Dr Darshan Shah: The 3 Blood Tests That Can Save Your Life

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and take it to the top, I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action, and lead.

A life of purpose.

Let's get started. Today's special guest is Dr. Darshan Shah, one of the world's leading experts on longevity. Enjoy the show. Dr. Darshan Shah, a huge welcome to Lead On Purpose.

I'm so honored to be here. Thank you for having me.

Oh, it's a pleasure. I've been following your work. I deeply admire your work because.

We all want to live longer, but not only that, we want to live healthier because there's no point living longer if it's in we're immobile, we're losing our cognition. So what you do specializes in that. So I want to go really deep very quickly into a tactic. The person listening right now going, okay, what are the four or five things like the markers around our body that we might need to know that will help us understand am I healthy? Because a lot of people say I eat well, I sleep well, I'm healthy, I feel good. But is it about feeling good or is it actually about getting metrics? What are those four or five things you think are important?

One of the most important things you mentioned just there that just resonated with me is people always feel good until they don't feel good. To go from feeling good to not feeling good, there's 20 years of biological damage on average that you're Doing that your body is just resilient to. Okay, so what happens a lot of times is that we live a particular lifestyle. We're doing internal damage in our. At a cellular level that we don't feel in quotation marks. And then we start feeling it. And by then we get a blood test done. And now we've diagnosed with diabetes, hypertension, some metabolic disease, and now it's a problem, and now we have to start taking medications to deal with it. Right. So, you know, I'm a big believer of becoming the CEO of your own health. And just like every other CEO that runs a company, or even if you don't run a company, say you run a department or you're managing anything that involves numbers. These are called key performance indicators. We have these key performance indicators for our own biology. We know what they are, we just use them way too late to diagnose disease and prescribe a pill. So I like to empower my patients with a set of 10 to 12 of these that they can easily follow themselves. And that way they understand from the root causes of disease where they're headed. And so if you manage these root causes early enough, you never have to have a disease in the first place. So what's great about that is, number one, you don't have a disease, you don't need prescription medications, et cetera. But guess what? The side effects to not having a disease are you actually feel awesome. You can move, you can remember your friends and family, you can travel, you can wake up feeling great every day. This is how we wanna live our old life, right? When we get to be 80, 90 years old, we wanna be able to do all the things that we love to do when we're 30 or 40 years old. And it's absolutely possible while avoiding disease as well.

That's seriously exciting because I feel that personally, and I'm sure other people might kind of agree that at this young stage of our lives now, where we are relatively healthy and mobile and flexible and our brains work, it's hard to even imagine the time that would come where we can't walk or where we do fall over, or where we can't remember our own spouse, that's a reality for people. People get to the point where those diseases kick in. So how do we get the person listening right now to go, today's the day I'm going to start looking at those KPIs and be the CEO of my own health. How do we convince them?

Yeah, I think, number one is the realization that you have full Control, Right? You have full control over your health. You need to. You outsourcing your health to your primary care doctor, your regular doctor, is a total losing proposition. Right. If you're running a business, you don't look at your numbers once a year with a consultant and have the consultant tell you everything is going well. That's ridiculous. You're looking at them every day. You're obsessed over it.

Right?

And so, look, I don't think you need to be obsessed about your health, but you need to understand what they are. And I think one set of blood tests that you can easily get from any doctor, and if your doctor doesn't get them for you, you can get them yourself at a laboratory, will completely empower you to make these positive changes. I'm a big numbers guy. I like following my numbers, like knowing where I'm headed by the numbers. And also I'm a little competitive, you know, and so we have. If you have a friend that's also going down the same journey or a spouse tracking your numbers together. It's a great point of conversation.

100%. I'm the same as you. Like my spouse and I, we were using my fitness pal. Looking at our macros, looking at our nutrients and like, that matters to us. And then also like looking at our weight. Is it going up, is it going down? What's the protein balance? Is there muscle going on or muscle going off? That stuff is important. So this blood side of things, what, what are those markers? What should we be looking for?

Okay, great. So I'll give you a few examples. There's about 10 of them, so we can't cover all of them today. But I have a resource for your audience to all my biomarkers and what they mean so we can talk about.

