How To Reduce The #1 Risk Factor To Your Health [MASTERCLASS] EP 1311

A lot of people, when they hear about inflammation, they think of it as a bad guy. The key about inflammation is that you.

Don'T- Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. [Speaking of] Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's gonna be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. I have been using AG1 for years now to start my day, which is why I'm so excited to say that we have partnered with Athletic Greens for this show. One scoop of ag1 is all I need that gets me 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods Source superfoods, probiotics and adaptogens. It has quickly become part of my daily routine, and I owe a lot of it to the fact that I genuinely love the taste. It's got the kind of tropical taste that I actually look forward to. And right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition. And to make it easy, athletic greens is going to give you a free one year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/soG. Again, that is athleticgreens.com/soG to take ownership of your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. What would you say are the best ways to reduce inflammation in the body quickly? Is it through food? Is it through medicine? Is it through fasting? Is it through, you know, less, you know, more sleep? Is it through a better environment? What would you say is the...

So, you know, a lot of people, I think when they hear about inflammation, they think of it as a bad guy. And what I want to tell you is that inflammation is normal and it's just part of our immune system. So when you actually have a bacteria or virus invading your body, let's say you get a cold, your immune system sets up a little bit of inflammation in your nose, okay? Which is why we have a stuffy nose, a runny nose, and then it tackles the invader right then and there. And then hopefully that's all that's all it matters. And by the way, another sure sign of inflammation is if you cut yourself in the kitchen and you see that little cut will pretty quickly swell up, turn red and swell up. inflammation. That's your immune system trying to tackle all the bacteria that might be trying to get into your skin. Inflammation is good, but it goes up to protect you, and then it comes right down. I think about, I call it like a, like the volume switch in a car radio, like you get in a car, you want to hear some tunes, got to turn it on. But what the problem with inflammation is when it doesn't go back down, it keeps on going more, more, more. It's chronic, and it keeps on going up. And that's like getting in your car and having somebody, a passenger. turn up that volume and keep cranking that volume. And you're like, hey man, turn that thing down, right? Doesn't go down and you just can't go on.

Right.

And that's what happens inside your body. So what are some of the different ways to actually deal with that? Well, the first thing to do is think about lifestyle. Because we can actually give anti-inflammatories. I could tell you to go out to take some Motrin, Tylenol, whatever. That'll take down your inflammation. but actually there are ways of actually doing it. If you actually just if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some breath, did some breaths and start to meditate, your body's inflammation will start to calm down. Okay. If you actually got a good night's sleep, your body will start to the inflammation will start to calm down. It's kind of like, you know, everything is going crazy. Just let everything let the thing settle. a little bit. So that's your inflammation settling down. Now, there are foods that have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties that can be very helpful. So, for example, cranberries have a lot of anti-inflammatory polyphenols. Chocolate even also has anti-inflammatory properties. Vitamin C is pretty anti-inflammatory. Strawberries, guava, red bell peppers, all really good. and, and I, you know, I think that the other thing to think about is lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of fruits in particular, have anti-inflammatory properties. So the key about inflammation is that you don't want to get rid of it altogether.

Okay.

Okay. Like if you, if you got pumped up on steroids, it would shut down your inflammation. You might get infected. because you don't have any inflammation. You want your body to get its set point. You want to get back to balance. So I think that, you know, there's lifestyle, there's diet, foods you can choose, there's sleep. All these things can actually help to calm inflammation. It's not a single on and off switch.

I'm curious. What would you say are the, the most harmful foods then? If you said, here are three foods that we should be eliminating, what would be those most harmful foods that cause the spike in inflammation consistently and causes a lot of these other diseases and cancerous cells to occur.

Right. Well, I'll tell you three foods that actually harm the body's health defenses and including the immune system by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties, but also harm to your DNA, also harm your microbiome, also blunt and stun your stem cells. and also wreck your body's ability to control its blood supply. So it's a lot worse than simply causing triggering inflammation. And by the way, that's the whole point, right? Like we try to take the silver bullet approach to everything. Let's match this with match that. What I'm telling you is that the body is this system. So either you introduce something good to it and you'll probably light up a lot of good systems. And if you put something bad to it, you'll probably trash a lot of it. Right. Okay. So, what are some three foods that actually we know that can trash your body's health defenses? One is soda. So sugar sweetened beverages like soda. All right? So, you know the favorite ones? It's tough, right?

Because I wish I could go back to my younger self and say, put down the Dr. Pepper, eight cans of Dr. Pepper a day, you know, when you're like eight years old, man.

Well, and I'm telling you, like this is one thing that, I always try to coach people on, if you really, really love sodas, okay, try to come off it, you know, just by going down one can a day, because most people drink multiple cans, go down one can a day and get to as low as you can because the added sugar actually overloads your body, your body's ability to be able to handle the sugar and then it makes you inflamed just by the nature of the sugar.

Eventually, I cut out, I cut out soda years ago. I mean, maybe I have it once in a couple months or something. for like a treat, but it used to be almost an addiction probably for how much I drank it growing up as a kid in the summers. You're just drinking it nonstop, like water. But then when I learned about nutrition more, when I was playing sports and realizing this is making me tired, it's not quenching my thirst, that's when I said, oh, okay, I need more of.

A competitive edge and kind of cut it out of my life. Not only does soda actually, the sugar and soda cause inflammation, it really wrecks your microbiome, your gut bacteria as well. your gut bacteria just can't tolerate that much sugar. Okay. And then guess what? And then, you know, you say, well, wait a minute. That's why we have diet soda, right? Turns out that those artificial sweeteners and soda screw your microbiome, your gut bacteria, even more.

