The Plague of Pre-Diabetes with Jonny Bowden

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout.

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The energy to play full out at 100. I don't know if you've heard the latest statistics on metabolic health. Pre pandemic it was 12% of the population was metabolically healthy and they looked at metrics like blood sugar, waist circumference, blood pressure, triglycerides, hdl. But now post pandemic really no surprise. The pandemic certainly wasn't like a great move for our health. We are at 6.8% and the big thing there is the primary issue within that is insulin resistance and that's what we are going to be digging into today. I know we get so many questions around cholesterol. I've got the author of the Cholesterol Myth with me and the author of the 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. Those are just two of his 15 best selling books. It's my longtime buddy Dr. Johnny Boden who's a board certified nutritionist and nationally known expert on weight loss, metabolism and aging. Plus he is going to be gifting you his seven days of unusual health habits. You'll just have to get them to.

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We might have gone on a few tangents and rants here. Johnny's been a longtime friend. He and I have both been in the field 30 plus years and he has just a wealth of knowledge. So much great intel and actionable information in this interview. And so you can grab his gift@jjvirgin.com johnnyjo and then why and I will be right back with my buddy Johnny Bowden.

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Johnny Bowden, Long time, my friend. You know, you have this provocative statement you've laid out about the metabolic plague of the 21st century. And I'm like, oh boy. I mean, it's like the pandemic got people's attention, but we have an epidemic that no one's paying attention to and they're not unrelated.

The metabolic plague that I'm talking about and that we will be talking about underlies every single chronic disease we know of and every comorbidity for Covid.

Yes. And I think, honestly, I'm really concerned that we are tiptoeing around things nowadays, trying to make everybody feel like, okay, and all you're doing is leading to people's early demise and poor quality of life. And that ends here. It's just ridiculous.

You're preaching to the choir.

I mean, it's not helping anybody. It's like, are you going to be the one to go explain to them when they just had to have their feet cut off because they have diabetes that, sorry that I told you that it was totally fine, that you could totally be healthy, 60 pounds overweight. No, I'm not doing that. It's not okay. So when you're saying metabolic plague, that is a great term, by the way. I am going to quote you.

Thank you.

What do you mean? What are you talking about?

I'm talking about something called insulin resistance, or what's technically known as insulin resistance syndrome. Generally, our parents, or the people in the world in general know insulin resistance as pre diabetes. They are essentially the same thing. And what's really important to know is that this isn't some esoteric thing that only happens to diabetics. 88% of America. And this is in the literature. You can Google it, you can find the studies. 88% of us have some degree of insulin resistance. And according to Dr. Casey Means, who's another great hero in this play, that number's gone up to 93%. I haven't seen that data.

I just found it. It's 6.8% of the population now is totally metabolically healthy.

Here's the part that makes my head explode. Insulin resistance is almost 100% treatable, preventable and reversible with diet, fasting and lifestyle. No one's talking about it. Your doctor doesn't even know what it is.

So insulin resistance, let's talk about that, because I remember hearing some statistics. You and I used to go to so many medical conferences.

God, did we ever.

I know. Well, I'm back out on the tour again. I'm going back out because I'm working on my next book. But I remember hearing, I think maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And I thought, that's the most ridiculous statement ever. And they said by the year 20, 20, 20, 30, I think it was, a hundred percent of the population will be diabetic. And I thought, no way. No way could that be. And all of a sudden you go, oh, wait, wait, it could be. What is going on? How is this happening? How does it develop? Where's it coming from?

