Health Expert: On The Foods That Are Slowly Killing Us | Shawn Stevenson
In this extended interview, health expert Dr. Akil Palanisamy and host Lewis discuss the alarming state of metabolic health in the United States, citing recent research that shows 88 % of American adults are metabolically unhealthy, 60 % have at least one chronic disease, and obesity has risen to 43 % of adults (projected 50 % by 2030). They trace the root causes to a cultural environment saturated with ultra‑processed foods—about 60 % of the average adult diet and 70 % of children’s diets—liquid sugars, and a dramatic shift in dietary fats toward poly‑unsaturated vegetable oils, which have risen from 2 % to 25 % of fat‑cell composition and are linked to inflammation. The conversation moves to how sedentary, hunter‑gatherer‑absent lifestyles, food deserts, and socioeconomic barriers reinforce unhealthy habits. They present three peer‑reviewed studies (Harvard, Journal of Nutrition Education & Behavior, Pediatrics/JAMA) showing that regular family meals (≥3 times/week) increase nutrient intake, reduce ultra‑processed food consumption, lower childhood obesity, and decrease stress in adults. The dialogue also covers the hidden health costs of polypharmacy (70 % of adults on prescription drugs, 180 k deaths annually from properly prescribed meds) and the role of the liver in processing sugars, alcohol, and drugs, highlighting non‑alcoholic fatty liver disease as a growing epidemic. Dr. Palanisamy explains alcohol’s “fat‑sparing” effect, the macronutrient status of ethanol, and the dangers of excessive distilled spirits. They critique modern healthcare’s drug‑centric model and advocate for cultural change that starts within families, emphasizing personal agency, environmental design, and personalized nutrition (nutrigenomics, microbiome‑guided diet). Personal anecdotes illustrate how changing one’s environment, accessing higher‑quality foods, and adopting supportive habits can break the cycle of chronic disease, even in low‑income, high‑stress contexts.
Chapters
We're not just victims of our environment. We are products of our environment. We don't have any choice but to be. Humans are incredibly adaptable. What's different about us is that we're also creators of our environment. We can consciously create the environment that makes health automatic, that makes healthy choices easy and accessible. We can create an environment that makes love and joy and friendships more accessible, safety more accessible, creativity more accessible. This is what makes us so special.
I think you gotta have a dream.
The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis.
Very excited about this. We've been friends for, I don't know, probably a decade now, right?
It's getting close to 10 years.
It's been a while. And I've seen your evolution as an expert, a thought leader, a teacher, a scientist, a researcher. And there has been a lot of information over the last, specifically three years, that has confused a lot of people. A lot of people have gained a lot of weight, not only emotional weight, but also physical weight. A lot of people seem to be getting sicker more than ever now. Just things are happening and they don't know why they're getting sicker. And the first question I want to ask you is around healthy habits. Can you share the number one reason why healthy habit changes don't work long term for most people? especially when it comes to weight loss?
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And first and foremost, we need to start with what's the situation that we're dealing with here? All right, so a paper that was just published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders detailed the health of American adults, and they established that 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy.
What does that mean?
So we're talking about blood lipids, we're talking about hormones like testosterone, estrogen, some derangement there, we're talking about blood glucose, things like C-reactive protein inflammation, we're talking about hemoglobin A1C and other blood sugar markers. I can go on and on, but metabolic health really is the foundation of health itself because the word metabolism oftentimes can get a little bit twisted. We tend to think about metabolism as burning fat. But metabolism is everything. Everything about human health and function is metabolism.
What is tied into the metabolism? What is it including?
Everything. So your cardiovascular health, your cognitive function, the health of your skin, metabolism is taking place with every organ, tissue, and cell in your body. So this is number one is 88% of American adults are now established to be metabolically unhealthy.
88%.
Pair this with the CDC just published some new data this year. They established that 60% of American citizens now have at least one chronic disease.
60%.
40% have two or more chronic diseases.
Come on.
All right, so what is this setting up here? Yeah, what I'm setting up here is looking at what is the conditions that we're in when we're trying to change our habits? What does society actually look like? Let me share just a couple other stats with you. Right now we're knocking on the door. We have over 43% obesity rate here in the United States.
Didn't it used to be like a third, like a few years ago? Yeah, yeah.
Now it's 43%. There's been a titanic jump during the pandemic. As you set things up with the last three years, those numbers haven't even come out yet. We do know, according to the CDC, that childhood obesity essentially tripled. Oh my gosh. Time frame for certain groups of children, children that were moderately obese, and even children who are of a healthy weight gained an excessive amount of annual weight. So going from like two pounds a year to almost five pounds.
Now, what is obesity?
That's a BMI metric by the way.
Okay.
So this can also get into a little bit of controversy. Like, is that the right thing? Because a running back who's five foot nine, 200 pounds, he'd be considered, right, to be overweight and teetering into obesity, but he's a running back. with probably 8% body fat. But that's not what we're talking about. We know that. We know that obesity has reached beyond epidemic proportions here in the United States. But according to BMI, that's the big metric that's being used. You know, we've got, just like I said, 43% of American adults are clinically obese now. And until 2030, which is less than seven years away right now, It's projected we're gonna hit 50% obesity in our society.
What was it 10 years ago? The obesity rate in America, do we know roughly?
About a decade ago, it was somewhere around 35%. 33%, like you said, about a third.
Now.
Now it's 43%. So it's gone up 10% in a decade.
Now, we're just talking about obesity. We're not talking about the inclusion of overweight and obesity. If we bring those together, at almost 80% of the population.
Holy cow. What's the difference between obesity and overweight?
It's just going up in that BMI number.
Even more.
Yeah.
So overweight is more than obesity or is it less than obesity?
Obesity is more than overweight.
Okay.
Right.
And so then we have degrees beyond that, morbidly obese, for example. And even those numbers, again, we have television shows now. We turn this into entertainment, right? And even dating back to when we had shows like the Biggest Loser, for example, And early on in that process, actually, I've been reached out to several times to participate in those types of shows. And of course, I've respectfully declined because it's putting on this entertainment factor and this kind of concentrated effort for somebody to lose weight without really addressing the root cause of the obesity, of getting into the situation. And this is what I was wanting to set up, is that if we're looking at habit change and truly having sustainable weight loss, you would have to do something that is incredibly abnormal in our culture. The majority of citizens in our culture today are unwell, and we've had a massive transformation in the state of our health as a society in recent decades. Many conditions that were relatively rare are now normal, right? So if we're talking about things like obesity, for example, that is type 2 diabetes, for example, that's There's a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the paper is initially titled 200 Years of Diabetes. And what they found was that in the last 40 years, diabetes in the United States has quadrupled. All right? So not just doubled, not tripled, but quadrupled. Something truly phenomenal has taken place. All right?
Was type 2 diabetes a thing, you know, back in the day?
Was it even- yeah, but it was rare. It was rare. Today it is again is becoming normalized where we have somewhere around 130 million Americans have type 2 diabetes.
Come on.
More pre-diabetes. This is facts, man. 100.
That's like half America.
About a third.
A third of America.
Yeah.
But type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.
Okay.
Okay.
And so what does pre-diabetes mean?