Ooh, more than regular can of soda.

More than a regular can of soda. Come on.

So if it says zero sugar and it's a soda or a pop, you're saying that could be more harmful than just sugar?

For your gut microbiome. Gotcha, gotcha. Right, because the zero sugar is actually to prevent glucose spikes in your body. But in point of fact, it actually wrecks your gut microbiome. And remember what I told you, the gut microbiome communicates your brain, communicates your immune system, communicates your healing systems. That is not a system you want to screw with. And so that's why I try to tell people you really got to watch out for those artificial sweeteners. They do some bad things. So that's one thing.

What are the best, before we go to the next thing, what are the best sweeteners we should be looking for when we're adding something into food or we see it on the packaging?

Sure.

Well, natural sugars in fruits and vegetables, people go, well, I don't want any sugar in them, but what about in a peach? There's nothing better than a summer peach to me. And that natural sugar is okay because when you eat the peach, you're not just getting the sugar, you're also getting all these other bioactives in the fiber and everything else. Hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are good for you from Mother Nature's kind of pharmacy with an F. Okay? So that's different than just having sugar in a glass or corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup, not good for you. Maple syrup, a good way to sweeten. Honey is also a good way to sweeten as well. Monk fruit is actually a really, really sweet tasting gourd. I'd say a shell that is also a decent sweetener. Stevia, actually pretty powerful sweetener. I've been doing some research on it. I haven't been able to find anything wrong with it. But for people that are looking at Stevia, be very careful. Pick up that package and look at the side of the box and read what's on there because a lot of things that are called Stevia actually have a lot of other things added to it.

Okay.

So you want to get the pure stuff. I always tell, if it's in a box, look at what's inside it before you buy it.

There you go.

Okay. So, Soda and Pop is the number one thing that is one of the worst things you could be eating to, or the things that could cause more disease and cancers in your body. Okay, that's number one.

Number two, processed meats. Now, all of us that were kids grew up, you know, at the, you know, eating deli meats, turkey and a ham, right? I mean, like, that's basically you, you. What is your mom. What is your mom pack in your lunch bag? Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, that's a relic of the 1950s, of the sort of ultra processed foods that are everywhere laden with chemicals. That's not what we want to be doing. Now, I have to say, it doesn't mean categorically that hams or sausages are bad for you, because if you go to Italy or if you go to places in Asia or Latin America, where they create dried meats kind of the old way. They're not putting chemicals in there and they're not manipulating it. But here, you know, where you go to the deli counter and, you know, like, take a look at that deli meat. Like, that's not meat doesn't come like that. Okay. So here's the thing. Processed meats are actually classified by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen. and, you know, linked to the causation of cancer. You got to eat a lot of it, but a lot of people actually eat. I mean, how many hoagies or subs?

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. And I gotta say, you know, like, when I was growing up as a kid, I love those kind of, like, fancy kind of, like the deli meats and stuff like that. Absolutely. Totally not good for you. So that's not good for you. It also damages the gut microbiome. oh, and it can actually damage your DNA. So you want to kind of be cut down or cut out sodas and processed meats. And then the other thing is really a category. And I call these ultra processed foods. So things are in a box or in a can that, you know, like our instant this or, you know, scoop it out and eat it quick. You know, I don't want to name any particular products. I don't want to call any products out, but I think we all know the stuff, a lot of stuff we grew up with and were advertised on television to kids. The frosted this, the Pop that, the things that you, you know, they're like the TV dinners, things that used to be like instant foods. Got to be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging, and I'm telling you, there's one thing your viewers can get from me, about things to watch out for, whatever you buy, pick it up. If it's in a box or in a can and look on the side, don't look just at the label, look at the, I mean, at the name of it, look at the side and see if you recognize the ingredients. If you start, you know, if you start losing track and you can't pronounce and you don't know what most of that stuff is, it's an ultra processed food that harms your DNA. that lowers your immunity, that screws up your gut microbiome, it impairs angiogenesis. It actually causes our cells to age faster. Those telomeres burn down faster. Oh, man.

By those processed foods.

Yeah, ultra processed foods, ultra.

What's the difference between ultra and processed?

So look, processing is technically any type of food you manipulate. Like, if you pick a tomato and you cut it up and you make spaghetti sauce at home, that's processing. You're processing it. Okay? If you're taking flour and an egg and you're making homemade pasta, you're processing it. I'm talking about ultra processed. You know, there's a term called Extrusion. Have you heard of this? Yes. Okay, so basically you've got these die cut machines that, like, this goop gets thrown into and, like, the big oil, like, crazy oils get thrown in there, and then it just, like, pushes out, like Play-Doh. I guess maybe the definition is it takes food and transforms it into a form you don't recognize.

You know, if you look at the root word, you know, coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to set on fire, right? And so there are these- Flame. And these are some of the outward symptoms we might think about, it's just like pain, swelling, bruising, burning, aching, those type of things. But there's a massive, the majority of the inflammation that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed. They're these little kind of chronic low grade fevers or little fires burning that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders. And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to support in defending against infections and repair. and the list goes on and on. Inflammation is actually not a bad thing. It's a heal, right? Right. If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation. If we got an infection, it would be deadly without inflammation.

It's an important part of our evolution and our health.

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation? Right. So what we generally think about is acute inflammation. We think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days. But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places, it can be devastating. And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation. And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components? What is creating the fire? What is throwing gasoline on the fire as well? And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 240 42 million of our citizens are overweight or obese. 245 million.

