Inflammation: How To Reduce The #1 RISK FACTOR To Your Health | Lewis Howes

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

Don'T- what would you say are the best ways to reduce inflammation in the body quickly?

Is it through food?

Is it through medicine? Is it through fasting? Is it through, you know, less, you know, more sleep? Is it through a better environment? What would you say is the- so.

You know, a lot of people, I think when they hear about inflammation, they think of it as a bad guy. and what I want to tell you is that inflammation is normal and it's just part of our immune system. So when you actually have a bacteria or virus invading your body, let's say you get a cold, your immune system sets up a little bit of inflammation in your nose, okay? Which is why we have a stuffy nose, a runny nose, and then it tackles the invader right then and there, and then hopefully that's all that matters. 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.

Right?

You get in a car, you want to hear some tunes, you gotta 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. And that's what happens inside your body. So what are some of the different ways to actually deal with that? Well, the first thing to do is think about lifestyle because we can actually give anti-inflammatories. I could tell you to go out to take some Motrin, Tylenol, whatever. That'll take down your inflammation, but actually there are ways of actually doing it. If you actually just, if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some breath, did some breaths and start to meditate, your body's inflammation will start to calm down. Okay, if you actually got a good night's sleep, your body will start to, the inflammation will start to calm down. It's kind of like, you know, everything is going crazy, just let 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, really good. And, and, you know, I think that the other thing to think about is lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of fruits in particular, have anti-inflammatory properties, so. the key about inflammation is that you don't want to get rid of it altogether.

Okay.

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

Right. Well, I'll tell you three foods that actually harm the body's health defenses. and including the immune system by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties, but also harm to your DNA, also harm your microbiome, also blunt and stun your stem cells, and also wreck your body's ability to control its blood supply. So it's a lot worse than simply causing triggering inflammation. And by the way, that's the whole point, right? Like we try to take the silver bullet approach to everything. Let's match this with match. What I'm telling you is that the body is this system.

Yes.

So either you introduce something good to it and you'll probably light up a lot of good systems. And if you put something bad to it, you'll probably trash a lot of it.

Right.

Okay, so what are some three foods that actually we know that can trash your body's health defenses? One is soda. So sugar sweetened beverages like soda. All right, so you know the favorite ones, it's tough, right?

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

Well, 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.

I cut out soda years ago. I mean, maybe I have it once in a couple months or something for like a treat, but it used to be almost an addiction probably for how much I drank it growing up as a kid in the summers. You're just drinking it nonstop. 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 got it cut 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. Ooh, more than regular can of soda.

More than a regular can of soda. Come on. So if it says zero sugar and it's a soda or a pop, you're saying that could be more harmful than just sugar?

For your gut microbiome. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Right.

Because the zero sugar is actually to prevent. you know, glucose spikes in your body. But in point of fact, it actually wrecks your gut microbiome. And 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 got to watch out for those artificial sweeteners. They are, they, they, they do some bad things. So that's one thing.

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

Sure.

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

Okay.

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

There you go. Okay. So, Soda and Pop is the number one thing that is one of the worst things you could be eating to or the things that could cause more disease and cancer.

Yeah.

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, what is your mom- what did your mom pack in your lunch bag, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, well that's a relic of the 1950s, you know, of this sort of ultra processed foods that are everywhere. laden with chemicals, that's not what we want to be doing. Now, I have to say, it doesn't mean categorically that hams or sausages are bad for you, because if you go to Italy or if you go to places in Asia or Latin America, where they create dried meats, kind of the old way, they're not putting chemicals in there and they're not manipulating it. But here, you know, where you go to the deli counter and, you know, like, 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.

Absolutely.

Totally not good for you. So that's not good for you. It also damages the gut microbiome. Oh, and it can actually damage your DNA, so you want to kind of be. cut down or cut out sodas and processed meats. And then the other thing is really a category. And I call these ultra processed foods. So things are in a box or in a can that, you know, like 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 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 like this goop gets thrown into and like the big oil, like crazy oils get thrown in there and then it just like pushes out like Play-Doh chunks of food that get cut and dried. That's what I'm talking about. Like 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.

You know, if you look at the root word, you know, coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to.

Set on fire, right?

And so there are these... Flame. And these are some of the outward symptoms we might think about, it's just like pain, swelling, bruising, burning, aching, those type of things. But there's a massive, the majority of the inflammation that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed. They're these little kind of chronic low-grade fevers or little fires burning that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders. And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to support in defending against infections and repair. And the list goes on and on. Inflammation is actually not a bad thing. It's a healing, right?

Right.

If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation. If we got an infection, it would be deadly. without inflammation. It's an important part of our evolution and our health.

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?

Right. So, what we generally think about is acute inflammation. We think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days. But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places, it can be devastating. And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation. And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components? What is creating the fire? What is throwing gasoline on the fire as well? And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 242 million of our citizens.

Are overweight or obese.

242 million.

Out of how many?

Right around 330,000. 330 million.

I'm sorry, 330. So 240 million are.

So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80%.

How is that possible now?

Exactly.

That should be gotten this far.

Yeah.

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

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

All of humanity or just USA?

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

We're the Homer Simpsons. We're the Stove.

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

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

We'll just power pack bullet point these. Number one, and this is because our culture, I always like to connect to something visceral. and people, we care about how we look.

Of course.

And so, you,'re young, right? Nobody's waking up like, I want to.

Look so old today.

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

Diet.

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

See what would happen.

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

Hours, tracked all their metrics. Same group.

Same group on the same exact calorie restricted diet.

Same calories, yeah, everything.

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

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

What was it just like? Everything is the same. This is what I love, too. It's a ward study. So they're under the conditions where they can track everything. Now here's another part of study I don't often talk about is that they actually did biopsies. So they actually took the fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions. And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too. Because when the fat cells were not, when they weren't adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant. which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat, right? So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well rested versus when you're sleep deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin resistant. And it's just going to lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on. So that's just one part, one thing. So number one, number two, the cognitive performance. And I love this study. This was published in the Lancet, and they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task and tracked all their numbers. And they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine, and had them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different, like, surgical type of simulation. They made 20% more mistakes. doing the exact same thing, and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing.

Wow. All right.

So, and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective, right? And so that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance. Number three, and this, it parallels with cognitive performance, is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans, and, you know, we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep-deprived brain just again, 24 hours of sleep deprivation. And the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control. So the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally, as we're more and more tired, just shuts down. With a lack of sleep. With the lack of sleep, coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sign, you just came back from Vegas. So these changes happen in the brain very quickly. And that leads into number, well, number three, reduce cognitive performance. So being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions, and then we'll go to number four is going to lean into this as well with the brain function. is, I talked a little bit about this earlier, during sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system, cleansing it all out. It's 10 times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake. And your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself. And also insulin resistance in the brain, we can talk about later. But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen? They do it on their own.

Are we getting that? The final thing, so four is the cleansing.

