4 Ways To Live A Healthier & Longer Life EP 1134

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Father's Day is coming up, and for lots of dads out there, dad doesn't quite cover it. They're groundskeepers, patio whisperers, and rogue leaf vigilantes too. So this year, show dad some love with gifts from the Home Depot. They've got fast free delivery on handy gear that helps dad do his thing. We're talking Ryobi cordless outdoor tools like the Ryobi 40 volt expanded string trimmer. Find the perfect Father's Day gift at the Home Depot. Shop in store and online at homedepot.com, free delivery subject to availability. Fuel your greatness with Wonderful Pistachios no Shells. Wonderful Pistachios is a great source of protein with zero guilt. Each one ounce serving has six grams of protein, giving you over 10% of your daily value. Pistachios are known for their protein power, fiber, and better for you unsaturated fats for a combination that may help keep you feeling fuller longer. And now there's a new way to snack strong with unsalted no shells holding the salt not the flavor for a snack that packs a protein punch. Visit wonderfulpistachios.com to learn more. This is episode number 1134 on the ways to live a happier, healthier, longer life. 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. I've got a big announcement. The School of Greatness is available on American Public Television. That's right. When I started my podcast, I had zero listeners and I kept going because I wanted to help people get the information that I didn't have access to growing up. Now, not only have we become one of the top podcasts in the world, but I'm excited to tell you that the School of Greatness Show is on TV and you can go to lewishouse.com/watch to see when it's available on your TV. Every person tuning in really helps us right now. So if you're able to also share this with anyone you think would find it valuable that doesn't consume podcasts regularly, that would be greatly appreciated. Again, that's lewishouse.com/watch. Check it out now. I'm excited about today's podcast because it's all about optimizing your health. to live longer, better and happier. Because on the School of Greatness, we've had so many great health experts talk about the different ways you can take control of your health. And I wanted to bring together some of the best moments from these episodes that really helped shape my knowledge and give me a deeper understanding of what to do and what not to do, most importantly. So in this episode, we discuss what you need to do to live longer with Dr. Stephen Gundry, how we can prevent and treat chronic disease by changing our diets with Dr. Mark Hyman, how food affects our brain and the link to Alzheimer's with Dr. Lisa Mosconi and the main causes of cancer and what we can do about it with Dr. Jason Fung. This will be powerful, so make sure to share this with a few friends you think would be inspired by this as well. You can copy and paste this link, lewishouse.com/1134 or just take the link wherever you're listening to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Okay, in just a moment, it's time to take back control of your health. In this first section, Dr. Steven Gundry shares the top ways to live a healthier and longer life. I want all of us to stick around as long as possible here on this earth. For people that want to live longer and be healthy while they live longer, not having to get surgeries all the time. Right. If you had three to five minutes max, to talk to someone who said, I just want to live longer. I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys and you've got three minutes with them. What would you say in three minutes are the things they must do every day or as often as they can for the rest of their life to extend their life?

The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. The only purpose of food. and preferably it'll be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one. The evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil, if you really wanted to live well for a very long time, olive oil is the key. Two of the blue zones, actually three if you count the Acheirologi, use a liter of olive oil per week. Now that's a lot of olive oil. It's like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So, there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talk about where you took 65 year old people and we'll dumb it down real quick. Two groups. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic. The other group had to eat a low fat Mediterranean diet, both Mediterranean diets, Spain. At the end of five years, the olive oil group had better memory, had improved memory than when they started. The low-fat group lost memory. The women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat group. People in both groups who had coronary artery disease, the group that got the olive oil had 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low fat diet. And so if three blue zones and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you, olive oil grows brain cells. And it's not the oil per se, it's actually the polyphenols in olive oil. Olive oil, the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery. And I've actually published data on this that your blood vessels, you cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels. if you have olive oil in your system.

Huh.

Yeah.

So, you know, drink the dumb stuff.

You drink it?

Yeah, I do.

Wow.

I take a shot of it.

Craig's always talking about how he can drink as much as possible.

But what I would urge people to do is, so you can cook an olive oil. This myth that olive oil oxidizes when you cook it is one of the worst internet myths there is.

Really?

It turns out that olive oil is the least oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize.

Oxidize, meaning like evaporate.

No, oxidize means gets damaged.

Damaged, got it.

Okay.

It turns out everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damaged.

It's not.

So you can burn it as much as you want. You know, cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years. And you know, there's not a lot of dead Italians from cooking an olive oil. Okay, so you gotta get olive oil. So that's number one.

Number one.

Number two, you got to take vitamin D3. You got to. Vitamin D3, not D. Well, there's D2, there's D1.

What's vitamin D3 and why is it important?

So D3 is the active form of vitamin D that we use. You will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream live the longest and live well compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3. It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation.

Vitamin D is also through the sun, is that correct?

But it's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the sun.

Really?

Nearly impossible. 80% of Southern Californians are vitamin D deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeve shirts and.

We'Re still getting a lot still.

We're inside a lot, you know, I live in Palm Springs. It's pretty hot in the summer.

Really hot.

Tend not to go out a lot in the summer. So we don't have enough vitamin D. And so you have to swallow vitamin D. The University of California San Diego published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9,600 international units a day. So basically 10,000 international units.

Wow.

They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.

You can't overdose on vitamin D. I.

Have yet to see vitamin D toxicity and I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years in patients every three months. I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead. So far, so good.

Right.

Here's just to tell you how crazy this is. If I feel I'm getting something, if I'm coming down with a scratchy throat or something, I'll take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3.

How many capsules is that?

Three days. Well, so you can get 5,000s, right? So that's 10 capsules three times a day for three days. So I'm basically taking half a million international units of vitamin D. to ward off a virus.

Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratchy throat.

It really doesn't work. Vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered.

So vitamin C really doesn't help that much?

Really doesn't help that much. We can get into vitamin C and I think everybody should take a time-release vitamin C twice a day and it's.

Actually for a different purpose. What's the purpose?

All right, quick version. All right, quick version. So you and I are one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C. us, monkeys and guinea pigs. And we have actually all the genes to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene. Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar, from glucose. And it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C. So the theory is, and I like the theory is, we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants in our diet. And so it was unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C and the theory goes we'd have some extra glucose left over that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times were rough and we're the only fat storing ape. So the problem is vitamin C is essential to repair collagen and everybody collagen, okay? The reason smokers get wrinkles is collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks in collagen with vitamin C and smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress. So they don't have any vitamin C. In fact, here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease, I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts of vitamin C while I get the rest of his diet squared away rather than tell him to stop smoking. Now the reason I say that is, and I talk about this in the book, there's this fascinating island people called the Kitavans in New Guinea who smoke like fiends. They eat 60% of their diet is taro root, the other part of their diet is coconut oil. And they live into their mid-90s with no medical care, but they've been studied extensively. There has never been a case of a heart attack, heart disease or a stroke in these smokers. What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet.

Olive oil as well?

They don't have any olive oil. They have coconut oil, that's their coconut.

They don't have any olives down there. So you can do without olive oil and still live a long life. Yeah.

But you think olive oil will-- yeah, since olive oil is so readily available, you might as well. Might as well. Might as well. Okay, so anyhow, back to vitamin C. You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they'd bleed to death on long ocean voyages. Actually, 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages, just dying from scurvy. And the British Navy, the reason they're called limeys is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them limes to take on the voyage, that they wouldn't die of scurvy. And that's why the British Navy is still called limeys. So vitamin C repairs the cracks in collagen and our blood vessels are flexing all the time. And so these cracks have to be repaired. And if they're not repaired, you basically bleed to death. We have a system of repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol. And cholesterol will patch those cracks.

Interesting.

So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you'll be able to repair those cracks. And there's a wild study, I mean, head down a rabbit hole, you can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C. And they will live half as long, as a normal rat. If you then put vitamin C in their water, they will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C, but they're drinking the water throughout the day. So, vitamin C unfortunately- We have to manufacture it. We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up. But in the meantime, the average person should take like 1,000 milligrams of timed-release vitamin C twice a day. Okay.

To cover their ass. Wow. Okay. So the first thing I heard you say, this three minutes is turning into 20 minutes. It's okay.

No worries. The first thing I heard is olive oil. Oh, and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the dose gene. Polyphenol and olive oil.

Okay. You will actually make vitamin C. Okay, there you go. So there you go. Another good reason. So have olive oil and vitamin D.

Have lots of vitamin D. Three. D3. D3.

And then what's next to live a long life?

