Health Tips To Prevent Disease And Live Longer | Lewis Howes

You are in control of your own body and your blood flow is running to the cells, feeding the cells. You get a lot of energy and that energy is without stress. You are simply there. That is what a cold shower can do.

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Yes, I would say if you go to a two-way shower, have a nice hot one and then finish off cold. Because that is vascular fitness. Your energy is going to run a lot better. afterwards. And that means when you sit, your energy flow, your blood flow is a lot better. So you just feel better because the energy flows better. That is vascular fitness. Did you say so end up?

Did you say high?

Yes. Alternate is even better.

Okay.

Because then you open up, close, open up, close, and then you train the millions of little muscles in the vascular system. which is helping the blood flow go through the system. And then the heart rate goes down with 20-30 beats a minute. That means stress, bye-bye stress. You don't feel the stress anymore. You are in control of your own body and your blood flow is running to the cells, feeding the cells. You get a lot of energy and that energy is without stress. You are simply there. That is what a cold shower can do. It's amazing. And from there I say do 20-25 minutes of deep breathing exercises because it has been shown that it changes the chemistry. You become actually the alchemist in the morning. Make sure that you are the alchemist. You are the ruler within your own mind and your own body. That is the mindset. And the cold shower will help your vascular system, which is running through everything you got. And the breathing is changing the chemistry. And then suddenly you find out that consciousness, the way we actually are within our brain, is to be the master over our stress, over our health, over our happiness, it's all there. That is going to be the new paradigm. We are the directors or the presidents within our the kings and the queens. We shine the crown, the corona, the crown, the crown. That's who we are. We are that. We should behave like kings and queens and feel alike. and we should be able to rule over the world of what we see and bring love and prosperity. There we are. And now it is science. So psychology goes over physiology, Michigan study, brain over body. It is there. And now it's the time that the scientific world will have to take up that the defense system in every individual in the world is able to be altered within one day or half a day. Half a day. And I can challenge any scientist to prove me wrong. Because we got all the data. And I'm asking, please, scientists, look into this. If you want to talk inflammation, can we influence what causes damage? in a coronavirus, the coronavirus infection, that is the IL-1, the IL-11, the IL-6, the IL-8 interleukins. Those are interleukins, inflammation markers. Can we bring them down with that, control the damage? That's what we have shown. We have shown to bring it down. And that was the first group in scientific research ever, who was able to bring it down in such a way that they did not feel the fever, uncontrollable shivering, nausea, vomiting, backaches, muscle aches, and all caused by a bacteria injected. In the end, it causes inflammation. And the inflammation markers went down. The coronavirus virus and/or a bacteria cause inflammation, they go up the innate immune system. Can we control the innate immune system? That in science was shown to be not possible at will. And now we have shown at will to bring it down. So that inaugurates in the future, and they have to techniques that enable people massively all over the world to be much more into influencing their innate immune system and therefore bringing down the damaging factors of inflammation and control their immune system a lot better. So viruses through the white blood cell increase which we also through science have shown, those are the detectors. Those are the little Sherlock Holmes inside our blood stream. And when the bad guy is coming in, then the Sherlock Holmes knows how to detect. And then inflammation doesn't need to happen, because a little bad guy is not able to do damage. And this we have shown. And this in the end shows, hey, if we are able to take down the information and with that change the perspective of what we at will as humans are able to do in relationship to disease in general, then there will be a big change. People become much more self-aware Begin to do these breathing techniques, take the damn cold shower and feel great.

I love it, man. When is the last time you got the flu or got a cold or got sick where you were out for a while? Do you remember the last time?

Must be amnesia, but I don't know. I forgot. It's not there.

You're doing cold training often. You're leading retreats every other week. You're climbing. you know, a mountain and snow and freezing cold, shirtless, you're jumping in freezing rivers, cold tubs, ice showers, you're doing these things, but you don't remember the last time you got sick. Maybe a little here and there, but you were able to get yourself back to full power. Are you in this time staying at home and making sure you're protecting yourself and the ones around you, even though you're trained to not get sick?

Sick?

Or are you saying, you know, I'm gonna go outside, I'm gonna live my life, I'm gonna touch everything and touch my mouth and I'm not worried. What's your mindset during this time?

I'm absolutely not in fear related to coronavirus infection. I know how to.

Beat it.

I know how to spike up my immune system. I know this. I already talked to the university and I told them, hey guys, you still got my blood, my blood taken while I was doing my exercises. And that blood has shown to be resistant against a bacteria injected into the blood. Normally there is aggressive reaction of the immune cells. Ex vivo in laboratory setting, so without me, but it's my blood. And they took it when I was doing my exercising. And they took it normally there is a very violent reaction on the immune cells. Now they took my blood and they put in the same bacteria and there was zero reaction on the immune cells.

Really?

Zero. Zero.

Is this with.

So I told him.

Yes.

Coronavirus or just where.

Absolutely.

Any virus.

That's what creates inflammation. And coronavirus also just equates inflammation. So we were not able to bring down inflammation at will and. I showed how to bring it completely down. So at least let them investigate how this is possible because I've been showing it. And then they told me, you are the only one who is able to do this because you are the Iceman. Then I directly said, no, give me a group of people and I will show just in a couple of days how to bring them to the autonomic nervous system the innate immune system, how to bring down inflammation, and then you test them all with the bacteria, you inject them and cause inflammation in the body, the innate immune system reaction, and then you will see they all will bring it down. That in contrary of hundreds and thousands of people who have done the same experiment And all got sick.

Wow.

Now, there we are. If someone is feeling sick right now, and maybe they have coronavirus, maybe they just have the flu or some type of cold or something else, maybe they're causing sickness because of the mind and how they're stressing so much. Who knows why? What would you say people should do? Obviously, if they're sick, they should probably stay quarantined with the practice, but what should they do in terms of just feeling better to try to strengthen the immune system and weaken the sickness? What is something they could do every day? Is it 20 minutes a day of breathing like you said and doing the ice stuff even if they feel weak? Will that help? Is it more breathing? What's the strategy to increase the immune system?

Dr. Justin M. If they feel weak, then they should do the breathing exercises. the breathing exercises changes the chemistry, brings down the inflammation. And when it is brought down through the breathing techniques, not hey, just do a little bit of breathing. Yeah, I breathe already all day long. No, not that way. Just follow the protocol, which these guys in the university also did. Also those people are humans. So you are a human, follow the protocol, and then it will show you will bring down inflammation. which was weakening the person. So the person feels weak, he brings down through the breathing techniques, the inflammation, then he feels strong again. He feels connection again and that is feeling strong. And from there...

He starts to fight off the sickness.

Yes, the inflammation goes down with that, the sickness, and with that he feels he has control. within his immune system at will again gives confidence and great feeling. That is one. And then from there, then take a hot shower, take a cold one afterwards, from 30 seconds to two minutes, and you're gonna feel even greater because you are exercising and activating the transportation system of your body. and it's all logic.

Why does breathing help boost the immune system by itself? Why is air into your body and your cells? Why does that help?

Yes. When we do these breathing exercises we have shown in the university, they work different than any other breathing technique I have been looking up. And I've gone through science to show it. So it's factual, it's factual. These breathing techniques I've been exercising randomly by going into cold water. And cold water is real stress. And when real stress comes and you are able by certain kinds of ways of breathing, then those are breathing techniques. that is able to fend off the stress of the cold. And so that those breathing techniques after being so much in the cold, I took home, I began to do those same breathing techniques which I was doing before to fend off the cold. I took them home and began to exercise at home. And then it showed, wow, this goes deep. It changes my consciousness, it changes my feeling, deeply. I see all the lights. I see all the chakras. I see enlightenment. I see anything. I learned it by going into a cold water. And cold water is merciless, but righteous. It's what I always say. But it is so. It is my teacher. If it works in cold water, it will work against any virus and or any bacteria.

I love that. And. And.

And more so, you learn if you learn how to deal with cold water, which is very stressful, which goes directly into your emotion, you learn also to deal with your emotion, with your mood. And this has now been shown in the brain scans that I'm able to connect with the areas where emotion is residing.

My father. had a lung cancer back in 2005. He survived, but he shrunk in size by one-third.

His body.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And his quality of life never recovered to this extent. So this is where my passion for longevity starts.

Longer and more quality.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so that's number one.

One, two.

I call it don't die stupid or don't do stupid things or. Scientifically, I call it passive longevity, right? So if you're smoking, statistically, you're gonna live 10 years, well, less. And if you look at the average for your gender and population group, okay? So smoking, minus 10 years from your life. Not using seat belts, minus two years. Seat belts in the car? Seat belts. Yeah, minus two years from your life. Well, excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, I don't even have the figures, but that's dangerous as well. So these are the simple things or don't doing super extreme sports. For example, I've been blessed and I had an opportunity to travel to South Pole and North Pole because it's still pretty safe trips. Then I thought, okay, what if I want to go to Everest, like the highest mountain on earth? So, probability of death, if you try to do it, is a little bit above 6%. So, I thought, like, as a man who wants to change one billion lives and father of four kids, I don't want to do it. So, these are the simple choices. And again, they are all rational in regards to smoking or your safety procedures, etc. So, that's very important. important, too. And people really underestimate that.

Don't die stupid. Don't do things so extreme that it gives you more chance of dying younger. Yeah. Okay, number three.

Third is diet. So one of our limiting beliefs, and this is what has changed for us, is we underestimate the power of food and the food and the fact that food can be our medicine.

Right?

So in this regard, there's so many disagreement in, in in scientific circles around what actually extends our life today. But there's almost one agreement, even the most skeptical ones say that if you decrease the number of calories, your caloric intake, it's almost, it's almost your guarantee that you're gonna live like two, three, four years longer and the quality actually gonna be better.

Crazy.

Yeah, it is.

You'll look younger too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But then the question is how you do it, right? Because you know what, it's for me, it's a nightmare just to three days a week, sorry, three times a day, seven days a week just to control like the number of calories that you do. So what I do, I'm doing a lot of plant-based food because the caloric intensity of vegetables is so small. Even if we have like the whole table full of vegetables, you're still gonna be fine. So that's one. Two, because of the current production practices for meat and fish, the industrial version of this is full of growth hormones, antibiotics, E. coli bacteria itself. So I'm just trying to avoid this. So that's important as well. And this is why you switch to vegetables as well. I also do fasting, but it's not for everyone. You know, I do like 36 hours of fasting every week. Monday evening to Wednesday morning.

I've been starting to do that from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning. Yeah. And I feel great.

It's amazing.

I just did this a couple days ago. I've done it a few times this year. And I'm kind of like, okay, once a month right now. It's try for 24 to 36 hours. And it's like maybe every two weeks or maybe every week eventually. I feel like I'm getting leaner. I feel like healthier, younger, all those things.

So yeah, yeah. Well, that's, I also like your choice of weekdays. because I'm kind of trying, I'm killing the blue monster in the beginning, right? So I'm like the most difficult part is like do it on Monday and Tuesday and then for the rest of the week.