Right, cleansing. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different things that this can benefit. But I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform. You know, we want to be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time. And one of the fun things I talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford. And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their sprint time just by increasing their sleep. They improved significantly their free throw shooting and a three-point shooting just by getting more sleep. All right? And these are things that we just kind of on a periphery, you kind of know that, but at the same time are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Now Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on. these things weren't taught to us when we were in high school.

No, it was just like, Get up.

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

Make a play.

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

Saint Louis icon, man.

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

It's crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right.

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

It's cool.

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

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

Absolutely.

Have you seen this?

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

She's great.

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

Really.

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

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

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

It's Dr. Emran Mayron.

Yeah, yeah.

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

It's so fascinating.

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

Yeah.

So, for example, even our heart within the gut, the human brain itself itself is just a absolute universe of neurons. So it's like 84 billion neurons, right? I was thinking about human cells overall. So we have about 84 billion neurons in the brain. We have about 100 million in the gut. All right? So this is like nerve tissue. It's like a mass of neural tissue in the gut. But the heart also has neurons as well. So when it's called, anybody can go to Dr. Google and look this up. It's called the heart brain.

All right?

So your brain, your heart actually has this kind of ability to think and there's this electromagnetic energy that it's expressing. And there's a field also, it's called a tube torus that's been monitored that's expanding beyond our body to be able to see this. And if folks want to check out the work from HeartMath Institute, HeartMath Institute is phenomenal. I've been, you know, probably for about 10 to 15 years, connected with heart math institute. It's just absolutely phenomenal.

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

What does this field do?

Let's talk about the energy field.

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

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from HeartMath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, it can be upwards of, at last checked, around eight feet from your body. And so now this is getting into some freaky stuff, right? And I'm a very... Give it to me. I'm a very logical, analytical human, so seeing is believing for me. But then we get into... There's many things that are just... And also, I'm very open-minded as well. And there's many things that we don't understand. But when we talk about people being in your space and you picking up people's energy and interacting, and that stuff is very real, you know, you can pick up people's vibes.

Bad vibes.

So we don't want to downplay that because other species of animals, they have that bigger connection and we can attribute bees, for example, in this hive mind, but we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years, I've been seeking to find how can I explain this to people to make sense? Because I'm a very solid thinker, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers, they found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes, all they had to do was create some rapport and their brain waves started to sync up.

Come on.

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

What does that mean? We sync up.

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

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

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

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

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

Where is it? Is it around here?

Is it in our brain?

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

It's not.

It's not. It's not that.

What is it?

The mind is.

Okay. The mind.

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

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

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

Olive oil is great.

Olive oil of course.

Do you take supplements yourself?

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

Really?

And you make them yourself?

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

How long have you been studying mushrooms?

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

Really?

Yeah.

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

So.

I began, you know, I really became knowledgeable about mushrooms.

Really?

Yeah.

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

And I eat mushrooms whenever I get the chance.

Mushrooms are powerful, huh?

They're real powerful.

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

I'm sure.

You've seen this on Netflix, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

For a few hours and you'll be fine. Talk to me about teas, because I'm interested in teas and the power of teas. and what is the purpose of tea and why do people drink it so much in general?

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

It's not tea.

Rooibos tea is not tea.

What is it? It's just herbs.

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

Where does the species grow? It can grow anywhere.

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

Right, right.

Or iced tea on the rocks. With a lot of sugar in it. Yeah, right.

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

What are the benefits of tea? Why drink tea?

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

All tea or I guess.

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

Like a mint tea that's non caffeine.

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

That's with caffeine.

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

So, it's got caffeine which gives you sharper energy, but also a relaxation.

Yeah, people, you know, I think it describe it as a relaxed alertness.

Interesting.

Different from the stimulation of coffee, which I personally think is much more jangling.

A jittery alertness versus a calm alertness. A focused alertness.

Exactly.

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

I need my tea. Yeah, I need my tea.

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

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

Fine. And these are often problems that have been going on for years and nobody's hearts. And nobody ever told them, though.

You're breaking people's hearts. Right.

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

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

So, you're relatively caffeine insensitive. Yeah.

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

Right.

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

Really? What do you mean?

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

Give up chemically stored energy that it.

Would normally not release all at once. Like stored where in the fat cells or in the... No, in all cells, in energetic compounds in all cells. But when you release that energy, then when the drug wears off, you have depletion of energy.

And you feel tired.

Yeah, you have a crash.

And why does tea not do that specifically?

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

Like, what are the benefits?

Overall lower death rates.

Really?

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

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

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

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

Like, I've thrown up before.

I have heard this from, I've heard this from people.

I get a little nauseous sometimes. I hear this from people, so you.

Wanna have food in your stomach.

Right.

That's fairly simple fix.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

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

With coffee, I'm fine.

I mean, interesting. I don't know.

I don't drink coffee in the morning and not eat all day.

I do not know why.

Maybe there's a compound in the tea that's stimulating something. Interesting.

So my preferred form is matcha green.

Tea, which is the powdered tea.

Yeah, but matcha doesn't make me feel sick. Okay, good. I like matcha.

Oh, good.

I'm glad to hear that. You gotta try our matcha, which is the best.

But you guys have, I mean, the best.

Domain in the tea world of matcha.com.

Yeah, what was a good score?

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

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

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

This was great. I got to travel around the world for nine and live with native families in different countries. It changed my life. Anyway, a quick story there before you tell it.

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

Right, but you brought it to you.

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

It was a substitute for that. Amazing. No substitute for that for knowing about other cultures.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I lived with with Japanese families outside of Tokyo and Kobe. And the Japanese family outside of Tokyo, there was supposed to be a student studying English, but there was no language.

No one spoke English.

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

Starbucks made it popular. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Well, it's just sugar infused.

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

What are the benefits of matcha in general?

Well, it's the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. And it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds than that L-theanine and other forms of tea. So it's grown in an unusual way. It's like they're specialty plants. And starting about three weeks before they harvest it, they cover the plants with shade cloth. That's about a 90% shade cloth, so pretty dark. And in response to that, the leaves get bigger.

To try to get the sun.

To get bigger and thinner. They produce more chlorophyll to try to make more energy. And they produce more antioxidants and more flavor compounds. And then The leaves are harvested, steamed, dried, aged, and then they're ground between stones. It used to be done by hand, now they're sort of mechanically driven, but it's these grooved granite stones to this superfine powder. And so it's, you know, it's a special form of tea that has higher content of all the good stuff.

I'm gonna have to come to Tucson and have you make me some of this stuff. I would love to whisk it up for me. I would just go to Japan. And find a specialty place.

But meantime you can get it from our website, matcha.com. matcha.com, there you go.

You guys teach how to make it.

To you and sell the wafers. There's instructional videos. We sell everything. Everything, everything's all there. That's exciting. Yeah, that's fun.

So it's been fun to turn people onto that. So why matcha over jasmine or green?

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

And is it, you know, the Starbucks way is like you put almond milk in it or something, but how would you, is this with water?

