook with it, bake with it. Sort of amazing. And you know, so I really like that oil because not only is it good in heat, but it lowers your cholesterol, lowers your LDL, lowers your triglycerides, increases your HDLs, it helps you lose weight. It has all these well proven scientific benefits, which makes it really hard to ignore the other ones. Yeah, it's good for heat, but do we have any signs that it's going to lower my LDLs or increase my or we don't know, you know, so that's why I like olive oil because it just brings it down to just get yourself good quality olive oil and go with it.

So the message is do your research, make sure you're getting a good quality olive oil. Great, Very helpful. So, you know, you were exploring this before, but I'd like to go back a little bit to talking about the biome and we've heard so much about that in recent years, how it affects not only our immune response, all of our health, but it affects our mood, our mental health and everything. We also know some of the ways people who are embracing methodologies for self regulation using breath regulation and so forth. We hear a lot about vagal tone and the vagus nerve, which has one branch that goes basically into the respiratory area, another one that goes down into the gut. And so I saw all these systems are interdependent and you already mentioned that we could focus on getting our digestive tract healthy as well as using breath and the nose breathing and all the rest of it. So it seems like the biome is kind of where the action is in terms of our focus on where we really want to put our effort to keep that healthy. So could you just talk a little bit more about how that functions? Because I think for many of us, I mean, when I was growing up, I don't remember learning in school even. I mean, I grew up in the 50s, came of age in the 60s. I don't remember hearing that we had a body full of bugs and you had all these bacteria there and there were healthy bacteria, not healthy bacteria, and you got to feed the right ones. I mean, that was just like.

The interesting thing is in the Rig Veda, which is considered one of the oldest texts ever written, talk about bugs, invisible and, and visible microbes called Crimea. And they discussed how they could be problematic and they're often due to poor hygiene. They talked about all this stuff and they also mentioned that it's not appropriate to kill the bugs, that it's actually better to change the host and change the environment, which is a concept we're still beginning to wrap our heads around in Western medicine, still want to kill things. But in Ayurveda, it's all about change the environment of your intestinal lining. Create an environment where the good bugs want to be there and the bad bugs aren't allowed. So the more good bugs you have, the better off you are. There was a really interesting study by a woman, a woman, her name was Sister Noel and she was in Connecticut somewhere making cheese in her convent. And she did it with a big old fashioned wooden barrel and she would stir it with a wooden spoon with a cross at the bottom. And she'd stir the milk and make this cheese out of it. And the cows be walking in her little stable and she'd make all this stuff and she would make this cheese and give it to all of her practitioners and she made a little extra income. FDA came in and shut her down, said, what are you nuts? She says, raw cheese. You can't sell this. This is impossible. You can't do this. So say shut her down. She went back to school, became, got her PhD in microbiology, went ahead and made the exact same cheese in a sterile environment and did it and then put E. Coli in both batches. Her old fashioned wooden spoon wooden barrel version with the hay and the cows everywhere and the sterile version. And when they, and when they put the E. Coli in the, in the sterile cheese, it was toxic. You couldn't eat it. When they put it in her cheese and she made it, there was basically no E. Coli in the cheese. And you could eat it was edible because the good bugs take out the bad bugs. So that's what we want, diversity, right? We want that diversity in our gut. And if we don't have it, we pay a price. We pay an immune price for that. You know what I mean? Which is why it's so important. You know, one other study that blew my mind, Fleet, is a study on deer. And deer eat bark in the winter, and they have a certain kind of bugs in their gut for bark in the winter. And they have different bugs in the gut, first for leaves in the summer. And the study, they gave the beer bark in the summertime. We had the wrong bugs, and it caused such a level of indigestion, it almost killed the deer. So, and I read that. I was like. And I already wrote my book, Three Season Diet, about eating into the seasons. But nobody really read it. I didn't make a dent, didn't change everybody sleeping the same stuff. But I was like, are you kidding me? Deer potentially die when they eat out of season, and we have no clue what eating in season is about. And that's when I took my book and I broke it down into monthly sections. We have a thing called the Three Season Diet Eating Guide, which is free, gives you recipes, grocery lists, superfood lists for every. Every single month of the year for free. So people can say, okay, it's January or it's February. This is what I should be eating in this season, you know, and here's some recipes, and here's some superfoods, and here's a grocery list for that season to get. Make sure you're getting the right food to inoculate your gut with the right bugs in the right season to get the best benefit. So it's. So it's, you know, that's how we. How important the microbiome is. And the last thing I'll say about the ancient wisdom is what they knew and understood more than we have any clue about today is how powerful the most subtle things are. In fact, I would say that the more subtle it is, the more powerful the effect. And like you said, nobody even knew there were bugs in your gut when we knew, when you and I grew up. But now.