Yeah, enjoy.

You enjoy yourself.

I also like wine, but specifically California wine, but it's really unhealthy, specifically from the age of like 45 when your aging processes are starting to progress. So I'm sticking like probably one or two glasses of wine every week, like on my scene days, like Friday evening or Saturday. Max.

And that's it, yeah. I just did a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen.

Do you know him? Of course, yeah.

I interviewed him for the book, Amazing Guy. I just got my results back literally last week and did three brain scans. Supposed to go back in four months. He's given me some supplements and some hyperbolic chamber. Did my first one yesterday. I'm doing another one tomorrow. Supposed to do 40 sessions. Yeah, it's at Next Health here.

Yeah, yeah.

And in the chamber. And he said, I asked him, I go, we just had an interview come out with him, but I asked him, of smoking marijuana, cigarettes, or alcohol, which one is worse for the brain? And he said marijuana, based on 80,000, I think, scan results, those that had marijuana had far worse brains. looking brands than those who didn't. He said, obviously smoking and alcohol also affected, but marijuana is the worst. And so if we know these things, that smoking alcohol, marijuana is bad for the brain, bad for longevity, why do we keep doing them? Why do we keep doing it?

It's a trillion dollar question. I can guess that I do think through evolution, we didn't really have access to all these things. our body and our mind has never been prepared to tackle the challenge of this kind of over availability of this world.

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Exactly, exactly.

There was still adversity, but it was like, okay, we're just hanging out with our few friends, in the farm.

That's it. Yeah, I agree. And we've never been. Well, that's why I, I talk about discipline and the unit and longevity, because otherwise your body, through centuries, actually through million years of evolution, has not really been prepared to, to handle all this stress and all these choices. That's, that's probably the surest way to answer that.

Okay.

So that's how we diet. And also the final that was three, right? Yeah, yeah, final piece on the diet is the importance of like take out the sugar drinks, so like we drink in water today, so that's super important. We have way too much sugar that we should and we can't process in terms of how our body works. The fourth is physical activity. And we have a funny view on physical activity. So, I mean, as humans, Everything is like black and white. Everything is binary extremes. So it's a group of people just sitting and watching football on TV. The other group of people are, okay, I need to run a marathon. But there's so many things in between. The easiest thing you can do is just wear your Whoop or Fitbit or Apple Watch and count the steps. 10,000 steps a day is enough, actually, to transform your metabolic state, to support your longevity. like a healthy state of your body. If you look at science, starting from 6.5 thousand steps or 7,000 steps is actually enough then it's a plateau. But usually say like 10,000 steps a day because we tend to under-deliver in terms of our target. And it's very easy, it's gamified, you can have immediate feedback like a badges, congratulations, prizes. That's the whole thing. I had an interview with Adrian Gore, the founder of insurance companies. I don't know who's their partner in the US, in the UK, it's Vitality UK. They started from South Africa and the only option and tools and resources they had to make people healthy is lifestyle changes. Because of the way the country was run and how poor they were, like it was like the only thing that they did. And they work a lot with guys like Apple, with Fitbit, just to make a change in your health through giving you different stimulus to do physical activity every day in the form of steps. So like if you do every week, if you complete your seven goals, you get like a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Every two weeks is, I think, tickets to the cinema. And then But then the funny thing, you'd be amazed how many things that we can do for free cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Like, oh, I'm gonna go do this for an hour. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that's the thing. So gamify it. And then obviously on top of that, if you can, you should add stretching, you should add like a cardio exercise because this is the best training for your heart and vessels. And remember, it's one of the top risks for that. So then, yeah, it's heart disease and cancer. So that's, that's super important as well. And also heavy lifting. What I've, what I've heard, I've seen the study, actually, that people who are professional, like, heavy lifters, they have zero problem in any stage of their life, even during the old stage, zero problem with joints and bones as well. I don't know how it works, but it's, it's really amazing. So that's, that's worth that's your health. Yeah, everything. I mean, there are some heavy lifter.

Bodybuilders who have destroyed their bodies. So if you're an extremist with it, obviously it's gonna shut your body down. But I think the science behind this is just like the resistance training, the heavy lifting is increasing bone density. It's like, it's doing all these things for your body.

Yeah.

And muscle burns fat, so it's like helping you keep the fat off, which is helping you stay younger and. all those things. So that's physical activity. Number five. Yeah.

Number five. I call it peace of mind. And as we discussed, every time we, we think about health, we kind of defer to and we focus on, on physical health. And I do think we underestimate the importance of the mental aspect of that, because if we want to live longer, we want to live in healthy and happy state. So that's important. And that's that's a lot of simple things like sleeping. My rule is eight hours in the bed, seven hours of sleep.

So that's what I resting for an hour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what I do. You know, I might fall asleep earlier, but then just, I don't want to mix that, you know, time in the bed is not always your kind of quality sleep time. Then meditation is very important. The problem you just mentioned. how difficult and and distracting this world is. So by this means we all probably have very high level of cortisol, the stress hormone. And the way Mother Nature constructed our body, it's actually meant to be like a spike. So you see a bear or something dangerous in the forest, you have a spike of cortisol, the stress hormone, you run and then in, if you're lucky, in, you know, 10 or 20 minutes, then you can actually relax and your cortisol level goes down.

So.

But we live in with extremely high cortisol level, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. And it's, it's, and it's very dangerous. So meditation is a, is a really simple way to decrease your cortisol level. and it has enormous health effect. And also in terms of the happiness, I think the sense of purpose and sharing the social realization sense of purpose is super important. And again, as we discussed pre-show, if you think about religious leaders or people who have a big mission in life, they tend to shine more, have more energy, and live longer. So, I mean, a meaningful purpose. Yeah, exactly.

A meaningful purpose. So those are the five out of the ten buckets. Going back to the psychological age and social, I guess, pressures or social norms. Something my father did as a child growing up is he would never celebrate my birthday. And I remember all the other kids in my class would have birthday parties, cakes, balloons, presents, all this. It was like this big celebration. My birthday comes around, nothing. I got no gifts, no parties, no nothing. It was just another day. And I remember after like a few years of this, you know, once I realized at like five, I was like, oh, I'm not. And there was like seven and eight. I was like, Dad, why don't you celebrate my birthday? What's like, do you not love me?

You know, it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He goes, Son, we celebrate you every day, but I don't want to put emphasis on your age, on how old you're getting, because I've seen so many people focus on their age and be held back mentally and emotionally, physically by how young they are or how old they are. And so we never celebrated it. And I was like, Dad, but we can still get, like, a cake or something, you know, and have, like, presents. But he was like, I just don't want you to be limited by your age, by focusing on time. as a factor that's of importance for you that could hold you back. And I thought it was, you know, after of like the sadness of it, I was like, yeah, this makes sense. And I grew up feeling just like, it doesn't matter how old I'm getting biologically, right? But psychologically, I'm staying young and healthy and fulfilled and fun and joyful.

Yeah.

I'm expressing myself like a child. And therefore I feel young. And so, and I never feel like limited because I'm like, oh, I'm now 38 biologically, so it's like, I can't do this. It's like, no.

You can't. I can still do whatever I want. Oh, yeah, that's a great story. I mean, it's obviously a little bit painful for the kids, if I can imagine.

But that's a great lesson. But it's kind of a great habit. It's breaking down the social norms of like how to put emphasis on our age. And how, okay, now you're a big milestone 30, now it's 40, like, oh, you're getting over the hill. It's like saying these things, things, words have meaning and start to psychologically affect us. Like now I'm middle aged. Okay, so you only got half your life left?

I mean, yeah.

So St. Alphonsus all downhill from here. It's like the words we use transform our mindset, which affects our physiology.

Exactly, exactly. You also touched on very important topic of how society and our life will change if we're all gonna live much, much longer. Whether it's 150 years or 200 years as well. And then I think the biggest mindset shift that we need to do is that our life will consist of several beautiful mini lives. Okay, so there are mini lives. Mini lives.

Seasons.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's a great metaphor or way to call it. So then every 10 to 20 years, we will have an opportunity and the pleasure of changing career, right? Or start to do things that you always were dreaming of doing. So that's that I do think it's important to recognize and we always be on this trajectory of redefining ourselves. And I do think it's very soon that we'll have it's going to be a social norm to make a lot of changes in your life in terms of, you know, education, career, even purpose, even a dream, every 10 to 20 years. Well, that's one of the things to, to grow young. But also I think it's a necessity in a world where our lifespan will go beyond or well beyond 100 years.

Yeah, that's cool. I'm curious about environment and weather. How does that play into age and aging or ants are staying young. Do people that live in cold, extreme colds live longer? Do people live in extreme hots? Is it more mild temperature where they live longer? Do we have any research around this?

Yes.

So.

And this is very interesting actually. So every time we're talking about extremes, it's not really great.

Either way.

So if you like right in the middle of Africa, Right. And always under the sun, it's not that great because it, what it does, it's actually speeds up, like the aging processes in your body.

Yeah.

Well, the other, the other extreme, if you are like really up north, that then...

The body has to work so hard to stay warm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's, that's one. Well, the other thing is, you are deprived of sun because it's like six months or, you know, what? Vitamin D, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of polar night and six months of polar day, you don't have like a vitamin D which process naturally in your body. And also you usually have certain limitations in terms of your access to nutritional food. Food is in deficit there in terms of variety and like vegetables as well. So you're really far away from your organic farm or wherever you take your vegetables from. So, I do think that we all, like if you think about US or Europe in a sweet spot of where we can live to maximize our longevity. I also talk about this in the concept called longevity revolution. I do think, and I say there's seven signs of longevity revolution just for communication purposes. And first sign for me is that I want you and all of us to watch out how longevity friendly our environment is becoming. So like China and India added 10% of their timberlands in the last 10 years. Or driver's cars.

They added what?

Timberlands, like forest area. Forest area increased, right?

So that's why is that for oxygen? Is that for nature?

Because I think making sure the world is becoming better, right, and fighting global warming is on everyone's agenda. And, you know, like these countries, they kind of thought, okay, if we will increase the timber like a forest land, that's going to help to solve a problem. the other sign is like driverless cars. So if you are, I was about to say, if you're driving driverless cars. So if you are in a driver's car, your chances to get in severe accidents or die is actually 10 times smaller.

If you're not driving the car.

Yeah, yeah.

If it's drive, if it's driven by a computer.

Is that out there yet? I mean, there's the Tesla I have has like self-driving, but you're still.

Yeah, yeah, we get in there. It's just a matter of in the next, because, you know, I want to prepare all of us not only for changes that we just discussed for today, but like you need to stay on Longevity Bridge in the next 5 to 10-15 years. You need to be healthy and happy to make sure you enjoy the benefit of all these technologies which are coming.

It's not too late.