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

What's the, are you drinking one tea a day? Do you have multiple?

I'd say one a day.

For you?

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

What's your nighttime ritual?

My nighttime ritual, I eat early.

What's that?

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

That's your dinner.

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

Right. Right.

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

You know.

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

That's pretty cool.

Yes.

That's pretty cool.

And we're the world leader in education in this field.

Wow.

You know, as I said, we've graduated over 2,000 physicians from our trainings. We train medical students, we train, we have our curriculum in 80 residency programs, we train other health professionals, we train, you know, chiropractors, dentists, nurses in integrative medicine. And, you know, I've always said one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative, it'll just be good medicine. And that's coming.

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

No, it builds on conventional medicine.

So you still can prescribe, absolutely, traditional yeah.

You know, we, we, if, I've always said, if I'm in a serious car accident, I don't want to first go it away into a Christian Science practitioner or a chiropractor or Shaman. You know, I want to go to a trauma center and get put back together. But then I'd use other methods I know to speed up healing.

Right.

So, yeah, I think the, frankly, I could, one of the things I can see happening, I think that a lot of smaller and Community hospitals aren't going to be there in the future. I think nobody's going to be able to afford that stuff and that what we call conventional medicine, allopathic medicine, that may become a specialty for dealing with trauma, for critical illness, and there'll be one large facility in cities that has all the hardware, and there'll be new kinds of institutions that'll come into being that I think of as healing centers. That's one possible future.

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

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

Is it because they didn't have the.

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

They weren't processing food as much too.

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

There was no fast food then.

Right.

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

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

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

Yeah.

You know, we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition. It's hard to know where to start. Where I would start is if we could get people to stop drinking sweet liquids, that would be... We had to put it so far ahead of the curve.

Soda pop.

And it's not just soda pop, it's also fruit juice, it's energy drinks, it's putting sugar and coffee and tea, all the Starbucks nonsense. That would be one place to start, just to not drink sweet liquids. That would be a big step.

What about alcohol consumption?

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

Yeah.

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

Really. And when you created the anti-inflammatory diet, right?

Yeah.

When was that?

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

Inflammation is good when you're in pain.

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

Really?

But diet has a huge influence and that's one that's potentially under our control.

Right.

And I think there's no question that the mainstream North American diet is strongly pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong kinds of fats, the wrong kinds of carbs, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, tea, things like that.

Yeah.

So what would be the anti-inflammatory diet?

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

Fat.

Or avocado oil.

Avocado oil, yeah. Nuts, seeds, good.

They're good, yes.

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

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

It's all flour.

I think the one of the almond.

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

What are the biggest triggers for inflammation in the body? Is it environment? Is it what we consume? Is it toxins on our body that we're putting on ourselves? Is it stress hormones? What are these biggest triggers for information?

Well, I mean, you, you know, you listed them all. So, I mean, I mean, so the way the body works, it's, it's, it, it integrates influences from multiple sources, particularly the central nervous system, the, the, the brain. Um, and it's sort of like this supercomputer applying artificial intelligence to these influences. And then it extracts patterns, and decides on relevance and salience. and based on that salience, it makes responses in terms of this needs to be, we need to adjust this system, and it's a justice system. And it's doing obviously a phenomenal job because a lot of the influences that we're exposed to, the brain and evolution is never encountered. The chemicals, the kind of food that we eat, we never, humans never were exposed to that kind of food. The visual experiences, you know, so, so, yeah, the brain and the brain gut system, because I really always like to link, keep those together, and we can talk about this later. Why is, is a master in this, you know, in this computation of salience and responding to it. And that system has worked so well that it's kept us alive as a species and. you know, we're thriving. I'm not sure what's happening now. The salience, there's some sort of a mismatch now between the salience assessment and what's good for us on the planet. But, you know, there will be corrections in that as well, I'm sure.

Right.

Now, do you think the, is the brain influencing the body more or is the gut influencing the brain more?

So you could, you know, I've compared this to, to a central government and local governments in the states and counties.

And.

There'S, there's a lot of influence that goes, that comes from the body and that plays a big role in our emotions, in our emotional States. And as, as I'll talk about, you know, there's a lot of stuff now going on with this. low-grade immune system activation that we all, most people are now exposed to because of our diet. And that's a stream of information that constantly goes to the brain. You don't feel it. It doesn't hurt, doesn't generate any symptoms, but over time it does change your brain structurally and functionally. So a big influence subliminally that goes to the brain all the time. And also big things. So people have said, yes, we can generate artificial intelligence, but it won't have emotions because it doesn't have the body to send this constant signals to it. But then on the other hand, I mean, the brain is obviously the most sophisticated computer in the universe up to now. And it It sends signals to the body all the time. There's a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system that reaches pretty much every cell in your body. You have a sensory part, the vagus nerve, that reports anything that goes on anywhere constantly to the brain. And then the brain has a system to respond to that. And again, it can influence every cell in distinct patterns. It doesn't always kick in. because they would be overwhelmed. It kicks in when it's necessary.

There's a threat, there's, you know. I'm curious about, I don't know if you've studied this, but I'm curious about when human beings look themselves in the mirror and they see themselves and they shape an identity, they perceive an identity, and maybe they look chiseled. They're like this Greek god that's just chiseled, they're athletic, but they don't believe they're healthy or fit for whatever reason. Their identity has made them look like they're not, they don't love themselves or they don't believe that they look good or whatever it is. Is there anything to play around shape for ourselves, the image of ourselves and making us either healthier or more susceptible to diseases or a weakened immune system? Am I out there too much by asking this, but I'm curious.

Yeah, no, no. So, I mean, this is definitely something that happens a lot. a lot of people that their identity is obviously shaped early on in life. Typically, there could also be genetic factors, but most of it will happen early in life, the feedback you get from.

Your parents.

And from your friends, if that's generally positive or negative. If it's negative, you can have two effects. One is it can really damage your self-identity and your self-worth or you could rebel against it and say, I'm not going to accept this. You know, I'm creating my own, my own identity. I, I think it will have almost certainly it, it does have. I mean, anything that happens in, in the brain in terms of these emotional, like, or identity, I, like in my own research, I've always been more concerned about the emotional influences on the body. So any emotion that you experience either chronically or so more of these emotions that are present all the time, background emotions, that has a mirror image in your body.

Really? So give me an example. If you're thinking, if you're feeling an emotion of not enough or lack or sick or stress, if you're feeling and thinking that consistently, then the body will mirror that.

The body will mirror it. And so I focus primarily on the gut, you know, because it's kind of a unique organ because it has all these other things in it, not just the gut wall, but the immune system and the nervous system of the gut and hormonal system. But that will, so this is not separate, you know, this is like, Just as some people, you look at them and you look at their face and you can tell what's going on, you know, if you're good in that. The, you know, the furs between your eyebrows and, you know, it's, it's, unless you're a poker player, you, you exhibit these emotions in your face. But the same thing happens in every part of your body, you know, your, your heart and your, I'm not sure about organs like, you know, like the, like the kidneys and the liver, that they're not sort of more mechanical devices or chemical devices, not as much these computational. So the heart is also the heart is basically a pump and, you know, but the gut is something that is in a different realm. You know, it's very sensitive to emotions and I would say- the gut is.

