1040 How to Upgrade Your Brain, Boost Metabolism, Maximize Hormones & “Burn” Body Fat w/Shawn Stevenson

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This is how powerful food is. You know, it becomes everything about you, the things you see in the mirror, how you feel. It's all based on food.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Steve Maraboli once said, by choosing healthy over skinny, you are choosing self love over self judgment. And author Paul Kahn said, I live in my body, my house, so I better be good to it. My My guest today is a good friend. His name is Sean Stevenson. He's an author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter, which was transformational for me and my health, and creator of the Model Health show, which is a top fitness and nutrition podcast in the United States. He graduated from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied business, biology and nutritional science, and went on to found a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide called Advanced Integrative Health Alliance. Sean's been featured all over the world on many major media outlets including New York Times, Fast Company, Muscle and Fitness, ESPN and many others. He's a personal friend of mine and I truly value his mission to share quality information with the world to help us all be healthier. And I could talk to Sean for hours about nutrition and mindset, health and even relationships. I never want to stop. And he was able to give us a sneak peek of the crazy new information that he's learned while writing his latest book. And Eat smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life. I'm so excited to share with you this information. Some of the research he shares may shock you and blow you away, but I know it'll support you with your personal growth. And in this episode we discuss how our body burns fat that we've stored, what hormones are and why they are so important to understanding them. How to get a healthier microbiome, how much water we should be drinking daily, the true amount, the five different types of fat and how our body uses each one of them, the history of calories and why they have become such a prison to us, why it's so important to diversify the foods we eat. And this is something I struggle with. Why we need to treat the root of chronic disease, not just the symptoms and so much more. Get ready. Share this with a friend, with someone you think would be inspired, and someone who you truly value and you appreciate in your life, who you but you want to see improve their life as well. Just send them to Lewishouse.com 1040 for the full episode show notes or just copy and paste wherever you're listening to this over on Spotify, Apple Podcast or anywhere else. And while you're at it, please click that subscribe button to the School of Greatness on Apple Podcasts right now as well as give us a rating and review each week we bring some of the most incredible insights and interviews and guests all around the world at and I never want you to miss these. Coming up. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I've got my dear friend Shawn Stevenson in the house.

My man.

What's up, brother?

Good to see you, brother. Very excited about this. You've got a new book called Eat Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life. And I want to jump in and ask you a question about something I've been insecure about my entire life. Belly fat. Never had a six pack.

Never.

And no matter how hard I've trained as an athlete in the past, no matter how matter how hard I tried to biohack, optimize sleep, which I did in your last book. To eating the right foods, to eating just chicken and broccoli all day, it seems like I've always got a little belly fat that I can never get rid of. I'm curious. Is there a way you think I'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good through the things that I'm eating in a better way?

First of all, folks need to know that you are ridiculously masculine. You know what I mean? Like, you've got a great frame, just an incredible athlete. You know, we've done a lot of stuff together, too.

We've worked out together in St. Louis.

Yeah. And played basketball together. Right? Man, Dude, I've got a story about that I can tell everybody. But afterwards, driving home, because we were just gonna shoot around a little bit, then we ended up playing three games and then lifting afterwards. And on the way home, I've never felt like that I had to pull over and take a nap. Really, I've never felt like that before.

We played hard because you and me.

Were both like, no, I'm not gonna let him win. But, yeah, There's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, with that said, we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon is epigenetics.

Yes.

And things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is. And most folks have no idea, unfortunately. Like, we're at war with something we don't even understand. And so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. And a couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're going to go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue. This is the fat that's just below your skin. And so if you're trying to. If you think about, like, fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly. But that's the stuff you can pinch.

Now, I can pinch a lot right here.

The other type of fat is visceral fat. And that's also. It's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity. Right. So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs, you know, kind of putting. If you Have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys. And just everything in your core is.

The fat inside your. Not on the outside of your muscles, but inside your body.

Yeah. So it's like your abdominal cavity.

Gotcha. Your visceral fat. And you want less of that.

This is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core. Everything, which there's so much around there.

Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything.

And this is the stuff. It's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. And so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay. So your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy. Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it, though, and it could be a little bit clingy, you know, so you have to give the right messages, and that's part of the issue. So I just want to make that clear. And fat is also. It's not. We tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself. So that is an organ. It's an organ. It's an organ that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones. All right? So it's like making. Producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage. And if it gets out of hand. All right, so I want to preface by saying that.

Wait, is it an organ or is it, like, an organ?

It's an organ.

Fat is an organ.

Just like, for example.

So fat in our body is one organ, and it's all connected from the brain in my. From the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe.

Now, there's different types of fat communities.

All right?

So this is another conversation. I go through all of these. I literally call it the fat communities in Eat smarter and break this stuff down. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about. It's called intramuscular fat. All right, Intramuscular fat.

This is the third type of fat.

Yeah. And so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of. They have this dichotomy, like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, all right, that's.

That's.

That's your intramuscular fat. Now, that can get out of hand, too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles, all right, with the intramuscular fat. So it's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community. All right, so these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now, here's what's really amazing, and a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue.

All right.

Or bat brown adipose tissue or brown fat. Now, brown fat, the reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria.

All right, mitochondria are good, right?

Yeah. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of our cells, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy. And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. All right, so folks, don't. We're taught these, like, diet paradigms, like, where the. How does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? Your mitochondria actually the place where the triglycerides get shipped to to actually burn them and use them as fat. So brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria.

Side note, how do I go to bed weighing a certain amount, and then I wake up and I lose two pounds? Where does that go? Is that just a burn through sweat? Is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating into the air? What is happening?

This is such a great question. So in Eat Smart, this is the first time in book form, like, we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens. And it's Just the question should be, like, where the hell does fat go?

Where'd it go?

Does it go to just poop it out?

Do you sweat it out?

Does it.

You've got that.

Do I breathe it in?

You've got that Thanos keychain. Does it go to another dimension?

You know what I mean?

But what they did when this was so fascinating, they actually tracked the papa of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated. And so what they discovered was that about 84% of the fat. Because. Okay, we have to preface by saying this for us, psychologically, in our culture, we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it. It's sweating.

Yeah.

Like, we're out there. We're at the gym. We're sweating it out. That's like. That's your fat cells crying, having a good breakup cry, you know, that's how we. That's what we think.

Yeah.

But in actuality, about 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

What?

Yeah, it's eliminated via your lungs. Yeah, it's carbon dioxide.

So it. No way. So fat in the body and then.

It goes, what, into your lungs?

It's like transporting through the lung cavity, and then you breathe it out.

It's an eliminatory organ. You know, we don't think about that. What we tend to think about, like our gastrointestinal tract, our bladders and eliminatory organs, your lungs. And so you breathe. About 84% of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens while you're sleeping at night.

So you breathe fat out. That's how you burn it.

Yeah.

80. How much?

CESAR Millan is the dog whisperer.

Yes, I was just with Whisperer.

Exactly.

I burn it in my sleep. So wait a minute. How much fat do we burn through our. Our lungs?

About 84% of it.

All of our fat.

So if I'm 100.

This is not just your breathing. It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoot. It just comes through the mouth through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. So about, you know, somewhere around the ballpark of about 15%, 16 to 14%. Sweat, urine. Yeah. Tears. All of these things are eliminating products, you know. Yeah.

Is the fat. It looks coagulated when you look at it in, like, in your body.

Right.

So how does it break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a very complex and beautiful process.

Body is fascinating, what it can do.

It is, it is. And we go through we. And it can be so overwhelming. But what I did was I made it an analogy in the book of a theater making your body like a cellular movie theater. And there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to quote, kill fat or burn fat, but that's not really how it works. Actually. Your fat cells are storage containers, and what they're getting filled with the fat cells, basically, when you're. When you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells, all right. You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel.

Right.

All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats, the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell, or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of his hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. Right? Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater. All right. And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing, you know, namely your. Your. Your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin, and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. All right. Insulin is so man. When you think of insulin, what do you think of, though?

Eating sugar? Yeah, that's right, because insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar.

Right?

Yeah. And most folks think of diabetes, too. It's like, tied into that lexicon. But insulin is so important for our survival. It's just. It's a super amazing.

We need it.

Yes, you absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin. Like, you can die. Your cells won't get energy. So now, here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy and to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a Problem.

It's storing too much fat.

Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. All right. And then you have something called this kind of instant cell fat cell creation that can take place with the liver. It'll just start making its own fat as well. So. But we'll circle back to that a little bit.

Yes.

But here's the thing. So you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy. But glucagon cannot do its job when. Unless his brother sits his ass down somewhere and stops. Yes.

So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job?

That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want to stop. We just want to be efficient.

Efficient.

And it's. Now, here's another thing. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin. Carbohydrates in general, pastas.

Right.

Yeah. But protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree, for sure. And even fat, in a kind of backdoor way, does drive insulin function, too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing. But we do know that in our culture, on average, folks are eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year. So that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this overactivity of insulin to the point that we have insulin resistance.

100 years ago, we weren't eating as much sugar, I'm assuming, in processed foods.

It's not even close. It's not even close.

But what is with the life expectancy increases every year? It seems like we're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

That's the misnomer, though. We're not necessarily living longer. We're dying longer.

We're getting sick and being able to stay alive.

Yes. Very different. And this is the first generation. We are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us. Right. This is the first time we're seeing this downtick when we're supposed to be seeing folks. Well, basically, the life expectancy has gone down for the first time, really, in, like, recent history. Yeah, yeah.

So we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or what do you mean?

So we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old. Now it's 79.

Really.

You know, so it's just going a Life expectancy has gone down for the first time.

Previous generation.

Gotcha. It's interesting.

I was asking Dr. David Sinclair about this.

I love him.

He was like, the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable. He's like, I've seen that in too many people. The goal is to live as long as you can. Healthy, flexible, abundant, you know, not with chronic pain, and then die quickly.

Right.

It's to get sick and then die within a week, not get sick and die within 20 years of misery. He's like, that's not a great life.

Yeah, we don't want. Just want lifespan, we want health span. And it all really boils down. And this is the most beautiful part about this and what I'm really hoping to impress upon culture, because when we tend to think of food, we tend to think of it in relationship. In our culture, we think. Think of diet in relationship to weight. It's just like what's connected when in reality, food is one of the greatest, if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times. And this is what I really want to get across is, of course, I'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food, but also how does food affect your cognitive performance? And it's shocking when you find this data out how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people. Break that down as well.

What are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion? And what are those foods, before we.

Get to that, the fat storage. There was one more.

Were you talking about brown fat?

Yeah, brown fat.

And there was another fat.

Yeah, but there's one other fat. And so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria. Right. So these energy power plants, that's why it's brown. Babies have a lot of brown fat. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia, you know, just to basically keep thermogenesis going. As you become an adult, you have a lot less. Brown adipose tissue is mostly located like around your collarbones, your shoulder blades, down your spine. And brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated. If you have enough brown adipose tissue, which you can create more and the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition.

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So this type of fat is burning fat for you if you know what brown fat. Yeah. All right, so that's a. We got three storage fats and then we've got two other types of fat.

