How To STOP DESTROYING Your Health & Decreasing Your LIFESPAN | Lewis Howes

The fact that 80% of our future health is in our own hands is liberating. That's really... Because often we think, ah, it's not going to make a big difference. It really makes a big difference how you live your life every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is...

How much does alcohol, smoking, or marijuana, or psychedelics actually affect lifespan? Do we have enough research on this yet? Or...

Well, we do on tobacco smoking. There's obviously it's very clear that's a decade off your life. And what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate. So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically than people who've never smoked. That's why they look older too. We can measure that now in my lab. If I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically, not just you.

Chronology. I want to do that. I saw you post this on Instagram that you're like 46.

Is that right? Or you're 42 or what is it? I went down to, what was it, 44 I think? Okay, 42.

It bounces around, but it's usually a decade younger than I thought I was. That's cool. So what do you do?

You take a blood sample, like, and then you what? Measure the blood? There's two ways of doing it. There's one company that I advise called Inside Tracker and that's what I use. I've had that too, yeah. You've done that, yeah. So they come to your home or you donate and then you get this, this readout of, I think it's 40 different parameters and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm in the top 2% of people my age for youthfulness. So I'm happy with that.

Just dust it off, a little brag over there. I like it, yeah. Yeah, well, you better be if you're researching this and the top scientists in.

The world on this. Oh, yeah. I don't like to brag. That's not what Australians and scientists do. But what I do want to say is I use my body as an experiment.

Yeah.

And trying to be a role model. And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now based on this feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12, 13 years. And you can see the graphs of things going out of the optimal zone, and then I make a change based on science and it comes back or even better.

So we know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke, is what you're saying, right?

Yeah, well, that's one test. The InsideTracker test is what I do routinely. every few months. But there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horvath test, named after my friend, Steven Horvath, at UCLA. The way to think of this is, if you've ever heard of the epigenome.

I've heard of that.

These are the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure. It's chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably. and we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before. And I'm gonna bring this test to the public so people can test their biological home or something. It should be a cheek swab.

That's what we're developing.

So you don't have to prick or.

Take blood or anything. You do a cheek swab. Exactly.

And then you ship it in or something. Yeah, you'll post it in. And then you get, hopefully just a week later or less, here's your credit score for your body. That's cool. And then even better, Here's how you slow it down or reverse it based on everything we know about you.

Wow, that's cool.

We'll take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this.

That is cool. I gotta take that test.

Yeah, well, you can get on the wait list if you want. Okay, where is the website? There is a website, because we are taking names right now. We may do some studies with early adopters too.

That's cool.

Where's the wait list? It's called Tally. T, A, L, L, Y. A-L-L-Y, TallyHealth.com and the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good. Is it too much, too little? If I eat this, does it help me? We need a dashboard for our bodies and that's what these give you.

That is really cool. Okay, so we know that smoking makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older smoking. what about drinking alcohol? We've talked about wine and the substance in wine that could be supportive, but alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

Well, it all depends on quantity. One glass a day, most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, it's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with the cardiovascular system, reduces bad cholesterol and more importantly raises the good cholesterol HDL.

This is for red wine.

And the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too.

But beer.

So beer will raise the levels of uric acid, which is a breakdown product of a protein breakdown product that you can pee out. But if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter? It's becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels, your body will age faster.

We just had Dr. David Perlmutter on.

Exactly.

He has a book about uric acid talking about this is one of the root causes of poor health and aging faster and things like that. So, I'll call you. You talked to him a lot?

Yeah, yeah. I actually was one of the most people who read his book before it came out.

Yeah, it's really good.

It blew my mind. I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips. You can just buy them on the usual.

You just pee on it, you spit.

On it, and 10 seconds later you see. You see your acid levels. Yeah.

And so, the lower the level, the better.

Right.

The higher the level means there's risk for what?

Everything, according to David, it's really bad for cancers and heart disease mainly. but I think he's right that it's a sign of accelerated aging.

The higher the uric level, the faster you're going to be aging. And a larger amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer, I'm hearing raises that level.

Beer in particular has a lot of the chemicals in it that will raise uric acid, unfortunately. And that's from David Perlmutter. He gave me a list of foods. I still go on there like, oh, that sucks.

Now, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Does it help you improve the quality of your health? Does your brain get better? Does your body, your system get better? Does it make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

There are benefits because there's alcohol in there and a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system.

But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system, right? That you don't need.

So beer on the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health, mostly, unless it's full of sugar, like those very sweet wines I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin B, B group vitamins, B3, tons of it.

But you can get that in other ways too.

You can, so what can you do? I mean, you gotta live as well.

Right, right.

I don't prescribe a life that's prolonging and feels longer. You gotta live a little.

Right, right.

Enjoyment, the enjoyment of the richness of life. Yeah.

Right. Though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days.

I've never been drunk in my life.

Yeah, amazing.

Never been drunk. I don't find it amazing because I just never found.

The desire to do it.

I never tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, I don't understand why I would ever drink this. Plus it was also for me, maybe that's one of the reasons In your mind, I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as an advantage in sports. When everyone else was drinking, I was like, oh, it's weakening their immune system, it's making them slower. Mentally, this will give me an edge in athletics. They were hung over after games in practice, and I was like, I'm gonna be sharp. And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just gonna make me sharper. Now, I have my other vice, I use sugar in other ways, is my vice. not perfect, but does alcohol make you look older too?

In excess.

In excess, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah. So a little bit every day is okay, a little bit. But most doctors, like physicians, would say if you overdo it, you will age. And actually what you do as a researcher is you look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin, which has been done, or family members.

Interesting.

Yeah, and actually, how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study. They took identical twins, genetically identical in Denmark, and they said, okay, let's look at them through their life. And there were massive differences in how they looked and how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were, they could figure out, first of all, that 80% of their lifespan was determined by how they lived. not their genetics.

You mean the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or what do you mean? Well, mostly their lifestyle.

What they ate, did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise? Those that did- Did they sleep well, all that stuff?

Right.

And those that did all the good things, the same genetics, twins born the same day, one could live 10 years.

Longer than the other. Now, this is what I'm curious about. Were these twins hanging out all the time? or because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time, you pick up the similar habits, right? You pick up a similar lifestyle habit as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, I'm gonna drink every day and I'm not gonna drink every day if you're living.

Together and in the same room, right?

Yeah, I don't know how that is.

Maybe they got separated at birth or something. Interesting. But it does tell you a lot. The fact that 80% of our future health is in our own hands is liberating. That's really cool. Because often we think, ah, it's not going to make a big difference. It really makes a big difference how you live your life every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is I look at my future self and I ask myself, what's that guy saying to me today if he could speak to me?

What's he saying? Please don't eat that. Exactly. Please don't drink that anymore.

You had enough, like, you're going to.

Hurt me in 10 years. That's how you need to think about it. It's coaching yourself 10, 20, 30 years out.

Right.

It's interesting, I asked David Perlmutter, I said, what are some things you wish you would have done sooner to improve the quality of your health? And he was like, flossing. He's like, and I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum issues or something he had to deal with at one point that was really affecting him for a year or two. I don't know, I'm just making this up. But if he can go back, he'd be like, I wish you would have done this better. so I didn't have to suffer later, right?

Yeah.

What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old self will be so happy for? But if he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high-fiving you non-stop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. And then what are a few things that he's gonna say, man, I really wish you wouldn't do that right now.

Oh, yeah. Okay. All right, so let's see. So I measure myself so I can speak scientifically, not just that it makes me feel good. It's the one meal, one main meal a day.