This is getting back into my original statement about metabolic hell. All right. So, with prediabetes, we're gonna see elevated blood glucose, right? So fasting glucose numbers, we're gonna see potentially and very likely abnormalities in something called hemoglobin A1C. So your blood glucose is like a snapshot, all right? So right now, if we both were the chug a lug, you know, some Coca-Cola, and then we get our blood glucose taken, it can look like, oh man, we're like, we have pre-diabetes, right? But it's just a snapshot. It's a snapshot. And you got to think about the conditions. Hemoglobin A1C or A1C, that's more like taking a movie. It's like looking at the activity of your blood and your blood cells over a longer period of time. And that number is a much more valuable or valid number, but it's not as easy to get. You can't just do a finger prick at your local you know, pharmacy most often to get that number. Like it's getting a blood panel done. Probably would be helpful. And also talking with a physician who understands some of these metrics. But here's the thing. If we have abnormal blood glucose like that, what will happen here or pre-diabetes or diabetes is that will get put on to metformin or will get put on to potentially, depending on the state of your pancreas and the beta cells and insulin you're producing. you can start taking exogenous insulin to try to manage your blood sugar because having high amounts of blood sugar is really dangerous. We didn't evolve having a lot of sugar in our blood. And so today you guzzle a Mountain Dew and some Funyuns, like there's gonna be so much glucose in your bloodstream that it can start to tear things apart very quickly. And so this is why insulin is so important because it takes and shuttles that glucose out of the blood It starts to store it away in your cells, namely your fat cells, namely your muscle cells potentially. But insulin resistance isn't just about fat. It's also about your muscle cells because this is a primary site for glucose uptake is in your muscles. And so, but here's the thing, Louis, are we dealing with an obesity crisis today? And this is our friend Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has talked about this. Or muscle lack of muscle problem.
Yeah, it's in both. I was just thinking about it. So say that one more time.
Are we dealing with a body fat issue as a society? Or are we dealing with a lack of muscle issue?
It's both.
It's both.
I was just thinking with the amount of sugar, I mean, I used to have, I don't know, eight to ten Dr. Peppers a day in the summer as a kid growing up in Ohio, just like, But, and I wonder if I would, I wonder if I would have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes if I didn't work out as hard as I did for most of my life.
Yeah.
If I wasn't lifting, if I wasn't running, if I wasn't jumping, if I wasn't doing explosive activities. That was saving you. That was, if I wasn't on sports teams, like just pushing my muscles in my body, building strength during that time, I think I would have been extremely obese.
But what you were doing, even though your body was metabolizing this input, right? Because it isn't just food or isn't just a beverage, it's information. You're also accelerating your aging process. Say that now. That's the thing, because it's not just, I'm burning off this fuel. What type of fuel is it? Is it aging your vehicle, right? Because it's low quality. And again, it's not just the fact that you're making your cells out of Dr. Pepper, All right, because your body's gonna be utilizing the materials you give it, but also the fuel that your cells are running on and how your cells are communicating are gonna be based on Dr. Pepper. All right. So, you know what I'm saying?
Based on 60 chemicals.
Yeah.
And sugar water.
It's crazy. You know, if you really think about what is probably the number one most inflammatory from a metabolic derangement standpoint thing that we consume, In our society, it's liquid sugar.
All right, liquid calories.
Liquid sugar specifically.
Wow.
If it's coming in liquid form because it's gonna hit your stomach, your small intestine, your large intestine, it's gonna hit your system so much faster, get shuttled into your bloodstream, your liver, all this stuff is getting hit so quickly because there isn't as much digestive energy needed to break it down. It's just like pure uncut, you know, it's like it's dangerous.
So what do you think is the root cause to the acceleration of obesity in America and around the world and the acceleration of type 2 diabetes and so many other chronic illnesses? What is the root cause? Is it psychological? Is it emotional? Is it our environments? Is it the excess of all the foods that are available that are processed? Is it our lack of forming stable habits and discipline. Like what is causing us to consume so much things that hurt us and kill us younger?
Yeah, this is what it's all about. This is what this conversation is all about. And I really think we can make a big change from this conversation, the people that we're both collectively able to reach, we can create a tipping point to help to normalize health again. Because what I was doing is setting up the state that we are existing in right now. It is very difficult to be healthy in a culture that is largely unhealthy. In a culture that is constantly feeding you messages and information and conditions that make being unhealthy so easy.
Right?
And so- and fun and fulfilling and.
You know, exciting and all these things. Like to have all these foods- On the surface.
On the surface. Right? But it's not fun when we have diabetes. It's not fun when we have Alzheimer's disease. That is not fun. And so what we're talking about here is the culture we're existing in. And this is really the root cause. The primary reason that we're unable to make healthy changes long term is that we're existing in a culture that is largely unhealthy. And so what does this really mean? Well, culture is defined as the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of a group of people that is then passed down to future generations. All right? So the culture that we're existing is determining what we are aware of, how we think about things, how we interact with our world, how we interact with the people in our environment, the world around us, the food choices that we make is based on our culture. And so today, the majority of American citizens are born into a culture that is feeding them messages that is creating conditions around them that are making unhealthy choices so accessible. As a matter of fact, it's making it normal. Let me give you an example. So if, for example, we would go to a hunter-gatherer tribe, right? So like the Hadza, we still have hunter-gatherer tribes in the world, right? Now, not to say that they don't have like a, you know, a nice t-shirt or something every now and then that they might get from, you know, but largely there's, their culture is constructed in a way where underlying belief is if you don't move, you die. Because movement is required for you to procure your food, for you to hunt, for you to gather, for you to get water, you have to move or you will die. So it's embedded in the culture that movement is a part of life. Here in the United States, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity, all right? We've done more and more things, more innovation that has taken movement and activity out of it. Now again, it can be under the guise of doing something positive, right? Automation. But if we're taking away something our genes expect us to do, which is to move, what are gonna be the downsides? Now also within the hunter-gatherer tribe, because of their culture, it blocks them from the awareness that 7-Eleven exists. That quick trip is a thing. Right, that they can just instead of going out and throwing a spear through an antelope, they can throw a spear through a hot dog, right? They could throw a net over nachos or chili and cheese. Right, right. They're not aware that that exists.
Now again- They don't have access to it.
It's not accessible.
It's not a part of their reality.
It's not a convenience store on the corner. Exactly. Now this is not to say that there isn't a hunter-gatherer out there who knows a 7-Eleven. Right, right. But overall, hopefully people are understanding the analogy here now. To bring this to reality for me to use an example, I grew up in conditions where it's a glorified food desert, right? And I struggled to use the word food desert because it still sounds kind of good, like a desert. I think of Boys to Men videos, like, you know, water run dry. A food desert is not a good place to be, all right? So we're on food stamps, we're on WIC. we were getting money, we're getting food from charities. And- In St. Louis? In St. Louis, yeah. So like the Hosea House, we would get basically handouts for toys and for during Christmas time and for food.
And.
From my childhood into my adulthood, when I was in my university, I was going to college working on my undergrad degree, all right? I was living in Ferguson, Missouri. And in Ferguson, Missouri, It is one of the most populated with fast foods per square foot of any place in America. Really? Yeah.
Ferguson.
Yeah. And so when I go out my door within a two mile radius, there's every fast food place that you can name. It's just all, I'm surrounded by, not to mention all the convenience stores, not to mention the check cashing places, not to mention Dollar General stores or whatever else. Yeah. And not to mention the lack of anything that is affirming health. I didn't know what yoga was. There was no yoga studios.
Are you kidding me?
There's no gyms. There's no gyms, right? So if I go outside of my environment, I can get to those things. Now, ironically, the university that I went to, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, was just outside of Ferguson, all right? Just on the outside of the outskirts, and I had access to that. So that's where I turned my health around, was at the university gym. that was kind of my low hanging fruit. But most of the people in my community didn't have access to that. And so, you know, you got to think about what choices am I gonna make when I go out my door if all I see is ultra processed foods? That's all that I knew really existed. I didn't know there was a difference between fish sticks or wild caught cod or salmon. Like, it's just food for me and it's cheap. That's the other part.
It's affordable.
The low income environment that I'm in. And I can get two for 99 tacos, two for 99 cent tacos at Jack in the Box. Or I could spend $3 to get an avocado. Like, why on earth would I get an avocado?
