3 Ways You Can Reverse Aging & Prevent Disease In Your Life [MASTERCLASS] EP 1329

So you've got me thinking, okay, well if the patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? So then I'm thinking, okay, well what do I need to do as a functional medicine doctor?

I need to go to the root cause. And then it became clear to me that it's our food. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special master class. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. This podcast is sponsored by Northwestern Mutual. Everyone wants to feel good about their finances, Well, that's why I've had life insurance with Northwestern Mutual for years. Their financial professionals ask the right questions, truly listen, and help uncover opportunities most people miss. I've seen it firsthand. Northwestern Mutual has been a part of my journey from the very beginning, providing the security and peace of mind I need as a human and an entrepreneur. Find a better way to money@nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, paid testimonial by a Northwestern Mutual policy owner.

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How many different types of diabetes are there?

Okay.

And how is it caused?

Okay. Okay. So type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Pancreas fails, it's called, we used to be called juvenile diabetes, and you need insulin. It's just, you need it. You need insulin.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin.

You need insulin, yeah. To do your pancreas dies, 'cause your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced, keeps, that's the blood.

It'S sort of like a gatekeeper, lets the glucose into your cells. Okay.

So it's really important. So how does that die? What happens? How does it die from that? I mean, how does the pancreas die? Oh, well, how does it get to that point? It's an autoimmune, like an auto, like you get multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis. It's basically your body attacks your pancreas. Is that from eating a lot of bad foods? Well, there's been links to dairy and actually as a driver of type 1 diabetes. Gluten, 29% of people who have type 1 diabetes have celiac that are undiagnosed. So celiac is a big cause of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes. So that's a very small number of people. Very few. One out of two Americans have what we call type 2 diabetes. We used to call it adult onset, except now kids as young as three are getting type 2 diabetes from drinking soda. from the crib. Oh my gosh. I was working when I was a resident in an urgent care center and this woman comes in for back pain. She got her baby in a carriage and I see her feeding this baby this brown liquid in a bottle who's seven months old. And I'm like, what is this?

Soda?

I'm like, what is that? That's Coca-Cola. No. I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She's like, well, he likes it. Oh my gosh. Oh my God, listen, my wife showed me this video on on, on the social media other day, it was as a baby. Look like it was maybe eight or nine months old baby having ice cream for the first time.

Oh.

Having sugar for the first time.

And you watch the baby eat the ice cream. I light up.

The eyes.

And then the baby, like, I want to grab the thing and, like, stuffs in his face. I was like, oh, my God, it.

Was just so crazy.

And it's, it's highly addictive, so. Yeah, so, so now we're seeing One in two Americans suffer from either prediabetes or type 2. Or type 2 diabetes. And that is when you eat too much sugar and starch, and every time you do that, it raises your insulin, your body becomes resistant to the insulin, so it doesn't work as well, so you need more insulin. And insulin does what? Insulin makes you hungry, it makes you store belly fat, it locks the fat in the fat cells, and it slows your metabolism. It's like a quadruple threat for your body to gain weight. So it's why we're seeing, you know, and that goes back to what we're growing, right? So why are we eating all this food? It's because that's the food we produce, right? And so that's the other part of the problem. So we have the chronic disease, we have the economic impact, and then we're like, well, why do we have this food? So as a functional medicine doctor, I'm always asking why. Well, why are my patients sick?

Because it makes money, right?

Well, yeah, but I'm going even further, why I got interested in this. Why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking about my patients' diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food. So I'm thinking, well, if it's food.

How many are most of them? Is this like 50%, 70%? 80% of anyone that comes in to the hospital, or your patients, who has some type of disease or some type of sickness?

I mean, unless it's like an environmental thing like mercury or lime or mold, You know, most of the things- Cancer. Cancer is caused by food. Really?

70%.

70% of cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit. Heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, the big killers.

Are by sugar and food.

Yes. So if you change your diet, you.

Should be able to cure those. Prevent. Or cure sometimes.

Sometimes cure.

Depends how far along things are, I guess.

Yeah.

You can prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's?

Yes, 100%. I mean, the studies are there. Even people already have Alzheimer's, when they improve their diet, they can, they get more functionality back. So you've got me thinking, okay, well, if the patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? It's the food system. They're like, well, what's causing the food system? It's our food policies. Like, what's causing our food policies? It's the food industry that's lobbying Congress. It's got money. It's the biggest lobby group in Congress is agriculture and food. By far, like by twice as much as the next lobby group. By gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if I'm going to help my patients, I can't do it in my office. It's like I'm in the boat bailing the boat with a hole instead of plugging the hole.