And that's body fat that burns fat.

Yes. And so this other one, and this is one a lot of folks might know, might not know a lot about yet, is beige fat.

This is the fifth type of fat.

Yeah. So this is beige fat, beige fat. And so beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat. All right. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming, turning into a fat storing type of fat or fat burning type of fat and the browning of this fat. One of the things, and I'll just throw this out there for folks since you asked about a specific food when we go through so many different. But I'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy. A little controversial is coffee. Coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And in fact, one of the studies that I cited in Eat Smarter found they actually used FMRI and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up, signaling increased thermogenesis. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 to 11% increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now there's a U shaped curve of benefits. Right. Some is good. Once we get to a Certain place we can mess ourselves up. And also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with? Right. Is it just. Is it coffee? Are you consuming coffee with donuts and crap and like, you know, these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals that is not good. And even the coffee itself, are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut? So there's a big conversation there and we dive into all these pieces to see, like, there's so many wonderful things that we have access to, but in our culture, we've been a little bit led astray. And it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad. It's been utilized for by humans for centuries, but it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make.

All the difference and the quantity, probably. And.

Yeah, yeah. And so just going back to your original question, when we're targeting that, you know, the belly fat specifically, and this is something that is not talked about enough, it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning.

Right.

And this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this, but when I was in my nutritional science class in college, the very. Like the king, the monarch, the warden of diet is calories. And I say warden intentionally because it's a little. It gets into this kind of prisoner mentality.

Yeah.

And diets are really revolving around this. And I. I'm always asking this question, and I'm so grateful that I've kind of hardwired myself to do this. Where did it come from? Where the hell did this idea start? And so I went back and examined the entire history of calories. And it actually, for me, it's just like when we find like Egyptian pyramids, like they didn't have any about calories. Nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it, even when it was discovered. And it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition. It was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering. Yeah. And this was in 1800s. And then it made its transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named Wilbur Atwater. But he's just Kind of a little side note as well. And I basically, I go back and talk about all the people involved. But this is what changed America. This is what changed the world, really. Was a physician. She's a pioneer, for sure. Her name was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, and she's the one who popularized the term calorie. And she sold. This was back in the early 1900s, she created a nutrition book, a diet book, and they sold 2 million copies back then, which is basically everybody and their mother has.

Right, right.

All right.

Now, what's it called?

This was Diet and Health and the Key to Calories, something like that. The key to calories. But I went back and read these old fangled writings. There's like a lot of pieces of it online. And this began the indoctrination of our culture and starting to look at food in terms of numbers. It's no longer this dynamic, multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems. Now it's numbers. And she specifically said, we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread. You won't say one slice of bread. You'll say 100 calories of bread. You'll no longer say a slice of pie. You say 350 calories of pieces. And so we stopped looking at food as food. We started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers. And she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake. And now let me also make this clear. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters battled with her weight for her lifetime. All right? And it's that term of like, teach what you want to learn kind of thing. Now, this is also crucial. And some people, this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit. This was also the beginning of this indoctrination, associating food with character, associating food with morality. And so she basically asserted that it's a character defect. If you're not able to manage your weight, there's something wrong with you. And started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food. And this was also during the time of, like, World War I. So food rationing was a big thing. And she said one of her quotes I put in the book, and I'm paraphrasing, that for every pang of hunger you feel, you should have a double joy, knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or, you know, with soldiers and what. So she's basically saying this was also A massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss. If you're hungry, you're doing it right. And this started to really change the psychology of dieting. Right? And so calories began to become the king and the big focus. Now I want to say this calories matter for sure. It's a measurement of energy in food. Just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same.

The same distance.

However, calories are different. Completely ignore. When you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function. It's going to be different every day, the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body.

Because our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing, our timelines are changing. What we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50.

Exactly. Let alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And it's. I'm sick of it, man.

Wow.

Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them and they're not getting these very fundamental principles. And so. So folks can start to free themselves of this caloric prison. I can share. There's five really powerful metrics that are not examined. There's really five major things that control what calories do in your body.

What's one of those?

So if we think about. I keep mentioning hormones, but just to give a good analogy of what hormones are, hormones are really biochemical messengers that help your cells, the cellular community that you have, this amazing cellular community to communicate with each other. It's like metabolic DMs, right? It's like text messages, emails.

How many hormones do we have?

There's about 50.

50 different hormones.

About 50.

Our hormones. What is a hormone? Is it a.

A cell? Is an organ?

Is it a connecting point? What is it?

So hormone, The. The building. The most important fundamental building block of our hormones are proteins. All right? So I want to. I want to really reiterate this, how important protein is, because it's needed to build your freaking hormones, right?

Where are hormones stored?

All throughout your body. You know, even like that fat organ that we talked about is making its own hormones. But there are hormones that are being produced and secreted by your pituitary gland. Your hypothalamus is like a master Regulator of your hormonal system, your endocrine system. It's in your brain. And so one of the things we talk about in the book is this growing epidemic of neuroinflammation that is messing up people's hypothalamic function. That's screwing up what's happening downstream. Like your thyroid is on that HPA axis.

So thyroid here or something in your throat.

In your throat. And so that's largely considered like the metabolic regulator, like your master gland associated with fat loss or fat storage. And it definitely plays a role. So these are all pieces, and it's in this web now, what's actually determining what these calories are doing. And so I mentioned. I gave a little preface of what our hormones are. So when we're talking about calories, these five things. And I'll give an analogy, I'll give like an acronym, the dm, all right? We're going to use that as our letters. So it goes down in the dm, you know what I'm talking about? So the first thing that's controlling what calories are doing, the T stands for the type of food itself, determines what the calories are doing your body. And this is highlighted in this crazy study, and this was published in Food and Nutrition Research. Listen to this. This is just freaking crazy. They went to find out what would happen with a meal of the same calories that's either a meal of whole foods or processed food. Same amount of calories.

So a bowl of cereal and some fruits and vegetables.

So what they did was they had sandwiches. And so one set of folks got the sandwich that was considered whole food. Sandwich was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. The other folks received the processed food sandwich, which was white bread and cheese product, right?

Oh, no.

And that's Kraft. Kraft slices.

That American cheese.

So good they can't call it cheese. And so here's what happened after. And I love this study because they tracked the pathway of calorie burn, their metabolic rate, and what happened when they ate these two respective sandwiches. After they compiled the data, the folks, even though the calories were the same, the folks who consumed the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after eating that damn sandwich. 50% reduction.

Why is that?

Because the body. So this gets into some of the other things we'll talk about, but that the processed nature of those foods created some metabolic dysfunction and some confusion for your endocrine system.

Oh, man.

And your nervous system and all these, the cellular community that. That communication. So now the body is less apt to let go of that energy. It's confused. It's trying to hang on to it. All right, now, what are most folks eating?

Processed foods.

Processed foods. All right, so it's literally changing their way, Changing the way their body even associates with calories. And they're trying to count these damn points and not understanding that the very nature of how their body's operating is skewed. So that's just the T, that's the type of food. Right. So the H is how the food is prepared has a massive impact on what the calories do in your body.

So you mean whether it's cooked, whether it's raw, whether it's stir fried. I don't know all of that, really.

Exactly, yes. So to give a good example, if you think about spinach, right, Spinach, a lot of folks, of course, consider it's a healthy food. Popeye was like knocking it down in a can. I don't know if. Have you ever had spinach out of a can? It must have been tough times. But. So spinach is a good. This is a good one because these green leafy vegetables, there's nutrition that's locked in this inside the cell wall. And you have to basically crack open the cell wall to extract the calories and some of the nutrients. And as the. As the spinach gets older, that's why we have this baby spinach. And as the spinach gets more mature, the cell walls become harder to break into. All right, so just right off the bat, baby spinach versus the same quantity of mature spinach, you're going to get more calories out of the baby spinach.

Is that better for you or.

This is not about better or worse right now. This is just like understanding there's some other stuff happening.

Interesting.

Okay, now, but here's another thing. Cooking the spinach, too, breaks down the cell wall. So regardless if it's a baby spinach, cooked spinach, I mean, a mature spinach, and when this happens, it also, the density of the spinach, like you've seen.

It, you can shrinks whole bag, comes.

This little teeny baby teaspoon. Right? And so this is one of the things, and I really start the book talking about this, that most experts will agree that it was our ability to cook that really created like a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain, because we're now able to extract more nutrients and calories from our food, even though this term wasn't invented yet. Not to say that it's good or bad or that raw food isn't good. It's just understanding how the food is prepared changes what calories do in your body.

Interesting. So if you're cooking spinach, it has less calories in it.

If you're cooking spinach, calories become more available.

So what does that mean when you consume it? Yeah, your body's consuming more calories, able.

To extract more of the calories when it's cooked.

So if it's raw, it's got less calories, A little bit less.

Less that you can extract from it. In general, these are. So there's minutiae. These are small things, but they matter. So this gets into the conversation of what food is. And so even when we talk about calories, the way that this was initially kind of brought to the forefront, they use something called a bomb colorimeter.

All right?

A bomb colorometer. And what they do is they took the food and they put into a box, and they put that box into another box that's filled with water, and then they would burn the food with electrical energy to find out all of the available calories that were in this food that was used to heat the water up. And so once they did this, they were like, okay, there's 200 calories in this particular food product. The problem is you might. You might be the bomb Louis, but you're not a bomb colorometer. All right? Your body is very different. There are indigestible components of that food, for example, whereas the bomb colorimeters is basically saying all the calories that are here when you don't absorb all the calories in the food that you eat. Okay, so this creates this schism. All right? So those indigestible components could be. They're going to be more in raw spinach. This you're not going to digest as much. Yeah, I hope that makes sense.

Yeah.

So you're not going to digest as much, and you're not going to pull as many calories in. However, there's bioavailable micronutrients that you're going to get. It's not that raw spinach versus cooked spinach is good or bad. It's just there's different ways that it impacts your body. So that's how the food is prepared.

Types of food, how it's prepared.

Right. So the dm, it goes down in the dm. All right? The next one is the E, and the E stands for energy exchange. Now, this one here, this is something folks might have learned about a little bit in school. I know I did in my university Class, However, I don't think we really get this. It costs energy, it costs calories to digest calories. Your body uses calories to digest calories.

To burn or digest the calories to.

Produce the chew, the saliva to chew.

To swallow through the intestinal wall, like everything, right?

To produce stomach acid, to move it, to take the food from your gastrointestinal tract through your small intestine and move it through into your bloodstream and move those cells, those, those nutrients to your, to your brain, to your eyeballs, to your toes.

How much does, how much do we burn from one meal? From eating, chewing, to eliminating? How long does that take typically? Is that a 12 or 24 hour window from one meal?

That's such a very diverse question. Because it depends on the type of food. It depends on. Matter of fact, we'll get to that in a moment. I'll get to that. So energy exchange. Energy exchange. Now this energy exchange, how many calories or how much the caloric expense is in digesting food depends on the type of food too. The macronutrients specifically is what people know about. But it's a little bit more diverse.