I'll give you the story that I tell most often because I think it illustrates insulin resistance in a way people can relate to. Insulin resistance is, for want of a better term, a broken metabolism. A metabolism that isn't working optimally. And the way we can understand it best is to look at how a metabolism is supposed to operate. So let's take a five year old or an eight year old kid who lives in a wonderful area where there's organic food and everything's wonderful, and he has play dates, he comes home from school, eats an apple, his blood sugar goes up a little bit, which is just perfect because his muscles are going to need that sugar because he's going to go out and play and ride a bike and go on the jungle gym and do all the things that kids did before micromanaged play dates on computers. So that's a normal metabolism. What happens is the blood sugar goes up a little. The pancreas says, oh, there's a little bit of a rise in blood sugar and it releases a little squirt of a hormone called insulin. Vital for your health, vital for your life. Insulin comes in, one of its major jobs is to remove that sugar from the bloodstream because we don't want high blood sugar in the bloodstream. That's very dangerous. So insulin comes along and it corrects that and it takes that sugar and it delivers it to the muscle cells which are delighted to have it. And the kid goes out and plays. And after a while, sugar goes back to normal, he's hungry again, he goes back and eats dinner. And that is a normal, healthy metabolism. Now let's fast forward 35 years. You wake up, you're stressed out of your mind, you barely slept, your cortisol levels are on the roof. You rush over to the nearest coffee emporium, you buy yourself a 900 calorie, no fat, blueberry muffin and a latte, whatever the hell it is with, you know, couple of pumps of this and that, your blood sugar's on the root. Now the pancreas is going code blue, code blue. It's squirting out all this insulin. The insulin is running around trying to get that sugar into the muscle cells, but this time the muscle cells are saying, what do we want this shit for? This guy's going to spend all day at the office on the computer, then he's going to go home and work the clicker in front of the tv. We don't need any more sugar, thank you very much, take it elsewhere. And they become resistant to the effect of insulin, the sherpa of sugar. Now the fat cells don't become resistant that quickly. So the fat cell says, bring it over here, we'll take it, we'll take it. So now you start to gain some fat around your belly, maybe on your hips, butts and thighs, but mainly around the belly. And for a while, that insulin is able to keep your blood sugar just barely from the diabetic range, but it's working really hard. Eventually even the fat cells say no mas. And now you've got both high blood sugar and high insulin. That is the definition of diabetes. And that's what insulin resistance is. I like to explain it in a way where if when you were born, whether it was God or the genome organizing device or whatever it is, nature or God gave you a bucket. That bucket comes in different sizes. Some people get a big bucket, some people get a small bucket, and you can eat all the carbs that you can fit into that bucket. Now is it fair that some people get big buckets and some people get small bucket? No, it's not fair. It's metabolism. That's just the way it is. It's like gravity. It doesn't care if you like it or not. So you get this bucket and if you try to eat more carbohydrates than the bucket will hold, you are going to eventually overwhelm the system. And that is what's going to produce the no mas of the cells saying we're resistant to insulin.

The process you just described didn't happen overnight.

No, it did not.

And there's so many signs all along the way that something is awry.

Correct.

And for someone, you went to their doctor and maybe their blood sugar was elevated, their human A1C was elevated, maybe they checked to fasting insulin, though they don't seem to very often.

They do not.

I don't understand how you can get a picture with just blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c and not look at insulin. It makes zero sense to me. But someone going to get their labs done. Like, what should someone be looking for now as these indicators that something is sideways? Because again, I still hear it today that people go to the doctor and the doctor is saying, hey, we'll watch this. I'm like, watch it. So what are the signs that someone can look for to know? And I mean, there's signs that you don't even have to go get a lab test to see.

I have a very low tech, free at home test that you can do to See whether or not you might be insulin resistant, and that is this. Stand in front of a wall about 6 inches in front of the wall. Walk slowly an inch at a time towards the wall. If your belly touches the wall before your nose, 98% sure you've got some degree of insulin resistance. If you're a man and your waistline is 40 or over. If you're a woman and your waistline is 35 or over, very likely that you have insulin resistance. Now, if you can get a doctor who isn't completely owned by the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and will order a fasting insulin test, you can take that number together with your fasting glucose, which is done on every blood test ever done in the entire history of the world. You take fasting glucose, you take fasting insulin, you plug it into a calculator online, very much like the BMI calculator. The calculator is called the HOMA IR and it's available online. Put the two numbers in, it will give you a number and it will show you where you are on the insulin resistance scale.

Nice. Remember growing up the special case cereal commercial that you can pinch an inch? I remember well, except when you get really insulin resistant, you can't pinch an inch because you've got so much visceral fat. And I had a client like this early on, Johnny, and I remember it completely, it made me reevaluate everything because I was using skin folds as my primary way to detect body composition, which works fine if you're metabolically healthy, but seeing that that's less than 7% of us no longer works. And what I started to discover was that the skin folds became more and more wrong around the waist. Like, the more metabolically unhealthy you are, the less predictive this was. In fact, it would look like you were super lean because you'd have so much visceral fat to be pushing so hard against your stomach that you'd have very little skin that you could pinch. I love that idea of walking towards the wall, of using that waist to height of looking going, gosh, am I not able to pull any skin off my waist? Because I've got so much intra abdominal fat, that visceral fat pushing against that. I look like, I call it the potato on stiltz. Look, skinny arms and legs in a big trunk. That's another big indicator of it.

