LS 95 - A 180 on Health with Matt Stone

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

Welcome to.

The Longevity Show, Informing listeners on the.

Important aspects of health, wealth and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest.

With fascinating interviews with top authors and.

Gurus in the field, along with the.

Latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer.

And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman. My pleasure to welcome Matt Stone to the show. He is the voice of 180 degree health. He's an independent health researcher, writer, blogger, has a lot of great videos on YouTube and he has read over 300 books on the subject in the last several years. And I think you're going to learn some very interesting stuff today. Matt, welcome. How are you?

Thanks, Jason. I'm great. How about you?

Good, good. So where are you coming to us from today?

Well, I'm coming from Reno today. I don't live here full time. I spend most living in Florida. But I'm in Reno for a few weeks helping a friend of mine with a couple of his projects.

Fantastic. Well, if you could sum it up before we drill down into the specifics. Do you have sort of a way to sum up your philosophy of health and diet and all of the related parts?

Well, that's an awfully difficult thing to summarize.

I knew it was going to be a tough question. I figured I'd start with a hard one and get easier on you.

After that, it's hard for me to say something simple, but basically I'm a health researcher and I've come at this with a really open mind. So I really looked at this and I often tell people that when I first started I knew everything and now I've learned so much that I hardly know anything anymore. I think the sciences of human health and nutrition and things related to it are very young sciences. We don't really know a whole lot about it definitively. A lot of the ideas that people have about health and nutrition and the human body are very overly simplified. And as I dig deeper, it becomes more and more complex and I think just not being so sure about everything and having an open mind and being willing to explore it freely and change your tune when you come across some things that conflict your held beliefs that you held so near and dear to your heart and having the flexibility to reexamine those and keep pushing forward and learning more and more. And that's what I do in my site and in my work, it's just constantly being updated and renewed as new information comes into the pipeline. And yeah, so that's why I kind of encourage people really to focus on how their bodies work and see if they can get them working correctly with an open mind.

Well, there are several things here, and I'm just going to sort of say them all at first and let you address them and how they blend together. But there are some contrary things that you talk about. You call them the 180 degree opposites on your website. One is eat more, exercise less. The other saturated fat is the healthiest type of fat. And for treating obesity, the best diet is a high calorie diet. And then saturated fat is the best fat for reducing heart disease risk. Carbohydrates are good for type 2 diabetics. You should spend more time in the sun without sunscreen. Two more hereditary has much to do with our health problems, but has absolutely nothing to do with our genes. And then the last one, germs do not cause disease. Poor health does. Do you believe all those things?

Well, they're all partial truths. They're not absolute mandates per se, but there's a partial truth in all those. And one of the things that I've helped to do is people have obviously these firmly held beliefs about certain things, such as the simple belief that people are obese because they eat too much and they don't get enough exercise. And that's a really simplified way of looking at it that ignores all the different hormonal things that are going on underneath the surface. It denies all the abnormalities with the metabolism that we know that are exemplified by people with weight problems. If you actually look at it from a hormonal standpoint, we see that people with obesity or prone to obesity typically have a low metabolic rate or a reduced metabolic rate. I was reading even a study this morning about how they established this in dogs, that there was a strong connection between low body temperature or low metabolism and obesity. In dogs, the larger the dots were, the lower their body temperature and metabolism. So from that point of view, if you're to eat less and exercise more, particularly doing a lot of endurance exercise or really just trying to create a calorie deficit, you're always going to see metabolism decrease. So that's the recipe for lowering metabolism. If an obese person has a low metabolism, why would you do something that makes their root problem of their obesity even worse? That's just one example. I mean, obviously we could go through each one of those individually one by one, but there's certainly other ways of looking at things. And part of it is just to really help people neutralize their thoughts and feelings about things. Because like I said, people in the modern world are looking at these complex issues with these very simplistic ways of looking at them.

Sure, sure. Well, let me ask you about one. Let me ask you about sunscreen, for example. Now, nowadays, everybody's really into sunscreen. When I was a kid, not so much. Recently I've become much more interested in sunscreen because I'm noticing the effects on my skin as I get older and I don't like it. Would you say don't use sunscreen?