Next is you gotta get some form of long chain omega-3 fat, better known as fish oil. And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae based DHA and EPA, but here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you wanna call me a fat head, I will attack you.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can just see now the internet lighting up and getting angry is a fan.

Fat head.

So half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA. So half, basically half of your brain is fish oil. And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, you look at people, what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. She didn't know why it was, but we now know DHA is really what makes your brain.

So sushi is good.

Sushi is actually not a good idea.

Oh, wow.

Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are Sushi eaters or dentists, so. And particularly sashimi grade tuna.

God, it's so good.

You just wanna. Just kind of want to stay away from it.

Oh, sugarfish is amazing, though.

Yeah.

And it's got the grains, too.

Yeah, it's got the grains, you know, so.

So no sushi.

Yeah.

So once in a while.

Yeah, once in a while.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But, yeah. So fish oil is incredibly important.

Yeah.

And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking, you know, thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years, you want to get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil. I mean, you can go to Costco, I don't know. And you look on the back and you find serving size and make sure it says one serving size. They love to fool you. They may say two or three and then you look down below and you see DHA and you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule and you add it up and say, oh, okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule, so I need to take four.

Wow.

Four a day.

1,000 a day.

Okay.

DHA.

We got olive oil, we've got vitamin D3, we have fish oils. What else do we need to live longer?

So you gotta have polyphenols in your diet. So, what the heck is a polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywannaphenol.

Okay.

Phenols are plant compounds. Polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight. Just interesting fact. We know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol. The other one is quercetin or quercetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make because they.

Need more to protect themselves.

Yeah, exactly. It's basically Suntan. You know, they've actually protected themselves against sunburn.

Interesting.

Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself.

Right.

Okay. So polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So, for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries. And I take black raspberry capsules, by the way, and it's in the book.

There you go.

So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols. And olives that are stressed produce better. They are even better. Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.

So what about like, you know, leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens or do you want healthy, thriving looking?

Excellent question. It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these creatures, these plants actually have to work harder and they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmer's market and the poor little organic vegetables have got potholes of insects and they don't look very good, you go, I want that guy. That guy he is struggling. He is going to just be so loaded with polyphenols.

Really?

And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing, you know, my signature product Vital Reds, it's pure polyphenols primarily and they're bitter. So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're going to mask these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, I had the pleasure of knowing Jack Lalanne, who you would know is really the godfather of fitness and nutrition in the United States. And I knew him in his later years. And Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good, spit it out.

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Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things is actually what is going to give the bugs that are actually going to keep you alive what they want to eat. and don't, you know, more bitter, more better. So, you know, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into you, the better.

But you can get that through capsules and other things, too. You don't.

Yeah, you can. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements, because we, if you look at even, you know, really good organic eaters, most human beings only eat maybe 20 different plant species.

I probably eat like three.

Yeah, yeah, most people do.

Like five maybe.

Yeah, you know, and ketchup is not a vegetable. It's a tomato and we can't do that. So our ancestors, and even looking at modern hunter-gatherers like the Hunza tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And you think about it, all those plants are grown organically. they're in six feet of loam soil, they got their cool microbiome. So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols. And so, you know, if people think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy without supplementation, I got Ocean Front Property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them.

Right. Exactly.

Okay, so I want to get one more thing. I've heard that but in order to extend your life, you need to, I can't remember the name, extend something at the end of your.

Telomeres.

Telomeres. What is that?

Or telomeres.

So how do we, is that true? You have to extend this.

So that is one theory of longevity. And it is a, it's a good theory. I like the theory. It's controversial. Vitamin D. Turns out that people with the highest levels of vitamin D have the longest telomeres.

There you go.

So why wouldn't you do that?

Right.

If you like that theory.

There you go.

So that's vitamin D is, vitamin D. It's, if anybody is, if anybody takes away, it's vitamin D. So you've given.

Four things so far. Let's give me one final thing that can extend our life and the, the quality of our life as well.

Great.

So the last thing we want to do is we want turn off as much as we can the sensor called mTOR, originally called the mammalian target of rapamycin. It's subsequently been discovered in all organisms besides mammals. And so now it's called the mechanistic target of rapamycin. And so mTOR is an energy sensor, and it's in all of our cells. And Basically, we come from a circadian rhythm system of plentiful food at one time of the year and very little food at another time of year.

Right, fruit sometimes, not the other.

Exactly. We use fruit to gain weight for the winter and that's a whole another subject. So, mTOR senses energy availability and it senses sugar molecules. and it also senses amino acids, protein. Now, it turns out that it's very sensitive to particular amino acids rather than all amino acids. The ones it's most sensitive to are amino acids contained in animal protein. And animals include fish, animal protein includes eggs, it includes cheeses, and besides meat, so beautiful work that's been done. A lot of it done by now my friend, Walter Longo from USC from the Longevity Center. Is that the mimicking, fasting, mimicking diet?

I've taken that a couple of times.

He got a patent for Prolong.

Yeah, Prolong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got a patent for it. So Prolong, yeah. So Prolong is a vegan low amino acid diet that you do for five days.

Yeah, it's tough the first time.

It is.

For me, it was.

Now, in the book, I wrote about in the Plant Paradox actually before he made promo, but I write about it again and he and I, and he's even given me a nice shout out on the back. If you, the idea is you want to reduce mTOR as much as you can and the longer, the more you suppress it the longer you live. And here's the reason. you, if times are rough and you sense that times are rough, your body, your immune system actually goes around and looks at all the cells in your body and says, who's pulling their weight? Who is really, you know, contributing to this effort? And who's a slacker? Who looks a little weird? Who's not, you know, not doing. And it actually instructs cells to commit suicide, and it's called autophagy. and it tells cells, sorry, you're not out of here, you die. And so it gets the fittest of the fittest to survive.

It makes you stronger.

And you have to have these periods of time. You have to call the herd, as we say. So unless you do that, you have all of these cells that just kind of build up the debris. They're called senescent cells. Some people call them some zombie cells. And it's the amount of these zombie cells that is actually going to make you deteriorate long before you should.

It gets sick and it makes you feel bad.

Exactly. So you got to call the hurt. So how you do that? Five days in a row, once a month.

Once a month you do this?

Once a month, five days in a row, five days in a row. You follow a vegan diet, of about 900 calories and I got some great recipes. It's easy to do and you do it five days in a row. It's as if you did calorie restriction every day and what this does is not only call the herd, but it activates stem cells.

In this section, Dr. Mark Hyman talks about how we can prevent and treat chronic diseases By changing our diets, one of the lessons I'm learning over and over is how important our diet is to success in every area of our lives. What do we categorize as sick?

That's a great question. So what's obese?

What's sick? What's...

So at the top level, we have to understand that over the last 40 years, a tsunami has come that we weren't aware was coming. that we weren't prepared for and still haven't grappled with. And that tsunami is chronic disease and food related illness. In 40 years.

In 40 years.

Did we have chronic disease prior to this? We did, of course we did, but not the magnitude. We used to have like 5% obesity rates in this country in the early 60s.

It's 40% now in most states.

I thought it was like 30, like a few years ago. Nope, nobody, nope. It's like 40%. Many states are 40% and many are is pushing 40. So it's 35 to 40, depending on where you look at it. Like California is probably less, Colorado is less, but Mississippi and Alabama are, you know, 40 plus. So we have six out of every 10 Americans who's got a chronic illness, four out of 10 who have more than one. By 10 years from now, we're gonna have 83 million with three or more chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, dementia, you name it. We are having 11 million people and this is I think a conservative estimate. 11 million people around the world die every year from bad food, from ultra processed food and not enough good food. Now, I think it's more like 50 million when you look at all the related conditions and so forth. It's a staggering number that beats out smoking, war, violence, accidents, you name it. Nothing else comes close. Not malaria, TB, AIDS, all that is a fraction, a third of the deaths that are caused by chronic illness. And they're mostly preventable and they're mostly caused by food and they're mostly caused by the ultra processed food that our food system produces en masse. It's the biggest industry on the planet. It's $15 trillion, about 17% of the world's global product and it is controlled by a few dozen CEOs that are in monopolies around seed production, agrochemicals, fertilizer, processed food companies. It's staggering how the system has sort of just over the last 40 years completely transformed. And, you know, I remember like I was in some store or cafe and I saw this picture of Woodstock and I'm looking at the all the sea of people and the 60s, right? 69. There wasn't one overweight person. I watched this movie, I think it was called Amazing Grace about Aretha Franklin, African-American church. Now, African-Americans, 80% of African-American women are overweight. It is, you know, 80% today. 80%.