You probably run into many men, particularly who have this huge belly, which is like, I've got insulin resistance, folks. And they'll go, here, touch it. It's like a lock. It's not muscle.

Yeah.

So what was interesting? I am just on a rampage to get everyone to do a dexa. I don't understand why this tool isn't used. Like, why are we going to the doctor's office and stepping on a scale, which is like getting your total cholesterol, which is a meaningless number when we can go get a dexa? You know, first of all, we should start doing this in. In our 20s and 30s for bone density anyway, when we can actually make a change, but to really see what our skeletal muscle is and where that fat is distributed. And it's so amazing to me that we still have scales in doctor's offices and not at least an in body bioimpedance. But yeah, let's dig into. I love the book the Great Cholesterol Myth. Just like this, cholesterol's still another one out there that just continues to be out there as this big scary thing. Can you unpack that for us?

I would love to, but what I want to point out is that Steven Sinatra, the late Steven Sinatra, the cardiologist who wrote the book with me, we wrote it originally in 2012, and we did the revised edition in 2020 when we really had time to go and dig into the research on insulin resistance. And what we found is that insulin resistance predicts heart disease as it does just about any other chronic disease you want to mention. But it predicts heart disease about 10 years before your doctor says, oh, Mrs. Jones, you have elevated cholesterol. Let's put you on a statin. Or, Mrs. Jones, you've got elevated A1C. We just see that. I think we should put you on Metformin 10 years before that happens.

Wow. And how insulin resistant, because I know it's progressive.

If you don't do something about it, it's on a crash course with diabetes. There's no question. And here's the other thing that we pointed out in the book. This whole notion of metabolic disease, which really starts with insulin resistance, is a continuum. So pre diabetes is diabetes. It just hasn't quite reached. It's a long analog scale. Prediabetes is diabetes, and guess what? Diabetes is pre heart disease. And all of this is just one long pathway that you can actually interrupt and fix, but not by just measuring LDL cholesterol. It's 1963 medicine, and it's still happening constantly.

We're not doing a fasting insulin and we're doing cholesterol.

We talk about that for two seconds. Because if you have like Three take on points from this discussion with jj. Please take this as one. The old fashioned test of good and bad cholesterol is 1963 medicine. It is as out of date as using a cosmopolitan astrology thing to figure out what your future is going to be. We now know there's at least 13 identified sub fractions of cholesterol. They do not all behave the same. All HDL cholesterol isn't good. All LDL cholesterol isn't necessarily bad. These particles, these lipoproteins, come in different sizes. And if you think about it just open for a moment. Cholesterol doesn't go into the bloodstream. It's water phobic. It doesn't mixed with water. It needs to be carried in something and the carrier is the lipoprotein. And if you were managing a marina and you wanted to avoid boat accidents, what would you need to know? What the cargo is in the boat or how many boats are in the water. You want to know how many boats are in the water? If you are bouncing a nightclub. Even if they're the nicest people in the world, the more people that are in the nightclub, the more likely that somebody's going to step on somebody's toes, somebody's going to spill a drink, somebody's going to get in a fight. You want to know the number. And in the new cholesterol tests, they look at the number of lipoproteins. Cholesterol is the cargo. To look at the cargo when you.

Are ignoring how many particles, your metaphors are killing it. Like your metaphors are so good.

Thank you.

They're so good and they're so understandable. So I just want to clarify because, you know, I think most people don't know what they should be asking for when they go to their the doctor's office. What would they be asking for specifically when going to the doctor's office for.

Lab work, they should insist on the modern cholesterol test. Now, when we started talking about this, they weren't that common. You had to get insurance to cover them, which they still don't always do. Now LabCorp's got a test like this. Quest Labs has it. The biggest labs in the country all offer this test. And why are we still using the old ones? The old one is like putting people in a category of short and tall and doing a medical diagnosis about that. Now, obviously, short and tall, those are factors. But we've decoded the Damn genome. There's 30,000 genes. We're going to just look at short and tall, we're looking at good and bad cholesterol. The whole idea of it is idiotic.