I'll put that in the show notes. The show notes. I'll have that. That resource right now. So if anybody wants to download that, I'll make sure we put it in there.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, it's us. Drshaw.com biomarkers and what I give you is the biomarkers and what is the normal range and what is the optimal range? And that's what's key. You want to be optimal, not just normal. And you want to know years before things go into the abnormal range. Right? Okay. So there's blood tests and there's also simple tests that you can do at home. So let's talk about the blood test first. One of the key ones There is hemoglobin A1C. Hemoglobin A1C is an average of your last three months of blood glucose levels. Okay? Now, if this is high, you get diagnosed with prediabetes or diabetes. 5.7 is the number where you get diagnosed with prediabetes. 6.5 is diabetes. However, optimal range is 5.2 or below. And it takes years to go from 5.2 to 5.7. Years of eating ultra processed food, years of being sedentary, years of eating too much sugar in your diet, and too many carbohydrates and refined carbs. Once you know you're going from 5.3 to 5.4 to 5.5, you have that light bulb go off in your head like, whoa, this is going in the wrong direction. I need to do something. I need to turn this around. And you start modifying your diet and your activity levels to get this number back under control. So simple blood test, virtually free. It's only a few dollars to do this test if your insurance doesn't cover it. And powerful, powerful information.

Amazing. And so people can just go to their local. If their doctor doesn't give them a referral, they can go to a local laboratory and just get it done.

Exactly. Hemoglobin A1C and, you know, metabolic health in the western world is present now in over 85% of individuals. So when your metabolic health goes awry, it sets you up for getting not just diabetes, but also heart disease, also Alzheimer's disease, and also cancer. It's so important to get your metabolic disease under control and, and have good metabolic health. And it's all about the amount of movement and all about the amount of insulin secreting and the hemoglobin A1c is a key marker there.

Incredible. Before we look at the next marker, can I ask, when you talk about movement, what does that mean? I mean, it might mean things for different people, but are we talking intense high interval training? Are we talking just walking sporadically throughout the day? 10 to 12,000 steps? What does good movement look like?

So glad you asked me that, James, because there's different levels to this. Okay, so level one, the most important, by the way, I'm a big believer in the pareto principle. There's 20% of the information that gets you, 80% of the knowledge and moves the needle, 80%. And for movement, it's not any of those things. Believe it or not, it's actually not being sedentary. Sedentary behavior is what's really killing all of us. Sedentary behavior is defined as spending more than four hours a day seated in a seating Position. Okay, how many of us sit in front of a computer for four hours and sit down for lunch, then sit down for another four hours and sit down on the couch? It's, it's. 90% of humans are defined as sedentary now. It's, it's mind blowing scary. So. Yeah, exactly. So guess what? Counteract sedentary behavior. It's not going to the gym for an hour and working hard every for an hour. That actually doesn't really affect the negative outcomes from being sedentary, when what does is taking what's called an exercise snack. That means every 45 minutes you get up and move around, whether you're doing some air squats, a few weights, or just even walking around the building that you work in. That completely counteracts the negative aspects of being sedentary. So that's one aspect of movement. And then the second aspect is what you talked about is being mobile. Being mobile. Humans were built to be mobile. That's why we spread from somewhere in Africa to all over this planet. Because humans evolutionarily were evolved to roam around. We used to walk 8 to 10,000 steps a day before farming and.

Industrialized society became the norm. Okay, so getting back to that, that's what we're evolutionarily meant to do, is walk at least 8,000 steps a day. A good hack for that is I have in my office right here next to me a walking desk. I walk 10, 12,000 steps a day. And then number three on movement and exercise is exercise. Going to the gym at least two to three times a week and getting in, especially as you get older, a good 20 to 30 minutes of strength training in lifting heavy weights. Our muscle are the key to our longevity. And making sure that you have adequate muscle stores early in age and you maintain them late in age is critical. And you can only do that by lifting heavy weights.

Amazing. And I want to spend a bit of our conversation going deep on the muscle component, because I'm fascinated by that right now. So this idea of movement, I love it. It's getting up every 45 minutes, it's doing, as you say, air squats, just walking. My partner, Caroline, got a treadmill put under her standing desk. And so now I jump in there every now and then and get on the treadmill. It's brilliant. Still, you can still get your emails done and have some phone calls whilst on there.

So I'm more productive on my treadmill desk because I'm moving, my blood's flowing. I feel like, you know, I'm more awake all of it.

I'm with you 100%. So that's the first blood marker we're going to look at. What's the next one you think would be a really good one for people to check in on?