Processed food, it's going to be harder to digest. It's going to be more work or less work.

It depends on the type of food.

Got it.

But let's. We'll stick with the overarching because we could do the whole show just on that one topic. But just on the macronutrient side, proteins are well noted to be more calorically expensive to digest. It costs you about 20 to 30% of the protein that you eat is the calories in there are used to digest the protein. So we'll just say if you consume 100 grams of protein, 20 to 30. I'm sorry, 100 calories of protein, 20 to 30 calories are used to digest that.

Wow, that's pretty good.

So you get a net profit of calories of 70. All right.

So you can have more calories and realize it's going to be less that you're actually.

Yeah, with protein. With protein. With carbohydrates, it's going to cost you. It's about 10 to 15% of that energy that you take in caloric energy is used to digest it. For fats is about zero to somewhere in the ballpark, about 5% to digest it.

So more protein equals more burning calories.

It's called the thermic effect of food. All right. And protein is largely kept out of the conversation today. It's. People are battling about carbs and fats.

Right.

These are the big diet frameworks. And protein is like. Rodney Dangerfield is like, you know, I get no respect. You know what I mean? It's just like. So it was so fascinating because I think, too, in our culture, we believe that most Americans are just eating a ton of protein when the data actually shows something very different. There are populations that are eating a very high amount of protein, but the quality of their protein, too, is a problem. But there's a large portion of our society that's not eating enough protein. They don't. Not even near.

What are they stealing sugar and carbs?

Yeah. Because we've replaced so many things in food with more. With more sugar, you know, so the thermic effect of food, this is not taken into consideration. This does not show up on your product label. And just to give people a food tip here, one of them is almonds. Almonds is really great example. And there was actually a study that was done, and they was looking at basically saying there's a discrepancy in the Atwater system of caloric. So what you see on the back of a product label, companies are not using a bomb calorimeter anymore to measure calories in a food. They're just doing some math.

Right.

All right. They're just like, okay, there's four. Four calories per gram of protein. Right. And they're just doing some math. Right? So that's the Atwater system. But what they found was that even though it might be 170 calories of almonds you're consuming, that's on the product label, in actuality, you only get a net caloric intake of 129 of those calories.

All right, Say it one more time.

170 calories you're consuming on the almonds.

Yeah.

You're only netting. You're actually only getting 129 because you're burning. Yeah. There's energy being used as a thermic effect of food. Right. So almonds are great.

Now, is that true for everyone? Is that based on your hormones and your metabolic rate that gets to the next one?

All right, so the T H E. So it's going down in the dm. All right, the dm. So the D is digestive efficiency. All right? Digestive efficiency. And this leans into. Into the conversation of your unique metabolic finger.

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All right. Every single human being is incredibly unique in what their metabolism and their digestion is doing. There's never been a digestion like you before in human history. There will never be after. And you are not even the same today as you'll be tomorrow. It is always fluid, changing. And the problem is we think that we are, we put ourselves in this box. Even a diet, a diet might work for us for a year and then all of a sudden we're doing the same things and it stops working and we blame us. It's like, no, I just need to paleo harder. I need to keto harder. I need to vegan harder.

Count calories more.

Yeah, and these are great frameworks, but we don't want to. We don't want them to imprison us because we change. Our bodies are continuously changing and evolving. Not to say that any of those aren't wonderful. And Eat Smart is really a unifier of whatever diet framework you want to go with, I support that. But there are principles that apply for success in all of them. So digestive efficiency means your ability to produce stomach acid is one factor of that. Your enzyme production. Like folks that produce lactase, the enzyme that can break down lactose, right? Milk sugar. About 75% of population don't produce adequate amounts if any of lactase enzymes. So they're not digesting right? And so they're not extracting as many calories from it. Not that this is a good thing, though, because your bacteria in your body are going to go crazy if you're not digesting it properly. Thus, you know, running off to the bathroom, you know, because you don't know if you have to fart or whatever, you know what I mean? And you're not fun to be around if you're lactose intolerant, like you have a, you know, extreme case of that and you're like down in some, you know, some, some milk you're on the gallon day diet. Right. So these are all factors that influence your digestive efficiency. And also for you, for example, your gastrointestinal tract is probably longer than the average person. Right.

So there's bigger and taller. Yeah.

And there's more time for it to kind of stay in your body. That, that super highway is just longer because it has to try to fuel this bigger vessel.

How long is our intestinal tract?

Depends on the person. How long is several feet? I'll just put it like that. Yeah, it's. It depends on the person and it's. But it's also. We tend to think it's very uniform. We think these things are uniform across the board. Right. Like this 5 foot 2 girl is supposed to be doing the same protocol as a six foot four, Lewis Howes. Right. You should drink the same amount of water. Eight glasses of eight ounces a day. No, we have. Everything is unique. We got to get back to these principles. So digestive efficiency. That's the E. The D. The D goes down in the dm. So I'm sorry, that's the D. Yeah, that's the D. That's the D. The M. All right. Goes down to the DMs. This one right here. Oh, this is really. This one, man. This is like the final frontier when we're talking about nutrition and health and where we're at with science right now. And the M is your microbiome makeup. The makeup of your microbiome has a massive impact on your body's association with calories. This is part of the lexicon. Now, I know just about everybody listening has probably heard of the microbiome, right? This incredible ecology, this, this dynamic plethora of, of microbes that inhabit our bodies, that are in and on our bodies even right now. Dude, you got like 400 trillion viruses.

Yeah, I know.

The viruses are on people's mind.

Bugs.

Right.

All over the body. Over crazy.

400 trillion. And many of them are opportunistic. Right? But that means that when you're compromised, they can take control. But the thing is, why are they around? They all play a role. It's not good or bad. It's about us being in good state of health because viruses have actually helped us to evolve as humans. As a matter of fact, when the human genome was decoded, they found that humans. The human gene itself is 8% virus.

Right? It's like alien, right?

It's like, dude, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy. And we're at war with these Things, we're at war with microbes. We want to kill viruses, we want to kill bacteria. Not to say that novel things or things that the body doesn't have an innate immunity towards, we shouldn't be careful about. But we also have an adaptive immune system that this is how we got here. And the greatest science that we have right now shows that our immune system itself was started by viruses that were defending itself against other viruses. That's how we became the kind of dynamic, adaptive immune system that we have today. And so this is the B cells, T cells, you know, these interferons, natural killer cells, all these things. So, but going back to the microbiome and the association with calories, this is going to freak you out. Listen to this. So to start with, this was published in the journal Cell. They found that there's specific bacteria in mice that actually block their intestines from absorbing as many calories. So the bacteria in their gut blocked the absorption of calories. Now, some folks are like, well, we're not mice. I get that. Now we have human studies, and now we know that folks that start to lean into being overweight and obese, there's a very distinct shift in the microbiome cascade. We can literally just look at somebody's microbiome cascade, not even know what they look like, what their body composition is, and know that they're overweight based on their bacteria.

All right?

And so what they did was they took these human, quote, fat bacteria and implanted them into lean mice. And what happened was the mice who had the fat bacteria put into their bodies began to gain weight. They became insulin resistant and gained body fat rapidly versus taking human samples from healthy test subject, lean test subjects, and putting them into mice. And they begin. They stayed lean. All right, well, I'm getting excited. This is the one. This is, this, this study right here is the freakiest one to me. They took identical twins.

All right, Humans.

Humans, yeah. They took identical twins and they looked at their microbiome cascade and they found that the, again, these are identical twins. Same caloric intake.

All right?

The twin who had a higher ratio of bacteria associated with obesity, gained more weight, had a tendency towards gaining more weight and body fat, even though they're eating the same diet and they're identical freaking people. They're identical twins. The calories became such a lower tier thing. They're eating the same amount, yet one's gaining fat and one isn't. So this conversation is so much bigger than just managing calories and telling your patients that they need to Be in a caloric deficit. We're way past that right now. These things matter. They absolutely matter. But there's so much more to the picture, and so many people are suffering because they keep doing calorie restricting and trying all these different diets and not understanding we need to get your microbiome healthy.

How do we get the microbiome healthy?

Ah.

So that's the solution. Yeah, it's focusing on the microbiome, not the calorie deficit.

Yeah, this is a big part of the book too. You know, we focus on these things. We can get into that. So one of the most important things that the research is showing is that one of the most remarkable things in association with fat loss and weight loss is associated with having a higher diversity of microbes in your gut, specifically bacteria. The higher the diversity, the lower your body weight and body fat percentage. The correlation. The problem is here in the Western world, our diversity of our microbes is just like we've got a lot of endangered species and a lot of things are extinct versus folks who are in more of a kind of an indigenous culture.

A plethora of fruits and vegetables and uniqueness. Right.

Somewhere around four times as many different microbes. Right. So take yours, multiply it times four. The different. The different species of microbes. All right, so in the Western world, our diversity is going down. And this is also associated with some of the problems we're seeing that we don't. We think it's just associated to people are they don't have willpower, end of story. But here in the United States, and I want people to really get this, we have an epidemic. And nobody's talking about this, and nobody's talking about this right now. In association to the problems we're seeing, we have an epidemic of obesity. Over 200 million people here in this country right now are overweight or obese. All right, these numbers.

What's the definition of obesity?

Obesity.

How much? This is body fat.

You know, unfortunately, this is tied to some questionable metrics with like, with bmi, you know, because somebody can be like, have a lot of muscle on their frame. But we're not talking about that, all right? We're talking about. We know what's happening here in the United States. And a recent study came out, it's meta analysis determined that about only 12% of United States citizens are metabolically healthy. All right, so you got over 200 million people who are overweight or obese.

How much body fat is overweight on a person? Or how much body fat percentage would that be.

It depends.

20, 30, what's the.

I mean, even these numbers, man, can be a little bit, you know, for just, for example, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthier because your body fat percentage is low.

Right.

Like I had a 4%, 4.6% body fat at one point. I was not healthy. Right, right. But just in general, you know, guys can be somewhere in the ballpark of 12%, 15%. And that's still. But then it's just like the vanity aspect. Like I can't see my. I can't see my lines.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm right now, I'm like 16%.

Yeah.

And I just checked.

But you're a healthy guy. Like, this is what I'm saying. Like when I say that it depends on you. These numbers, we have a big problem with these numbers. But I'm using the numbers as a leverage as far as with statistics to try to like get our eyes open. But there's so much variance within that because again, like some people would sell their, like they name their first born child Rumpelstiltskin, like to have your body, you know what I mean? So, yeah, we got to keep this stuff in context now.

Okay.

200 million people in the United States are obese. Obese or overweight.

Yeah.

On top of that, over 130 million people in the United States have type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes.

130.

Yes.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

It is crazy. It's crazy. So diabetes or prediabetes, and on top of that, about 60% of the United States population has some degree of heart disease. Right. Now.

What does heart disease consist of? What are the types of heart disease in that category?

