8 Surprising Things That Are Actually Making You UNHEALTHY! Feat. Jeff Bland

I was doing consulting years ago with Bill Phillips and his brother, and one of the things, the analogy I made is that marketers invent a lot of diseases. Marketers invent a lot of stuff, and some marketers are great and other marketers are frankly evil. And so if you were to give your industry or a category a disease, what would it be? And so we were talking about fitness, and so I came up with a term like, well, people are in the fitness fog is what I came up with. That's what I shared with them. I said they're getting all this conflicting advice. Take this much protein. Drink this type of protein powder. Should you even be drinking protein powders? How do you exercise? How do you work out? All this variety of stuff. And it's more complex than ever. There's so much information that is conflicting out there. And so I think in the same way, people are in this fog. So if you were to— start a process of building the strongest immune system, reversing it, just how you explained, where do you start? Do you start with diet? Do you start with sleep? Do you start with water intake? Do you not use Bluetooth headphones? I mean, you know, there's so many different factors that impact us. What are the fundamentals? And I guess I'll say it in this way, like if you want to build strength and you're, you know, a weightlifter, even though we got John Jaquish, inventor of X3, is he in the room? Or is he not here till tomorrow? Is John in here? You can't miss the dude. He's a big dude. But basically, you know, bench press, squat, deadlift, right? Those are the 3 basic strength moves. What would be the foundational things for immune health? Like where does one start?

Yeah, I think that is a really an extraordinarily important question at this day and age because we're going to have more exposure to funny organisms that our immune system is going to be challenged by. We're going to have more stress. We're going to have more pollutants. We know that this is all part of the industrialized society in which we live today. So the question is, how can we maximize our resilience? And our resilience really is our immune system. And so if, you know, a lot of people feel it's just the resilience against infectious organisms, but it's way more than that. We've now discovered our immune system is on a search and destroy mechanism for all kind of injured cells, injured tissues. It's constantly there to repair, replace. In fact, let me just say one thing to you, Joe Polish, on this whole issue about maintaining good health. So if I was to analogize everything I've ever learned about biological science into a simple metaphor as a major freeway, you've got traffic heading in one direction on one side, and then separated by some barrier, you've got traffic heading on the other direction. The lanes of traffic of our society today are on the traffic side, which is called senescence degeneration. And, um, uh, dis-ease. Um, on the other side of the highway, however, is another set of highway lanes going the other direction that's regeneration, rebuilding, and is operational in every human body. Our body doesn't have just one direction. It has bidirection. The problem is we're over-accentuating staying on the lanes that are degeneration and senescence, and we're not occupying the lanes that are regeneration at the same level. So you may need to get off the off-ramp of the degeneration to get on the on-ramp of regeneration. By the way, those are all biologically accessible. They reside within our physiology. That's why I don't talk about good molecules and bad molecules. People say, "Oh, glucose is bad." Well, glucose is pretty darn good. It's just where is it and how much and under what conditions is it being delivered? You can take that state for anything, like lactic acid with exercise. We say, "Oh, when you get lactate overload, now you have sore muscles, it's damaging." But we know that lactate at a certain level is a metabolic activator for certain immunological properties. So what we really talk about is resilience and balance. Now, go back to your question. How would you start with the immune system? The immune system, because it's a dynamic system, first has to take its message somewhere as to what it should do. Should it be on the lane of degeneration, which is you will get worse as you get older? Or should it be on the lane of regeneration, or we call it immune rejuvenation. And the way you do that is to recognize what Dan Buettner so beautifully brought us to understand with the Blue Zones. If you get on the Blue Zone state of the highway, you are in the regenerative mode, because you're by natural carrying on a lifestyle, because you're going to be fit, because you're outside exercising, you're going to be eating the right foods, because you're eating like the rainbow. And I'm not talking about synthetically colored foods, I'm talking about natural plant foods. You're going to be having relationships with people like we're having here that are positive on the lanes of regeneration, not degeneration. How many of your conversations are about doom and gloom at this meeting? Aren't they about up and out? Up and out creates a different gene expression pattern because these signals that we're receiving on receptors that sit on the surface of our cells are going to translate into the genes that perform to give us what our phenotype is, how we look, act, and feel. Obesity isn't a consequence just of calories. It's a consequence of a degenerative alarm system in which our body's trying to defend itself. Could be hostile abuse, it could be trauma, it could be so many variables that then deal through the genes to then produce a body shape that tries to protect us from injury. It's not just calories alone. So all these things are part of the new science that we're trying to leverage as it relates to immunorejuvenation.

That's an interesting statement too, a body design, a body image that's trying to protect us. Protect you from injury.

Absolutely, there's no question. Let's use another example, autoimmune disease. As you know, 8 out of 10 people with autoimmune disease, which is increasing in frequency in our culture, you only need to look at the TV ads to see the number of products that are now being sold, these biologics for all these autoimmune conditions, colitis and skin-related psoriasis and arthritis and SLE and so forth. So what are those really speaking to? They're speaking to the fact that 80% of the people that get those conditions are women. So there's something about being a female. And so I have heard so many times in the decades that we've been focusing on autoimmune disease, which is now more than 3 decades, that women will say, why is my body damaged? Why am I an injury waiting to happen because of being a woman and going to get autoimmune disease? As if they have an image that they're flawed. They're not flawed at all. Think of what a woman's immune system is prepared to do to be able to support in her body another individual that may be the opposite sex. Now, what has to happen to her immune system to allow that to be tolerated? Just ask my wife about that. It's really a very remarkable, sophisticated immune system that can adapt to a foreign body being in that that person's body for 9 months and accept it and have a healthy infant coming out of it. And so the sophistication of a woman's immune system is much more complicated than the unicentric dials in a male immune system. And as a consequence, she may carry the yellow canaries that then makes her more sensitive to certain things in our environment, which are the first early warning signs men get and wake up, because you'll get them too. It's just a matter of time until the spreading effect of these bad messages that our immune system is designed to seek and destroy. So what is really inflammation? Is it an injury, or is it the body doing what it's supposed to do because it perceives a threat? I'm telling you, from dealing with thousands of patients, publishing over 100 papers and clinical studies, there is a tremendous amount of relationship between the environment that person— I'm not going to say woman— but that person is engaged in, how it translates through her immune system, to produce then her body trying to defend itself, or his body trying to defend itself against perceived offenders. You take away those offenders, the immune system then relaxes, it finds its point of resilience, and lo and behold, you get spontaneous remission without TNF-alpha blocking agents. Wow.

So if you were in charge of everyone's healthcare here, what would you suggest they— Who would they go— like, how do you find the best healthcare doctor, functional medicine advisor? There's a lot of choices out there. How do you advise people to find not only the best person to help them, but I think the very best person for someone is themselves. It first has to start. A lot of people have doctors that are I've been seeing in my experience harmful advice and many that are wonderful. They're amazing. They transform people's lives. And it's a mixed bag. Just because they— what's that joke? What do you call the guy that got the worst grades at Harvard Medical School that graduated? Doctor. You know, you can— so it doesn't necessarily— because they have the name doctor behind their name, it doesn't mean they're they're gonna follow a protocol that's helpful. So—

Well, we know the term doctor means, you know, in the strictest definition of the word, it means teacher, right? So in this area, I think what we're looking for are partners who have certain expertise that they've learned through years of study that can then help open up opportunities for the person to make self-discoveries as to how their own individual uniqueness can be properly managed in this complex environment. And that's what we try to teach in the Institute for Functional Medicine. We— it's, you know, a lot of people say, what are the protocols in the Institute for Functional Medicine? We're not teaching protocols. We're teaching ways of thinking. We're teaching ways of relating the information that exists in the biosciences of today, which by the way is exploding dramatically. I can hardly— I'm probably not even keeping up even though I'm trying very hard to stay on top of the literature of this front edge of what's going on in molecular science, cell biology, and so forth that's translating in medicine. But you really aren't— we don't want to just have a geek squad out there that's giving you technology. We want people to know how to relate and communicate so that a person can take the operating system of their own body and start to use it effectively for their health. Now that's what we try to train in the Institute for Functional Medicine. I am very appreciative for the docs that have done this. Now think for a moment, when I started the— when we started, and I want to emphasize we, it was my wife that actually was the brainchild for the idea and in 1990— or 1988, actually. So when we started, just real quickly, we started with a very small group of people. And I was told by my colleagues in academic medicine, because I was just transitioning out of being a professor into the world in which I gave all my security up, my tenured faculty position, to start a company to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. That was my business. Business plan. Now that ended up with 20 companies later and eventually forming Metagenics and having 2,000 employees and all sorts of things that I would have never dreamed would have happened over the next years. But the start of that was my colleagues at that— at the initial phase said, Jeff, you're never going to get medical doctors to go back and open their books of anatomy, physiology, cell biology, and so forth. Come on, they're licensed and they just want to forget all about that. And move on with their lives. And I said, well, I think there'll be some that will be interested because accessing that information with a different perspective might lead them into things that are much more fulfilling for them as to why they went into medicine. So we— I naively moved ahead. Now we have, as you said earlier, over 150,000 certified functional medicine practitioners in the world. It's in 67 countries that I'm aware of. And That then is validation that these individuals will go back on their own, even though they have busy lives and practices and they're fulfilled by the covenants of insurance and all that stuff, and open these textbooks on their own and pay money to come to these courses above and beyond that of their normal daily life to become capable of doing what they set out to do to help people. Now, that is so inspiring for me. And I'm so pleased that now we can send them to the IFM registry of physicians, and they can type in their zip code, and they will come up with a list of certified functional medicine practitioners that have certain criteria fulfillment that you can read about. And it's not yet half a million, but it's certainly better than we started with 5 of us. So we're moving in the right direction.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free There's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. How many— there's approximately, what, 130,000 functional medicine docs right now in the United States?

Yes, and then a lot more internationally.

Wow. I mean, are you pretty proud of what you created? Do you like get arrogant and say, I'm like a total badass here, or what?

