Heroic Interview: How to Go Wild + Why You Should with John Ratey, MD

You're listening to how to Go Wild and why youy Should An Optimal Living interview with John Ratey and Bryan Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series today. I'm thrilled to be back with John Ratey. Yesterday, which happened for us to be about two minutes ago, we chatted about his other great book, the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain. And today we're going to talk about Go Wild Subtitle Free youe Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization. Fascinating book that John wrote with Richard Manning on looking at the importance of in the phrase they use, going wild. We're going to talk about what that means and why we should consider it, the impact of nutrition and how that shifted. We'll talk a little bit more about exercise and connect back to what we just discussed, the importance of sleep and getting in touch with our circadian rhythms, et cetera. As I mentioned in our chat on spark, John is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of exercise, attention and a number of other areas. John, thanks again so much for taking the time.

I hope to have as much fun as we did yesterday.

Right on. Okay, Go wild. Let's just start with that phrase, which I love. What does it mean to go wild?

To go wild really means to get back to our wilding days when we to rewild ourselves. It's a process that they're doing with some of the over cultivated land. They're trying to make it wild again. And that's what we need to do to ourselves as much as we can because we still carry with us the hunter gatherer genes when in fact we were wild. And the more we can begin to work that into our lives, certainly the healthier, the happier, the more content we will be. So it really doesn't mean going down to Spring Break, down to Fort Lauderdale as the East Coasters do, but really about going back to our ancient roots and paying attention to our given genetic prescription. That implies that we developed over 400 million years, but implies that we need to play and move. We need to have a diet of a certain type and that we need to sleep. We need to be in nature, we need to be connected, we need to be operating in small tribes if we can. And we need to be mindful, we need to be present. Because think of a hunter gatherer who was hunting and hunted by the big cats. They had to be present, they were in nature, they were moving. No one was training for Triathlons, you had to be in great physical shape and your diet was very, very different than our processed foods and our corn syrup sugar that finally having a turn. You know, Pepsi and Coke are finally losing ground, which is, I think, a triumph. We're beginning to get the message out.

Yeah, I'm excited to go into all that. And your commentary on sugar was particularly impactful and something that I want to drill into and make sure our listeners are aware of the powerful toxic effects of that sugar and everything else. And I just love, just to reiterate, I love the idea that we were wild. Hunter gatherer is a euphemism for we were wild humans essentially. Right. Pre domestication. You have a phrase where you say the effects of the Industrial revolution in the information age pale in comparison with the effects of the advent of agriculture. The single greatest change in 2 million years of hominid history. Can you tell us about that?

Yes. We were Moving anywhere from 10 to 14 miles a day before we began to stay in one place. We had to change our environment all the time because we over hunted the game or picked all the berries or got all of the tubers and roots that we were aware of. But then we had to move and we were moving a lot on average, and we had to move because the big cats were chasing us. So when we began to plant and sow and reap the benefits, we stayed in one place. We became sicker, actually, for a while. We became smaller, I mean literally statue wise, we were smaller and less healthy. And all this comes from archeology and we have evidence of that for a while. And then we began to maybe get a little smarter and grow back again. But it really put us in one place and that was a problem. And then we began to grow the nutrients that we needed and then we overgrew them and then we became dependent upon them. And now in today's world have an overabundance of calories that are readily available, that are cheap, that are kept cheap by the government and our GMOs and all we know how to make them readily available. And that's great if you're starving, but we're not starving in most of the developed world. And we're still pressed to eat the highest caloric food that we can find as a hunter gatherer of wood and to store it, that is, don't waste it. You don't run unless you have to. You don't walk unless you have to. That's what we call the thrifty genes that we have as well, so this all contributes to our natural tendency to the obesity epidemic that we're now in.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about that in a little more detail and just kind of drill into the effects of dense packages of carbohydrates, particularly refined flour. You talk about bread and pasta and bagels, grain in general, and describe us as really becoming carbivores. Right. As a result of the domestication of grain. Can you tell us about that and the negative impacts of that?