You're not going to the source.

Right. So then I'm thinking, okay, well, what do I need to do as a functional medicine doctor? I need to go to the root cause, right? food cause and why. And then it became clear to me that it's our agricultural system that's driving so much of the problem. And what we grow has been based on good intentions that were in the 50s and people were hungry. There wasn't enough food. There was a lot of poverty. And so we figured out a system to produce an abundance of starchy calories.

So we can have food.

So we can have food. And we were great at it. And we have cheap abundant corn. and wheat and soy, which are the commodity crops that are turned into industrial processed food, which is now 60% of our diet. And for every 10% of that you eat, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Yeah, so you're basically feeding Americans a diet we know is going to kill them. The research is so clear on this. There's no scientific debate. And yet we don't do anything about it because we have these dysfunctional food policies. And then the way we grow the food causes climate change. We'll get into that, but the number one cause of climate change is our food system.

Really?

People don't realize that. I didn't know it. I'm like, oh, it's oil and gas.

And all this stuff. I'm like, what is it?

Is it the trucking? Is it the animal feed? And to end, is it the end? Okay, so first of all, deforestation is devastating. Not only do we destroy the soil.

On which we cut down the trees.

But the trees are carbon sinks, so we lose that. So they're not sucking in the bad air. They're sucking out carbon dioxide.

Right.

I mean, basically plants suck out carbon dioxide. That's what they breathe. oxygen, they breathe carbon dioxide. So that's a perfect antidote, right? And then the soil also, we're damaging by the way we're farming. We've lost a third of our top soil. It's responsible, and people don't know this, but of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of soil organic matter, like healthy rich soil, is responsible 30 to 40% of all greenhouse gases.

Currently in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Does that mean, why is that? Does it suck up?

Because soil can hold more carbon than is in the atmosphere right now. There's a trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, which is a lot. I don't know, trillion tons, I don't even know how to measure that. And the soil can hold three trillion tons of carbon. And how does it do that? It's an ancient carbon capture technology that is available all over the world. that's free.

Free.

That can be more effective than all the rainforests on the planet, than all the forests and trees on the planet. It's called photosynthesis. And if you have grasslands, for example, like we had big prairies in the United States, they suck down carbon, they breathe it, and they put it through the plants, into the roots, feeds the mycorrhizal fungi, which then make healthy soil, feeds the bacteria, and you get this incredibly rich live soil that holds tremendous amounts of organic matter that is carbon, right? I mean, carbohydrates comes from the word carbon, which comes from carbon dioxide.

Wow.

Right?

Ding, ding, ding, it all connects. And so we've lost.

So we don't have the soil for it to consume, then we, it just bounces off back into the air, I guess, and we're just consuming it in other ways.

Yeah. And the soil, can hold so much carbon. The UN estimated that if we took the five of the 5 million hectares of degraded farmland around the world, if we took just 2 million of that and spent 300 billion, which is the total military spend for 60 days around the world, which is not much. 60 days, two months of everybody's military spending. We literally could stall climate change by 20 years. Wow. Because of putting back the carbonate in the soil. And not only that, it holds water. You see in Iowa, in the Midwest, there was floods that just destroyed a million acres of cropland that otherwise could have been fine if the soil could hold the water. But it just sits on the top where it runs through and we lose all this water. So that when you have organic matter in the soil, it holds 27,000 gallons for every 1% organic matter in the soil per acre. So it's an incredible water sink. It's a carbon sink. and we've lost all these soils and it's because we're growing these commodity crops in ways that destroy soil. Soil. We're tilling the soil, we're turning over soil erosion, it runs off into the rivers, we kill all the life in the organic matter by poisoning it with fertilizer, with pesticides, with glyphosate herbicides, and it's staggering. And then we have all these sort of unintended consequences. We started growing all this food and we thought this agricultural revolution was great, All these chemicals are great, you know, fertilizer is great, we can do all this good stuff, tractors, big farms, more food, feed the world. It's backfired on us. And it's producing the worst food on the planet that's causing devastating environmental damage, staggering climate change. So it's the soil loss, it's the deforestation, it's the factory farming of animals, which should be banned. It's the transportation, storage, refrigeration, and the food waste. I mean, food waste in- A lot of waste. Yeah, but well, we waste 40% of our food. We believe that's not our plate.