He would be grateful for.

I'm sure of it. And as a result, I'm leaner and more ripped.

You look lean.

I'm lean.

You look really lean.

I've gone shredded over the last two years from 150 pounds to 133.

Yeah, you look leaner even from the first time I had you on. Your face is leaner and chiseled.

Yeah, I don't think I can lose any, I want to lose any more. Yeah, I need to go back to the gym and do a little bit more.

So the one meal a day, but you weren't doing one meal a day, what, five, ten years ago?

No, I only started during the pandemic. Yeah, this is new for me too. It's hard actually when you begin. Very hard. You feel hungry because you've got those crashes that make you really hungry and you've got this, and hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks. So anyone who tries it, make sure that you don't give up early. Just power through and then your liver will wake up.

One mean meal a day.

So that's one. The other thing I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods.

Oh man.

Yeah.

Don't eat that cake. So at a restaurant when they say, do you want dessert? I always say no, but then I'm hoping that someone at the table will choose what I want. But that's all you want. All I need. I need to taste it. I don't need to fill myself with a cake.

Gotcha. Because you still want to enjoy your life and live a full life, but you don't want to, in 10 years, be like, why do they eat cake every day?

It's not worth it.

Yeah.

Really? Your future self will thank you for it.

Mm.

Lifting weights, I know, You do that, so I need to do more of that. I got a standing desk, so most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it. You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

Yes.

Your legs will. I'm now mostly focused on eating plants.

When did you start that?

That's recently.

Eating mostly plants?

Yeah, I've switched. I love meat. I wish that I could eat more. but you just got to look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people who just look at how long people live and what they eat. And I mean, it's not even an argument.

But there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only. And, but people make the argument, right? Like you see it online, people making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So how, where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on an only meat diet?

I don't know.

But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

Well, there might be one person or two, but when you look at 10,000 people, what they eat, it's the vegan and the pescatarian that win out.

In the blue zones, right?

Yeah, and the numbers are something like that. You drop it down to you've got 88% less chance, or actually it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets.

Really?

Wait a minute. 80% less chance of what?

Of dying at any one point in the age range of the study, which.

Oh, wow. Which is by being a pescetarian.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's vegan pescetarian. Those are the best. Then above that would be actually pescetarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help, but it has to be fish.

And what's the omega-3s in there, right?

Yeah, and particularly oleic acid is good, which is found in avocados and olive oil. That activates one of the protective enzymes that we study in the lab.

Which acid?

Oleic, O-L-E-I-C. What is some of that.

But not a lot of it?

It's a monounsaturated fatty acid or a MUFA. If you have a bit of olive oil, there's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day. Okay, cool. with the DHA and EPA, all that stuff, all that good stuff.

Yes.

Okay.

So that's my fish intake as a pill.

You don't eat fish, or you eat very little?

Well, you know, I'm evolving my diet. So I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant-based, no dairy, and yeah, no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment.

Yes.

It's not a philosophy. And if things don't work out biologically, I'll go back. I mean, I'd love to go back to a steak. I'm Australian after all. But, you know, I'm driven by science and that's all that is. Yeah.

Okay, so you got these four. Is there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day, don't eat sugary foods. That's going to be one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants, was there anything else?

Get control over psychological stress.

Oh yeah. Why is this so important?

Well, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically. And it's clear that people who have high levels of, really high levels of stress are chronically ill and even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older. if you have stress.

Really?

This is scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time or more frequently, you're going to get older biologically.

Correct. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

And can you reverse gray hair without dyes?

Yes.

Really?

Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. There are some drugs that have shown in the clinic that that make hair go gray from gray to brown. The best example I can tell you is that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in the banking world and they're losing their minds, you can find hairs that start to turn gray. Okay? So you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, good, turning gray, okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks. And guess what happens to the hair shaft?

I think it's brown.

It's brown again. You can find these gray brown segments of hair.

Interesting.

And people.

Yeah.

And what they tracked it down to was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really.

Hard to reverse that.

It's hard to reverse that, yeah. But I'm the first person to say aging is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not really difficult anymore once you figure it out.

When I'm hearing you say obesity is a big factor to mental health stresses and brain stresses.

And Alzheimer's disease.

And Alzheimer's, obesity.

I mean, it all sort of goes together from depression to problems in school to memory problems later in life.

What's your thought? I'm all for people loving themselves where they're at, where they're at in their life, and loving their bodies for where they're at and not shaming themselves and the self-love movement of accepting yourself for where you are. But that's only going to hurt our brains if we're not actually saying, okay, I accept and love myself where I'm at and decisions I've made to be here. But I've got to start working on these things. Otherwise, there's going to be some challenges emotionally, mentally, anxiety, depression, if I don't work on it, right? My health.

The don't worry, be happy people die the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. And I want people to love themselves, but doing the right thing is an act of love. Like if you're really unhealthy walking, is an act of love. And so, so it sort of catches me in this funny place. I remember I was on a plane once and I'd figure out this connection between, as your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down. And I was sitting next to someone who was very overweight and we were on a tiny plane going to Des Moines, Iowa for public television. And in my head, I'm like, oh, you want to talk to her about that? And then I talk to myself all the time. It's like, no, you don't want to say anything. Don't need to upset her day.

And.

But then I went to Pittsburgh and I went to GNC, you know, the supplement company.

And.

One of my core values is being authentic. So I live the message of my life and the message of GNC is health. And their number three guy, their marketing director, took me to dinner, was morbidly obese.

Really?

And that thought in my head is, you should talk to him about this. And he made the comment, he opened the conversation. He's like, you know, I don't know why I'm overweight, but my numbers are okay. And I'm like, what numbers? And I'm like, Tom, you don't wanna be a dinosaur, 'cause I had figured out, big body, little brain, you're going to become extinct. And we had this great conversation because my favorite verse in the New Testament is John 8:32, Know the truth and the truth will set you free. I'm like, Do you not want to be like the number two guy or the number one guy? You're not going to do that if your brain's not healthy. And that conversation the next year, he lost 80 pounds.

Wow.

Most people don't know that this is a serious health, mental health, brain health risk. And I just want to tell people the truth, and I want them to get healthy. And people go, But I don't like any of, one of my NFL players, But I don't like any of the foods that are healthy for me. And I'm like, None, not one. And we did this great exercise. And it turned out he liked like 70 of the foods that were out there. You only want to love food that loves you back. It's a relationship, right? I don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship.

Sure.

But I've been in a bad rela- as in a 20-year marriage with someone who didn't like me very much. I'm never gonna do that. Again, I'm just not. It's a boundary for me. I'm damn sure not going to be in a relationship with food. I want to be in a good relationship. I mean, I love food. I just want it to love me back.

What are the five foods that we should have to help our brain the most?

Salmon, wild salmon, blueberries, walnuts, It's olive or avocado oil. Yeah, healthy protein, chocolate. I make this great brain healthy hot chocolate every night for my family. I just look at the six of them that live at home, I'm like, okay, who's up for it tonight? So Costco, of all places, organic vanilla, unsweetened almond milk, raw cacao, it's a superfood. So organic raw cacao, And a little bit of Sweet Leaf is a company that makes flavored stevia. They make chocolate flavored stevia and put it in the blender, heat it up, it's phenomenal. Good for me, I love it, and it loves me back.

It loves you back. Salmon blueberries, walnuts, avocado or avocado oil, raw chocolate are some of the top favorite foods for the brain.

For the brain.

Why are these foods, is it high in antioxidants? Is it proteins that they have?