So they are going to get a particle size number of fractions. Also fasting insulin. Insist on it.

If they would just do that, I would be very happy.

Yes.

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Okay, so someone is walking up towards the wall and their belly hits first. What do they do?

Well, let's talk about what causes it. It's not even just diet. This is a very interesting thing. I don't know if you've had Matthew Walker on the show, the sleep expert. Pete points out you can induce insulin resistance, the metabolic markers for insulin resistance, in about two days of sleep deprivation. So if you are sleeping five, six hours a night, you're probably contributing. It's not the only cause, but that's a contributory cause.

Well, remember that study that came. I think it was Washu that showed that even if you're eating healthy and exercising, if you are not getting your seven to nine hours of quality sleep, you are at risk for obesity. And I mean, I would just say we all know this, like, what happens when you have a crappy night's sleep?

Sleep's a big part of it. Overeating. The simplistic answer. And obviously there's a lot of ifs, ands, and buts on this. I don't want to be quoted as, like, he said, you just eat carbohydrate.

I'm totally quoting you. I'm going to pull out all these.

Little misquotes, but really, honestly, it's a disease or a condition caused by eating too much processed food. And most of our processed food, not all of it, but most of it is in the carbohydrates category. So we're just eating too much sugar and starch. It's as simple as that.

The only thing worse than a processed food that's high in carb is a processed food high in carb and fat.

Could not agree more. But we're up against a medical industrial complex that says the opposite. Coca Cola invested before they got exposed for what they were doing. Millions of dollars in that global whatever it was that they sponsored to basically say, hey, you don't have to worry about. It's all about calories. Well, of course Coca Cola wants you to think that, because then you can justify Coca Cola as part of a healthy diet as long as the calories are right. So we're fighting an establishment, as I mentioned before, Kasey Means, she pointed out, and this is going to blow your mind. It's almost unbelievable up until 2018. What? A few years ago, the American Diabetes association, which is responsible for life certifying doctors and training them in how to treat diabetes, told doctors that their patients can eat all the sugar they want as long as they take their insulin. Let that sit in for just one minute. That was the official advice of the American Diabetes Association.

Wow. So I still think about back to our buddy, Dr. Diane Schwartzbein.

Yes.

And we'll just let some of the situations rest. But I think of one of the things that she told me about early on when she wrote the Schwarzwein principle. And the whole premise came to bat because she was dutifully following as an endocrinologist the American Diabetics association diet. And she was prescribing it to all of her patients because that's what she'd been trained. And so she was doing what she was trained. She was, you know, board certified fellow, the whole bit. And what she discovered were the people who were cheating were doing better. And thankfully she asked questions. And when someone was having this great effect and they weren't following it, she asked why. And that's where the whole thing came from. Is someone going, wow, look at the great results they're getting. Oh, they're doing the opposite of what I taught them to do. Maybe I should look at that instead.

Yes, but we can't ignore the psychology behind confirmation bias and the ability of people to ignore evidence that doesn't support what they already believe. We saw this in the 90s. I was a low fat person. I was almost a vegetarian. I would send the eggs back if they had even a little bit of yolk. And we would have people go on the Atkins diet against our reg. You know, I was a trainer at Equinox. That's where I started. And these people would come in and they'd go, we're going to try the Atkinside because this shit is just not working. And we go, you can't do that, you're going to die. And they'd come back and not only didn't they die, they'd have all these results we were talking about, and you know what their doctors would say. They'd come in to the doctor and people reported this to me all the time, and they would show them their blood work and their blood pressure had gone down and they had lost some abdominal fat, and they were doing great and their energy was good and their metrics. And the doctors said, Mrs. Jones, what are you doing? Well, I tried that atkinside, and they said, you can't do that. That's going to kill you. Sometimes they don't even believe their eyes or the evidence of their research.