We don't waste food.

Imagine going to the grocery store, buying a bunch of groceries, and getting home and throwing 40% of the garbage. The average American wastes $1,800 of food a year, and it's about a pound a day. And that goes to landfills. The landfills, then it rots and creates methane. So you could be a vegan, throwing out your food waste and scraps, and you could be contributing to climate change. if food waste were our country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. Wow. Yeah, it's methane to produce and we need a compost, we need to have community garden, like always to fix it. But it's like when you look at the whole end-to-end food system, it is the number one source of climate change, about 50% of greenhouse gases.

And people just don't appreciate that. So why, I mean, if this information is public and it's out there and.

Policy makers are aware of it. They're not aware of it. They're not aware of it. No, I spent two hours on a sailboat this summer with a senator, a smart senator.

He wasn't aware of it. And I literally, his jaw was hanging.

Open the entire time.

And then I presented with this research and information. No, because I got so much money sent to him by the lobby, it's probably. Right, I mean listen, if all the people who are walking in their office are Monsanto and Cargill and, you know, McDonald's and Pepsi and like, and they're all donating millions of dollars, I would say billions of dollars, they're not hearing the other side of the science. And, you know, how do you fight that? So, you know, I always should deride a lobbyist, but I plan on, you know, creating a food fix campaign, which is a nonprofit, along with an advocacy organization to start to literally lobby senators, congressmen, key people in the administration around these issues and start to drive policy changes.

Because in the UK and you were talking about, I think, in Australia, New Zealand or in, I think, in Asia, you were saying that you can't do certain things with the food. Otherwise you'll go to prison, you'll go, you know, you'll get killed.

You'll.

Well, yeah. I mean, in the UK, they don't have a lot of these dyes.

Right.

Yeah. So it's so funny, you know, the FDA, you know, is so influenced by the, the food industry. And, and I was once with the, the former head of the federal drug administration, food and drug administration. Peggy Hammer, former. She was, you know, but then she was the FDA commissioner.

Yeah.

But now she's former. And I was at the World Economic Forum. I said, Peggy, how come, you know, we have so much trouble with getting advances in food labeling or dealing with toxic chemicals in our food or the antibiotics in animal feed or, you know, it's like, she's like, well, when we try to make too aggressive change, Congress threatens to shut down our funding because of the food lobby.

They threaten to shut it down?

Yeah.

And then what?

If they shut it down, what would happen?

Well, they're limited in their ability to do their job. And so the FTC, the same thing happened in the 70s. There was a movement by the Federal Trade Commission to have negative education campaigns around sugar and how bad it was. But the Congress says, we're gonna pull all your funding and shut you down if you do this. And so they pull back.

So.

You know, for example, you ask the question about Asia, we have this thing called GRAS, which is generally recognized as safe. So the food additives, we have, you know, we have, you know, thousands of food additives, only about 5% have actually been tested for safety. In the US, some of them are grandfathered in, right? So Crisco, for example, trans fat, was grandfathered in as a safe food to eat. But it took 50 years for researchers to finally prove to the FDA that it wasn't safe. Wow. 'Cause it was the basis of all processed food.

Oh. Right?

Crisco shortening, you know, it shortened your life. I was like, oh, my gosh. And so they literally had to be sued by a scientist in order to actually turn it into a non-safe substance. And then of course they gave their food industry years and years to get out of food. But in this country, there's so many things that are used in our food supply that are banned in Europe, like BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene and food additives, various dyes and something called azodicarbonamide, which is a softener that makes bread more fluffy and soft. And it was used in Subway sandwiches. Our friend, Vani Hari, outed them and said, this is your yoga mat material.

In your Subway sandwich.

And they got it taken out. And she got it out. but the FDA still says it's fine to eat. And in Singapore, if you use it and you're a food producer, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail for putting it in the food.

That same ingredient. The same ingredient. That anyone can use in the US right now.

In the US, yes. And most of the things that are safe, quote, safe here are banned in Europe. So, it's like, yeah, they're not doing their job. And then antibiotics, you know, we have 30 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal feed, we're about 37 million total. So about 7 million for humans to treat disease and 30 million for animals.

Why?