They'Re invisible. We can't even see them yet. They're the most powerful thing that regulates our health and wellbeing.

So we're going into winter season here in the US Anyway, and all the northern hemisphere, we're headed into winter season. And of course, things don't grow in the winter. And I Guess traditional cultures. And even when I grew up, my grandparents all canned. And so they had canned, you know, they did canning and made preserves. And other cultures have air dried or different ways of drying things. And so what do we, what's in season in the winter when things are actually not growing in the winter. So what do we eat in the winter?

Well, you know, definitely going to be a little bit more on the protein side, more on the fat side. Your nuts, your seeds, your grains, your legumes, your beans, these are all heavier foods that take more digestive strength. Turns out that the digestive fire, the strength of your digestion is stronger in the winter. And there's good science to back it up. Parasympathetic activation and indigestion increases to strengthen your digestion in the winter. So we have the ability to digest harder, to digest things which are more dense and deliver more heat and more warmth and more insulation to our body. Fermented foods, for example, which have lactic acid fermentation. That acid heats the body up. Another thing that you would do in the winter to preserve your vegetables, but you wouldn't do it in the summer because your vegetables are being cooked on the vine and you eat them. You know, they don't have any. They're cooling because the sun has cooked them. You don't need to cook them. You can eat them with minimal heat or steaming, but they're not like meat that has to be cooked or, you know, so they have a cooling effect where the foods in the winter are dense and they need more digestive heat in the summer. That same heat would overheat us and that'll become a problem if we're trying to survive in a very hot climate.

You know, it sounds like, and I think I, I probably read this at different times, different places, but apart from that mindset that we've developed and been enculturated into that I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, all the processed food and have food from all over the world, that kind of immediate gratification. If we let go of that and somehow kind of drop below that, there's. And we get into our body, our body kind of instinctually knows what it needs. I mean, I think, you know, you mentioned heats that are going to warm. So in the winter we need that body heat, right? So naturally we're going to be attracted to foods that will give us a sense of, you know, that, that body heat. So is there a way that we can learn to trust the body more and let the body even guide us into good healthy nutrition.

I think, you know, really listening to your body and their natural instinct, I mean there are receives some not so good cravings too, but that's usually due to. Because you're not, you didn't get what you needed. I had a patient who came to me once, it was like March. And she said, you know, my, my, my digestion is better, my mood is better. I'm not depressed anymore. I have so much energy. I feel fantastic. Except I have one problem. I go, what is it? And she said, I'm not hungry because all I want to eat is salad. I can barely eat that. And I got nice and I was like, everything else is okay. And I went through the list and she said, yeah. And I said, I think it's March and it's springtime and you're craving what's in the season, which is an austere time of the year. And you shouldn't have a lot of hunger in the spring because that's what we do is we fast at that time. We burn fat. We burn the reserve fuel, that's our fat cells. We lose that weight in the spring and we burn that to stabilize and get us through the end of spring in the early or end of winter and early part of spring. And it was just like perfect. And I think all of us know that we like soups and stews in the winter and hot things in the winter and yeah, maybe some more baked goods in the winter for sure. But in the spring those rules got to change because if you do carbs all year long, you become really good at delivering carbohydrates. So you get a stable of bugs in your gut that are really good at delivering carbohydrates. So when they don't get their carbs, what do they do? They tend to message your brain, where are my carbs? So now you're craving carbs like crazy and you lose that circadian rhythm effect of your guts. Going from carbs in the spring to fats in the in or carbs in the, in the fall and fats in the spring. And that's important because if you just burn the same fuel, you get bugs that are only good at doing one thing, delivering carbohydrates. And that causes diabetes and prediabetes and weight and glycation and all these degenerative concerns we have where if you have reset the body in the spring with fat burning bugs, now we've changed it up a little bit so no one gets to rule the roost. All the bugs get to have to have their churn. And it's all part of the big, you know, Mother Nature's plan to change with the seasons.