Why is that?

Well, because they're targeted by the food industry, because they're in a vicious cycle of economic stress, of social stress, of unfair targeting and manipulation by by the food industry. This is well documented by, for example, studies from Yale, where they look at the amount of advertising and targeting to poor and African-American and Hispanic communities, it's staggering. And there was not one overweight person, this sea of African-Americans, in 1970. And so it literally just happened. I was 11 years old in 1970. And in my lifetime, you see this change. So we had this staggering problem of chronic illness which people suffer from is bankrupting people, that's bankrupting our country. I mean, think about the amount of economic stress. We talked about insurance, too.

I mean, so much insurance money that's involved in this, too. People are having to go to the doctor so much more probably now because of these issues, right?

Absolutely. People-- and then many people are not adequately covered. So there's a lot of co-pays. I mean, you know, people can have $10,000, $20,000 in co-pays. I had a patient the other day who you know, had diabetes and I fixed his diabetes through food. And he says, I saved $10,000 a year on co-pays for my insulin. Just the drugs. Yeah, and when you look at the amount on diabetes spent in this country, which is basically one out of every two Americans has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, one-third of Medicare spending is on diabetes. One-third of Medicare is on diabetes. Medicare, if it was a company, would be the biggest company in the world, a trillion dollar budget. a year.

Shut up.

Yes, one-third of our total federal tax revenue expected to grow to 100% of our mandatory spending by 2048. And in six years, Louis, six years, the Medicare Trust Fund, which is sort of the bank account that we use to make sure we cover Medicare. It's a little complicated how it works, but the Medicare Trust Fund is going to be out of money. So that means that we're going to have to get a trillion dollars a year out of our tax revenue. We're not covering. Oh, my gosh. This is a threat to our our economy. It's a threat to our political stability. It's a threat even to national security. Those because seven out of ten kids who apply for the military get rejected. Can't get in. Because they're too fat or unfit to fight. Yes, it's a, it's, there's 700 admirals and generals that published a report called unhealthy and unprepared about the threat in our military and national security. And not only that, soldiers are overweight. So we're feeding them crap. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the number one reason for medical evacuations was not war injury, was obesity-related problems. Yes, 100%.

Obesity-related problems. What does that mean?

Like they're-- Injuries.

Like a heart problem.

Injuries from being overweight. And you can read about this. I didn't make this shit up. In that report, it's unhealthy and unprepared. Just Google it. You can read it yourself.

Wow.

It's staggering. So we have, you know, a $22 trillion debt. We have, you know, this threat of chronic disease exploding. It's getting worse and worse. Medicare for all is kind of a silly idea and so is repealing Obamacare. Now they're going to help the problem unless we figure out how to stop people from going into the system in the first place.

Into the system, meaning getting unhealthy.

Yeah, if they don't need medical care.

It'S cheap, you know. So let's go back to diabetes for a second. tell me again the stat on diabetes, how many people have it or are pre-diabetic? And what, I'm uneducated on this, so 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.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin. You need insulin.

Yeah.

To do your pancreas dies. because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced. It's not like a gatekeeper, it lets the glucose into your cells.

So it's really important. So how does that die?

How does it die from that?

I mean, how does the pancreas die?

How does it get to that point? It's like you get multiple sclerosis or pancreatitis. 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. Okay. 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 God. I was working in, when I was a resident in an urgent care center, and this woman comes in for back pain. She's 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 it? Soda? I'm like, what is that? That's Coca-Cola.

No.

I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She said, well, he likes it. Oh my gosh. Oh my God, listen, my wife showed me this video on social media the other day. It was of a baby. Looked 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.

And then the baby like, I want more. I want more. And then the baby like, wraps the thing and like stuffs it in his face. I was like, oh my God, it was just so crazy. And it's highly addictive. So yeah, so now we're seeing one in two Americans suffer from either pre-diabetes.

Or type two.

Or type two 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 and 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 this food. That it's because that's the food we produce. And so that's the other part of the problem. 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, no, yeah, but I'm going even further why I got interested in this. Because as a, why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I thinking about my patients' diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food.

Some people, well, how many are most of them? Is this like 50%? 70%. 80% of anyone that comes in to the hospital or your patients.

Yeah.

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 could 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. as agriculture and food. By far, like by twice as much as the next lobby group. By gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, right.

And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if I'm gonna 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?

The root cause and why. And then it became clear to me that it's our agricultural system that's driving.

So much of the problem. 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 loves 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 because you look pretty good. Well, I train hard too, right? I go the weights. And 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.

I'm the president, it's not 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.

Yeah.

'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 gonna go through them because it's just, people just don't know. The celebrity endorsements, right?

Yeah.

First, you know, obviously, you know, celebrity enforcements, 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 wanted 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 a schedule a few days later, I call that we couldn't show it. I'm like, why? She's 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. I go to 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, because they're, they're in the, you know, in the funding of these, these big soda companies. And then, of course, they, they fund research. So they fund 12 times as much research, 12 billion dollars worth of research.

A year to study nutrition. What would be the first steps that someone could take to help.

Well, I think, you know, it seems.

Like such a big- It is, it is.

It is a little bit. So let's talk about some of the solutions. So we know, you know, food is causing chronic disease. It's destroying our economy. It's crippling our climate. It's destroying our environment and killing all the pollinators and all biodiversity. And it's causing social injustice because it targets poor minorities who suffer from problems. It prevents kids from learning in school.

Because they're eating all this crap.

It threatens our national security.

Creates political instability. So we know all these things.

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But the good news is that by fixing the food system, we can solve these. And how do we do it? Well, it's going to need citizen action. It's going to need business innovation. and it's going to need policy change and of course other philanthropists and governments to help get on board. And I think that's what's really exciting to me because there's so much hope. So for example on a personal level, you can shift what you eat and what you do to drive change in the marketplace. Why are companies like Nestle and Unilever and Danone creating regenerative ag programs within their supply chain? Why are they trying to up the quality of their food and take out chemicals because consumers are demanding it.

Well, they're buying companies like Primal Kitchen that have like- Kraft. Right.

Bought Primal Kitchen, which is basically a Whole Foods, really high quality nutritious product with no junk in it.

I'm curious, you said something about nut milk and about dairy. Has dairy been declining?

Yeah, dairy in the last five years? Yes, dairy consumption. It's been declining dramatically. Do you know the percentages or the amount of milk? Yeah, I think over the last few years it's gone down about 25%. Borden, which is a big milk producer, has been around since 18, I think '87, has gone bankrupt.

What? Yeah.

A lot of these milk producers, now people are still eating cheese, they're eating yogurt, they're eating things, but actual milk consumption has gone down and the demand.

For milk has gone up. Why is that?

Is that because of education? I think probably a lot of reasons. I think 75% of the population is lactose intolerant. So they don't feel good.

I used to drink so much milk every day.

And how did you feel? Fine?

I always had like a stuffy nose.

Right.

I was always tired in workouts and practices. I was always blowing my nose.

Actually, milk is nature's perfect food, but only if you're a calf. I mean, we're the only species it consumes milk after weaning. There are very few populations that seem to thrive on milk, the Masai and some of the Northern Europeans. The other problem, the dairy we're eating today is not the dairy we ate. So there are heirloom cows, I mean you travel around the world, you travel, I travel, and you go see these really weird looking cows in other countries and I'm like, what is that? And it's a cow. But these are complex breeds that have different types of protein the milk, different types of casing. And the Holstein, the sort of the homogenized cow, I don't mean homogenized milk, but they're all the same. Not the same. Fertilized by like this three bulls, I think. They get the sperm of the bull. And it's like they're all the same. And they have bred out the beneficial or the safe casing, which is A2 casing, and then A1 casing, which causes more inflammation, more congestion, more irritable more autoimmunity, more skin issues. So people are getting that milk isn't always the best. And I think then, you know, people are eating nut milks. Now, they're not really.

Are those good for you, though? Because a lot of people have still, like, skin problems.

Yeah.

Well, nut milks are problematic.

So one, almond milk is great, but, you know, almonds are.

You can't have too much of it.

Yeah.

I started to get, like, a rash after, like, I switched from milk. Yeah. Years ago. I started to get like eczema, like a little eczema right here and there. And then when I stopped drinking it, it would go away and I was like, huh, maybe I'm drinking so much.

Almond butter, almond milk, everything. Well, everything had carrageenan in it, which is causes leaky gut. You get leaky gut, you get eczema. So it's a thickener they put into these milks. They put a lot of sugar in these milks.