Out of how many?

Right around 330,000.

330 million.

So 240.

Million.

Yeah. So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80%. How is that possible? Exactly.

That should be gotten this far.

Yeah.

How is it just food is too accessible or the wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people? now, the social media, is it laziness? Why have we shifted from being a healthy nation, I don't know, probably 60-70 years ago, to an unhealthy nation?

It's really a perfect storm of all the things. The first thing to look at and to ask is what's going on? Because our genes expect certain things from us, our DNA expects certain things to have healthy outcomes or healthy cell replication. healthy expression. And so we've got to look at what are the things our genes expect of us. Our genes expect us to move. For example, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity and recorded human history. We're the most sedentary culture to ever exist right now.

All of humanity or just USA?

Right, especially the US. We're the LeBron James. We're the king of sedentary.

We're the Homer Simpsons.

We're the stoves. Yeah, we're really leading leading the league in these things. And so that's number one. Also, our genes expect us to get adequate sleep. This is something that we've talked about multiple times in the show, but this is, it's built into our evolution. And if you think about sleep, it's very strange because you're incredibly vulnerable, you're unconscious. You'd think we might evolve out of it just for safety. But the thing is, so many wonderful, absolutely amazing things take place during sleep that we just haven't found a way to replicate. Right? So even with the reduction of inflammation, which we'll talk about more, you know, we have microglial cells in our brain, which are, it's kind of the brain's immune system and it's primarily active when we're sleeping to reduce inflammation and clean out metabolic waste and things of the like.

What would you say are the five biggest benefits of the greatest night of sleep consistently? Like what are the five main benefits that you get if you get deep REM sleep for seven, eight hours a night consistently, no interruptions, no light exposure, all the things you talked about in your other book, Sleep Smarter, what are the five main benefits that come from that versus interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, staying up late with the phone, having coffee late at night, all that stuff. What's the benefits?

Well, just Power-Packed Bullet Points. Yes. Number one, and this is because our culture, I always like to connect to something visceral. and people, we care about how we look.

Of course.

And so, you,'re young doctors.

Right.

Nobody's waking up like, I want to.

Look so old today.

I want to get my George Burns on. I want to be as old as possible. Or I want to feel bad today about the way that I look or they're not waking up like, I just want to look terrible and feel terrible today. And I've run in my clinical practice, I never met one person and people might argue these things, and get into a, because of our cognitive biases, I've never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy. Every single person wants to be healthy. Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, me being a nutritionist, I thought that food was everything, you know, because it was for me, it was my bridge, but there's many paths to the goal. When you're sleeping, It is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in. So it's just, you're just teeming with what we call these quote anti-aging hormones, you know, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really it's also known as the youth hormone. Yeah. You know, and also in that lane of body composition and overall health and fitness, researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study. They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss. They put them on a calorie restricted diet.

Diet.

And they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well rested versus when they're sleep deprived. And so they put them under both conditions. And I love studies that do that. They put people under both conditions to.

See what would happen.

And so they allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study. And they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, et cetera. And then they sleep deprived them for the other phase. So they was getting eight and a half hours, now they're getting five and.

A half hours, tracked all their metrics. Same group.

Same group on the same exact calorie restricted diet.

Same calories, yeah, everything.

But when they were sleep deprived, when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately rested, when they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just by sleeping more. That's crazy.

It doesn't even make sense. Were they working out the same or was it like no movement?

What was it just like? Everything is the same. This is what I love, too. It's a ward study. so they're under the conditions where they can track everything. Now here's another part of study I don't often talk about is that they actually did biopsies. So they actually took fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions. And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too. Because when the fat cells were not, when they weren't adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant. which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat.

Right?

So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well rested versus when you're sleep deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin resistant. And it's just going to lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat. The list goes on and on. So that's just one part, one thing. So number one, number two, the cognitive performance. And I love this study. This was published in the Lancet. And they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task and tracked all their numbers. Then they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine, and had them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different, like, surgical type of simulation. They made 20% more mistakes. doing the exact same thing, and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing.

Oh, wow.

All right. So, and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective, right? And so that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance. Number three, and this, it parallels with cognitive performance, is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans, and, you know, we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep-deprived brain just to get 24 hours of sleep deprivation and the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control. So the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally, as we're more and.

More tired, just shuts down.

With a lack of sleep. With the lack of sleep coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sign, you just came back from Vegas. So these changes happen in the brain very quickly. And that leads into number, well, number three, reduce cognitive performance. So being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions, and then we'll go to number four is going to lean into this as well with brain function is, I talked a little bit about this earlier, during sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system, cleansing it all out, is 10 times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake. So, and your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a build up of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself. And also insulin resistance in the brain we can talk about later. But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen?

They do it on their own.

Are we getting that?

The final thing, so four is the cleansing.

Right, right. Cleansing. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different things that this can benefit. But I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform, you know, we want to be able to to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time. And one of the fun things that I talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford. And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their sprint time. Just by increasing their sleep. They improved significantly their free throw shooting and their three-point shooting just by getting more sleep.

All right?

And these are things that we just kind of on a periphery, you kind of know that, but at the same time are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on. These things weren't taught to us when.

We were in high school. It was just like, Get up at.

4:00 a.m. and lift. Yeah, right. Just go right into somebody. You know what I mean?

Make a play.

Make a play.

