Inflammation: This ONE RISK FACTOR Is Killing 60% Of People! | Shawn Stevenson & Lewis Howes

And neuroinflammation, I believe, is the most troubling issue that we're facing as a society. But it's a hidden, overlooked issue because the brain is so protective. We don't really know that this is going on until oftentimes it's too late.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

I saw a recent stat I wanna share with you. By Rand Corporation in 2014, nearly 60% of Americans had at least one chronic condition. 42% had more than one and 12% of adults had five or more chronic conditions. I'm curious from your perspective of all the research you've done, why do more than 60% of people have chronic inflammation and these conditions? What's the kind of the root of this?

Inflammation is an underlying component of a myriad of different diseases. But we don't tend to think about it because inflammation seems like sort of like a ghost in the machine. It's like, ooh, inflammation. But it truly is, if you look at the root word coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to set on fire.

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 process.

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 when 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. 240 million.

Out of how many?

Right around 330,000. 330 million. I'm sorry, 330.

So 240 million.

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

How is that possible now?

Exactly.

That's what we've gotten this far. Is it just food is too accessible, the wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people now? Social media, is it laziness? Why have we shifted from being a healthy nation, I don't know, probably 60-70 years ago, to an unhealthy nation?

It's really a perfect storm of all the things. 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 are just USA.

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

We're the Homer Simpsons.

We're the Homer Simpsons. 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 in the show, but this is it's built into our evolution. And if you think about sleep, it's very strange because you're incredibly vulnerable, you're unconscious, you'd think we might evolve out of it just for safety. But the thing is, so many wonderful, absolutely amazing things take place during sleep that we just haven't found a way to replicate. 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 talk about in your other book, Sleep Smarter. What are the five main benefits that come from that versus interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, staying up late with the phone, having coffee late at night, all that stuff. What's the benefits?

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

Of course.

And so, you-'re young, you-'re beautiful. Right, nobody's waking up like, I wanna look so old today. I wanna 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 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 with 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 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.

Uh-huh. 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 the 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 gonna lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on. 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 simulations. They made 20% more mistakes doing the exact same thing, and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing. Oh, wow. All right. So, and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective.

Right?

And so that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance. Number three, and this, it parallels with cognitive performance is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans and 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 a 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. So this, 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 for you is the cleansing.

Right, right. Cleansing. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different things that this can benefit. But I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform. You know, we want to be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and 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.

Wow.

They improved, significantly improved, their free throw shooting and their three point shooting just by getting more sleep. sleep, all right? And these are things that we just kind of, on a periphery, 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 AM and leave. Yeah, right. Just go right into somebody. You know what I mean?

Make a play.

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

Right.

So have an opportunity to say it was 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 could be my role model. And I could just, I wanted to, to play. I went to compete, play baseball. And so I actually met him at the gym. And so he was there. I think he was probably in his, around in his mid 60s, maybe at the time. But he was there getting strong, like, and he was one of the first, if not the first high level elite baseball players to really embrace strength training way back in the 80s. The reason 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 tried, had to find out a way to strengthen everything around it. because he didn't want to have surgery, he would have been out for a year at the time. And now, you know, of course, surgeries have advanced tremendously since then. But so he found that he strengthened everything in his shoulder, but also he started throwing from a completely different arm angle. And still wants 13 consecutive gold gloves.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right.

He's out there back flipping with the glove on. It's crazy. 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. So that strength, if you can train your body, 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. you know, 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, 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 the dots. on a new skill. So something to think about there as well. I'm curious about this. Have you seen a study around or any research around how our belief about our identity, how we view ourselves in the world, whether we think positively of ourselves, we have confidence, we believe in ourselves, or our lack thereof, we have a bad view of ourselves. Is there any research about how that affects the brain? Our actual mindset of the brain and ourselves?