Is that why you feel butterflies? You feel sick when you see something, you feel it in your gut?

Yeah, and also this self-identity. quite honestly, before you ask the question, I never even thought about this, but.

I'm absolutely fascinated by this.

I'm absolutely convinced that your gut has a mirror image of your sense of identity.

Really?

Yeah.

I think if you have an inferiority complex, that will affect the gut. And now, since we talked a lot about the gut microbiome that lives inside the gut, which communicates very closely with the gut, Even that system gets these messages from the brain.

And.

This is different. So if you are threatened by a wild animal, you will have a peak in your stress response. And within a couple of seconds or minutes, it will go down and be normal again. With these background emotions or something like a sense of identity, that's with you all the time.

Always. Always thinking and feeling like I'm not enough. or imposter syndrome or something.

And it's ingrained in your unconscious, it comes out in your dreams.

So what does that do to the body or the immune system if you're constantly thinking these things or have a belief system that I'm not enough or comparing to someone else or something else or in lack or in scarcity? What does that do to the immune system, the gut, the body?

Yeah, so I'm talking about the immune system. If you have this, I talked about this acute threat, this acute emotion of an acute stress, it will temporarily increase the activity of your immune system.

How do we eliminate inflammation? What are the main factors that support us?

Yeah, so inflammation by itself is actually not that bad. It's useful when we need it. Exactly. Well, it's useful when you need it. So, for instance, how does the body get rid of a virus? it gets rid of it by finding those cells that are infected with the virus and calling all their friends in to destroy that cell. And part of that is inflammation. The problem is when the inflammation goes out of control. And we talked about last week.

Or chronic inflammation.

Chronic inflammation, yeah. So we talked about in our last interview, vitamin D. Vitamin D is one of those substances that looks, if you just look at just Google the structure of vitamin D and you'll find out very, very shortly that it looks like cortisol. It looks like a lot of the steroid hormones. And these steroid hormones go into the cell, go into the nucleus, and they go down to the actual DNA and they can manipulate and they can regulate. That's probably a better term, regulate the transcription of messenger RNA and tell the cells to be more inflamed, to be less inflamed.

Vitamin D can do that.

Vitamin D. And so that's part of the thought process about how vitamin D might be helping people with these inflammatory viral infections. We don't know for sure at this point how vitamin D, if vitamin D works in COVID-19, but we certainly have good evidence from going back to 2018 published in the British Medical Journal that steady supplementation on a daily basis or a weekly basis with vitamin D can reduce the incidence of acute chest infections. That came out of Ireland, that came out of the UK. Big meta-analysis, 25 different randomized controlled trials.

And that was before COVID Consistent vitamin D supplementation. Yes. Reduces chest infections, as you said. Chest infections. Chest infections. Yeah.

And what happens when you have a chest infection? Chest infection is like a viral, it's like a cold. And it goes down and becomes a bronchitis. and this is what causes a lot of mortality, death. Pneumonia used to be known as the old man's friend, 'cause it would just put him out of his misery. Really? That's what it was, yeah. Look it up, old man's friend, pneumonia. You can Google that and you'll see. So this idea that vitamin D, lacking vitamin D, especially in those northern latitudes, may be contributing to that. That's why a lot of countries in the northern latitudes have introduced programs to supplement vitamin D in the dietary. Really? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Wow.

Okay, so would you recommend vitamin D for everyone then? Or if you're in sunlight, you're outside.

A lot, you don't need extra supplementation? So who are the people that are susceptible to vitamin D deficiency? It would be people who are older because as you get older, it's harder to make vitamin D in your skin. Number two, people who have darker skin. This vitamin D is made literally from the ultraviolet B light from the sun. and it's made deep, deep, deep in the sun. So if you've got a lot of pigmentation above that, it's going to be harder. You're going to have to spend more time out in the sun. People who live in northern latitudes, people living in northern Europe, people living in Canada, the Northwest, actually anybody living above what we call the 35th parallel, which is sort of the southern border of Tennessee, is not really able to get enough vitamin D. And Luz, we can talk about where we have come as a culture in the last 100 years. So think about this, just to sort of set up the rest of the talk. 100 years ago, we spent a lot more time outside in the sun.

All day.

Than we do, absolutely. The other thing that's really important is we spend a lot more time sleeping.

A lot of time.

Back 100 years ago.

Absolutely.

What have we done in the last 100 years? Just look at a nighttime satellite image of the United States.

Lights are on.

Lights are on. We have basically turned turned night into day.

Ooh.

And that has tremendous implications for us as human beings, as our culture, our health. I mean, let's just take off the table the fact that we have severely cut back the amount of time we've allowed for sleep. That's number one. Number two, the socio culture in this country that if you need to get some sleep, you're somehow weaker.

Right.

Right?

So there's that stigma. Let's just put that off to the side. There's a whole other aspect to it. and that is that light, especially at those very sensitive times before you go to bed, stimulates receptors in the back of your eye to shut down melatonin production, which is essential and it's a very powerful anti-inflammatory. So you mix all of that together. So think about all of the socioeconomic things that have happened in the last 100 years. Think about cities, think about commute times, think about how early you've got to get up in the morning to get to work, and then how long you've got to work. And then when you get home, what do we do? We want to relax, we turn on.

The-- the lights, the TV, the TV.

The TV, the iPhone. And this is hitting our eyes. There's a recent study that showed that.

The blue light filters don't do a thing.

That's what I heard. You mean like the blue blockers? Blue light filters, because it's the blue light particularly. We know this from academia that seem to respond to those receptors the most.

Or stimulate those receptors.

The blue light filters don't work.

So you're saying wearing sunglasses or some type of glass blockers and watching your iPhone here isn't that effective?

It could work at a certain point.

The sunglasses, what I was referring to was the actual machine itself has a switch in it that will make the light a little bit more redder. But it still- Doesn't work.

Doesn't work, gotcha. So sunglasses might work. Might help out, but not, gotcha.

Okay, cool. And then, okay, so on top of all that from 100 years ago, we're very agrarian culture. We weren't as rich as we are today. And so as a result of that, we couldn't afford to eat a lot of the substances that we eat today, processed foods. Let's just talk about vegetarian versus meat. That's a hot topic.

Yes.

Back 100 years ago. It was every piece of square footage of land was very valuable, even though we had lots of it, it was hard to farm. and we didn't have the big industries with the big machines, right? So we didn't have a lot of that money. So anything, if we grew this off of this part of land, we had a choice to make at that point. Do we feed it to the cow or us? Or do we feed it to us, right? Much easier to do the former than the latter. Nowadays, since we have so much grain, so much machinery, we actually have vast amounts of acreage in this country that are used to feed cattle. and so we are able to probably more than any other time in our life eat meat more in today than we were able to before. Abundantly. Whereas 100 years ago it was probably.