Well, there's two, there's a couple of things here to talk about. One, because there was a time in my life, six months where I was on food stamps when I was actually a professional athlete, but on food stamps because we got paid $250 a week. we got free housing and we had a roommate, which is an apartment. And then we had, they gave us free food stamps for the local fast food restaurants, right? This is a professional athlete playing arena football. So I'm eating every type of sandwich and burger and whatever else I can find. And I'm trading with my teammates. I'm like, hey, I want this thing and I'll trade you this, like the food stamps. those are food. You can't live off a couple hundred bucks a week, really, in America, at least. It's challenging. And so I was grateful for the, the support when I didn't have the finances to go and buy food, right? My own food or healthier food. And I think these programs that provide food stamps, charity food, you know, when the restaurants give food or the grocery stores give food to local charities. I think that's a powerful thing. We need those things. But there's also something that happened to me once I started to make a little bit more money and I could afford my own apartment and I could afford my own food at the grocery store. I didn't choose healthy, even though I had the ability to, I didn't choose healthier for many, many years. And now is that How do we get to the place where we start to choose healthy when we have the option? As opposed to, man, this is convenient. The Starbucks, oh, I'm just gonna get all the sugary drinks. I'm gonna get the cookies. I'm gonna, you know, when you have the money to buy healthy food, but you still choose the convenience, the high sugar, the high calorie foods that have a lack of nutrition, why does that take place?
Your culture's already inundated you. with the deliciousness, the perceived deliciousness of all these ultra processed foods. In the United States, the average American adult is according to the BMJ, it's one of the most prestigious medical journals, British Medical Journal, 60% of the average American's diet is ultra processed foods. All right? Now, the revelation that I'm bringing forth in this new project, the East Marder Family Cookbook, is that a new study that was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, found that almost 70% of the average child's diet is ultra processed foods. Ooh. All right, so you're inundated as a child here in the United States. If you're average, if you're the average child, you're inundated with ultra processed foods that is engineered by brilliant food scientists to taste a certain way that has this excitatory thing that influences what's happening with your dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, adrenaline, all these different hormones that make you feel exhilarated, that make you feel pleasure, right? And so it's not just a taste thing, it's a addiction thing that is taking place with our children, all right? And so you're inundated with this. Why would you even consider eating, quote, healthy? It just doesn't even sound right, right? Especially I'm tasty and you're young and so you're, you've got, you're healthy, you're all these metabolic benefits on your side, right? And so you're gonna have the candy.
The ice cream, the processed food, the packaged food all day long.
Absolutely.
The fast foods, all that stuff.
Free rein child in America, like we got free range chicken out here. If you're a free range child in America, you're going to go for ultra processed foods. And let's make a distinction to it, people are curious, what is ultra processed foods? So processing of foods has been done by humans for thousands upon thousands of years, all right? And it's just taking a food.
And.
Processing it in a way that makes it palatable, that makes it easy to store, to make it easy to trade, and to make it more enjoyable. So processing would be something like taking olives and using a stone press to make olive oil, right? That's extra virgin olive oil today, right? And something like tomatoes and making a pasta sauce. You can still tell where it came from. It's like a one step and then maybe adding some spices, some cooking, that kind of thing. Ultra processed foods is when the food is harvested. We'll just say a base food substrate. So we'll, we'll say corn, for example. And the corn itself uses kind of a base and also as a sweetener, right? High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup. And somehow that corn, that field of corn that you're looking at becomes pop cereal. All right, you gotta have my pops, right? You don't know, you no longer that hunter gatherer, if they were to see that box of cereal, they would have no idea where it came from. There's no essence left. It spins processed so much, all these different, not only breaking that corn down into sugar and different substrates, but the additives, the flavors, the added flavors, added preservatives, colorings, food dyes, which we have strong data on this now of this being one of the underlying causative agents in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders. Really? Our food dyes. Many food dyes have actually been banned in other countries that are still largely used here in the United States because they're disruptive to our nervous system, especially for our kids. And so, again, really starting to unpack these things, you start to realize, like, we're so disconnected from our food. It's scary because not that long ago, we evolved, really. If we just take out the last hundred years, just put that to the side, if we look at the thousands upon thousands of years of humanity before that, our food, we were deeply connected to it. It was a tribal thing. We all had responsibilities in procuring our food. And not just that, the acquisition of the food, the preparation of the food, and the eating of the food was a community thing. All right?
That's something you talk about with your new cookbook. which is about really eating healthy foods that taste delicious with family. Because we've lost the art of connecting with family when we eat. Everything is fast or convenient or watching with the TV on, which I'm guilty of half the time, but not as a community. And you talk about in your book about how, you know, when you deal with family or friends you care about and you're eating meals together that sure, specifically creating together or having some element or role in the creation process, how much more powerful is doing that consistently over time versus eating isolated and eating ultra processed foods by yourself?
Yeah. The last time I saw you, that's what we were doing. Eating together. It was a celebration for you for your birthday. It was one of the most magical days, right? We'll always remember that experience. And funny enough, this was normal. I just came back from Maui, for example. This was normal, this celebration around food, right? Having a luau, like this is kind of like maybe a commercial aspect of it now, but it's deeply rooted in sharing a food with your tribe, right? And celebrating life, celebrating our connection to food and to each other. And this is the mission right now. Now we're getting to how do we fix this? I talked about the larger culture scape that we're existing in and culture is like an invisible hand that's guiding our behaviors. We think we have free will, but our culture is really deciding what we're aware of and the choices that we have. Now, how do we change this culture? We start with our own family. We start with the controlling the controllables, all right? Because I've been in this field for over 20 years and thinking about all the time I've spent trying to target the bigger culture, it's very, very difficult. And what I found to be the most effective is changing the culture from within, starting with yourself, your family, that starts to bleed out to your community. People start to see things different. They see an example. I didn't see any examples when I lived in Ferguson, Missouri. I didn't see what health looked like. And so for people to see me and my family, knowing where I come from, It changes everything. Now, how does eating together with friends and family start to shift this culture? Well, according to the data, I'm gonna share three powerful studies with you. It's creating a protection for our health that heretofore we didn't really understand.
What does that mean?
Science. So eating together with friends and family, let me start with study number one. This is researchers from Harvard. They gathered all this data on family behaviors around eating. and they found that families that consistently eat together have a higher consumption of vital nutrients that prevent chronic diseases and lower intake of ultra processed foods. Really? Alright, so this is Harvard research.
Why is that? Why do you think that is?
There's a couple of reasons why, and I break this down in the book because I'm a why guy. I wanna know why. Right, right. And so one of the things that really jumps out is the intention behind eating together as a family.
Right?
There's an intentional meal planning that's automatically going to take place. It's not going to be across the board all the time. But if you know I'm having family dinner tonight, you're thinking about it. It's a, it's an unconscious subconscious thought process. It's like, okay, we got a plan. Like, what are we going to have? Right? Whereas today, if we're not, if we don't have this as a constant structure, DoorDash is on tap, right? Or just picking up something because we're not thinking, but we, we make the food decision last minute. and that's okay because we have access to that. That's okay. But when that becomes normalized, we get more and more separate from each other and also this protective mechanism for our health. So that's study number one. That's from researchers at Harvard. Now, this next one was cited in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. And they looked at family behavior around food and the outcomes for the children specifically. And they found that families who eat breakfast with their kids, parents who eat breakfast with their children four times a week had dramatically lower intake of ultra processed foods, higher intake of vital nutrients, at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at each day, most days of the week. And the list goes on and on, all these different benefits they were saying. But this is the most important part about this study. And by the way, they found that when the TV was rarely or never on for these families, they hadn't even further drop in their consumption of ultra processed foods to kids specifically, right? Because of that marketing, that advertisement. Now, the most important part about the study is that this was looking at minority children who would generally be in the context of low income conditions, families like mine. We didn't know that eating together could help to protect our health in some strange way, but had we known, even if we were eating processed foods, just the behavior of eating together, it starts to create this protection. I'm going to share with you why this leads to the next study. This was a collaboration of studies. It was actually published in Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
And I'm going to get all these.