Absolutely. Have you seen this? The number one driving force of the human psyche is to stay congruent with the ideas that we carry about who we are. Every thought that we think, every action we take is really correlated with who we believe ourselves to be. And this is why change can be so uncomfortable. You know, 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 great. And she's really brought to the forefront. And I talked a little bit about this in Eat Smart in my new book and how our thoughts really affect our biology, even how food affects us based on our beliefs about food. And so one of the biggest things to really come from her work that unfortunately it wasn't embraced, even though she's been in the field for 40 years, she really knows her stuff and has affected so many different lives. But it takes time for kind of collegiate training to change, for the books to change. But one of the big takeaways is thinking, 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 a 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.

Yes, 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. Emmeron Mayeron.

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. It's fascinating.

It's so fascinating.

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

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

So what does this field look like?

Let's talk about energy.

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

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from HeartMath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, It can be upwards of last checked, around eight feet 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, you know, bad, bad vibes. So we don't want to downplay that because other, other species of animals, they have that bigger connection. And we can, we can attribute, like bees, for example, you know, in this, quote, hive mind, but we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years, I've been seeking to find, how can I explain this to people to make sense? Because I'm a very solid thinker, you know, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers. They found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes, all they had to do was create some rapport and their brain waves started to sync up.

Come on.

Their brain waves started syncing up just by having rapport and talking to another person. we start syncing up. And this is, this happens all the time. What does that mean?

That we sync up, the brain is...

So it's like, it's, again, this is, 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, all 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 it's...

The mind.

So what is the mind? that's put Dr. Caroline Leaf's episode in. 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? Like here? 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.

It's not.

The mind is.

Okay.

The mind. And we still are trying to dictate what the mind is. It's so big and it's so beautiful. It's expansive. So this is the adventure of all this stuff. It's like we get to learn, we get to discover. But as soon as we think that we got it figured out, That's when everything starts to go wrong.

And also it sounds like if the brain isn't optimized through sleep, through nutrition, through healing the inflammation, the chronic inflammation, if that's not optimized, your mind is not going to be optimized. You're going to be thinking poorly, you're going to be acting poorly, you're going to be tired, all these different things. So if you want your mind to be sharp, you got to make sure your brain is healthy and recovered and healed.

Is that what I'm hearing you say? It's true if we're just going to be again, looking at this from a very foundational simple principle, it's much more difficult to think the thoughts that we want to think when we don't feel well.

Right.

We don't feel well, we start to think bad thoughts.

It's hard to get together. It's hard to come together because of our so much of our biology is driving our lives, you know, how we feel. But this is the thing and everybody's seeing this example, We can think externally of our biology. We can change our thoughts and change what's happening with our biology instantly because every thought that you think has correlating chemistry that's released. Really? In an example. So, right now, female in her wife. Yeah. In a loving way. So, I'm gonna start releasing a little bit of oxytocin. Uh-huh. You know, a little bit of maybe a little dopamine, you know, a little serotonin.

In the brain.

Yeah. Which then releases- It also depends on the thoughts as well. If it's some sexy thoughts, it might be a little, get a little, adrenaline or epinephrine produced, you know, just like that a little bit more aggression might come forward, you know, just depends. But also if, for example, we have a thought where something bad is happening right now, where we're thinking about, you know, maybe we're worried about something that we care about, maybe they've been in some type of an incident of some sort, and, but maybe we heard some news about it, but it's not true. Okay, so maybe we heard that somebody that we love got into an altercation, right? And we're just like, you know, really upset, like, oh my, I can't believe this happened. I can't believe whatever. And we can start to produce these chemicals associated with that stress. So much more cortisol, right? So a lot of people know about cortisol. Cortisol is not a bad guy.

We've talked about this before. Right, right, right.

It's a big part of it. Consistently. Too much hurts you. Especially and chronically. So, We start to release all these neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, hormones, all driving us towards worry, fear, anger, regardless if the situation is real or not. That's the rub.

We make it up.

So we can think external, we can think beyond our current circumstances and change our biology. But if our biology is in a tough place, it's harder to keep trying to do that.