I call it Horizon 2. So we will discuss that as well. But then drive these cars. So that's a natural choice. So you just decrease mortality rate by factor of 10. Isn't it amazing? Or plant-based meat or lab-grown meat? Well, that's just another caloric restriction intervention, if you think so. I'm actually very hopeful and positive about the fact that right now we have a choice whether you go for like a usual meat or plant-based meat as well. And I'm not religious about being vegan or vegetarian. I have plenty of friends who are.

Gonna.

Have this habit. But, you know, obviously all these changes in the environment contributes to.

Right.

You know, our ability to live longer and enjoy in our life. In fact, I'm actually, I'm doing a lot of pro bono programs called longevity at work with largest corporations on Earth. I, I just. I don't want to use their names. And again, everything I do in longevity is me sharing the best of me, so I do it for free. But what we do, we create longevity bubbles, like a longevity enabling environment in their offices. So people use the stairs, there's healthy food in canteens and vending machines. They all have wearables. And then week by week, you just compare this department with this department, this state with this state. as well. They have. And, and right now we have so many apps for, like, meditation, for smoking cessation and, and annual checkup is, is a part of so many health plans. So you just need to have, like, a good focus on that.

Yeah.

So this is what we do. It's just another way for you to improve your longevity chances to make sure you have, you're surrounded with healthy choices rather than, you know, just you open out your fridge and it's like alcohol and chocolate. I love all of this, but it's just not really healthy.

Now, our government told us to eat 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta today to eat a low-fat diet and fats and oils were sparingly only at the top supposed to be eaten. And yet, that advice led to the worst obesity epidemic and diabetes epidemic in.

The history of mankind. That's like the food charts that we.

All saw in school, right? Completely opposite of what we should be doing. No. And so the science has caught up with this bad advice. And the advice, unfortunately, Lewis was based on really shoddy science, on very weak evidence, on a few population studies, not really experimental studies. In fact, all the experimental studies that told us the low-fat diets, they actually didn't tell us that we should be doing that. They were actually contradicting the recommendations that were developed in 1980 by the UK and the USA. Really? So basically, if you looked at the actual randomized controlled trials that were There weren't that many, but there was a few of them. They all said that eating low fat wasn't beneficial, but the population studies- Dr. Outside of the US trials. No, trials all over. Trials in the US. They just didn't look at that evidence. So the guideline committees who were working on it didn't sort of dismiss that evidence. And they had this theory and they went with the theory, because it made sense, right? If you look at calories, for example, fat has nine calories per gram, carbs and protein have four calories per gram. So, you think, well, gee, if it has more calories per gram, if you eat less of it, you're going to lose more weight. It's logical. But unfortunately, metabolism is not a math problem. It's a metabolic problem. It's a hormonal problem. It's not energy balance. The whole idea of calories in, calories out, this is the biggest crock of, you know what, that's been pushed on the American public because there's a message implicit in that, which is, if you just told someone to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, if they don't do it, it's their fault. Just eat less, exercise more. If you don't, you're a lazy glutton. So, it's your fault, you're fat. But the truth is that it's not. It's not just about calorie balance. In fact, that's what the Global Energy Balance Network, which was actually funded by Coca-Cola, and they actually funded university scientists to kind of be the front people for this nonsense that's all about calories in, calories out has been completely discredited. The New York Times wrote a big expose of this, but what we've been taught is that all calories are the same. They're actually not.

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Okay, let's get back to this video. So, Food is not just energy, it's actually information. It gives instructions. So this is like a big breakthrough in science. So food is not just calories, it's actually information. So the information in food communicates with your body every single minute. So every bite you take, it turns on or off genes that create health or disease, they make you lose or gain weight. It turns on or off hormones that make you lose or gain weight or create health or disease.

It's like a feedback for you.

It's direct instructions and it works minute by minute. It's not something that takes a long time. It regulates inflammation, it regulates your hormones, as I said, it regulates your brain chemistry, it regulates even your gut microbiome, all the flora in your gut that we now know are linked to everything from weight gain, diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer, to autoimmune diseases, and so many other things. Even depression. And ADD and autism may be linked to changes in your gut flora. So, we now know that when you eat food, it's not just about the energy in it. Because if that was true, then you could just survive on soda all day and it wouldn't matter as long as you only eat 1800 calories of soda. And I had this argument with the Vice Chairman of Pepsi. We had dinner together. No way. Yeah, we had dinner. And the guy in between us, because I was in here, he was sitting here, the guy was like being in the middle of a war zone. And I said, how can you say that eating 800 calories of soda is the same as having 1800 calories of broccoli or almonds? He says, well, as long as you have that amount of calories, it's not going to be any different. I said, this is just not how the body works.

You're not getting the nutritional value from that, right?

Right.

I mean, when you, well, it's not even nutritional. So just like look at 1000 calories, let's say 750 calories of broccoli is 21 cups, 35 grams of fiber, half a teaspoon of sugar. and tons of phytonutrients, phytochemicals that upregulate your genes that actually help you prevent cancer, that improve hormone metabolism, but so many things, right? Same calories from a big gulp, 750 calories, 46 teaspoons of sugar, high fructose corn syrup upregulates your liver to turn on a fat production factory that makes high triglycerides, stores fat more, right? Stores fat, lowers triglycerides. I mean, raises triglycerides, lowers good cholesterol, causes a fatty liver, raises hormones that make you, in women, make them grow hair on their face and have lost hair on their head. Men, they drop their testosterone, they have no sex drive and they lose their hair on their bodies. All this from the same calories, right?

The number of calories.

Calories are the same, but the information in the food is very different. So now we have this concept that is actually really about the hormonal, I call it the hormonal I talk about in Eat Fat Get Thin, which is how do you change your hormones so you're not hungry all the time? Because that's the key. The typical advice, you eat low fat and your fat actually makes you satisfied. Because if you eat fat, you're not craving all the time, you're not hungry, and it actually is a brain actually food because it actually stops the addiction center in the brain from turning on. So you never feel hungry or have any cravings. It also speeds up your metabolism. Fat speeds up your metabolism.

Yeah. So it helps you burn more fat.

It helps you burn more fat. It releases fat from the fat cells. Interesting. Right. So it makes you less hungry. It makes you burn more fat and it liberates the fat from the fat cells. So it's really a powerful whereas if you eat sugar, the opposite happens. You get hungrier because you increase insulin.

You drive...

I used to have so much sugar. It's terrible. I was addicted to it. All of us were. I mean, I was too. I was a vegetarian. like tons of, you know, whole wheat bread and sugar and honey and everything. I mean, grape nuts and ice cream for breakfast. That was my life, right?

So when did you stop, when did the research become known or the facts or the data become known? Not even. It's honest.

That's probably the most honest answer.

Because you're a doctor and you were eating sugar. It's not even. When did you start to realize it? When did this information about fat become, you know?

Well, it's been mounting for decades, right? So it's building on a mountain of evidence. And in the book, I reviewed over a thousand studies or 500 quoted in the book that I referenced. They wouldn't let me put more because there was no room in the back of the book. Yeah, yeah. And it's all well documented. And the science of this is very powerful. One of my colleagues, David Ludwig, wrote a book called Always Hungry. He's a Harvard professor. He's done a lot of the research that this is based on where he frankly gave two groups of people same calories, same calories, but changed the percents of fat and carbs. And it was a very well-controlled study. And in the first group, they had 60% carbs, 20% fat, 20% protein. The other group switched it, 60% fat, 20% carbs, 20% protein. So it's the opposite. And the group that had the high fat diet burned 300 calories more a day by doing nothing at all.

Really, just by having more fat?

By eating more fat, their metabolism sped up 300 calories a day. It's like running.

Same amount of calories though.

They ate the same calories in, but.

They burned 300 more.

Right, because their metabolism sped up. Interesting. Right, so in other words, it's like running an hour a day without getting off the couch. Interesting. Right, that's powerful. Very powerful. Yeah, and I know for me, as I've seen myself and my patients, transformation is amazing and their cholesterol gets better. It's totally contradictory. Yeah. Right, fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol, right? Eating cholesterol is supposed to raise your cholesterol. But for the first time since the dietary guidelines came out in 1980, the US government in 2015 completely reversed their stance on fat. There's no more restriction.

Really?

Like January, first week of January 2016. This year. This year.

Like a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago.

They just changed this.

They changed this completely.

The whole guide.

Completely. So they-- Really. First time they said, forget about fat. You can use as much as you want. No way. No limit on fat.

This is the government.

The government, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee established these recommendations. This is a scientific group. that establishes guidelines for the government, helps them shape policy, and then the government makes the policy. They kind of they kind of sit.

Around this research of this Yeah, They.

They they say, you know, don't worry about fat, don't worry about cholestol. Eggs are back. night, eggs are back. You know, forget about the egg white omelets. Jut eat the whole egg. No way. Completely. And they said there's what they it made me laugh. They said nut cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concernte nutrient of concern. like, well, we got it wrong for 35 years.

No way.

So it's like, it's totally different. And they also said that we should, for the first time, they said we should reduce sugar. Now, the policy advisors who are the scientists said we should limit sugar-sweetened beverages because they're proven to be linked to obesity and diabetes. But the government, because of the food lobby, changed the wording to say, no, we should be restricting added sugar. So we should eat less added sugars. Now, what's an added sugar? It doesn't say added sugar on the label. So how do you know? Because the food labeling from the FDA is also influenced by the food lobby. So we should say added sugar on the label, not just sugar. So you don't know. It's designed to totally confuse people. The truth is that this is a huge advance and now we actually have come to realize that this is not true. The science around fat and how your body burns fat and what makes you fat is all really clear now. It's all based on this hormone idea of insulin, which is a fat storage hormone. So anything you eat that increases insulin, which is sugar, refined flour, I mean white flour raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. So if you had two slices of white bread, it raises your blood sugar more than a tablespoon of table sugar. People like, oh, I mean, whole wheat bread. It's just as bad. Unless the bread is so like dense that you can stand on it without it squishing. then you shouldn't eat it. You shouldn't eat it. No, like the German rye bread. I love bread though. Yeah, everybody loves it. The bread we eat isn't the bread we ate. Right? So, our ancestors ate very different. It's not the hard bread. It was very coarse. And we only had the grain mills that started in the 1800s.

Before that, we couldn't eat refined grain.

And now even whole wheat is super refined. It's just, you know. And are all grains bad as well, in your opinion? No, I don't think all grains are bad. You know, I joke, I say, you know, in the book I talk about, you know, an induction plan, like basically a way to get quick start to change you from like just being storing fat to burning fat to eating fat to makes you thin. And that's a 21 day plan. And after that, I talk about how you transition to what I call Pegan diet. Pegan? Pegan as opposed to Paleo or vegan. It was kind of a joke because one day I was sitting in between. Yeah, I was sitting on a panel with two friends of mine. One was a vegan cardiologist and the other was like a Paleo doctor. Sure. And I was like, well, I don't know. I guess they must be a Pegan because I'm in the middle here.