Resources and link them up for you guys, too.
Yeah.
And they're all in the book detailed in the book. And so what these researchers uncovered was that, and this is the most important take away from today. This is the one. Do this one thing. They found that families who eat together any meal three times a week. Okay, so parents eating together with their children or parent eating together with their children just three times a week, dramatically decreased overweight and obesity in the children and decreased eating disorders and just overall decreasing the risk of the onset of early mortality and chronic diseases. Wow. By eating together with your family three times a week. That's fascinating.
All right.
This is the major takeaway that I want people to take on and make that a mandate. Make it a mission to eat with your family, eat with friends three times a week, plan it, add it to your calendar. Because today we've got a lot of stuff going on. And a lot of times, if you don't put on your schedule, it's not real. Like literally plan it out. This could be whatever flavor it looks like for you. This could be, you know, family dinner on Wednesday and Thursday and then brunch on Sunday, right? Just whatever works for you. But there's something really special about this process and we can unpack more of this why, but also the psychological aspect. And this was shown in data looking at adults and how eating together with their family dramatically decreased their stress levels. This was coming from a population of workers from IBM, and they found that as long as the workers were able to get home and have dinner with their family, it kept work morale high. But as soon as their work schedule and the demand started to dig into them spending time with their family and getting home in time for dinner, their work morale started to go down, their stress levels elevated. Now, why does this matter overall? Well, and this is another big takeaway from today. and this research as well is published in JAMA. But the research, this was a meta-analysis and the researchers determined that upwards of 80% of all physician visits today are for stress related diseases. 80%. Up to 80% because of the stress related component. Because stress isn't just something that's invisible. Your thoughts create correlating chemistry in your body instantaneously. And so if you're having these Habitual stressful thoughts and automatic negative thoughts, as our friend Daniel Amen discusses, when this is on automatic for yourself, you're just releasing these chemicals, a chemical cascade that can lean towards toxicity. They can be great in the short term to help you to survive short term stress, acute stressors, but we were never designed to carry constant emotional stress, constant mental stress, Constant environmental stress. So a lot of people might hear that and be like, well, I'm not that stressed. You know, my work isn't that stressful. We got to talk about this, something called an allostatic load in your overall stress load. So what goes into your stress load individually? Well, we do have work stress. Yeah, that's a common one. We have relationship stress. Relationship stress can mess you up. Oh, man, can mess you up.
I was messed up for about 15 years in different relationships, man. It was like, It'll mess your health up. Absolutely.
Your mind up.
Absolutely.
Your energy flow, everything. And it's based on your perception. It's based on your perception. That's how you think about it. And the correlating chemistry that you're gonna be creating, the most powerful pharmacy in the universe is in your body. 100%. Because it's, this isn't bioidentical. It is identical. It's the, you're creating chemistry for your receptor sites designed in you for you. There's nothing else more powerful than that. And so we've got, of course, there are also, there's some great breakup songs out there, all right? Some great love songs that come from that. There's that. So we've got work stress, we've got relationship stress, we've got mental stress, emotional stress, we've got exercise stress. Exercise stress is what's known as a hormetic stressor. It's in good stress if you're able to heal from it and recover. Because exercise isn't making the magic happen, it's tearing you down. the magic comes when you're able to recover, rebuild, come back better. But add that on to an already stressed person, spiritual stress. What if you feel disconnected? What if you feel like you're lacking purpose and significance? All these things, it starts to add into that overall stress load. And now here's another huge one, environmental stress. The environment that we are living in today is very, very different from what our ancestors evolved in. There are tens of thousands of synthetic, newly invented chemicals that we're talking about millions of tons released into our environment. And so the very air that we're breathing is different. And to take this into one of the cultural contagions that we need to protect our family from within our own household, a really good friend of mine, and she's one of the most brilliant researchers, she's the leading authority in the world on dietary oils. All right, so our name is Dr. Kate Shanahan. She has background as a family physician, but also she was a nutritionist for the Lakers during Kobe's time. Wow. Later in his career, helping to extend his career. Every time he would go to a different hotel and travel, he's bringing bone broth or finding a place where they would make it like that was one of his things. Bone broth that she introduced.
Yeah.
And also Dwight Howard was there, too, and she was like, he had the worst diet. He was eating all this candy and whatnot.
Some of these guys, you hear about these NBA, NFL guys, it's like just.
Candy half the day.
Yeah. And they're just genetic freaks though. Yeah, well we'll see what happens.
Yeah, but the injuries start to come, you start to feel tired.
Yeah.
But Kobe wasn't like that. Kobe was always looking for the edge. It was, right? And so anyways, so she's got this huge database of research on dietary oils. And one of the research papers that she shared with me, and this blew my mind, like I had to sit with it. Like I had to really sit and think about it. We're taking muscle biopsies of human fat cells back in the earlier part, like the night, around the 1900s, to see what makes up a human fat cell. What is, what's in there? And in the biopsy, they found that the fat cell itself was made of about 2% PUFAs. Okay? PUFAs are polyunsaturated fatty acids. All right? And they're naturally occurring in different plant foods like nuts and seeds, for example. And so that's all good. Now, they recently took biopsies of fat cells of modern humans, and they found that the average fat cell was made up of about 25% PUFA's, polyunsaturated fatty acids. Now, why does this matter? Polyunsaturated fatty acids are, by their very nature, very unstable, right? They're by their very nature, very pro-inflammatory. and they are a byproduct oftentimes, unfortunately, are coming along with things that stir about something called these reactive oxygen species or accelerated oxidation of your cells or accelerated aging to put it bluntly. All right? Now, what does this mean for us? About the span of about a hundred years, 2% polyunsaturated fatty acids make up our fat cells to now 25%. What does this mean for us? The very ingredients that make up human beings has changed dramatically. The recipe for making a human is dramatically different, all right? And wondering why we're having such poor health outcomes. Could this be one of the causative agents when we're talking about our switch over in the oils that we're consuming? Where are we getting all these polyunsaturated fatty acids, ultra processed foods? that are riddled with vegetable oils, canola oils, and all these unstable oils. And by the way, I encourage people, we'll put in the show notes as well, to go to YouTube and look up how canola oil is made. All right? And just watch. Watch. Wow. All right. It is going to shock you. If you look at olive oil, right, or extra virgin olive oil, that means just cold pressed. and you're pressing olives and you get the oil. That's it.
You're just pressing it down and then oil comes out.
When you see how canola oil is made, to be able to extract from a canola plant that amount of oil, it is scary. Really? So it's all this chemical processing, all these solvents and deodorizers, and by the way, because it stinks, you know, they're trying to nullify, neutralize the smell. and a lot of even inflammatory, like I'm talking about literally being able to catch on fire type of chemicals used in this process and to get something that looks uniform and clean. And then they put it in a plastic bottle and sit on store shelves. And plastics don't just biodegrade, they photodegrade. So light is breaking it down over time, by the way. And there's been a lot of science. I've talked about this on past shows about Bisphenol A.
What are the, what are the, what would you say are the three oils we should try to eliminate from our diet and then three healthier oils that may even have some benefits?
Yeah, let's stay right here with extra virgin olive oil. So one of the studies that I shared in the new book, in the East Mordor Family Cookbook, looks at olive oil and researchers at Auburn determining that olive oil can actually help to reduce inflammation in the brain. and help to heal the blood-brain barrier incredibly. Like that's astronomically powerful. Like why is this oil, why does it have such a resonance with the human brain and nervous system? That's amazing. And this is more of mono and saturated fatty acids, by the way. And also, if it's treated right, it's gonna be bottled in dark glass because it's sensitive to light and heat. And so even using it, by the way, we wanna make sure that we're not using it on too high of heat. and also traditionally maybe finishing your dishes with it, right? So you plate your food or using it for salad dresses, pour on some olive oil, right? Our mutual friend, Dr. Steven Gundry, he's a- obsessed with olive oil. He's like, drink it every day. Look at his results. My guy is, you know, he's in his senior years big time and he's just so on point, like his cognition, his health, his energy. Last time I talked to him, he was like on a ski trip somewhere. It's amazing to see.