So blueberry, it's the phytonutrients. They've actually done studies showing cognitive enhancement with blueberry juice, salmon, it's the omega-3 fatty acids and the complete protein, avocados, it's the healthy fat, especially omega-3 fatty acids, same with walnuts. Your brain, is fat. Low-fat diets are bad for your brain. People who go on low-fat diets actually have an increased incidence of depression.

Really?

Yeah. Now, you don't want bad fats, fried fats particularly. You want healthy fats, avocados, nuts and seeds, green leafy vegetables.

Olive oil is in there.

Olive oil, avocado oil, Damien nut oil.

Yeah. So.

How much food should the brain have? Is it, you know, your buddy, our buddy, Dave Asprey talks about fasting a lot. A lot of people are in this fasting craze. If we're not giving the brain food or nutrients for a day, three days, five days, does that help the brain? Does it reset the brain? Does it hurt the brain?

So intermittent fasting, where you go 12 to 16 hours from dinner to breakfast or lunch is good. They've actually found your, there's a term called autophagy, where your brain begins to clean up some of the trash.

So it works in the brain too, not just in the gut.

It works on the brain as well. Now, I grew up Roman Catholic, and long suffering was one of the gifts, and I never got that one. I'm not a fan of long suffering. I'm not doing a marathon. It's like way too much stress for my brain and I'm not fasting for three days. But I can go 12 hours and that's not a big deal and it helps people lose weight. It helps them be healthy. And I come from a family of fat people. My dad used to say when I would say that, but I have a brother that's 150 pounds overweight despite me loving him, nudging him and you just have to be thoughtful, know your vulnerability and bright minds and gee, it's genetics. So know what you're genetically vulnerable to and you know, I have to work on it. Right, right.

How you mentioned you don't do marathons. If you're not traumatizing the brain through contact sports, but you're an endurance junkie, you love to run marathons, you run them every year, you do triathlons, you do ultra marathons, you're doing mountain climbing, are these activities good for the brain to put some extreme stress on it, even if it's not physical contact to the brain, or does it long term hurt the brain?

The scans I have of extreme athletes are not good.

Really?

Yeah.

I think it's too much stress for the brain. I love HIIT training, high intensity training that's been shown to increase mitochondria in cells. I'm not a fan of putting your body under a lot of stress. It's just not good for it. Some stress is good. We call it eustress. A little bit, so your fibers grow. That's why weight training is important. The stronger you are as you age, less likely you are to have Alzheimer's disease.

Really?

But you want to love your brain. You want to make sure you're sleeping for your brain. That's the essence of bright mind.

So someone's like, you know what? Okay, I hear what you're saying, but I really love to do a marathon or two a year. And a few times in my life I want to do, you know, on a climb Everest or something like that. I want to do something to challenge myself.

And I go, Is that gonna be awesome?

Is that gonna hurt the brain?

It's not gonna, if you're doing everything else right. So one of my NFL players just signed an $80 million deal. So he's gonna play. He's going to play. But if you're going to do something that is potentially damaging to the brain, make sure you're doing everything else right. So for example, being a firefighter is a brain damaging profession. We need to own that, just like we need to own playing football is a brain damaging profession. It's like, own it, everybody knows it. Now, when I started my work in 2007, very few people know it now.

Everybody knows it.

But they don't know that being a firefighter, because there are heroes, those are the people we need when we need them, and we need them healthy. But because of the toxins they breathe, because of the emotional trauma they see day in and day out, because of the head traumas they experience, they have a higher incidence of depression, a higher incidence of suicide, and a higher incidence of early death. We should not be okay with this. But it doesn't mean we're not going to have firefighters. What it means is we should put their brain in a rehabilitative environment all the time. We should be teaching them about brain health, like with NFL players currently. We should be teaching them, look, if you're going to do this, own it. It's a brain-damaging sport, so let's just do everything else.

Right.

What are the other things right that you talk about? Are there are a few main keys? Is it nutrition? Is it sleep?

Well, we think about Bright Minds, it's just such a good model. So blood flow, B is blood flow, so exercise. And foods like beets that increase blood flow or supplements like ginkgo that increase blood flow. The R is retirement and aging. New learning is absolutely critical. Your work and studying greatness, you're always learning.

Always.

Something new. which is great for the brain.

Retirement plus aging, is that what you said?

Retirement and aging.

So continuing to learn in those stages.

And always putting yourself in an anti-aging environment. So the food you eat, the exercise, new learning, being passionate, never retiring, right? I mean, maybe you go and do something else you like better because you have enough money, but never When you start not doing things, your brain actually starts to disconnect itself.

So when we say people, someone retires at 60, 70, 75, and they say, you know, I'm just gonna sit on the beach for the next however long, enjoy my family time, enjoy the money I've had, and relax. What happens to those people if they don't have a purposeful mission? in their life beyond relaxation. What happens?

Their brain disconnects itself, really. They have a higher incidence of dementia. And my dad worked until he died when he was almost 91. And he's like, when my friends retire, they die.

Really?

Now, if you retire, because you really didn't love what you were doing anyways, and you go off and do something you love, maybe not golf, because you're around all those toxins on the green. Maybe not golf. But if you're doing things you love and you're always learning, well, that's awesome. That's definitely. That's a really good thing.

So, you can retire from your job. Don't retire from your life. Don't retire from your life. Stay connected in some meaningful pursuit.

Absolutely critical to staying keeping young. And then the eye is inflammation. This is the big bad. actor because inflammation in your body, which comes from eating processed foods, one of the surprising things comes from gum disease. If you're not a flosser, you need to floss. I'm a flossing fool.

I do it twice a day.

I wasn't that way until I started reading the studies that people who have gum disease have a higher incidence of heart disease, but also a higher incidence of brain disease. They actually found gum bacteria higher in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. Wow. And so omega-3 fatty acids decrease inflammation, fruits and vegetables decrease inflammation, flossing, and probiotics, getting your gut healthy, there's this huge connection between the brain and the gut. Because inflammation often comes from having an unhealthy gut, either from infections or the lousy food that you're eating. And the G is genetics. You need to know your vulnerability, but genes aren't a death sentence, what they should be, is a wake-up call to know what you're vulnerable to. I have heart disease and obesity in my family. I don't have heart disease and I'm not obese. Why? Because I'm always on a prevention program. You just want to be serious as soon as you know what your risks are.

Right.

Okay.

H is head trauma, which we talked about. Brain is soft, skull is hard. There are 3 million new head injuries every year in the United States. This is a big deal.

Three million new head injuries?

Is that- Every year.

Is that from car accidents or- Falls? Sports, falls, everything.

Everything. Wow. You know, being hit, domestic violence, whatever.

It might be, anything, gunshot, whatever.

Whatever. Three million. Which means most people live over the last 30 years. That's 90 million people in the United States who struggle with the effects of traumatic brain injury. Very high in prison populations, very high in people who struggle with psychiatric diseases. And then T is toxins. And so you go, what can I do to support my brain? Well, one, avoid them. Alcohol is not a health food. My biggest blog last year was titled, I Told youd so. And when I dated my wife, Tana, and I think you met my wife. She's awesome. And when we were dating, she said, your current wife. My current wife.

Not the 20 years.

Not the 20 years. She said, I'll never tell you I told you so. She lied. She just flat out lied to me. It's like her favorite thing to say. But I've been telling people ever since I started imaging, alcohol is not a health food. And our first clinic was right next to the Napa Valley, so it was not a popular thing to say. But it's just what I saw. And then there was a study from Johns Hopkins that said people who drink every day have smaller brains.