No, no, I don't. I actually— it's quite the opposite. You know, I'm 79 almost, and I recognize that it's time to start handing off the baton. I wanna make sure that we have the right successional plan so that people coming up can carry this forward and take it to the next level and we can scale this thing. It needs to be scaled. It needs to be scaled on every level from humanism to cost efficiency. We need to unburden ourselves of this unnecessary inflationary spiral in disease care. And the only way you do that is to go to the ground ground level and say, why are people getting sick that need hospitalization, and is it modifiable? And the answer is absolutely yes. There is no question of anybody in science that we are capable of reversing this epidemic of chronic disease by implementing what we already know. In fact, let me give you just a quick anecdote. You might find this humorous. So obviously I get a lot of opportunity to lecture to different medical groups, and I'm always the I'm the kind of fugitive guy on the program. If they want to have a balanced program, they choose me to be the balanced person, right, for the rest of the program. And so one of the common questions I have is something like this. This is a very common kind of question. Someone will say, "Well, Dr. Blyant, I really like what you talk about. It makes sense and you're a really good storyteller, but I only practice scientific medicine based upon double-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials." and you haven't proven your hypothesis with the appropriate amount of randomized trials. Now here's my response to this, and I don't mean to sound deferent or facetious, but it's something like the following. Okay, let's assume just for the sake of our discussion between the two of us that you are saying I practice a form of non-scientific medicine. Let me ask you, do you ever have occasion in your practice that you prescribe a series of drugs for a patient that you will know they will be on for years in duration, maybe decades in duration. Does that ever happen in your practice? And they'll say, well, of course that happens. And I say, what is the scientific evidence that that particular treatment program you've chosen is both safe and effective over the years that you intend on using it in your patient? Well, yes, we have this study on this drug. And we have this study on this drug. And we have this study on this drug. And I say, so how long are those clinical trials that led to the FDA approval for those drugs? Well, I don't know. And I said, maybe you should read the studies. And are there any studies that demonstrate the effect of all those drugs, those 3 or 4 you're implying, together in a patient over a long period of time? Well, I'm not sure of any group studies. And I say, okay, then let's both assume that we're practicing a form of non-scientific medicine, but mine is safer.

What I'm going to do in the future, because of what we're doing with Artists for Addicts and the platform with addiction— Charles can speak to a variety of different subjects on health and exercise and fitness and supplementation, but he also knows a ton about the brain and about human behavior. And so I want to do a whole episode with you in the future when we launch the platform to help people with addictions about— because like, for instance, uh, the supplements— if someone has an alcohol problem and they want their body to kind of reject alcohol, what is it?

The best two are the combination of two amino acids, which is tyrosine and D-alphalanine. And if you take 3 grams of each on an empty stomach in the morning, people will find that they don't find alcohol tasty anymore. So they naturally take it out of their regimen. You will find that pretty much anything that has to do with the brain is fixable with a certain combination of the omega-3s and certain amino acids, okay? Because with fish oil, if the fish is big and comes from warm water, it tends to contain more EPA. And of the omega-3s, EPA downregulates inflammation. So if you have arthritis, high blood pressure, and so on, you want to use a fish oil with a lot of EPA. But if you have attention deficit disorder or bipolar disorder— there's at least 16 brain disorders that we know are manageable with the right type of fish oil, but that fish oil has to have a high DHA content. And where do you get a high DHA content in the fish oil? They tend to be small fish in very cold water, like sardines and herrings and so on. But when you go to the store, if you go see your doctor or your nutritionist, you could look at the ratio between EPA and DHA, and that will decide actually which tissues are affected with it. If you don't have anything particularly with your health, I would say every time you go through a bottle of fish oil, pick another brand with a different ratio, and that will lower the odds that You have any sort of disorder. One thing you should know about omega-3s is that there's not a single disease known to man, and I've known this since 1994, that is not helped by omega-3s. So if you don't believe me, you could go to PubMed, which is the biggest library of scientific papers, and put in any weird disease you know and put omega-3 as a second keyword, and you will find at least one study, if not minimum of 14, that show that that fish oil is beneficial for any ailment known to man.

Is there any way to know if fish oil is good?

I've heard that a lot of the fish oil you buy in stores is rancid and you should just never eat it.

It's actually worse than not eating it.

I used to do it until I heard that.

And you know, you hear so much bullshit advice. You know, worst advice is, you know, bad advice is the worst thing you can take.

So how do you know whether fish oil is good or bad?

The best way to find out is available through a health practitioner only. So basically it means that you can't buy on the internet. The only company— there's an exception to the rule, and I don't get paid by this company— it's called Nordic Naturals, okay? And they have very high quality. They really standardize the way they make fish oil. But, uh, and in Canada the rules are very different. So in Canada you can actually buy a store-bought fish oil, and probably the best company to buy is called ATP Labs, but they make a fish oil that already has carnitine in it. It's called Omega Carn, and I think that's the best product for your brain. One thing we know from research is that any brain disorder is actually like an electrical problem in your brain, and research backs up the combination of carnitines and omega-3s is probably the best healing agent for any brain disorder, from ranging from dyspraxia to dyslexia.

And you're saying 6 grams per day?

That would be a minimum. I mean, it depends on your percentage of body fat, right? So at higher body fats, I've used as much as 45 grams, but that means your body fat's 45%. As you get leaner, you will use less and less fish oil, okay?

So it's relative.

If you got 10%, do 10.

Yeah, typically when you start off, but it could be at 10%, you've been on fish oil for 6 months, if I measure your fatty acids in your blood, it may be down to 3 grams. But usually, one of the guys— I was recommending 30 to 45 grams for at least 2 decades. And then, I remember Mark Houston is probably one of the best vascular health specialists in the world. He said, "Man, that's 3 to 8 times more what the literature recommends." But the problem, the literature never tried high dosages. And one of the best confidence I ever had is that in 2008, there was a Canadian study that showed that in the average person, 60 grams of fish oil was the best dose. Okay, so he sent me an email. He says, "The bottle a day, huh?" Now, if you use liquid, it's not so bad. But the thing, the interesting point that Mark put in his email is clinicians always ahead of the research. Okay, but when we were cavemen or cavewomen, we consumed 300 to 400 grams of omega-3s a week. But where would they come from? It came from animal brains. Because if you're in South Africa, you know, in the middle of the savanna, you're not going to have access to a lot of fish. So what would happen is that the caveman would wait for the lion. Lions eat the entrails of the antelope and leave the rest alone. So what the caveman would do is he would split the skull of the antelope and eat the brain. And 60% of the brain is actually omega-3s, and 80% of that is DHA. So that's why what you find in research is that where humans, early humans, consumed the most omega-3s, the faster their brains developed. Okay, there's a strong correlation between omega-3 content in a native diet and IQs. Okay, so for example, uh, the bow and arrow concept was developed where there was more, uh, better developed brains.

Hey there, this, this is, uh, Joe Polish, the tall one in this, in this video, and I've got the very awesome Dr. Mark Hyman and JJ Virgin, and we're working out here together.

And Mark feels great.

Yes, he does.

Look at that. Let's do it. Mmm. He probably won't be able to lift his arms up later.

Well, here's the thing. Both of you are like sugar experts. So which one of you is smarter? I love sugar. You do love sugar? I love sugar. All right. But you both have written books about why sugar is toxic and poisonous. Now, I guess this is all about blood sugar. Balance, right?

Which is every— which is everything.

I'm just fed up. Yeah, I'm just fed up with sugar, fed up with the food industry, fed up with all the bullshit we're eating. It shows all the lies the government's telling us, all the stuff. I mean, I actually met with a woman who's head of the ADA, American Diabetic Association, this week who has diabetes, who was following their freaking guidelines, was on 4 medications, shots, and all kinds of crap. And wasn't getting better. She went on my program and boom, off the medications, diabetes better.

And she was like, wait a minute, the ADA is wrong.

If you follow that diet, you will become diabetic.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay.

So when you say programs, so you both have programs, what do people do? People watching this, what do they do to get in optimal physical shape, get diseases? They buy her book, they buy my book and do them both.

We have a package.

How do people get both of you in their house? Like to just have a sleepover? Like if they wanted a sleepover, how do they do it? You want an eatover, not a sleepover. Well, that too.

A workout.

That would be actually kind of cool. What if there was a prize where you could hang out with Mark and JJ, get back massages the whole work? You know, I'm good.

Who's doing the back massage?

Me. I'm good. Yeah, that's how I got into medicine. It's because massage people are like, oh, it feels good.

I'm like, oh, I like this.

Yeah, let's maybe do some medicine.

Well, he's been going into houses and cooking.

That's true. Okay, so I'm gonna plug some stuff here because I have done amazing interviews with both of them, which you can find at geniusnetwork.com. Ilovemarketing.com. We've put them all kinds of— and ilovejoe.com. And yeah, and I love Joe. And that's really this because this video, I really wanted to lead back to me. But okay, so, so out of the— out of all of the things that you guys have learned, what would you consider are the essential elements in taking people that are at a stuck point? They're not exercising, they're not eating right, they feel hopeless, they have consumed, bought so many books, and they feel lost.

What do you—

my view And I think JD is probably similar, is people need to do a reset, like a reboot.

When your computer's on the fritz and it's going round and round and it doesn't work, you've gotta do a reset.

So that's why I wrote the 10-Day Detox. People can do anything for 10 days. And in 10 days, if you change your food and do a few simple lifestyle practices, you literally can change your physiology, retake your brain chemistry back, retake your hormones, retake your taste buds. And in 10 days, you can go from feeling like crap to feeling great. And the weight loss is just a side effect.

Yes, it's automatic, like you said. And here's the coolest part about that, because people talk about losing weight and they're white-knuckling and struggling. But when you reset your taste buds and you get rid of your sweet tooth, which you can do in 7 to 14 days, we've seen it. All of a sudden you've got the control back over sugar. And even though, like Mark says, I love sugar, it's like it's not an issue because you don't crave it anymore. And then everything changes.

It's really true.

I think, I think most people don't get that it's not their fault. Like people, I think they blame themselves. I met a woman the other day who was told by a food expert, a nutritionist, that she— it was— there was no such thing as food addiction, that it was her fault, that she didn't have willpower, and that she couldn't control herself.