It takes like a shot a day of olive oil, right?
Yeah.
It's just like that crazy old man. Or he's like, oh no, he actually is looking at the data. And so that would be one in the healthy category. And another one, now this one, there's a little bit of, by the way, none of these are 100% across the board for everybody. All right, we've got to keep that in mind. the new, the future of nutrition and health is personalization. For some people, olive oil is not your thing. You might have background genetics that don't metabolize this particular oil a certain way or small amounts or whatever the case might be. So you got to keep that in mind. So we've got nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics are going to be some of the leading fields of science. Looking at how what you eat influences your genetic expression and also your your set of genes, how it's catering towards certain things being better for you versus other things, right? Versus your friend, versus your wife, versus your brother, all right? Everybody has our unique cascade of genes. And on top of that, microbial genes, all right? So all the genes that make up your microbiome, all the bacteria that make up your microbiome, they have their own genes. If we go gene for gene in the human body, 99% of your genes are bacterial. It's the little critters, their genes. And so now where we're at today with science, we're looking at how our bacteria's genes are affecting our human gene expression. All right, so we can go down the rabbit hole. Sure, sure, sure. But just circle this back to another oil for us to look at would be avocado oil. Avocado oil is hot out here in the streets. We like it. You'd want that to come in a dark bottle. It's more, it's higher in monounsaturated fats. and it's coming from a real food, all right? An avocado. It's a lot more close touch than trying to process corn and make it into an oil. All right? So, and that leads over to, and those are just a couple.
What about for the audience watching or listening, I had my first taste of guacamole at your place.
Yeah.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Actually, this sounds bad, but as a 40 year old man, I had my first avocado like, hard avocado about a month ago.
Congrats, guys. You're a big boy.
I stole the palette of, like, a seven year old child.
But. But every time you've been with us, we've introduced something.
I know. And I was like, ah, I'm scared.
But did I do it? I'm like, that's not that bad. But it's also salt out there. These great food experiences, you know, because you tore that guacamole up, let's be honest. I did. It was also, like, the cookies that my wife made back in St. Louis, for example, like, very, again, using high quality ingredients, but still, like, every now and then you want a cookie. Nah, give me some.
You know, I think we added casserole to here, man.
That casserole is amazing. Yo, when you come by, I'm in.
We've got some great stuff. I'm in. Okay, so we got olive oil, avocado.
Oil, all in dark bottles. What would be one more, you think?
All right, is there one more or.
Man, there's so many. There's so many popping to mind. There's good oils. Yeah, but there's a caveat here. So there are these cat, this category of seed oils, which that in and of itself, unfortunately, is going to invoke some controversy. And what I want to implore everybody who is really about that life and nutrition, let's come together, let's have healthier conversations and not become so black or white or dogmatic about a certain thing. So seed oils in general, the majority of these seed oils out here on the streets that are riddling, riddled in processed foods, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about hemp oil, flax seed oil, chia oil, that's cold processed, all right, that's stored in shelf stable ways, it's generally going to be in a refrigerated section. You can find some really valid benefits here that's backed up with peer reviewed data. All right? So there's a plant form of omega-3s that can be utilized as an energy source by the body pretty efficiently and also can get converted into some of the omega-3s, DHA and EPA to help to fuel your brain and nervous system. Now, your conversion process is going to depend on you. It's going to depend on your genes, your microbiome, your overall metabolic health. But so I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But first of all, where does that analogy come from? All right, who's throwing babies out? But with seed oils just being all bad, all right, certain seeds, but the important thing is they cannot be exposed to very much heat at all. Are they going to become oxidized and rancid? So those are the ones I would say, and as far as the ones to avoid, absolutely avoid vegetable oil, quote vegetable oil, it's not made from vegetables, by the way. All right, it's the framing because it sounds healthy. You throw, this is called health washing, throwing the label on a thing and making it sound like it's healthy. And marketers are using this like crazy now, right? So you can get a box of Cheerios. It's like it's heart healthy, right? Honey nut Cheerios. Lower cholesterol. They actually had to change that. Really? Yeah. Because they finally face some backlash and, but also they'll, now it'll say gluten free, right? Gluten free. Oh, you're a gluten free diet or like, they're just fat free, right? They're still throwing these catchphrases onto things with an ultra processed bowl of crap. But by the way, vegetable oil, I put this study in the book as well. This was published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology. So it's a top journal looking at how in inhaling different things, fumes and things like that creates toxicity in the human body and other animals as well. What the researchers found was that just smelling vegetable oil during cooking can damage your DNA.
Holy cow.
Just smelling it.
Now, is there any, is there any studies, I'm sure there are that you're aware of, and maybe don't have the data with you right now, but are there any studies that talk about if you smoke cigarettes, smoke weed, smoke.
What.
Are the other things that people are doing?
Vaping.
Vaping, if you're cigarettes, weed, vaping, or inhaling any types of toxic smokes. Or if you're drinking alcohol or taking other prescription or non-prescription drugs recreationally, how does that affect your body, your DNA, your metabolism, whether you eat unhealthy ultra processed foods or if you're eating healthy foods but doing these other drugs and substances. Is there any data that talks about that?
Wow, man, that's a huge question and that's a huge array of inputs. And so the overarching piece here, number one, is understanding, okay, what have we evolved having exposure to, right? And the concentrations that we're getting exposed to. because the conversation around something like marijuana, for example, can be very inflammatory. But have humans been consuming some form of that throughout our evolution? And what are people smoking today?
Right.
And so adding all these pieces together and on top of polypharmacy, which is multiple medications, right now in the United States, about 70% of our adult citizens are on some form prescription drug or 70%.
Yeah. Yeah.
70%.
Do we know? Yeah.
So it's normal. It's normal to be on medications.
And also that America or is that world?
It's here in the United States. We're the most, we love drugs. We love them. Here in the United States by far. We are the most, we're the most chronically diseased society in the world. And also the, the, the biggest consumers of Pharmaceuticals, of course. because we have this mismatch going on. In the United States, just last year, we had a $4.2 trillion invested into our healthcare system. 4.2 trillion. We can't even fathom. We can't fathom how much money that is, all right? And the next closest country is like, we're four times. It's not even close, like how far away we are on our healthcare investment, but we're not getting better. That's the thing.
What are some of the healthiest countries? that take the least amount of- Japan.
Is- Drugs that have the least amount of obesity. Japan's on the other end of the spectrum with obesity.
Really? But also again, there's- They also have.
High suicide rates too, don't they? Or- Every country has their thing. Right, right. But also you've got to look at something like that that might not necessarily be a result of food. We're not just this linear thing. This can be a cultural thing where this perceived stress, perceived value, the list goes on. Pressure in other ways.
Yeah.
Overall, chronic diseases are- It's extremely low compared to us, obesity extremely low compared to us. And this was getting me to my point of what you talked about, all of those different pieces, how does that affect our health outcomes? With polypharmacy, there was a paper, we might have talked about this during the age of the virus that took over our lives. And there was a paper that was published looking at polypharmacy specifically and finding dramatically higher rates of infection and severe outcomes. from the virus when people are on multiple medications. And the biggest culprits were PPIs, proton pump inhibitors, or acid blockers. Why would that be? Well, your stomach acid is incredibly important in neutralizing, right, parasites, viruses, invaders coming into your system, which this is gonna be, your immune system is right there, a cell layer, just one cell distance between your gut and your immune system. All right. Your immune system is mostly located right around your gut.
But if we're taking something, a chemical in a drug or smoking something and we're ingesting it, how does that impact our metabolism?