Well, it's a really fascinating topic. Here's my general thoughts on it, is that we know that people in the modern world are really suffering from chronically low levels of vitamin D. And our primary source of vitamin D is what we synthesize from actual sunlight. We can actually synthesize a pretty phenomenal amount of vitamin D from sunlight.

Right.

As long as that's full spectrum sunlight that isn't has, you know, some of the rays partially.

Is it the same as supplementing with vitamin D, though? Like, I take a, I mean, I look at, I live in Phoenix area. Okay. So it's very sunny here almost always. And you know, you just get enough sun, I think just walking around, you don't even need to lay out in the sun, so to speak. But, but you know, I, when I lived in Californ, I moved here last summer and I lived in Newport Beach. I started taking vitamin D supplements. I just remember hearing someone on the radio talking about the benefits of it. Is it the same? The vitamin D we synthesize from sunlight, Is that the same as what we can get out of a vitamin?

It's not exactly the same. It's foolish human error to believe that we can supplement an isolated supplement like vitamin D, which is a very powerful substance, and believe that we can do that without any kind of collateral damage or that it's going to behave the same as if we were synthesizing it in a more coherent way from the sun itself. Getting back to the point that I was going to make, we know that natural sunlight and vitamin D reduces our risk of almost every known cancer except for squamous cell carcinoma or skin cancer. Yes, it might raise your rate, your chances of getting skin cancer, which is relatively minor. And the treatments for that are certainly a lot more easygoing than treatments for bone cancer, stomach cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and so forth. You're really taking a Powerful preventative way to fight a very benign disease. In comparison, I'm a big advocate of getting natural sunlight. I also think that because we spend so little time in the sun, when we do go out in the sun, we get sunburned really easy because our exposure to it is so sporadic. If people were actually to go out and get half an hour of sun every day without sunscreen, they would develop a natural tolerance to the sun and their skin would never really get damaged because they wouldn't be exceeding their skin's threshold of how much solar exposure it can handle. I have a lot of different philosophies and attitudes coming at it, but that's certainly part of why I made that statement.

Yeah, okay, interesting. But is the number really a half hour a day? I mean, you can get that much sun or does it depend. It probably depends where you live, right?

It depends on where you live. It depends on your heredity. It depends on, you know, how long you spend in the sun. I mean, obviously some people can get fried in 10 minutes, but most people can expand that amount to, you know, 10 minutes to 20, 20 to 30 and so on and so forth. I used to live in Hawaii, and I managed to get to the point where I could go out for a couple hours in full sun in the middle of the day in Hawaii and not get sunburned just because my skin was building up a natural tolerance to it. There's other factors involved, and we could certainly talk about those, but they relate back more to the type of fats that we're consuming in the modern age. Are heat and light sensitive? Our skin and the cells in our skin are actually very heat and light sensitive because of the type of fats that we're eating. I look at that as more of a root problem as to why people are developing skin cancer. Because we're having a lot of oxidation and cellular damage in our skin, because we have these heat and light sensitive fats in our skin. Whereas 100 years ago we were eating a lot of heat and light protective fat, the saturated fat.

Okay. Yeah. There's just so much to it and so many interconnections that it's hard to keep track of this. So what else should people know about? You know, maybe some of the common misconceptions about health and so forth. If you want to address any of these other ones here, I think that would be great. But, you know, I really want to dive into what should we be eating?

Well, you know, part of my research, like you said, it's hard to keep all this straight because there's so much out there, a lot of it's so conflicting. We're getting all kinds of new studies and research coming in, pouring in all the time on a daily basis. How do you keep it straight? Part of my purpose, I think, is to help keep people from being so sure about everything. Because people get it in their minds that there is this optimal human diet that we need to eat this way, or certain foods that we should be eating and so forth. If anything, I'm trying to get people to have less mental interference getting in between their body's needs and what they think that they should be eating. For example, if someone thinks that they should be drinking eight, eight ounce glasses of water a day, this is a really common thing. This is something that we've universally given to the public as a health recommendation. Then we also recommend to people that you should eat a low salt diet and that salt is bad for you. Well, interestingly, our system, our bodies are very, very sophisticated. If you eat something that is salty, you will get thirsty in a matter of seconds, sometimes even on contact. If you eat something salty, you get thirsty because the body is very well designed in terms of its ability to regulate these types of things for itself. But if you plant a seed in someone's mind about how they should be consuming more water, eating less salt, and they start making decisions based on an idea and they shut down and trump their body's natural signals and everything with an idea, they can get themselves into a lot of trouble. Even making a simple recommendation like, oh, you should drink X number of ounces of water every day can be very dangerous or things like that. I actually try to encourage people to be less sure about what they should be eating and try to steer the conversation away from what people should be eating. Get them instead focusing on how their bodies are working so that they can find out for themselves really what type of diet or what type of foods is really going to help the systems of their body work and function correctly. And also helping people understand what proper function of our body systems really is.