So this is such a diverse topic too, because even our definition of these things is a little skewed, you know, hard hardening of the arteries, for example. Like, how does all this stuff work? But I want to point back to a really important point because I just, I don't want this to go left unsaid. Some of my best friends are like the top cardiovascular surgeon in the world or the top gastroenterologist in the United States. All right, These are my friends, colleagues, and they will tell you. So top gastroenterologist. Just talked with him recently. He was in school for like what, 15 years? 15 years. And he shared with me, he got. And he, he specializes in the treatment of, of systems associated with digesting your food. The system, that's all he does. Organs. But guess how much education he got on food. One month, two weeks. Yeah. Like you even a month versus 15 years of education, learning about food for two weeks. You treat organs that deal with food. We have a big problem. So in the cardiovascular domain, same thing. Elective. Right. And your heart is made of the food that you eat. Your arteries are made of the food that you eat. Your blood is made of the food that you eat. How do we not have an education on these things? You know, like our attention is so the system itself. These are incredibly smart people. These are some of the best and brightest. But if you take a really smart person and you miseducate them or you teach them the wrong thing, they become world class at doing the wrong thing. And we keep trying to treat symptoms. We're treating the symptoms of not knowing how food creates all these things. So it is that deep. This is how powerful food is. You know, it becomes everything about you. The things you see in the mirror, how you feel. It's all based on food, you know, it's so powerful.

So what if talking about how to optimize the microbiome. Yeah. And I'm hearing you say it's the diversity of the whole foods that we should be eating. And in America specifically, we have very limited diversity of these whole foods, these vegetables, these fruits, these healthy fats and meats and nuts. I'm assuming, Is that what it is?

Yes.

Having a diversity. And the more diverse we can have, the better our microbiome makeup will become.

Yep. And in the book, I cite a brand new study that found that increasing your diversity in your fruits and vegetables inherently increases the diversity of your microbes. So this is a very simple thing we can do. Even if we're eating healthy, we tend to get caught in our little like food. Meal prep gone awry. You know what I mean? Like chicken, rice.

Yeah, same thing.

Chicken, rice, broccoli, you know, But I'm eating healthier compared to the. But what are you doing for your microbes? They need a diversity. And really the heart of the matter is I've been talking about probiotics for 15 years.

Taking probiotics.

Yeah, not taking, but just the science of probiotics. And of course that's one input. But you could take all the probiotics you want. They're not going to colonize if they don't have the food that they want. It's kind of like going to a party and you're hungry and they don't have snacks that you want. You're going to have to leave there soon. Hit Del Taco.

The taco Bell life, baby. I've been at Taco Bell Probably 10 years.

Dude. I would get the 10 pack. Oh, man.

Back in St. Louis.

Yes.

Taco Bell.

We'd come a long way.

Steak and shake. Oh, man.

That's if you want to get fancy, you know. So here's the thing, and it's. It's so wonderful because, you know, when we get into these principles and how all of this stuff kind of fits together, this is a simple input is increasing the diversity of the fruits and vegetables. Helps to give. Helps to create the preferred food choice or the prebiotics. So there's probiotics. Prebiotics. Prebiotics are the food that the microbes want in order for them to stick around. And so we're losing all of these species because they don't have their preferred food in our system anymore. All right? And then we have postbiotics. We have pre, pro and post. The postbiotics are basically the vitamins, minerals, scaphas, these short chain fatty acids, all the nutrients your bacteria create in you. For you, it's a symbiotic relationship, and that's really the front line right now. It's the, you know, the. Like I said, the final frontier that we're studying.

Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Obviously, this would never happen, but I've asked this to different nutritionists and doctors and scientists who've come on hypothetically, you're only able to eat five foods for the rest of your life. Just say hypothetical, you're on an island. There's only five food groups there. Or you're only able to choose five every day for the rest of your life. If you had to choose, what would those five foods be to try to optimize your hormones, your mitochondria, your microbiome, everything. To optimize, obviously, would be very limited, but if you could only choose five, and you get to choose five vitamins and supplements if you wanted to. So five foods, five vitamins. Obviously, it's hypothetical, but what would you say, Louis?

I don't know if anybody's ever done this on your show before, but I'm gonna have to plead the fifth. I can't answer that question. It goes against everything, and there are you know, even that. If I had to choose, like, my five favorite or whatever, you know, I could do that. But it's. It's really getting away from the. The urgency of us increasing our diversity of food. It's. It's an urgent situation.

Right.

Really.

And on top of that, I got to share this, too. We go to the grocery store, it looks like there's all this different stuff to choose from. But the majority of foods that the average American eats are from the same 12 foods just packaged up differently. Like most of those, like wheat, corn, soy, you know, sugar, oranges. Made the top of the list too, largely orange juice, you know, but we're just eating the same stuff packaged up over and over, wondering why our gastrointestinal tract and our microbiome, so many species are becoming extinct. We eat the same stuff.

So yeah, it's becoming extinct because we're not eating more. Diversity.

Yes, diversity.

So why grow it, why plant it, why, you know, develop it if we're not eating it? Essentially, Right.

It's, it's the way that this, this gets into the most important part of the book for me, which is the systems behind why we're eating the way that we're eating and how do we fix those systems? You know, our governments, unfortunately, a lot of our food policies are controlled by lobbyists who, you know, work for these major food companies and our government. And I shared one of the studies in the book, which is this should be really eye opening for folks, provide government subsidies for processed food creation, you know, like billions, hundreds of billions of dollars. And there was, and the thing is, just like, okay, does that actually correlate with worse health? And there was actually a study done looking at the people who consumed the highest amount of these government subsidized foods had about a 40% greater incidence of being obese. So there's a direct link between what's being provided to our citizens. And it started off with good intentions providing government subsidies to farmers, but now it's these big agricultural businesses that are growing the same genetically altered food crops that become the very basis of the.

Human foundation of our food.

Yeah.

And the fruits and vegetables aren't getting anything. And so this also leads to the reason it's so damn cheap for us to go to Taco Bell and get a whole Damn taco for 99 cents. Right. Not just one, but you get two for 99 cents. Right. Two for 99 cent tacos. And an avocado costs four bucks or three dollars and it falls off a damn tree.

Right.

How is that possible? And it gets into how the money is managed and where money is being funneled and is being funneled into the processed food system.

So what would you say on a weekly basis are the types of foods you're eating in your house? What do you eat then? What's the diversity of foods? If you're not eating five if you're eating 50. What are those foods? Those main foods for you?

Okay, so keyword here. Diversity. Okay, Diversity. And I hesitant to say because I don't want people to base on what I'm doing because they need to do what's best for them. And what we do is we go through all of the stuff that has some clinical efficacy, like actual peer reviewed evidence to support how this food is effective in blank things. So whether it's helping the diversity of your gut, whether it's helping mental performance. Yeah, that and also since we're on the subject of metabolism still, I'll give you one of my favorite food groups and what I do on a regular basis. And this is highlighted in an incredible peer reviewed study that found that the consumption of green leafy vegetables. Everybody hears it. Eat your veggies, eat your veggies. Why? Now we know why. So what they found was that the consumption of non starchy green leafy vegetables led to a direct increase in the production of our body's major satiety hormones like GLP1 leptin. Right. So the things that control our satiety, because that's one of the issues with any diet framework is you need to, you need to make sure that you're avoiding the thing like I call these, these kind of three amigos of body fat growth.

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And one of them is hunger. And managing your hunger hormones and neurotransmitters related to that. That's one of the things. So green leafy vegetables. And another study found that to help with your metabolism. Yeah. So they found that for every serving of vegetables that you have in a day correlated with a one third reduction in waist circumference.

What's that mean?

So every serving of vegetable led to about a third less fat being on your waist.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah, really Fascinating. And then if we want to make the jump to the cognitive side, what.

Would be the top Veggies?

Leafy.

Leafy greens.

So many diversity, man. Spinach, kale, bok choy.

All of it. Just get all of it.

All of it diverse.

Now, is it cooked raw on a salad?

What's both really diverse?

Doesn't matter.

It also keeps things fresh and fun. And also, let me be clear about this too, when I'm talking about green leafy vegetables. You know this, man. Well, it might. You might not have. You might not remember. I didn't eat a salad until I was 25.

Yeah. Took me till about 25. Maybe. Maybe I was 30 when I got sweet greens. It was 30 in New York City.

Yeah. The greatness bowl.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. But I'm. I think part of why I'm so good at this is that I was really, really messed up, you know, And I just grew up in a culture where, you know, this just wasn't a part of my reality. There's no way that I would eat a salad.

Right.

And so please understand, a big part of that is association and culture and environment. We talk about. In the book that. In the book. But also, if food tastes good, it makes it a whole lot easier. What if we make those vegetables take taste? Phenomenal. Right. And that's the thing that's missing oftentimes. And we also have this thing in our minds that if it tastes good, it's not healthy. There's like this little thing, like, this can't be good for me, but it's actually. Why do you think food tastes good? It tastes good for you to eat it. It encourages. We're hardwired to seek tasty things, but food manufacturers have leveraged that desire to eat tasty things to our detriment. And so I talk about that food science and the science of flavor, because even flavors in foods are indicators of nutritional content. If we were living in a natural way. So we develop these flavor preferences based on we might be deficient in selenium and omega 3s. So we have these flavor associations we know, like, okay, I need to go and Eat blank food. You know, I need to go and catch some fish because my body is wanting this thing. Now we just go to 7 11.

Right?

You know what I mean? Like, but we can take back control of these systems and recalibrate them. And I was going to share earlier, one of the things that I wanted to do was stack conditions. So when I give you this food, it's not just one thing it's good for. There's another side with the cognitive function side. And this was conducted by researchers at Rush University in Chicago. And what they did was they looked at folks who were beginning into their senior years and actually looked at their brains and looked at their diets. And they found that folks who ate two or more servings of green leafy vegetables each day had brains that were about 11 years younger on average.

Shut up.

Yes.

This is why I was so stupid in school. I said sugar all day. I never ate any vegetables.

Yeah, man, me too. Me too, man. I would get that personal pizza.

Oh man.

And get the, to get the pretzel with cheese. I dip the pretzel into the cheese and then dip the pizza into the cheese.

That sounds like my life.

So I'm over there, game day, you know, like the muscle dinner. When the offense is in, I'm doing my thing, defense, I'm, I'm yawning, I'm tired. Like I was so tired.

Tired all the time. Yeah. Working out, practice. Always yawning.

Yeah.

Never ate anything healthy.

Yeah.

Did I think I told you this? When I went to Principia at the boarding school, there was a milk dispenser in our Dorm. I was 13 years old. A five gallon milk dispenser.

What? A milk dispenser.

Milk dispenser. Not 2% whole milk.

That whole milk.

This is the cafeteria milk dispenser. You know what I'm talking about? That you like.

Oh yeah. For the cereal, they put the big.

Bag in there, like big five gallon bag that you put in there. Cut it open and then you open it up. I got them to move it into my room. And I swear to you, I swear to you, I would go through five gallons every week.

No, this is crazy.

Drink it throughout the morning, drink it at night when I'm studying. Drinking it all day. Because this is how I was conditioned as a kid. My dad would give me a glass of milk every night. It was just like, drink more milk commercials, all this stuff. I had a five gallon dispenser for a year in my dorm, just drinking it all day. And I was like, man, why am I always tired? I can only imagine the, the quality of athlete I could have been had I learned nutrition when I was a teenager because I didn't eat anything.