Okay.

What does a Pegan diet look like? So, Pegan diet, you know, it's amazing, Louis, is that the principles of Paleo-Vegan are often very similar. So, both groups believe that we should be eating whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods. Yes. We should get rid of food additives, hormones, everything. No antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides, no GMO. We should be having no MSG, no artificial sweeteners, no high fructose corn syrup. Everybody agrees that that's true. We also agree that everybody should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables. Yes.

Right?

Heavy on the plant foods. Yep. Basic principles. Both agree that we shouldn't have dairy, which is interesting.

Yes.

Right.

We'll talk about that. Paleo, no dairy as well.

No dairy, right? No dairy. I guess there's some of them that say like some specific cheeses or something. Yeah, grass-fed butter. There's some things, but it's but the proteins in dairy are very inflammatory and the dairy again we eat isn't the dairy we ate. We've hybridized our cows, all fertilized by one bull. It's not organic dairy. It's not organic, it's not raw, it's not how our ancestors ate it. Even organic cows, they milk them when they're pregnant and they're full of hormones.

And also, you know, it's just not.

Always tolerated well by many people. What else did everybody agree on? Everybody agrees that we should be eating foods that that are phytonutrient rich, that are nutrient dense, and we should be lots of nuts and seeds and lots of good oils like avocados and olive oil. What's phytonutrient? What does that mean? Phytonutrient is a chemical that's in plant foods. Phyto means plant, and it's not a vitamin or mineral. It's not a protein, fat, or carb or fiber. It's something else. So for example, broccoli has glucosinolates, which upregulates detoxification. Okay. Catechins are in green tea, which are powerful detoxifiers of metal, powerful antioxidants. Tomatoes have lycopene, which is a powerful cancer preventer for prostate cancer. Okay. So, so anthocyanins. You're gonna have black rice, which has anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants that are in black rice. It's Emperor's rice. Love that. It's also very low glycemic. Sure. So I think the, the, the things that they, this the disagree on are basically beans, grains, and meat, like where you get your protein from. Everything else is the same.

Paleo and vegan is the same except.

For meat, beans, and protein. I mean, beans, grains, and protein.

Beans, grains, and protein.

Okay. Right. And, I mean, you know, like meat. And so, you know, what I realized is that, you know, I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So, if you're for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're a diabetic, which affects a lot of people. I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is as a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means if they eat a lot of starch, if they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans, it can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains and non-gluten grains in particular. because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think meat is the big issue, right? The meat is the big issue. So should we be eating meat?

We just had dinner the other night.

We both had meat, right?

We had fish.

We had fish.

Black cod.

Yes.

Which was awesome.

I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod, is that what it was? Yeah, I had the black cod.

Yeah, I had the black cod.

The guy next to me had meatballs. The guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so, so the issues around meat also, I think are, everybody agrees and fish, everybody agrees that if, if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised. It should be sustainably raised. It should be grass-fed it should be not harming the environment. The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and they're real.

Yeah.

I mean, I have many Buddhist patients. I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's a, you know, is a diabetic and he's never going to eat an animal, you know, so I, I need help him understand how to never eat an egg, how to eat a higher fat protein diet, which is low glycemic. So we can do that. So more nuts and seeds, less rice, more beans, there's strategies for doing that. And he did great. He lost 35 pounds, reversed his diabetes, and now I have tons of bun people praying for me. That's great. Yeah. the meat thing is tricky because, you know, it's also an environmental risk if you're eating factory farmed animals. There's antibiotics in that and is runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers that damages our water supply and rivers and lakes. There's climate change that happens from the methane produced. It's more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. There's so and there's high energy use. One fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption. Our water is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals. There's basically, I think, 70% of all water use and there's basically only 5% of the world's surface is fresh water.

Usable, right?

It's fresh water. 1% is in Russia. Wow. And at least 4% for the rest of us. And 70% of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. Sure. So I think, you know, a factory farming just should be not supported in any way. And we need to change that. And that means we need to change our patterns of consumption around me. We need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having condiment. Condiment. Condiment. As opposed to like a condiment. Like condiment. You know, it should be a side dish or a dressing if you're gonna eat it. Sure. And I think, not a full plate.

Of steak, you mean?

You know, I think there's three issues with me, right? There's environmental issues, there's moral issues, and there's health issues. So we kind of talked about the moral. I think that's, people are entitled to their beliefs, and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy. The environmental issues are real, and I think everybody would agree whether they're paleo vegan that we need to stop harming the environment. And I think even if you're not paleo vegan, everybody really believes that. In fact, the Dietary Advisory Committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact. Now, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably raised meat, it's not as abundant, you can't produce as much, and so we all have to eat less of it. It's more expensive. That's okay. I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in in Eat Fat Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was, I'm like, why don't I know for yourself, too? Yeah, I'm like, I'm recommending to my patients. I'm, you know, human too, and I want to live a long time and I don't want to be doing something stupid. Yeah. So, I wanted to find out, what.

Does the science tell us about meat?

So, you did all the research. So, I looked at all the research and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat. Wow. There's a lot of research in there. And, I address all these issues, you know, environmental, moral, and the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right? Right. So you want the paleo people like a meat's healthy, here's all the research. And the vegan, like, meat's gonna kill you, here's all the research. So it's like, and then you're at.

The average Joe, you're totally confused.

And your average doctor, you're totally confused because we have no training in nutrition. And they haven't done the research themselves. No. So they're going off of their opinion or their theory. Yeah, they're like the average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science. They don't know because it's not what we learn. Right? I mean, I just am at Cleveland Clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school there that's integrated in, which is so great. And I helped Tim Ryan, who's a congressman from Ohio, introduce him. You love Tim. He's great. Has he been on your show? He's been on here. Yeah, he's great. You know, introduce a bill called the Enrich Act, which was a bill that is funding $15 million to fund nutrition.

In medical schools, nutrition education for doctors. that's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food.

Oh my god. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease.

And yet doctors know nothing about food.

And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I, food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class.

Like that's what doctors should be doing. That's how I'm gonna get this out. That's real medicine.

That's real medicine.

Now, just a quick side note. What is your involvement with, what is functional medicine and what is your involvement.

At the Cleveland Clinic? Can I finish my meat? Yes, go ahead. I was still rolling on the meat. We'll talk about functional medicine. Then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic.

Perfect, perfect.

Because people want to know, like they're like, well, what about meat? They're like probably listening. Yeah, do it. So the science, 8,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8,000 words. I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating. So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, Here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, followed them, and then they asked questions of them. What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last month? And they basically do these food frequency questionnaires, and then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And I try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death.

But what else was...

They were smoking, they were drinking. Yeah, exactly. So, sleep. Exactly. so if you look at the data, they ate 800 more calories a day. They almost ate no fruits and vegetables. Tons of sugar. They had tons of sugar and processed food, lots of fried foods, drank more, smoked more, didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals. Well, guess what? They weren't as healthy as the other people. So most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few study that were interesting. I found one was a study of 11, 000 people who shopped at health food stores, and they found there were like a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. Like, so who are the people who are you know, like healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or who, because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on factory farmed meat, right? So then again, how do you generalize that? Sure. But then there were these 11,000 people and they followed them for many years and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes. Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who.

Basically eats a healthy diet and has.

Grass-Fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference in your healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle. then there's no difference.

What does your daily diet look like?

Oh, gosh.

Doctor himself.

So today I had a protein shake because I went to this friend of mine's company called Essential Foods, Living Foods, and he had this, it was like a hemp, coconut, chia, moringa, coconut cream, protein powder with lots of, yeah. And I had a couple of that with a spoon of coconut butter for fat. and almond butter for fat and blended that up. That was my breakfast. And then lunch was a big salad with lots of avocado, olive oil and some wild salmon, which has fat. And dinner I haven't had yet. And dinner I'll usually have a small piece of protein and I'll put 75% of my vegetable plate as vegetables. So if I go out to eat, I'll order three sides of vegetables. And if you look at your plate, by volume, 70 or 80% of your diet should be plant foods and non-starchy veggies, right?

Non-potatoes.

Right.

And by calories, it should be like 50 to 60% fat. But fat doesn't take up a lot of space, so you can get a lot of calories in a little space and still eat like people a lot of olive oil in your thing or even coconut butter. So you don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat and that, you know, the trick is I don't worry about how much I eat. I just worry about what I eat. And I make sure I have stuff. Like, I, I know that I'm gonna be, like, here, and I know how long it's gonna be. So I always bring stuff in my pocket. Almond butter. So I just have a pocket. I know I'm never gonna be in a food emergency, so I'm not gonna have to eat something crappy. And I, I, I think, you know, I eat very little grains, very little beans. I do eat them. I eat mostly vegetables and some low glycemic fruit, and I eat lots of nuts and seeds, and I eat. you know, good quality fish and animal protein.

What's low glycemic fruit?

What does that include? So, I'm not eating like tons of pineapple and grapes and, you know, like those are sugary things. And I eat like berries and I eat, you know, mostly berries and then like y'all eat like an apples or pear sometimes or kiwis or grapefruit or mangoes or papaya, things like that.

Nice. Okay. So, let's go back to functional medicine.

What does that actually mean? So functional medicine is- Compared to regular medicine. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of like what's happening right now in science, but it's profound. The shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is it's like Columbus going, hey, the Earth isn't flat. Right now, the last few years. It's just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome, of systems biology, of the body as a biological network, as a system, it's like an ecosystem where everything's connected, working together. and so the way we organize medicine is according to these organs. You've got your cardiovascular system, your neurologic system, your GI system, and so you go to all these specialists. And everybody cheats their part of your body. If you have a migraine, we're actually learning that it might be related to gut flora, or if you have heart attack, I mean now we know that you might be getting cancer because of your gut bacteria. Well, no oncologist is asking you what what's going on in your gut microbiome. Right. And so now we know, for example, like the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare. You know, the microbiome, which is your gut floor, it's really. It's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells. It's a hundred times as much DNA as your own DNA. So I. We're kind of lazy. We have about as much DNA as an earthworm. Okay. But we borrow the DNA of the bicromes, the microbes in our gut to do things for us, and we. We borrow things from plants to do things from us, like, for example, glucosinolates. So the microbiome is this huge thing that's got two to three million genes. We only have 20,000 genes. And it regulates your weight. You can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with diabetes and reverse it. Amazing. We've seen people—I've heard stories of fecal transplants, not only curing things like that, but autoimmune diseases.

Really?