I was gonna get to that.
Yeah.
So number one, just really quickly, PPIs, opioids was the second. and also psychiatric medication. So antipsychotics, those are the three biggest culprits leading to poor outcomes. Looking at again, when folks are consuming pharmaceuticals and having poor outcomes from that virus, so making you more susceptible to infectious diseases. Now why is this? I can go through multiple layers on this. Let's look at the big one of the big agents here. And this would be the way that it impacts your liver. Your liver is responsible for drug metabolism. That's like, even let me give some respect to the liver. Okay?
What?
What word is in liver? Liv.
Liv.
Liv.
Right.
It's just using etymology. Like, it's got some really important relevance for human health and functionality in our survival. A liver isn't something you can just get a new one. All right. But also the liver is the most regenerative organ in our bodies, you know, outside of like skin, things like that. But your liver, you can get a portion of it sliced off and you can grow some of that liver back. Wow. Which is very, that's like, amazing. That's like some lizard stuff that our bodies can do. Yeah.
Grow another tail. Yeah.
Yeah. Our livers are very regenerative and they do so much to protect us. And again, it's responsible for drug metabolism. So all of those foreign items that are coming in, your liver is doing its very best. It's doing a lot of work to process, but also to compartmentalize and send things to different places, but also to store things. This is why today we have an epidemic. This is one of the leading causative agents for so many chronic diseases, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
What does that mean?
So oftentimes fatty liver disease, we relate it. Well, just historically it was related to people who were drinking a lot. All right, and they would- the liver couldn't take all the alcohol. It would basically become, have an obese liver. Inflamed. Incredibly inflamed. And it wouldn't be able to process anything. Exactly. Exactly. And your liver also, again, it's in, don't, I just, I struggled to talk about this because it's not operating in isolation. It's in communication with your heart, your lungs, your brain. It's all connected. It's all connected in the same person. But non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, that is skyrocketed in recent years, increasing our risk for heart attacks and strokes, for diabetes. And in particular, sugar is one of the biggest problems because your liver also is handling the glucose you're taking in. So we talked about insulin shuttling glucose into your fat cells, muscle cells, but also it's gonna get stored in your liver as glycogen. All right? So when that gets tapped, you know, like it reaches its full point, and you got. And your liver keeps on taking more and more of that burden. Like, I'll take what I can. I'll take what I can. I take. I'll take what I can. Because we can't keep shuttling this. And your insulin resistance goes up, your insulin sensitivity for your other cells goes down. Your liver's gonna just keep getting kicked in its liver nuts, basically. All right, right. And so it's going to create this kind of inflamed State. Wow. And if your liver goes, man, like, it's a wrap. It's really rap. Yeah. So to relate all the stuff that you talked about.
And it's hard to keep the rest of your body healthy if the liver is not healthy. It's hard to keep your brain, your thoughts healthy. It's hard to keep your heart healthy, your skin, your other organs.
Your liver is deeply connected to your skin health too.
Yeah. Really?
Yeah. The list goes on.
So what impacts the liver the most? What types of foods, substances hurt the liver the most?
That's a tough question, but you know, the things that you already mentioned, again, being that is responsible for drug metabolism.
Alcohol metabolism as well.
Are there any benefits to drinking alcohol? Well, that, you know, that's a, that's an inflammatory question. But, I mean, you know, my, one of my dearest friends and mentors, Dr. Daniel Aman, I mean, he's looking at the brain. He's, he's been doing this stuff a long time. And also, we, him and I send studies back and forth and. you know, the thing is, we're going to validate, we're going to affirm anything that we enjoy, right? And we're gonna have a tendency to ignore, like, and I've even seen it in my clinical practice back in the day, people would be like, I don't want to know.
Right?
Don't tell me anything that's gonna make me think differently, this thing that I enjoy. And I'm not about taking Joy away. I'm a joy advocate out here. I am about informed consent. I am about intelligent usage and utilization of things. And so one of the things that we see, and by the way, humans have been consuming alcohol for a long time. Alcohol is actually a macronutrient. Okay, so this is important. We have fats, proteins, carbohydrates. This is what I was taught in my university. You know, I went to a private university first. I went out to Lindenwood. But, you know, my university education was telling me there's these three macronutrients. and these are your three things you got to focus on from a nutritional perspective and manage calories. Those are the two things to do. But in reality, water is a macronutrient as well, and alcohol is a macronutrient. Your body can use alcohol to fuel processes. That's what makes it a macronutrient. That being said, when you consume alcohol, it does something really interesting. It kicks on this phenomenon. It's called fat sparing. And so you might be, you and I are just hanging out here now and we haven't eaten in a while. Our body's gonna be utilizing our stored fat for energy should it need to, right? It can break down stored glycogen from the muscles and from the liver, yeah. But if we're just chilling in a relaxed state, the body's really good at using stored fat when we're just doing low impact things, all right? Now, we bring some alcohol here and we drink that. suddenly fat burning stops completely. Your body automatically switches over completely to utilizing that alcohol because this is why, this is what makes it different. Your body can't store alcohol. Your body can store the other macronutrients. But alcohol is incredibly volatile. We evolved, if we're really going to look at this picture, hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans would find fruit that had, you know, fallen from the trees or whatever that had began to get rotten and ferment, right, and consume that. And we developed over time the ability to metabolize that ethanol, to metabolize the alcohol that's getting resulted from this fermentation process. So it's like we have that pathway. It doesn't mean that all alcohol is bad. We have it for a reason. So again, I'm trying to create a balance indication of this here. However, then we created distillation. We was like, okay, this naturally occurring alcohol. Not enough. We need more liquor in the liquor. We need more alcohol. We need spirits. All right? And so this process of distillation took it to another level, increasing the alcohol content of things abnormally. And it hits our cells different. This is something that's, again, it's relatively recent in human evolution to have access to so much alcohol at one time. and so with that being said, and with fat sparing taking place again, this shuts down fat burning. All right.
Especially if you drink at night.
Oh, it's.
You're not burning fat overnight.
Yeah, it's. Again, your body has to use that immediately, and your liver is immediately going on red alert because it has to try to process this without killing you. Because I don't think we, we really realize or talk about often in our culture how many people die from alcohol poisoning.
Right?
And also not just the deaths, but also the resulting brain damage that takes place. Like, I just lost my father recently, and I was actually at his funeral about two and a half weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago now. And he had been in assisted living facility for about 15 years because of drugs and alcohol, really creating brain damage. And he developed epilepsy from that. And I've seen this again real time, first hand. I grew up in that environment. I grew up during the crack epidemic. I've seen the impact that it had on my family members. I've lost family members to violence and the associated consumption of these things I've seen firsthand. And so I had a decision to make. Am I going to follow that path or am I going to do something different? And let me tell you, Louis, that's why I'm here today, man. It's very difficult to change when you're in an environment that you're inundated with this stuff. I saw it as the only way until I got exposure to something else. little happy accidents, little moments, like getting busted out in the, quote, descent program to Lafayette High School and getting exposure to a different environment, having a friend that lived out there and going over to his house and seeing, like, wait a minute, you guys aren't getting woken up by people fighting stuff breaking at night. Like, you can just go to sleep. And it's like, cool. Like, everything's going to be normal when you wake up in the morning. Like, it created this sense of certainty and peace, and I'm just like, oh, I'm gonna live here when I quote, grow up. And you've been out to my house out there, right by Lafayette. It's so crazy, man. And I didn't think about that until we moved in like that week. I was like, oh, my God. You know, and this is this. This speaks to the power that we have, because it's not just we're not just victims of our environment. We are products of our environment. Absolutely. We don't have any choice but to be. Humans are incredibly adaptable. What's different about us is that we're also creators of our environment. we can consciously create the environment that makes health automatic, that makes healthy choices easy and accessible. We can create an environment that makes love and joy and friendships more accessible, safety more accessible, creativity more accessible. This is what makes us so special, okay? Other animals, again, this is what makes humans exceptional. Shout out to the beavers, you know what I'm saying? They can build dams, they got their own beaver life. But with us as human beings, we have the ability to think externally of all these things, right? You know, I don't really want to disrespect beavers. Shout out to all the beavers in the dam. But my point being that in reality, regardless of the circumstances, maybe the dam that the beaver built, we can foresee, we can plot, plan, we can create using different materials, we can think about and measure and monitor all the problems with it. We can think upstream, downstream. I know beavers think about that too. Let's shout out to the beavers, okay? But bottom line is, you know, for us today, for us to take full control of our ability to create, and for, but for us to do this, and this is something that I'm so grateful for you because you've been on a mission to talk about, for us to do that and really understand our power to create, we have to put aside our victim story. We have to take responsibility.