All right, So I think when we really talk about, like, carbs and fat, we are not talking about a sweet potato, blueberries, some, you know, broccoli. We are talking about. I'm calling them dirty, processed foods. Because the challenge is all foods are processed. You want to have some wild rice? It was processed. You're not in the field. I'm a big proponent of protein powders. I think as long as you get a clean one, they're fantastic. So we need to really distinguish between clean and dirty. But these dirty ones are ones that have been created to make you overeat. They basically shut off your satiety signal so that you'll be a little piggy. And here's a great example. I found this stuff and, you know, I'm so much better not knowing about these things. But I found this thing called Catalina Crunch keto cereal. I grew up on Captain Crunch and Pop Tarts and Cocoa Puffs, right? Anyway, so they have a golden Graham style. It's like, oh, my gosh. Wow.

But they all have the American Heart association heart healthy.

No, they don't. These are keto. These are not low fat, low protein. These are keto. So they're actually super high fiber protein and fat. There's really nothing bad in them except that you could easily eat the entire bag. Like, you could plow through 600 calories.

I know the feeling, right in a second.

So I let myself have it in my smoothie or on top of my almond yogurt. But I have to measure that sucker and walk away. Otherwise they're not allowed in the house. But I think that's what we have to look at. These things have been engineered, I think back to the snack wells. You know, those.

Oh, my God.

Whoever ate one of those cookies, the.

Marketing slogan, bet you can't eat just one. I don't know if people remember that, but it was when I was growing up, that was a very big thing for lay's potatoes. They're not Kidding.

No.

There have been books written about this. They have PhD food scientists who literally work on this stuff to find what they call the bliss point. The point where, like, it's just sweet enough and you just want more and all your signaling mechanisms that say, hey, dude, you had enough food. The cells are fuel. They're gone. They go to sleep. They are engineered to create a desire for more of them.

So I think the key thing here is too much healthy food's unhealthy. So even if something appears to have all the right stuff, if you're losing your mind with it, like me with crunchy almond butter, I'm in the fridge with a spoon, I'm like, get out of there. Put it away. Walk away from the almond butter. You know, whatever that thing is, then that's a trigger food. Like, knock it off. Did you listen to that 60 Minutes interview about semaglutide Wegovy?

No, I did not.

Someone on Instagram dmed me and said, oh, my gosh, I'm so upset about this. And so I had to listen to it. And it was. They had two bariatric docs, and one of them said, 50 to 85% of our obesity is genetics. And I thought, well, that's very interesting. If only 1.5% of the population was obese in the 1900s and it's 20, 23 and it's 43%, genes didn't have.

A lot of time to change.

That's amazing that our genes changed. Like it. Come on. No, that's not the case. We start in the 1950s, we get these, you know, pro inflammatory industrial seed oils. It was starting in the 60s and 70s with Twix and all that stuff. But it really ramped up in the 80s. And then in the 90s when we went all fat free. I was fat free in the 80s. I was counting my fat grams a day. I let myself at 10. I'm amazed I even have any hair on my head at this point. Anyway, boy, that didn't work very well, I can tell you that. I was so hypoglycemic all the time. I'll bet I was shaky all the time. I had to have, like, a steady stream of frozen yogurt and sourdough bread was basically my diet.

We didn't know any better, jj.

We didn't know any better. And I remember sitting in a workshop, and it was an American College of Sports Medicine workshop on nutrition, and these two dietitians told us that we could get all the protein we needed in a Potato. And I remember looking at them because they both looked like potatoes on stilts. And I thought, this is you are what you eat. This is so interesting. And everyone in the workshop, they were all American College of Sports Medicine exercise physiologists. And they were all ripped and buffed and these two dietitians were totally out of shape and borderlining on obese. And everyone's kind of looking at each other going, I don't think so. We disagree. But anyway, it's really clear, like if you really look at the big shift, it's not our genes that have changed, our diet has changed. There's environmental toxicity and there's stress and there's cell phones and too much light and too late and all that. But boy, you look at that key driver of these hyper palatable ultra processed pro inflammatory insulin rising foods and you go, hmm, you know, so someone now is in this place and hopefully catching it early. What do they do?