For growth. It's a growth factor, right? It makes them fat and it makes humans fat too. And it is used for prevention from overcrowding. And the FDA says, well, this isn't a good idea. I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea. But they go, would you please, pretty please not do it? It was a voluntary guideline that the FDA produced. not mandatory.

Please don't do it. Yeah.

You have to have a vet certify that the animal's sick before you give them antibiotics.

Oh, man.

And now they, they, you know, continue to do it and just laugh. You know, they had voluntary. The, the, the FDA FTC put in voluntary guidelines around junk food marketing. Would you pretty please not advertise the bad stuff and advertise more good stuff? It was just voluntary and the food industry went ballistic and had it overturned. So even the voluntary guidelines are nullified. Like, no, wow.

And it just, it's, I mean, sugar, I mean, it's like, I'm the first one to raise my hand when I say, like, I love sugar and it's my biggest vice, right? Everybody, everybody. I love cookies and candies and cakes and brownies and anything you can think of, I love it, right? I don't know why I don't have diabetes. I have so much sugar I've had in my whole life. You can't be having that much, 'cause you look pretty good. Well, I train hard, too. I go through waves. But as a kid, I would drink like 9-10 Dr. Peppers a day, I remember.

What?

Like some days in the summer, you're.

Just sipping around the president, is that what it was?

Exactly.

I would just, I mean, I would.

Run around and work out and play.

Sports, but then I would just drink, 'cause I thought that's what presidents do.

But you were 16-18, you know?

And I was like 9-10, right? So I was like, but it was, you'd see it on commercials, like your NBA superstar drinking Dr. Pepper or Sprite or whatever. after on the basketball court. And I don't know if it was just like subconscious or just it tasted.

Good and you didn't think about it. I mean, this is where the food industry is so, I mean, I talk about in my book, food facts, but the food industry is so strategic about how it advances its mission and goals. And it does it through multiple channels. And I'm just going to go through them because it just, people just don't.

Know the celebrity endorsements.

Right.

Yeah.

First, you know, obviously, you know, celebrity endorsements, which is the obvious one. they co-op social groups. So they fund groups like the NAACP and Hispanic Federation, the African American and Latino communities are the most affected by diabetes and obesity, and they co-op them by funding them. I want to show the movie Fed Up at the King Center in Atlanta, and Bernice King, Martin King's daughter, was all about it, and she was excited. But once we got it scheduled a few days later, I got a call that we couldn't show it. I'm like, why? She said, because Coca-Cola funds the King Center.

No. Yeah.

I went to Spelman College, you know, which is African-American women college in Atlanta. And the dean said to me, half of the 18 year olds coming into college have a chronic illness, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, 18 year old women. And I'm like, why is there soda machines all over the campus? Why? She's because Coke funds. No. And one of the people on the board of trustees is one of the highest Executives at Coca-Cola oh, man. an African American woman. It's like, so they co-op social groups. And that's why they, for example, oppose soda taxes, 'cause they're in the funding of these big soda companies. And then of course, they fund research. So they fund 12 times as much research, $12 billion worth of research a year, to study nutrition. So Gatorade gets studied by Pepsi.

Really?

Gatorade's the best thing in the world. It's not, it's just sugar, right? Right, right. It corrupts and pollutes science. So people are confused. Why is there so much confusion about nutrition science? Third, they create front groups, call them spin doctors. So they create front groups that seem like they're independent groups like CropLife or, you know, like Center for Consumer Freedom or the American Council on Science and Health, which by the way is run by a bunch of doctors who suggests that pesticides are safe, that Thai fructose corn is great for you, that smoking isn't cause disease.

And, you know, why do they do, why would they do that?

Because they get paid a lot. They're funded by Monsanto and Big Food and Pepsi. You just look at their funders. And they're, I mean, they spend 30 million dollars fighting GMO labeling in California, this front group. It was all funded by Monsanto.

Right.

And then you, so you got these front groups and then you have them co-opting scientists and academies. So the Nutrition Academies, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, their funding in large part comes from industry. And so the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which is our main nutrition association, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. They have sponsored lectures at their meetings that are you know, when people say, well, high fructose corn syrup is good.

And diet drinks are good and like, Right.

It's just completely corrupted. And so these professional societies give guidelines and they're corrupt. And Dr. Ayanianides from Stanford, who's a scientist who looks at carefully at the research and conflicts of interest says, you know, these professional societies like the American.