Wow.

Now, last year, the American Cancer Society came out and said, any alcohol is associated with an increased risk in cancer. Oh, in cancer. Seven different cancers.

Oh, any alcohol.

Any alcohol.

And so my wine drinker is saying, no, you're wrong. No, I'm not listening to this right now. What about a glass once or twice a week? What about the nutrients from the grapes?

Oh, come on. All you're gonna do something that's bad for your brain, you should be doing other things that are good for your brain. It doesn't mean you can never have a drink, but just know it's not a healthy, healthy full thing to do. So you want to do the other things.

When I eat a bowl of ice cream and pizza, I know it's not helping my brain.

Right, and if you do it once a month, it's not the biggest deal in the world. But then, 'cause here we're talking about tea for toxins, you want to support the four organs of detoxification. So your kidneys drink more water, your gut eat more fiber. In my shake every morning, I put fiber in it for your liver kill the alcohol and eat detoxifying vegetables. They're called brassicas. brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, and take infrared saunas. People who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's disease.

Really?

Because it detoxifies you. And it's also, there's actually a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, people with major depression took one infrared sauna their mood was better. Well, how cool is that? I mean, that's like simple. There's no side effects mostly to taking a 25 minute sauna.

So is it infrared or any type of sauna?

Well, it's probably any type of sauna, but the study was on infrared.

But anything that's releasing the toxins, any heat exposure and not sweating.

Sweating with exercise or saunas, is detoxifying for you. This isn't hard, right? Like not one thing I've said so far is hard. The M in Bright Minds is mental health. This is where you learn to kill the ants and tame the dragons. So ant stands for automatic negative thoughts, the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And the exercise is super simple. Whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking. And then just ask yourself if it's true. You don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. I didn't learn that till I was 28 years old. I'm like, I'm in class. I'm a psychiatric resident at Walter Reed in Washington, DC. And I'm like, no, I don't have to believe the noise in my head. It's like thoughts come from your genes, right? They're actually written. into your genes, you're a failure, maybe because your grandfather had to file for bankruptcy. They come from your parents talking to you. They come from your siblings. I'm one of seven. They come from the noise. They come from your coaches. And they lie. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true.

Absolutely. And I was working with a therapist recently that said just because someone tells you something about yourself doesn't mean, and they're trying to give you this thing, doesn't mean you need to receive that gift. It's not a gift you need to receive. They're offering you a gift that's a bad gift. Doesn't mean you need to take it. You can just say, okay, I don't need that gift right now. I don't need to let that thought sink in and believe this. And I think I'll speak for myself growing up, anytime I heard someone say, you suck, you're dumb, you're an idiot, you're not enough, you'll never amount to whatever, I learned to believe those things. And I think a lot of us probably learned to believe whatever we hear from anyone, whether it was a side comment or a direct comment. And how have you learned over the years to really defend against those ants? Like, besides someone might say, okay, I tried writing it down that this is not true and analyzing this, but what's an, what, how can we really show up for ourselves so our thoughts don't consume us in a negative way.

So you know that if you're overweight on Monday and you have a salad, you are not going to be trim on Friday. You need to develop practices that getting well physically is a discipline that occurs over and over, over time.

Right?

To be mentally well, you need to develop practices that you do like eating well over and over and over. So for example, I start every day with today is going to be a great day. As soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning, and today was easier because I spent last night in Santa Monica and walked on the beach this morning, and I get to hang out with you, today is going to be a great day. That way my unconscious mind finds why it's going to be a great day. And then your brain is always listening. I talk about taming the hopeless and helpless dragon, the dragon from the past that feeds depression. And it's something I do called Positivity Bias Training. I want to get my brain looking for what's right because it automatically goes for what's wrong. And so I start every day with today is going to be a a great day. And then if I have a hard time, if I feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, I write down what I'm thinking. And then I just go, Is it true? And there's a whole bigger method in the book. And often I'll go to, what's the opposite of that thought? No one loves me or no one respects me or you're a failure. And so quickly my brain, if I go, My wife never listens to me. I've had that thought. I'll go, well, I never listened to my wife. And I'll be like, oh, that can be true. Or she does listen to me and then I find the times that she, it's just I don't believe what goes on in my head. And then when I go to bed at night, and this is so powerful, I say a prayer and then I go, what went well today? And I put myself to sleep by reviewing the positive things that happened.

So this is this thing we're chasing after. We're trying to get more of it. We know it's important. But sleep is really, first of all, it's very strange. You know, if you look at some of the characteristics from the outside, it's like you're unconscious.

You know what I mean?

You lay there for hours. You're vulnerable. You're not really moving. Your senses are dulled and gone down. You know, obviously your visual senses are reduced or just none, unless you're weird and you have your eyes open. But, you know, even your auditory, your sense of smell, your sense of touch, all those things reduce. And your But what's different from that in like a coma is that it's easily, you can come out of it if somebody nudges you enough or you.

Have something that goes.

It's a light coma. Yeah, it's like a little minor coma. It's a mini hibernation. You're like a baby bear for a minute, you know? But what we see in the inside, and this is what's so cool now, is that we can track and we can study the brain and see what happens. We know you're sleeping based on changes that happen in your brain waves. And so right now we're in a, kind of normal waking state of beta frequency in our brain waves. Maybe a little gamma if we get to like, you know, Bruce Banner, like amped up a little bit. But from our normal waking state of beta, we shift into alpha. It's just a slower pattern. And alpha is really aligned with what we would refer to as like getting in a flow state, right? It's just a calm, relaxed state of presence. And we naturally transition into that state when we're getting close to sleep. this one, a lot of creativity can kind of manifest.

So when we're getting ready for sleep, we get into alpha.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is why it said it's very good to like, you know, when you first wake up, because you go in reverse when you wake up, you know, to, you know, focus on your day, your goals for the day, because. Okay. So we move from beta to alpha, and then we go to Theta. And Theta is a really strong transitionary state. And Theta you're in what it would be considered if we looked at it as compared to something like a hypnotic trance.

All right.

And- Theta. Theta. And so this is- this is when you're asleep. This is when you're not asleep. This is a transitionary state very close to sleep. And when you're in a hypnotic trance, like we were just talking about Marissa Pier, I was just talking with her the other day. But we're kind of trying to manipulate that theta frequency to kind of get in there deeper in the brain. And to give a good analogy, kids up until the age of about seven are spending a lot more time in Theta. And so you're very impressionable. This is why kids believe everything. I'm not gonna throw out any names, Santa Claus and anything like that. I'm not gonna say it's not real. But everything is just taken in very deeply. And this is where a lot of our programming that even lasts into our childhood takes place. So Theta, you're very impressionable. and then from there we transition into Delta. And so this is when we know that we're in sleep. And then within our sleep, there are four primary stages. We have the big two that people know is non-rim sleep and REM sleep.

Right.

So REM sleep, that's rapid eye movement sleep. This is when you're getting your dream on. And this is when your eyes literally, like, it is freaky, right? It is just a weird, weird thing.

Yeah.

So it's rapid eye movement.

Your eyes aren't moving. And that's the best type of sleep?

No.

Okay.

I'm not gonna say best. It's a part.

Okay.

You know, we need all of them. And this is the point we're going to come to. And so this is when a process, for example, during REM sleep is when you have something called memory consolidation. This is where things that you're learning even right now get converted into your short-term memory. Right. So it gets filed away and becomes more of a permanent potential thing in your brain. You need sleep in order to remember stuff.

Really?