Yes. No, we crave it. We crave it because it's calories. We crave the calories because we need the calories. Well, and these are convenient. And then we become addicted to it. Cutting the carbs is almost as hard as cutting smoking, maybe harder, which is almost as hard as cocaine. Stopping that, I mean, it's difficult, but because the carbs really pull us. And the damage that we're doing is incredible to our cells, to our bodies, to our pancreases. So we don't. So we have all this insulin resistance going on. Now, at a very early age, I would said that we. When I was in training in medical school, we wanted to see a type 2 diabetic because they were sort of rare. We didn't see that many adults. We certainly never saw any type 2 diabetics as kids. And now the school nurses have to be really up on their treatment of diabetic kids because our kids are like us, they're way overweight, which leads to the development of type 2 diabetes, which is a scourge, because this really leads to toxicity, because too much glucose in our brains and in our bodies leads to changes that lead to damaging our nerve cells and our body cells. And then if we have too much in our system, which we often do, it doesn't get burned. We don't excrete it. It gets changed immediately into fat. And this is one of the things that people are now beginning to recognize, which is amazing. In the past two years, I'd say people are beginning to sort of pay attention to that in general, that this having those carbs is like, you know, we became fat phobic, and now we're becoming carb phobic because that's what we were as hungry gatherers, because we didn' have grains. We had wild grains, wild rice, and we got carbs from 400 vegetables that we had, you know, but. And yeah, we had meat and fish and all that, but it was the carbs that were scarcer and we had fruit, but it was. Every now and then we'd Have a fruit fiesta. But. And those were times of plenty and.

Delight pre winter when we wanted to fatten up. Right.

Yeah. Whenever you could post the summer.

Yeah. And the important point here is that we evolved for X hundreds of thousands, millions of years without those dense packages of carbs. And then 10,000 years ago, boom, all of a sudden we have it and our bodies just didn't evolve to consume it in the quantity they consume it, no matter what we may have been led to believe.

Right, right, right. And when I was growing up, it didn't matter because we were moving enough. Our jobs, our lives, our daily living was much more movement oriented. We had to moving from place to place, standing in the kitchen, preparing dinner. No more this before microwaves and all that. And you know, and it was, it was a different life. So we didn't see obesity in the 40s. And then we became fat phobic. And then our glorious cornstarch sugars came in and we substituted sugar for fat. And now we're more obese than any time in history.

Yeah. Which is that paradox of I used to be a low fat, high carb vegan and I look back at that now and my energy was all over the place and I was doing it for moral reasons and I convinced myself that it made sense nutritionally. And if you had told me that I'd be eating what I eat now, which is a low carb, high fat, moderate protein approach with obviously greens, et cetera and veggies, but I would have laughed and ridiculed this version of me because I was so convinced. Yet I had migraines every month or six weeks or so, and energy was unstable. And it's been a fascinating exploration personally to just test it. So a lot of people have different approaches and I just strongly encourage you to experiment. If you have fluctuating energy and weight issues, experiment with a reduced carb approach. But I think one of the things that's really important that you bring up in the book is, look, it's unambiguous that we're having too much sugar. So what can we all unambiguously agree on? And it's amazing, as you said, over the last couple years that insight's been led to the broader carb discussion. But you also make the point that things like apple juice, you said, is one of the hidden causes of childhood obesity, even in households where there is very good parenting. So this tell us about sugar?

Well, no, but it's so amazing. I mean, my kids grew up with apple juice, but when I grew up in the subsequent years after that, no one ever used apple juice for their kids. You know, I mean, it just wasn't, it wasn't a thing. And then all of a sudden it became a thing. And now I think parents are diluting the apple juice because it's full of sugar, you know, and Gatorade is full of sugar. So you see a lot of these athletes, or used to, and I still think you do, who have a lot of fat with them because they're drinking Gatorade, which is tons and tons of sugar. So you're, you know, even though you're exercising and doing all that, you're piling it on with every Gatorade and sweet drink that you take and getting rid of them and getting closer to taking in the amount that's reasonable and that you can use is thankfully, I think, happening. I just saw a statistic seeing that younger kids were actually seeing a drop in obesity in kids 2 to 8 or 2 to 6. I'm sorry, 2 to 6. So parents are starting to get the news, I think, and beginning to change their habits. I hope that's what we're seeing.