Number two is a blood marker called hs, crp, High sensitive C reactive protein. This is a measure of inflammation. Okay. Inflammation is a good thing if you have a wound that you're trying to heal, or, you know, you have a cough or a cold, your throat gets inflamed, because this is your immune system's attempt at either killing bacteria or healing an injury. Okay. The problem is chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is when your immune system is active all the time. And there are reasons for this that we'll go over. But HSCRP is a marker of chronic inflammation if it stays high for long periods of time. So this number you want as close to zero as possible. Once it gets over one or two, then it means you have chronic inflammation. So how do we get chronic inflammation? Well, sitting around and being sedentary. Number two is eating too much ultra processed food. But number three, which is the most important reason, the most common reason is poor gut health. So 90% of our immune system lives in our gut. And if our gut is not healthy, our immune system stays overactive all the time. So it's very important. We're learning more and more about our microbiome. That's the trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi that live synergistically with us in our gut. If they are not healthy, they cannot protect our gut from toxins. Toxins enter through our gut into our bloodstream and our immune system is always on fire, it's always active. And your HR CRP level goes up. And when you have inflammation, that's another root cause of disease, it leads to a higher chance of Alzheimer's, higher chance of cancer, higher chance of metabolic disease, all of it. So all these things go hand in hand. That's another key indicator is hscrp.

That's a big one. So it's interesting. Recently my partner and I did a microbiome test and was at home and it was quite unpleasant, to be honest, having to get the sample. But it was quite incredible what came back and the information and the data, and actually off the back of that data was, hey, you're actually missing some of the key bacteria in your gut. Here's a supplement, particular supplement you need to take. Great. I like that. I like being able to focus on what's going to move the dial, but also the other side of it for years, Darshan, I've had dry skin on my elbows, eczema and in my nose. My turbinates are almost fully inflamed 99% of the year. And so I think there's a bit of inflammation going on there for sure.

Absolutely. You know, you mentioned something interesting. It's like you notice it on your elbow, in your nose. No one thinks this can have anything to do with your gut, but it absolutely can. Once you get your gut healthy, a lot of people, their allergies go away, their skin rashes go away, their autoimmune disease goes away. That's what happened to me personally. I had an autoimmune disease. I was on immune suppressive medication. I got my gut healed. Autoimmune disease vanished.

That fascinates me. So I was told by the skin specialist, let's get you on an immunosuppressant. And right away I was like, hell, no, I don't want that. My immune system needs to work. So what did you do to. Were there a couple of things you did to improve your gut health?

Yes, absolutely. So let me give you a three step plan, just like we did with exercise. Okay? Three steps to improving your gut health. Number one and most important, eliminate ultra processed food. Ultra processed food is like a nuclear bomb in your gut. It, it gives your bad bacteria the food they need to thrive, and your good bacteria cannot thrive, and therefore the bad bacteria went out and you get more and more inflamed. Secondly is to increase the amount of fiber in your diet. Fiber is food for your good bacteria, and it allows better transit time through your gut to start every meal with fiber, not carbohydrates, vegetables, crudite, salad before you eat the bread basket. That's one simple way of doing it. And thirdly is getting a good diet that is high in fermented foods as well. So adding fermented foods can also really help get you more beneficial gut bacteria.

Amazing. And those three things are so achievable for most of us to get into our diet. They're not expensive, they're not difficult. We can access all of that really easily.

Yeah, yeah. And I love doing the microbiome test that you did. And, you know, there's some probiotics that I love too, that I think work really well. But it really starts with the basics of, you know, getting the diet organized first. Because our gut once again has evolved for millennia with this type of diet, not with ultra processed food.

Yeah. The UPF fad right now is unbelievable. Like, everyone just Reaching for it so quick, so easy, so cheap. You know, I'm a bit curious, walking around the supermarket, looking at people's, you know, shopping trolleys and sometimes, like, I just shake my head. It's like ultra processed everything and barely any vegetables. Barely anything. That's real food.

Yeah, it's terrible.

Madness. No, thanks for that. And what about the next blood test? We'll do three blood tests if you're up for that.

Okay, yeah, let's do another one. That's really important. It's called apob. Have you heard of apob?

I have, yes.

Yeah. So, you know, most of medicine, unfortunately, is still being practiced. Like we're in 1975. We're looking at total cholesterol and LDL. And the. Even though it's important to look at this really, the biomarker that really encapsulates everything you need to know about your cardiac risk is apob. APOB is a collection of all of the potentially harmful forms of cholesterol in your bloodstream that can lead to cardiac disease. Ldl, vldl, lp, all of it, it's all captured in this one biomarker. So if you have any risk factors for heart disease, you should. Excuse me, you should know your apob and you want to control your APOB by using dietary interventions as well. Most people should have their APOB 80 or less. This is what's going to be really protective to your blood vessels.

I need to go and look at my APOB number because I remember I did get it done and the gentleman I was talking to that kind of gave me the information, he was like, you've been dealt a bad deck of cards. And he said, you're either with your apob, you're dealt with the good, or a bad deck. And it's a genetic thing, is what he kind of explained to me. But he didn't say what I should take. He didn't, didn't give me any heads up. Now, my grandfather died of a cardiac issue, so I'd like to kind of prevent that, if possible.