So our thoughts shape our biology. Our thoughts shape our feelings, which create your body. Your thoughts create the body.

So now we get into, I'm gonna bring her up one more time. Yes. Caroline's work.

She's great.

Yeah, so we had a great conversation about that as well. And actually an interview that I did with her, it came out recently and we put our toes in in that conversation a little bit more because this, again, this is kind of difficult for us to to think about today because we've been so inundated with the genetic dominant theory that our genes are controlling our lives. And now today, of course, I believe just about everybody listening has heard the term epigenetics at this point and how these are above genetic controls, like epidermis, like your skin, the outermost part of your skin. So epigenetics is controlling your genetic expression, right? And so humans collectively, we've got maybe 20,000, 22,000 genes collectively. But I think that that's gonna play out in your hearing it here first. I think that that number is not quite accurate, but when they did the Human Genome Project, that's what they discovered. But why are we so different? It's because of the expression of the genes. There can be a thousand different out picturings of one gene. And it could code or express what we would deem to be something negative. But even the negative things are trying to push us towards health. Our body is always adapting, trying to help us to survive.

Trying to realign us and saying, this is not good. You need to pay attention to this and fix it.

Yeah.

Even with obesity, our bodies are trying to save us. They're trying to save us. So, for example, when we bring in an abnormal amount of sugar, like the way that humans evolved, we didn't have access to sugar like that. You know, if you come across a beehive or something, like you're gonna risk you're gonna risk getting stung to get some of that. All right. But today we've taken that just here.

Eat it all day long.

It is, it's so remarkable how, and it's for me, it's just, it's a very simple principle of biology.

When do we start getting sugar accessible in this country? When was it, what year or decade was this where it's like, oh, sugar is available now.

Here's the beautiful thing. Humans we've always had a hankering for sugar, like through our evolution. We'd go towards, like I said, we'd go for those things, especially, but also is available for some cultures only certain times a year, for example. And so you would rack up on it as well. Now, this is an important tenant as well. Because, and there's a reason for this, the human brain itself, if we think about the blood-brain barrier, protects the brain and only allows in certain things, certain nutrients. It only has gates for certain gases like oxygen, for water, only certain nutrients get into the brain. The brain has its own exclusive diet. But there are a lot of sugar gates. Your brain will gladly confiscate Harvard researchers, uncover this. Your brain will gladly sop up half of the sugar that you take in in a meal.

You take 50 grams of sugar, 50% of that 25 grams going into the brain.

Going into the brain.

How is it going Where's it going? Does it go throughout all the brain? Does it go to a section of the brain? What happens?

And it's just filtered throughout and you're just on a sugar high? Yeah, so even the term sugar high, like it sounds, it's kind of funny, but that's not funny. It's not funny because what happens is, so there are these protein gates that allow the sugar to transfer over through the blood-brain barrier into the brain itself. And yeah, because many of the neurons run off of glucose. So your brain is like, look, give me that. We got stuff to do. Let me take all of it. But what happens is over time is it starts to create insulin resistance in the brain as well.

All right.

So this is one of the biggest issues facing our world today. And if we get into the conversation about inflammation, neuroinflammation, I believe is the most troubling issue that we're facing as a society. But it's a hidden overlooked issue because the brain is so protective. we don't really know that this is going on until oftentimes it's too late because the brain itself, we talked about the symptoms of inflammation, pain, swelling, burning. The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors. So your brain can tell you about pain in your pinky toe or on your, you know, pain in your neck. But pain within the brain itself, it doesn't have pain receptors.

What about like a migraine or something?

Is that not? Migraines are not the brain directly expressing pain. It has a lot to do with, now, there is, this is a little bit more complicated. There are some offshoots of things happening within the brain with migraines. Let me be clear. So let's just take the borderline, migraines are different also. People who experience migraines, they know that it's different, but from a headache. We'll just take that borderline experience, maybe like an acute migraine or maybe a tough headache. What it really is is the blood vessels that surround the brain, that surround your skull, not the brain, but that's surrounding your neck and your shoulders. And so muscle spasms and things of that nature can start to kind of cause restriction. But there can be some electrical storms taking place in the brain for sure.