That's great. You make the point that I'm just going to share another little mini passage here, but you said annual per capita sugar consumption in the United States was 5 pounds per person in 1700, 23 pounds in 1800, 70 pounds in 1900 and 152 pounds today. And this is one of the things I come back to a lot, that you don't need to think too hard about that to realize that that doesn't make any sense. And if you rewound that to 11,000 years ago, it was a miniscule amount.

Exactly, exactly. And we get, and what people don't get, it's not just sugar, it's starch too. I used to, you know, about seven years ago, I and many of my colleagues would say to their patients, okay, they were wanting to lose weight. Okay, first of all, stop eating anything white. Stop eating anything white except cauliflower. Okay. You know, because white means, usually means starch containing, you know, starch containing foods. And starch is just power packed dense sugar. And so grains are sugar. And yes, in whole grains, yes, it has a lot more fiber and that's great. But it also, if that's what you, if you eat enough of it, you're going to get, you're going to challenge your pancreas, you're going to challenge your insulin levels. And so you need to really pay attention to where that's At.

Yeah. And David Perlmutter wrote the introduction to Go Wild, and I reference him in my little note I created on this book. And in Grain Brain, he did the same exact thing that you did with sugar, of going from basically 0 to 5 pounds on 1700 to 155 pounds today, or whatever. 150 plus with grains. So again, when we go back 11,000 years ago, we ate a minuscule amount of grains. Today we eat, according to Perlmutter, 133 pounds. That's crazy. 133 pounds of grains and 150 pounds of sugar vis a vis nearly nothing. It's no wonder we have the challenges we have.

Right, Right. Exactly. Exactly. And then it gets all broken down into sugar that is toxic, and we make the point and go wild that glucose in our system is toxic, even though that's the driver of our cells. Okay. But higher levels is toxic to our bodies, in our brains, because it gets changed into fat. But it also inflames us. It pushes inflammation, which is one of the key new words in Alzheimer's research and in a lot of depression research. Inflammation. We're worried about inflammation everywhere, and too much glucose will cause more inflammation. So for general health, for brain health, and for keeping us on track, that's great.

We could obviously talk about the nutrition side of it for a weekend at least, but check out the book for more on all of that. And then in our last chat, we talked about the science of movement, which is a huge part of this book as well, an important part. I'll just say again your line that in 2010, the American Psychiatric association issued new guidelines for treating depression and for the first time, made exercise a proven treatment, although we've known since Hippocrates that's one of the most powerful ways to do it. So check out that discussion for why movement is so important. But our Paleolithic ancestors, our Stone Age ancestors, moved a ton. We need to do so as well if we want to go wild. I want to hear your thoughts on sleep and why sleep is so important and how before we became domesticated, we slept a heck of a lot differently than we do now. Right.

We slept when we needed it, we slept. We didn't have lights. We had the fire going in the cave, but that's where we were, and that's the only light we had. So we had the perfect sleep environment. We didn't sleep all that time because people had to wake up and guard the camp and guard for the big cats to make sure they weren't coming after Us, and we slept in naps throughout the night, but we had a long period of dark, and we used that. And now just today on CNN.com the Surgeon General came out and said, we all need to sleep more. You know, I mean, it's finally, the message is getting out. And as I travel around the world talking about health and wellness, it's one of the things that I know is happening everywhere. Everyone is sleep deprived, meaning everyone is getting way less than seven hours of sleep a night. You know, no matter what country, civilized country, you know, third world, second world, first world countries, you know, there where we can stay up and we're being addicted to our machines and our devices, and our kids especially are sleep deprived. They're being pushed to jam in information for the Common Core for what I call no child helped at all tests that have been the scourge of the US Education system. But it's pretty dramatic when you see kids that are getting about four to five hours a night of sleep and they're doing it chronically, and then they go to school and they drink a monster drink or Red Bull or the Starbucks to pump themselves up rather than having the needed amount of sleep that our genes demand from us, and we are not getting it. And it's hard for any of us to get the seven and a half, eight hours that we really need.