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And then, so you've got all these ways in which they sort of screw things up. And then, of course, they are aggressive in advertising and marketing, which is illegal in most countries. And then they have lobbyists running around Washington driving policy that supports all what they do. so you've got this massive effort and it's often subversive and illegal.

Fixing the heart medically can only take you so far.

Yeah, that's right.

We have to fix something else and what is that?

Well, you got to fix, you know, why, for instance, you got heart disease in the first place and I was taught, as all my colleagues were taught, that heart disease is kind of inevitable, that, you know, that's the leading cause of death for both men and women.

It's inevitable for all of us.

Yeah, pretty much. That's what we were taught.

Yeah.

And then even if you get it, let's say you get coronary artery disease, that the best we can do is slow it down to slow the progression. And what I realized thanks to Big Ed, who I talk about in all my books, who reversed his coronary artery disease.

This is a man who had 100 pounds overweight.

Yeah, he was really overweight. He was late 40s, he had inoperable coronary artery disease. Everything was clogged up. And this guy went- so you opened him up. No, well, he had gone to six different centers in the United States saying, you know, do something. And everybody who saw him said, well, no, there's no place to do bypasses, there's no place to do stents because everything's clogged up, have a nice day. And so this guy spent about six months doing this and he went on a diet during this time and he went to a health food store and he bought a bunch of supplements, kind of willy-nilly, quite frankly. And so when I met him, he was still a huge guy who weighed 265 pounds. he brings me his angiogram, the movie of his heart from Miami, Florida. And I look at it and I go, you know, I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I'm gonna do for you. And he says, well, yeah, that's what everybody says, but here's the deal. You know, I've gone on this diet. I've lost 45 pounds in the last six months, and I've taken all these supplements, and, you know, maybe I did.

Something in here, you know, and I'm scratching my.

So the video is from six months.

Prior.

Prior.

Wow.

Okay.

And I said, well, good for you for losing weight and, you know, I know what you did with those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I fully believed. And he said, well, you know, why don't we do another angiogram? You know, what would it hurt? So I go, yeah, don't get your hopes up, but okay. So this guy has cleaned out in six months time half the blockages in his coronary artery. gone, shrunk. And you go, I've never seen this before. That doesn't happen. Which was what, after 30 years of doing this? Oh yeah. 35 years. Yeah, that doesn't happen. Come on, that's impossible. You don't clean things out.

The only way to clean it out is through surgery.

Right.

Yeah, or put a stent in. So let me give you an example, and this is kind of off the subject, So if you work out with weights and you happen to wear a wedding ring or an aura ring, you get calluses, right? So calluses are your body's response to protecting itself against an irritation and you build up layers and layers and, right? So it turns out that these plaques inside arteries is a response to an irritation and you build up Calluses. And think about it, if I took off this ring and started working out with weights, this callus would go away because there's no longer any irritation. And what Big Ed showed me was he had removed the irritation, so he no longer needed calluses and his heart started to heal. And it literally goes away. And so that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years, is teaching people how to remove the irritation to the inside of their blood vessels and the calluses miraculously go away. They don't miraculously go away, you don't need them anymore. Jacqueline Lane used to have this expression, is that if it tastes good, spit it out. He actually meant that you should not be eating for this two inch by three inch piece of muscle, your tongue. But you should be eating for the microbiome, for the bacteria and all the other cute little viruses that actually live in your gut, live in your mouth, live on your skin. And if you eat for them, they will take care of you because you are actually their home. We're merely a condominium for bugs.

And how many bugs do we have in our body?

Yeah, we have well over a hundred trillion bacteria. And since the Human Microbiome Project was finished about five years ago now, I mean, we didn't know that these guys really existed. In fact, Dr. David Kessler, who was head of the FDA, in the Reagan years who made the guidelines for the labels, the labeling laws on the back of packages that show saturated fats and carbohydrates. And the labels, by the way, if we get into this, are completely wrong. They were forced on the Reagan administration by big food companies. And so anyhow, if you feed bacteria what they want to eat, and that's this all in the longevity paradox, they will take care of you. They will not, they'll take care of the wall, the lining of your gut, and they, you will not actually age. which is kind of cool.

So if you take care of them, of the bugs in your body, you will not age.

Right, so you got a hundred trillion bacteria, you have over 10,000 different species of bacteria, and just last year they discovered another thousand, so who knows.