Interesting.

Anyway, so the brain itself doesn't experience pain. So this is why, for example, there's, you know, you can have a brain surgery and not feel like, yeah, you're awake. You're awake. Yeah. And it's just like, nuts, isn't it?

It's so weird. Isn't there someone who was like playing violin on a brain surgery that like opened the head and was like, to.

See if she could still play or make sure that was, that's like some total recall. That's crazy, man. Where's Arnold? That was crazy. I'm like, yeah. It's amazing, man. But these are really overlooked simple principles. But going back to that tenant of inflammation. So if the brain can't experience the pain, how do you know when it's on fire?

How do you know when it's in pain?

The brain. You don't know. Until it's too late.

You don't know. But there are downstream symptoms. I'm feeling this in my face, my.

Arm, my back, like something, my gut doesn't feel good. There might be a- It's a constant superhighway of the brain-body connection.

Right?

So these researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, they found that neuroinflammation is a double-edged sword for nutritional diseases, metabolic diseases. All right, so what that means is inflammation in the brain is one of the primary causative factors of obesity. Ah.

So when you have inflammation in the brain, you're more likely to be obese.

And obesity is a causative agent for neuroinflammation.

So, they both hurt each other.

So, you're getting into this double-edged sword or vicious circle. And this is why, again, we tend to downplay or belittle people who are struggling with obesity, for example, and not knowing how many programs out there are telling you we need to target the inflammation in your brain for you to get well, for your metabolism to heal.

Yeah, the work that Dr. Daniel Amen is doing, which is, you know, he says the bigger the body, the smaller the brain. you know, your brain starts to shrink. I think that's accurate, if I remember. But it's like, and you want to really focus on both the nutritional side and the brain, make sure the brain is healthy, and you can heal and recover a lot of the brain from what I'm learning from my scan that I took there. There are ways to optimize the brain, even if you've hurt it in a big way.

Yeah.

That's the beautiful part about us.

Yeah.

And Daniel's a really good friend. If there's anybody who knows, it's him. He has the biggest database of speck imaging scans. He's looking at the brain. He's not just making it up. And so this is a fact. I talked about this in Eat Smart as well. He actually wrote the COVID quote for Eat Smarter.

Nice.

Man, I'm so grateful to have a friend like him because he's just such a wealth of knowledge. But one of the really interesting thing is that as your waistline grows, your brain shrinks.

That's crazy, right?

So we see that. and particularly the gray matter of the brain is gonna be inhibited.

So obesity, what does that mean? Obesity impacts the quality of the brain. And what if 65, 70% of Americans are now obese? That means they have smaller brains, which means they're now gonna be able to perform as well. They're gonna be more temperamental. They're gonna be more mentally unwell, I'm assuming, have more mental health issues, potentially more depression, anxiety, and stress and overwhelm. based on obesity.

You said it, man. What do we, I mean, this is where it really gets, how do we make us scary? Because we often, we look at the condition and we just like, and me being in this field, I've been in this field almost 20 years and we'll just say, if I got 30 family members, 28 of them are obese growing up. Like I grew up around obesity, yeah, you know, but for me, My genetic cards were a little bit different because I ate worse than everybody. But I had asthma, you know, I had-- Gotcha. Of course, you know about the degenerative disc conditions, you know, so I had advanced arthritis when I was just a baby, really.

You had other painful side effects than obesity.

You're right.

By eating pork.

But my fat genes kicked in.

Yeah, eventually after 25, 30, you're starting to feel it.

When I got to 20 and stop because for me also, it's always very active as well. And so now I've got this chronic condition diagnosis, so-called incurable and nothing I can do about it. And now I was given a permission slip to do nothing, you know? And so that's what I did. So again, to get in that state of learned helplessness.