Quality.

Yeah, never. Crazy man, like that's literally blowing my mind. You got them to move it into your room. My room. You're free.

Right next to my bed. Just drinking it all day.

Wow, dude, that's crazy. And like you said, what could have been.

What could have been.

Same thing for me, you know, in. I ran a 4540 when I was.

15, you know, imagine eating healthy, dude.

But it was that same six feet.

Tall, if you ate healthy.

This in the same season. In the same season. I was doing track practice, 200 meter time trial. And as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, you know the story. My hip broke. My bones were so brittle. I was, dude, I was five, nine in eighth grade. Like I was towering, you know, you're in the back row and then everything just start to break down, you know, my bones. And it wasn't until I was 20 when I got diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease. So my spine was just deteriorating and nobody stopped to ask like how could this happen to a 20 year old kid? Or a 15 year old kid is breaking his hip at track practice. And from there my dreams of college football, everything start to become vanquished. I've got game films where I break away like 39 sweep. I'm gone. I'm five yards from the end zone, nobody's behind me. And then I start to fall, like breaking down. No way. Tearing muscles. Yeah, I've got on game films and I'm like limping into the end zone and falling down. It was a nightmare, man. And I couldn't stay on the field anymore because my body was just breaking down. And what I was exposed to is what's called standard of care. Which standard of care means they gave me some NSAIDs, gave me some crutches, like, you'll heal up. I did, but nobody asked how is his bones breaking from running? And when this diagnosis happened, man, it was earth shattering because I was always like this fit guy, like capable and like now I can't even really walk right because of this pain from my spine that's going into my leg. And my physician at the time, he put the MRI up and I was just like, okay, like how do we fix this? You know, just working with the trainers and like, okay, what do we do? You know. And he's Just like pump, basically like pump your brakes. Like slow down, son. This is, this is bad, you know, this is incurable. And he told me that I had the spine of an 80 year old man.

Wow.

When I was 20. And not a healthy 80 year old either. You know, like shout out to Mark Sisson, you know, wow. But is he 80? He's like, he's 70. I think he's 70 or 72 now.

No, no, no, he's 6. Could have been.

No, no, I think he's in his 70s.

I think he's late 50s.

And he's definitely not 60s. He's definitely at least in his 60s. I think he's 70.

I don't think he's 70. That's amazing. If he looks that great at 70.

Yeah. But this is what's also possible. Even wherever he is, he's a freak.

He's a six pack at 60 something or seven, whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah. And. But I was the opposite. I was what you would think about with the 80 year old person breaking down and, you know, a lot of chronic pain and, you know, he sent me on my way and that was that. You know, he gave me some medication, told prescribed bed rest. Now I want to encourage anybody, if you've ever, if you ever get a diagnosis with something life altering like this, do your best to get a second and or third opinion before taking any dramatic action. And I did. Unfortunately, it was the same thing. And it was until two. And by the way, for the next two years, every doctor that I saw told me bed rest. So I just kept doing nothing.

Sleeping. Yeah.

Just sitting around playing is the worst.

Thing you can do for yourself.

Not only, not only was my spine beginning to atrophy in my hips and my bones, but now everything else is muscles.

Everything your body, your organs are not producing. They're not.

Yeah, your body works on this use it or lose it basis. So I'm literally just decaying, you know.

You're dying at 22.

Yeah. Accelerating that process. And two years later, man, it was, it was a little over two years. It's tough to. Man, it's tough to talk about. Incredibly, I, I was in fear. I, I got into a place where I was scared to stand up because the pain, I would have to like walk very gingerly because I know like the sciatic nerve has to like hit and then I could walk normally like a normal gait. And so I just decided not to get up because I was scared to.

Wow.

And being that I'm eating the food that I was eating at the time, what I call the tough diet. Typical university food. I was made out of this. My body was made out of this. And I'm not moving now, so I gained so much weight.

Pretzels and cheese dip.

Yeah. I ate fast food every day. Every day. Not a day went by because it was cheap and tasty.

Tastes amazing.

Yeah. And so. But everything changed. And it was. I don't remember if it was that day or the day after, but I went to see the last physician because I had hope. And I had this chronic question going on in my mind all the time. Why me? Why won't somebody help me? Just like. But I didn't realize it. And our brains are really run on the questions that we ask. It's this. It's. It's an. It's a reflexive thing. It's called instinctive elaboration. Because our brains are like a servo mechanism is. Even right now, we're exposed to trillions, hundreds and hundreds of trillions of bits of data and information that our brain has to filter and only present to us consciously the thing that we hold most important. Right? Because even now, like, you'd be focused on your toes, you know, and probably thought about your toes a little bit, you know, for people that are listening. But were your toes not existing before? They're there. But it's not a top priority. And so that servo mechanism is guided by the questions you ask. And so if I'm asking all the time, why me? Why this happened to me? Why won't anybody help me? My brain is just looking for a reason to affirm why my life sucks. And after I got that last diagnosis, he again gave me a new prescription, told me bed rest two years later, and sent me on my way. And he meant well. He meant well. But I realized it was either that night or the next night that I'm by myself. They're not thinking about me, even though they mean well. They are not walking in my shoes and dealing with the suffering. And it was the first time that I asked a different question. I asked, what can I do to feel better? What can I do to get healthy? It was the first time I ever looked at, like, what can I actually do? Because I'd been like, why won't somebody else help me? And it changed everything, man. That was the first night I slept through the night in, like, two years without drugs. And I woke up with just a renewed sense of purpose because I had already. I went to school. I was in the auditorium. Nutrition class.

Yeah.

But I got out of it because I hated it. I hated science, ironically, which now you're.

Now you love it.

Science is my boo now. You know what I mean? But it's the way that I was taught. It didn't really have an association. It didn't have that connective tissue.

Wow.

And I began to dive back into my training because I always did good in school.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, straight A's. But I would get into trouble, you know, I would. I didn't enjoy the process of like learning science because it just, it didn't stick. And so asking a different question, I did the low hanging fruit first, which was exercise. Like, I just went and started like going on a, a cycle. You know, just got on a stationary bike at the gym, just started pedaling. It was hard. The next week I started doing a little walking and just built up from there. The first thing I did was I did slim fast first because that's the commercial. Yeah, right. I'm like, I got to lose weight. A shake for, for breakfast, shake for lunch, a sensible dinner.

Right.

But thank goodness I quickly transitioned out of that. And because of that question, somebody that I knew for two years, no, three years at that time, she was a, you know, somebody I'd, you know, kind of hung out with for a while. You know, just hung out anyway. She was a chiropractor.

Wow.

You know, she was older. She was like, you know, 10 years older. And she took me to Wild Oats. I'd known her this whole time. We never went to Wild Oats. Went to Wild Oats. I walk into this entirely different dimension. Like, I'm like, why is there grass sitting up there on the counter?

You know, people to buy this and eat it and.

But there was this nutrition prescription book. Is this massive, like, nutritional bible there. And I began to look at all this, like peer reviewed evidence on this nutrient working for this thing. And, and I was shocked that this stuff existed. I had no idea. And this goes to the conversation of exposure. You know, so many people were born into these conditions. When I was growing up, man, you know, we were on wic. We, you know, food, food stamp. Christmas would come around, you know, the 1st and 15th, and we even got food from, you know, shelters and, you know, food pantries. And we didn't know that there was a difference with food. You know, it's just stuff that you eat and I just want stuff that tastes good. That's the end of the story. I didn't know that it mattered. I thought that if you want to be healthy, you Exercise because I looked fit, you know, but it was. My body was made out of straight crap.

Yeah, yeah. Sugar crap. Processed food.

But going, going there. I started to this. Then I went from slim fast to becoming a natural pill popper. All right. Because now it's like all these isolated nutrients, but I quickly, thank goodness again, transition out of that.

You mean supplements?

Yeah, because. And not to say that supplements aren't helpful, especially the right ones, but it's still looking at food through this allopathic lens that I was taught in school, which is like a pill for this.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, a pill for every ill.

Do you take supplements now?

Definitely not as many. And there's a reason why too that we talk about and Eat Smarter, which it went from about 7% of all liver damage to about 20% in recent years being associated with supplements.

Shut up.

Over consumption. Yeah, yeah.

It's real.

Because your liver has to handle the process of these isolated nutrients. Oftentimes it's not a very regulated system either. Not to say supplements aren't good, but we're taking like some people taking 20, 30 different supplements a day.

So what happens when we take that many supplements a day consistently over time it affects our liver.

So your liver is responsible for number one, like drug metabolism. We have over. Somewhere around 70% of the United States population is on prescription drugs. Your liver is handling that first and foremost. And also your liver is responsible for food, you know, food metabolism, that interaction as well, which. And your li. The name live er. It's responsible for you being alive like massively. We can't survive without your liver.

There's only one liver, right? It's two kidneys, one liver.

Yeah. You got two eyes.

You can.

There's some pirates out there. You can have, you know, but you can only.

You can have one kidney and survive. Yeah, but you can only.

It's only one.

Even with your liver, like you can lose portion of your liver and grow. Grow it back. No way. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's regenerative, magical, like seemingly magical.

How big is the liver?

It's pretty big. I mean as far as like the internal organs. But here's the crazy thing is that with it again, I want to reiterate, it's not that supplements are bad, especially the rights, food based supplements especially. But synthetic, isolated synthetic chemicals. Right. So about 20% of hospitalizations from liver problems is associated with supplement consumption now.

No, come on.

Yeah, yeah.

Not pill, prescription pills, but actual over the counter supplements.

Yeah.

20% of liver challenges in the hospitals.

Are Due to this.

Yeah.

How do they know it's based on.

Supplements and they just do an intake and, like, look at what the person's consuming, you know? So again, this. These types of science. This type of science is still, like, very. There's nuance there. But just for us people to. Just for us to be aware that this exists, that, hey, wait a minute. Maybe I want to pump the brakes a little bit on taking all these pills. So this was game changer for me, man. I asked the question, okay, so I've got degenerative disc disease. My spinal discs have degenerated. I have two herniated discs that cause me all this pain. What are they made of? I asked this simple question.

What are my discs made of?

What are they made of? What are my bones made of? My bone disk is so low. What are they made of? We think of calcium.

Calcium is what we think of.

Right. Because of the marketing. But there was, like 20 other things that were as important, if not more important, for the formation of bones and our bone density, really, that I had no idea about. Magnesium, even omega 3s that we think about associated to, like, brain health. Omega 3s are needed for bone formation as well. All right, so I wasn't getting any of that stuff in my diet. So I started taking pills first, but then I was like, supplements or. Supplements.

Yeah.

So I asked, what foods are these things found in? And then I understood the seemingly magical aspect of food, which there are all these other things that are there too, these CO factors and biopotentiators. And the game changing insight was that, what have we been consuming the longest? This supplement is new. This drug is new. Humans. We have millions of years of evolution in relationship with eating foods that have supported our development. What do my genes expect me to eat? Where is it expected to come from?

From a concentrated pill supplement or from food?