They put a lot of gums in these milks.

So you have to be very careful about which one you're having. Just because it's healthier doesn't mean it's healthy. Yeah, and I don't want to remember like again drinking tons of soy milk. It could be GMO soy, it could be full glyphosate. If not, it could be, you know, getting huge amounts of these phytoestrogens, which our bodies aren't really meant to get. Eating traditional foods and traditional amounts are fine. Tofu, miso, tempeh, those are fine. Really? Those are how people have consumed soy over millennia. But not 10 pounds a day and not three lots of gallons of it. No, I had a stepdaughter once, she loved soy milk, she was drinking it all day. And she started like at nine years old getting little breasts. And I'm like, well that's not good.

You know? Yeah.

And so yeah, we have to be smart about it. And I think, you know, if you're using a little here and there, but I don't recommend people drink it as a drink.

Really?

You know, if you want to put a little coffee. Almond milk or soy milk. There's soy milk, almond milk, coconut milk.

Don't drink oat milk.

No, I mean I think have it sometimes.

You have a glass once a week.

Maybe it's okay, but not like drinking glasses every day. Probably not. But you could add it to things. Sure, you know, put it Smoothie, you know, you kind of mix them up, you know, it's macadamia milk, cashew milk, there's hazelnut milk, there's all kinds of milks now.

So, I like, you know, I like macadamia.

Macadamia is so good, it's like sweet tasting. Yeah, you can make your own nut milks. I have cookbooks, my food, what the heck should I cook and others.

Teach you how to actually make your own nut milks at home.

You soak the nuts, you put them.

In a blender with some water, there's.

No additives, ingredients, sugar, it's great. But not too much of it, is what you're saying. Yeah, that's the challenge. It's like anything, like anything. Except for water.

Drink a lot of water.

That's good. Yeah, I mean, listen, anything, it can kill you, right? Water can kill you. Marathon runners who overhydrate, their body is diluted, their blood is diluted with too much water, and they get what we call low sodium or hyponatremia, and that causes seizures and death. So yeah, you can die from drinking too much water. So it's all about eating stuff in complex amounts and in a complex variety of foods.

So a variety of food is good.

We used to eat 800 species of plants.

That's good, not having the same like three things every day.

Well, listen, most of our diet is corn, soy, and corn, soy, and wheat. Most of our diet. You know, and in other countries, rice in there. And those are, you know, all mostly turned into processed food. I think we used to have, you know, like I said, 800 species of plants we ate now, there's 12. We've lost 90% of all our edible plant species, half of all our livestock species.

We've lost them. What do you mean? Those plants are gone?

Gone. I mean, there are- We can't create-.

There's no seeds anymore.

There are seed banks that are there. There's seed vaults. Oh, those are valuable. Yeah, the USDA has a lot of seeds. Actually, a friend of mine was trying to develop different varieties of plants. I was trying to get some old seeds and got to the USDA and by accident he got a packet which was numbered like 43216 whatever and he was like called him and said what is this? Because he was working with an agricultural guy to grow healthy food and he was like these are these Himalayan buckwheat, Himalayan buckwheat, which is kind of a rare buckwheat from the Himalayas. It grows in really rough conditions. and it's one of the most nutrient, phytochemically rich, dense foods, high protein, low starch, full of phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals on the planet.

And it's almost extinct.

Pretty much. Maybe there's a few villages in Himalayas that grow it. So, you know, how do we bring that back? How do we start to create different sort of more beneficial grains? There's Kuranzo wheat, which has been developed by Rust Jackson out in West Jackson out in the Midwest, which is a perennial wheat that grows roots that go, you know, tens of feet into the ground, breaks up the soil, creates organic matter, and creates incredibly delicious wheat that's heirloom wheat. It's actually a new form, but it's actually doesn't have all the gluten in it. It's less inflammatory, less sugar. Oh, man. So we need to kind of bring back some of these different different kinds of foods in these complex farms that actually restore soil, restore human health.

Amen.

So, you know, I spent 30 years doing functional medicine and just seeing the power of food to actually heal people. And, you know, people often don't understand how close they are to feeling good or how bad they feel.

It could be like one or two days switch.

Yeah, what you did, Dr. Hyman, I didn't know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling good. And I was joking, I see people have FLC syndrome, which is when you feel like crap.

Right. And it's just like the information, the pain, the achiness, the tiredness.

Like you said you had congestion. No, your digestion is not right. You have a little headache. You have brain fog. You're tired, you're achy, you don't sleep well, you have skin problems, blurry eyes. Yeah, all that stuff. And people are like, oh, this is normal. This is just normal. I have an irritable bowel. I have sinus issues. I'm like, my joints are a little sore. Oh, it's your food. It's what you're eating. And so for 10 days, you do a 10-day reset and literally It's like when your computer's not working, you hit the reset and it reboots everything. It's like a reboot. And then you get to see within 10 days how powerfully food impacts you. Yes, and then you go, Now I can choose. Now I can feel like crap or I can feel great.

But now I know.

Yeah, and then the serious form of what we call feel like crap, which is FLC syndrome, called FLS. Right, exactly.

That's when you go to the doctor.

And the first time I ever created anything, because I really want people to experience is called, it's a company called Pharmacy and you go to getpharmacy.com with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y and you get the 10-day reset. It's a whole program that's really integrated and it's powerful and it involves lifestyle change and diet change and the right nutrients and supplements and shakes and it's just awesome. -Wow.

-10 days.

-10 days. -Reset it. -I mean, I didn't do it. You know, like I, you know, I came back from the holidays, you know, and I try to do well. I cook Christmas dinner, I'm going to be doing Yeah, my wife's family and I made it all healthy. But you know when it was their mom's house, we were here, it's like a little ice cream, all this. And I didn't go too far, but you know I didn't feel great and I came back and I just did the whole 10-day reset. It's like, I feel amazing.

I mean you don't crave bad stuff, your energy's up, your sleep's better, your joints don't hurt, your digestion's good.

I gotta get it. I gotta get it for me and the team.

Make sure we reset it.

Amazing.

So getpharmacy.com.

Yes.

Food Fix Book, foodfixbook.com and your podcast.

Dr. Food Fix Book. Dr. Food Fix Book. Yeah, we need everybody on the team here to fix this food system because it's an existential threat. If we don't do it, we're screwed. I mean, we're just, you know, we know the decline of the Roman Empire.

Was because of some bad stuff that was going on there.

Well, our food is the decline of our empire.

Really?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, for all sick and dead, we can't do anything. I mean, yeah, I mean the amount of disability and suffering. A lot of pain. Mental illness, mental illness connected to food. Depression. Depression, obesity, chronic disease, it limits our productivity, our ability to engage in life. Like we all want to feel good, we want to have energy, we want to be able to love the people we love in our life, to do the work we want, to have the mission, we want to be energetic and engaged. And I just want to sit around all day and binge on Netflix, right?

Yeah.

I mean, watching Netflix is fine, but like not in a way that avoids life because you feel so bad. And I think what's frustrating for me is, Lewis, is that I see so much needless suffering. You know, something we can't change.

In this section, Dr. Lisa Mosconi shares the effects of food on the brain and the link between the rise in Alzheimer's. When you've learned, you know, the more you've studied brain foods and the functionality of optimizing your brain and you know, living longer and having the function of your brain use, what have you, what would you shy away from? What would you say, you know what, that's probably the worst thing for your brain to have functionality and to, to, to function longer and live longer with your brain health. What are the, the main foods you would absolutely never touch? You never give your family or your kids because you just feel like it's.

Very harmful processed foods.

And any processed foods?

No, we don't eat processed foods. I don't eat processed foods. I really try to stick to whole foods.

So does that include like, that's a cooking, pastries, yes.

I was just thinking, oh my goodness, this is maybe not true. I do eat crackers occasionally, but.

I.

Really don't eat a lot of processed foods and they're mostly minimally processed. My daughter really loves this. peanut butter called banana bites. So I buy those. But I wouldn't call it a processed food. I mean, it's not fresh from the plant, but it's certainly not burgers or hot dogs or popcorn. And then it's just frozen pizza. I don't eat that.

I just never. So what is processed foods do to brain health?