Parkinson's and people with MS and like crazy stories that I'm starting to hear. And there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases. It's transferring poop from one person to another. Yes. What does that, how do you do that? Well, that's a process. Well, they collect the poop. There's actually a, I've never heard of this. Yeah, you've never heard of this. Never heard of this. Oh my God, this is huge. So, so the, what is it called? Fecal transplant. FMT, fecal microbial transplant. The way it came about was some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called C. diff, which is an infection of the intestines that happens after antibiotics, is life-threatening. And there's a huge amount of people are now resistant to antibiotics because of all the antibiotics in our feed and in the animal production. So there's the drugs don't work. People die. And somebody thought, well gee, if I put the poop from a healthy person into a sick person, let's see what happens. And the doctor did it and the person was cured like that. Shut up. 98 effective. 98 effective.

How do you do this? So understand this process.

You want to get into it? Give me the 10. We can do the visual. So basically they take, like, they take a fecal trans transplant specimen, like a donor specimen from a healthy person, and they screen them for all sorts of diseases, and then they spin it up with some saline, and then they inject it in with a catheter or a colonoscope. And then they actually also shit.

It just heals inside or what's it.

Do when it's— well, it goes in. It's like massive probiotics, right? Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And so, it's like an infusion of probiotics. And also, they're actually pills now. They actually are making special encapsulated poop pills. Poop pills. And it's not, I mean, this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about stuff that's wacky.

I'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing.

But it's not just for that. Now they're looking at it for all sorts of things.

People are cured right after one infusion.

Yeah, it's amazing. Functional medicine is really understanding the body as a system and network and understanding that the focus should not be on treating disease, but on creating health. It's the science of creating health. It's the ultimate biohacking tool. It's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through testing we do, for example, you don't have to do testing, but you can look into the body and look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status. It's like doing a soil sample. So I'm like a soil farmer, organic soil farmer rather than an industrial agriculturist. I don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better like herbicides and pesticides. I create a healthy soil and then disease doesn't occur. You just, disease can't land in a healthy soil. So that's exactly what functional medicine is. We help people get in balance. We take away the things that cause imbalance. We put in the things that help create balance. So for example, I had a woman come she had a whole list of problems. That's why I call myself a holistic doctor, because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. So she had, like, psoriatic arthritis was on a drug that cost 30 grand. Oh, my God. Called stellara and still was miserable. She also was overweight, had pre-diabetes migraines, sinus problems, earl bowel reflux, depression, insomnia. She had, like, this whole list of things. Of course, she saw all these specialists, the sinus doctor, the migraine doctor, the autoimmune doctor, the skin doctor, the depression doctor, the gut doctor, like in, you know, everybody's treating her with their best practices.

Their best drug probably.

But I mean, she's being seen at the top medical center, right? They're not doing bad medicine. They're doing standard of care. In fact, they're doing excellent standard of care.

But the standard of care is not.

The way we're going to fix these problems. It's outdated or it's not. It's not, it's totally outdated. So rather than thinking about how all these were separate, I said, how are these all connected? Interesting, right? how are these all connected? And so there were connections. It was all inflammatory. And I said, well, why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet, the Pegan diet, basically, right? Took away anti-allergens and I. And I cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing huge bloating and she had yeast reactions. She had, like, vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere, yeast on her mouth and thrush. And so I gave her an antifungal. I gave her stuff. to clear out the bad bugs in her gut. I put in good bugs, I put in enzymes, I put in things to heal the gut lining. I gave her fish oil, vitamin D, just some basic stuff, probiotics. But it's really eliminating the bad foods, eliminating the bad bugs in her gut, putting in new bugs, and putting in nutrients to help her body heal. Two months later, she comes back completely symptom-free.

No way.

No more arthritis, no more to $30,000 drug, no more skin psoriasis. No migraines, no sinus problems, no oral bowel, no reflux, no depression, no insomnia.

And she lost 20 pounds.

All from food. Totally. And what was food and her gut flora? I focus on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune system is in the gut.

Interesting.

Yeah, why is it in the gut? Why is it there? Because you're sticking pounds of food, a.

Foreign material, every day in your body.

You've got to fight it off in your gut. Yeah, and you've got you know, you've got like bed bugs in there and poop. It's like a danger zone, right? It's like you're like, and it's one cell away because you're one cell away from a sewer every minute. Really? Yeah, it's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop, right? So your immune system is like, if anything happens, like right there. So when people have autoimmune disease, it's.

Often a gut issue.

It's often a gut issue. People didn't know this before, did they?

No.

No. So now, like, now all this is really coming to light and functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data. It's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it. And it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance. That's what's powerful. And then at Cleveland Clinic, you know, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I call him the Wayne Gretzky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's gonna be, not where it is. Smart, right? And he basically came after me to go set up a center there. And I'm functional medicine center.

Yeah.

I'm like, I'm not going to Cleveland Clinic. It's like you know, it's like, I'm not going to go to a place where I'm going to have to bang my head against the wall, where it's traditional medicine, where they don't get this.

Where they're in the dark ages. I just.

It's also known as one of the top hospitals. Of course. But it's the top hospital in the old model. Yes.

Right.

So I'm like.

But he know.

He knows what's happening. He knows what's happening. He's like, we need this here. Wow. And so he's investing tons of money, millions and millions of dollars building this. We're building an 18, 000 square foot. facility. We started with a little space and we just outgrew it. We're hiring doctors. I have an interview with the doctor right after this. And we're, we're basically growing. We're doing research in all sorts of conditions. We're changing medical school education. We're changing policy. We're doing Community work. Amazing.

So we're really, he's really putting us.

On the map in the traditional world. And, and because he's gonna go out of business if he doesn't start doing this. But what's amazing to me, you know, Louis, I thought when I got there, people would be you know, skeptical, negative, make it difficult for me and my team there. But it's the opposite. And I, at last, they want to learn. Last week, when I was there, I had two deans of medical schools, two chairs of Depart, two chairs of institutes, which are like big deals.

Right.

And another doctor as patients.

No way. Yeah.

They're coming as patients because they're not.

Being cured with the medicine.

The executive team, the C-suite team. is sending all their family members to come see us.

Do you know Dr. Lisa Rankin by any chance?

Yeah.

She's been on as well and she talked about how she had all this medication she was treating herself and then started saying, well, let me just change the way I eat and my relationships and my emotional health. Exactly.

It's all about that.

It's like, oh, I got off all the medicine.

That's right.

And then I stopped giving medicine to my patients.

I started asking them deeper questions. It's so powerful. So we're at this point. But we're at this fulcrum. It's not just I'm like one lone doctor with a crazy idea. There's a whole movement going on here. We had dinner with James Masek. He's helping move that movement forward. I'm the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine where we train doctors all over the world in this model and operating system of how to actually do this in practice. So we are literally building an army of doctors that change healthcare and it's pretty exciting and it's actually starting to really hit that hockey stick point where it's changing. People want it. I mean, people are desperate for this model.

So, if someone is listening and they're on some type of medication or they're just feeling like constantly sick, you know, something's constantly happening to them. What do you think is, because there's so much information online that it's scary.

It's scary, right? Well, here's the thing, you know, these.

Stuff, just like looking up anything and Googling it and seeing all the nasty photos and just like, ah, yeah. What is an approach that someone should take? if they have some challenge that's constantly happening in their health, should they first analyze the food they're intaking and do like an analysis? Do you have like a process?

Absolutely. It's a great question, Lou. So, you know, what I am is a doctor and what I do is see patients in my office. That's my main job. Yes, I've written a dozen books. Yes, I do a lot of stuff, but that's my main job. And so I've learned over 30 years of doing this how to create sustainable practical programs to help people get from sick to well very quickly. And what I've done, because not everybody can come see me and there aren't that many of us out there yet. You have so many hours in a day. And there's not that many functional medicine. So I've written books and programs to help people operationalize this in their own life. So each of that get thin. And I look, I'm, you know, you know, I could say, you know, do my program, but I'm not, I don't really care what program you do. As long as it's based on the basic principles, and there are a lot of my colleagues who are writing great books about this. It's all the same information because it's all the same science and if you're telling the truth, there's only one story here, the truth, right? And so, this Effectiveness then is a great program that I put together to make people have no friction. It's easy. It's very straightforward. 21 days. 21 days, practical, goof-proof, and it tells you what to eat. And when you get to the end of that, you'll see how you feel, because most people in 21 days will change their habits, but they'll also allow their body to reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings. Right? And then if something's left over, then, you know, gee, maybe I need to go deeper. Like, if you still don't feel great, maybe you have Lyme disease. Maybe I've heavy metal poisoning. Maybe your thyroid's not working. Maybe you have a parasite. Maybe, you know, like, you could be eating the perfect diet, but still feel bad. So do that 21 days first. Yeah, but most 80 of the time.

You're going to cure yourself.

80% I mean, 80% of the time this works for people and then the 20% who have to get extra help, they need to come see somebody.

And the body is pretty incredible in how it can heal itself very quickly.

Once you change habits. Unbelievable. We did the survey of a thousand people who did this. I mean, they lost weight, yes, and they lost inches, yes, and that's all impressive. And their blood sugar dropped 20 points and their blood pressure 10 points. But the thing that really matters to me is I have everybody fill out what I call the FLC quiz. You know what that is? that's when you feel like crap. Okay, so it's a quiz. How do you have like, you know, do you have bloating? Do you have asthma? Do you have headaches? Can you sleep? Like joint pain, muscle pain, what's your mood? Are you depressed? Like, so you fill out this whole score and zero to four for every symptom and you get a score. They do want it before and after. And the before and after score, there was a 69% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. Whoa. Because you don't have to treat everything individually. If you put in the right information, like I said at the beginning of the show, The body knows what to do. So the information in food is so powerful that if you figure out what to eat, you don't have to worry about how much. You don't have to count fat, grams, carbs, calories, nothing. I don't do that.

I don't have time for that.

Right, right, right. And I don't want to be on an app all day figuring it out. I just want to know how to get my body to naturally do what it's supposed to do. If you're off by 100 calories a day, you're going to gain like 50 pounds in 30 years. You can't do it by willpower. you have to use science. And the science of using fat and low glycemic food, like low sugar food, is. Is really powerful. It's magical. I mean, I notice my own body. I'm like 56, and I noticed young, man.

You're like fit, healthy, energetic.

No. Well, I I can tell you, I I was always been, you know, focused on health, but I was the doctor who was trained to eat low fat and to tell my patients eat low fat, and I did that. And I also ate a lot of things that I thought were healthy, like pasta was a health food.

Oh my gosh.

Pasta was a health food.

I used to eat so much pasta.

Yeah, health food, right? Low fat.

Saw health all the time.

Yeah, exactly. And so I basically changed that and I started eating a lot less starch, a lot less sugar, a lot more fat. And I know it's my body, without any exercise, I'm so lean, so fit. I'm like, wow, I got a six-pack and I didn't work out. It's just stunning what happens when you're on my brain is clear, I have more energy, my food's better. I mean, you're. I know. So you're drinking a, like, a bulletproof coffee.

You know that it works. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I started doing, testing some different things at the beginning of this year in January. And the first week, I did no sugar. The second week, no sugar, no gluten.

Yeah.

Third week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy. Fourth week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no meat.