So she—

so she read, uh, my book, which talks about the power of these foods like sugar to hijack your brain, literally to be biologically addictive. She says, I'm going to try it. And she literally got her body back, lost 30 pounds, and was able to reset her brain and realize that it wasn't her fault that she was fat. It wasn't her fault she was craving. It wasn't that she didn't have willpower. And our whole government policy and the food industry is all about blaming the fat person. Eat less, exercise more, moderation, all things. There's no moderation of bad stuff. Like if you actually are eating trans fats and high fructose corn syrup, you can't moderate that. You've just got to cut it out. And if you do that, you'll reset and then you can enjoy all sorts of foods, but you're not going to become a victim of your brain chemistry that's been hijacked by the food industry. Yeah.

And if you assume that these are all drugs, which they are, and sugar is the number one drug of choice. It's taking down everyone everywhere. Kids are not smoking and drinking at age 5. They're having juice and cookies. If you knew that, you wouldn't have a little bit. No, that would be ridiculous.

But I, but I, I do eat sugar. I do eat sugar, but like it's a recreational drug. Like I like tequila, but I don't like drink it all day long. Like people have sugar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Well, they start with cereal, milk, juice, and a banana or a muffin and a latte. That's right.

And people don't realize that breakfast cereal is 75% sugar. It should be called breakfast.

It should be called dessert.

Right.

It's like, So, we need to just reset and understand how to—

And find where everything is sneaking in so that we don't turn our salad into a sundae.

I love that, salad into a sundae, right?

Alright.

So, JJ, exercise, how frequently? Must you do it? Kind of, sort of?

What are your thoughts on this?

You must do it.

You told me 15 minutes twice a week. I'm good with that.

So, yeah, for weight training. Resistance training. Look at this specimen.

This is like 15 minutes once a year. Look at this.

Well, this was the start today of a whole new Mark, right?

Yes, right. Today is the last day of the way Mark used to be. I know, right?

You got to move more. Everyone should be moving at least 60 minutes a day, but if you're not getting hot, sweaty, and it hurts a bit, it doesn't count as exercise. But we are supposed to move.

That's why you were hurting me this morning.

That's why, because I wanted to count as exercise.

I was hurting.

And then high-intensity interval training, or Cardio burst training 3 times a week to accumulate 4 total minutes of all-out bursting. So if you're on the bike—

what's bursting?

Where you go as fast as you can?

As hard as you can for 30 to 60 seconds. And you don't want to pace yourself, you want to burn yourself out. Yeah, it'll be the longest 30 to 60 seconds of your life. And then you recover and you do it again, 4 to 8 total minutes, 3 days a week. And then resistance training, hitting pushing, pulling, pulling, pulling.

Nobody told me about pulling. I was always pushing.

Hips and thighs and core, you do that at least twice a week. So for you, we'll start there.

I'm good.

And that's the big thing is how do you fit fitness in? And then you've been whining, you've been whining here all day. And then flexibility work, but really like yoga flexibility work, because you want to lower your stress hormones. And so that's— that is huge.

This is true.

So there you go. I mean, that's a simple 4-4 formula, I think they agree on. And you're just— we're missing a little piece, right? But we're fixing that. And that helps you with your sugar cravings.

Yes, it does.

It helps.

It just helps you with your life. And so if you do not take time out for this now, you will take time out for it later with very poor health and disease and probably misery and suffering. And so if you're a parent, this is also something that children will watch how you live. They will watch you become a model. And so you want to be a model not only for yourself but for everyone around you. And, that's how everyone around you gets better. And, there are a lot of forces that are literally always directing you in wrong— See, because I have always loved the line that the most expensive information in the world is bad information. And, there's a tremendous amount of bad information that can kill you. So, both of these individuals have written amazing books that have led literally collectively millions of people to better health. So, what is the best book for people to start with with you and then with you? I think it's a 10-day detox diet. 10 days, people can do anything, reset, and then they own their body. And then they realize how close they are to health and happiness.

It's just a few days.

And if it doesn't work for you, great.

But if it does, you literally get your life back.

It will work if they work it.

It's true. It's true. But you don't have to believe me.

You just have to do it.

Yes. And the Sugar Impact Diet, and what the Sugar Impact Diet helps you do is identify where all the sugars are sneaking into your diet and to understand that it's not about no sugar, but that all sugar's not created equal and you need to know which to choose and which to lose, which I've made simple to do.

There you go. And if you watch this on YouTube or wherever else, I'm gonna put the links of their interviews and stuff related to both of them in the little area. So just do it and it's fun hanging out with you guys. And you could pay like $5,000 to come see us or you could buy the book for $10 on Amazon and like change your life. That's true.

That's it.

And they make good presents.

Famous last words from you.

I think the most significant thing you can do to change your health, to change the health of your kids, your grandkids, to change the economy, is to lower your sugar impact.

Absolutely. I would say remember that sugar is a recreational drug and use it like that.

Don't think of it as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It's a drug. And enjoy it, but not in a way that you would enjoy like tequila all day long. We're going to talk about kids in a little— you know what, I'll come to kids because people may not realize how children are truly being poisoned with foods that are actually marketed as healthy and nutritious. And it's, it's, it's really screwed up because not only— see, children don't have the, the mental ability to really even determine long-term consequences of what that's going to lead to later in life.

Well, they also generally don't have a car or a bank account, so someone's giving them this stuff. They're not going grocery shopping. They might get in the cart and and, you know, then bug their mommy for the sugar-coated cereals. But it's, again, it's not the ones— you just point out really well that it's not the foods that we think are bad that are creating the problems. It's the foods we actually think are healthy. And one of the things that drives me insane is the fact that we can put "no sugar added" on a label. Now, I'm gonna show you one. I have things.

You got props here.

I've got things. So, but I just wanna show you. So this says no sugar added on this label. Okay, so if you look at the ingredients on this thing, it says no sugar added, yet it's— and this is called Green Machine, right? Boosted Green Machine. No sugar added, yet it's got apple juice, mango puree. If you look at kiwi, all of those—

pineapple, banana puree. And these are all the fruits and the sugars in the beginning. And then you get to spirulina, natural flavors, alfalfa, broccoli, spinach, spinach, barley, but those are at such low levels.

[Speaker:DR_POMPA] So they did a little bit of green to give it color so they could call it Green Machine, but in reality, they, and they put purees of fruit juice in there. So fruit juice concentrate, fruit juice purees, you can put these things into products and say no sugar added. So those little dried fruit snacks that they do, like check this one out. This, I mean, does this not look, it's organic, made in nature, I'm not sure I'm not sure where else you'd make cranberries. Like, in a lab? Like, where would you make them? But they say no gluten and no nuts and no sugar added. No sugar added. Now, I'm not sure how you could have gluteny cranberries. But, you know, it's such a good marketing thing now. We'll put no gluten, I'm sure.

Yeah, you put no gluten on something.

You put it on a potato. No gluten. Remember when they did that with cholesterol? They'd have a potato with no cholesterol. I'm like, it doesn't have a liver. Never had one. But no sugar added. It's got apple juice concentrate. So let's talk about apple juice. Apple juice, I'm going to go on a total rant here because this is a kid's drug of choice. Kid's drug of choice is this and I'm going to talk Oreos in a minute because Oreos are crazy. But let's say this is a kid's drug of choice. This is worse than this. This is worse than this. You're going to say, why, JJ? Why would that be?

Well, if people are listening to the audio version of this, There's a can of apple juice.

Can of apple juice and there's a Coke.

Yeah.

Now, how could a— oh, that was a Diet Coke. But let's pretend for— let's pretend, let's suspend disbelief here in TV land and say that was a Coke. So an apple juice is worse than a Coke because it's higher in fructose. So again, you've got kids with fatty livers. We've got kids right now, the obesity rate in children, 1 in 3 kids is either overweight or obese. Do you remember when we were growing up that it was like there was one fat kid in class and it was the weird, it was like the rarity and they teased them and they weren't even obese, they were overweight. Now we've got 1 in 3 being overweight or obese.

Oh, it's dramatic, I mean the way human beings have changed in the last couple decades.

It just breaks my heart. Yeah, that whole evolution thing has gotten way worse than anyone ever would have projected that evolution picture. But we've got this quadrupling now in teens, like obesity is now quadrupling over the last 30 years ago to now, obesity has quadrupled in teens, doubled in kids. This should not be happening. The fact that we've had to change the name of adult onset diabetes to type 2 diabetes because children are getting it should be sign enough. But what we're doing is when you look at exposure equals preference, we are creating drug addicts with our kids. And realize that if you are an overweight or an obese child, the chance you'll be an overweight or obese adult is 70%. Now, a lot of that is, okay, exposure equals preference. And realize that, again, the kids aren't getting in their car and driving to the store, so how are the Oreos getting in the house, right? I mean, we don't have the stuff in the house. So I will tell you a funny story. I get these Oreos because I— and I'm going to tell you the drug story about the Oreo in a minute— but I get these Oreos and I bring them to my studio house because we're going to tape this whole kitchen makeover where we throw the bad stuff out and we bring the good stuff in. So I get the low-fat Oreos and I get the Double Stuf Oreos, which in reality, the low-fat Oreos are worse than the regular Oreos because when you take fat out, you bring more sugar in. I mean, that is one of the biggest problems that's happened over the last 20 years, is that we decided that fat was the villain because of Ancel Keys, who really took down our health nationwide. We pulled the fat out, we put sugar in its place because high fructose corn syrup is because it was so cheap and devastated the health of the nation. But so I have these Oreo cookies and Bryce, my 17-year-old, comes into this studio house. He's like, "Wow!" Like he has walked into, you know, heaven. He's like, "What is all this stuff?" Because there's sodas and cupcakes and all just trash. He's like, thinks mommy has finally like lost her mind. And he's like, can I have some of those? I go, they're props, Bryce, they're props. You know, he goes, please, pretty please, pretty please. He wants these Oreos. Like he's going straight to the Oreos. Apparently this is the number one cookie, Oreos. Amazing. With this thing inside that who even knows what this white stuff is. Anyway, he eats two of these Oreos. Because I just, I'm like, okay, I'm going to watch. I'm going to watch what happens here. Eats 2 of them, and I'm looking over, and he says, I can't eat anymore. He goes, I feel sick. Score. Score one for the home team. So they did this study of rats at Connecticut College. And what they found in the study, they compared morphine to Oreos. And what they found was that morphine and Oreos both have the same effect on the brain. They both light up the reward center of the brain. They trigger endorphins. Dopamine and serotonin. But given the choice between the morphine and the Oreos, the rats chose the Oreos.