There is a lot of research showing that the standard American diet or the SAD diet is really, really, yeah, it's really, really bad news for your brain. And we have seen this many times using brain scans. We published this time and time again. Then this may sound biased, but we were using a Mediterranean style pattern as an example of a healthy diet, which is what scientists would tell you most scientists really endorse. It's a Mediterranean style diet as a healthy, it's a brain healthy diet. And we were comparing the brain scans of people on the Mediterranean diet to those of people of the same exact age, educational level on a Western diet or on a standard American diet. You could see the difference just by looking at the brains. So if you are- what do the.

Brains look like on the Mediterranean diet versus the sad American processed diet? But is it just like it light up, it's lit up more, it's more rich looking, it's just fuller. What is the difference?

Yeah, the difference is that the brains of people on the Western diet look older. Just picture that in your mind if you can. The brain of a 50-year-old person on a Mediterranean-style diet looks very full. The brain is composed of three different parts. But mostly just two parts. There's brain and then there's fluid inside your head. And you want to have as much brain as you can and as little fluid as you can. I mean, you want to have some fluid because it's protective, but not too much. You have more fluid and less brain. It means your brain is shrinking. Like you're losing neuron and fluid is taking over the space.

Oh my gosh.

If you compare the brain scans, you can tell that people on Western diets show brain shrinkage already in midlife and that continues over time. worse than that, and we have published this, the Western diet is associated with the emergence of Alzheimer's plaques already in midlife. So people on Mediterranean diets are basically zero plaques, at least in our hands.

What do you mean by plaques? What does that mean?

Alzheimer's plaques. So Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia, in the population is characterized by presence of these plaques inside the brain.

So this plaque on your teeth would be plaque in your brain.

Yeah, there are lesions inside the brain that are considered the hallmark or the signature of Alzheimer's diseases. For a really, really long time, scientists, everybody thought that Alzheimer's was a disease of old age. And that's because the symptoms become evident when people are in their 70s.

But now people are getting them in their 50s, the plaque buildup.

That's right. So Alzheimer's disease starts with negative changes in the brain decades prior to anyone forgetting keys or forgetting names. That happens in midlife. And the very first signs that we can detect using brain scans are these plaques, these lesions that you can see building up inside your brain. And there's a very clear difference in the timeline for people in Western diet who developed the plaques earlier than people who follow healthier diets.

Wow.

So that's a really, that's a big flag.

Is there a way when, if you notice someone's brain scan is shrinking their brain, they're building some of these early stage plaques around their brain, they've got more fluid, less brain matter. Is there a way to reverse that so your brain can actually grow and expand and become healthier and reverse Alzheimer's plaque? Is that possible?

So, well, that's the hope with the vaccinations that we're working on. So, scientists have been working on developing vaccines for Alzheimer's disease for a really, really long time. The idea is that if you remove the plaque, your brain once will stop deteriorating. But so far, all the clinical trials failed, which is.

And removing the plaques.

No, they've removed the plaques, but they do not reverse dementia or cognitive impairment or the atrophy. So that's disappointing in, in so many ways. I can't even begin to tell you. But that's another reason why. the entire scientific community is now moving towards prevention. People say we're starting too late. We should start treating this when people are younger. Right.

Not when they need it. It's like when you're.

Well, it's preventative. You know, we want to. We want people not to get those plaques. I think that would be ideal.

So when you get. When you start to build up these plaques, What I'm hearing you say is you can remove the plaque potentially, but you still cannot reverse dementia or Alzheimer. Are you able to reverse Alzheimer's in some way?

Is that possible?

It depends on what you mean by reversing Alzheimer's. So, there's Alzheimer's disease, which is the actual pathology, the lesions and plaques and tangles and a bunch of other things. And then there's dementia. which is the clinical syndrome with the symptoms. We can reverse Alzheimer's by removing the plaques, but the problem is that the symptoms don't go away.

Really? So we were unable to reverse the symptoms of dementia currently, is that right? Certainly. No one's had dementia and then reversed it.

Not in clinical trials.

In real life, has someone done this that you're aware of?

I don't think so.

So is there a way to slow it down?

I think it would know about it.

Is there a way to slow this process down so it doesn't get worse? And it's kind of like a manageable symptoms where it's like, okay, I'm, you know, I'm forgetting or I'm losing memory, but it's not worse and worse and worse every day. Have we seen that?

Yeah.

So there are some medicines that we have, that are Alzheimer's drugs. that slow down progression, like donepezil or rasagiline, like the most common, well, we only have four medications approved for Alzheimer's disease. We have acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which are the most common. We have memantine for some cases. They do slow down progression, but they do not fix the problem.

And where is the problem?

Maine, where life the way it should be transforms all who encounter its spectacular landscapes. Rugged coastlines, pine-scented trails, sandy beaches, sparkling lakes, and tranquil forests inspire you to reflect and make meaningful moments. They offer endless opportunities for adventure and exploration. Whether peddling or paddling, hiking or biking, Maine has more than enough outdoor spaces to make the most of long summer days. Relish in exquisite flavors harvested from the ocean and the rich soils of orchards and fields. Maine's makers are rooted in its heritage while boldly branching into new ways of thinking, doing, and being. Connect with its people in warm and authentic towns which beckon you to stroll art galleries and locally owned shops where generations of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople see the world anew. It's tempting to do it all when you visit, but take a beat and a breath. Get a feel for the time and tempo of Maine. Simple pleasures, Scenic Adventures, where every route is the scenic one. Discover more at visitmaine.com Is it just.

Me or is it getting really hard.

To figure out the best way to save for retirement? Fidelity can help you find clarity so.

You can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking, and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way.

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Where is Alzheimer's the most prevalent in the world? Is it in the USA? Is it in Europe? Is it in what countries or regions of the world?

Yeah, the United States are quite on top. And then there are other countries as well in Europe some places in Asia. I think industrialized countries in general experience higher rates of dementia. And one thing that I would like to point out that is, again, it's my work, so Alzheimer's disease affects women more than men or affects more women than men, to say more correctly.

Why is that?

One thing that people don't realize is that almost two-thirds of all Alzheimer's patients are women.

Really.

So for every man suffering from Alzheimer's, there are two women. And that's one of the reasons that I started looking into Alzheimer's disease is that I have a family history of Alzheimer's disease that really affects the women in my family. So if you can't believe it, my grandmother was one of four siblings, three sisters and one brother. All three sisters developed Alzheimer's disease and died of it. but as the brother was paired. So for me, that was terrifying for my mom as well. And I started asking questions. I was like, why? It doesn't matter. Is it just my family? Number one. My screw.

Is it a gene that your parents have that then you're gonna have no matter what? Because I think that's a fear for a lot of people, like, oh, my grandfather had it. My dad's gonna, you know?

Yes. For a really long time, most people understood Alzheimer's disease as some kind of inevitable consequence of aging or bad genes in your DNA. But we now understand that no more than 2% of all Alzheimer's cases are genetically inherited. 2% at most have genetic- so you.

Could have five people in your family have it and you are still have a 2% chance of getting it from them, the gene, is that right?

Well, this is in the whole population. I think if five people in your family have Alzheimer's disease, you want to get tested for genetic patient.

Now, is it, is it because of the diets they've been eating? That's the reason why they're getting it, or is it because they're going to get it no matter what?

Well, so for two percent of the population is genetic, is genetically determined. For 98% of the population is multifactorial. So there are a number of factors that really matter, including your genetic background, not not in a causative way, but more there are genes that give you blue eyes and genes that give you brown eyes, and there are some genes that negatively impact brain health and genes that are protected. So it's a combination of things. But then medical history is supremely important. Lifestyle is huge and the environment, they really all matter. And what we have found is that hormonal aging, your hormones are also incredibly important, especially for women. So it's what I was telling you. So for a really long time, people would say to me, women live longer than men, and Alzheimer's disease is a disease of old age. So obviously, more women than men have Alzheimer's disease. But what we have shown is that, yes, women live a little bit longer than men, four and a half years on average.

Four and a half years.

But we tend to develop Alzheimer's disease at a younger age. the men.

And this is, do you think that's more?

It's menopause. Well, one of the reasons, at least the reasons that we are looking into much all the time at this point is menopause. And it's literally that during menopause, we lose the superpowers of estrogen, and the brain goes through quite a transition. You can see how brain energy levels literally change. in women's brains, connectivity changes, the white matter volume changes, blood flow changes, everything kind of changes. And for some women, it's just a phase. It's just a transition. The brain adjusts. There's a new baseline, there's a new normal. We move on.

It's a what a- Some women, we don't- How long does that transition take? Is it months? Is it years?

I don't know, it's years. It's years.

So you might feel this brain fogginess for a couple of years. And then It should balance out.