Absolutely. I mean, it's so important that you jump all over this, James, because like, okay, first of all, APOB is not just being dealt a bad genetic deck, okay? There is one marker, your lp, that's fully genetic. Okay? So look at your lp. Maybe he was talking about that one.

I think it might have been.

Yeah, yeah, lp. Everyone needs to get it tested once in their life. If it's high, it means you do have a genetic bad deck of cards, but it means you have to Be more aggressive about lowering your overall cholesterol, your apob. And what I would say is that. Also remember that heart disease is not just high cholesterol. There's multiple factors. There's poor metabolic health, there's inflammation, there's high cholesterol, there's high blood pressure. All of those combine to create damage to your blood vessel wall, and then the cholesterol gets in there and forms the plaques and the blockages. So you have a lot of different levers that you can pull to reduce your risk of this happening. Another thing that you might want to consider, James, is getting a coronary calcium score as well. This will tell us how much plaque you have in your arteries. This is a very simple CT scan of your heart, takes five to ten minutes, very low radiation, and gives us a score about how much plaque you have in your blood vessels. So then we know, using scanning, what your risk for having a heart attack is.

That's amazing. It's interesting. Here in New Zealand, I'm pretty proactive with my health. I like to try and be a CEO of my health. And so I went to the doctor with a list of about 30 blood markers that I wanted to test, and she kind of laughed. She went, no, no, no, we're not sending you for that. And I was like, why not? She says, why would you want to know that stuff? Just to see how healthy or unhealthy I am and prevent future ill health. No, James, no. The hospitals won't like me sending you for those tests. And, you know, if we find something, we've got to start chasing shadows. And I think, well, I'd rather find something early and actually get after it. And I've got insurance that can cover that, so, like, let's. Let's do that. And so she wouldn't do it. I went to the labs like you suggested, did it anyway, and it started to show some things, and I'm so glad that I did, because it gives me the opportunity to make decisions around my health. So I'm glad that you're telling me I need to go for this and particularly the scan, so that'll be on my list for this year.

Yeah, that paternalistic attitude where it's like, let's not look because we. Then we have to go fix things. And, I mean, that's crazy. Why would you not do that? Why would you. You don't drive your car that way or. Or take care of your home that way. We just don't do any maintenance or do any checking. And I. I'm So glad that you took matters into your own hands and went into a lab. I highly encourage all your listeners to do the same exact thing. If your doctor is not going to order for you, either find another doctor or do it yourself.

I'm with you 100%, Darshan. So the other thing I decided to do, which again my doctor actually told me I shouldn't do and it would be a risk if I did it was a full body MRI and they wouldn't let me do it in New Zealand. I had to fly to LA for it and I went to a company called Prenuvo and went through. It was pretty painless and it gave me some information and that information was valuable and helpful. What are your thoughts on those kind of scans, those full body or specific? Is there anything that you think people should consider doing if they were going to go and do a preventative scan? Is there one that's better than another?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Yes, I'm a big believer in preventative scanning if you can mentally handle getting the results. Okay, so there's nothing dangerous about getting an MRI scan. There's no radiation to an MRI scan. You have to lay in that machine for 45 minutes. The only danger you have is if you get claustrophobic. You know, you might want to practice meditation techniques. Pernuvo is an excellent company because they provide this in a very comfortable facility. They let you watch Netflix while you're getting your scan done. So it goes very quickly. Here are the benefits of getting a full body mri. Number one. You can detect anatomical abnormalities that could lead to potential problems in the future. How many people do we know, or have you heard of that have died of an aneurysm? Either in the brain or or in their abdominal aorta? This could have been completely Prevented. Full body MRIs can also catch cancer much earlier, before they become symptomatic. Full body MRI can also give you an indication of your liver health by looking for fatty liver. There's all sorts of things that can be detected in a full body MRI that you would have no idea with, that you live with, because there's no other way to really look underneath your skin without radiation, and you find out when it's too late. So I'm a proponent of full body mri. I do recognize health anxiety is a real thing. And if you are someone that suffers from health anxiety, then definitely have a really good discussion with your doctor about this test. But I do think that that's another tool that finally, like, we brought this technology out from the hospitals where we use it for, you know, too late. Let's look at how big your tumor has grown and invaded everything. And we brought it out into where now you have a choice whether you can use that technology or not. Yes, it's going to cost you a little bit of money. I think they're like eighteen hundred dollars now, but this stuff is getting cheaper and cheaper. It's going to be a few hundred dollars soon and then almost a hundred dollars, you know. And so I think it's very useful to start getting used to that technology. And what I will say too is that, you know, right now people are poo, pooing it like some physicians. Right. But this is exactly what many physicians did 10 years ago with DNA testing. And now DNA testing is a mainstream of medicine, you know, and so it's, it's always, you want to be ahead of the curve, not catching up.