Right.

So 99% of the genetic material that exists in you and me is non-human genetic material. We're only, our genes are actually so unimportant, it's kind of humorous. And when people take a family history, what they're actually finding out is if your parents taught you how to eat, and most people's parents teach the kids how to eat, and your parents had diabetes, or your parents had high blood pressure, or your parents had coronary artery disease, disease and you eat like your parents did, the odds are that you will do that. For two reasons, the food choices that you made, but more importantly, you inherited your bacteria from your parents and actually your siblings.

So it's not the genes of your parents that mean you are susceptible to heart disease or Alzheimer's or whatever, right? It's not the genes of your parents, it's typically the foods they ate that you're probably eating the exact same foods that cause the same type of problems.

Correct, yeah. I mean, there is an Alzheimer's gene and my program, according to Dale Bredesen, is the best way not to activate that gene. And there are certain genes that people inherit that make the world's the meanest, nastiest, stickiest cholesterol that most doctors don't even measure. And oh, by the way, if you're prescribed a statin drug, you know, a lipid-lowering drug, it actually worsens this other particle. So yeah, there are genes, but there's such a small part. Nature magazine had a big article in late 2018, I think, proving that only About 7 or 8% of what will happen to us is based on our genes and 97 or 98% of what's going to happen to us is based on our environment and our food choices.

Our decisions.

Our decisions, yeah.

Now you said we can, you know, aging is essentially a choice is what I'm hearing you say, but if someone watching this saying, well, Dr. Gundry, you've got white hair, you look older than when you were 10 years old.

Yes.

So how can you say that you can eat certain things that can reverse aging or can make you not age when you look older than when you were younger?

That's true. I'm definitely chronologically older, but recently on my podcast, I had Dr. Terry Wahls, who I think is very famous, rightfully so, for reversing her MS. for multiple sclerosis. And she did it via diet. She did it initially by eating nine cups of vegetables a day.

And.

I dare people to try to eat nine cups of vegetables.

A lot of fiber, right?

A lot of fiber. And we'll get back to fiber because I think that's probably the key. And this is actually what Jacqueline was trying to say, if it tastes good, spit it out. And Terry became famous for telling people that when you look in the toilet every morning, you should see a very large coiled snake looking back up at you. And in fact, in the Plant Paradox, in the original manuscript, I had said, when you look in the toilet, you should see a giant anaconda looking back up at you. And my editor, Julie Wills, called me up. She said, Do you know there's a movie where an Anaconda is coming out of the toilet? Coming out of the toilet. And I said, oh, yeah. She said, I don't think we want that visual in your book. And she said, Let's take that out. But what we didn't know, what you didn't know, I didn't know, is that that giant coiled snake is not the fiber and the roughage that we ate. It's actually bacteria that have eaten the fiber.

No way. And the bacteria inside of us. That's coming out.

That's coming out. So most of your poop is, if you will, baby bacteria.

No way.

And so the more.

So we want to get the bacteria out of us.

No, you want them to grow and prosper. and the more they grow and- It.

Sounds like our aliens in our body.

It's like, you know, eating us. You're absolutely right. And one of the things that is kind of hard to embrace is.

We.

Probably only exist as a place for bacteria to live on Earth.

Wow.

And, you know, intelligence.

If there was no bacteria inside of us.

We're done.

We would die.

So we know that we can breed germ-free mice. And interesting fun fact that I put in the Longevity Paradox, my fifth grade science project was to build a germ-free mouse environment. This was in 19- Wow. 1960. And so this isn't my first rodeo. So so we can build, we can raise germ-free mice that have no bacteria in them, have no bugs in them. And they live short lives.

Really?

They have horrible immune systems.

They get sick.

They get sick, yeah. And they, so they're the basis of so much of what we know. And so you can, so bacteria are incredibly important. And we know now that these bacteria actually teach our immune system from day one. In fact, scary, we used to think that the placenta, where the baby, the womb, the uterus that feeds the baby is sterile. Of course it has to be, because the baby has to be sterile. The placenta is full of bacteria.

Feeding the baby.

Feeding the baby. And it turns out that the bacteria in the placenta actually give information to the baby's immune system before the baby even pops out of the womb.

So we need these viruses, these good viruses.