Yes. For some women, however, the symptoms of menopause don't go away. It may turn into something more serious, including a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. So basically, we start developing these Alzheimer's plaques. Not all women, it is not universal. But some women, women with a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease, start developing these red flags for Alzheimer's disease. in their 40s and 50s. So much earlier than we had thought before. And then, of course, think about it. So you're going through menopause, your brain is changing, and it really needs support. And you're eating poorly, you're not exercising, you're not sleeping, you have a ton of stress. Those factors all really work together against you in a way. So I think it's really important for men and for women. I would say women really need to start thinking about that in midlife, that our brain is like a muscle. There are things that we can do to make it stronger and more resilient. We can exercise it properly, we can feed it properly, we can take care of it properly, and your brain will perform so much better for you at any age. And men and women need to do slightly different things.

What are the things?

Not so slightly.

So.

For example, for some women, we have a lot of patients who come to us. They learn so much more about their brains and their, the risk factors. And then some women will start taking hormones, hormonal replacement therapy. It's per, it's, it's really case by case. Some women swear by it, some women swear at it. They really hate it. It does not work. It doesn't help at all. For some women is a godsend. And I think it's really important to have a conversation with a doctor, not just your menopause specialist, but I think also brain doctor. And we're not there yet. We're not there yet. I now work at the intersection between neurology, neuroscience and women's health, which is a very unusual space, a very interesting space, but it's also very challenging space. And I think my hope for the future is that we'll start looking at women as organisms, as a person, right? Not like you go to the endocrinologist to look at your thyroid, you know, you go to the OB-GYN to look at your ovaries, then you have to go to a brain person to look at your brain. I believe in integrative medicine. I think that we're moving in that direction.

It's all connected. It's yeah. Yeah, might be a problem here, but it's affecting something else. You know, it's all connected.

Yes. So I think that is really, really important. But however, hormonal replacement therapy really doesn't work for all women and there is no recommendation to use it for Alzheimer's prevention. Yet we're working on it. We're hoping that we'll find a good way to help integrate these therapies in a safe way. But, yeah, sorry, I just made this point.

Go ahead.

I would say that, you know, the point of hormonal replacement therapy is that you want to get women the estrogens that the body is no longer making. But where are these estrogens coming from? Because plants make estrogens. So estrogen is the most ancient of hormones. And that means that it can go across species. so plants make estrogens, animals make estrogens, women make estrogens, and estrogens from a plant, phytoestrogens, enter a woman's body. And if you consume these plant-based foods often enough, that's effectively a very gentle hormonal replacement therapy over time, which is one of the reasons that people think that a Mediterranean style diet that is more plant-centered is beneficial for women's health because women on this kind of diet have a much lower risk of a number of things from cardiovascular disease and stroke to depression, to Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and also they have fewer heart flashes that they don't suffer from menopause the way that so many American women do.

Now, I've heard from different scientists and nutritionists about meat being a complete protein and having like these nutrients, nutrient dense within the meat.

Yeah.

How, but I'm hearing you say that plant-based is, has just as many nutrients and proteins and antioxidants and all these other things. What are the, what are the benefits or the, are the, the cons against eating quality meat, let's say, for brain function and brain health. Are there other things we should look out for if we do have a lot of meat or some meat in our diet?

It's a really interesting point. I think so many people right now are eating a lot of meat. There are a lot of diets out there that really support and encourage eating good quality meat, but quite a lot of meat. I, I would say the research points to plant-based diets as being healthier overall and more protective for the brain. I would say, yes, for the brain. But I think also in general, there aren't that many diet, hide recommendations that include a lot of meat. I think every person is different, but to your point, there's no need to eat meat to obtain complete protein. It's an easy way. It's definitely convenient for you if you're not an animal. It's a good way to obtain complete protein just in one small amount in a small portion of food. To obtain the same amount of protein from plant-based foods, you need to eat more of those. But there are some plant-based foods that are actually quite rich in protein, which are interesting, like hemp seeds, complete protein, tempeh, complete protein, nutritional yeast, complete protein, and also a good source of vitamin B12. So I think it's a bit that fish is a good source of complete protein that's actually been linked time and time again a lower risk of dementia by almost 70%.

If you could only eat five foods every single day for the rest of your life. Oh my gosh. To optimize brain health, brain functionality, longevity, support memory, all those things.

Yes.

What would those five foods be on a daily basis?

I would say, well, you don't like berries, but I would definitely go for berries. because they're rich in fiber, they're low in sugars, and they provide really an enormous amount of antioxidants for a small serving size. And just evidence that consuming two to three servings of berries per week really slows down cognitive decline in both men and women, and especially in women. So you might want to try some.

Man, I gotta start. Which berries? Which two or three? They're the best.

Blackberries actually have more antioxidants than even blueberries. That's an interesting type of berry. They're not as easy to find as blueberries, but you can get them frozen and they're still quite intense.

Now, if it's a modified blackberry where it's frozen, it's put in a smoothie and blended, in liquid form, does that all still matter or do you need it in raw form or is it doesn't matter?

No, cooking. So cooking destroys vitamin C. Vitamin C, all the antioxidants are really easily damaged by heat. So freezing shouldn't reduce the antioxidant capacity by too much. Obviously, I don't want them to be frozen for 10 years.

I mean, you know, so we got blackberries, blueberries.

Blackberries are great. Goji berries are one of the most concentrated sources of vitamin C. There's a kind of plum that I haven't been able to find. It's a kakadu plum, which seems to be the most powerful concentrated source of vitamin C on the planet. I know they have been in Australia and Pacific Islands. I've never seen it here, but I would like to try it.

Okay, so we got berries number one. What would be the second?

Mulberries are really good.

Mulberries.

Sorry.

I'd actually, I actually had mulberry tree in my backyard in Ohio growing up, and I would eat some mulberries every now and then.

So maybe I'll get back into mulberries. That could be nice. You can also find them dry.

Okay. I'll dry.

Dried mulberries work, too. Yeah, they're very good.

They're very tasty. Still.

You still have the nutrients when they're dried. Yes.

Yes.

A little bit less than the fresh ones, but they're sweeter when they're dry. Okay.

I grow them in the garden.

Yeah.

And those are high in antioxidants.

Those are high in antioxidants. Yeah. They're high in antioxidants. Okay, great.

Awesome.

Okay, so we got berries is what you get.

The berries. And I would go for dark leafy greens. Okay. Because they're really important. They contain a ton of phytonutrients. which are really good, you know, they have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties and a lot of fiber. And fiber is really important for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that it supports gut health, obviously, and 70% of the immune system is in the gut. So eating fiber also supports immunity, which especially now is a huge concern for everyone. But also fiber has a really important modulatory function on sex hormone binding globulin, which is what regulates flow of hormones inside the body. And so it really helps support hormonal health as well. So I would say two reasons to eat fiber and go for your leafy greens. And there's a ton of greens and we don't have to eat kale all the time. there are so many other varieties that are just spinach and arugula, all those.

Yeah.

All the lettuces, all the different microgreens, their color greens, if you like them, but also cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower. Now is the season. So cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Romanesco. They're yummy. I'm sure you eat veggies. I eat those.

I eat a lot of veggies.

Yeah.

There you okay, so we got.

Those are the first two. Well, I, I would throw some polyunsaturated fatty acids there, that the Omega-3s whether from fish. Do you fish? Yeah.

Right.

So in that case, for those who do eat fish, then the smash fish. So salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, herring, smash.

Smash fish.

Yeah.

All right.

So there's a really good source. It's very concentrated sources.

And if you and if you didn't get that from fish, what would be the substitute you would do plant-based?

Well, for me, plant-based so omega-3 is from hemp seeds, for sure. Flax seeds and flax oil, walnuts, almonds, chia seeds, and also seaweed. I don't know if you like seaweed.

I actually love seaweed. I eat those little...

The nori sheets.

Yeah, the little sheets. I can eat those for days.

I know.

So good.

Yeah.

That's good for you then, huh?

Yes.