Keep your head on a swivel. But today, you know, it's really built into the system. Also, the strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis. Whereas now, if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which I'm. It's so weird for me to say this right now. This is, like, the coolest thing. I actually got chills. Ozzie Smith. All right. So have an opportunity.

St. Louis icon, man. Icon.

When I was a kid, my two Idols were Ozzie Smith and Michael Jackson. Wow.

Yeah.

I tried to wear the Thriller jacket to school, and I got drove. That was not a good look, but Ozzie. Sith could be my role model. And I could just, I wanted to, to play. I wanted to compete, play baseball. And so I actually met him at the gym. And so he was there, I think he was probably in his, around in his mid 60s, maybe at the time, but he was there getting strong, like, and he was one of the first, if not the first high level Elite baseball players to really embrace strength training way back in the 80s. The reason he did it, funny enough, was he tore his rotator cuff and he didn't want to be out. Like this was back in the day where it's just like literally you pat, you do whatever it takes to get on the field and he wanted to be there for his team. And so he just tried, had to find out a way to strengthen everything around it because he didn't want to have surgery. He would have been out for a year at the time. And now, you know, of course, surgeries have advanced tremendously since then. But so he found that he strengthened everything in his shoulder, but also he started throwing from a completely different arm angle. and still wants 13 consecutive gold gloves.

It's crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right.

He's out there back flipping with the glove on.

It's cool.

It's so powerful. But it's a big part of what our genes expect is to be strong in some different domain. And we talked about this before the show. That translates over into our lives as well, you know? strength, if you can train your body and your mind, because your mind is in play too, life gets a little bit easier in many aspects. You feel more physically ready to handle whatever life throws at you. And so in the context that final one is being able to perform at a high level to recover from the training that we do, all the magic happens when you're sleeping. When you're up in the gym and training or you're out on the field competing, you're just tearing your body up. That's all catabolic stuff.

You get the anabolic reward when you go to sleep. When I was interviewing Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist out of Stanford, he was saying that even learning a new skill, it's like the neurons connect when you're sleeping. Like when I do Spanish class sometimes, I'm just like, I'm not getting this. You know, there's moments where I'm like, c'mon, this hurts my brain. It's so challenging. But then I come back the next day or two days later, and I'm like, oh, I've connected the neurons or it's like in your sleep, things are moving and processing for you to really connect those things you're learning, those new skills, those challenging things. And if I wasn't sleeping, I probably wouldn't connect the dots on a new skill. So something to think about there as well. I'm curious about this. Have you seen a study around or any research around how our belief about our identity how we view ourselves in the world, whether we think positively of ourselves, we have confidence, we believe in ourselves, or our lack thereof, we have a bad view of ourselves. Is there any research about how that affects the brain, our actual mindset of the brain and ourselves?

Absolutely.

Have you seen this?

The number one driving force of the human psyche is to stay congruent with the ideas that we carry about who we are. Every thought that we think, every action we take is really correlated with who we believe ourselves to be. And this is why change can be so uncomfortable. When we start to think things that I don't think that way or these are things that I don't do, our physiology, this stuff really gets hardwired into us. And so it creates discomfort because we're literally going to start creating new neural pathways and potentially start to break down old ones. a mutual friend, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Man, I love her.

She's great.

And she's really brought to the forefront. And I talked a little bit about this in Eat Smart in my new book and how our thoughts really affect our biology, even how food affects us based on our beliefs about food. And so, one of the biggest things to really come from her work that unfortunately, it wasn't embraced, even though she's been in the field for 40 years, she really knows her stuff. and has affected so many different lives. But it takes time for kind of Collegiate training to change, for the books to change. But one of the big takeaways is our thinking, your, your thoughts create your brain.

Really.

The process of thinking itself is creating your brain. And we think that the brain is in and of itself just kind of off shooting our thoughts. Now, we can absolutely have thoughts stored in our brain, but Thinking is so much bigger. Our mind is creating our brain.

So thinking is a part of the mind. Is that right? Also the brain as well.

It's both. Yeah, it's kind of within the brain then we start to create it. She shares, I don't know if she did this with you, but she brings up the little trees and all these things. Yes. And branches. So we start to create these with a thought. Little thought trees start to bear fruits, but we can supersede it. Your mind is bigger than just your brain. We tend to think that because everything is kind of up here, but our mind is in our toe as well, and our mind is just in our gut. Yeah, in our gut.

It's Dr. Emran Meyer on.

Yeah, yeah.

He was talking about the mind in the gut and how it's all connected to the brain as well. The gut brain and the brain brain, and it's fascinating.

It's so fascinating.

The mind is connected throughout all throughout your body as well.

So, for example, even our heart within the gut, The human brain itself is just an absolute universe of neurons. So it's like 84 billion neurons, right? I was thinking about human cells overall. So we have about 84 billion neurons in the brain. We have about 100 million in the gut. All right? So this is like nerve tissue. It's like a mass of neural tissue in the gut. But the heart also has neurons as well. So when it's called, anybody can go to Dr. Google and look this up. It's called the heart brain. your brain. So your brain, your heart actually has this kind of ability to think and there's this electromagnetic energy that it's expressing. And there's a field also, it's called a tube torus that's been monitored that's expanding beyond our body to be able to see this. And if folks want to check out the work from HeartMath Institute, HeartMath Institute is phenomenal. I've been probably for about 10 to 15 years connected with HeartMath Institute, it's just absolutely phenomenal.

So there's a field around the heart. Does that mean like quantum physics we're talking about or is this something else? What does this field, this energy field?