Yeah, I'm with you, Darshan. And I would say hand on heart, to be totally honest, I have a level of health anxiety and I had found a lump in my left pectoral, and that had sent me on this journey of, well, why is it there? And I'm told it's gynecomastia, and I'm told not to worry, but I've got a family history of breast cancer. And so I, I want to go to this prnuvo thing. And yes, I am nervous and I did need to meditate and I did need to watch something ridiculous on Netflix to distract me during that full body mri. But it was great. I came out the end of it five days later. I have such comprehensive information and peace of mind, and if there was something there, I could then actually go get it dealt with, get a specific diagnostic scan and make some choices for my own health.

Yeah, that's so key. James, I'm really happy that you got that MRI done and What I will say, in addition to that mri, since you do have that lump there, I don't know if you've had a doctor take a look at it or not, but men should get mammograms if they feel a lump in their chest. I'm a surgeon. I've done many breast lump removals and I found two or three cancers on men in their chest. So it's not just a woman disease. Men can get it for sure.

Yeah, I'm with you. So my mother and both my grandmothers had breast cancer. And so I went and got a mammogram done. And yeah, I'm going to do that once every couple of years just because it's very uncomfortable, of course. But, hey, millions of others do it. But good prevention.

Exactly. Exactly.

Now, so you're a surgeon. So what specifically in terms of surgery have you focused on over the years?

You know, I did surgery for 25 years.

Now.

I've retired from surgery to practice this health and longevity medicine, I call it. But for 25 years, I did 10 years of trauma, emergency room surgery. Then I did another 10 years of reconstructive surgery after cancer, so a lot of breast cancers. And then I also did cosmetic surgery for a few years combined with that practice. But now, you know, since I saw the light and wanted to be more on the prevention and the functional side of medicine, I decided to wind down that career and focus all my energies on NEXT Health.

I'm so glad. So I'm going to put a link actually to NEXT Health as well. So we've got listeners not just here in New Zealand, Australia, but all over the world, including your neck of the woods. So if anybody's close by, they should go check it out. And if anybody's traveling over your neck of the woods, they should definitely come and drop in.

Thank you.

Now, muscle, let's chat about that. So you'll laugh. Darshan. I'm built like an equestrian jockey, so I'm quite lean and I wasn't blessed with a lot of height. I'm 5 foot 9 and 5 foot 10.

I struggle to put weight on, and that's probably an excuse to be fair. And recently I've realized I don't eat enough protein. I don't eat enough food, actually. And so I'm starting to address that. I'm also starting to do three times a week, some strength workout, resistance training, because I've never done it. And the reason being is I actually don't want to look like Arnie. I'm not all about Muscles. I don't care about that. When I'm 82, I want to be able to walk. We live in a hilly little village. I want to walk down the hill and get my groceries and go to the local farmer's market, have a coffee with my mates and walk back up. I want to not be falling over. I want my brain health to be as good as it can be. My understanding through everything I've read and listened to in recent years is that muscle, lean muscle mass, has a massive impact on our health. Spanish lifespan. And on neurology as well. So I'd love to talk to you about what you know about muscle and what we can do to start building sustainable muscle.

My favorite topic to talk about. So muscle is the organ of longevity for many reasons. Okay. Some things you might not have thought of. One reason is your muscle obviously keeps you mobile. The longer you're mobile, the longer you're going to live with better health. Spanish. Okay. Is when we become immobile that our health span deteriorates very, very rapidly. Okay. Second fact about muscle is your bones stay healthy and strong longer because of one thing, your muscle. It is incredibly important to have strong muscle. To have strong bones, you need vitamin D3K2, you need some calcium, obviously. But none of that matters if you don't have enough muscle. Okay. Next is your muscle is actually where your metabolism lives. Half of your mitochondria for your body live in your muscle with. When you have good muscle health, you have good metabolic health. And metabolic health, as we know, prevents not just diabetes, but all forms of chronic disease. Another reason is that your muscle is also an endocrine organ. It secretes what's called myokines. Myokines are signals to your, the rest of your body that you're healthy. And we need to keep functioning well and we need to stay alive because we are healthy and we are in the environment and we need to live. When your muscle starts degrading, it's a signal of poor health. And poor health means your body just starts shutting down. So these are just four of maybe 20 different ways. Your muscles are an incredibly important organ of your body. And it's absolutely, for me, is number one priority to protect your muscle health. Right?