Yeah. And so there's a study recently, and what they did was they had folks to do a memory test, and they had one set of the participants take the study, take the test in the morning, and then they had them to repeat the test at two hour increments for 12 hours, and then they track their results.

Okay.

Then they had another set of study participants. They had them take the test. And then they had them just, you know, kind of wait all day, get a good night's sleep, and then retest in the morning without doing it over and over again. And they performed 20% better on the memory test, only testing once and then getting a good night's sleep and repeating. We tend to think that we need to keep hammering.

So we shouldn't do the overnight, stay up all night testing and quizzing ourselves. We should be actually Practice for an hour, get a good night's sleep and hopefully have better results.

Yeah, I mean. They're pulling all-nighters. The thing is, you know, we've been in this situation where we're pulling all-nighter.

Because we don't know anything. We don't know nothing.

We gotta study the whole book. So yeah, man, but that's non- that's REM sleep. And then we have non-REM sleep. This is, it's considered more of the anabolic deep sleep. This is where a lot of the anabolic hormones like HGH gets secreted.

Right?

And it's also known as the youth hormone. So kids have a lot of HGH. Up until around 18 to 20, we have a big sharp decline in our HGH production. So how do we get more of that? Sleep. You produce the greatest amount of HGH because we secrete it during the day. All of our hormones are based on the time of day. And this is another really important point is that we're lined up with nature's clock, but we just don't realize it because humans have the unique ability we can cut ourselves off from it. we could shut all the blinds and we could just create an eternal daytime in this room if we wanted to, you know what I mean? But all of our hormones are getting released in a cyclical pattern and human growth hormone, our greatest secretion or spike of the HGH, happens during sleep and specifically during that first stage of sleep. When we go through for the first time into deep delta non-REM sleep. That's when we're producing HGH.

We're creating more of it.

The biggest secretion happens then.

Okay.

Yeah. And so if you're not getting optimal sleep, you're missing out on this powerful vital hormone. And whenever I would hear HGH when I first started doing this research, you know, getting close to a decade ago, I would think of Barry Bonds and like Jason Giambi. A-Rod, no disrespect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A-Rod, no disrespect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marion Jones. It's because of ESPN, just seeing the highlights in the news. But human growth hormone is something that we produce within our own bodies. You know what I'm saying?

How do we produce more of it? It's only through sleep?

No, no. With exercise, especially drivers of anabolic growth. Resistance training, but more so power lifts. You can get a really good power lifting.

Will produce, help produce more HGH.

Yeah, and so the benefit-- what does.

HGH do for you when you have that?

That's what I was gonna go to. So the benefit of HGH, it's not that what we tend to think is that it makes you perform better, specifically makes you bigger, right? That's what we think. If you see the transformation of somebody like Barry Bonds' body, it's not that it just makes you bigger and you can hit the baseball faster. They already have these skills. It's the recovery. It helps you recover a lot faster. My son, My eight-year-old son can get out and run, do sprints with us like crazy where we're just demolished the next day. And he's totally fine.

Doesn't feel a thing.

He's just producing HGH for that sleep baby. He's healing. You know, he's healing. So it helps with healing. It does help with protein synthesis and also retention of muscle mass. So this is huge. This is something we tend to lose as we get older is our muscle mass. And I think it's really important for us to understand and when we're talking about body composition, weight loss, fat loss, all that stuff, muscle is your body's fat burning machinery really that's on your frame. You have more of it if you want to burn fat. Yeah, because even as we're sitting, we're not training right now, but depending on the amount of muscle mass that we carry on our bodies has a huge impact on how many calories we're burning just sitting here, you know, our resting metabolic rate.

Right.

You know, so HGH helps you to.

Retain that muscle that you're out there.

Working hard to build, you know? So those are just a few of the things.

So what are the main lifts that you would say?

Ah, man, I'll tell you straight up deadlift is like it's money in the bank for producing HGH.

You're talking like heavy heavy or is this just like if you're doing it at 70-80%?

I mean even 80% is pretty good, you know? But we're talking like getting up there close to your max.

Really?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's for a lot of people it's like that might be a little a little bit of fear comes up like I don't want to lift that heavy. I'll tell you right now, I've been in this field for almost 20 years, all right? And what I've seen people don't get hurt deadlifting. People getting hurt picking up a feather. You know, they're getting hurt picking up a pillow. Why is that? Just because our bodies are so conditioned to sitting and not performing and we're not doing the things that kids do.

That keep them healthy, right? One of those things- Jumping on the.

Couch or just running around or just.

Picking When do we do it?

We do it as a kid.

And then something happens and we're just like, you know, our environment starts to say, stop playing.

Yeah.

Stop playing so much. Especially from where I'm from, it's like leaving that something we say, you play too much.

Wow. You know, that's so true, man.

You play too much.

But it's- you- should play a lot.

You should play a lot. You know what it does, and this is a thing, this is why, you know, both of us love sports.

Yeah.

It's a dimension of that that's still socially acceptable, but we love it. you learn boundaries, you learn how to communicate in different ways besides just vocally. You learn how to move your body in space and like things like proprioception. This is the awareness of your body in space. You improve your proprioception, your neuroception, all these different aspects of our bodies interacting with our environment and also our internal environment. And if we're not playing, we're missing out on this vital part of our development. development.

Yeah. You know, what are the best ways we can play, you think, as adults?

Oh, man.

Is it sports or is it just go out and throw football or play Frisbee or what's, what are the activities you think are best?

It's such a great question, man. You know, I've been, this is so funny. I've been thinking about this, like, the last two weeks. I have. So I, I didn't realize I was doing this because I have, my two sons live with me. I have three kids. My daughter's oldest. My two sons live with me. I have a 19 year old son and an eight-year-old son that live in my house. And we just have a culture of like, we're dancing every day, you know? Like, I don't know why, we just do it. We're playing every day. Just the other night, my sons, we had, you know, we sat down and ate dinner together. And then afterwards, they were fighting for like 20 minutes. But it was like, you know, they're play fighting. Sure, sure. But, and there's with you being a parent after a while, she's like, would you shut up? You know, like, stop, you know, like we start getting irritated. You play too much. But then I catch myself like they're just having a good time. They're learning how to have those boundaries, how to play with each other, how to move in space, how to grab somebody and not hurt them versus hurt them, you know what I mean? And they're playing, they're having a good time. And the thing is I'm the one who usually initiates it. I just want to do it for a couple of minutes.

Right, not for an hour.

You know what I mean? And so, that's one of the things is if you have children Play with your kids. What's that mean?

Play? Wrestle?

One of the great exercises and what I used to do with my son, I mean, you know, we just moved out to LA, so I don't know the landscape as much, but I would take my son to the park and then I would just follow him and do whatever he does. Whatever he wants to do.

Yeah. Just run around.

Going through the tunnels, climbing stuff. I follow you. He's the boss, you know? Simon says. You know what I mean? I like that. That's one thing.

Okay, by the way, your wife has some of the best home cooking I've ever had with your wife at your place. It's amazing. I can't remember what it was specifically, but it was something like casserole type of thing.

Oh, the casserole, yeah. So good, man. The buffalo casserole. Oh man, it was amazing. And then she made cookies.

And I know you were both so done. And this is the best. I can always throw a cookie. Yep, you know those cookies. Can always eat those cookies. That's my downfall, sugar.

How bad is sugar for sleep? Mmm. That's such a great question, man.

Because that's the only, I wanna say it's the only, but it's one of the negatives about me is that I eat too much sugar and then I'll go off of it for like 60 days, right?

I'm like extreme.