That's great.

Beautiful.

Beautiful. Absolutely. You've mentioned fasting and the natural cycles and times of year for fasting several times. Another, I don't say call it a fad, it may be a really good thing. But intermittent fasting is becoming popular these days and I'm curious how you feel about that.

I love it. And there's an Ayurvedic version of it which is a little bit different than the modern version, which is skip breakfast and have a breakfast, a lunch and a supper, which is against the circadian science. And Ayurveda was always like, have a breakfast big enough to get you to lunch, lunch, the biggest and relaxed meal of the day. And then supper is a supplemental or soup like meal or even one that could be skipped. So if you have a breakfast and a lunch and then nothing from lunch all the way to breakfast, you're actually in sync with your circadian rhythms. The science shows that you, if you eat a breakfast and a lunch or a lunch and a supper, same number of calories. People who eat a breakfast and a lunch lose way more weight and many have more health benefits than people who had the same number of calories at lunch and at supper. So the study after study are now emerging showing that the circadian clock of having breakfast, which they always said was the most important meal of the day, it's right up there with lunch. They're really important. But we have now the new thing. I intermittent fast, I skip my breakfast, I starve myself till noon, then I have a nice lunch and I have a nice supper with my family. Work socially better, but from the circadian rhythms, again, we're kicking the real can down the road again, not fixing the real problem.

Yeah, I'm kind of in that place because having dinner with my sweetheart, my wife, is a nice time for us. So. And actually what I've done to get my weight under control, I'm somewhat stabilized. I want to lose a little more, I think, to get down to real fighting weight. But is I basically skip lunch, I eat breakfast and you know, halfway through the day hungry because I work pretty hard, have a few nuts or something like that. And so that's another version, probably doesn't make sense, but it's what I'm doing at the moment.

Here's the thing, here's the question you should ask yourself. And that is, see, between 2:00 clock and 6:00 clock in the afternoon, the brain becomes active and that wants the most of your feelings. Why traditionally have people have their big lunches in Europe? They still do it that way and then they have a full tank of gas for the afternoon. How you do, how do you feel between 3, 4, 5 and 6 o' clock in the evening is the magic question. If you're crashing and burning, feeling tired, craving Starbucks or chocolate or something in the afternoon, then you're crashing. That's triggering an emergency response. The brain pulls down the menu says, oh, I can get chocolate or this or that to get me out of this hole. And now I'm craving. And now I start the roller coaster ride again. So that's the really important question when you're playing with these diets is how does this diet make me feel between 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the afternoon? If I'm cruising through that time, not crashing, I'm okay.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and definitely ties into my experience. I think I've talked to my wife about maybe we can figure some way to reorganize our lives to have lunch be our primary meal of the day. We share. We'll see about that. So, yeah, this is also fascinating and you've also mentioned the importance of nose breathing and especially at night. And I was just reading, while I'm reading. Is it James Nestor? Is that his name? The new book, Breath. Yeah. Sophie and I are listening to it on Audible around chapter five. It's just absolutely fascinating. And that traditional cultures would actually, with their children, infants, going forward at night, they would, they would hold their lips closed and just get them, trained them to breathe, nose breathers, and they realized in traditional cultures how important that was. And we've lost sight of that, of course. And just the host of maladies that are associated with mouth breathing is just really kind of amazing how it impacts every part of our, of our system. So I'm just curious about breath regulation altogether. I mean, yes, probably if we could, you know, use the mouth taping and reconvert ourselves to be nose breathers at night. But what else in terms of breath regulation do you reckon? I know, you know, Ayurveda is from Mother India as well as Pranayama of the yogic traditions. And so there's a lot of different kind of breath regulation techniques and so forth. So just how does that fit into the overall picture of health work, the way we work with breath for you?