Yeah.

And so you're doing a lot of things right, James. You're, you know, you're taking more protein. 1 gram per pound of body weight is the target, but necessarily doesn't need to be that way for Everybody. Strength training two to three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes. Also key for almost Everybody to get that minimum effective dose of strength training in. I'll add a couple of things to this, is that when you're strength training, you know, a lot of us are time poor, right? We don't have time to be in the gym for an hour and a half. So here's how you increase the efficacy of that workout. Focus on more whole body movements, Chest presses, maybe lunges, maybe deadlifts. The more movements that you can do that are not isolation movements, more whole body movements, the more efficient your workout will be and the better balance and coordination you'll have. At the same time, it's more functional. Secondly, you want to aim to lift weights that in one set you get as close to failure as possible. You don't have to go to failure, but we call it like one rep and reserve or two reps in reserve. Okay, so what does that mean practically, if you're doing a set of bench press, for example, if you can do it 15, 20 times that weight is too little for you and you need to increase the weight so you can only do it eight or nine times before you fail. You need that stimulus to create muscular growth and create strength. Okay. Third thing about working out is you have to incorporate the rest time as well. Rest a little bit in between sets, but also like you're doing, give yourself a day of rest in between full body workouts as well. Now, rest time is when your body creates new muscle. And I think many people know this already, but you know, just, just to reemphasize it for 24 hours is how long it takes really to create new muscle. So those are all really important. And I also think that there's some proven supplementation that can definitely improve the efficacy of your workouts. Those are vitamin D3K2, magnesium and creatine. All three of these supplements can be very, very important. And lastly, the biomarker of muscle health is skeletal muscle mass, which you can get on a special scale called a bioimpotence scale. This is that scale that you step on with bare feet. It sends a slight electrical current through your body and it gives you a skeletal muscle mass. So everyone just replace your regular scale. I don't care what your weight is like for you. You mentioned you have trouble putting on weight. Doesn't even matter to me. I want to know what skeletal muscle mass you have. And with this scale, a bioimpedent scale, which are like 25 buc, you can, you can get your skeletal muscle mass.

I'll be ordering one of those today.

Yes, I have A link to one in my my guide on the biomarkers I can send you.

Brilliant. Awesome. Well, everyone that's listening, that link is in the show notes. Go get the biomarkers PDF and then you'll see the link. That's awesome, Darshan. I think just taking control of our health is so crucial. The One thing I'm 39, turning 40 next year, and something I'm aware of is hormones. And certainly going through this kind of lump on my chest, they measured my estrogen, my testosterone, all these different hormones. So I understand that hormones are really important and that there's a way that we can influence them. So for high performers that want energy, that want to be, you know, a lot of vital health, what can we do to supercharge, protect and sustain good hormone levels?

Yeah, fantastic question again. So this is another one of those biomarkers that every man and woman should follow for themselves is their testosterone level. We are genetically programmed to create less testosterone as we age. We know that however, many people that are super healthy have higher testosterone levels and many people with chronic disease have low testosterone levels. And they go kind of hand in hand. And so there's a lot of things that we can do to improve our testosterone levels without taking testosterone. And that includes getting enough sleep is critical. Doing a meditation or some sort of breath work twice a day is extremely important. Not eating ultra processed food, not being sedentary, lifting heavy weights, all of these things can actually improve your testosterone level. Losing the belly fat, the visceral fat that is underneath our abdominal muscles, that is particularly inflammatory, it can really reduce testosterone levels as well. So those are all different techniques that you can use to improve your testosterone levels. And that's why if you check your biomarkers once every four to five months, you know what direction you're headed in. And if all of these kind of lifestyle changes that you're making are headed you in the right direction. Now, if you can't improve your testosterone level by using those things, it is definitely time to see an expert in hormone replacement therapy, because that can be a game changer for your overall health and to protect you from chronic disease as well.

Yeah, that's cool that you say that because often with hormone replacement therapy, people automatically go to increases your chances of cancers and so forth. But it sounds like from your background and research that you've done and obviously the field that you're in, you know that that's not true.

Yeah, it's been proven over and over again. We have many studies now that show testosterone replacement Therapy actually is not related to heart disease. It is protective against all forms of cancer. And so everyone's mindset has really been changed over the last 15 years on hormones, because our body naturally makes them for a reason. And so if we can be safe and effective with it, why not do it?