I'm a big fan of simplifying things. I think that our audiences are overwhelmed with contradictory information and lots of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Kind of arguments. We really need to simplify it. And I'm telling you, the best piece of nutritional advice I have ever given or gotten ever in my life, that you could live your life by just these three words are eat real food. Done. That is more than the amount of protein, the amount of the macros. It matters whether it's a vegan diet or carnivore diet, because you can eat crappy junk food on a vegan diet. You can eat crappy reprocessed meat on a carnivore diet. Eat real food. And if you're not sure if it's real, it probably isn't. Kale chips are not real food. Kale is. And yes, most foods have some minimal processing, but we're talking about the ultra processed hyper palatable industrial products. That is the stuff that is going to kill us, folks. It just is.

So we're eating real food and we'd like to do some things to help us heal a little faster. What would be some of your top tips?

Top tip would be to move every day because remember, movement creates a demand for sugar or for fuel from the bloodstream, right? So the more you move, the more you're actually using up the sugar that's in your bloodstream that's causing or that is indicative of insulin resistance or pre diabetes. The second thing that you can do besides moving as often as possible and not even moving, standing, just doing Something with your body. I have a standing desk. This is probably the only time I'm going to sit all day. So moving, being active, and here's the one that people do not realize is so important. Building muscle. 80% of the sugar in your bloodstream is cleared by the muscle cells. You lose three to four pounds a decade if you don't do something to keep it. And you are literally losing your best friend when it comes to fat burning and to using up the sugar that's in your bloodstream that's causing all these problems. Our mutual friend Esteban says the key to menopause, and I think she's really talking about the key to life, is a steak and a set of barbells.

And here's where I really on a mission. Because if you look at this, I think one of the big challenges and you even look at something like the biggest loser, I have a whole lot of issues with. Because here's the thing, if we focus purely on weight loss, hey, what we should have everyone do is just have a little glucose water and lie on the couch and don't move and lose your muscle. And if we solely focused on helping someone improve their muscular strength and endurance, just think of what happens when someone exercises regularly in terms of all cause mortality, in terms of cancer, heart disease, to every single major disease. It's like cancer is almost non existent in fit people. And I remember reading this one study where they were talking about that and they said, so it would seem that maybe in addition to monitoring your glucose that doctors should also recommend exercise. I'm like, wow.

And even when they do, they're talking only about cardio. I think that's very important. But I think muscle training is even more.

Well think about this. So as you age, you know you have slow twitch and fast twitch fibers. And we know that we have some fast twitch that can be slow or fast. And as you age, you are losing primarily fast twitch fibers. That's your muscular strength. And when you talked about losing that muscle mass over each decade, which is 1% a year, age 40 to 50, age 50 to 60, then it doubles. It's actually 2 to 4% a year of strength. It's 6 to 10% of power. It's frightening. So then you hear about the 60 to 65 year old who breaks their hip and then dies within a year. And just the correlation between grip strength, being able to balance on one leg. And it's like, why aren't we putting this mission to get people to lift heavy things? Because life involves lifting Heavy things. I don't know about you, but I want to be a hundred and be able to pick up my grandkid, carry my dogs up the stairs. I want to be able to unscrew the lids of things. And you know, if you just look at some basic things, basic thing is are you having to hand the jar to someone else and ask them to unscrew it? There's a problem. If you are having to ask your friends to wait up because you can't keep up with them, there's a problem. When I first started going to yoga, which I still, I have a love hate relationship with, but now I understand why we're doing these things. If you can't go to yoga and hold a tree pose for 10 seconds, problem. And these are just the basic things that we just don't think about until all of a sudden you can't do them anymore. When I was in Palm Springs, I had a client who at gym she had access to was the local rehab center, the cardiac rehab center. So Johnny and I would take her in there and everybody was on their treadmills walking. They could have been doing a crossword puzzle as quickly as they were walking on this treadmill and I was having to do pull ups and dips and all these people never thought this was possible. But we've got to show people what they should be doing and that it is possible. And this is what's going to make you have this amazing life. So you know everything you worked for that all of a sudden now you're in your 70s, 80s, 90s, you can actually do all those things.

That's why I love to tell people my age because I'm talking to people 30 years younger and saying, do this stuff you will look or I know.

You look amazing for 90. For 90, when you said 76, I'm like, holy smokes. How long have we known each other?

At least 20, 25 years.

I know. You look fabulous.

Thank you. So do you know?

Very fit. What's your body fat? Do you know?

I don't know.

Have you done the DEXA lately?

No, I haven't.

I need to do you gotta go do that?