Well, there's two things. I've written so many articles about different pranayama techniques and written all the research and the science and the common denominator for all of them is the change in neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means taking the old patterns of behavior we created as children that are protective and needing to be approved of and appreciated. Dopamine reward chemistry patterns and changing those so we stopped projecting those on the screen as adults. So Ayurveda was all about, you know, becoming free, becoming conscious, you know, waking up and not living the same old patterns. So changing. We think about, you know, the holidays and everything people are thinking, God, you go home to the holidays, you start acting like a four year old again. It's not uncommon that we have all these pre recorded experiences of, you know, how we handle mom and dad's stress. And we just keep doing the same old dumb thing. Ayurveda's like, we got to become conscious and stop doing that. The most important muscle of breathing is your diaphragm. And because we sit around a lot and we slouch, this ribcage just drives onto the diaphragm which pushes it down already. Sitting in a car? Yeah, we work out, we do yoga an hour or two a day. The rest time we sit, driving, sitting in a car, watch a movie in the front of the computer. And the diaphragm gets squished, pushed down. Diaphragm is supposed to contract and pull the air down and expand your rib cage like a balloon. Because the rib cage has elastic recoil, it wants to clamp down on your rib cage, making it into a cage. Over time your diaphragm becomes weak because you don't use it as much and it stops contracting fully. And we don't breathe fully any longer. We start to shallow breathe. And when you shallow breathe, you over breathe oxygen. And that's a problem because you end up. One study showed that 75% of the people of the oxygen we breathe in, we breathe out unused. So why are we breathing in so much oxygen? It's an imbalance when your diaphragm is working. And 75% of elite athletes had a diaphragm that was not contracting and relaxing fully. Which means that most of us probably don't have it either. Which means that the diaphragm is not contracting and taking time to bring the air all the way down into the lower lobes, your lungs, and breathing out in a real slow pattern. That slow pattern builds carbon dioxide levels. When you have low carbon dioxide levels and high oxygen, because you breathe real shallow, the bond between your oxygen and your Blood gets tighter and now all the oxygen stays in your blood. Big difference, fleet, between how much oxygen is in your blood and how much oxygen is in your brain and your tissues. So the more you over breathe and shallow breathe oxygen, the tighter the bond becomes and the passengers never get off the train. The oxygen stays in your blood. But then when you start to slow breathe and the oxygen starts, the CO2 levels start to rise more comfortably. That is what releases the oxygen into the town to oxygenate the tissues and your body. So most people find that over time, they start breathing more and more shallow and their oxygen stays bound to their blood. 98% oxygen, my blood. When you go to the doctor and they say it looks great, that's not what's in your tissues. So what the breathing does is it releases the oxygen to alkalize and heal and repair your tissues. And most of the cancers are all hypoxic based. There's mutagenic hypoxic stem cells that cause all these problems. They can be reversed with breathing. So there's breathing techniques. One that I love is called pratyloma. P R A T A L oma pratiloma. And it's very, very close to what's called inspiratory muscle training, which I use in hospitals. Just approved for Covid, which strengthens the muscles of your diaphragm. I've written articles about it. Just type in proxyloma. And you just partially close your nostrils and breathe in against your resistance. And that makes your diaphragm work twice as hard. And that forces diaphragm to contract and relax. So you breathe in against.

And when you breathe all the way to the top, you'll actually feel under your rib cage, your diaphragm contracting maybe for the first time ever. And they're going, oh my God, that's my diaphragm. I've never felt that move like that before. And now we start to get that guy moving and it gets stronger to open up that rib cage. Instead of your rib cage being a cage clamping on your heart and your lungs and your lymphatic system, it becomes like 12 levers, which is massaging your heart and your lungs 26,000 times per day. And your diaphragm is the number one pump for your lymphatic system, which is the drainage system, immune carrying system, and garbage can system. So it's really critically important that that diaphragm is engaged. And for most folks, they don't have that because of our culture of sitting. They Only invented chairs a couple hundred years ago. Really, when you think about that for a minute, they're recent. They're a recent invention, I think 16, 1700 or something like that. And it's really recent. And so.