Yeah. So I started to make my mandate then, 20 years ago was food first. And that was a game changer. So once I did that, man, six weeks after that moment of decision and, like, revelation, the pain that I've been experiencing every day that had me in fear of standing up was gone.

Wow.

And I was scared. I was even more scared there because I felt like I'm gonna do something that's gonna happen. So I'm like, freaking out, but I'm also like, let me just keep going with this. Let me keep going. And I was feeling so good. I lost about 18 pounds at that point, which is not typical. But I was like the skinny kid in my family for A while. And now, like, it just those, you know, fat co. Fat genes, these epigenetic influences turned on, so weight just came off of me. And the most wonderful part and why I'm sitting here today with my. With my man Lewis Howes, is my professors, students, you know, at the school, they started, they saw me, and it wasn't like I looked like somebody just lost weight. It looked like somebody who was, like, really healthy and alive. Because when I see my pictures of myself, then I look like freaking like Casper the Goat. I look like a shell of myself. Like there's something missing. The light is not there. And so people started coming up to me. And the first person who, like, specifically asked me for help, she was somebody I went to high school with, who went to end up going to the college I was at. And she saw this transformation. She was like, can you help me? You know, to do. To. To do what you did? And I was like, absolutely. And so I was just, like, gonna, like, schedule time to, like, meet up with her. And then she was like, how much should I pay you? And, like, time froze.

You're like, wait a minute. I can make money helping people live better.

I had no idea it was a thing, you know, And I was like, $7. And that was the beginning, man. So then I went on to, like, certification for personal training, strength conditioning coach, then, you know, graduating, shifting all my coursework, like, to biology and all those things, and then opening my clinical practice and working as a nutritionist for over a decade, man, and just seeing some amazing transformations. You know, we specifically work with a lot of folks with chronic diseases, you know, diabetes, heart disease. People coming in, they got blood sugar is like 300, 400. They're on metformin, sometimes insulin, oftentimes somewhere around 80% of the time, we're able to normalize their blood sugar without medication, you know, working alongside with their physicians. And, you know, just. But we did that by education because that's the thing that's not. That's not given to them. You know, this. Nobody's telling them why. It's just like, sugar's bad. Okay. But I would reverse engineer it. I would like, literally walk them through, here's how your body actually does this thing. Here's how diabetes is created. Here's how insulin resistance happened, and you could see the light come on in their eyes, and it's proper education. Yeah.

What's your thoughts then, on fasting in general? Because I don't know if you've seen Dr. Jason Fung's work. The Obesity code, the cancer code, where he's talking about fasting a lot to reverse type 2 diabetes and a lot of his patients, as part of the process, a part of the treatment plan, I guess, is adding fasting into your life. How does that apply to things, to the hormones? When we fast, whether it's a one day fast, three day fast, how does it apply to our metabolism? Does it slow down our metabolism when we fast again, whether it's intermittent or three days, what does that do to the body?

Oh man, this is in, this is. I could not, not put this in there because the data exists and it's just. And I want to make this clear, I also have a protocol for if you don't want to fast and you just want to have your three square meals a day, you know, like. But for all of us, if we can put our nutrition even into a 12 hour window and that 12 hours of fasting, of not eating, which is just, that even includes your sleep time.

12 hour window of not eating, 8.

Hour window of eating, just say you finish your last meal at 8 o' clock and then you sleep, you get a good night's sleep, you wake up the next day, you have your first meal at 8:00am wow. Let me tell you some of the things that can happen. Number one, we see a substantial increase in production of human growth hormone. Right. Which is largely is considered the quote, youth hormone, you know, associated with, you know, healthy body composition, but also like cognitive development and, and especially in recovery, you know, protection from illnesses and speed of recovery from injury and things like that goes, it just goes on and on and on. It's why kids have so much energy too. It's really tied to energy. Right. Hgh. But I know we talked about this before. I think of like Barry Bonds.

Yeah.

You know, Jason Giampi, you know, we've been for St. Louis, Martin McGuire, Big Mac, they named a highway after in Highway 70. They took it back though.

They took it back down.

But yeah, so by having a little bit of fasting, that process is elicited and you know, you produce more hgh, but also improvement in insulin sensitivity. Like we see marked results with that too. And one of the studies that I put into the book was so shocking for me that I could not, not talk about it. They had folks to consume essentially the same amount of calories, but once they partitioned it all, they did, they gave him this one restriction of like, okay, let's take this consumption of caloric, you know, availability that we're giving you and put it into this 12 hour window. And then they saw increased weight loss simply by having the same amount of calories, but in this window instead, same amount of calories. They also saw increased production of satiety hormones or normalization of like leptin and ghrelin. They saw biomarkers associated with longevity as well. So. And I can go on and on just by putting your nutrition into a window. And then there's so many different types of fasting too.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and I can't talk about anything with efficacy or ethically without me doing it, so. Man, that's part of what happened to me too, of going too far. I've tried all of them, whatever diet framework, you know, I've done it. Raw food.

Yeah, Everything vegan.

But I'll do it for like a year, two years, three years, you know, and that change in the. And I didn't know at the time of my microbiome, and taking away certain foods that really might, for myself personally, were associated with good health. By removing those prebiotics, sources like that can cause gut dysbiosis. And so I was dealing with that for a couple of years and like, I started to become food, have these, all these food sensitivities that were rooted in this change in my microbiome. And so my, even my story of like, what did I do to fix this? Because it's like one of the biggest things growing right now is dysbios of gut bacteria. And you might not have stomach problems or digestive problems, but it might show up with migraines. It might show up as issues with your thyroid. It might show up with arthritis.

Interesting.

This is important because even our methods of testing. Look, man, I'm just gonna say the thing nobody else is willing to say, dude. Like, honestly, man, we've gone through a lot of stuff today, but we don't know. Yeah, we don't know anything, man. Like, even the top virologists in the world knows less than a fraction of a percent about all the viruses there are and how they function. We don't know anything, but we act like we do, you know, and it's, it gives us a sense of certainty. We do. We, we know so much more than we did. But. And that's the beautiful part, too. Even our innovations in the last couple of decades have been amazing, but what have we done as a result? Like, we're not getting any healthier. You know, the data exists. And part of this problem is that on average, when we have a peer reviewed, even if it's a placebo controlled double blind, like everything, gold standard of study. We get a result finding that say curcumin active component in turmeric has anti angiogenesis properties, meaning it helps to cut off the blood supply to cancer cells and fat cells selectively. That's in curcumin? Yeah. All right, well we'll circle back to that. But we find that it has, it's been proven. It takes on average from proof to being in clinical practice in medicine. 17 years. Wow. We don't got that kind of time, Louis. And that's part of the problem, is that these studies are often designed and speaking to, in this language of academia, to sound smart to other people instead of like, how can people take this information and use it in their lives? Because I don't have to wait 17 years to find out that this thing can help me. Right. So we don't know anything. That gatekeeper system. And also the level of information getting to people is changing thanks to the work that you're doing. What I'm doing, taking this information and making it available to everybody, but making it make sense, because it doesn't have to be. Food is complex, but it's also incredibly simple. You just put in your mouth and chew. Your body handles the fine print, but it's very complex in that it affects so much. You know, like there's so many different factors and that's one of the things I move towards in my clinical practice is that personalization and also looking at where do people come from, like what's their lineage? Maybe we can eat what your ancestors ate, you know, a little bit more like that. And I would find great effects with that too. You know, there's so many different things to consider, but the basics are often not addressed, you know, for most folks in our society. And again, we tend to like try to treat a symptom, but at the end of the day we have to cover the basics and make sure that we are getting the nutrition that our body needs right now, which can be different next week. Let me give you an example here. Right now as we're recording this, we're at a probably the most stressful time in human history. And the, the number one mineral that's really associated with the modulation of stress, like our body stress systems, is magnesium. And prior to this experience we're having right now As a culture, 56% of the United States population was chronically deficient in magnesium.

Yeah.

And it's responsible for over 350 biochemical processes in the body. So that means there's 350 things your body can't do or can't do properly without it, you know, so that one, getting that one nutrient addressed can help to elicit the parasympathetic nervous system response. Turn off that fight or flight and start that healing to deal with stress. Because what I was going to say is the nutrition side, stress, it seems invisible. That's the thing. Like you can't see stress, but it is very real and it can kill you. One of the most interesting reports this was in my first book. About over 90% of all physician visits today are for stress related illnesses. They have a stress component.

Yeah, I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm overwhelmed.

Because what does that mean? What is it doing this related to your hormones, your neurotransmitters, the things that are determining what your liver is doing, what your heart's doing, what your body fat's doing. You could overeat your way fat, you can under sleep your weight fat, you can under exercise your weight fat, and you can overstress yourself fat as well. Now, most people have issues with all of these things because 115 million Americans are regularly sleep deprived. What are we doing again? We're looking for another drug to solve our problems. Right now we are the sickest nation in the history of the world. Self inflicted, let me be clear, self inflicted, that's the root and the system that all of this, that's governing all of this is sick in and of itself. And unfortunately, you know, again, we have a great medical system, especially for emergency care. But as far as the treatment of our biggest killers sucks, everything continues to get worse. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, obesity. Nothing is getting solved because we continue to treat symptoms, not the root. Yeah, with pharmacology and not addressing the issues that cause these things. How many people go in that have Alzheimer's and or even early onset, how many people go in and get counseling on sleep? Because now we know that sleep deprivation is correlated with Alzheimer's. And this is the stuff that's going to continue. Even Alzheimer's also is in many aspects is being called type 3 diabetes. So the relationship with insulin in the brain, you have receptors in your brain too, and your body's ability because your brain runs largely on glucose and it needs to be able to do that process right. But what happens when insulin resistance happens in your brain, man? So how often are we getting this kind of education? We're not. We're not, but we can change it. That's the beautiful part. About right now is that so much is fluxed up. You know, so much is in flux and it's so malleable now that it can be changed. It's getting shaken. Before, the systems were very sturdy and I'm just like out there promote, like, don't go to McDonald's. No. Like, I'm not going to get very far doing that. But right now, when things are so shaken up, I really, I'm so grateful to be alive right now. I really feel that Eat Smarter coming out right now is not an accident. And I even share with you, like, we have a national campaign. We're going to be at essentially every Target store in the United States. I used to work at Target. Yeah, I was a floater. I'm out there pushing the carts now. My book is going to be in Target and not just in the book. Section, special 2021 wellness initiative. I'm not playing, man. Let's go, man. You know, we were born for this moment. This is the time right now. All the stuff that we've done to prepare ourselves, this is the time to do it. And we really have to work to get our communities healthier. At the end of the day, that's our greatest defense. That's our greatest defense. Because unfortunately this isn't being talked about enough. A CDC report came out, which I've been talking about this stuff since April and also in March, looking at the numbers coming out of Italy and finding that about 88% of the folks who passed away with this virus had pre existing chronic diseases and comorbidities somewhere around 2 to 3 on average. Comorbidities, what's that? So these are additional causes of death.

Additional causes of death.

Right. And. Or pre existing chronic diseases. Right. So heart disease. The main three were heart disease, diabetes and obesity. And I was like, oh, we're, we're in trouble.