In this section, Dr. Jason Fung shares the main causes of cancer in today's world and what we can do about it. What are the main causes of cancer? As it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or the early stages of cancer. What are the main causes of cancer?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. And sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort of a cop out because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer. And these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens. And the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you break it down into what causes cancer in most people. You can look at the sort of a couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer. And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of by far in a way, the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2001. So it was higher before when more people are smoking, but as a contributor to cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general and far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or chemicals, sunscreens, and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer, but the contribution in a whole population is very small. What's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? That's where things sort of bogged down a lot. Initially, in the '70s, people talked about fiber. So people thought about, oh, hey, well, maybe if you eat a lot of fiber, what you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat. So if you remember the '80s and '90s, there's this huge movement against fat that all fat is bad for you. It caused the heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which is sort been overturned at this point. But there's this thought maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer. So we tested vitamin A, Vitamin D, B didn't work. Folic acid didn't work. Vitamin C didn't work. Vitamin D didn't work. Vitamin E didn't work. Selenium didn't work. Omega-3 fatty acids didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. And so we're sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, oh, no, it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity related disease. So what happened, of course, is that in the 70s, 80s and 90s, people didn't really think about it, but then we had this obesity epidemic, so it became a bigger and bigger problem. So obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, that was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, you know, obesity is actually a huge risk factor as well as type 2 diabetes. And both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer lung. So it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking. Like if you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking. Or if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung, again, obesity plays no role. But things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity-related cancers. So that was the sort of big link. And to this, you know, at this point, the World Health Organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity-related cancers, which is huge because from 2003, we didn't even know, like when I went to medical school, nobody thought obesity caused cancer.

Really?

It's almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. So therefore, if you know that, that's super powerful because if you can maintain a normal weight, you're going to reduce, just like stopping smoking, right? You're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer.

But aren't there a lot of healthy people out there or non-obese people that also get cancer?

Absolutely, because there's a lot of different things that go on and that's what I spend the first half of the book talking about is how the sort of cancers develop. So it's not just about obesity, just like you can smoke forever and not get lung cancer, but it raises your risk.

So same as what are the other factors? If you're, say you're, there's people out there that are super healthy, they're working out, they're eating well, but then they get cancer. They're under 15% body fat, 12% body fat. What are those other factors? of people getting cancer.

Mainly, yeah, the rest of it we actually know very little about. So we need to know more about those because certain things, so smoking and diet are probably your biggest factors. And then there's a whole, there's like a hundred different other risk factors for cancer. These are the other carcinogens that we talk about. But also things such as, you know, background radiation and sun exposure, you know, like if you get too much sun, for example. So there's all sorts of other things. Genetics plays a role. But one of the big mistakes I think we made is that we focused so much on the genetics part of it, thinking that, well, this is sort of a random mutation that causes cancer, not sort of which puts the onus on sort of this random luck sort of idea that it's just bad luck.

My parents had this, my grandparents had this gene, so I have this. I'm going to get cancer.

Yeah, exactly. And some people think that that's sort of a death sentence. BRCA, which is a certain type of gene, for example. So this is the gene that Angelina Jolie, for example, got diagnosed with. Her mom had cancer, I think, or an aunt had cancer. So she got tested and she had the gene. And people think, well, for sure you're going to get cancer. But it turns out that if you look at the incidence of cancer, if you have BRCA, if you have that gene in the 30s and 40s and 50s, at risk, of breast cancer was like 30% compared to sort of like 80% in modern day America. So what's the difference, even though you have the same genes, what's the difference between those two situations? And it comes down to the lifestyle. So the point about cancer is that cancer is like a seed. So if you have the genetics, you have the propensity to develop cancer. And this seed of cancer actually exists in all of our cells, and actually not just all our cells, but in all multicellular animals have that sort of seed of cancer. So what's important then is you can't do anything about the seed, but what you can do something about is the soil, which is that if you provide a fertile sort of soil for that seed to germinate, then you are going to increase your risk of developing this cancer. And cancer is not a rare disease. I mean, it affects like one in 10 of us, one in eight of us, something like that. So it's something that we really have to think about. as we live longer because it is one of these really important things.

And it sounds like, you know, in the next 30 to 60 years, if we don't figure out how to reverse this or solve this or, I guess, create bad soil for the seed of cancer by creating healthy habits in other ways, it seems like this is going to accelerate where it was 30%, I guess, 20, 30 years ago or 50 years ago now, and now it's 80%, I guess, it's going to be even more in 20 to 30 years, right?

Oh, absolutely. And the, the trend is very clear. because if you look at the biggest killers of Americans, it's always been heart disease and cancer. So if you go back sort of to the 70s, so 50 years ago, you look at heart disease, number one killer of Americans, that's heart attacks, strokes, that kind of thing. Cancer was a fairly distant second. But the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very, very quickly, and the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very, very, why is that? It's because cancer is a very complex disease and the way we think about cancer, we just don't know what it is. So for such a common disease, it's a total mystery why we get this cancer because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us. That is, if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer, for example. that cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells. So why would it want to do this? That is, if you get cancer, then the cancer grows and then it kills you and it kills itself.

It kills it, yeah.

Why would this sort of thing ever develop? It doesn't make any sense from a sort of looking at it that way.

But most diseases want to spread, but they want to stay alive.

Exactly. Exactly.

Like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily. It wants to be able to spread.

To infect other people. Exactly. And, you know, if you sort of by standard, it just kills you, you know, along the way, but that's not its primary purpose. So the point about cancer is that we have never sort of understood what this is as a disease. That is, if you look at heart disease, Heart disease is caused by blockages in arteries. So we develop all kinds of things. So we develop drugs, we develop blood thinners, we develop, you know, you go in and you use a balloon to open up the artery. You develop new technologies such as imaging technologies. You develop ways to monitor patients. So because you know what causes it. Because if you don't know what causes something, it's really hard to fix. Like if you have a car and all you hear is a random plank and you don't know what's going on, you don't know what the clanking is from. It's really hard to fix it. Same thing with diseases. If you have a disease like COVID, for example, and you know it's a virus, well, now at least you have somewhere that you can start. That is, okay, it's a virus, let's develop vaccine, or let's develop some antiviral drug. But if you have no idea what this disease actually is, then you have nowhere to go. So that's what I talk about is how we think about cancer, the paradigm of cancer as a disease. what causes it, you have to first understand what it is. And that's been the real mystery, the medical mystery is what is cancer? And the way we look at cancer has changed significantly over the last 10 years. And most people don't even understand that. So it's a very interesting story from that standpoint.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned, you know, the heart disease. I saw Dr. Stephen Gundry endorsed the back of your cancer code book, and he's been on my show a few times, and he's a guy who did 10,000 heart surgeries and realized that the things that he was doing on the surface level to create temporary relief, people were coming back in because they weren't solving the root problem, which was a lot of it around diet and lifestyle. And, that's what I'm hearing you say is that diet is a massive contributor to cultivating the seed of cancer to grow and flourish with the wrong types of diet.

What?

Is it possible?

Is it possible in your mind to reverse cancer by the right diet and by fasting, which is something you talk about a lot? Oh, yeah. Because the thing is that if you.

Like, once you have the cancer, it's really hard because that's sort of like, you know, if you, if you don't change the oil in your car, then your car breaks down. Then you say, oh, I'm gonna start changing the oil.

My car.

Well, yeah, that's good. But you need, you know, a lot more than that. It's the same thing. Once you actually develop the cancer, then it's really hard to fix from a diet standpoint. You really need the drugs that we've spent millions and billions of dollars developing over these last 30 years. But in terms of preventing cancer, there's actually no reason why you couldn't because you can look at people who live in a traditional society, for example. So you can take a look at, say, the Inuit or the American Indians before sort sort of they became westernized. Or you can look at the African people before they were sort of assimilated into a Western culture. And interestingly, those peoples were actually considered, some of them were considered immune to cancer. There was so little cancer that they thought that the Inuit, for example, or what used to be called the Eskimos actually could not get cancer. So the university, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. They used to send an expedition up to the Arctic Circle every year to study why these Inuit we couldn't get cancer. Of course, as they became westernized and started eating sugar and white flour, then they started getting all the same cancers that we did. In Africa, for example, this fellow by the name of Denis Burkitt, who is a sort of a missionary and doctor, when he got down there, he's like, wow, in he was like, look at these, the difference, the people who live traditionally in Africa get no cancer, no colon cancer, but the minute they transition to a Western style civilization with their foods, with their, you know, the whole thing, they actually start to get cancer. You don't find cancer when that. So it was called actually a disease of civilization. So all of these diseases obesity, diabetes, and cancer were not found in people living traditionally. So the point is not that, you know, one is that they didn't live as long, but the point is that if you can find and understand what makes it, you know, protective from them, why this soil sort of soil, like we all have to seed, but the soil was different. What it is about that, if we can understand that, then you can, you can, you can reduce your risk substantially to the point where your risk is very low. Again, as an example, if you take a Japanese or Chinese woman from Japan or from Shanghai and you move them to San Francisco, within a couple of generations, the risk of breast cancer approximately tripled.