Watch out now, you're gonna get people coming after you. Tell people to let go of our victim story. Listen. But what if you're raised in a challenging place and all you have is food stamps and you don't have the jobs? I'm that guy.
You're at a food desert and you're-.
This is what makes me- you-'re obese already and you can't get a job and you've got- your parents are not around. And- most of the time- what if.
All these stories- most of the people who are being warriors, to try and say like, listen, this is not fair out here. It's about access. You have access, they don't. I come from that. I come from conditions where I didn't have access. I come from conditions where I was in the most poverty state here in the United States. I was getting food from charities to feed myself and my family. My mother, and again, like, well, why don't you guys just work harder? My mother worked overnight at a convenience store. She got stabbed eight times. and almost died, okay? I lost my father to crack and alcohol. So when people are talking about this stuff, they don't really know what they're talking about. You're trying to stand up for people. Yes, it matters. You want to have access to health, to healthy relationships, to a healthy environment. It was a risk me going outside because of a f***ing drive-by. I grew up in that environment. But what people don't talk about and don't understand is all the beauty that exists there too. There's so much beauty, there's so much kinship. It's under volatile circumstances. It's like war. It's like soldiers bonding, all right?
Coming together, helping each other, supporting each other.
Exactly. And we also develop this resilience that most people would never understand. And so, yes, creating the conditions where this is normalized, where people have access, that's one part. But even with that story, it's been like, oh, people need more access to healthcare. what kind of health care, this the kind of health care that is simply medicating symptoms and not helping people to address the root causes of their conditions that are making these companies multi, multi, multi-billion dollar companies more profitable while people continue to suffer. And by the way, one of the studies that I reference is looking at obesity and chronic disease. Being in that state in a low income environment makes it harder to get out of that environment. and that's a fact. And we know it. I know it experientially. Until I got healthier, I couldn't. I didn't know. I couldn't. I didn't have the awareness, the energy to lift myself out of that situation. So the access matters. Yes. But also, we also have a choice. We also have power to change, even within the most up, trying, difficult, toxic, abusive circumstances, we. have the ability to make a difference. Even if it's just the difference in our own mind. Even if we're in an abusive situation at which I've been in, I grew up in it. I had the ability to change my perception. I could have been sitting here today with you and holding on to that story about all the bad things that happened to me from my parents, all the violence, all the abuse. But I chose to change my perception, to forgive them, to see even the glimmer of good that was in my stepfather, which was, there was actually a lot. And we got to celebrate that at his funeral and all these people that got to see him because he got clean. He had to. He's in this adult living facility. And all these people coming up and sharing these stories that I never met before.
Really.
Sharing the same stories that I grew up with his childlike nature. his always cracking jokes and making light of things, and also his work ethic. Because even that was the thing I chose to take. That was the number one thing. No matter what happened to him, no matter what he went through the night before, no matter how inebriated he was, he always got up and went to work. He never missed a day. Never missed a day. And so I picked that up. And so my work ethic, when I'm not doing this, I'm researching, I'm working my ass off, I'm studying, I'm teaching every day. I'm infatuated with it. I must do it. And I picked that up from him. Now, also, knowing this is the case and hearing these stories by all these people that were coming up, I chose to see that childlike nature because this also was the first man that I ever met that beat a video game. All right, he had Mike Tyson punch out. You know, he got the Nintendo. He beat the game, you know, he'd be up late at night. Sometimes I could get up, you know, after my brother and sister went to sleep and hang out with them. But there was this childlike nature. But something would change. Something would change over time with, and he had this story. He came from an environment of abuse, of, you know, substance abuse as well. And he's replaying that. And then the demons will come out. All the things that he's been exposed to, all the oppression, all the things. And who's he gonna take that out on? The people he loves most. But I chose to see that he was doing the best that he could with the person that he was, circumstances, what he was handed. And so we get to choose the meaning. We get to choose how we allow these things to control us or how we take control.
It's a powerful story, man. Thanks for sharing this. And for, you know, there's people that are gonna listen to this or watch this. And I know people are going to share this with their friends who are maybe struggling or dealing with health challenges or maybe are in cities or environments or communities that aren't of a culture or mindset of health or they don't have the access to healthy foods. And the culture chooses unhealthy decisions. And it's just they don't have the time to think, they're exhausted, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed, they don't have the money, and life didn't go their way to be able to make those choices or they've been unhealthy for a while now. What would you say to those individuals who are struggling when they're just like, it's easy for you to say, even though I hear this story that you were in that situation, but it just doesn't seem possible for me. What would you say to them?
The piece that I didn't share that we've talked about in the past was that When I was living in that environment, I was diagnosed with an arthritic condition of my spine and bones. I was rapidly deteriorating. I was on a plethora of medications just to be able to sleep at night because the pain would keep me up at night. It was absolute terror. It was anguish. It was constant pain and fear. I was living in fear. I was living in fear of standing up because every time I stood up, this sciatic lightning bolt would Just go down my leg. And so I just stopped standing up as much as possible. And at the time, the physician that I was working with, the first physician, he of course took a look at my MRI. He told me that I had the spine of an 80 year old person when I was just 20. I was just a 20 year old kid. And he told me that this was incurable. I was just going to, this is unfortunately is gonna have to live with this. He was sorry, but he was gonna give me some something to help me manage it. And there were two really popular drugs at the time, by the way. One was Celebrex. It's non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and the other was Vioxx. All right? And if people know about Vioxx, Vioxx ended up killing. This was a drug that was distributed by Merck, one of the most powerful drug companies in the United States, even today. And this is, again, over 20 years ago, Vioxx factually killed 40,000, at least 40,000 the estimation is 40,000 to 60,000 Americans killed. This is a fact, killed 40,000 at minimum of our people. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of injuries and cardiovascular events that took place. And what they did was they knew the risk. They saw it in the drug trials, but they did a little bit of this, a little bit of that to hide the risk. and one of my friends and colleagues, John Abramson, has done some really great work on this. He works in health care policy at Harvard, no big deal. And he was brought in in litigation in a lot of these big drug company trials. Drug companies just regularly, it's always something going on. And I'm talking about massive loss of life here, 40,000 people. And my physician put me on Celebrex, not ViOX. I would have taken either without question. I just wanted to get out of pay. I might not be sitting here with you because a lot of young people died as well. All right? Now, all of this to say, even in that circumstance, there was little pieces of hope. There were little pieces of light that I can grab onto because especially in those dark times when it seems like everything is wrong, you're totally alone. Even my own mother, who I talked about earlier and her situation that she went through, she disappeared. You know, she was going through something in her life. I lost my mom. I couldn't, you know, she wouldn't. I couldn't find where she was at. She left me. And this is after she borrowed some money from my refund check from Umsl, from my college. I got a refund check, and I was paying my rent with that. And my mom asked to borrow some money. I was like, Mom, listen, I have to pay this rent. She disappeared. My mom, my own mother left me to get put out on the street. I'm in chronic pain. Oh, I don't even have my mom. Okay. let alone my dad. You know, I just, I never even met my biological father. You don't even keep going on how this can be on paper. Right. But the bottom line was this, even in those conditions, what happened was I grabbed onto that glimmer of light, and I kept ignoring it for a long time. And that glimmer of light was my grandmother, who kept on checking in on me every now and then. Like she knew that there's something was not right with me. And I just remember like how much she loved me and how much she invested in me and how much she knew I would be somebody and I would do something special in my life.