Interesting. That is interesting.

Frightening. I mean, just scary stuff. So I mean, think about that when you're giving your kid apple juice and Oreos.

Yeah, you know, I was actually talking to someone earlier today about addiction and about drugs, because, you know, as I've talked about publicly, publicly, I was a really bad drug addict when I was 18 years old. I would freebase cocaine and I literally would wake up to get high and I would get high to go to bed. I mean, I literally was just— that was my coping mechanism. I wanted to get rid of the pain, the anxiety, the stuff I was experiencing, the boredom. I just chose a really bad way of doing it. And we were having this conversation, it was with a dentist, And it was funny because I said, well, you know, they found out in the '50s that if they hit the dopamine-serotonin centers of a rat with, you know, drugs, the rat will push the pellets and, you know, keep hitting it to get the high over sleep, over food, over sex, over, you know, everything. And a rat doesn't have the ability to make a moral judgment. I mean, they don't sit and think, "Well, what I'm doing is right or wrong." They just want that hit. And so what's going on in the brain is biochemical. And so people that are, you know, really beat themselves up, or other people that beat up addicts, it hijacks the brain. And food hijacks the brain.

It hijacks the brain, and then they sneak it in everywhere. So you don't even realize you're doing it. You think, "I'm having that green drink, I'm doing a great thing." You know, I'm having, oh, I'm supposed to We start today with this skim milk and cereal. And so you don't realize, so your brain, you're addicted to this. Now you have to eat every 2 to 3 hours because you've got the brain issues put together with your biochemistry. Because now your blood sugar is going up, your insulin's up, your insulin's high, you can't access stored fat for fuel, so your blood sugar crashes, you have to eat again. And all of a sudden you can't even use stored fat for fuel, you're a sugar burner, and you're addicted to the sugar, and your biochemistry is starting shift, you're becoming insulin resistant. Right now in the United States, we have 86 million people who are insulin resistant, pre-diabetic, 86 million. 29 million people are diabetic, and of those 29 million people, 8 million don't even know they are. And a sweet drink, if you drink 1 or 2 sweet drinks a day, so that could be that green drink, that could be this, that could be this Vitaminwater that you're having for focus that has 31 grams of sugar.

So let's talk about this. I mean, I think—

Oh, this one's lower. This one— no, it's 31 grams of sugar.

So it's Vitaminwater. It's called Vitaminwater. That sounds very healthy. Is that healthy?

It's Vitaminwater Focus, by the way. This is for focus because actually— and it's naturally sweetened. It's naturally sweetened. I just want people to understand how duped we are by marketing. I mean, shame on them for doing this. And this is why I'm taking this on. I'm gonna need a lot of help. 'Cause as you can imagine, I'm taking on all of these, all of these companies with all this marketing that are taking our health down. And I mean, we have an economic crisis. Our economic crisis is because of these things. This is what's happening. It drives me crazy because if you drink one of these every day, you are going to increase your risk of diabetes by 25%.

Interesting.

And you thought by drinking this or that green drink that you were doing a good thing for yourself. And it makes it even worse.

Yeah, see, that's the whole thing. It's one thing to know, oh, I'm just drinking a milkshake, or I'm drinking— but there's a lot of—

But what about Ensure Active? That's the muscle health one.

So talk about that.

OK, so I actually—

and this is the thing.

Because that was my question, is what are these liquids that people—

Now, here's what's so ridiculous. You can't even— even with my glasses on, I wouldn't be able to see this. So in order to— so I have this huge—

Yeah, this is a magnifier glass.

But if you look at it, so—

Guys, real quick, just for the camera.

Because you can't see this, but look at— here's this thing, it's 200 calories, 250 calories for this little bottle, and there are 22 grams of sugar in it. And the first ingredient's water, but the second ingredient is sugar, and then there's corn, which is basically corn maltodextrin, which is also sugar. Okay, so it's got sugar and sugar, and it's got some and soy protein just to lower your thyroid along with it. So we'll raise your insulin and lower your thyroid. Bam, bam.

That is a muscle building liquid.

And that's muscle health. How on earth can—

Just goodness in a bottle, isn't it?

All this stuff. It just makes me, it makes me crazy. It just makes me crazy.

And it should.

I mean, it's bullshit. Well, but here's the deal.

I have so many, this, I mean, we talk about sugar as a drug and people are like, I'm not eating that much sugar. I'm not eating that much sugar. We're not eating this anymore. I mean, our table sugar consumption thankfully has gone down, but we are getting 22 teaspoons of sugar in a day, and kids are getting in 34 teaspoons a day.

Can you—

because when you talk about grams, like 22 grams or 18 grams or 30 grams or whatever in a bottle, can you explain what that is? Like, I think in the— in a soda like a Coke or Pepsi, there's something like 11—

is —so a 16-ounce soda has 44 grams, which is about 140 calories of sugar. I mean, just, it's a little heap of sugar. What I like to look at it, how I did this for a great visual for people, because I think, you know, no one's going to get up and have an ice cream cone for breakfast, I would hope. But if you got up and had your cereal with your skim milk, a glass of orange juice, maybe put some sliced bananas on that cereal because that's got good potassium, right? That's basically about 4 ice cream cones worth of sugar.

4 ice cream cones worth of sugar, bowl of cereal, skim milk, a banana, what else?

And some orange juice. Okay. You know, the calcium-fortified orange juice. Let's make it even better. Or let's say you were just going to go get a skinny latte and a muffin. A skinny latte and a muffin is 3 ice cream cones. Now, that muffin in reality, if you wipe the frosting off a cupcake, take a look at it, what is it? It's a muffin, right? So a muffin is just a cupcake without the frosting on it. But all of a sudden you called it a muffin, and what if it's a whole grain muffin? And you just, now you have a little halo, and I think that's where the biggest damage is coming from is all these things that are agave sweetened or there's no sweetener added. You know, a low-fat little strawberry yogurt, 26 grams of sugar. That's nearly 2 ice cream cones worth of sugar. And again, these are things that we're doing to be healthy. That's why we've got this crisis. We've got a crisis of misinformation where we are being duped. It's creating this addictive cycle with all of us and then destroying our biochemistry along with it. So all of a sudden we're going, I cannot— why am I pre-diabetic? You know, I just had someone come to me and she was using a health shake every day. She can't figure out why she can't lose weight. I go, you know, it's probably just a couple simple tweaks. I usually just can catch a couple little things. And she every day had been given this, this shake that was supposed to help control blood sugar. It had 17 grams of fructose in it. This is where you get into trouble, right?

Totally, totally. So here's what I like to do, just because I'm sitting there thinking to myself, alright, If someone, this is like new to them, they've never heard this before, and I know a lot of people that, you know, I interview lots of health experts and stuff. They're familiar with it, but they may not have gone this deep with it or heard this perspective as it relates to sugar. And some people are like, "You know, I mean, you're talking about stuff that I eat every day. I love the way this tastes, and I don't want to trade that for—" because the brain is still hooked.

And we don't like change either.

Oh, absolutely not. And when you're addicted, and I think a ton of food stuff is addictive.

It's built to be addictive that way. We sell more of it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, look, you look at the McDonald's playgrounds. I mean, they don't just want the people hooked on the food. They want them hooked on the environment. They want them hooked on the Happy Meal, the toys.

Well, we put gluten on the french fries. Yeah. There's gluten on the french fries at McDonald's.

Yeah, and I think even, God, 20 years ago, the Chicken McNuggets, they were injected with 6 different sort of liquids, one including real high sodium to give flavor.

Yeah, usually we've got a sugar, salt, fat combo that, like, if you look at a lot of the sodas, it's sugar and salt, because then you want more and more and more. Right. So there's reasoning behind all of this stuff. And it's so that you'll want more, more, and more. But here's the thing. And I kind of get where you're going with this. And the deal is it's simpler than people realize. What I wanted to do was make this If it's not easy to do and if they're hard to find foods or it's expensive or it doesn't taste good, no one's gonna do it. What I hear from people over and over again is they actually like the swaps better 'cause it's really just trading habits. You're used to eating one thing, you're just gonna shift it out for something else. In the first couple days you might be going, "All right, where's the, you know, I'm missing the skinny latte," but instead you're having either your Bulletproof Coffee, shout out to Dave, Dave Asprey. We love Dave Asprey. So either you're having that and you will never miss that skinny latte again, or you're having some coconut milk in an espresso. It's not hard to do. It's just knowing which things to make the shifts from. But the bigger thing that I've heard is that within 2 weeks, and really during— so I have people, I'll kind of back up. I have people first test just by doing that simple sugar impact quiz and doing what I call the sneaky sugar inventory. Food Inventory where I go through the most common medium and high sugar impact foods. We talked about some of them, pickle relish and balsamic vinegar and these no sugar added jams. We go through all that just so you can get a feel for how much you're eating in a typical week. Because it's an eye-opener even for the most healthy eater. And if it is, what I tell people similar to the Virgin Diet is that's awesome. Because if you were absolutely flawless and still feeling like crap, you know, then we gotta go look for some real deep, deep-lying health issues. If you see that these things have been sneaking in, how awesome is that? Because in 2 weeks you can be in a totally different place. Now, what I think makes this different from everything else is when I looked at these programs, I went, "Wow, they have you go cold turkey." That doesn't work with someone who's now trained their body to be a sugar burner, because the minute you pull these foods out, your energy's gonna crash and that's gonna send you searching for a cookie. So the first week I have you just learn to live by the sugar impact plate, which means eat clean lean protein and healthy fats and some low impact carbs to give a nice steady supply of energy to the brain. Do that, but taper from high sugar impact to medium sugar impact. You're not gonna go low right away, you're just gonna start creating that awareness. And then you take 2 weeks and you go low. And it is the most exciting thing because this is where you make this transition from being a sugar burner, where you have to eat every 2 hours and your whole life is about food, to being able to go 4 to 6 hours. In fact, Jeff Moore told me that he said, "JJ, I don't even— I have to remind myself to eat." This was a food addict guy who dieted as a hobby for his whole life. I mean, he's probably lost a couple thousand pounds in his life, and he has to remind himself to eat again. But the bigger thing that happens during that time, because we drop fructose down to almost zero, is you reclaim your sweet sensitivity. And at the end of that time period where we go back and we start to match you up and go, "Okay, let's try some higher sugar impact foods," they taste too sweet. You recognize how bad they make you feel. [Speaker:JOE_POLISH] Right. [Speaker:DR_LYDIA_GRAY] But they taste too sweet. You don't want them anymore. And it sounds incredible to say that. I'm sure if you're listening, you're like going, "Yeah, that sounds crazy." But again, I took these diehard sugar addicts. I didn't do this the easy way when I tested it on 700 people. I basically went out and went, all right, who, if this is your problem, if you feel like you cannot quit sugar, it's taking you down, you're the one I want.