Well, what you say about the salt issue makes a lot of sense because, I mean, think about it, you don't see it as much nowadays, but a few years ago you used to see every bar would serve chips or pretzels or peanuts or something to make you thirsty so you'd buy more drinks. So there's always a counterbalance, isn't there? There's a countervailing factor that comes into play. And a lot of people just think, you know, on the face of it, well, eat less salt because it dehydrates you. But that's not the whole issue, is it? People that eat more salt drink more water.

Dr. Well, that's the thing. We file these things into these black or white hero and villain categories.

Salt has an incredibly vital and essential physiological function. So going to war against it is a huge mistake. It's more about learning how when you need more salt, when you need less, and identifying those types of things and using it with greater precision. And a lot of times our minds can't even make those decisions. Our cravings actually dictate what we need better than anything else. If you force somebody to drink water against their will, they will often develop really strong and powerful salt cravings. So we have a lot of intelligence guiding the system that operates us. A lot of times this whole health fanaticism that is permeating our 21st century culture is causing a lot of people a lot of problems. So there's a lot more than we can really just figure out with our brains about what we should and should not be eating and drinking and so forth.

Well, what else should people know? I want to talk a little bit more about eating, but what about exercise? I mean, can you exercise too much?

Yeah, I mean, exercise is just, it's another thing where, you know, if a bodyif a person's body is ill or it's not functioning properly or it's under a lot of stress, doing a lot of exercise is just adding to that burden. Really what determines whether exercise is healthy or not is whether or not somebody can recover from it properly. A lot of people are not eating very much food, they're not getting enough sleep, they're not doing the things that they need to rest and recuperate from exercise. So that exercise just makes them break down even faster. So exercise is all relative to the actual person that the exercise is being performed by and how well their system is operating, how fast it's recuperating. And it's all very individual. How long it takes a 65 year old to recuperate from a bout of exercise is very different from how long it takes a 15 year old to recuperate from a bout of exercise. So it all has to be done on an individual basis. And to eliminate one's biofeedback and follow a set prescription that's supposed to be applied to the masses is can be a great success or a great failure, depending on who's taking that advice and how seriously they're taking that and how much they're ignoring their bodies as they pursue these quote unquote health practices.

In that example you gave Matt, where it takes a 15 year old a lot less time to recoup from exercise than a 60 year old, you know, and everybody on its face says of course that's true. You know, and as people get older, of course they experience it firsthand. Why is that the case though? And can that be undone? You know, you hear these commercials for HGH and you know, all these anti aging supplements and stuff like this and, and you know, is it because our cells just regenerate more slowly? Is that the reason we recover slowly? I've certainly noticed it myself, and I hate to talk about this on a, on a health segment, but you know, if I go out drinking, I just can't do it anymore. I mean, not like I used to. I just feel bad the next day and I don't, I don't want to ruin my next day. So I've noticed a massive decrease in my interest in alcohol consumption, that's for sure.

Yeah, there's a lot of systems that become weakened with aging and a lot of that is unavoidable. We're never going to have a gold medal sprinter that's 78 years old. It's never going to happen because there are certain declines that we undergo with aging. Most of those are declines in metabolism and just our cells ability to produce and generate energy. So one of the things that I focused on over the years primarily is just seeing the importance of metabolism and making sure that people aren't bringing about an unnecessarily rapid decline in their metabolic rate through some of the things that they're doing. So yes, I mean, you're always going to see a decline in overall health, vitality, recuperative capacity and whatnot with aging. But there are a ton of different ways that we can slow down that degeneration or in some cases even reverse it. Doing something like strength training, which does increase human growth hormone and does build muscle mass and strength. That reverses the normal decrease in muscle mass and strength that we see with aging. So there are things that we can take.