And.
So just being able to honor her, I decided to get my ass up and to do something about this. After all of these physicians told me that they couldn't help me, I hadn't decide. what am I going to do about this myself? Because I've been outsourcing my health and my potential to other people, and that's impossible, right? You could have people that can help you along the way, that can provide resources and coaching, but change is from the inside out. And so I made a decision to get well. Most people never do that. Please hear what I'm saying. Despite your circumstances, decide, decide, and the resources there are things right now in your world, in your environment that are already there that you're not seeing because you're tuned into how up it is and how incapable you are. As soon as I made the decision to get well, no matter what. Matter of fact, this is what I said. All right? This is crazy. I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to get well. And I asked the question, what can I do? What can I do to feel better? What can I do to get well? What can I do to be the healthiest? person in the world. I had no right to ask a question like that in the circumstances that I was in. And within a week, a friend of mine who I'd known her for years, she took me to Wild Oats and the Whole Foods. Like, I'd known her for years, and she was in chiropractic school. I thought she was so weird, right? Her and her friends, like, she'd invite me to some things, just like, man, you guys are so weird. She took me, but now I'm seeing through a new, new lens. I'm seeing through new eyes and I'm at this place and I'm going over to the books and I'm like looking at my condition, this arthritic condition and I'm finding there's studies here like, wait a minute, this... I'm deficient in vitamin D, but I'm... Wait a minute, Omega-3s, like where am I, am I getting any of this stuff? And I found out like there's a mismatch, there was an environmental mismatch. My body was a result of the inputs that I was giving it. And so now I started to change the inputs and start to give my body all these things that had been lacking, but it was based on something that was already present that now I'm gonna tune into. And by the way, I didn't have money. I didn't have money. Okay? And so now I'm in a situation where I'm risking for me to buy this Omega-3 supplement, I'm risking paying my light bill. All right? But here's the rub. this is what happened. When I start to invest in myself, I start to feel better. I start to make more money.
You got more energy.
I start to find more opportunities. I start to acquire more resources. When I first bought some goji berries, which are pretty popular now, there's tons of, tons of studies, and I talk about in the book as well, just one of these great foods. But they didn't have them at Whole Foods or, like, even at these health food stores yet. And I was, like, getting them from this. There was, like, a, a Chinese. herbal place where they did, like, acupuncture and stuff. And I went in there and I, like, talking to the guy, and it's just like, it's super.
Like, I felt like I was in a movie, you know?
You got some Goji berries I can get for me. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just so interesting. And. And by me doing that, investing in my health within about two to three years, I was getting Goji berries from free from the top company that was Distributing Goji berries. And this is true story. All right. As a matter of fact, this is great. I mean, they saw me. They were doing an event somewhere. It was, like, one of those Health Expos, and I. And. And somebody was asking a question to one of the people in the booth, and the person wasn't. She was, like, working with somebody else. I was like, oh, yeah. And I started telling her about whatever it was. Maybe it was, like, chocolate or something. And then the other employee, but who was actually the manager of the setup, she heard me talking, and she came over me.
She was like, who are you?
Like, That was incredible. Cut to, I ended up getting connected to the CEO of the company. They sent me a pallet to my house in Florence, South Ferguson. A pallet of these superfoods. That's awesome. And I started teaching nutrition classes until, Bro, do you understand?
That's cool.
That was from me saying yes, me investing in myself, me saying, I decide to do this no matter what. I will find a way. I don't want people to downplay their capacity for greatness. I don't want people to downplay their capacity for figuring things out, for finding a way where there's a will, there's a thousand ways.
Yeah, I love that, man. And I think it's also important to know that, I mean, I don't think life is designed to be easy for everyone. I don't think anyone is supposed to have an easy life. Even if you're born in wealth, you still have challenges and other things you got to deal with. Maybe not money challenges, but other stuff you got to overcome. But I feel like once we accept, like, okay, there's supposed to be some challenges. How can I accept or embrace that this is a part of life always and find peace with the challenge and start looking at things differently than it's gonna feel a lot easier as opposed to hard and challenging. So it's a perspective around that as well. So I'm grateful for that story because I just think people need to hear that. And I think people who feel like there's no way out need to see more studies, more stories like yours explaining what is possible when you have a lack of health, you can't stand up, your parents are gone, you got no money, you're in a sick culture and community and town, all that. So it's possible, which I think is really inspiring. There's something you said there that I'm just curious, I wanted to touch on. About 40,000-ish people dying from a drug that was prescribed from our health professionals and health companies, drug companies. Do you know the stats on how many drug-related deaths there are a year in America?
Absolutely, I do. Of course I do.
How many people die due to drugs every year?
This is according to the EJS Center for Ethics at Harvard. you know, again, reputable organization and the researchers affirmed and by the way, I did all of these resources, anything that I talk about, you can triple check, all right? And so again, it's the EJS Center because something like this is paradigm shifting. The EJS Center for, for ethics at Harvard determined that about 180,000 Americans die annually from prescribed, from properly prescribed medications.
180,000 die a year from prescribed medicine from, like, doctors saying, take this.
Yes, properly prescribed medications. Now, again, this is not to create any kind of controversy. We need our physicians, we need pharmaceutical companies. We just need more ethics. We need better understanding. We need more education around the possible downsides and not treating a symptom instead of helping people to remove the underlying cause of the condition so they don't need the drug, they don't need the added risk.
Right.
Now, that's just deaths. We're not talking about the millions of hospitalizations. Again, these are all confirmed. But this is why most people don't know this. And this is why we need to have a little bit more compassion for this research from these, again, from research at Harvard, is that this isn't something that's easily checked off on a death certificate, right? We know today about comorbidities, but saying that this person died from a drug, properly prescribed drug, requires that the researchers dig so adamantly into the data and finding the cause is very difficult. because it could be anaphylactic shock, it could be, you know, heart attack, whatever.
And what caused that? Yeah, yeah.
You feel me? This is. This is the problem. This is another mismatch with perceived data, right? That. That the public sees an actual data. There's a mismatch.
There's probably more people die every year that are somehow related to prescribed drugs.
It's very difficult. It's very difficult to say. It's very difficult to pinpoint, especially if time has gone on. right? And now again, but we have a model today of healthcare that is drug dominant. We have a drug model of healthcare in the United States. It's not true healthcare. It's a model that is farming sick people. It's a model that is dependent on repeat customers, right? You getting well is losing a customer. Why on earth would they do that? It's just not logical.
Right?
And so the more people that are taking these prescription medications and the longer they're taking them, the better. It's just we have an unfortunate healthcare model that depends on people to be sick in order for it to be sustainable. And our economy here in the United States, obviously there are a lot of problems. One of the safest, most surefire bets for investors is investing in healthcare because we have so many sick people. It is one, it is one field that continues to grow. True, man.
And so for our economy to depend.
On the sickness of its citizens, we have a very twisted reality right now, which goes back to we have to change the culture. And the culture starts with you and your family because here's the cool thing about culture. Yes, we can go and visit a culture, right? I just visit a culture in Maui, for example. I've never been to Hawaii. That was amazing. Oh, man, it's amazing. And so we can go and visit a culture, but when we go to a culture, we're taking our culture with us. And so people are seeing it. People are seeing your culture, the culture of your family everywhere you go. You're modeling it. That's all I needed. This kid from those circumstances, I just needed to see what health looks like. I just needed a glimmer of light from somebody.
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