Yeah, well, see, that's one of the reasons why I really am happy that we're doing this interview because I've referred a lot of people to your work, to your books. Jeff Moore, you know, I introduced you I want to introduce you to Jeff Moore. The cool thing about him is this is a guy that runs a multi-million dollar food company. I mean, he sells Wild Things Seafood. He sells seafood, he sells meat, grass-fed, all kinds of stuff. This is a guy who you would think has access to all kinds— I mean, he has all the food he could want, healthy or whatever, and he's lost at this point, and this is a few months —over 40 pounds.

But I think the funniest thing of all, and it just, it shows what a problem this is, is here was Jeff, he said, I've got your book, I just don't know, you know, what will I eat? I go, what do you sell? You sell wild fish? So he sent me a picture, and I talked about this actually in my public television show, this just shows how far you can go. He sends me a sent me this picture of this sea of cheesecakes. He is at this event and there is a sea of cheesecakes, every flavor. Surfing. Surfing, oh my God, I mean every flavor, they're beautiful with cookies in them, like just cheesecake. And I'm looking at this and he sent me this picture and I'm thinking, uh-oh, right? Uh-oh, like this is gonna be, this is gonna be his takedown shot. And he sends me this, he goes, I don't feel anything. I'm sitting here in the sea of cheesecakes I have no cravings, no desire, no, I mean, this is a sugar addict. Right. Right? And that just shows you that you can get there. And it just, it's like just say, hey, I've got 2 weeks. I mean, what if in 2 weeks you could break that control that sugar has had on you for your whole life? Because for all of us, I mean, if you look at it, I don't have a sweet tooth, but I was raised, because some people genetically I was raised on Pop-Tarts, Cap'n Crunch, and Cocoa Puffs. And when I thought I was doing better, I switched to frozen yogurt and black licorice. I just kept shifting my vices thinking I was doing better until finally I went, this is not, this is not working. It hasn't fixed the problem because I'm still getting sugar. It just is in a different wrapper.

So how do we turn off the survival mode?

So that was the thing. You know, I went through this whole evolution of seeing what this crisis was, seeing how the current model just really was not doing it justice, seeing how there's a lot of causative factors that we can't all control. We can't stay away from all of it. So that was the big question, was how can you efficiently do this? And I also thought it was important to get some clarity on food. I think that it's a double whammy. We need to eat something, and at the same time, we can stress about our eating. Food can be a direct source of stress from all the confusion. Do we have to do zero carbs or low fat, or what about the gluten? So what I realized was that you could use the way that cortisol, the adrenal hormone, the way that it interfaces with your blood sugar, that we could use that to strategically time foods to fix that rhythm back again.

[Speaker:JOE_POLISH] So the way that I currently eat is more— now I'm not super religious, I'm not hell-bent on any particular method of eating, and I've interviewed people on every type from raw foods to vegans to, I mean, you name it, to paleo people to, you know, whatever. And my current diet is close to like a paleo sort of diet with very healthy food in the sources of where they come from. What is— is gluten the devil? Is dairy the devil? I mean, like, how do you— now certainly, and I don't eat processed foods. I mean, it's very rare that I will eat something out of a can or a bag unless I'm stuck in the airport, and if I do, I'll probably get nuts or something like that, right? And so how do you recommend people eat, and what are the things that you 100% know to be healthy, or is that even too much of a stretch? I mean, 'cause it seems like every decade, I mean, look what happened to coconut. I mean, I remember going and seeing, what's Tim Allen, the comedian. We had a backstage pass and he did this whole skit, he's like, you know, kale, everyone's eating kale. He's like, when did kale get an effin' publicist? I won't say it. But you know, there's so many things about, foods. So what do you know are just, this is the way to eat, or does it depend? I mean, how does one answer this? Because there's so many different opinions about this, and I've interviewed very smart people that look— very divergent ideas. Yeah, they're intelligent and they are healthy, it appears. Completely, you know, different opinions. Isn't that wild? Yeah.

So there's really two questions that you had in there. I would like to tease those apart. One of which is, is this the devil? And the other one is, what's the solution? They're actually separate. So I don't argue that any one simple food caused the crisis that we're in. I don't find that evidence compelling. I don't see the timeframe of 1990 to 2000, I don't see evidence saying that we suddenly consumed too much animal protein and that was the culprit. Or that that's when we first discovered wheat. It's probably not when we first discovered wheat. Nor was that when we first discovered dairy foods. Nor was that when we stopped eating animal protein. It's not starting or stopping it. So I don't think anything's got clear single causes. But I think food can be a solution. And we've gotta eat something anyway. So I would argue probably the simplest step is to really avoid processed foods. You know, things that have weird chemicals. And I think few would debate about that. Another thing I think everyone would agree upon is that we're served by getting a variety of produce. Lots of colors, fresh leafy greens. The Paleo and the vegans, they're in alignment on that. The part where I really kind of forge off on my own really comes down to carbohydrates. People tend to be, in the nutrition world, either all for or all against. Back in the '80s, I was a runner and this was like the low-fat craze.

Lots of sugar but low fat.

Lots of sugar but low fat, yeah. So I was at a friend's house, totally fit gal, and she served us these snacks and it was jelly beans and pretzels because they were fat-free. So this is like all good food and you have all you want, you don't worry about it. So now we've kind of gone the opposite way to where bacon and coconut are the new health foods. Right, right. And chocolate. Yeah, exactly. And I would argue that carbs are a tool. It's not carbs, fat, protein, neither good or bad, they're all tools. And carbs have a unique effect upon our daily rhythms. There's so much data showing that. And intuitively, imagine if you have pancakes, syrup, some waffles, some fruit juice for your breakfast, and then you want to go be productive. You're going to crash. You know, you're going to feel tired. So when you have a lot of carbs, what happens is your body makes a lot of insulin. You know, no mystery, no debate. So that insulin causes you to lower your cortisol output. Cortisol raises your blood sugar. Insulin lowers your blood sugar. So if you eat carbs, insulin comes out to lower your blood sugar. Well, that makes you have to not make as much cortisol, otherwise your sugar would go back up again. They fight each other. So in the morning when you shut down your cortisol, you're not mentally alert. You know, you're not energized, and you're going to want to take a nap after a little bit. On the other hand, In the evening, you really need to have a good suppression of your cortisol. That's how you sleep. You know, everyone knows that.

Yeah, 'cause you write about in your book, like, if you're not getting enough carbs, some people, they just can't sleep. Right.

There have been studies on that. If you drop your carbs, in even just a couple of days, the quality of your sleep suffers. And there's really well-known chemical pathways by which our neurotransmitters that allow us to sleep our serotonin and our melatonin, they depend upon healthy carbs. We need some carbs to drive them to be made and to get into our brains.

Well, what I know, what I've noticed, like when I go and lift weights, if I will eat some brown rice or even white rice, the strength I have when I'm working out is just greater. Sure. You know, and I'm a pretty clean eater and I'm always trying to test things again, you know, I mean, as much as I've I've interviewed people and I've read a lot and I think I know a lot more than the average bear. I'm always trying to fine-tune it and try to see what works with me, for me, and there's obviously, which you very much describe in your book, there's other factors than just the food you're putting in your mouth. It's also timing too. 'Cause one of the things that I've learned from you about eating carbs, it's not even eating carbs, it's when you do it. Where some people be like, don't eat any carbs carbs, you know, eat them in the morning, and you say the exact opposite, right? Explain that.

Yeah, so in the morning, the logic behind that idea is that, well, if you eat them in the morning, you can burn them throughout the day. And the reality is, we burn fuel in different ways. And our very best fuel source is stuff called glycogen. That's a stored type of carbohydrate in our liver and our muscles. Now, that's our best fuel, so when you're training hard and you have the rice, you generate more glycogen. That's our greatest, most powerful fuel source. It takes us a long time to form it. It doesn't go from our mouth to our leg in a matter of minutes. It's more like about 8 to 14 hours at the quickest. It may be a lot longer. So the meal you have in the morning is actually a super important thing for your brain chemistry, for your energy, for your blood sugar, but it's not your fuel for that day. You're not really burning it for fuel that day that you ate it. But the stuff you have in the evening the night prior, that can form glycogen. That can form this good muscle energy that you can get the most power from.

Okay, so across the board advice that you would give for anyone listening to this on the podcast or watching the video, 'cause we're obviously recording this on video also, what advice would you give them about starting today, how to look at eating food and carbs? I mean, obviously, you know, read your book if they want a deep understanding of all of this, But what are some basics that people would be well served to hear?

You know, simple foods, unprocessed foods, solid breakfast, protein for breakfast, and have some healthy carbs. They can be from vegetables, they can, like, such as squash or sweet potatoes or turnips or parsnips. I actually really like beans and legumes, and I love intact whole grains. They've really got a place in the intestinal flora, and they work better in the body in the evening as opposed to earlier in the day.