Are you saying that one should lift weights versus doing yoga, for example.

When.

It comes to some of the. If you look at very specific problems. So with the elderly, we see increasing rates of sarcopenia, which is the decline in muscle mass and strength. We also see increasing rates of osteoporosis or osteopenia, which is the decrease in bone mass, strength training, or doing something with a heavy load is known to overturn sarcopenia and increase bone density. So we know that we have specific sort of lifestyle medicine and strength training. It can be used to prevent certain declines or even overturn certain declines that have already taken place. So we can look at something like that and see what its usage is and see what it can be used for and know when to sort of administer that medicine. So I really like to look at very simple things like that, very simple modifications and pay attention to those. But yes, there's no question that you're going to get a better improvement in sarcopenia and osteoporosis and osteopenia if you're doing strength training as opposed to yoga. Now, any exercise would probably help, but something that actually increases the force of gravity is what's going to actually reverse those types of things. Anyway, that's just one interesting thing. But there's a million different little things we could talk about like that. But that's certainly something, I think with aging. It's a very powerful medicine. Strength training or exercise is definitely a very, a youth promoting type of activity, but only if you're doing it within your own body's physical threshold. You're allowing time for adequate recovery and so forth. Otherwise it's just going to hasten your decline if you're overdoing it. So really finding the right dose is very important as well.

You know, I've read studies and heard about the concept of caloric restriction. Do you think that's a wise idea or. It sounds like from what you were saying at the beginning of our discussion today, that you might not like that idea. You know, and then these studies were where they, they worked with laboratory animals and so forth and found that they lived longer if they, you know, restricted calories and just ate light. I mean, I think most people would agree that Americans eat too much food. Probably you'll get universal agreement on that one. But, you know, really just eating less in general, Is that good for one's health or not?

Well, we have all these, I mean, we'll talk about this for, for quite a while because this is one of the most fascinating topics and there's lot of just widely held beliefs that are really set in stone in people's minds. And again, this is another one of those things that people should be a lot less sure about because there's variables that are not really taken into account here. Well, the first we talked about with obesity, we have all these different hormonal and biochemical regulating forces in the body that determine what our appetite Is it determines whether the food we eat goes into our muscle tissue, whether it's used to generate heat and energy, or whether it goes into storage into body fat. These hormonal factors really dictate and control whether one person gets fat when they eat a lot of food, or whether they just get really strong, muscular and energetic when they eat a lot of food. So we can't definitively say that people eat too much food. And even if we do find that people are eating too much food, it's not necessarily something that people are choosing to do. It would be like finding, if we found that there was too much oxygen in people's bodies, we couldn't just say that people are breathing too much. It would make more sense to actually look at all the different factors that regulate our breathing to determine the fact that, oh, there's something going on where the body is retaining too much oxygen or its rate of respiration is too high. You know, these are things that are out of our voluntary control and our sort of energy and calorie accounting system is largely out of our control as well. To think that we have all these fine tuned mechanisms to regulate the amount of fluid to salt or the amount of oxygen to carbon dioxide and all these things, but then the amount of calories we eat is something that's just completely under our own control and then it's a matter of discipline is really ridiculous Anyway, that's that part of the equation. I can't say that we're definitively eating too much. I can say that we're definitively storing too much energy and body fat, and that there's probably a significant hormonal metabolic reason for it. When it comes to calorie restriction. And what you asked about that, there's so many factors that are not taken into account here. The first is that they start restricting calories at birth, Whether it's a fruit fly or a rabbit or a monkey or whatever they're doing a calorie restriction on. What this does is it allows the body to become underdeveloped. So and the size, the general size, is much smaller of that organism. So if you look at small dogs, they live longer, a lot longer. They live a lot longer than big dogs. They want to read the dog because they're smaller.

So just because they're smaller, it's not a genetic thing that all small dogs happen to genetically be the longer living creatures and big ones don't live as long. It's the actual weight of the dog is what you're saying.

It certainly is. A factor. And to think that once you've already developed a body that is very large that you can now go back to eating a low calorie diet.