Yeah, I agree. The one thing that interested me there was the mindfulness meditation piece. So I'm a big proponent. I've been doing it for years. I love it once a day, sometimes twice a day. And sometimes when I kind of challenge my clients or my listeners to meditate, it can be like, it's such a feminine energy thing. It's such a soft thing. It's like, I think it's a superpower, personally. So you're telling me that it can actually influence testosterone?

Oh, absolutely. Your testosterone level is very sensitive to the amount of stress that you're going through. And so meditation is a very powerful way to mitigate stress. And even though, you know you might not feel less stress, your body is regulating during meditation the balance between your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. During meditation, your parasympathetic rises, your sympathetic goes down. And doing that twice a day, which most of us never do that all day long. You know, we wake up, we're stressed from the moment we wake up, the last thing we do is look at our phone and answer a few emails. There is zero parasympathetic activity during our day. Doing this twice a day gives your parasympathetic system a chance to participate and to calm your system. And that improves testosterone levels.

I love that. That's seriously amazing to hear and something I can now, when someone says to me it's very feminine and it's very this, I can actually give them some facts. That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

Now I want to think a little bit about steroids. So people want to build muscle and they're. They want to use steroids to do that. What's the research? What's the facts around that? Can it be healthy? Is there a way to do it? Should we avoid it?

Yeah, I think steroids, you know, there's a big.

It's a. It's a catch term for a lot of different ways of taking something exogenous to improve your muscle mass. Right. So testosterone is technically considered a steroid. So is growth hormone. So are these growth hormone analogs? A lot of different ways of.

Categorizing these steroids? What I will say is there's a healthy way to do this. And there's a non healthy way of doing this. Obviously you want to try to not use steroids if you don't need to, but we just had to talk about testosterone. And testosterone actually protects you from disease. So you might be using testosterone. Then it's all about following the levels and not getting what's called super physiologic, where you're giving yourself much more than your body would have ever produced, ever. You know, and those are people that are using steroids to, to kind of cheat biology and to go beyond the limits of biology and create more muscle than they would have even gotten on their own, even with optimal testosterone levels. Same with growth hormone. We make growth hormone until probably about the age of 35 and our growth hormone starts declining. And some people take growth hormone to improve and normalize their growth hormone. Other people take peptides to create a more natural secretion of your growth hormone. Some people go way off the rails with it and take a really high amount. And you know, you see this a lot in the bodybuilder community as well. So what I would say is, look, bodybuilders use it, they've been using it effectively for over two generations now. And if that's kind of your end goal, do that responsibly under the care of a really skilled practitioner. Please don't buy it black market, inject yourself and you know, all of this. But I think responsible hormone therapy can very easily help you achieve better muscular growth without any side effects or risks.

Thanks for sharing that. That's certainly for me, something I will never contemplate. I want to do it in a natural way. I've got no bodybuilding aspirations. I just want to stay healthy for longer. So I appreciate it. So a couple more questions just before we wrap up. If there was a listener, they're a high performer, they're really driven. They are all in with their work. They're flat out. They're what they might call themselves as busy person. They're always doing things. If you could whisper something in their ear first thing in the morning, what would that advice be?

Yeah, first thing in the morning, do not grab your phone. Okay?

I think a lot of us charge our phone next to our bedside. So it was literally the last thing we see before we go to bed. First thing we see as soon as we wake up, it's our alarm clock. And the sad thing about these phones is now they're way more than just a communication device and a clock. You are getting constant signals from your phone that take your attention and Create stress. There's research that shows that even a phone that is turned off by your bedside leads to higher levels of cortisol than not having there by your bedside. So my advice is something very simple is to put your phone charger as far away from you in your house as you can do. I keep mine by my coffee machine, so it is the last thing I put away before I start my bedtime routine. I have about a 30 minute bedtime routine that does not involve looking at any electronic devices. And guess what? First thing in the morning, my phone's not there for me to grab. So I go to the bathroom, I brush my teeth, I get a cup of coffee and then I use my phone after I've done my morning routine. That little bit of space between bedtime and wake time where you don't have a phone is a game changer for your mental health and your physical health. If you can try that, I can promise you it will change your life.

Amazing. I have to agree with that. Just having the phone out of the bedroom is just a game changer. It's huge. And you talk about your morning routine. Anything else in there that you didn't mention around morning routine that you do that helps you structure a really good day?

Yeah, I'm a big believer in my morning routine. I've been practicing this now for 30 years and it's been a cornerstone of my life. I try to never skip it. And so my morning routine involves a few things I do for my mindset, for my brain health and also for my physical health. For I start off by doing some journaling. I do a visualization and a affirmation exercise. Gratitude. Practicing all this only takes about 10 minutes or so. From there I move on to I do some reading. I read about 30 minutes a day. I actually read from three different books at the same time. Just a few pages in each one. And then from there I move on to something physical. I make a cup of coffee, I drink a big glass of water, take my supplements, I do a workout that is 10 minutes long. I have lift heavy weights and then I drink my coffee and then I go on with the rest of my day.