Maybe once a week or something. If you look at per capita meat.

Consumption in the United States, it has never stopped. It's continued to go up. Really?

Yeah.

We're eating more meat today per capita than we've ever eaten before. Per capita.

Yeah.

I was just interviewing Dr. Matthew Walker who's like the sleep expert Northern California, I think in Berkeley. And he had saying a lot of same things that you're talking about. Like even if you take it down to one hour less of one night of sleep, how it impacts the immune system is exponential. And if you do it every night, you sleep less and less. So you have one hour less sleep or two hours less sleep or you miss a few hours, it really impacts the brain and impacts the immune system and all these things.

Yeah.

So, sleep is a massive factor for having a healthy immune system as well. Absolutely, no question about it.

I mean, they did this study once on some college students. Okay, college students are our favorite. They'll do anything.

Yes. Pull an all-nighter.

Got you. I'll just put it this way. There's a way to determine where the circadian rhythm is and it's to find the coldest temperature in the 24-hour period in your core body temperature. And the way that the scientists like to do that is to put something up the backside.

Really?

Yeah, that's part of the study. So, college students will do anything. But the interesting thing about this study was they had them do an all-nighter. How many times as a college student.

Did you do a pull an all-nighter? I probably did once a quarter when.

It'S finals, you know, something like that.

Yeah.

So, the next day they checked hundreds of different proteins and they found all sorts of derangements. Things that were supposed to be high were low. Things that were supposed to be low were high. And these are really important Substances that regulate immune system function, looking for cancer cells, some of them had to do with diabetes, had to do with hunger. So all of these things were manipulated just with one night. One night.

One all-nighter.

One all-nighter.

Man, okay. So sleep is a big thing to help prevent disease, it sounds like, but also inflammation. Having inflammation. what are some other factors on how we can prevent inflammation? So get a great night of sleep. What is the research you've shown?

Seven to nine hours? Yeah, so actually the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's come up with some really good recommendations. Once you get out of high school, generally speaking, it's seven to nine hours of sleep, seven being the bare minimum. And who gets seven hours of sleep? I mean, I'm preaching, right? I should be preaching to a mayor because I need to get more than that. But when you are school age, teenagers, if anyone is watching, it's 8-9, 10, 11.

Really?

Yeah.

It's like elementary kids, like 9-10.

So what are some of the main things to help us prevent inflammation so that if we attract a virus, it doesn't hurt us, or it helps us minimize the pain or the side effects or anything that can hurt us?

Yeah, so we have known for a long time. that there are certain risk factors that increase the risk of death in viral infections, let's say COVID-19 in this case. So BMI is one of those things. Body mass index. Age is another one. Obviously older people get into the hospital and don't do as well. Diabetes, hypertension, all of these things may sound familiar as to who is having the problem. And very early on we knew that the ACE2 receptor, this is this receptor on the cells, was the focal point for where the SARS-CoV-2 virus came in. The spike protein that we've all heard about interacts with the ACE2 receptor. Now that ACE2 receptor, that ACE2 is not just a receptor to the entrance of the cell, it actually has a very important function in all of the cells, in the respiratory cells, in the GI cells. What it does is it reduces the amount of oxidative components, oxidative stress, pro-oxidative stress components, and it reduces that and it increases the amount of antioxidants. So ACE2 is like this humming engine in each of your cells that is regulating the amount of oxidative stress that's going on. And when that virus binds to it, it shuts it down. So now all of your, so your oxidative stress goes up in that cell, and your antioxidants go down. Okay. So if you can imagine you're on the edge of a cliff, you are balanced, you are just sort of, and there's, imagine this cliff, and there's people standing in different places. Okay? There's some people that their oxidative stress balance is right on the edge, right? And you could probably tell who these people are. They're older, they have some diabetes, hypertension, they're on a lot of blood pressure medications, maybe have some renal problems. They're standing right on the edge. And then there's the younger people who don't have these medical problems. They're far away from the edge. And then this massive gust of wind comes called coronavirus.

Knocking people off the edge.

And who are the people that are gonna knock down? Exactly. It's the ones that are on the edge. And so it's kind of like a stress test. This spike protein comes in, binds ACE2 receptor, and it causes problems. And remember now that when the virus comes into your body, it replicates. and replicates and replicates up to some studies have shown a billion to a trillion copies of itself inside one human being.

That's crazy.

And it spreads everywhere. It goes through, it goes to the brain. They've done autopsies. I've looked at the autopsies. They go to the brain. I've seen slides in the bladder, in the bone marrow, in the heart, in the lungs. It's everywhere. And each one of these trillions of viral particles have spike proteins all over it. So you can imagine the load of spike protein and the complete shutdown of the ACE2 receptor, among other things.

Okay.

So that is one of the things that we talk about in terms of inflammation. So how do you prevent that from happening? How are you getting away from the.

Edge of the cliff?

Exactly, because you know there's a big gust of wind coming. Some of the things you can do for a long time it takes a long time for it to work. Other things sometimes you have to implement, you don't have time to do it. Somebody comes in, someone's sick, their diet is their diet or whatever it is that they've had.

Right?

So one of the interesting things that's come up in that somebody, there's a guy named Dr. Varki in San Diego that's been studying this thing called sialic acids. This is the newest thing and it's actually very interesting.

Sialic acids.

Sialic acids. So I won't even talk about the fact that some people believe that the virus actually uses sialic acids to enter into the cell. That's a whole another topic. What I will mention though is we're all used to seeing the outside of cells on these animations that they see on the TV, and they've got proteins coming up, right?

Yes.

So imagine my arms are the proteins, and imagine I don't have a hand. That's kind of how they've been describing it, but that's actually not reality. Reality is that you've got proteins and then my hand, think of my hand as glycoproteins. Glycoprotein, that's a sugar and a protein put together. And then my fingers are the sialic acids.

Okay.

Okay?

Yeah.

So really it's the part of the cell that is the first thing that gets touched. Sialic acids are really important.

Okay.

Okay? It's a nine-carbon sugar and Actually, if you were to go to, let's just say, a HIV vaccine convention, almost the entire convention would be on sialic acids. Why? Because the HIV virus masquerades itself with sialic acids. That's why we haven't been able to get a vaccine for HIV. Because sialic acids are sort of like, put it this way, the Christmas tree is the protein, the decorations, sialic acids. That's what we're talking about. Gotcha. So here's the problem. The problem is with sialic acids is that the human body can only make one type of sialic acid. Let's call that Neu5Ac. I'm going to get a little wonky here, okay? But people want to look this up. So I'm just going to call that AC. So a human being makes a certain type of sialic acid on its glycoproteins, on its proteins, on its cells that is called AC. and that is self. Now, we used to have a gene apparently. We used to have a gene, it's non-functional now.

Really?