Well, you know, I can't remember who I asked this to, but, uh, it takes, you know, gluten. There's a whole attack on gluten and stuff. Yeah, and lots of books with a lot of evidence. It appears that, you know, wheat and gluten is a bad thing, and I'm pretty much wheat and gluten free. What is gluten? I mean, people hear it, but I also see how a lot of packaged food companies are using it to produce really crappy food that is gluten-free. Yeah. So what is gluten and how does it— what does it do to the body? And, you know, who does this apply— how do you find out if gluten, you know, if you're gluten intolerant? And I say this playing devil's advocate here because I've done a lot of tests and I know what certain things in my body responds to and what it doesn't. But I'm asking this question more for the listeners.

So gluten comes into a category that I call the sticky proteins. So you make, you make dough and you need flour and eggs and milk. They will make it all stick together and bind up with it. So some proteins are just really hard to pull apart. And yeah, gluten's a very sticky, almost like snot, so to speak. It's very tenacious and holds onto things. That's very exciting.

I like this description.

The downside is that if we're not all the way digesting it, it can hurt our immune system. It can activate our immune system and trigger inflammation. And you're right, it's hard to really divorce the effects of it from processed foods. And I would also agree that many could focus on just that one issue and still not be on a healthy diet. There's a lot of gluten-free crap nowadays. I talked to someone earlier that I diagnosed for the first time having very advanced celiac disease. And I told her, I said, you know, this gluten-free thing, it is very popular right now. The good part about that is For those to whom this is a real condition, there are more resources, more options. And they're not all healthy. So you always wanna think big picture. And I'm really a fan of just simple foods, intact whole grains, vegetables and fruits as they come, fresh meats, nuts and seeds, and really building your diet around those. Not even the packaged things you get from the health food supermarket, just not even packaged things in general. [Speaker] Mm-hmm, yeah.

Certainly, I mean, one of the best pieces of advice, I don't know if I heard it from Michael Pollan or whatever, is just, you know, eat foods that have one name, like, you know, broccoli. You know, Doritos is not one name. Doritos is like a bunch of chemicals with a, yeah, so, just not eating processed foods, that alone will change your life. Do you have to have money and be rich in order to eat really well and to do all this stuff?

Strategically, you do not. And that's the thing is that the unprocessed foods, many people have done analysis on this, that if you're doing some simple shopping and some batch cooking, no, it can actually be more cost-effective and more time-effective, believe it or not.

Yeah, at my Genius Network meeting, the last one that I did here at my office, we had Dr. Joel Kahn, who's a big heart specialist, writes for Reader's Digest, and his specialty is the heart. And he was giving a 10-minute talk. One of the things he talked about is eat vegetables, eat your vegetables. And I know people are going to complain, "I don't like the taste of vegetables." He's like, "Well, I wonder if you'll like the taste of cancer. I wonder if you'll like the taste of chemotherapy. I wonder if you'll like the taste of diabetes." And it was a really interesting analogy because a lot of people are like, "Well, you know, I don't have the money." I mean, if you don't take time out for your health now, you're going to take time out for it later and it's going to be painful and it's going to be costly and your life may not be long. So you'd be really well served to learn about eating and about something that every human being needs to do day in, day out, and understand how it affects your body. So I mean, that's, of course, that's my perspective.

That same thing from the opposite angle. I had a long-term patient who has a yard maintenance company, and he was in early diabetes and dietary change completely cured him of that. He had seen a general doctor and was put on medications. They weren't helping. They were causing side effects. And he went on a program like I've outlined, and he was non-diabetic after about a month and a half. And I know he had some favorite foods, and his name was Joe Polish, also a coincidence. But I was talking to him and I said, well, how are you doing on, you know, staying away from the big swigs and this and that? And he said, are you kidding? He said, nothing tastes better than being healthy. Feeling good and being energy was more pleasurable, was more positive than what it was he was giving up. And that was his discovery.

Yeah, well, I had this, I used to have it on my refrigerator where it was a saying, "Nothing tastes as great as being lean feels." And now certainly there's things that taste really damn good. There are certain behaviors that are very indulgent but are very destructive. It's really about building in the rituals. 'Cause there's a period of time where I think it's like you have to work through the burn. I mean, if you're addicted to sugar, you're gonna go through withdrawals. I mean, you're gonna, you know, to make a shift. But you know, that's why we don't have everyone walking around looking awesome, being super wealthy, and having great relationships, because all of those things require a certain level of work and commitment. And the challenge though, in what you identify here, is the road to get there is not guilting yourself into saying, "Oh, I've got, you know, I'm just a bad person and I've got bad habits." It's really understanding that we're a walking biochemical machine. We're a pharmacy. Our brain's a pharmacy and a lot of these things are affected and, you know, your goal here with the adrenal reset diet is to reset that so it gives people, "Okay, you know, shut this thing off and start a new sort of thing." thing. Well, not quite in that way, but it's really about just giving people a new lease on life, if you want to take it to that level.

You know, one of the most beautiful things I learned was from very hardcore science. You know, our body is a mass of tissues made up of organs made up of cells made up of molecules made up of atoms, and it's all totally transitory. You know, it's all in a state of dynamic flux. So right now, you know, who you are, you know, what your physical body is on the very most material level, if we went back a year prior, none of the same stuff was there. You know, the same identity that you identified as being Joe Polish, that didn't physically exist. You know, less than 1% of those actual atoms have carried through and stayed with you to today. So we're constantly in this process of change.

Why do I have the same looking nose though?

Well, the structural parts come back in the same place. But the building blocks and the actual chemistry of us, it's in a state of dynamic flux. So the cool thing is that if we can identify things that are disrupting us and just change the big blocks, the big barriers, and supply the needed pieces, then transformation's normal. It's not mystical, it's just the normal state of affairs.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. Well, you know, you're a real expert on thyroid and hormones. So how do our adrenal hormones relate to body weight? Let's talk about that.

So the adrenal glands are the biggest single factor for the largest number of people for body weight. They, they control just that burning and storing stuff. The thyroid gland, it's a big deal for a certain number of people, and it may be a quarter or so of the population. So the adrenal glands are affected by, by just life and by stressors. The thyroid gland can be affected by a disease, and that disease makes it not able to generate enough hormones. And these hormones control how much we warm our bodies, how much energy we generate warming our bodies. So when they're lacking, we burn less fuel. And for many, that can be a source of weight struggle as well.

Can diet help correct adrenal rhythm? It can. And so what is—

what does that mean? So we did a clinical trial on this. You know, I've always been my own guinea pig and I checked my cortisol via saliva, hair, blood, urine, all these things. And I checked my blood sugar all throughout the day and I saw that I could change it by shifting the carbohydrate intake. Then I had some patient friends who were early diabetic, who had weight struggles, they saw the same things. Then we did a formal clinical trial. And we had people that, all of whom had had at least 3 diets just not work for them in the last few years. They were all struggling with their weight, and none of them had had an easy time managing it. We measured their adrenal cycle, and there was not a healthy rhythm amongst the bunch of them. They all had very poor circadian rhythms. So only by doing diet— there's a lot of things that can help the rhythm that I talk about in the book that are not diet, but I only wanted to see what the diet did. So we just did the diet with them, and a month later, the average rhythm was more than 50% healthier than it was before. By just the food thing. So we saw that diet can correct that. And I'm not aware of data apart from that study showing that that can actually happen.

So when you say circadian, what does that mean?

Thank you. That means things that change throughout the course of the day. So we're awake and we've got one mode of functioning, we're asleep and there's a different one. And we are daylight creatures, and there's this bigger rhythm properly called a diurnal rhythm. And being daylight creatures, we have a circadian cycle. So we wake up with the sunlight, we go to sleep with the darkness. And all these orchestrated events of our digestion, our immunity, our metabolism are all linked to that sunlight cycle.

[Speaker] So if I'm gathering this right, it's our rhythm, our adrenal rhythm that will dictate how we weight gain, how we respond, respond, how we think, how we sleep, how we feel. Is that correct? Yep. Okay, so what ways other than diet, because you describe the diet and give recipes and everything in the book, what are other things that people can do to regain or put themselves on the best rhythm?

I mentioned the sunlight is one trick, that morning sunlight. And in many parts of the country or the world, that's not an option. It's not bright sunlight when you wake up. They've got really good light boxes nowadays. You want ones that generate 10,000 lux or greater.

You mean like the Philips blue light box or things like that, or you talking something else?

They're not blue, the ones that are best researched. Okay. But they generate high amounts of bright light, and the better ones have stands that allow them to be above the height of your head, like on a table.

Like this video camera behind you that's blinding me just so we get the proper lighting here, and hopefully I look less More attractive or something, I don't know.

Pretty much. So you get something like that, and in the morning you have your breakfast, or you have your tea, or you read the paper, and you've got a light going like that. Or when you can, you do those same things outside. And of course, bonus points to go for a walk or be active, but just the light exposure passively by itself is huge towards that. Another thing along those same lines is temperature changes. So some researchers have argued that Another big change that's caused weight gain is the fact that we don't get cold anymore, you know, that we're the same temperature all day and all night. And that was not true for our ancestors. So part of our daily rhythm was burning calories in ways to warm us at night. So when we're not getting cold, that does not get engaged. So a simple habit is to cool your environment by at least 5, preferably 10 degrees greater than your daytime environment for nighttime.