We'll keep it real simple first, which is if we think about the electrical energy that the heart is kicking off, like when you're in the hospital, right? And you see the monitor, it's it's not reading the smoke coming off your heart. It's reading the electrical energy that's coming off the heart. So we got EKGs and things of that nature so we can read the electrical currency that the body is throwing off. Your body is just teeming with energy. And there's even a form of energy that we generate. It's called piezoelectricity. Just for moving, we're generating energy and electricity. So just from a very simplistic level, the heart is kicking off energy that we can't see. That's the thing about it, right? It's emanating from beyond us. Even our skin is emanating energy. We just see a certain spectrum of light as humans. We see a certain spectrum of energy.

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from HeartMath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, it can be upwards of last checked around eight feet. heat from your body. And so now this is getting into some freaky stuff, right? And I'm a very, give it to me. I'm a very logical, analytical human, so seeing is believing for me. But then we get into, there's many things that are just, and also I'm very open-minded as well, and there's many things that we don't understand. But when we talk about people being in your space and you picking up people's energy and interacting, and that stuff is very real, you know, you can pick up people's you know, bad vibes. So we don't want to downplay that because other species of animals, they have that bigger connection and we can attribute like bees, for example, you know, in this quote hive mind, but we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years, I've been seeking to find how can I explain this to people to make sense? Because I'm a very solid thinker, you know, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers, they found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes, all they had to do was create some rapport and their brain waves started to sync up.

Come on.

Their brain waves started syncing up just by having rapport and talking to another person. We start syncing up. And this is, this happens all the time.

What does that mean? We sync up the brain is So.

It'S like, again, this is expanding beyond our kind of normal concept of what the brain is. Because it's not just the brain, it's also the mind. It's controlling the brain, right?

The mind is controlling the brain. The brain isn't controlling the mind.

We tend to think that it's the brain that's running the show.

It's not, but the mind. So what is the mind?

That's put Dr. Caroline Leaf's episode into perspective. She could dive in deeper. on what that is from a more clinical aspect. However, I'll tell you this. The mind is, it's something that we're still having a hard time to identify what it is and where it's located. That's the thing.

Where is it?

Is it here?

Is it around here? But is it in our brain?

It's definitely not in your brain alone. Your mind is everything about you. Everything about you. The problem is that we tend to think that the brain is the master controller.

It's not.

It's not. It's not.

What is?

The mind is.

Okay.

The mind. And we still are trying to dictate what the mind is.

The brain foods that would actually help increase our mood, the function of our mood, to feeling better, not in an addictive, I need this all the time, McDonald's hit, but overall calming, happy, healthy mood.

Well, I think that, you know, Omega-3 source is huge. You know, we know those are really necessary for brain health. So, you know, oily fish are the best sources. I think there are some of the mushrooms. And the one most studied is lion's mane, which is a very good edible mushroom. But that really looks as if it improves cognitive and protects the brain. I think anti-inflammatory agents like turmeric, ginger are great.

Olive oil is great.

Olive oil, of course.

Do you take supplements yourself?

I do. I take a multi-nutrient supplement. I take CoQ10, I take magnesium, I take a number of mushroom formulas.

Really? And, you make them yourself?

I don't make them, but a friend of mine does and I'm a great believer in mushrooms. and their medicinal benefits.

How long have you been studying mushrooms?

Geez, probably since the 1970s also. You know, I first became interested in, well, I grew up, my mother was very fearful of mushrooms, as many people were. You know, she said, don't even touch them, you'll get poisoned. Really?

Yeah.

And so I first got interested in food mushrooms and then started when I began reading about Chinese medicine, to see how much they were valued in Chinese medicine and in Western medicine we never paid any attention to them. So that interested me and I began looking at, you know, what are the effects of these things and why are they so much loved in Asia? And they're really interesting, you know, a lot of these affect immunity, resistance to cancer, viruses, you know, they're just, they're great. So I began, you know, I really became knowledgeable about mushrooms. Really? Yeah.

So you take them daily or weekly? Yeah, I take, yeah.

And I eat mushrooms whenever I get the chance.

Mushrooms are powerful, huh?

They're real powerful.

Wasn't there a documentary called like the Magic Power of Mushrooms or something?

I'm sure.

You see this on Netflix, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's how many species of mushroom?

Countless.

I don't think we know. Thousands, right? Yeah, thousands and thousands. and the percentage of them that can kill you is very tiny. So when you go out, when you learn to pick wild mushrooms, the first thing you want to do is learn the ones that can kill you. And those are fairly easy to learn. And then once you learn those and avoid them, you can experiment. And the worst thing you're going to get is a stomach ache of one sort or another.

For a few hours and you'll be fine.

Yeah.

Talk to me about teas, because I'm interested in teas and the power of teas. and what is the purpose of tea and why do people drink it so much in general?

Okay, first of all, tea all comes from one plant. It's Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. A lot of things people call teas are herbal infusions that aren't made from the tea plant. So chamomile tea is not tea. It's not tea. Rooibos tea is not tea. What is it?

It's just herbs.

It's an herbal infusion. But if you're talking straight tea, strictly about tea, it's all from this one species of plant.

Where does this species grow? It can grow anywhere.

Yeah, it's native to China and India, but it can, I hear people are cultivating tea in Oregon now. I haven't tried any of it yet. Interesting. Anyway, so it can grow over a wide, you know, in, it can't take frost, but it can grow in, you know, a lot of different areas. But then there are many varieties of tea depending on how the tea is grown, how it's treated, whether it's steamed, dried, roasted, toasted, how long it's oxidized, and you've got like everything from white tea, which is very delicate, green tea, oolong tea, black tea, and you know, there's all sorts of different preferences. When I was growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank. Right, right.