There you have it. We have to antidote the thing that we're not using, which is one of the most important muscles of our body, which is our diaphragm. So breathing exercises are critical in this day and age.

Thank you very much for that. I've been doing breath work for a long time, but my interest and fascination with it has just ramped up tremendously in recent years. And so I'm exploring a lot of it and reading Esther's book. I was really interested to study about the oxygen carbon dioxide relationship. And a lot of times we think the problem is we're oxygen deficient. We don't breathe, so we're not getting enough oxygen. That may or may not be the case. But. But getting too much oxygen and not enough carbon dioxide, we always thought carbon dioxide is just waste. And. And his position in a book at carbon dioxide is actually one of the building blocks of life altogether. And so just, you know, having that deeper understanding of this, it's just so incredibly helpful. And so one thing that I also heard in there was in terms of learning to breathe properly, as well as breathing diaphragmatically, which we want to make that shift from chest breathing to diaphragmatic breathing, but also sufficient exhale, that it's not just about breathing in through the nose, but exhaling all the way so that we're really exercising that diaphragm and getting that full range of the breath. So slow, full diaphragmatic breathing. And, yeah, it's just really fascinating in terms of how it plugs into all the rest of our bodily systems. So this summit, it's the best year of your life. And it's really. The idea is inspiring all of us to enter into the new year with a fresh start and not give up and not settle and kind of reignite our dreams and our passions about having the best life we can, being the best we can, contributing as much as we can to life, and continuing to grow and evolve in life. And so some of these basic.

Access points seem so important. And I have a close friend who's a spiritual teacher in a different tradition, actually kind of a Hindu yogic, Ba' ul Neo, I guess, sort of bhakti, mixture of bhakti and advaita school. And they feel that the most powerful practice, if you want to create a Shift in consciousness, the most powerful practice is a diet practice of some kind. Taking on a discipline, taking on some kind of diet. Discipline is the quickest way to shift your consciousness. And I've always heard that from me, I'm never sure I quite agree, but the more I'm listening to you, it's seeming like that might really be a place where the rubber meets the road and where we can get a lot of traction. And what you said about Ayurveda not just being a system of health, but really a system about becoming conscious. And you know, a lot of our presenters on the summit are going to be talking about how do we get out of the control of all that childhood programming, right, which were all the best coping mechanisms and things we could design when we're 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and all the ones we inherited from our family legacy. And for many of us that's still running the show. And if we want to evolve and get out of our own way and really optimize, it's really about getting out of that childhood programming and becoming conscious. And I never had before really thought of Ayurveda in that way. So I just find that fascinating.

I mean that's the whole point of it. You know, like I said, neuroplasticity is how you change those old patterns. And when you look at chanting and breath holding, pranayama means breath extension. If you read the Hatha Yoga, Pradipika and Patanjali yoga sutures, they clearly say that pranayama is not pranayama unless you do Kumbak, which is breath hold. And breath hold in western medicine is called intermittent hypoxia. Intermittent hypoxia means just like a little bit less food calorie restriction and a little bit less air. Being comfortable with CO2 levels rising, a little bit of air, hunger increases stem cells increases nitric oxide, Nobel prize winning molecule whatsoever, got busted for injecting epo, a hormone for them to give you, you know, endurance. You know, you produce neuroplasticity. It changes your blood pressure, you know, heart, blood sugar, heartburn, endothelial growth factors, transcription factors to protect your genetic from your genetic code, from mutations. I mean, the benefits of intermittent hypoxia in the scientific world is just phenomenal. And here we have thousands of year old science that says, hey, if you're going to do Pranayam breathing techniques and you don't do a breath hold, it ain't Pranayam. Which means that it's all about what James Nestor is writing about his book Research I did way back in the early 1990s when we actually did nose breathing versus mouth breathing exercise and found that when you nose breathe, your brain goes into a meditative alpha state. We literally produced and published studies showing that when you breathe through your nose and exercise, your brain slips into an alpha state, into a meditative calm. So imagine running as fast as you could, but your brain responding to that as if you're in a meditation. That is what I call the eye of the storm. Being calm while all the stress and all the winds are spinning around you. This is where we hail from, the center. But most of us live in the winds of the storm, dodging refrigerators and trying to make it through the day and get recovery on the weekends. But the whole point of Ayurveda was to establish a rhythm of life going downstream with the current in the eye of the storm breathing to create a neurological brainwave pattern that says, I am calm. I'm in a parasympathetic dominant mode. I'm not in the fight or flight, and my brainwaves are in a meditative state while I'm in the midst of activity. This is beautiful, incredible science. And it's something that I've been so passionate about my whole life. Because the whole mission is not about me for digestion and eating wheat. The whole mission is. What you're talking about is how do we get people to reach their full potential and get out of the winds of the storm and the world of stress and enter into that eye of the storm. The bigger the calm, the more powerful the winds. And that's what Ayurveda is really about. So we transform those old protective patterns into not needing to be loved and approved of and appreciated, but actually feeling safe enough to open the petals of your flower so you can actually be the love and not need anything. Because you're full in the giving, like the sun is full in the giving. And that's what Ayurveda is about. That's why it's so magical. Really.