If you look at this photo, you might see some resemblance. This is a picture of me in the early '90s. It turns out I'm the first person to sell anything over the internet. We didn't have the word e-commerce yet because we hadn't invented it, but I did it, and it's because I sold a caffeine t-shirt out of my dorm room to 14 countries to pay for my tuition. But you might also notice a couple other things about this. I was a little bit fat, as in I weighed about 280 in that photo. I hit 300 pounds at the height of my weight. So I lost 100 pounds. I also lost $6 million during that dot-com time, which can be a little bit stressful. I also lost my brain. Right as my career in tech was going up, I started having a hard time remembering things. I didn't have enough energy. I was kicking ass. I got my MBA at Wharton, working full-time at a startup that we sold for $600 million. But it took every ounce of willpower and energy to put one foot in front of the other. It was not a fun experience. And I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And then I got this. Can't read it, it's from a doctor. Let me zoom in on that for you. I'm 29. Increased risk for stroke or myocardial infarction. They're like, you're gonna die like you're old, your brain works like you're old. Oh, and by the way, I also had arthritis since I was 14. So I'm kind of old when I'm young, and it sucks. So I went and saw Dr. Amen, who's a member of Genius Network. That was my brain, and here's what they called me: an interesting referral. Oh man. So what do you do when you're faced with something like this? You've already made and lost a fortune, and you're a little stressed, and and your body and your biology will not do what you want them to do. Well, I decided yoga. I became an advanced yoga master. If you were at the party last night, I put my ankle behind my head just to prove a point. It was not a pretty sight. I went to South America, did ayahuasca with a shaman way before it was cool. I shaved my head. Went to Tibet, learned meditation from the masters. In fact, this photo was taken on Mount Kailash. It was on that very day that I had my first cup of yak butter tea that was the inspiration of Bulletproof Coffee. But that wasn't all I did to upgrade my brain and whatnot. I went to this cave and I fasted for 4 days led by a shaman. That's actually called First Woman. It's shaped like a certain anatomical part, and this is where Adam and Eve emerged from that local tribe. So that was a very very holy place to go meditate for a while. And I finally hooked my brain up to electrodes, and I listened to the sound of my own brainwaves. Radical storytelling, understanding what's the story that I told myself inside my head. What do I believe versus what's real? And how do I get control of my own brain? Because after all, my body wasn't doing what I wanted. I got that to work kind of. But my thoughts weren't. I was stressed all the time. And today, I actually run a neuroscience institute on the side because I needed the world's best brain mechanics for me. And in Seattle, this is something that I do. 11 weeks of my life have been invested in this, which is the most important thing I've ever done. Here's what I learned, and here's what's in it for you. After I did all this stuff, I'm going to read a few sentences to you. This is where I ended up after that incredible dense path. Every day, think as you wake up, "I'm fortunate to be alive. I have a precious human life. I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to use all of my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others. I'm going to think kind thoughts towards others. I am not going to get angry and think badly about others. And I'm going to benefit others as much as I can. That's what I learned from that incredibly long path. And now you're going to learn exactly what's going on inside your head that prevents you from having those thoughts all the time. Sound useful? All right, let's do that. I can't believe I can fit this in 10 minutes. This is cool. If you were to, say, design a species to live forever, which we are designed, you really only need 3 behaviors for the species. The first behavior, well, make sure that you eat everything. It's an F-word, feed, right? Eat everything. And you recognize this in a big Labrador. I call this a Labrador brain. Labrador retriever walks down the street. Oh, a gutter taco? I think I'll eat that. You'll eat everything. It's OK, you're wired that way so the species doesn't starve. The next thing that you'll do is fear, another F word. And that one is run away from or kill anything that might be scary. Pretty cool stuff, right? Well, the third F word required to keep the species alive is one of Joe Polish's favorite words. The other F-word. Come on. Right? You got to reproduce the species. Fornicate. Fornicate. Thank you. You can always count on Sean to take it up a level. That wasn't where I was going, but we'll deal with that F-word. So here's what you can do. You look at how much energy you have every single day. There is something you can do that turns off the voice in your head that says, "Eat the cookie." Right? You put the cookie in front of you and the voice says, "Eat the cookie." And you say, "No." And the voice says, "Eat the cookie." And you say, "No." And eventually you say, "I'll just have half." And then you say, "I'm a bad person because I failed, because I didn't have enough willpower." It's all a lie. That's the story you told yourself. The real story is that willpower is finite. You can run out of it. It is a function of how much energy you have and a function of how many decisions you make. What if you could turn off the voice in your head that said, "Eat the cookie"? So when someone puts the cookie in front of you, you're like, "Oh, a cookie." And blissful silence. You've probably experienced that because you had Bulletproof Coffee this morning. The whole point there isn't to buy my Bulletproof Coffee. The whole point there is that when you eat the right kinds of fat and you don't eat foods that cause cravings, it frees up one of the only 3 things that you are biologically wired to do all the time, which is think about food all the time. And if you don't waste your energy thinking about food all the time, might you waste that energy on building another company, playing with your kids, or binge-watching your favorite Netflix? It doesn't really matter. It's free energy and you can do anything you want with it. But it's unacceptable to have food cravings. And one of the first things I learned is that if I have a food craving, it's my fault. And if you have one, it's your fault too. And the whole basis, or the whole teaching behind that, is in the Bulletproof Diet book. And I'm not telling you to buy the book because at the end of this, I'll send you one for free. Because this is the most important knowledge that I can offer you. One of the three things that gets in your way all the time can be turned off by what you put in your food, which is more plants and more of the right kinds of fat and less toxins. You get that right, and the toxins are a little bit different based on your genetics, you will not yell at your employees as much. Your middle finger will actually shrink as the muscles atrophy because you don't want to use it as much as you did before. I think I lost a pound in just my middle finger. It's that big of a deal. And one of the things that happens, that other F word we talked about, fear. When you run out of energy because your blood sugar dipped, you know what happens? Your body is afraid you're going to die because there's not enough blood sugar to run away from tigers. So it triggers adrenaline and cortisol and all the fear and stress hormones. So when you don't control your hunger and your cravings, what happens? Your fight or flight response gets kicked off and then you sit in the meeting and you yell at people and you say things you're ashamed of. And you go back to these words, which by the way, I completely copied from the Dalai Lama. And you say, I'm not going to get angry and think badly about others. But you know what? You get me a little bit hypoglycemic, a little bit hypoglybitchy, hangry, I might think bad thoughts about others. And I don't like myself when I do that. And I don't think you like yourself either. So that's the number 1 thing. The number 2 thing is that fear response Inside of you is a story that you tell yourself. From all of this neurofeedback I've done, here's what happens. Something happens around you, your nervous system picks up on what happens, the actual thing that happens, it responds with an emotion that may or may not include fear, and then about, oh, 300 milliseconds later, you think about it and you tell yourself a story. For instance, you lean on a hot stove, You don't go, "Ah, it smells like bacon. I guess I should move my hand." Right? Something moves your hand, and then you say, "Whew, good thing I moved my hand." That's bullshit. You did not move your hand. Another consciousness within you that is far faster than you and far dumber than you, meaning to keep you alive, moved your hand. And that is the part of you that gets triggered when you're hungry, and it's the part of you that feels like you are going to die when your business is at risk. It's the part of you that John talked about when someone goes after your baby, your company. It's a visceral response. And, that response can be absolutely reprogrammed using 20 or 40 years of meditation in a cave, which is the way we used to do it, or you can do it with neurofeedback much, much more quickly.

[Speaker:JOE_POLISH] I'm a big fan.

And, at first, it was a comment. Miracle Morning really did kind of change my life. It changed how I looked at the morning. But, Then what I realized is I suck at the follow-through and the consistency of it. And there was two other books that are related to Genius Network that made a material huge impact on being able to implement. And that was Ben Hardy's Willpower Is Not— Isn't Enough, or whatever the right name is. And BJ Fogg. And BJ Fogg with Tiny Habits.

Tiny Habits. Thank you, BJ, for that.

Yeah. And that really setting myself up to be able to do the Miracle Morning had a lot more to do with how I was framing it and what I was doing to prepare for the morning than it actually did about knowing what to do. And I thought all of those were important. How have you seen those kinds of techniques? How people best use them to implement for the Miracle Morning in your experience, Hal?

You mean, how have they implemented which techniques?

Well, I mean, at first, I start off with the checklist that comes out of the book, right? You want to do affirmations, you're doing all the different pieces, but how have people been successful in implementing that to actually get it done and not get distracted in the middle, I guess, is maybe the simpler version.

Yeah. No, that's a great question. So, and actually in the book, I talk about that when you implement any new habit, right? And like BJ's more the expert than I am in this. But my layman's explanation is that you go through 3 phases and I broke them down into 3 10-day phases, although there's no exact science. But the first 10 days is what I call the unbearable phase. The next 10 days is the uncomfortable phase. And the final 10 days is the unstoppable phase. Obvious alliteration there. But the general idea is that unbearable means, you know, when you're trying to make a change, right? They say change is painful. Change is difficult, right? Because you're having to completely do something and/or see yourself in a way that you never have before. And so those first 10 days though, if you go into something aware of what you're getting into, it's much easier to endure the challenges and follow through. So if you go in going, okay, the first 10 days might feel unbearable, but even if something's unbearable, I can do anything for 10 days. Now, there's some little hacks in terms of moving your alarm clock across the room specific to getting yourself out of bed. I think that is one of the most underrated strategies in the book. It's a game changer. In that if your alarm clock is within arm's reach, your level of discipline, those first few moments when the alarm goes off and you're still half asleep, you're going to reach over on the nightstand and you're going to turn it off almost every time and hit the snooze button. But if it's in the bathroom and you've got to get up out of bed and you have to walk over to the bathroom, you're literally, you're 5 times more awake than you were when you were reaching over, fumbling in the dark with your hand to find the snooze button. So, by having to wake up and go across the room, and then if the alarm clock is right next to the bathroom counter, the sink, I mean, right? You just, I'm here. I'm going to brush my teeth, wash my face. I'm awake now. I'm up. Right? So, that little hack is important. But back to the general mindset, those first 10 days, realize it might feel unbearable at times, but either you're committed or you're not. And then the second piece is the uncomfortable phase which is where it's not, it's now you're acclimating to it, but it's easy. You almost can talk yourself out of it and go, well, I made it this far. So, for me, it's committing to a 30-day block. You know, and there's, I think it was the book, The One Thing, that Harvard showed that it took 66 days to change a habit. So, there's different psychology on this. It goes back to the mind-body connection. If you believe you can change a habit in a week, Damn it, I believe that you can too. And that's going to be your reality that you create. If you believe it takes you 66 days, then that's how long it's going to take you. I like 30. It's kind of the sweet spot for me. And so that 30-day challenge for me is the game changer, knowing that after you get through the unbearable and the uncomfortable phase, once you get into that unstoppable phase, it's where you wake up and you all of a sudden go, wait, this is effortless. I'm actually looking forward to this. There was no resistance. I didn't want to go back to bed today. And that's when your identity has been reshaped. You're a different person. And then it's easy to stay, you know, for the rest of your life.

Hi, Hal. Howdy. Okay.

So my question is, were you always positive since you were a child or did you train yourself to be like that?