Or iced tea on the ice with.

A lot of sugar in it.

Yeah, right.

And the only tea that we had available was tea in bags. And that's the common stuff is literally the sweepings from the floor of tea estates. So it's been only relatively recently that people in this country have become aware of good tea.

What are the benefits of tea? Why drink tea?

Well, it's agreeable. I mean, throughout for centuries, people have found it to be agreeable. It's a stimulant. It's got caffeine.

All tea or I guess?

All true tea has caffeine. Some has more than others.

Like a mint tea that's non caffeine.

That's not tea. There is however, mint flavored tea. So you gotta read the label.

That's with caffeine.

Yes, that's with tea. It has caffeine. Caffeine, right. Now, the stimulation however, of tea is very different from that of coffee. Coffee has more caffeine in it, but they have different other things in them. And tea has a compound called L-theanine that you've probably heard of that's a relaxant. And I think that combination really affects the quality of stimulation of caffeine. So, it's got caffeine which gives you.

Sharper energy, but also a relaxation. Yeah, people, you know, I think it.

Describe it as a relaxed alertness. Interesting. Different from the stimulation of coffee, which I personally think is much more jangling. A jittery alertness versus a calm alertness. Exactly.

A focused alertness.

Exactly. Now, the other observation I make, I don't want to bash coffee too badly, but I see an awful lot of people who are addicted to coffee, physically addicted. If they try to stop, they have a withdrawal syndrome. It's like lethargy and then a pounding headache and it lasts for 48 hours and instantly relieved if you have some coffee.

You don't see that with tea.

I mean, I need my tea.

Yeah, exactly. Rarely.

I'm on my tea. I'm on my tea. Exactly. and also, when I was actively seeing patients, I used to say that I would produce one miracle cure a week by getting somebody to stop drinking coffee. And it was from everything from hand tremors to irregular heartbeats to bladder problems, GI problems, stomach problems, a whole range of stuff. And they had no idea that the coffee was doing it to them.

But you got them off the coffee and they were like, two weeks later, they were fine.

Fine. And these were often problems that had been going on for years and nobody.

Ever told them, though.

You're breaking people's hearts. And nobody ever told them, though. You're breaking people's hearts, too.

Right.

But also there's a huge variation in how people respond to caffeine in general and coffee in particular. I see people who have no idea that the one cup of coffee they have in the morning is the reason they can't sleep at night. And I see other people who can drink a pot of coffee at bedtime and fine. So, you got to find out where you are on that spectrum.

Yeah, I can have a cappuccino at night, like 10 o'clock and pass out the next day.

So, you're relatively caffeine insensitive. Yeah.

Not that I need it, I just like a little taste or whatever. And I wonder, and I'll drink it in the mornings and it doesn't give me more energy. I feel like I have energy.

Right. But when people say they get energy from coffee, it's their energy. Coffee just bunches it up. and when it wears off, you're left with a depletion of energy. Really?

What do you mean?

It's their energy of bunches it up. Caffeine isn't giving you a gift of coffee isn't giving you a gift of energy. It's like it's forcing your body to.

Give up chemically stored energy that it.

Would normally not release all at once. Like stored where in the fat cells or in the- no, in all cells. It's in all cells, energetic compounds in all cells. But when you release that energy, then When the drug wears off, you have a depletion of energy.

And you feel tired.

Yeah, you have a crash.

And why does tea not do that?

Probably because it's first because it's less caffeine, so it's gentler stimulation and it's also got this other compound that moderates the thing. So, I guess you can find, you could find tea addicts. I don't see them very often. And, I don't see many people who say they get a crash from Tea, tea drinking. And also coffee does have, you know, there are health benefits of coffee, but there's been a tremendous amount of research on health benefits of tea, especially green tea.

Like, what are the benefits?

Overall lower death rates.

Really?

Yeah, there's a huge population study in Japan.

Is that because of the tea or because of all the other factors, the environment, friends?

We don't know. But, there's a clear association between the more tea people drink, lower causes, all causes of death. It's got improved cardiovascular health, lower rates of cancer, all sorts of stuff like that. And, of the various forms of tea, personally I think green tea has been most studied.

Here's the thing, when I drink green tea in the morning with no food, it makes me feel a little upset. Like, I've thrown up before.

I have heard this from people.

I get a little nauseous sometimes.

I hear this from people, so you want to have have food in your stomach. Right. That's fairly simple fix.

Gotcha.

Gotcha. Why is that, do you think? I don't know.

And it's- If I'm drinking coffee, I'm fine. I mean, interesting. I don't know. I don't drink coffee in the morning.

And not eat all day. I do not know why. Maybe there's a compound in the tea that's stimulating something. Interesting. So, my preferred form is matcha green.

Tea, which is the powdered tea. Yeah, but matcha doesn't make me feel sick.

Okay, good.

I like matcha.

Oh, good.

I'm glad to hear that.

You gotta try our matcha, which is the best. You guys have, I mean, the best.

Domain in the tea world of matcha.com.

Yeah, what was a good score.

And why, why is, why did you get in, how did you get into the matcha?

When I was 17, I was on a student exchange program. This was 1959. No, actually it was an experimental school called the International School of America.

Your whole life just sounds woo-woo out there, which I love.

This was great. I got to travel around the world for nine and live with native families in different countries. You're getting experience. Changed my life.