That's really beautiful. And that would be a good place to finish. Except I forgot one particular subject that I wanted to ask you about, and that is cleansing. And I know you support various types of cleanses, so could you tell a little bit about the benefit of doing various types of cleanses?

Well, you know, cleansing from the Ayurvedic perspective means healing the intestinal skin, rebooting liver function, helping lymphatic flows, turning on your digestion. So the body, when you then detoxify. The reason why people get toxic in the first place is the body couldn't deal with these toxins through their digestive system and they stored them. So if you go in there and just clean them out, you never fix the reason we got toxic in the first place. You haven't done anything. You just make them dependent on a cleanse. So what our cleanses, Ayurveda cleanses are about is restoring liver function. Bile flow, lymph flow, intentional integrity of your skin, the right microbiome, turning on the coordination of your stomach, making acid, liver making bile, pancreatic and dual enzymes all coordinated upstream. So what you put in your mouth, you digest it and deliver it as nutrition or get rid of it as waste because your detox and digestive pathways are the same. So if you can't eat a certain food, then yeah, stop eating it. But fix that problem because that means that there's a detox issue as well. And in 2019, America dumped 60 million tons of toxic chemicals in our environment, which end up somewhere along the line in our digestive system trying to be broken down by our liver. So we got to realize in the liver, like I said before, is the kingpin of digestive strength. If that's not working for you, you're slowly going to digest less efficiently and you're going to just say, I don't eat this, I don't eat that, I eat a healthier, cleaner diet. Which is true. Which is good, but not because you can't eat X, Y or Z. You should do it because you choose to eat a healthier diet. Because you can fool yourself thinking you're healthy by eating this really rigid diet. But you go off the path, you pay a big price. What about the 90 million tons of toxic chemicals you have to digest? The mercury from the coal mine plumes in the environment you breathe and have to digest. You're not dealing with those. So they're getting stored in your brain, your fat, your tissues, and they're going to rear their head in your 70s and 80s or 60s or 70s. Somewhere along the line they're going to come back and have to be dealt with.

So doing cleansing, it's a, is one way to release some of these toxins. But then what we come out of the cleanse into, I assume if we don't, if we, we just go back to eating whatever we want. It's kind of a temporary symptom control thing as opposed to really changing the landscape.

So then we're back to living with the seasons, right? We're back to eating in harmony and taking time and relaxing in our meals and giving the body time to burn the fat. And then all of a sudden, you're not feeling like life's a struggle. You feel like it's the same energy at the end of your day as when you started. You're not finishing your day like you were beat up along the way.

Wow. Well, thank you so much. It's been incredibly valuable and it just connects in with so many different aspects of this summit. And I really encourage people to check out Dr. John's website, lifespa.com and, and you have a huge archive there, right, of all these articles you've done and the research, and if people are nerdy enough that they want to really jump in. And it's all there. And, and I remember the first time I even just. You offer a lot on your website for free. There's a lot of videos, a lot of teachings, and, and the first time I listened. It's just this, this obvious encyclopedic knowledge and common sense approach to health and, and awakening. So I just can't recommend it enough. So thank you very much for being with us today and really wish you all the best.

Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

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