They were a co. Cause of death with COVID They got Covid. But because they had these other elements, it's what also caused the death.

So this. And what tends to happen right now is people get skewed because everything is so polarizing right now.

So I think until recently there's 250,000 deaths in USA related to Covid. Is that so?

Let's be clear because we get so skewed on what this means. This does not mean that COVID 19 was not a factor. And some folks can lean so heavy into this, just like, well, these people would have been alive or these people died because they were going to die anyways because they had heart Disease. Not saying that. Let's be clear what I am saying and what the data now shows, even here in the United States. Because when I saw the numbers, I was like, we're in trouble here. We're the sickest nation in history. And so the CDC report found that 94% of the folks who lost their lives with this virus had an average of 2.6 pre existing chronic diseases. So would had they. This is only 6% of people didn't, quote, have a health problem, which they.

Might have had some health problem, even that.

Right. Because these are opportunistic viruses that I talked about earlier. You can be compromised being sleep deprived and being overstressed. Right. But 94% of these folks, and nobody is scratching their head and nobody is saying a thing on major media. And our health leaders, like we have to get our people healthier. We see the number one risk factor is being sick, having pre existing lifestyle related chronic diseases. And I'm not saying this because it sounds good. The Journal of the American Medical association, one of the most prestigious journals, 2018 published a report, massive meta analysis. They concluded diet, poor diet is the number one cause of our chronic diseases in America.

Wow.

Number one, it's right there.

It's the root that causes so many things. Obesity, heart, diabetes, all these other things. But we're not talking about that.

Yeah, we're not talking about it. It's the root we're talking about. Let's get another drug to treat a symptom. We really need to be talking about how do we get our citizens healthier? You know, and so in truth, our chronic diseases loaded the gun and Covid pulled the trigger. You know, that's really a good way to look at it. It was setting us up for trouble. And this isn't the last time. This isn't the last time.

There's gonna be more.

Oh, yes, absolutely. This is just, especially if you look at the trend. We've got sars, we've got mers. All this stuff is just happening in the last couple of decades. People keep talking about the flu from back in 19, but it's been pretty quiet now all of a sudden, why? We are more susceptible than we've ever been before. And humans are tinkering with stuff that we've never tinkered with before. Messing with our food system, all these genetically modified crops. And you know, we're of course in the lab tinkering with viruses and not really understanding. Like we keep carrying this level of arrogance, like we can outsmart a virus. What, like how's that working out for us?

Right.

Just look at the numbers. And we keep blaming, we keep blaming people and not the systems that are governing all this stuff. You know, there is absolutely a degree of personal responsibility. But I grew up in a situation, I didn't know that there was a choice. I didn't know there was a difference. You know, And I want to make sure we have access. That's one of the things that changed my life, is just getting access, getting exposure. And we can provide that for everyone, truly.

Yeah.

So many things I could go down there, but what I'm hearing you say is going back to the basics with nutrition. And if we could go back to the basics, if you give people one prescription today around types of foods and or types of supplements they should be adding to give themselves the best chance to have a strong immune system, burn the unnecessary fats they don't need, optimize the metabolism, what would you say we should be eating and taking? In general, obviously each person's unique in different stages of life, but I'm hearing green, leafy greens, a mixture of diversity. Is this a mixture of a diversity of meats, fruits, nuts, oils as well? Or is it more in the leafy green category?

So that's one facet for sure. Another thing so funny, I've been talking about this stuff for years, but now we've got really cutting edge data on this stuff. Another major thing I want everybody to focus on from today forward is their omega 3 fatty acids. A lot of folks have heard of this. Now we have a wonderful study that was just released and highlighted in Eat Smarter where they're looking at the ratio of omega 3 fatty acids to omega 6 fatty acids in human tissue. The ratio as we evolve was about 3 to 1. Omega 6 to Omega 3s and Omega 6 are known to be the kind of more pro inflammatory of the omega 3 of the omega family. Omega 3s are more of anti inflammatory, but omega 6 are important. They're important for many processes in the body. But when that ratio gets skewed, we see increased inflammation, which inflammation is tied with every hormonal problem you can name. And I talk about that as well. And also inflammation in the brain. And so now that ratio is 20 to 1, 30 to 1 for some people, omega 6s to omega 3s and what they found in this particular study was that as folks improve their Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio is directly correlated with decreased body fat. This is a major regulator of what your fat is doing. Right? Your fat communicates with each other the Fats you consume. Part of the problem is, I know I was indoctrinated with the idea that eating fat makes you fat. You know, I, I thought we were past this, but we're not because it keeps coming up in the media every now and then. Like saturated fat. Saturated fat is going to kill you. And I've got studies that show the opposite, not to say, but they're not taken into account. Where does it come from?

The types of fat?

Yes. Where?

Quality of the fat.

The quality, yes. And so one thing you can do immediately is improve your omega 3 ratio. All right? So avoid consuming things that are extremely high in these inflammatory omega 6s, which for most of us, we primarily get that through these highly processed seed oils. Right. So corn oil, so called vegetable oil, which is not. It's not damn broccoli oil.

Right.

Like these are pros. These are highly processed seed oils. And dude, what happens like canola oil. Canola. Even at whole Foods, if you go to a hot food bar, if it was open, a lot of it's cooked in whole in canola oil. Like it's organic Canola oil. Health. No, canola oil is a hot. What it takes to make these oils, they smell and taste disgusting. They would, but they have to be deodorized, highly processed and refined. And then can you just. Even that in of itself should tell you, because these oils are very delicate. They're very delicate. It makes them rancid and increases the capacity of oxidative stress for your body.

What are the top oils we should be eating then? Olive oil is number one, right?

I wouldn't say number one. Very important.

Important one.

Very important.

It's also a lot of calories, right?

Yeah. But there's some really cool studies that I put into the book showing this direct correlation with increased olive oil consumption and weight loss.

Wow.

So, yeah, something special there. But here's the thing. Olive oil is not highly processed.

Right?

Right. It's often cold. It can be cold pressed and is bottled in dark glass bottles because it's sensitive to light. So don't get your olive oil in clear plastic.

You can see it. Don't, don't buy it.

It's already, it's denaturing.

Extra virgin olive oil. Is that better?

Extra virgin, organic or if you know the farm, they're not using like pesticides.

Olive oil is good.

Yeah. But with the Omega 3s, the number one source is through fish, Cold water, fish. Now some people listen like, I can't do that. I'm up. I don't mess with the fish. And some people, you know, I've heard this so many times in my years of, of clinical work that, you know, they're vegetarian. I'm sorry, they say they're vegetarian, but I only eat fish.

Pescatarian.

But they wouldn't, they wouldn't say like, like the term. It's more like I don't eat meat. I don't eat meat, but I'm pretty.

Sure this is me.

Yeah, it's just, just say I don't eat land meat.

Yeah, you know, exactly.

So but if you don't, if you don't eat fish or that's okay. We have, there's other ways. However, this is the most dense source that humans have been eating the longest. If we're talking about real whole food sources, which we want food first. And so specifically I'm saying this because of the DHA and EPA. These are the Omega 3s that are clinically proven to have all the benefits I've been talking about, whether it's cognitive performance and, or stuff with the metabolism. There are omega 3s implants, but they're in the form of ALA. All right, ALA is very different. Your body can convert some of the, your, your ala into EPA and DHA, but you lose about 95 of it in the process, conversion process. So you got to eat like, clinically speaking, a buttload of chia seeds like daily. Like you got to be shoveling it.

Whereas wild caught Alaskan salmon might be just like a higher source.

Over the, over the top, you know, how. So again, but what do we do? Algae oil. Look for a high quality algae oil. Yeah, it's good for you, huh? Yeah, super high.

Cook it or you just drink.

So algae oil would come in capsules, very concentrated sources of, of, of algae or krill oil. So krill is like a microscopic shrimp. So maybe that, on your, on your ethics, maybe that is like a, you know, more viable source. Yeah, super high in astaxanthin, which is correlated with longevity and reductions of heart disease and all this stuff. So that's really cool. So krill oil or algae oil. Now to be clear, 99.9 of the studies on the effectiveness of omega 3s, they're done on fish and fish oil, not these other things. The oil. The, the, the compounds are there, but we just don't know if they have the same effect. Okay, so just be aware of all that stuff. Green leafy vegetables. We covered Omega 3s. One other thing I want to make sure everybody walks away with today because we talked a little bit about the macronutrients, but there's not just three. So in school, again, we're taught fats, proteins, carbohydrate. There's actually six. The other one's. Alcohol is a macronutrient. And we talk about that, all the ins and outs of that as well, which we can't even get into that. But you got to read it. The data is. Is bananas.

Yeah.

Not to say good or bad, but you need to know.

Yeah.

Also, the sixth man coming off the bench for the macronutrients is fiber. But that fifth player that doesn't get a lot of attention is water. Water is probably the most profound of all these macronutrients.

So here's a question. How much water a day should we be drinking?

All right, so this is. I'm going to give you the answer, okay? But it doesn't matter if I tell you what to do unless you really have a connection why to do it. Water, your body, your. Everything about you is based on water. We hear this stuff. You're mostly made of water. What the hell does that mean? In the book I cite a study that had folks who drink 17 ounces of water and just within a couple of. No, just within a couple of minutes. And what happened is something called water induced thermogenesis. They ended up burning about 25 calories from drinking water.

Now, is the quality of water mattered? Is the temperature matter?

Not hot or cold? Not as much.

Okay.

That's a personal preference. There are, like, the ayurvedic principles, like, I know about all this stuff, but.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so here's the cool thing.

So, wait, they burned.

So you burned 25 calories from drinking water? Luis, one.

Just one little 13 minutes or something.

No. If you do that four, five times a day, you're burning, you know, 100, 200 calories just from drinking water.

17 ounces of water.

That's what was used in the study.

Okay, so that's like a tall cup. Right?

But the question is, why?

Why?

Why the hell? How can you burn calories like that? I thought you had to go exercise your face off, not just drink water. It's because water makes everything work better. Every single hormone we talked about is operating in a water medium. Your mitochondria is based on water. All your neurotransmitters are based on water. And it moves throughout your body in this water superhighway. And when you become deficient, which most people are just habitually through the day, all these systems start to basically these wide superhighways start to become these, like, dark back alleys where, like, Batman's parents got killed. You know what I mean? And so how do we fix this? Drink. Drink the water. But like you said, the type of water matters. And we go through all of that, too, but just to give some simple principles. There was one study. This was done from testing houses from Southern California all the way to New Jersey. And they found that tap water contained dozens of pharmaceutical chemicals, all right? Metabolic waste from people taking chemotherapy medications, antidepressants, lisinoprils, you know, stuff for heart disease. This was showing up in our water supply. It's like, what the hell? Why? How is that possible? We're all. We're really this Earth. We're in this Earth bubble, you know, and this stuff is getting recycled. You know, there is toilet to tap water. There's new projects that are taking. Yeah. And taking the water from our. You know, from our bathrooms and putting it back through the faucet. But it's one of the things trying to solve our problem with water here on the planet. But oftentimes it's not due to that. It's just the hydrological cycle and stuff that we're as humans putting into the environment now that never existed before. Before. And we don't have filtering processes that can get. These are microscopic amounts. Let me be clear. But they're there nonetheless. You know, so just understand, if you don't get a water filter, you are the filter. You become the filter. All right? So I highly recommend getting a water filter. But ideally, this would be something like reverse osmosis, but that makes it, like, blank water.