That used to make a different kind of sialic acid called Neu5Gc.

Okay.

But we don't make it anymore.

Okay, why don't we make it? When do we stop making it?

Good question. The biologists have their theories millions of years ago and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. But we don't know, right? We don't know for sure, 'cause we weren't there. What we do know is that animals makes both AC and GC.

Okay.

Cows make AC and GC. Any mammal makes AC and GC.

Okay.

Okay.

So here's the problem. When you consume those animals that make AC and GC, okay?

What happens?

What happens is it goes into your, digestive tract and it breaks it down and the body absorbs the AC and the GC. It can't tell the difference between the two. And then it gets absorbed whole in the body and the AC and the GC gets put onto your cells.

Okay.

Okay.

So we're getting animal GC now?

Yes.

What does that mean to us?

The problem is that you have antibodies against GC. Ah. Because it's not self.

It's not self, it's not us.

It's not us. We have antibodies in our system. It's not hardwired, but almost all humans develop antibodies against GC by the age of one.

Okay.

Okay.

So, if we're consuming GC, what does that mean?

That means that now that GC gets put onto our cells and our cells start to look to our immune system as foreign.

So, our cells are what? Defending themselves against it then?

The antibodies start to react against the cells with the GC on it. And what they get, what they call it is a sialitis. Siala-itis. Anything in medicine with an -itis at the end is inflammation.

Okay.

Pancreatitis, appendicitis, meningitis, just inflammation. So, you get the sialitis. And that, they believe, is one of the potential reasons for low-grade inflammation. So they always wondered.

Consuming meat.

Yeah, so they always wondered, okay, how come people who eat white meat, chicken, fish, how come they don't get the levels of heart disease?

Why is that?

This is what they think may actually be the reason. They could never figure that out. They did studies, huge epidemiological studies in the United States and in Europe. And they found that in some of the studies that it was only processed meats that were associated with cardiovascular disease. And regular meat was not.

And what's the difference between processed and regular meat?

Good question. So processed meats would be like sausage. Yes. It would be like cold cuts. It would be like those, yeah, right. So those are, but red meat's just like the pure red meat that you'd buy at the supermarket. Okay, so that's the difference. But newer studies are now starting to show that it doesn't matter if it's processed or not processed that you still.

Get red meat you're talking about.

Correct.

So white meat doesn't have the GC.

It does not.

Interesting. Okay.

Fish does not.

Fish is not chicken.

Yeah.

So here's a study that was done and they said, okay, so let's connect this together. So here was an interesting study that they did. They got a bunch of people and they said, Give us exactly your dietary habits for like 30 days. And so they wrote down every, it was meticulous. And then what they did was they went out and they looked at the food and they figured out in that particular food item how much GC was there. And you should see this list. It was a French study. I'm glad it was a French study. And I'll tell you why. because they listed every type of cheese you could possibly ever imagine. Wow. So, 'cause cheese is part of it. So you had, you know, mozzarella at the bottom and you had hard cheese at the, I mean, and so they listed it because there's a big spread. Some cheeses have hardly any GC in it. Really? Other cheeses are just packed. Certain meats have a lot of, pork has a lot of GC, other meats don't have as much. And what they did was they stratified it and they weighted it. And then they looked at the diet and they tried to figure out, okay, how much anti- GC antibodies did they have? And they matched it up. And it was this perfect correlation. So the more you ate of high GC foods...

The more information you had.

The more antibodies you had, and they linked it to colorectal cancer risk.

Oh man, so the antibodies, the more GC you have, your body's creating antibodies.

Correct.

And those antibodies cause inflammation.

That's correct.

Okay.

This is an immune system response. So when that antibody attaches to that antigen, that triggers an immune response because it's a foreign substance and that's what causes inflammation. So what you have then is inflammation in the blood vessels, inflammation in the colon that can cause colon cancer. So again, getting back to that Nature article, inflammation probably causes more than 50% of deaths in the United States.

Now you are practicing near the Loma Linda area, right? You're not in Loma Linda, are you?

I'm not in Loma Linda, but I.

Practice close to it, yeah. Very close to it, what, 10 minutes, 20 minutes away? Yes, exactly. And so some people might say, well, is he influenced by the blue zones and by being in this region where it's primarily vegan in Loma Linda? I think that's right, it's mostly vegans.

So is that play any influence into you?

It sort of gets me interested in that topic.

Interesting.

But here's the thing. Do you eat meat yourself?

I used to.

But not anymore.

No.

Because you saw the data or because of other reasons?

Because I saw the data.

Really?

I stopped eating meat in college.

Really? Yeah.

And I didn't start getting into this until like a year ago, starting looking into this.

So why did you stop eating meat then?

I think it was the influence of me being in Loma Linda.

Really?

Yeah.

And just being around-- But here's the interesting thing. So if you look at the Adventist.

Health Study 2, Adventist Health Study 2-- Loma Linda Adventist.

Pretty much, actually basically California. Southern California. 50% of the people involved in that study, which were Adventists, 50% of them were not vegetarian.

Really?

And this was the interesting thing about the study was because a lot of times when they do these epidemiological studies on diet, there's a lot of confounders.

Right.

Okay? So here you had a unique opportunity to take a very narrow set of people, people living in Southern California, subject to the same air quality, had the same values, went to the same kind of churches, but because it's not a strict religious requirement in the Adventist Church to be vegetarian, it's a dietary lifestyle. They were able to eliminate a lot of those confounders and compare the vegetarians with the non-vegetarians, with the Pesco-vegetarians, with the vegans.

Really?

Oh, yeah. So, what do they find in this study? Well, if you line up, let's say you got vegans right here, Okay.

There's some unhealthy vegans. I've seen some really unhealthy vegans who eat tons of processed potato chips, sugar, you can eat sugar all day and bread and create a lot of information still, right?

You're absolutely right. Okay. But I would say in the Adventist church, people who are vegan tend to be that way because they're health conscious. And that's the argument that a lot of people used, was that, yeah, vegetarians and vegans have a better mortality rate. because they tend to be health conscious people. And it's their health conscious activities like smoking in general that's doing it. But here you see, now you've got the ability to kind of eliminate those confounders because generally nobody in the adventist church smokes. Right.

Okay.

So you can, you see what I'm saying? Yes. So if you've got the vegans here on the right or on the left to you, I guess, and then the vegetarians and then the, what they call the PESCO vegetarians, fish.

Fish only.

Exactly. And then you have basically the non-vegetarians it was a step.

Any type of meat.

Any type of meat.

Okay.

Any diet.

Yeah.

You have this stepwise approach in terms of BMI and the same stepwise approach in terms of diabetes and the stepwise approach in terms of hypertension.

Really?

Absolutely.

What does the science say when it comes to walking barefoot to help you heal the body or reduce chronic inflammation then?