I'm all in on a bag of cookies. I can't just do one or I'll.

Do nothing for a long time. But I think that deprivation can lead to the rebound behavior. Probably, because I'll be- you- know what I mean? Now I need it. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. There was an incredible study that was done. And it's difficult to do human studies when it comes to addiction because of the implications, right? But there was a fantastic study done using rodents, using mice. And what they allowed the mice to do was have free access to either cocaine or sugar.

And they picked sugar.

96% of the time, the Cocaine. It's not enough, right? They were so addicted to the sugar. And they took sugar probably tastes better too, right? They took rats that were already even addicted to cocaine and they quickly progressed and shifted over to an addiction to sugar. Wow. It's that strong. And like we humans, we're hardwired. If we're just looking at our biology, we're hardwired through evolution to crave and to enjoy sweet things. For our biology, it's the implication that there's a lot of dense carbon, I.

Mean, dense calories there.

It's a dense calorie source.

Yeah, it's not a calorie rich, it's.

Not like a healthy calorie is right. Right, not necessarily, but even the sugar we'd be exposed to through our evolution would be something like, the biggest gift we'd run into maybe was some honey, you know? But today we have everything 24/7. It's a whole, we're not wired up.

For this exposure, that's the thing. Yeah, honey was probably like a nice, it was probably so strong and you just put a little bit on. to add, not like dump the whole thing in there. Right. Like a Winnie the Pooh or something. It's just like, we're looking out of the jar, 'cause I can drink a whole jar of honey. Yeah.

If I wanted to, you know what I mean? I was so addicted to Honey Nut Cheerios. Like that was my go-to. Oh my God, those were so good. That little bee, man. It was like my bestie, man. Oh, it's so good. But even when I met my wife and I was like shifting, like I changed my health and I've been working as a personal trainer for like a year and a half. But that was my thing. I was like eating organic whatever, but I had my Honey Nut Cheerios. It was my midnight snack, right?

But here's the thing. The milk tastes amazing afterwards. Oh my gosh, it's so good. I haven't had cereal in a long time. That was one of the things that was the hardest for me to let go of, but it's something I eliminated.

Essentially from my diet. The impact that sugar has on various hormones. If we're thinking about you know, cortisol, for example, or, you know, stress response. And basically what happens is when we eat a high concentration of sugar, we get this hit and it feels good. You know, we like, we get like a serotonin hit, you know? And this is why some carbohydrates, like if we are select selectively getting our carbohydrates, it can be a good thing. Right. But it's just when we go too far and we go. we have a hypoglycemic response, right? And so we get a blood sugar spike and then a blood sugar crash. And for us, that's emergency to our biology because when your blood sugar goes too low, you have reduced brain function and your body, if we're talking about survival in the conditions that we evolved in, you're not sharp. You're tired. Exactly. And you can be more of a victim, right? And so, or prey. And so what happens is you get a response from your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol levels, norepinephrine, adrenaline, all those things start to spike to lift your blood sugar back up again. So you're not vulnerable. Exactly, exactly. So that you're just sharp and ready.

And okay and prepared. So your body's just going up and down all day as opposed to a steady and maybe a spike when you.

Eat a little bit and then steady. Right. Or if we're talking close in proximity to sleep, that's gonna really mess up your sleep. Yeah.

So when, you know, there's all these different people that talk about intermittent fasting or when you should stop eating by. What does the research research say about eating before sleep? Anything, whether it's healthy, a snack, dark chocolate, wine. I don't care what it is. Is there a time limit you should stop eating by before sleep? And is there certain foods you can eat? or sleep that will actually benefit or not?

Yeah, this is a good question. I've been looking into this for quite some time now. So let's address both of these things. Let's address wine, let's address alcohol, and let's address food. All right, so with alcohol, so what we do know is that alcohol does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. This is a fact across the board.

Yeah.

It relaxes you.

It's a sedative, you know? and that's all good. The issue, however, is that we experience something with alcohol in your system and how your body metabolizes alcohol. It's called a rim rebound effect. Rim rebound effect. And so what happens is we go into, earlier we talked about those sleep stages. Basically, you are unconscious, but your sleep stages are fragmented and broken. And so we'll go into a deep sleep.

What are the stages again of sleep?

So we're transitioning as we go from... You're awake? Waking state to sleep, we go from beta, alpha, theta, delta. But within our sleep, we have these four stages. So we have non-rim sleep, rim sleep, and some transitionary stages.

Gotcha.

And so some of these stages when we're actually asleep and unconscious get broken. And so our rim sleep is suppressed, right? And remember, RIM sleep is where a lot of memory processing takes place.

So, if you're drinking a lot at night, you'll have less memory. Is that what I'm hearing?

Do you know anybody who is drunk before they went to sleep and not remember what happened?

Lots of people.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

It's because of the sleep.

So, it doesn't matter that you got sleep. It's the quality of your sleep that matters.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you can literally forget what happened? You know, this whole.

So many people say that.

I don't remember a thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's because their REM sleep is damaged. But then there's a big rebound effect with the REM sleep towards the end of the sleep cycle. If we, if somebody is getting eight hours of sleep on alcohol. And so, again, but this is not to say you can't drink. It's just, I would recommend give yourself a little bit of a curfew with the alcohol of a couple hours if you can. Like, if you plan on getting to bed at midnight, you know, maybe just.

Stop drinking around 10, give your body, your body.

Metabolizes alcohol relatively quickly for most folks and you can accelerate and support the process by having some more water.

Is there a thing as having too much water before sleep? If peeing is a problem, you know.

Yeah, like so many, you know, people come into my clinic and they're just like, you know, I keep getting up in the middle of the night. They don't drink water all day, then they guzzle it before they go to bed, you know, but there are, obviously there are some situations when folks have issues with the bladder and things like that. Sure, sure.

But for most folks, if you're drinking water before bed and you're waking up.

Once, even once messes up your sleep is what I'm hearing. I mean, it can, but I don't want to make a psychological big deal out of it because it's okay. There's even research now and it's come out recently just in the last couple.

Of years about humans having basically two phases of sleep.

Okay, so you're gonna wake up for a moment and then go back to sleep. Yeah, so what would happen if we're talking, a thousand years ago. Let's go back even further. 10, 000 years ago. Yeah. When folks are, you know, you're living in tribes, you got a hut going.

Right.

So you go to sleep, you know, but first of all, we would go to sleep earlier because when it gets dark.

Yeah.

Seven o'clock at night. Safety.

Right.

You're not out and about on the tundra. You know what I'm saying? Where the, the lion can see you. You can't see it. You're at a cave.

Yeah.

This is, and even if you think about 'cause again, like I've been just processing this stuff for the last few years. If it wasn't as valuable as it is, we would have evolved out of it a long time ago. Just if you think about how vulnerable you are, right? It's just so much magic happens when you're sleeping that we just can't get anywhere else. And so anyways, we would go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up maybe... So just say somebody goes to sleep at nine o'clock. They sleep until maybe one, you get up, maybe have a little snacky, maybe have sex, maybe, you know, if you got fire, maybe you write or read by fire. But today, phone, right? If we get up midnight snack, beaming light coming out of the refrigerator. Crazy, right? And, you know, and we're grabbing a.

Bathroom, a twinky, you know what I mean?

But then you go back to sleep and you'd have time to get another, you know, three, four hours of sleep in addition to that. So it's, what I'm trying to say is it's not a problem that we wake up at night. And I've seen so many people get just very, just psychologically troubled. Messed up with it.

Yeah.