Yeah, yeah, I'm planning on doing it.

Okay. I really think that once you're stable, once a year. But I think this needs to be part of that annual. Like some of the stuff we're doing is the annual that's really not important. But a Dexa to see your skeletal muscle and if it's balanced and worry about your visceral adipose Tissue and making sure that you're holding onto that skeletal muscle. If you, you know, put every year that I'm going to do a grip strength, a dexa, a Rockport. Remember the Rockport walk test?

Oh my God, I forgot about that. We were baby trainers then.

Yeah. All that stuff, it's like, okay, this all makes sense. Do that stuff. Do a balance test. Amazing.

And also it would be amiss to not mention the non diet and exercise parts of health. When we talked about in the great Cholesterol Myth. We spent a third of the book on this stuff. Your relationships, your community, your contribution, your sleep, your digestion, the time you spend in the sun, being around greenery, all of these things have major impact on the metrics we're talking about.

So. But don't you feel like that's really probably the biggest part of the Blue zones is that people have great community and purpose?

Hundred percent. The people who studied the Blue zones, they would love to find some, you know, Unabomber type up in the hills of Montana who's, you know, really thriving and everything. Living in solitude. They don't exist. They don't exist. The one thing the people in the Blue zones have in common is not their diet, not their form of exercise, but their social relationships, their social networks, their friends, the fact that they are integrated into their communities. This is such an important part of health and we really don't talk about it enough.

No, it's having your elders have a role.

Yes.

And being important, having a purpose that is the key thing. So much good stuff. And you've got a great little series that you are going to be gifting everyone, which I'm going to put@jjvirgin.com Johnny and that is J O N N Y. Tell us about it.

7 unusual health habits that really will make a difference to all the things we're talking about.

How unusual. Give me an example.

For example, apple cider vinegar, which has been around forever. People don't really know what it does or why to take it, but it has multiple really nice little effects on the body and on digestion and on being and all of these things. And these kinds of habits are easy to implement. They're not like you gotta go on a cockamamie diet of just orange food like Billy Bob Thornton did. These are things that are kind of easy to do. Starting every day with 8 to 12 ounces of water every single day. First thing when I wake up, that's what I do. I even keep the water bottle on the bed post so that I Don't forget, these are important. Dehydration is a trigger for fat storage.

I know. We did a great podcast with Rick Johnson.

Oh, my God, this guy's a hero.

I might have scared him because, you know, he gets on my podcast. I'm like, I love you so much. I have such a big crush on you.

He's a very nerdy kind of scientist.

Right.

I've never met because I gave him this whole. He, like, wasn't working out when I had him on the podcast. And I'm like, oh, oh, boy. Yes, he got it talking down anyway. But on that podcast, which we'll link in the show notes, he did such a beautiful explanation of how dehydration causes fat storage. And it's like, come on, these are the easy ones. Do the low hanging fruit first. You know, everyone's trying to hack these things. And I'm like, we got to start with the foundation. Do not go try to figure out what bells and whistles what you are going to get on your car if you do not have the engine and tires.

Exactly. You don't buy the packages until at least you know, the car runs.

So.

I couldn't agree more.

All right, we'll put that@jjvirgin.com forward slash Johnny. And Johnny, obviously you'll have to come back sooner than I would love 20 years.

Anyone who wants to reach me, I have a website, johnnyboden.com. just remember, no H and Johnny.

We will link all of it in the show notes, too. Your books, because you've got a bunch of great books. They're great resources, coaching programs, everything. Johnny has got, like, just a wealth of how many years in the field now?

Oh, my God. 33.

Oh, well, I beat you.

Did you really?

I did, yeah.

You are older than me right now.

I'm not older than.

Kidding.

I'm kidding. I started teaching calisthenics in high school.

Oh, wow. Mine was a second career. I was a musician until 1990. 33 years.

All right. Still, you've earned your stripes.

Thank you.

And clearly you've learned a little bit along the way.

Too much of it from you, jj.

Oh, brother.

I say it to everyone, not just you.

Okay. All right, well, I'll go ask everyone. Thank you.

All right, I hope I see you soon.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and more importantly, that you're built to last.

And check me out on Instagram, Facebook.

YouTube, and my website, JJ virgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetoj.com See you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.