That was last week.

And I was just to see what's, that's what happened.

Pulling a Band-Aid off slowly.

Yeah.

I should have just done it all.

It's better to do it the other way. The way I do with my patients, you do a detox. Basically, you get off everything at once. You feel bad for a couple of days and then you see how you feel. I feel amazing.

Because one of the rules of-- I.

Should have talked to you before this. And then you can add things back one at a time and see what bothers you. Interesting. So, because the rule in functional medicine, if you're standing on attack, it takes a lot of ask for making it feel better. So, if something's bothering you, you have to get rid of the cause. But if you're standing on two tacks, Taking one out doesn't make you 50% better. Interesting. So, if you're allergic to dairy and gluten, but you just take out gluten, you're not going to feel better.

Right. Right.

So, I did the whole wrong way. Oh, well. It was an experiment. But the thing what I was going to mention was I started doing Bulletproof in the morning and fasting until 1:30 and not eating after 9:30 or whatever it is at night. And, I realized that I wasn't hungry in the mornings when I would do the coffee. And, I would only have half a cup only. Yeah. And I would be fine until 1:30 to 2:00.

MCT oil puts you in ketosis, which is medium chain triglycerides. It's a super fuel. It comes from coconut, which is in the coffee. It's what I recommend as part of my Eat Fat, Get Thin program. Speeds up your metabolism. It's your burning fat. It actually makes your metabolism work faster.

And burn more calories. What are the main plants that we should never be eating then? Okay, real quick. Up until 10,000 years ago, we lived primarily on the leaves of trees and we ate Tubers that grew in the ground, like a sweet potato for a yam. Yeah, they're actually pretty darn good for you. You were actually designed to eat them. And 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we switched over to things that we had never eaten before. And those were the grains of grasses and beans. Now, the reason we'd never eaten them before is number one, we didn't need to. There's never been a documentation of an ape eating grass or grains. Beans are so lethal that five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood.

What?

Five raw kidney beans.

Raw kidney beans.

In fact, you know, most people have heard of the poison ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official. Yeah, lots on the way to Washington. Yeah, that's another subject. So, ricin is the lectin, of the castor bean. And we'll talk about lectins next. A lectin is the plant defense system. These are proteins that are designed to basically kill us in one way or another. And so ricin is so powerful that about four molecules of ricin will kill a human being instantaneously. There's a great study that was written up in one of the journals about a few years ago. They decided to have a healthy eating day in Boston.

Yeah.

And they serve the kids beans and because it's so healthy, right, part of the blue zone.

Yes.

And they had 30 or 40 admissions to the hospital with severe diarrhea, hypotension. And it turns out that it was all the fact that the beans were undercooked and beans are a plant baby and we're not supposed to eat those and So, no beans.

No beans.

Zero beans.

Unless you use a pressure cooker. Pinto black.

None of it, we shouldn't be eating it.

Shouldn't be eating it. You weren't designed to eat it. You have no defense against it. No matter how it's cooked. If you pressure cooked, pressure cook it, it's fine. Pressure cook it. What does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. Pressure cooker. The modern pressure cooker is as easy as a rice cooker. Got it. It's one touch.

It's not your grandmother's pressure cooker that blew up in the kitchen. So then it's okay to eat.

Yeah, so you can pressure cook beans. Now, the other thing, we weren't designed to eat grains.

Just a quick question before you start there, how much of it can we eat? It doesn't matter once it's pressure cooked.

Obviously everything in moderation, but I mean.

Yeah, well, like I was presenting.

20 beans are going to kill me or what? No, if you pressure cook them, they're fine. It's all good. Okay. And we talk about how to do this in the plant-based. Paradox. Got it. But my personal feeling is the only purpose of eating a bean is to get olive oil into my mouth, and we can talk about that. as we go along.

Okay.

So grains, for instance, everybody heard about gluten.

Yes.

All right, so gluten is a lectin. And again, a lectin is a plant's defense system. It's a protein that actually is designed to act like incoming guided missile attacks on the inside wall of our gut. And these things actually pry open the lining of our gut and actually break through the border.

Really?

Yeah, they really do.

That's what causes eczema and breakouts.

Yeah, exactly. Acne, brain fog, irritable bowel. This is actually all part of that process. And so it's fascinating to see people who either have come to see me or have even read the book and then write on Amazon, oh my gosh, you know, I had this horrible eczema and now a month later it's all gone and all I did was take grains and beans and nightshades away from my diet and everything got better. So that brings us to the second kind of group of things we shouldn't eat. All of us are not from the United States. America, we're actually from Europe, Asia or Africa, every one of us. So and even our Native Americans are actually not Native Americans. They're from Asia. You know, get over it.

Right.

So none of us were exposed to an American plant until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade. So getting to know a new plant, a new lectin, in 500 years is speed dating in evolution. I just don't think it can be done. For instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son Columbus brought them back because they knew how dangerous they were. They were part of the deadly nightshade family. And they, when they started eating them, they always peeled and de-seeded their tomatoes. because the peels and the seeds actually have the vast majority of the lectins. And it's interesting, years ago I did my fellowship in children's heart surgery in London, England, and I had a house officer from Italy, and he invited me up for pasta and tomato sauce. So I brought, you know, it'd be nice if I bought a couple cans of canned tomatoes, you know, help out.

Sure.

And he looks at it, he says, Why did you bring me this? We can't use this. I said, what do you mean? Canned tomatoes. He says, It's got peels and seeds. You can't make sauce with peels and seeds. He says, Ah, Mama Mia. What am I going to do with you? He says, you, can't use peels and seeds. I said, why? He says, They're deadly. And I said, Really? And he says, yeah, everybody knows that. And then I thought back as a child, my mother, my grandmother was French and she taught my mother that you always peel and de-seed tomatoes before you slice them and serve them. So until I went to Yale, I had never had a slice of a tomato with a peel and a seed. And this was, you know, this has come from cultures. For instance, peppers. Peppers are the same way. They're part of the nightshade family. You'll never open a glass jar of Italian bell peppers and see peels and seeds because they're gone. And the most striking thing is the Southwest American Indians always peel and de-seed their peppers before they eat them. The hatch chili roast will be happening in another month. And what do they do? They roast their chilies, peel the scarred off part, de-seed them, and then they eat them or they make them into chili powder. And you can prove this in your grocery store. Buy a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up, You won't see any peels and seeds because they're gone. So tomatoes and peppers, eggplant, potatoes and potatoes.

If you peel them and seed these things.

You're safer, correct. But you can pressure cook them and they're fine.

And they're okay.

Yeah.

Got it.

Now, there's two American beans that everyone should stay away from. Peanuts are not a nut, they're a bean. 94% of human beings carry a preformed antibody against the peanut lectin. We can take rhesus monkeys, our cousins, give them peanut oil and they will develop atherosclerosis, heart disease.

Really?

If we take the lectin out of the peanut oil and then give them the peanut oil, they will not develop heart disease.

So, if you get lectin-free peanut butter.

There is no such thing.

Dang it.

Okay.

So get almond butter instead. It's much better.

No peanut butter.

No, stay away from it.

You should eliminate 100% from your diet.

Absolutely. We can take, and this has been done, men feed them peanuts, take their bowel movements, feed them to rats, and you will grow cancerous cells in the rat colon because they've been exposed to the peanut lectin.

Yeah.

Love peanut butter.

Oh, you know.

So I can have as much all I want.

And I went to medical school in Georgia, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know, man, peanuts are everything. Sandwiches and Georgia. Yeah, no, sorry.

Eliminate it.

Gone.

Gone. Say goodbye. This will help me live longer, have.

A happier, healthier body. And then I won't have to operate on you, you know, when you have coronary disease.

And you'll go, what? I eat so healthy, I'm having my peanut butter. How many surgeries have you done?

Oh, over ten thousand.

10, 000. Do you have the. Is that what it is? The record? No, no, no. Someone said it's a record setting heart surgeon. Heart surgeries.

No.

Yeah.

No.

How many heart surgeries?

10, 000. 10, 000. 10, 000.

Yeah.

It's a lot harder.

What's the cause of these heart diseases? So it's the reason why you have to do so many of these. It's all in the plant Paradox. So 17 years ago, I met a guy by the name of Big Ed. It was a 30 38 year old.

Guy who came to see me at.

Loma Linda because I'm one of these surgeons who will operate on anybody. Wow.

Yeah.

Take the big ad.

500 pounder.

Big Ed, actually when I met him, he weighed 265 pounds, but he had such extensive coronary artery disease that you couldn't put stents in them, you couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't one main place to land. And he was from Miami and he'd be going around the country carrying his angiogram, the movie of his heart, his cardiac catheterization, and everybody's turning him down. And finally after about six months of this, comes to see me and I'm looking at his angiogram and I'm going, yeah, you know, I don't like to turn people down, but everybody's right, you know, we're not going to do you any good. And he said, well, wait a minute. Here's the deal, doc. I've been on a diet for the last six months, and I've lost 45 pounds. Now, this is a 265 pounder sitting across from me. It looks like a, you know, biker, big gut. And he says, and I've gone to this health food store and I've taken all these supplements, and he actually brought in this shopping bag full of supplements. He said, you know, maybe I did something in here. And I'm going, yeah, right. You know, I'm kind of scratching my professor beard and saying, well, you know, I know what you, good for you for losing weight, but it's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. And I really believe that. So he said, well, come on, you know, it's been six months. I've come all this way. What would it hurt to get another angiogram, another cardiac catheterization? I said, okay. And so we get a new cath on him. And in six months time, this guy cleans out 50% of the blockages in his heart.

50%. Gone.

Pretty good. It's pretty darn good. It's unbelievable.

Wow.

For instance, statistically on the best statin drug, you know, like Crestor or Lipitor, with the lowest levels of LDL, We scientists at the American Heart Association get crazy if after five years your plaque burden has decreased a half of a percent. And we go crazy and we go, oh my gosh, this is a miracle. It's the greatest drug discovery of all time. And we go, Really? So this guy, 50% are gone in six months. So I actually was so excited I operated on him and did a five vessel bypass.

What?

If I knew what I knew now, I'd say, hey, great. You know, another year, this will all be clear.

Going.

You won't need this.

So I start talking about what he did on this diet. And lo and behold, he gets started on this. I don't have a time out. I said, I had this crazy thesis at Yale University that I did for four years back in the Dark Ages of human evolutionary biology. And my thesis was you could take a grade eight. Change its food supply and change its environment and predict you would arrive at a human being. And I actually successfully defended it and got honors, blah, blah, blah. And so, I had given it to my parents and went off to be a famous heart surgeon. And so he's talking about this, Wait a minute, this is my crazy thesis. And here I am, this big guy, you know, running and I had prediabetes.

You were? Yeah.

This is 15 years ago.

Yeah, 15 years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, running and eating a healthy low-fat diet.