Anyway, a quick story there before you tell it. My dad, we had seven exchange students live with us when I was a kid. So it's like we didn't have the money to travel.

Right, but you brought it to you.

We brought it to me. So we had people from all over the world teaching us the culture and.

The food and the language. It was a substitute for that.

Amazing.

No substitute for that for knowing about other cultures. Yeah. Anyway, so I lived with with Japanese families outside of Tokyo and Kobe. And the Japanese family outside of Tokyo, there was supposed to be a student studying English, but there was no language.

No one spoke English.

No one spoke English. So the second night that I was there, the mother, through gestures, made known she wanted to take me next door to her neighbor who was a tea ceremony practitioner. That's cool. So it was cool. So the three of us sat around, And this woman in kimono made matcha. So first of all, the color of the matcha just blew me away. I mean, it's this brilliant green powder. I'd never seen green like that. And then the whisk that they whisked it in a bowl to a froth is a marvel of Japanese craftsmanship carved from a single piece of bamboo. And that whisk just, oh, I loved that. I wanted one of those. So, I then in the 1970s, I began going to Japan fairly regularly for different things. And whenever I'd go, I'd bring matcha back and turn people onto it. Nobody had ever heard of matcha. And I'd make it for people. And somewhere in the '80s, maybe '90s, I started importing matcha from a company in Japan that I met and selling it on my website, drweil.com, way ahead of its time. You know, there was no awareness of matcha.

Starbucks made it popular. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, but then watching matcha suddenly become popular here, I was amazed, but also disappointed that so much of the matcha here was terrible.

Well, it's just sugar infused.

But also the matcha itself, because it's such a fine powder, it's got a huge surface area, it oxidizes very quickly. So, if it's not stored properly, it loses that ring color, becomes sort of yellowish green or gray green, it gets bitter. And a lot of people, that's the only matcha they've tried is stuff like that. So I really wanted to turn people onto good matcha.

What are the benefits of matcha in general?

Well, it's the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. And it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds and that L-theanine than other forms of tea. So it's grown in an unusual way. It's like they're They're specialty plants and starting about three weeks before they harvest it, they cover the plants with shade cloth. That's about a 90% shade cloth, so pretty dark. And in response to that, the leaves get bigger- To try to get the sun. To get bigger and thinner. They produce more chlorophyll to try to make more energy and they produce more antioxidants and more flavor compounds. And then the leaves are harvested, steamed, dried, aged, and then they're ground between stones. It used to be done by hand, now they're sort of mechanically driven, but it's these grooved granite stones to this superfine powder. And so it's, you know, it's a special form of tea that has higher content of all the good stuff.

I'm gonna have to come to Tucson and have you make me some of that.

I would love to do that.

Whisk it up for me. Or just go to Japan and find.

A specialty place and but meantime you can get it from our website and matcha.com matcha.com there you go you guys.

Teach how to make it to you.

And sell the videos and we sell everything everything everything's all there that's exciting yeah that's fun so it's been fun to turn people onto that so why.

Matcha over jasmine or green what's the.

I think it's personal preference whatever you like I like the I first of all I just like the look of matcha I like the taste of it I like the ritual of Of whisking it. Yeah. Well, you can do it any way you want.

And is it, you know, the Starbucks way is like you put almond milk in it or something, but how would.

You, is this with water? Is this with milk? Yeah, just, I like it just with water, no sweetener. That's just the way I like it. I also like iced matcha. Sort of, I use an electric whisk in room temperature water and then put ice cubes in it. And when it's hot weather, I like that a lot. Wow.

I like to drink green things. What's the, Are you drinking one tea a day? Do you have more than that?

I'd say one a day.

For you?

Yeah, usually one a day or early in the day. I mean, occasionally I'll have another one, but I usually don't need more than one.

What's your nighttime ritual?

My nighttime ritual, I eat early.

What's that?

Five, seven? Four to five, I would say.

That's your dinner.

Yeah, I like to cook. So, even if I'm by myself, you know, I usually cook for myself. simple stuff, but I, you know, I like simple, delicious things. So, you know, I like cooking for other people. And then after dinner, I like to often read, watch movies, depending on the weather, of course. I mean, if it's up at Fulton BC and it's light till 10 o'clock, I'm, you know, outdoors and. Right, right.

The other thing is the dream. You've done so many different, different interesting things. What's the thing you're most proud of that you've created?

You know, I, I, I. There is now a center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine named the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

That's pretty cool.

Yes, that's pretty cool. And we're the world leader in education in this field. You know, as I said, we've graduated over 2,000 physicians from our trainings. We train medical students. We have our curriculum in AD residency programs. We train other health professionals. We train, you know, chiropractors, dentists, nurses. in integrative medicine. And I've always said, one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative, it'll just be good medicine. And that's coming.

And integrative is, is that the exclusion of medicine, like traditional medicine?

No, it builds on conventional medicine. So you still can prescribe traditional medicine? Yeah, you know, I've always said, if I'm in a serious car accident, I don't want to fly away to a Christian Science practice. or a chiropractor or shaman, you know, I want to go to a trauma center and get put back together, but then I'd use other methods I know to speed up healing. So, I think the, frankly, I could, one of the things I can see happening, I think that a lot of smaller and community hospitals aren't going to be there in the future. I think nobody's going to be able to afford, you know, that stuff and that, what we call conventional medicine, allopathic medicine, that may become a specialty. for dealing with trauma, for critical illness, and there'll be one large facility in cities that has all the hardware. And there'll be new kinds of institutions that'll come into being that I think of as healing centers. That's one possible future.