I love it. I really love that. So a lot of that's very, very similar to mine. Wake up, meditate, journal, read. I have four or five books by my bed. I'm the same as you.

But the supplements thing, the only supplement I'm taking is that prebiotic or postbiotic, probiotic, that for my gut. What else do you take?

Yeah, so you know I just became an advisor for a company called supco. S U P P Co. This is a fantastic app where you can, if you go there, you can see my entire supplement regimen that I take and it gives you a rating for all the different supplements as far as the quality of those supplements. And so I love this app. And you can find other biohackers and doctors supplements on there and protocols there. But anyway, what I would say is that there's some certain core supplements that I think everyone should really consider taking. And Those are vitamin D3K2, magnesium and a mixed form of magnesium and an omega 3 supplement. And then I take on top of that, creatine that I think everyone should take as well, men and women. And lastly, I have some mitochondrial health supplements that I take that improve the efficacy and the number of mitochondria that I have in every cell of my body. So that's kind of like my supplement stack that I use. And you know, I do a lot of research into this. I read the scientific papers. I really feel that starting with those supplements can be a game changer.

I love it. I'm going to write those down. And magnesium citrate, would that be Bio.

Optimizers Magnesium breakthrough because it has five different, five or six different forms of magnesium in it. All have different good effects.

Awesome. That's amazing. Thank you. And with NEXT Health, if we were to fast forward 15 years and you and I had another conversation and you're like, james, I am just so proud. I'm so excited. What's happened? How would you describe that with NEXT Health?

Yeah. So right now, Next Health has 12 clinics all over the United States and Canada and one in Dubai. And my vision for NEXT Health is we are creating a new health care system. What I mean by that is our current healthcare system is not a healthcare system. It is a sick care system. It is where you go to get diagnosed with the disease and either get a surgery or a pill. Thank God we have it. You know, if you have a heart attack or you diagnose a cancer, you get hit by a bus, that's where you need to go for most of us, like a healthy individual like yourself, you don't want to go there. You want to avoid that if at all possible. So where do you go? Where do you go do all the things that we just talked about? That's Next Health. We are the clinic to optimize your health, to reverse chronic disease and to keep you out of the hospital. And there needs to be thousands and thousands of Clinics like ours, all over. For every doctor's office, there should be one clinic like ours. I'm with thousands of them, right, where everyone has a place to go, where they're managing their biomarkers, where they are given good advice. The minute something is spotted, it is reversed immediately and you are empowered with your own data. And that's my goal. So we actually have 150 locations opening in the next three years and I think there's room for many more.

I love it. I would love to chat to you about Australia, New Zealand, and let's get get you showing up down here because we need it.

I love it. I would love to.

That's amazing. Now, one last question, Darshan. I want you to imagine that you and I will fast forward many years into the future and you're highly aware that it's your last day on earth and someone very young who you love dearly, comes into the room and says, darshan, I really need to know, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Yeah, I would say a few things. Number one, become a master of routines and habits. They will guide you in the right direction every single time. Number two, read as much as possible. Learn and read every single day, you know. And thirdly, don't get attached to anything physical. Physical possessions are basically an accumulation of garbage for the most part. And the less you can accumulate, the better it is for you, your mental status, but also for your pocketbook. How many things do you buy and then rebuy and then rebuy and throw away is just a total waste. And so you will be mentally healthier and financially healthier if you give up the attachment to things.

Such great wisdom, honestly, great advice. And I want to remind everyone that in the show notes there's a link. Please go and click it. There's an incredible resource from Dr. Darshan Shah there. And also I'm going to be looking up your supplement regime with that supplement company. I'll put a link to that as well.

Thank you. Yeah, they don't sell any supplements. It's just listings and ratings and so, you know, the supplement industry is like the wild, wild west. There's so much crap out there, especially what you can buy online. This really helps you understand what really works and what is good quality.

Beautiful, Darshan, thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for the effort that you put into your research, helping your patients and then most importantly, for sharing openly everything that you know. You don't hold it close, you share. So hats off to you and please continue to do that.

James, thank you so much. I can't wait to get down in New Zealand and we can hang out.

Bring it up.

Where do you live in New Zealand?

Just in Christchurch. Just outside Christchurch. A little town called Lyttelton.

Ah, beautiful. Can't wait to visit you.

Yeah. Come down and say hello.

I will.

Cheers, Darshan.

Cheers.

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