Why did all the doctors seem seem like they're bigger.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we're given all this advice. And so I called my parents in San Diego. I said, hey, you know, you got this thesis? Oh, yeah. You know, it's in the shrine.

Yeah, yeah. Eternal flame.

Whole room of your accomplishments. That's right. So I sent it up to me. So I put myself on my thesis, and I lost 50 pounds my first year. Wow. And I lost another 20 pounds subsequently, and I've taken it off. And then I started putting my patients who, you know, at Loma Linda, who I operated on, on this program, and the blood pressure went to normal, their diabetes went away, their heart disease didn't come back. And so after about a year of this, I was looking in the mirror on one Friday and I said, you know, I can't do what I do anymore because I can teach people how to avoid me. So I actually resigned my position. My wife still calls it Black Friday.

When was this?

15 years ago.

You resigned.

I resigned doing surgeries. I was doing being chairman of heart.

Surgery at Loma Linda. Wow. Just because you felt like it wasn't.

Solving the actual problem. It wasn't solving the problem. It was just putting a Band-Aid on it. The surgeries. The surgeries. Yeah. I was just, you know, it's famous for four time, five time redo surgeries on somebody who kept clogging up their blood vessels. And it's like, you could fix them up, but it's like, yeah, okay, they're gonna be back in a couple years.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I set up an institute in Palm Springs where all I ask people to do is every three months, let me take about 10 tubes of blood out of you and we'll send it to some labs and insurance will pay for it.

Wow.

And see what asking you to eat certain foods does and asking you to take certain supplements that you could find at Costco or Trader Joe's does. and that resulted in my first book in 2008 called Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. But then subsequently, I've seen about 50% of my practice is autoimmune disease and people would come in and say, hey, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I go, oh, I don't know anything about autoimmune disease, but I'm a transplant immunologist. And that means how do I get the immune system of you to accept the heart of a pig, for instance. And I'm actually hold the world record for the longest pig to baboon heart transplant, 28 days. That's the world record. So I started manipulating the immune system by food. And sure enough, you've got an autoimmune disease. We can teach you to get rid of it by changing primarily getting lectins out of your diets and changing your gut bugs to be basically friendly gut bugs. And the friendly gut bugs actually tell your immune system that, hey guys, we're all great down here. We're down at the beach. We're singing Kumbaya, the beautiful bonfire. And your immune system is basically the cops. And the cops go, oh yeah, we know these kids, great kids. Let's go have a donut. and now, so that's how it's supposed to be. But let's suppose a gang member moves into your neighborhood. Now all of a sudden you got, you're putting up bars on your windows and you got neighborhood watch patrols and you're shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. So what's happened to most of us through some of the foods we eat, like all these wonderful snacks we're talking about, we've, we've let these gang members loose. And the good guys actually can't eat simple sugars and these saturated fats. They want leaves and they want tubers.

They die off.

They die off, exactly. So the gang members are running rampant and now your immune system is going, oh my gosh, you know, the city's taken over by gang members and we're gonna have armed patrols everywhere. And anytime we see anything that looks a little odd, we're gonna shoot and ask questions later. And so what's happened to everybody with autoimmune disease is their immune system is just hyper on guard because it's no longer getting the messages from the good bugs.

Serotonin, right? Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and it's supposed to be like a feel good kind of compound. This is why so many antidepressant medications, they're serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer. Here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin. We already talked about how important this is. That's the anti- It's a precursor to that. Right, right, right. And so exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately. But also exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm. So cortisol is been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately because it's like glorified stress hormone. We've got like 50 hormones and cortisol is the only bad guy now. But cortisol is incredibly important and valuable. It's just when it's out of balance, it can become a problem. And so sunlight is clinically proven. I cited one of the studies in the book to help to normalize your cortisol rhythm. So it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day, which will elevate your cortisol. And cortisol and melatonin have basically an inverse relationship. so when cortisol is high, melatonin is low. When melatonin is high, cortisol is low. So it helps to get that on track again. And it's not like rocket science, you know? Like we know that sunlight is valuable to human health, but we've been dissuaded in the media because of, you know, photoaging of the skin and skin care and things like that. And I actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that, because then we get into conversation about UVA and UVB and all this stuff. But bottom line, make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day. It's going to help you sleep better at night. And this can also be through your photoreceptors, so through your eyes as well. And just getting light in the room, natural sunlight, you know, every day and that's going to help to kind of.

Set your circadian rhythm. What if in Chicago in the winter and there's no sunlight for, or St.

Louis and there's no sunlight for three months? Check this out. So, and I do recommend, and I share some hacks, right? There are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder. There are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal. There's visors you can wear and they're clinically proven to be effective.

Till sunbathing in a tanning salon or no?

That actually does work. If it's the right time. So you need more UVB actually and really depending on where you are in the world, pretty much the United States period is not getting UVB at certain times of the year. All right, so we want to be proactive with this, but understand it's not just the exposure on your skin is what I'm talking about. Your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light, but just the exposure in your, in your room. All right. So making sure you have, have an office with windows, access to windows. There was another study done. This is crazy because some people work in like a cubicle dungeon. Dungeon.

Yeah.

You know, and what they found was that office workers who are not exposed to windows actually got 173% less exposure to natural light. And they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night as a result of that. And they saw this correlation, which was so interesting. And they reported more physical ailments, less energy, and also a higher propensity towards diseases.

Wow.

Right?

So this is super important. And even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day is like 50 times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to, but those things are great hacks for sure. There's so many things there.

Of course. Okay, that was the first one. Second one, avoid screens before bedtime. And I think this is probably something that a lot of us are at a fault with.

I know you're kissing that phone goodnight.

Yeah, you know, I always tell myself, like, okay, shutting it off by a certain time and, like, not having it in the room and all these other things, but it's a challenge, man. It's definitely a challenge.

Here's why, dude. This is, with this book, I was able to dissect that because I knew that that would be the toughest one of the 21 strategies. This one is the toughest because we're addicted. We are in fact addicted. Here's why, here's what's happening. So there's this interesting compound called dopamine, right? And it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure, but it's not. Dopamine is all about seeking. It's driving you to seek. Right, and so the internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking. Instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going and just there's more to see. But every time you find, you get a little hit from your opioid system. So it's like a slow drip of drugs. I seek, I find, I seek, I find. And you get looped in and it's very difficult to break that pattern. And everybody's had this happen where you're like, I'm gonna check my Instagram for a for a minute. I'll check Twitter for a minute. And then it's 30 minutes later, an hour later, and you're still scrolling. This is what's going on. Like our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this. And these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and to take advantage of that. So this is a call to take your brain back. I'm not saying I love this stuff. I absolutely love it, but it has a place. And it's being more aware. Now that you're aware, you can catch yourself. and break the pattern. So here's why it's an issue at night in particular. So there was a study done at Rinsler Polytechnic that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion. All right, so again, you can pass out just being on it two hours before, you know, like that span. And so you can go to sleep or pass out, but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep. So this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours, but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning. Narcotics because melatonin is suppressed because they're on their device right before bed. And it's this blue spectrum of light that's shooting out, kind of pouring into your optical system.

What if you can stop that spectrum?

Is there shades?

Is there screen protectors? Is there glasses?

There's all of those things.

So now is that okay then if you have the-- It's a hack. It's not the optimal, but it's the better than-- Yes.

So absolutely, everybody. today can get flux f.f.lux Sorry f.lux which basically cools off your screen you know pulls off that do you have that troublesome of course so I've got all my different see what it looks.

Like or is it just a film that's like goes over the top?

Yeah, so it's a cool app. It does automatically.

It's an app.

Yeah, so you just download it on your phone. Yeah, and it does this automatically based on your time zone. Oh, wow and the time of year all that stuff. Amazing. So it pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light. And so Harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure, it's the color and it's the luminance. It's the strength of the light.

Yes.

You know, so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies. Wow. So cool stuff like that. So flux, you can get the blue blocking glasses. Basically they're like sunglasses.

Use those too? With the orange tint?

Yeah.

To do.

Yeah, if you watch TV or something.

Yeah.

You know, like if you're gonna stay up late and watch a movie a little bit later.

Yeah.

You know, but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are, of course, you know, these are hacks. But the best thing is, and this is so important, especially for, for, for our audiences, you know, who are really about taking their life to the next level. And they're missing out on this key component, which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device. So people, you know, actually connect with real people.

Connect with real people. A book.

Yes. You know, playing games with your kids, talking to your family, have sex. You know, there's other things that you can do.

Sleep well.

Yeah, I talk about that in the book too. But you have to find something that fills you up because that addiction is so strong and that's really the best tool, which is to avoid the screens in the first place.

Yeah, okay. That's number two. Number three. I have a caffeine curfew. So, what time? I mean, here's the thing. I feel like I don't have that much caffeine and I almost never drink coffee except for about a month ago I started doing some intermittent fasting testing and so I'll have Bulletproof in the morning. It's like, what time is it? It's almost two o'clock. I still haven't eaten today. But before, if I'd have a cappuccino after dinner or something, it would never affect me. I never felt like, oh, I'm wired now. I could always fall asleep. But, I'm assuming that it still does something to my brain or my body, even in my system, to not allow me to fully rest. So, what is the optimal time to how many hours before you sleep should.

We not have any caffeine?

Got it.

And, by the way, the hours before with the screen time, 60 to 90 minutes, that's all I recommend. So, with the caffeine thing, you just set it perfectly. You can definitely go to sleep, but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called in you.

Yeah. yeah.

It has a half-life of about eight hours. So if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight hours later, 100 is still active in your system. Wow. And so this can keep you out of normal stages of REM sleep and deep sleep. All right. So you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours sleep. And so this study that was done, they gave people caffeine right before bed, three hours before bed, and six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable, and they use, like, monitoring systems, you know, measuring their brain waves to find out that, whoa, their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine. And then there was the subjective, so there's the objective and subjective parts of this test. And people thought like, hey, I got enough sleep. Like, I feel great. But in actuality, their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep. And what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested and you automatically, unknowingly start using more caffeine. at some point during the day because you're gonna have more daytime sleepiness.

All right?

So, and that creates that whole vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going. Sure.

Okay, so how many hours before?

I recommend, and I'm a fan of caffeine, right? Just do it in the morning. Do it in the early part of the day. It depends on how sensitive you are. Before noon, real real thought would be ideal, you know? But some people are hypersensitive to caffeine. Everybody Metabolism is different. Some people might need to lay off of it completely, but that's a whole nother book on how to make it work.

Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so no caffeine afternoon. This is my fourth one that I see here that I like. This is one of my favorites that I was doing that I needed before I learned about the power and the importance of sleep, and that's be cool. I remember growing up in Ohio, my dad, we did not have air conditioning in our house. and my dad was just like, well, I don't want to spend the money on this. And it's only two months in the summer where you got to deal with it. But St. Louis is the same as Ohio.

Yes.