We need these viruses and bacteria. We need them. And in fact, fun fact, long ago the only way to treat bacterial infections were viruses that could actually infect bacteria and kill viruses. And Eli Lilly Company from Indianapolis got its start, this giant pharmaceutical company, as what's called a bacteriophage company. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. And it turns out that viruses actually are really useful in us as well. We have trillions and trillions and trillions of viruses in us. right now?

What's the difference between a good virus and a bad virus?

If the good virus is doing what it's supposed to do. Okay, let's do a deep dive into microbiology.

Okay. And what is the definition of virus?

Okay, so a virus is probably the smallest reproductible form of life. However, we want to define life. So most living things are capable of reproducing themselves one way or another, dividing or multiplying one way or another.

Just like humans.

Exactly.

So a virus unfortunately has to have, cannot replicate itself. It has to borrow another sell and take over the cells' machinery to manufacture more copies of viruses. And that's how they get reproduced. But in the end, every living creature is here just to make a new copy. And you and I only exist was to make a new copy. And, you know, my hopefully actually only exists so my bacteria can make new copies of them themselves.

Blood sugar management or control is one of the key factors of either being healthy or potentially linking to one of these other, I guess, diseases. Is that right?

That's right.

Yeah.

And what it really comes down to which kind of gets at your question of what is metabolism? Metabolism is fundamentally the way that we make energy in the body. So we eat food and, you know, food has, you know, fat and glucose in it. And either fat or glucose, glucose is sugar, can be used to convert into a type of energy that our cells can use, which is called ATP. So we take in this substrate, but we have to convert it through our mitochondria in our cells to a form of energy we can use, a currency that our body understands and can use. That process of conversion is metabolism. And this is happening in every single one of the 37 trillion cells in our body. And it has to work properly.

So break it down for me then. Fat or glucose, or I guess carbohydrates, enters the body through the foods we're eating, right? what happens after that? How is it processed in the body? Through the cells, through the mitochondria, how is it processed?

Yeah, so looking at carbohydrates for instance, they go into our digestive tract, they're broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream, broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. These go into the bloodstream and let's say we're talking about glucose, which is blood sugar. This signals to the body, particularly an organ called the pancreas, pancreas to release insulin, which is a hormone. That hormone allows you to take that sugar out of the bloodstream through the cell membrane into the cell. Once it's inside the cell, it's broken down even further and then goes into the mitochondria to go through a chemical processing that then creates ATP, which is this molecule that can be then used to essentially power all the millions of cellular processes that are happening every second.

So ATP is the power. It's the fuel.

It's the fuel. It's the battery in our body.

Okay, and so the way it's processed is it's based on the foods we eat, whether it be fat or sugar that comes through. Does that determine how the quality of the energy or what does that mean within, is it all equally the same when it converts an ATP or?

Well, I think the way to think about it is to really focus on the mitochondria. This is the energy factory of the the cell. This is the powerhouse of the cell. And the thing that people really need to understand is that our diet and our lifestyle in the modern Western world, so past 50 to 100 years, so much of it is actually damaging the mitochondria of our cell and creating problems in that conversion process. So for instance, when we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days the average American- Is eating a lot of sugar. Like 100 times more than we were like 100 years ago. the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes stress on the mitochondria and creates damage. And one analogy I sometimes use is, imagine you had a factory that was making something like cheese, and all of a sudden you get 100 times more of the raw product, like milk, delivered to the factory. The workers would be like, We don't know where to put this. We can't work. They go on on strike. There's nowhere to store it. There's no refrigerators. It would all go bad. All of a sudden you actually produce less cheese even though you have more substrate. And so it's like we are giving so much of the substrate to the body that it's gumming up the system. It's breaking down the factory and creating problems. And the molecular way this is happening is that each time you have these glucose spikes from eating these refined products or added sugars, your body's releasing more of that insulin. It's saying, okay, more glucose in the bloodstream, so we have to produce more insulin to get it out of the bloodstream. And over time, the body sees all this insulin circulating, and it's like, we can't bring more of this into the cell. There's too much. And so it actually puts up a block, which is called insulin resistance, which.

Is that cellular process that leads you.

Towards problems like diabetes.

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And so what's happening now is the.

Body- and that's why you're storing fat or you're storing other dead cells that.