You know that I wake up at night, it's okay. It's okay. We have to relax into it, understand that, you know, things happen our bodies. But for some folks, it is chronic. It's a chronic issue. And it usually has to do with what's happening with their hormones. And if we did a hormone panel, we'd see that a lot of times we call them clinically tired and wired. where even though they're physiologically tired, their body's wired at night. Cortisol is spiking way too early in the evening because your cortisol is actually supposed to elevate first thing in the morning, like between, you know, like when the sun comes up.

Yeah.

That's how we are hardwired. Cortisol is not a bad thing. And I, that's another thing I want to make clear today. None of our hormones are bad. We wouldn't have them, you know, but it just gets all of the bad press now. But cortisol helps your thyroid work.

Right.

Your thyroid is regulating your metabolism. You want to burn fat, you need cortisol. All right. It's not a bad guy. It's just if it's produced in the wrong times or the wrong amounts, it could be a little bit of a problem. Okay. You know, it's kind of. I I think of it like Hulk, you know, in the Avengers. You know, it's like he's got a role, but, you know, he might smash some stuff on accident because he's, like, giving too much responsibility.

You know what I mean?

Right.

So, yeah, so if we're looking at.

Alcohol just to go back on that.

Yeah. On that two hours before. Don't be excessive with it.

Yeah.

I'm assuming.

Right. Don't get drunk.

Yeah.

If you're getting, if you're getting drunk.

You better believe, like, you're screwed. Doesn't matter how much time you got.

Yeah. The hangover is a result of the sleep damage.

That's really the big thing.

Really? Yeah. So if you get a great sleep.

You shouldn't have a hangover. Absolutely.

Yeah.

But it's hard to have great sleep if you're drunk. Yeah. You can forget.

I mean, forget about it.

But also and I know that a lot of people experience this that you can handle it more when you're younger, right?

Yeah, but it's still you're not going to remember things. Yeah, I'm not saying that that part.

Yeah. And also we're accelerating our aging when we do stuff like that. Sleep deprivation. I don't know if you talked with her, but I was talking with Alyssa Epple and so her co-author of the Telomere Effect, they, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of telomerase. And so telomerase-- you- need them to be longer for you to have a longer life. Telomerase is an enzyme that can add length back onto your telomeres, essentially reversing the aging process. Essentially, it's very complicated, but just as essential. But what shortens your telomeres faster than.

Anything, apparently, is sleep deprivation. So, if you're pulling all-nighters, you're doing.

Four hours of sleep only, and you think that's cool, it's not cool. It's not cool. You're accelerating the time that you're going to kick on. You're gonna die quicker. Diabetes, heart disease, we used to see this stuff in folks who we describe as, quote, in the elderly population, arthritis. Then it started to happen generations younger and younger and younger. Now we even have children who are getting adult onset diabetes. We had to change the name to a type 2 diabetes, right? Because it's no longer just adults getting it, all right? And so, just to make that clear, and I know this from experience because this happened to me, I had basically arthritis of the spine when I was 20. And track practice in St. Louis, I was doing a 200 meter time trial and I broke my hip from running because my body, I accelerated the aging process so much. -Really? -Because of the way I was living my life. -You weren't sleeping well? -Nothing was well. But a big part of me is for me is like, what are you making your body out of? Which we know we get into and talk about another time but if you're not giving your body the raw materials to build your house, your physical house, it's just going to do a patchwork job.

As it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or the early stages of cancer, what are the main causes of cancer?

Yeah, that's a great question and that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. And sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort sort of a cop out because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer and these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens. And the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people, you can look at the sort of, a couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer. And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of by far and away the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2015. So it was higher before when more people are smoking, but as a contributor to a cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general and far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or, you know, chemicals, sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer. But the contribution in a whole population is very small. So what's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? And that's where things sort of bogged down a lot. So initially in the '70s, people talked about fiber. So people thought about, oh, hey, well, you know, maybe if you eat a lot of fiber, what you're gonna do is have a lot of, big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat. So if you remember the 80s and 90s, there's this huge movement against fat that all fat is bad for you. It caused the heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which has been overturned at this point. There's this thought maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer. So we tested vitamin A, didn't work. Vitamin D, B didn't work. Folic acid didn't work. Vitamin C didn't work. Vitamin D didn't work. Vitamin E didn't work. Selenium didn't work, omega-3 fatty acids didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. And so we're sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, oh, we know it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity-related disease. So, what happened of course is that in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, people didn't really think about it, but then we had this obesity epidemic, so it became a bigger and bigger problem. So, obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, I was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, obesity is actually a huge risk factor, as well as type 2 diabetes, and both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer a lot. So it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking. Like if you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking. Or if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung, again, obesity plays no role. But things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity-related cancers. So that was the sort of big link. and at this point, the World Health Organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity-related cancers, which is huge because from 2003, we didn't even know. When I went to medical school, nobody thought obesity caused cancer. It's almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. Therefore, if you know that, that's super powerful because if if you can maintain a normal weight, you're going to reduce, just like stopping smoking, right? You're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, absolutely. And the trend is very clear because if you look at the, you the biggest killers of Americans. It's always been heart disease and cancer. So if you go back sort of to the 70s, so 50 years ago, you look at heart disease, number one killer of Americans. That's heart attacks, strokes, that kind of thing. Cancer was a fairly distant second. But the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very, very quickly. And the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very, very, very slowly.

Why is that?

It's because cancer is a very complex disease and the way we think about cancer, we just don't know what it is. So for such a common disease, it's a total mystery why we get this cancer. Because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us. That is, if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer, for example, That cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells. So why would it want to do this? That is, if you get cancer, then the cancer grows and then it kills you and it kills itself.

It kills itself. Yeah.

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

'Cause most diseases want to spread, but they want to stay alive.

Exactly, exactly.

Like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily, it wants to be able to spread to infect other people.

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

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

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

Crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

They're the enemy. And it's the enemy coming to attack you.

That's right.

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

Right.

It's like you should have passed.

It's like, yeah, yeah.

But that's the point that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival. That is, it will grow and it will grow at the expense of its neighbor. So it will keep growing and it will destroy everything around it. So it will move around, for example. So a breast cancer cell will move around the body. And that's not for the good of the whole body, right? It's for the good of itself. It's trying to spread itself around. So, you got to realize that the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism. And it sounds very strange to say, okay, we have this foreign organism almost like an infection in us, but that's actually how our body sees that cancer. That is our immune system actually detects, it's a very powerful, you know, it kills stuff. but it's very powerful. It has to be reigned in because you don't want it destroying normal parts of the body. It recognizes certain cells as foreign and certain cells as self, and cancers are actually innately seen as foreign cells. It is a foreign invader almost that has evolved from us. During the development of this cancer, it will grow or not grow depending on growth signals. Our body has certain nutrient sensors. So nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available. So when you eat, certain hormones like insulin and mTOR will go up. And that tells our body that food is available, we should grow, right? Because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food, right? It's just natural. If there's no food, you got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells. So if you're eating all the time, and you're always activating these nutrient sensors. You're actually telling your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. So if you eat six, eight times a day, you're telling your body, your cells in your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. If you eat fewer times, like three times a day, or you do intermittent fasting, if you don't eat at all, what you're going to do is shut down those growth signals, and this cancer will have a more difficult time to grow. So if you grow breast cancer cells in the lab, for example, you can't do it without insulin. It will actually wither up and die. So therefore, if you know that, then you can say, well, if I, and that's one of the secret- and insulin.

Comes from eating any food or is this only sugar?

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

So are supplements and vitamins bad for us then?