You've seen the obesity go up in America since the last 50 years. It probably wasn't two-thirds back then. It's probably one-third maybe, or not even, I don't know what it was back back then.

Well, I remember watching, you know, a few years ago, I watched the whole Ken Burns documentary on World War II. Okay. It was on PBS. And there are many crowd scenes, both military and civilian, thousands of people. You don't see a single fat person in those crowds.

Is it because they didn't have the money to buy food?

Is it because they're not? No, it's not. And, you know, the other interesting thing is if you look what people were eating in those days, they didn't know a lot of what we know now.

They weren't processing food as much too.

So, yeah, so I mean, but people ate, you know, they were eating potato, meat and potatoes and pies and whatever. But it was real food made from scratch. You know, they were not eating manufactured food. They weren't eating fast food.

There was no fast food then.

Right.

What do you think is gonna, where do you think in the next 50 years we're gonna be as a country in terms of obesity?

You know, I saw, I saw this, this is a couple years ago, I read that the military is really having problems finding people who are qualified for military service because of obesity. So if it's really, so if it's threatening national defense, you'd think, you know, now people are going to take it seriously. We've got to do something.

Just because they're not in shape enough to pass the test, the physical test.

Yeah.

You know, we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition. It's hard to know where to start. Where I would start is if we could get people to stop drinking sweet liquids. Right. That would be, we had to put it so far out of the curve. Soda pop. And it's not just soda pop, it's also fruit juice, it's energy drinks, it's putting sugar and coffee and tea, all the Starbucks. That would be one place to start, just to not drink sweet liquids. You know, that would be a big step.

What about alcohol consumption?

I don't, you know, sure, I think the whole key with alcohol is moderation.

Yeah.

There's constant arguments about whether it's beneficial or harmful. And, I think moderation is the key. I don't think that's nearly as big a factor as sugar.

And, when you created the anti-inflammatory diet, right? When was that?

Long ago. And, I have a history of being ahead of the curve in a lot of areas that I've been able to foresee trans. I was, I think, the first people to warn people about trans fats 10 years before people took notice of that. So I became aware of this beginnings of this hypothesis that chronic inflammation was the root cause of a lot of different kinds of serious chronic diseases. And that just fascinated me because when I was in medical school, I was taught that cardiovascular disease had nothing in common with cancer, and that had nothing in common with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. And now suddenly it looks like all of these things are linked. They have a common root of chronic inflammation. And if that's the case, the good news is then there's a common strategy for dealing with them if you can reduce inappropriate inflammation. So, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about inflammation. Inflammation is the cornerstone of the body's healing response.

Inflammation is good when you're in pain.

Well, it's good, you know, it's the way the body gets more nourishment and more immune activity to an area that's injured or under attack. So, we all know it on the surface of the body, you know, it's redness, swelling, you know, pain, heat, but we aren't aware of it necessarily internally and especially if it's low level. Inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive that it's very important that it ends when it's supposed to end and stay where it's supposed to stay. So, you don't want it throughout your body. No, information persists. If it outlives its purpose, then it causes disease. And it looks now, if you can't produce enough inflammation, you're vulnerable to infection. If you produce too much inflammation, you're vulnerable to allergies and autoimmunity. And it looks like if you've got low-level chronic inflammation going on for a long time, you greatly increase risks of cardiovascular disease, of neurodegenerative disease, and cancer. And so I think one of the best things we can do is learn how to contain it. So what are the factors that influence it? It's partly genetic, it's stress, exposure to environmental toxins is a big one. Secondhand cigarette smoke is a very powerful pro-inflammatory agent. But diet has a huge influence, and that's one that's potentially under our control. Right. and I think there's no question that the mainstream North American diet is strongly pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong kinds of fats, the wrong kinds of carbs, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, tea, things like that. Yeah.

So what would be the anti-inflammatory diet?

So a base of high quality produce, you know, and the government always tells us to eat more fruits and vegetables, but The emphasis really should be on vegetables because fruits are sugar sources and you want to- Veggies, more veggies. You want to avoid pro-inflammatory fats, which are things like hydrogenated fats, margarine, vegetable shortening, and the polyunsaturated vegetable oils. So, you want to eat olive oil should be your main Main thing. Fat.

Or avocado oil.

Avocado oil, yeah. Nuts, seeds, good.

They're good, yes.

In terms of carbohydrate, it's not that carbohydrates are bad, it's that you want to reduce consumption of quick digesting ones, the ones that turn quickly into blood sugar. So, everything made with flour and that's all the snack foods, all the, you know, everything, everything, yeah. And sweeteners. in general. I mean, that doesn't mean you live without sugar completely, but you want to really keep that to a minimum.

So, is this all flour or is this just more?

It's all flour.

I think the one of the almond.

Flour and- well, that's a nut. So, that's better. But with grains, I think there's such misunderstanding. If I ask people to name a whole grain food, the usual answer I get is whole wheat flour or whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food. Where's the grain? And, the FDA doesn't get that. They let that put labels on it saying this is a whole grain food and good for you. Most whole wheat bread is colored white bread. When you have a grain, the starch is tightly compacted, very dense, and it's surrounded more or less by a fibrous bran and it takes time for digestive enzymes to get in there and convert the starch to sugar. when you mill a grain into flour, whether or not the bran is present, whether or not the germ is present, you convert the starch into a material with an infinite surface area and it's a snap for digestive enzymes to turn that into sugar. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.