Okay, well we learned along the way that if you ground somebody that has flaring arthritis, put an electrode patch here and put a coil cord on connected to a ground, the pain goes away in five, ten minutes. Now, nobody will believe this. Nobody listening to this will believe this whatsoever until they experience it. Then they say, oh my God, why didn't somebody tell me about this? In 1976, 1960. We have to start there. 1960, before then, we were either barefoot or we were leather sole shoes. Leather sole shoes are semiconductor. You know, they hold moisture, they hold perspiration, body salts, you know, the leather does. And so they're conductive. But in 1960, we. So before then, barefoot was common.

Really?

At 78 years old, I mean, I was born in 44, so. up until, you know, 19, early 60s, you only wore shoes. I'm from rural Montana too, by the way.

Right, you were on a farm and a ranch. Yeah, yeah.

But you wore leather shoes to work and when you needed them. But generally, when you got out of school, you lose the shoes for the summer. First thing that you did when school.

Was over, you lost your barefoot. You're barefoot in the house, you're barefoot.

Outside, you're running from inside to outside barefoot.

Right.

So barefoot was common. And if it rained and you were wearing shoes, you had to take the shoes off and carry them so they didn't get wet.

Right.

Otherwise the water would make them shrink up and gnarly.

Interesting.

And you couldn't get them.

So shoes were, you wore them on purpose. Huh. Not all the time. No, you didn't wear shoes all the time. You wore them on purpose. Wow. And you weren't allowed to wear shoes. house back then. A dog can come into the house sometimes, or a baby calf could come in the house and keep warm but not shoes. So anyhow, 1960 is when we invented plastics. The first thing we did was put them on the soles of shoes and created those ugly green shag carpets, green, yellow, orange, and kind of reddish shag carpets and everybody carpeted their homes and started wearing rubber sole shoes. Now they were really great because now everybody could afford shoes. You didn't have to worry about water and they were inexpensive and carpets were finally now everybody could afford carpet. Before it was wool carpeting, wood floors and wool carpeting and or linoleum type stuff. But anyhow, in 1960 we started to lose our ground. Television came along, we started spending more time indoors watching TV, less time outdoors and play. When we did go outdoors, we had shoes on. So over the next 60 years, now 95% of all shoes sold are plastic sole, synthetic sole shoes. Everybody lives on the computer or TV and nobody goes outdoors anymore. If you wanted to go outdoors and get grounded, where would you go? Unless you have a home that's got a yard, which is rare nowadays in many cases. Parks are more for pets and stuff. So it's an odd thing that happened. So over the last 60 years, we lost our ground. We lost our negative charge. So anyhow, I had not a clue of any of this at the time. So this was the story for 20 years. We have produced 25-30 peer-reviewed published studies on this subject. They're all at the EarthingInstitute.net We've produced a couple of videos, movies, the Earthing movie, which is on YouTube. and a host of others. We have a book that we've never really fully marketed, but it's sold over a million copies so far. It's published in 24 different languages. The Earthling book, the most important health discovery ever. The reason that we say that is because what's in it is free.

Yeah.

And it's important.

It's a rediscovery.

Yeah, it's a observation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, yeah, we didn't know until after we wrote that book anything. We couldn't find anything. But then, literally, I mean, we started finding information from Europe and from around the world for 100 years ago, Adolph Just had discovered the same thing in other people, but it never stayed with them. You know, never gained ground. I was at a convention in San Diego with Dr. Gali who had helped do the cortisol study. and Dr. Steven Sinatra, who was a cardiologist back East, came out and he was at this convention in Gali. He said, we need to go visit with him because he's a cardiologist, the heart's electrical, so he would understand what we're talking about. So we did schedule some time with Steve and he came out. I told him what we were doing and he said, Clint, he said, if you're affecting pain, he says, you need to be studying inflammation. because pain is a byproduct of inflammation. But the word inflammation was not in the literature. It was to some people, I mean the research and so on. So anyhow, I didn't know what to make of that because inflammation to me was you twist an ankle like playing tennis and it swells up like a balloon and you're just in miserable pain for a couple of days. And he said, no, that's not what we're talking about. He said, this is, you know, a chronic low grade inflammation. And so I took it from there and I started doing more research and finally I came across, you know, how the immune system works. You know, the immune system, you have white blood cells, neutrophils, microphages and so on. So if you have a pathogen or an injury or a cell that needs to be, you know, damaged cell, it needs to be replaced. or a warning cell. The immune system will send a neutrophil over and it's kind of a jelly-like cell and it will encapsulate the pathogen or the damaged cell and then it releases what we call reactive oxygen species. As soon as I heard the word reactive then for some reason I had a clue. This means it's an electrical. Reactive means it's electrically charged and it has a strong enough charge that it can pull an electron away from a pathogen and destroy it, kill it. It's gone. Well. So that was the first clue. Then I started, and this is all cowboy logic, you know, you just take a step forward here and a step forward here and a step backward. And I couldn't get any help from the docs or the You know, they just nobody understood this. This was just too bizarre and nobody wanted to put their name with take your shoes off, you know, and get grounded. No, it just didn't appeal. So, but anyhow, as time went on, we went to the next study and so on. But along the way, I was able to put together that, okay, when you ground yourself to the earth, Assume it's like a garden hose with water, you know, the ground wire. So it's electrons are pulling up the coming up the wire by force because everything is going to equalize in contact with the earth. So then if you have a pad there, a ground pad, and you're laying on it, then it's going to be grounded. Then when you lay on it, you're going to be grounded. Or if we put a patch in your hand, then you're grounded. So it's like cutting a hole there and pouring water in. So it's like electrons pouring into the body and the body equalizing. And as soon as the body becomes negative, then it stops all the inflammation.

And the pain stops.

And the pain stops. When the pain stops, you know the inflammation has stopped. And so to a story that really helps explain it is in the early days, the only people I could get for subjects were the rheumatologists would give me ladies with MS or lupus or fibromyalgia. And because they can't help these people, they said, here, you can help.

Try whatever you want. Try your woo-woo science on all of them.

I've been in a team for a while. It's really the concept. And so I did. I started grounding these women and I, as time went on, it got to the point where I could take a woman with MS. And I remember one came in one day in a study we were doing down in San Diego. And she had to hold her hand like this because if she let go, then it would, you know, wander all over and. And she had pain and she was totally stressed. And anyhow, we couldn't. She wanted to be in one of our setting. We said, you know, you can't be in the study because of she had to get up and go to the bathroom every 20 minutes or those kind of things, that's what she said. So because she came there and went to the trouble, you know, traveling and be there, I said, here, I'm going to ground you for a while and I'll give you some things you can take home and play with and it may be of value to you. So anyhow, we put her in the chair and I put patches on her arms and whatever and, you know, she was kind of moving around but she was interested. Her color started to change. Her, you know, her started to pink up. Her demeanor started to calm down. And she just kept talking. And all of a sudden it had been like 40 minutes or so and she didn't have to go to the restroom. So I went to ask her. I said, you need to go to the restroom. She said, no, I'm okay. And so about an hour later we had to get back to work on what we were doing. But, but at that time, this loss of control, you know, it settled down. It all stopped.