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

Really?

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

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

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

Exactly.

And people say it's good for you. People say, oh, you should eat multiple times in the day, six times a day, it's good for you. But nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do, right? It's not like your great grandparents, you know, working in the factory, they're taking off every to make themselves a little ham sandwich or something, right? It was like, there's work to do. You eat when you have time. So, in the 70s, it's funny because I always say you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that was it. If you wanted an after-school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. And if you wanted a bedtime snack, she would have said, no, you should have ate more at dinner, right? Right, you should have finished your meal. Exactly. And that was the point, and nobody ate not a lot of desserts and all that. Nowadays, of course, when you look at the studies, people are eating five, six times a day. You even look at schools, it's like, you know, oh, you know, they're gonna have breakfast, then they're gonna have a mid-morning snack, then they're gonna have lunch, then they're gonna have an after-school snack, then they're gonna eat dinner. And then if they play soccer, in between the halves of soccer, parents think that you need to feed them like cookies. It's like, yeah, well, you know, I played soccer growing up and nobody chased me around with a bunch of cookies. We had a great Exactly. We didn't need it, right? And, but that's six times a day, every single day, and it's ingrained into us, you know, a few years ago when my son was, you know, going on a trip or something, the school said, well, you should pack him two snacks. Like, why? All these diseases or cancers seem to.

Have this thing in common, right? This, these heightened blood cells, is that what it is? Or, too many blood cells.

Too many blood vessels. Too many blood vessels. feeding the cancer.

They're feeding the cancer. So I'm curious, do you know, is there a specific cancer or disease that's easier to reverse?

Okay, so let's take a look at what we know from the cancer treatment perspective. So I work in this area and, you know, I've been involved with helping treat cancer patients. So we do know that there is a new type of medicine that's not chemo that are called anti-angiogenesis. So they cut off the blood supply feeding the big cancers. By the time, so here's a research experiment that was done a couple of decades ago in the lab that I worked in. If you grew tiny little cancer cells and up to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, that's about three millimeters in diameter, and you kind of floated them in a broth, and didn't allow them to touch blood vessels, they would just stay there at that size almost indefinitely. Okay? And in our body, that's the size that the immune system would wing by and take out. The moment you allow blood vessels to grow into that microscopic mass, that tumor will grow 16,000 times in two weeks. It'll explode. This is like a trigger, you get pulled in order to have cancers grow up. And for that reason, biotech companies started to develop anti-angiogenic drugs to treat cancer by cutting off the blood supply. So there are about a dozen anti-angiogenic drugs that have changed the game for treating kidney cancer and liver cancer and lung cancer and even brain cancer. All right? So we know that we can actually do this with drugs. the question is, can we do it with food? Not so much when cancer is out of the barn, horse is out of the barn, but what about prevention? What are foods that can prevent cancer? Well, it turns out that two apples a day actually can lower the rate of lung cancer and colon cancer. Why? Because there are natural substances in apples like quercetin. That's one of the natural chemicals that actually are naturally anti-angiogenic. Green tea actually has been lowered risk of colorectal cancer, okay? Particularly in women. And what's in a cup of green tea are these polyphenols, EGCG. And when you drink it, it gets in your bloodstream. Why? Because the blood vessels are carrying it. And now your blood vessels loaded with this cancer starving stuff, these little tumors don't have a chance.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay. Is it the same as eating two apples a day and eating these specific foods as it would be just putting all those ingredients in a supplement and taking the supplement? Would that work just as well to have the super supplement that is just the killer of all cancer and diseases of all these different nutrients?

Well, look, I'm a researcher and I've been involved with drug development. And so, if it were that easy, it would have been done a while ago. But I can tell you that the whole, what I tell people is that the whole food is always gonna be a little bit better for the following reason. Number one, for a supplement, you reduce it to a couple of different elements, you know, that you try to pack into a capsule. The whole food, man, it's got hundreds, if not thousands of natural goodies and chemicals, including like an apple's got the skin, it's got ursolic acid, it's got fiber, which features gut microbiome, it's got quercetin, which cuts out the blood supply. So you're getting all that in there. compared to just one thing you try to pack into a little capsule. That said, supplements are useful and I'm involved with designing and developing supplements as well. What we want to do, supplements, the term means topping off, right? So you're supplementing, you're not replacing. And this is what you know, like what you were just asking, Louis is so important. Like, can we just not bother eating and just have a supplement? no, man. Like, you should be eating because you enjoy food. It's good for us. It brings people together. It tells us something about our Traditions, our culture, our family, our community. Everybody's from someplace. There's everybody's got something that they love to eat. And of that list, there's some good stuff in it. And so we should really lean forward. So that's the other thing that's a little bit different for me that compared to a lot of other doctors that tell people what not to eat. I try to tell people what you should add to your life, not that what you should take away. Plenty of people can tell you what to take away. I'm telling you what to add. And we should add foods that activate your health defenses. And supplements can be useful to top things off.

Got it. I've been told many times that inflammation is also a big, I guess, warning sign for diseases and cancers. And the more inflammation, the more your body is less capable of defending itself and its immune system is weaker is what I've been told. 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 about 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 takes, it tackles the Invader right then and there. and then hopefully that's all that's all that 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, you 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's it, 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, if you actually just, if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some 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 things 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 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? We try to take the silver bullet approach to everything. Let's match this with match. 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. Okay. So what are some three foods that actually we know 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 yeah, 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 non-stop 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, okay, I need more of a competitive edge and kind.

Of cut it out of my life.

So.

Well, not only. Not only does it. 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.

More than regular can of soda.

More than a regular can.

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 for your.

For your gut microbiome.

Gotcha.

Gotcha. Right. Because the zero sugar is. actually to prevent, you know, glucose spikes in your body. But in point of fact, it actually wrecks your gut microbiome. Remember what I told you, that 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, you know, I try to tell people, you really gotta watch out for those artificial sweeteners. They are, they, they, they do some bad so that's one thing.

So, what are the best, before you 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 S. Okay? So that's different than just, you know, having sugar in a glass or corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup, not good for you. Maple syrup. a good way to sweeten.

Okay.

Honey is also a good way to sweeten as well. Monk fruit is actually a really, really sweet tasting gourd. That's a shell. That is also a decent sweetener. Stevia, actually pretty powerful sweetener. I've been doing some research on. I haven't been able to find anything wrong with it, but. 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 cancer.

Yeah.

In your, 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 did your mom pack in your lunch bag? Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, well, that's, that's a relic of the 1950s, you know, of the sort of Ultra processed foods that are everywhere. laid in 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, yeah, take, 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, right.

And I gotta say, you know, like when I was growing up as a kid, I. I love those kind of, like, fancy kind of, like the deli meats and stuff like that. 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 are 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 or advertise on television to kids, you know, the frosted this, the pop that, the things that you, you know, they're like the TV dinners, like 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, that 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 lose, 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 and impairs angiogenesis. It actually causes our cells to age faster. Those telomeres burn down faster. oh, man.

By those processed foods.

Yeah, Ultra, Ultra processed foods, Ultra, right?

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 this goop gets thrown into. And the big oil, crazy oils get thrown in there and then it just pushes out Play-Doh chunks of food that get cut and dried. That's what I'm talking about. That's the ultra processing. It takes, I guess maybe the definition, it takes food, and transforms it into a form you don't recognize.

Got it.

Okay.

You don't recognize the food. Yeah.

Holistic simply means addressing the whole. Right?

You are a whole body. You want your body to be whole. So you need to look at all the aspects that tie into that. And some people, when it comes to weight.