You don't need to keep in the body, I guess, right? Right, because insulin is the signal saying tons of glucose around for energy, so we don't need to burn fat for energy. So insulin is also a block on fat burning. So it's this chemical signal saying, Too much glucose around, blocking it from getting into the cell, and also telling the body not to burn fat. So of course, for people who are dealing with trouble losing weight, insulin is the hormone we really, really need to be thinking about. And so we reduce our insulin sensitivity. Now we have lots of glucose circulating in the bloodstream, but it's not able to efficiently get into the cell. And then you've got all these other things that can hurt our mitochondria. And really a mitochondria energy-centric view of health can really help us. Some other things that can hurt the mitochondria are oxidative stress. So, I know you talked about this a little bit on the podcast with David Perlmutter, but aside from glucose, eating too much fructose, so this comes with like sodas or fruit juice or things that have really high concentration of fructose, it's not going to actually stimulate insulin in the way that glucose does, but what it does is it goes into the cell, and it's converted into something called uric acid. And that uric acid creates oxidative stress, which is sort of this sort of damaging reactive molecule in the mitochondria and creates mitochondrial damage. So now again, you've got more trouble processing energy through mitochondria. Environmental toxins are actually a huge problem as well. They can directly damage the machinery of the mitochondria. So we're thinking about things like pesticides and a lot of the fragrances in our personal care products. and a lot of the fragrances and chemicals in our home care products, these things actually go into our bodies, damage our mitochondria, make it difficult to produce energy effectively. Chronic stress can damage our mitochondria through cortisol and through our stress hormones. So it's interesting to think about how all these different aspects of modern life fundamentally feed down into damaging this precious part of our cell that creates energy.

So blood sugar management and metabolism management, is that right? So the main things we should be thinking about? Yeah. How does blood sugar and metabolism work together?

Yeah, so the way that those sort of things link up is that if your blood sugar is quite erratic, like let's say it's going up and down in big spikes and valleys.

Every day, yeah. You're having lots of sugar, you're just.

Eating poorly, you're stressed, you're overwhelmed. Yeah, and the majority of foods on the shelves in our grocery stores now have added sugar, like well over 60% So it's not unusual for an American to be on that blood sugar roller coaster up, down, up, down, up, down. And that's called glycemic variability. And that process of glycemic variability is very damaging to our metabolism through the mechanisms we spoke about of causing insulin resistance by stressing the body to make too much insulin over and over. But those high blood sugar spikes in their own right can cause damage as well. When your blood sugar acutely goes really high, like after eating a Pop-Tart or eating a pastry or something like that, or a big bowl of pasta, that spike can lead to inflammation. It can lead to oxidative stress because of the way that it's overwhelming our systems and creating free radicals. It can also cause a process called glycation, which is where sugar sticks to things in the body. And so if you can imagine if your concentration of blood sugar is really high, it's kind of going to just stick to things more like your blood vessels and proteins, and that's not good. That's like a signal for the body that something's wrong. And so all of these things kind of coalesce to just creating problems. So the more that we can minimize our glycemic variability and go from spikes and valleys to more gentle rolling hills, the better we are, the better we're going to basically be treating our cells. And it's not just the sort of like cellular optimization we're trying to do. It's also the way you feel. I think a lot of us have had that experience where we have a really high carb meal, a big dessert, and we feel like we kind of have a crash afterwards. It's like that post meal crash. We feel lethargic. like we may need to have another cup of coffee or even feel jittery after it, like a big high carb meal. We really understand how that works. The body sees a huge load of glucose from a high carb meal. The body then surges out that insulin, overcompensates, soaks up all that glucose, and you crash. And in that crash state is when we feel fatigue, potentially some anxiety, and it's when people usually feel cravings. So by limiting- you- want more when you crash. You want more to bring yourself back up because you've kind of crashed and then you're on the vicious cycle. And I think the majority of American bodies are on that cycle because you think about what we eat. It's like breakfast, it's cereal, juice, toast, Pop-Tarts, pastries, you know, sweetened coffee beverages. That's all refined sugar and refined grains. Then you go to lunch and bread, tortillas, wraps, chips, you know, all of that stuff. And then you go to dinner, pasta, potatoes, whatever, and then it's dessert. And it's like, if you're not, if you're just going along the normal American cultural treadmill of what's normal to eat, you're on a glucose roller coaster. And that means that your day might be highly labile in terms of the energy, mood, performance, cravings. And so, learning just simple ways to balance out that glucose roller coaster can be an amazing life hack.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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