Great question. In general, I was like the class clown. So I was kind of, you know, upbeat and funny and such. But I wouldn't say I was a positive thinker, had a positive mindset. When I started at 19 years old, I got hired at Cutco Cutlery. Anybody familiar with Cutco? Right? Probably many of you. And so, I got hired in sales, and we went through a 3-day, like 8-hour-a-day training. And on day 1, one of the first things our manager, who became my mentor, taught me is the power of positive thinking. I had never heard of the concept. And he explained, he taught us the 5-minute rule. You know, hey, don't dwell on this. Don't be negative. Be negative for 5 minutes, accept it, and move on. Be proactive. And so it was funny. I went home and after I learned about how, you know, positive thinking, I went home and I'm like, my parents are so negative. Like they're generally positive people. But I started to notice, I'm like, they're complaining about all this little stuff all the time. And I started calling them out on it. So yeah. So I mean, that's the answer is, no, I wasn't super positive my whole life. I learned positive thinking when I was 19. Although I will say though quickly, big picture, when I was 9 years old, I woke up to my mother screaming and my baby sister, Amery, was dead in her arms. She was 18 months old. She was just a year and a half. And so I was there and my mom was giving her mouth-to-mouth, trying to revive her. And I called 911 and it was this you know, this morning where I lost my sister that day. And I watched my mom, within a matter of months, my mom was leading a support group to help bereaved parents who had lost children. So she's like 6 months, less than 6 months into her grieving, and she is leading other people to support them. So in terms of positive thinking, I don't know if I'd call that positive thinking, but my mom taught me when I was really young that you take your tragedy, you take your adversity, and you find meaning and purpose in it and you use it to serve for other people. And looking back, I realized that that shaped kind of everything that I've done with all the tragedies I've gone through. It's like, how can I help people with this? How can I help people with this? You know, that mindset came from my mom.

Thank you for that question. Thank you.

So we're a little bit over time, so we're going to wrap up in a second.

But I do want to see Joe Weldon.

Are you on there?

I want to talk to you.

And I think that is such a powerful thing that you just said.

Everyone should be writing that down and remembering it.

Do not forget that.

And so much of it, it just starts in our head.

That's where it starts. So Joel, are you here on?

Yes, I am, Lee.

I would like to change the topic a little bit. You mentioned a little bit about Big Bold Health, which is your company that focuses on a different way of thinking about changing longevity. So the two things I wanna touch on is, you mentioned a little bit about stress. And I think stress is a big word because people think about stress as a bad thing. But I think stress can be looked at as a way to adapt. And you— the word adaptation and resiliency that you discussed, and I think it ties in very well to the concept of immune health and how you're changing. I think you mentioned yesterday of a really huge study that you found out recently about how we can change longevity and what is really impacting the way our body is able to adapt to stress and create some really amazing ways of balance.

So maybe you can really talk a little bit about that.

Oh boy, that's a fun one. That, yeah, that's got a lot of stuff to unpack on that. So if we really look at stress, as Hans Selye brought it over from physics to physiology as a term, It was defined as a series of variables that influence the physiology of an animal in such a way as it modified the function of its neuroendocrine system, right? So it changed its hormones, it changed how the animal was responding to its environment. We call it flight or fright. And so you get into this situation where the body is on either an orange or red light, it's on alarm. It's poised for defense. Now, the concept of stress in that process is a graded thing because you can go from an impending mortal injury that is terminal, that would really be stressful, or it may be just kind of like, I'm gonna have to give a talk and I don't like standing up in front of an audience, but once I get up there and get going, that stress actually made me better because it cleared my mind. So there is, there's a gradation of how stress or those hormones that are associated with stress influence your physiology. And this is the case with almost all hormones. They have a curvilinear effect. At a low level, they may be agonistic and produce positive, and at a high level, they're antagonistic, they may produce an adverse effect. So stress as a phenomenon is actually a positive thing until it moves into distress. And so this really relates to— I notice many of us are wearing devices, an Oura Ring. And so our Oura Ring, one of the things it measures is what's called heart rate variability. Now, heart rate variability is a surrogate marker for looking at the balance between the activation to the sympathetic nervous system to stress versus the deactivation, because life is a two-way street. For every activation you got a deactivation. So the deactivation is to the parasympathetic nervous system. And when those are balanced, you have high resilience, you take on the excitement of giving the talk, you give the better talk, and then you come off the stage and you feel really good about yourself and you relax. That's really good resilience and parasympathetic-sympathetic balance versus working yourself up all night with a sympathetic overload, you can't sleep, you get into the talk and you're just wired, and then you come out and you're exhausted. That's a different type of stress. It's the same hormones but played out under a different set of circumstances. So when we use the Oura Ring or other devices, we're measuring HRV, heart rate variability, which is a surrogate marker for measuring the balance between that sympathetic activity and the parasympathetic other road on the highway. And when it's really in balance, we have a high HRV. And when it's imbalanced, we have a low HRV. So it's, it's like a guidepost. It's not a definitive, like you were taking blood samples and measuring hormones all day long, but it gives you some guideposts about where you're living your life. Are you living your life in the fast lane all the time and you don't have a slow lane, or are you capable of balancing those? Now, that HRV as a measure from the Oura Ring, coupled with other things like pulse rate and oxygen and so forth are tied, believe it or not, to your immunological function. We were the first people to actually do a little clinical, I would say, observational study with Oura Ring, looking at the effect, this was in early stages of COVID of what happens when a person starts having an immunological challenge. And I think I put the first video on social media using myself as an example, showing what happens when you get into an immunological challenge to your HRV and your other variables that we would say, well, this is a fitness ring. Yes, it's an immune fitness ring because your immune system is regulating all those functions. I often ask the question, what organ in your body is in every other organ? And it's only the immune system. Well, actually the nervous system as well, those two. And they are intercommunicating, the nervous and immune systems. The heart is not in the lungs and the kidney's not in the pancreas, but the immune system is everywhere. It's in the muscles, it's in the brain. And why? Because the immune system is the principal sentinel system that's assessing what's going on outside the body and communicating inside the body in direct communication with the nervous system. And it's gonna tell the body how it should respond to the situation you find yourself, bliss or non-bliss. So the immune system is a guide, is an, gateway into understanding how your whole body is going to respond to the environment you find yourself. And so when we look now, I'm kind of departing a little bit from the theme, but when we look at the Americans' response to SARS-CoV-2 virus, we had the worst outcome of any developed country in the world going into COVID-19 and into intubation and even death. Why? When we are the medically most sophisticated country, because we had the poorest immune systems. And that was an aha. Only now are the medical experts saying, well, you know, there was something about our culture that it wasn't just that we were older. Well, no, we were not older than other countries in terms of mean average life age. It was that our immune systems, particularly the first line of defense, which is our innate immune system, was just not up to snuff. And why is innate immune system so important? Because it's on all of our barrier tissues. It's on the lungs, it's on the respiratory tract, it's on our gut. The microbiome is direct communication with it all the time. So if you have a disturbed diet, the disturbed microbiome, we have a disturbed innate immune system, and now you're less able to have your immune system doing the work. It has no headspace to manage and accommodate these other things. All these fit together in a different model. And that's the model that we've been working on because it's not like, well, you seem to be fine. We did a blood test and we don't see anything. Well, no, you weren't asking the right questions about the function of your immune system. So, yeah. That's great.

Let's talk about that study, the study that you recently found for Big Bold Health.

Yeah, so what we did, and I wanna emphasize, it's a pilot study, it's only 50 individuals that were apparently healthy when we recruited them in the study. They were between ages of 32 and 76. Half women and half men. And we wanted to know what the age of their immune system was when they started off. And we knew their age and birthdays. That could be— even if they cheated, we could find it out. But we didn't know the age of their immune system. But we have tools that allow us to actually determine the age of a person's immune system. We use a special chip that was developed for us by the Illumina company that measures 850,000 different gene sites in the immune system that relate to how the immune system has been epigenetically tagged to function in response to its environment. So we did a study of all those people to begin with, baseline. This is what is called an N-of-1 study, where the person is gonna compare themself to themself. And which, for doing studies on lifestyle, is a pretty good methodology 'cause it's hard unless you put a person in a metabolic ward to do controlled studies on people. And so it's better to do studies on a person against themselves and then aggregate the data using machine learning to see what it tells you than doing controlled studies that everybody does the exact same thing. That's not real life. So this was an N-of-1 study. We didn't change a person's diet or lifestyle. Whatever they were doing, they should do it. No depart here. Only thing is that we wanted to take 4 capsules a day of this high polyphenol containing a supplement that came— comes from this ancient food called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. It's a 4,000-year-old food that we knew has a lot of positive impact on the immune system. So we wanted to see what impact that would have on their immune system aging over 90 days of consuming that product. Very simple. And so we knew exactly what the composition of the product was, we knew the food it came from, and we knew the starting point of that individual's immune system. So 3 months they took took that daily. We did pill counts, measured compliance, and all that kind of stuff. And 47 of the 50 people successfully completed the trial. And when we then did the machine learning interpret— we had over a terabyte of data, so it was a lot of data from this study. But when we analyzed the data, lo and behold, we found out that those people that started off with an immune system that was already aged, which was about a third of the group, relative to their age and birthdays, their immune system was older than their age and birthdays, that they had a 47% reduction in the rate of aging of their immune system after 90 days by sending different signals to their immune cells. Because what people don't understand is our immune system, the cells we have today will not be the cells we have in our body 90 or 120 days from now. Our immune system is constantly turning over. So the question is, when the immune system is turning over and being replaced by new cells, are they as good, better, or worse than the cells they're replacing? And most often as people go through lives, their immune cells are worse. They're carrying bad messages. They're carrying bad experiences. There are things like zombie cells that we've heard about that are inflammatory-producing cells. So we wanna get rid of those. That's what we call immunorejuvenation. We wanna replace them with these naive cells that are waiting for good new messages. And that is speaking into the bone marrow because the bone marrow is what produces those cells. And they go out in the body and they develop now this new young personality. That can be more resilient and more capable of managing daily living.

Awesome.

Amazing, thank you for that. Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you wanna get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you wanna watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead, they're over here. Do it now. Come on, thank you. Watch 'em.