Crazy.

So it's crazy, exactly. But that's great hope because if you.

Know the root of it, then you to go back to a different way of living.

Exactly. Because if you can, and remember Shanghai and Japan and so on, they're, you know, modern societies. So if you can understand what it is about the diet, about the lifestyle that's so important, you could actually take that woman in San Francisco and reduce her risk of breast cancer by a third. So that's very, very powerful knowledge.

So what would you say are the five foods we must eliminate to support us in preventing cancer. What are those five key things that you're like, and if you can get rid of as much of this as possible, it's going to really support your chances.

Yeah, I think that's a good question. And it's sort of sugar is probably one of the very, very important things that we really need to lower because that really supports it. And it gets to how cancer develops. A lot of the refined foods and people talk and the most that we eat, like the one thing we eat more than anything else tends to be refined carbohydrates. So, you know, white bread and that kind of thing. That's probably the most important thing is the sugar and refined grains. Refined anything is probably bad for you. So, you know, even if you're not talking about carbohydrates, but refined, say, oils, you should eat natural oils, like eat, eat foods that are sort of in the natural state. and refined meats like, you know, eating bologna, for example. People talk about meat all the time, but it's like there's a big difference between bologna and, you know, grass finished beef sort of thing. There's a huge difference because one is jam-packed full of chemicals and other crap, and one is just beef, right? And people have been eating beef for thousands of years. So those refined foods, so refined carb, but also refined fats and refined proteins, probably those play a decent role, although the evidence is lower. And then the other thing that is really important, the fifth thing that's probably very important, is likely the frequency that we eat. That is, eating all the time provides that sort of fertile soil. So to understand why this is, you have to get back to sort of how cancer develops. So you have to understand that cancer develops, evolves almost as a separate species from us. So when you have a breast cancer cell, for example, it originated from a normal breast cell, but after it evolves, it grows or doesn't grow depending on growth factors. And it's almost a separate species from us. That is, it will grow and it won't. The normal breast cell or a normal lung cell, they will do everything to, you know, play on the team, right? So they're always supporting the body. your partner, a team player. Those cancer cells are not team players. Basically, they're out for themselves.

It's the enemy.

It's the enemy coming to attack you.

That's right. It's like the guy who's just trying to pad his stats, you know?

Right.

It's like you should have passed.

It's like, yeah, yeah.

But that's the point that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival. That is, it will grow and it will grow at the expense of its neighbor. So it will keep growing and it will destroy everything around it. So it will move around, for example. So a breast cancer cell will move around the body. And that's not for the good of the whole body, right? It's for the good of itself. It's trying to spread itself around. So you got to realize that the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism. And it sounds very strange to say, okay, we have this foreign organism almost like an infection in us. But that's actually how our body sees that cancer. That is our immune system actually detects, it's a very powerful, you know, it kills stuff. But it's very powerful. So it has to be reined in because you don't want it destroying, you know, normal parts of the body. So it recognizes certain cells as foreign and certain cells as self. And cancers are actually innately seen as foreign cells. So it is a foreign invader almost that has evolved from us. But during the development of this cancer, it will grow or not grow depending on growth signals. So our body has certain nutrient sensors. So nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available. So when you eat, certain hormones like insulin and mTOR will go up. That tells our body that food is available, we should grow.

Right?

Because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food, right? It's just natural. If there's no food, you got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells. So if you have, if you're eating all the time and you're always, you're always activating these nutrient sensors, you're actually telling your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. So if you eat six, eight times a day, you're telling your body, your cells in your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. if you eat fewer times, like three times a day, or you do intermittent fasting, if you don't eat at all, what you're going to do is shut down those growth signals and the cancer will have a more difficult time to grow. So if you grow breast cancer cells in the lab, for example, you can't do it without insulin. It will actually wither up and die. So therefore, if you know that, then you can say, well, if I, and that's one of the secret- Dr. Insulin.

Comes from eating any food or is this only sugar?

Mostly it's carbohydrates and protein. So, you know, but the nutrient sensors come from different foods. So different foods will activate different nutrient sensors. But the point is that if you don't eat, like fasting, for example, one is you're going to lower your insulin levels, which will, you know, lower the growth, overall growth signaling in our body, which is a good thing for adults. And adults growth is not good. Generally, you stay the same size. You don't want to be growing too much because the high growth environment, of course, lets the cancer sort of grow out of control. And that was the secret to why vitamins, for example, was not a good thing because it's basically growth. It supports growth of cells. And what they found in a lot of studies was when they gave people these vitamin supplements, they actually got more cancer. They didn't get less cancer. They got more cancer. So in fact, it's just like if you spray spread fertilizer on an empty field, you want the grass to grow, but what grows are a bunch of weeds because you've put down all this growth signaling stuff. So therefore, all you get is the weeds. Same with the body.

So are supplements and vitamins bad for us then?

There's no evidence that it's really bad for you when you give high doses in these studies, you do get certain ones, so folic acid, for example, and beta-carotene, which is a precursor to vitamin A. And those two studies, there is actually a suggestion that you actually get more cancer from them. Because in our current situation in North America, most of us are not vitamin deficient. Most of us actually have too much. You actually want to slow down the growth.

Really?

And this is why obesity and type 2 diabetes are so intimately linked with cancer is because both conditions are conditions where we have too much insulin in our body.

So we want to lower insulin overall because insulin is one of the main causes of the fertilizer for cancer to potentially grow.

Exactly. And there's several ways to do that. One is to change either the foods that you eat and that is the sugar, for example, the refined carbohydrates that make up the bulk of our diet. And the other thing is to change the frequency with which you eat because you can affect both things. So just like if you're, for example, to pay, you know, $10 and you pay it every day, it adds up quickly, right? If you have a coffee every day and it's like, you know, five or seven bucks at Starbucks every day, every day, every day, it adds up. So just like that, it's not just the amount that you're paying, which is not much, but it's the frequency. fluency, right? Same thing with the foods. It's not just the amount that you eat or what it is that you eat, it's how often you eat it. So if you're eating now six, eight times a day, well, that's a lot worse if you ate once a day, right? That's just basic math. Like, you can't get around that. And the problem is, of course, that if you look at how people eat today compared to sort of 1970, it's very different. So in 1970, people ate three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and no snacks. Nobody ate snacks back then.

Snack culture, like snacking all day.

Exactly. And people say it's good for you. People say, oh, you should eat multiple times in the day, six times a day. It's good for you. But nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do, right? It's not like your great grandparents, you know, working in the factory, they're taking off every two hours to make themselves a little, you know, ham sandwich. sandwich or something, right? It was like, there's work to do. You eat when you have time. So, you know, in the 70s, it's funny because I always say you have breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was it. If you wanted an after school snack, your mom said, no, you're gonna ruin your dinner. And if you wanted a bedtime snack, she would have said, no, you should.

Eat more at dinner.

Right. You should have finished your meal. Exactly. And that was the point. And nobody ate not a lot of desserts and all that nowadays, of of course, when you look at the studies, people are eating five, six times a day. You even look at schools, it's like, oh, they're gonna have breakfast, then they're gonna have a mid-morning snack, then they're gonna have lunch, then they're gonna have an after-school snack, then they're gonna eat dinner. And then if they play soccer, in between the halves of soccer, parents think that you need to feed them cookies. It's like, hey, well, I played soccer growing up and nobody chased me around with a bunch of cookies. great time. We didn't need it, right? And, but that's six times a day, every single day, and it's ingrained into us. You know, a few years ago when my son was, you know, going on a trip or something, the school said, well, you should pack him two snacks. I'm like, why? Why would you want to give him a bunch of snacks? Like, they're not good for you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure to share this with a few friends if it inspired you, just copy and paste this link wherever you're listening to this podcast, or you can go to the full show notes to learn more about all the different experts in this episode at lewishouse.com/1134. And if this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button right now over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay notified every week on the latest and greatest on how to improve the overall quality of your life here on the School of Greatness. So click that subscribe button right now, leave us a review, over on Apple Podcasts, let me know what you enjoyed most from this episode. And again, make sure to share this with a few friends or tag me on Instagram @LewisHowes if you post about it over there. And I want to leave you with this quote from the Buddha who said, To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear. That's right. It's our duty to take care of our vessel. This is your body. You've got one body. Make the most of it. and make sure every day you're doing things that help your body improve. I'm so grateful for you. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.

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