So I was going to ask you that number. So the number that you recommend for your patients, clients and others that you offer the advice to is what?

Well, the ideal is 8 hours and 14 minutes. You know, when you take away clocks and lights, that's what the amount of sleep people get in those kinds of environments. So, you know, they sleep that long and that's the average. So. But, you know, people do vary and all that, but, you know, it's such a macho thing. Oh, I only need four hours of sleep and I'm going, you know, but then they're getting their monster and then they're getting the Red Bull and then they're getting the, you know, there's two or three Starbucks to start with, or they have an espresso machine by their bed, you know, to get out, you know, and get up and get going and get moving. And we glorify that, but at the same time, we're killing ourselves, you know, and as Stickhold said is one of the leading research in the world on sleep. He says lack of sleep makes you fat, dumb and lazy. You know, and he has evidence for that. It helps you add on the pounds. It certainly decreases your motivation and it certainly impacts your frontal cortex and your ability to think and to, you know, produce through the world.

Yeah, I mean, fat, dumb, lazy and depressed. Right, right, right.

Well, depressed too. Yeah, yeah.

Little detail. Other than being fat, dumb, lazy and depressed, there's no reason to worry about sleep deprivation.

Right, right.

Well, you actually, I'd love to hear you describe, if you could, the research done on sleep deprivation and recall positive versus negative for depressed people, et cetera. Can you describe that for us?

Well, yeah. No. One of the things that we've learned about sleep, and we don't know why we sleep yet, but we know we need to, we're beginning to think why, of cleansing of the brain and all that. But one of the things that happens during sleep is we go into REM and then we go into rehearsals of what we've learned during the day. So the idea of staying up for an all nighter to do well on your test or get your paper, you know, getting your paper in is one thing, but doing well on tests is a bad way to think of prepping yourself because you miss out on the rehearsal that goes on in your brain of all that you stuffed in it during the day. And that's what REM sleep does. It. We learn it better. We have a rehearsal without us doing anything about it. And that helps wire in whatever it is we're learning. Now with depression, there's different ways of looking at depression. For instance, one of the ways of treating depression can be keeping people from going into REM sleep. Now, again, it's sort of something that we have little idea of what exactly happens, but we know that it can work. And people can, who are not chronically depressed, but, you know, episodically depressed can get them out of the depression. And this is one of the things that we see happen when people are going from depressed state into manic state is that they start to stay up all the time. And without getting that sleep, restorative sleep and REM sleep, they flip up into this manic episode. So it's very important for mood regulation and all that. And it's coated in our genes. I mean, that's what's so amazing about it. And yeah, when we. And a couple tips, you know, if you need sleep aids, a good one is the sound machines, that crackling of the fire or the breathing of dogs, which is how we evolved. Right. In the cave near the fire. So the crackling of it mildly in the background and the sort of panting and breathing, every breathing of animals that were close to us that Help us drift off into sleep and stay asleep.

That's great. One of the other points of research that you described that I thought was just fascinating was the fact that sleep deprived people had difficulty with recall but not with the negative images. They couldn't recall in general, but they didn't have a problem with the negative images. They could remember the negative stuff, but not the positive stuff, which as you said is a slam dunk linked to depression. Right. If we're giving ourselves the opportunity to remember the wrong stuff and forget the stuff that actually helps us.

Right, right. And if you stay asleep longer, see in the early part of REM is when we go over the negative. That's when you have your nightmares and night terrors and all the bad stuff. And then if you stay through that or go back to sleep, then you get the good stuff. Then you start having great dreams and then you come up and you wake up and you're fully in a state of motivation and ready to go for the day.