And, man, it was miserable because I couldn't wear sheets or anything. I'd just be laying there sweating with the fan on. And my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever. I don't know.

And.

Right.

So it was just misery. And I couldn't sleep. I'm up all night. And I wish my dad would have read this book again. So you gotta understand the importance of being cool. But what does What does it mean to be cool? What's the optimal coolness that you should be in or does it matter?

Yeah, absolutely, man. And my story is very similar with yours. My bedroom was upstairs. It's on top of the freaking house. You know, heat rises. Oh, it's cool. It's the worst. So that's why our basements tend to be cooler. Upstairs, I would literally see those heat waves. Oh my gosh. Walking up there 100 degree St. Louis weather. And so I would spray myself with a water bottle and then lay there butt naked and hope my brother Mother doesn't come in the room when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, man, it's not good sleep.

No.

And so this is really simple. Your body goes through a process, it's something called thermoregulation, and it does this every night, and we'll just say around 9 p.m. average. It does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep. Your body cools you off to sleep better. So you want to support it and not work against it. Some simple tips and it's gonna sound a little frosty to some people, but ideally your room temperature is gonna be, and this is according to research, what experts say, 62 degrees to 68 degrees for sleeping, all right? And some people are like, Two!

No way!

Like my wife is actually, she's from Kenya. So, hot climate, no, she's not having that. So I find a happy medium, you know? So you're at the top, you're at 68, 69. Like 69, you know? But, and also, you know, Friend Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett, he had a pretty big struggle with this with being too hot and he got it cold in the room, but it still was enough and he didn't want his wife to suffer so he got something called a chili pad which basically sits on.

Your side of the bed and he's.

Like he swears by it.

Underneath the mattress or underneath the sheet.

Right on top of the mattress. Yeah, right on top of the sheet. Exactly. But it just keeps you cool underneath you.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

It has been a game changer for him, you know, so just cooling your body temperature.

Yeah.

Even just one degree difference.

It's huge.

It's huge.

It's huge.

Okay, cool. So be cool at night. Doesn't mean you can still wrap yourself in a blanket. But just keep the room cool.

Yeah.

Gotcha. I like that. Okay, so that was number four. Number five, let's do is get to bed at the right time. So why is it important to be at the right time? Should we be at the same time every night? And what is that?

Optimal time. Good, good question, man. So timing your sleep is like timing an investment. If you invest a lot at the wrong time, you're going to get pain. But if you invest even a little bit at the right time, you get some big rewards. And so according to research, our quote, money time sleep is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. and why that is, is that this is when you're going to get your greatest increase of melatonin, which is going to help you to go through your normal sleep cycle. and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well. So more recovery, more anabolic growth and development. Between 10 and 2 a.m. That's right.

Is when you should be going to.

Sleep or that's when you get your optimal sleep. Right. If you can get some sleep in that window and some experts say that it's like twice as much value per hour.

Wow.

Right.

So if you go to bed at 9:30, 9:45 and you're asleep in that window that whole time, that's the optimal time.

Yeah, people will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier just like, wow, I slept really great.

Right.

You know, I see your face like, yeah, when that happens, but it rarely happens, you know? And so that's the kind of money time window. But it's not, again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle, stack the other conditions, do the other things, you know, because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature.

Yeah.

You know, and only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime, you know, and our, our systems are our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep, but we can throw on the, you know, do the laptop lap dance all night long today, you know, watch YouTube videos and Netflix and be on our social media, but our genes are not different from our ancestors even, you know, 100 years ago, let alone thousands.

So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn. So that's really nice to know. The sooner, it's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this, they grew up with this stuff. And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained in, literally, at my husband.

And they all work for me, by the way.

They're either all amazing kids or messed up kids. Totally, yeah. Yeah, we'll have to ask that question. Well, Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia, and then going to the more sort of things like that, we can accept grief, anger, Etc. These are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have. The second biggest, the first is that mind is the source. And if you don't get mind right, everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the seminars and self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't even use that stuff. It's just data. And so you, there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. responses. In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak, we're using our to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain. We can change our DNA. Literally. That's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally. If you change your mind. If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device, and for some research purposes, and I happened to while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels, and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute torment or family over December, and in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system. Anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled. I could manage it. And in. If glucose is at that level, your cortisol shot up at that level. Your DHEA has dropped your all that means is that your immune system is going crazy.

Exactly.

You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID And in fact, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever that it will recognize that as an invader like a virus like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought. which is the consequence of mind, think, feel, choose, you build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID, or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something, or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival, 'cause we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, Hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army, T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages. Let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate and fix. To protect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Isolate and fix. And then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause. And then this goes away. And then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with this stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in enacting, that the constant arguments or these certain, you know, they all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X and where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how.

You are managing your mind. Very interesting. Aren't they also based on how long.

You'Ll live as well?

If the telomeres are longer, exactly.

Totally correct.

So those are under attack and dying, you're probably physically gonna die as well.

Exactly. That's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of, in my clinical trial that I put in this book, we had subjects, and I've actually got a picture of this person's, one of the subjects brains. This is inside looking inside their brain. And the blue represents someone who's totally depressed, flatline brain, flatline, literally. And this person's, all their biomarkers were the cortisol, inflammation, Etc. But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was. Their narrative was tremendous storm in their life. They were offline. They were battling with work, relationships, everything.

Everything was off.

Everything was off. Sleep, you name it. They were at, like, really to check out.

What page is this on?

This is on page. This is I should tell you, I should know the page off my heart. 161. Okay, cool. I think you probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. So this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA, we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you how that the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting. So that will show in terms of. biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. Their ages were in this particular subject. And we had a group like this as well that similar. They were biologically, chronological, the actual age was in their mid-30s. But their biological age- 70 or something? Yes, a sickly 70 year old.

That's crazy.

Within crazy, within nine weeks of mind management. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial, it was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that the brain stabilized, that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying, I am depression, I am hopeless, all the biomarkers, DNA. Here they're saying, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why, and depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. it's not who I am, it's not an it, it's not an illness. By 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work, they were back sleeping, 25% improvement in sleep, and I mean all kinds of like their relationships, not suicidal anymore. And I mean that's, I can go on and on and on. Wow. This subject over here was in the control group, so they've got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible. This person's DNA telomeres were very short. And so with mind management in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. You know, It's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very significant.

Like, you know, leafy greens and plant-based.

Exactly, which is significant. And also, there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. But the biggest the first thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And even though, and they had also had this acceptance, and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped, our misery of life has been medicalized, to quote a brilliant psychiatrist, and Joanna Moncrieff. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses. They are just survival instincts. It's telling you, hey, pay attention. There's something going on. You need to go and uncover.

Something's not working.

Something's not working. Something's not working. And it's manifesting as a pain that.

Needs to be addressed. And that'll block the greatness. So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there there isn't a mental health disease. It's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of, but it's not an actual disease.

No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science. In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a... They've been looking for the neurobiological correlate. So, if you're looking for Where in the brain is depression? And for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even it was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for selling drugs, and also the simplistic way of telling someone, Hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemically imbalanced. Let me give you a drug to fix it. We want this quick fix mentality. So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. and but life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind, that's that there's this gravitational field, this force, this think field, choose thing, it's not going to go in a medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not going to get rid of this. It's just going to numb your brain. So maybe you don't feel this for a while it's working. But at the same time, as then when that drug wears off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your volume. The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh my gosh. You know, and this is what gets you stuck. And these are the patterns. So no, it's not an illness. It is a normal human response. Here we, the pandemic, we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. We, mental health has always been an issue. Notice from the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So mental health's not on the rise. But the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem. So here, so here we sit with, before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid 90s and this is when I was still practicing early days of my practicing sort of 10 years into my work. And I started seeing this trend of, and I was watching the study where people were, where they, the decades long trend of people living longer. So we know, we all hear this message, what this is, what we've heard, people are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us question that. But something happened in '96 that did start questioning that. By the mid-2000s, it established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that age group are being are dropping down dead like flies. and it's considered death of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the bone lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's weaker. Why? Lifestyle, which is mind driven. How am I eating, drinking, sleeping? But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the tormas, the established toxic habits? what am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we, when we ignore all of that, because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms. Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop, you, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. You know, it's like it's adding on. They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chopped their 20 years off, up to 20 years off their lifespan. people on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean, this is serious. So here we have this already existing. Then the pandemic hits. Now another years, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives. But there's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and, you know, not knowing if you're going to live or die and how is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot. That's trauma and they say that when they say, but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it. So here we've come into COVID with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems and scientifically this is all being researched and shown and now we've got the pandemic and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work. to this, which is going to make it even worse. So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants or depressed. 100% of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and spare and one of the others, a large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates it's probably 30-40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the -19, 819, if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to -10, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to reconcile back into civilian life after you you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this, they will inject things like Risperdal, which is an antipsychotic into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic and they psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. How do you deal with this? Of course you're going to be angry, you're going to be frustrated, you're not going to be able to love like you did. You have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug is not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain, it restricts the brain. You can't, there's no chemical cure for that. That's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to to facilitate change, we have to do something. So it's like a narrative.

Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? You know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease, or I have a chemical imbalance, I was treated with this, don't try to say I don't because this is who I am. Is that, do some people have that? Or is that, that's a result of Go ahead.

The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given. They're not given an alternative reaction, I mean an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given, I want you to, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain. You aren't, your brain isn't defective. You are going through something. So you aren't something, you aren't that, you are going through something. You're experiencing something. You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. so what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to, not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape with the abuse or the war trauma or the that it can drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment it might be nice to know, okay, well there's a label to how I feel because It kind of gives us a bit of, feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I have the sickness of PTSD. It's better to say I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story than saying I have bipolar, I have a chemical chemical imbalance. I mean, just research is coming out the other day showed that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you, we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, if you can't even measure that, there's no gene for, there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the cause. And then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body responds. So we will see changes. in the brain and the body. We will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily serotonin imbalance. That's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamine's down, serotonin's off and then anandamide's off and then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your DNA and your telomeres and 1400 neurophysiological responses are off. So, you know, that's the response though and that doesn't mean that that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you. And that invalidates. If someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say to you, Gosh, that's terrible. Tell me about it. I want to hear your story. I want to support you. Your depression and anxiety that feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on. There's an origin story, there's a source. So can I listen? Can I help? Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that takes time. It's not a 15-minute appointment where I can give you a label. That takes time. That's not also, and it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place, but to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them, you can't condition, you have to reconstruct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation. Y is how you should want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we're the sort of human experiencing life. We're supposed to be at Y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that, okay now we're going to create Z. We're just going to ignore X and Y, we're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals XY. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace and you want to put the two together to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into a future.

Oh man, this is powerful.

Gosh.

The organic movement still is an agent of positive change that is growing. So when someone says, could we transition agriculture over to sustainability using limited chemical intervention? The answer is yes.

We can do.