Right, that's not going to happen.

I don't think that's right. Because what that does is just lowers the metabolic rate and sort of accelerates the aging process. So starting it at birth versus starting it when you're 35 years old, totally different. Secondly, we know that restricting your calories for a long period of time and most people just causes them to get really hungry and be really prone to binging and things like that. We don't live in a laboratory. In the real world, trying to cut your calories back by 30 or 40% will just make that McDonald's sign shine even brighter. So.

You know, we're complex organisms with a lot of emotional and psychological relationships with food. We have food to tempt us around every corner. Trying to restrict your calories for most people will just make them more tempted and raising their appetite, and they end up doing that sort of yo yo pattern when they try to restrict calories. You restrict calories, you lose a little weight and then you binge and you gain back even more than you lost. It's not necessarily something that can be a workable solution. It's more of a theory. There's even more exceptions to that and even more factors that aren't taken into account, such as the fact that these studies are done in a controlled metabolic environment in a laboratory. In the real world, eating a low calorie diet and having low metabolism from doing that and so forth makes us much more prone to developing all different kinds of infections. We're now seeing all these very clear relationships between various types of infections and heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, and so forth. So in the real world, with all the different pathogens that we interact with and things, maybe calorie restriction in the real world just makes you get taken over by parasites and fungus and bacteria and viruses and all these things in the laboratory you don't have to deal with.

Yeah. In all fairness, though, on balance, don't we have to really define caloric restriction? I mean, it doesn't mean starving oneself. It just means maybe eating light and not becoming obese. I don't know, what's the number of calories everybody should have per day? They say like 3,000 or something, right?

Right. Well, to get the benefits of calorie restriction, they generally say anywhere from 30 to 50% reduction in calorie intake.

Oh, that's big. Right.

It's not minor, it's very big. Exactly.

Yeah. Okay, so I think defining it is the first issue.

Right? Yeah, okay, definitely. Alright, good. So if someone cuts their calorie intake by 3 to 500 calories, is that bad? Does that create all those other problems?

Well, 3 to 500 calories is not as severe as what a lot of people are doing. A lot of people are, instead of cutting their calories by 3 to 500 calories, they're cutting their calories to 3 to 500 calories and they're inducing all this rapid weight loss with things like HCG diet and some other ones out there like that that are akin to that. That does really cause a lot of people a lot of problems. You lose weight and then you stop losing weight and then you gain weight back again. We know that just by manipulating calorie intake, you always see the weight regain take place in well over 90% of the people, which is one of the reasons why obesity researchers think a lot of this calorie counting kind of stuff is just kind of a waste of time because it just induces a short term weight loss followed typically by weight regain. And we know that it's not really a very viable solution to our obesity problem.

Yeah, no, the yo yo dieting thing is well understood, I think, at least by. I agree with you on it. Okay, good. Well, what else would you like people to say in kind of wrapping it up here and give out your website as well, Matt, if you would.

Well, My website is 180degreehealth.com that's 180 degree health. And like I said, it's kind of a source where we can openly discuss certain things. And it's not a source of dogma where we believe in one narrow ideology or philosophy and then we're out there to sort of promote and protect our stance on things. It's ever evolving, it's ever changing. And I would say that the main difference between my site and all the other sites and all the other information in my books as well the difference is that it's really about getting your body to work correctly.

And being very open minded about how to achieve that. For example, if I encounter somebody with a low metabolism, usually their hands and feet are freezing cold all the time to increase the warmth of somebody's hands and feet. Things like salt and sugar and starch and saturated fat and all the things we're not supposed to eat corrects that problem really, really well. So if you're tethered to the idea that it's going to just raise your cholesterol and clog your arteries and you're afraid to eat it. Then it keeps you from actually finding and discovering what is going to make your body work correctly. It's my belief in my faith that if we get our bodies working correctly, we feel good, our digestion is good, our sleep is good, all these things are functioning correctly, that our bodies are going to be able to handle things and prevent disease on their own much better than an ailing body that's just not working correctly. So that's kind of where I'm coming from on everything. And my site is very, very fun place for people who have an interest in health to be.

It definitely is. Well, Matt Stone, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Thanks Jason. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We will would very much appreciate that and be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.