Wow.

And then she did have to go to the bathroom before she left, so she took the patch off and she went to the restroom, came back out, and she was almost in tears. She says, Look at me, I'm like my old self. I mean, her color, her energy came back, her pains down, her demeanor changed. but most of all, and she wasn't even talking about her arm, but she was able to move it, but she still had, you know, the damage that was done. And so as time went on, I could go on for a long time on those ladies, but as time went on, it got to the point where I could tell a woman after she had been grounded for five, ten minutes, I could honestly say, you no longer have MS. Wow. what you have is damage from MS.

After years of it, and now you've got that.

Yeah. How you'll recover from that is unknown to me, although there is recovery. Healing, because the body is a self-healing mechanism. You put the fire out, stop the inflammation, then it can heal.

It starts to heal, yeah.

But anyhow, I said, as long as you're grounded, you no longer have MS. You can't have MS when you're grounded because the body's flooded with free electrons. And so now when the neutrophils are in there taking care of those damaged cells that were part of the myelin sheath which caused this problem, then that stops. I mean, because free electrons are reducing those reactive oxygen species, the remaining ones, and it just stops it dead. Now this really sounds bizarre and everybody's going to go out and put their hands on the grasses which I want them to do. But anyhow, so that's where I, I mean that's how confident I became and I know this no matter what, whether it's lupus or MS or any kind of a flaring disease, arthritis, bursitis, you name it. If it's an itis, that means it's inflammation.

So it puts out the fire. You might still have the remnants of the.

The.

The challenge that you face with if.

You had it for years, right? If you're. If your arms are, you know, getting cramped or your hands are getting deformed or whatever it might be from the disease of the inflammation constantly for years, that may need time to heal. There might be pain there, but not the type of sharp pain.

You're not going to have the hot burning pain. If it's hot burning pain, it's inflammation. If it's still leave me alone pain. that's healing pain. That's normal.

So how easy is it to ground yourself? And how long does the grounding last for?

It's cumulative. If I ground somebody for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, they're going to get a sensation, their blood viscosity is going to normalize the thickness of their blood. Because as soon as you ground the person, their blood before is thick and sticky. That's why so many people are on blood thinners. Wow. So as soon as you ground them, the little red blood cells, they have an electrical surface charge, so they equalize with the earth. So now they have a negative charge. And the more negative the red blood cells become, they now repel each other like little negative magnets. Now the blood gets thin, and rather than sticky, and then it can get in and out of the capillaries, oxygenate the tissue, get rid of the inflammation. return the body to normal.

So 30 minutes is a good amount of time or how long should someone...

30 minutes will get you down the road. It will give you enough information to know, wow, there's something going on here.

Four and it'll last for what, a day, a half a day or...

It depends. I've grounded people who had a chronic knee inflammation type thing, arthritic type, and they grounded them for 30 minutes and they got up and and that pain went away forever. People who have MS and certain things, no, they've got a challenge ahead. Right. And so on.

You've got to heal. What's the difference in the benefits between walking barefoot on dirt, laying on your back on the grass, or putting your hands on the ground? Is there different benefits to these techniques?

I want to share one thing with you.

Yeah, go ahead.

Animals that live in the wild, they're grounded 24/7.

Right, they live on the earth.

They live on the earth. They don't have cardiovascular disease, lupus, MS, arthritis. They don't have, I mean, cancer rarely exists in nature. The only animals that die from cancer in nature are because we've contaminated or destroyed their ecosystem, their environment.

Right.

It's more like cats and dogs die because they're in the house.

Okay, so all the animals who live indoors with their own manifest similar health disorders as their owners.

Wow.

Which is everything from diabetes to, you name it. Diabetes is an inflammation related health disorder. Autism is, but that's not related to cats and stuff. But anyhow, so, but 50% of all these indoor animals, domestic animals, die from cancer just like their owners. So this is environment, so it's about being connected to the earth 24/7. you can't have these health disorders. So, in nature, your feet are the most conductive. We know this just by measuring. The palms of your hand and the bottom of your feet are the most conductive. Well, those are your ground paws. We probably were on all fours at one time, or we were using our hands forever to touch green living plants.

Plants, trees, everything else, yeah.

And so we were all naturally grounded, but these are the most conductive. and your body's always going to have, you know, autoimmune response, I mean, immune response, you know, the immune cascade. So you're going to have oxidative radicals in your body to reduce pathogens or to reduce damage cell. If you don't have redox potential or enough free electrons to reduce those remaining radicals left over from an oxidative burst, then that's what causes inflammation. Inflammation doesn't exist in nature. Well, I couldn't get here if that were the case. You need to get grounded and stay grounded until the pain goes away. Because then you don't need to run tests, you don't need to go to a lab, you don't need to do anything. When the pain stops, then you know the inflammation stopped. Because you can't have the pain without inflammation. But if you have pain, you do have inflammation.

So it might take 30 minutes, might take an hour, your hands and feet on the ground. Is it grass better? Is it touching plants? Is it touching dirt? Is it sand?

Is it water?

Does it matter?

I try to tell everybody, you know, what's better? It really doesn't matter because you're not grounding an electrical system. You're grounding a human body and Earth potential and Earth has a universal ground.

What about the sand or the ocean?

If you sand, if you just kick away an inch of it, It's wet, it's damp. I mean, there's always moisture. So youo want to be in the.

Wet sand, is what you're saying, or in the ocean?

Is that it? No, I mean, if you're there, that's great. Yeah, yeah. You're going to be well grounded. But you're going to be grounded if you're out in Palm Springs and you know, sitting under a palm tree, there's moisture in all sand. It holds moisture because it's rock and you have nighttime condensation and evaporation. so there's moisture everywhere. It's going to be better if you have a grass yard. I tell everybody, and if we have time, I'd like to tell you about the MS ladies a little bit, but if I can convince you to go out and just sit on the earth, put your bare feet on the earth and your bare hands on the earth, that's great. If you can't do that, then you take a chair out, take your shoes off, and at least put your feet on the earth and just sit there. until your respiration is going to calm down, your O2 saturation is going to come up, your color is going to come up because the blood's going to, your blood viscosity is going to normalize and your pain is going to diminish. And the pain going down, that's the inflammation. You're reducing the inflammation in your body. When you have no pain left in your body, you can still have pain left, but that would be the healing pain. But if you have burning pain, or oxidative, that pain will go away. That'll go away.

What are we missing out on by wearing shoes all the time and not being connected between, you know, and having this barrier between ourselves?

Whenever you're grounded, you can't have inflammation. When you're not grounded, then you start losing your redox potential or you bleed off your free electrons just by breathing oxygen. or eating food or, you know, all these environmental stressors.

So you flood the blood stream with blood sugar to feed the muscles. And you can imagine if you are doing a high intensity interval training workout and go to 90% your VO2 max in like five seconds, that is a stress signal.

But you're gonna use that glucose.

Your body's actually, so you're gonna see that rapid spike.