And then just another tip that you shared in the book was the fact that we want to reduce the consumption of the electronics, the light emitting diodes, the LEDs and all the things that are kind of messing around with our melatonin. And that's a really powerful way to help aid our sleep.

Right, right, right, right. Just get, get dark, get completely dark. You know, get, get even the. Yes, get even the diode. You know, the little, you're charging your phone or your, your computer, you know, turn it, take it out of the room, put it in another room so you don't have that little light going on or the beep going on or whatever, but just get yourself into a cave like state.

So good. We do what we call a digital sunset. The sun goes down and all of our electronics go off and then we have these little blue light blocking or blue light friendly lights, I should say, that kind of have that orangey look to them. And that's just what we have at night. And if for whatever reason we need to look at some screens or whatever, which I don't, but my wife likes to read at night. Sometimes she has her little blue light blocking glasses. And these little things add up in significant ways, right?

Oh yeah. No, it's all about, it's all. It's not one thing or another, you know, and this is what people, people always want the simple. We always want the simple cure or the simple the Newtonian equation so that we can do something and then that's going to change things. And we're questing that that's why we're so medicine driven when we think of disorders. And what we're talking about in Go Wild is sort of the sum of all the little things that our grandmother told us to do, basically, you know, to get outside, to play vigorously and play all day when we're kids, to eat right, to sleep enough, to have friends, to get engaged, and for God's sakes, to be present and not just drifting off into outer space, which is what our digital world takes us into. You know, the Netherlands. It's really amazing how these things sort of are now coming, coming back. And now, you know, one of the chapters that we have is nature, which is really amazing. The research that we have on nature and its impact on us physically, on our immune system, on our healing system, on our moods, on our learning, on our feeling, motivated, all that. I mean, the stuff that's coming out is terrific that we're nailing it, if you will, and seeing what our brain on nature is so much better than our brain. And by nature, it doesn't mean you have to be outside. You can put up a picture of nature in the CCUs, in the coronary care units they have now, some of them have pictures of landscapes and trees if they don't have a window. And it comes from research, not just somebody wanting to do it, somebody thinking this is a good idea, but the research shows that this really promotes healing and wellness.

What's the favorite idea from the book that we haven't discussed yet?

Well, I think my favorite idea of all is connection is being connected to one another. And we talk a lot about oxytocin in the small tribe chapter and about how important that is for our lives because it helps us bond. It's a very powerful hormone that women have more than men. That's called our love hormone, or a bonding hormone. But it's also a brilliant hormone. I mean, it really makes our neuroplasticity go way up. Our ability for our brain cells to work optimally because we are in the right space. And when we're with people, our oxytocin is up. I don't know whether we've even done it with Skyping to see whether that raises oxytocin levels, but it might. But it's better to be in a group. It's better to be in a group that you care about. It's better to be cared for in a group and certainly in a dyad and, you know, in a family, but then extend beyond that in small tribes because that's what we're. That's what we're meant to be in.

Yeah. That's so powerful. So go wild. We talked on, we scratched the surface of a few different areas, but John and Richard talk about both food or all of food, movement, rest, awareness or mindfulness, being in nature. Biophilia is how they describe it. And then the tribe and the molecule oxytocin that binds us to one another. John, thank you. I appreciate you and your wisdom and passion for this work and all you've done to help us optimize.

Great thing with you.

Tell everyone again where they can find you. It's johnrady.com and then facebook.com johnradymd Maryland.

Yes. Make sure you put the MD in there because I have two websites. An old website that I don't use anymore, but that's the John Rady website. But the John Rady md We'll have a news article every day except the weekends, posted on some new interesting study or story related to mainly to exercise and its effect on our brains, on keeping us young, on improving our kids, but also on nature and on mindfulness meditation and the like. So it's a really active Facebook page now. So invite everybody to go there.

That's fantastic. Facebook.com johnraty which is R A T E Y M D for all that goodness. John, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit Bryan Johnson for more.