There's no vitamins and minerals in the water. Right. Dead water.

Exactly. Dude.

You need, like, rich vitamins and minerals in our water. Correct.

This goes back to nature. When I was in school, we were taught water's H2O, but there is no H2O anywhere in nature by itself. There is no plain H2O anywhere in nature. It's called the universal solvent. Water is always combining with other things, and it's what gives water this character and structure is the minerals that's in that water.

So when you take all the minerals out.

Yeah.

What is that doing to our body when we're just drinking dead water?

So one of the things that I was, like, even battling with the publisher on is, like, putting this full story of water and how our cells actually get hydrated. So I'll just put it. To put it simply. It affects the hydration levels of your cells and your extracellular fluid and it can cause some serious problems. But what if water has too many minerals, like ocean water? It'll kill you. Right, right. So it's just. It's a basic.

So where do you get your water from? Okay, I want to drink your water.

What? We evolved drinking, like, in recent bottle water.

No, what we've been drinking.

Right, But I mean, like, throughout the recent centuries. It's like tap water. No, no. People go to where the springs are at in the wells.

I'm talking about recently.

Oh, like super recent. Yes.

But like, we used to go to wells.

We would. Humans would set up shop in civilization where the water was at and.

And dig a well.

Yeah, if they could. If they had technology for that.

Yeah.

So that's what would determine what we're doing. Right. So that's ideal. Human water is water. Yes.

But now we're getting from bottled sources or bottling it and. Yeah, right.

They're great. There are great sources that, you know, maybe bottling glass. We get in the conversation about BPA and all that kind of stuff.

Where do you drink your water from?

You know, when you came to my house in St. Louis, we lived on a well. We had well water.

That's crazy.

Right. But when we moved here, very different. So we get like, you know, spring water delivered bottled in glass. You know, got like a water dispenser.

What's it called?

Gonna do advertising. Mountain Valley. Everybody knows about Mountain Valley right now. But again, I've been on this for, like 20 years, you know, waking up every day. I'll drink about 20 to 30 ounces of water, start the day.

So how much should we drink throughout.

The whole day to give people a simple barometer?

Yes.

The number one marker for you to know how much water to drink is listening to your body. Unfortunately, we're largely disconnected from what our bodies are telling us. All right, so to give people a barometer as just a starting point, take the. Take your weight and divide that number in half and just say if you're 150 pounds, you divide in half, that's 75. That's the number of ounces that I want you to drink as a baseline.

So half your weight.

Yeah. Now once you get to 200 pounds and up just 100 ounces, that's solid.

Because I'm 230 right now. So 100 ounces a day.

Yeah, that would be the ideal gallons.

Is that a.

It's not that much. It's really not that much.

Is that a gallon? How much is in a gallon? How much is it is that 64 ounces?

So you remember, man, you were just.

I'm not trying to remember this stuff.

Yeah. So it's okay.

So 100 ounces a day for me.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's a long. And this is. I know, but this is if you're active, you know what I'm saying? Like all working out. Yeah. And it's so like, even given that barometer, it's going to depend on your lifestyle. So that's why I don't even like giving these numbers, because it all depends.

Okay, let me ask you a few things on better relationships. What are the foods we should be eating to have better moods and a higher chance of quality intimate relationships?

This is the most, this is the most important part for me personally of.

This work because relationships are a big factor of stress for people, which causes a lot of bad habits and obesity and all these things. It's the level of stress. So we can have better relationships with everyone. Our lives would be better. So what are those foods that can support that?

And have you ever seen as many people fighting, like arguing and like so much polarization and people being separate? That's the major epidemic because we can't solve our greatest problems with everybody fighting and nobody's willing to listen. And what the data shows clearly and that I really brought forward for the first time in book form and just getting this out to everyday folks is how much our food affects our ability to perspective, take and have patience and to have empathy. And this is highlighted. One of them is the, you know, study. This was from the Ohio State University.

Yeah, the Ohio State.

And what they did was they had couples, they just looked at their blood sugar, which largely what they found was that these blood sugar spikes and crashes. You know, we consider like hypoglycemia in your blood sugar going low, which is largely related to what, what you eat. When the, the study, I mean, the study participants, these couples, when their blood sugar would go low, they found that they were more aggressive and irritable towards their partners and less likely to perspective take and to resolve their conflicts because of their blood sugar being, wow, disturbed, too low. So yeah, so how do we.

Do we want the blood sugar to.

Be high or high? Just normal, medium level normal. And the reason that it could go so low and. But here's the thing, when your blood sugar go low, it will normalize, but it usually does that because it's like a survival response. It increases your production of stress hormones to get it back up. So cortisol, your body can literally. It's a process called gluconeogenesis. It can break your muscle tissue down and use it for fuel to get your blood sugar back up. Right. There's so many different ways your body does to figure out the problem, but it makes you more irritable and aggressive. And so many times in relationships, people are not fighting the other person. They're fighting their biology. People are. People are not fighting a real actual issue. They're creating. We often create issues. How. How many times do you get into it when you're tired? How many times do you get into it when you're actually just hungry, you're hangry. This term is used now, and it's cute, but it's real. Like, we've got science on this. And how many times do you get into it when you're. When you're just stressed out about stuff, right? And you get into an argument about, you know, some damn, like, I don't know, house shoes or something? Like, why'd you put my house shoes here? You know, it's like the stupidest thing, you know? And it's just because you're not showing up as your best self, because our biological needs or our biological thermostats are off, right? So we have to address these things. So that's, number one, one of the most shocking things. And this is more so than ever right now. We're seeing these. We're seeing violence displayed, right? Social unrest due to violent incidents. And there was. This is kind of messed up what I'm about to say, but it's a great community to study because it is a controlled environment. But they took prison inmates, and they went to see how nutrition would affect their behavior.

Interesting.

And so this was Oxford University researchers, and because it's a ward study, it's controlled environment, they wanted to see if they gave these inmates increased nutrition. So vitamins, minerals, omega 3 fatty acids.

Not the crap they're getting every day.

They didn't change their food. That's another study where they changed their food. And the results were even bigger than what I'm about to share with you. But I want to give you the baseline study. So they gave. They had a control group who didn't get these additional nutrients. And they had the study group, after they compiled all the data, they found that the prisoners who were getting increased Nutrition had a 30% reduction in overall behavioral offenses, and they had almost a 40% reduction in violent offenses.

Now, is that because they were just happier they were getting good food?

No, this was not affecting the mood. They had a placebo group, everybody's taking pills. They don't even know what they're taking.

It's just supplements.

That's it. That's why I wanted to share this study first.

Supplements only.

Right. And just getting everyone taking the same.

Supplement but one or told, wow.

Yeah. 40%. Almost a 40% reduction in violent offenses.

Wow.

By improving the nutrition available in their body.

Wow. So food, the nutritional value really affects our mood.

Yeah.

And it can affect our relationships.

This study was so profound. Another set of researchers saw this and there's like this, this can't be possible. 40% reduction in violence. No way. So they repeated the study with another set of prisoners and this was published in the journal Aggressive Behavior, which there's journals for everything. But they found almost the exact same thing happened. We can increase our propensity towards violence by improving our nutrition. And then so studies that were done actually implementing more whole foods saw even better results because food. Wow. Does something else. It does something really special. So with that said, right now, in communities that are in conflict, where oftentimes your likelihood you. Let's be clear, you can have empathy and compassion and patience for someone else. When you're not well, it's just harder.

So much harder. And when you're stacking all the stresses and sleep deprivation and not working out and you're lacking community and you're doing all these things and stacking it, you're going to explode.

Yeah.

At some point.

Yeah. It's just a matter of time. And just, just your ability to have patience, you know, your ability to see the other person's point of view, your ability to have compassion and understanding, it's harder to elicit those things. But it's not impossible what we're experiencing right now, because we know that we are the sickest nation in human history. Self inflicted. A nation of sick people are arguing against other sick people and wondering why nobody's listening. If we can get folks healthier, we can start to have healthier conversations. It's not that it's impossible if you're not well, it's just harder, harder. And I know some folks are listening. They think, you know, I might not be that healthy, but I know that I'm compassionate and I have empathy. Absolutely. But please understand it's not just about your perception of who you are. When you're not well, your biology starts to act very different and we start to see shifts in your brain activity and your prefrontal cortex that's responsible for decision making and social control and distinguishing between right and wrong starts to go cold and your amygdala, you know, these more primitive parts of our brain start to take over and we're just not our best self. So this is my big mission that, you know, I might not say that often, but this is imbued into the pages of the book is let's get our citizens healthier. Let's make this a mission because just imagine what we can do once we start to feel better.

Absolutely. Man. Man, this is powerful. Make sure you guys get this book Eat smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain and transform your life. This is going to be extremely helpful for you guys. Definitely. Check it out. Some amazing research, lots of studies in here and a 30 day smart plan of action at the end which you're going to really want to take on, which breaks down everything on what foods to eat, how much, when to eat. So if you need some sauces, dips, dressings, everything, that is the best stuff for you. Make sure you check this out. It'll be very powerful. Check out Sean eatsmarterbook.com also get sleep smarter while you're at it. Because sleep, sleep is such important to our overall health and wellness and when I started to optimize sleep from your teachings, it really helped my overall well being. So just getting quality sleep and it's not just the amount of time, it's also the environment, everything. So get sleep smarter. Make sure you follow Sean on the Model Health show podcast, one of the top fitness nutrition podcasts in the country. Check him out on Instagram, Sean, model, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, which we're gonna get you up on YouTube more. I want you to get more videos out there. So man, this is powerful. Eat smarter.

Thank you man.

Thank you so much for being here, brother.

Appreciate it. My pleasure, man. Love you bro.

Love you too, man.

Thank you so much my friend for listening to this episode. Make sure to share it with a couple of friends right now if you found this valuable. Lewishoues.com10 to take people right to the show notes link at our website or just copy and paste this if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And please do me a favor, if this brought you value in any way, click on that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now on your phone, click on that subscribe and leave us a rating and review that will truly help us reach more people in the Apple podcast ecosystem. And if you have any friends you think would be inspired by this, then just send them this link, shoot them a text post it on Instagram, Stories, Facebook, WhatsApp group message, wherever you like to share things best post it there right now. And if you want inspirational messages from me, if you like this type of content and you want it bite sized texted to your phone every single week, then text me the Word podcast right now to 614-350-3960 and I'll send you weekly updates and inspirational messages to keep you going every single week. And I want to leave you with this quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Su who says, health is the greatest possession, Contentment is the greatest treasure, Confidence is the greatest friend. I hope this information builds your health and increases your level of confidence because now you have the knowledge to take action action and improve this area of your life. And I want to remind you that if no one has told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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