Now, I'm going to ask something that might be controversial. There's a big movement of the accept yourself, self-love, no matter how big you are, small you are, like just Love yourself for where you're at. And, you know, how do we love and accept people for where they're at without shaming them, but also encourage them to improve the quality of their health so that their brain gets bigger and healthier, so that they can live longer, so that they can perform better. Because from what I'm hearing, obesity is not something that's going to make you live longer and healthier.

Yeah.

I love this question, man, because the first thing is, I love it because this conversation is bringing to light the fact that we've been inundated with an idea of what beauty looks like. We've been inundated with an idea that thin is better for many years. We've been inundated with an idea that you've got to look a certain way, you've got to have a certain, certain complexion, certain eye color, whatever the case is, to be the epitome of what beauty is. And human humanity is so so beautiful, so diverse, so gorgeous, so magical. There's so much beauty and expression and there are cultures that are just thicker than a Snicker by nature. If you talk about folks, Polynesian cultures, Polynesian culture for example, incredible athletes and they just right out of the gate is gonna be a little bit thicker but that's beautiful. It can be beautiful, it can be healthy. It depends on your genetics, on how much weight you carry and how healthfully you can carry it. You maintain your insulin sensitivity, the health of your brain, the longevity. The list goes on and on. There are different, and this is one of the things that I really brought to the fold with Eat Smarter is your unique metabolic fingerprint. And a part of that metabolic fingerprint is honoring your genetics. And so with that said, shifting the culture right now to honor our diversity and our our variation of what beauty looks like and not having this idea that having some body fat is something that's wrong or ugly. That's an absolutely terrible thing. The other part, and it's not even a but, it's and, so we have that acknowledgement and we have to understand that if you have insulin resistance, you're pre-diabetic or you're diabetic or you have heart disease, or you have neuroinflammation that we're talking a little bit about. You have allergies and asthma. List goes on and on and on. Advanced arthritis, all these different conditions, all these underlying things that can take place. This is going to, in many ways, destroy your quality of life. And we want you to be healthy and a unique expression of what beauty is.

Yes.

That's it.

You don't have to be perfect and have a six-pack and have like a certain amount of body fat, but.

You.

Gotta live a long time. If you wanna live happy and healthy and not feel these kind of mental health issues as well, this will help that if you're healthier physically.

Absolutely, because that goes hand in hand with all the other things that we're seeing as a society where we're losing so many people prematurely. We're losing lives, but not just that, not just the actual loss of life, but the loss of life where people are still living.

What do you mean by that?

When we fall into these places, I lost my grandmother, the love of my life, the love of my life. My grandfather, her and my grandfather were an entity. And so we just had some friends over yesterday and they were like, you guys are the only married couple that we really know that are like, and I'm just wondering how we have, my wife and I, when I didn't have any examples of a healthy married couple. Like, I just pretty much never seen it, never saw it. But I lived with my grandmother when I was a little guy, when I was, you know, between the age of about, we'll say, four to eight years old, right? So it was very formative. And for me, that was my earliest memories. And they're an entity. And I'm sure they had disagreements, but they never, all I saw was love. All I saw was them, like, his arm around her and just affectionate. she loved him literally to death. And so he ended up having multiple open-heart surgeries. And he was, you would think again, he was hunting, he was foraging, very outdoor guy, but he was living under chronic stress in the city. He was a country boy, right? And so he was in this environment, but also when he was noting, okay, you got a high blood pressure, he also was a very angry guy, you know? Well, he dealt with anger.

Yes.

But not towards us, you know, but just his conditions that he came up around. So now this is very important. The physician, based on his preliminary blood work, which again, I wish I could have been there and to be able to intersect this, it was like, okay, you got to cut the fat. You need to switch out that butter and start to have this partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is country croc. The first time I saw a country croc was in my grandmother, grandfather's house. And he went from having some blood work issues to having a heart attack.

Oh, man.

To having open heart surgery. To him dying early.

Is he obese or no?

No, he looked incredibly fit. Wow. But that was his.

Do you think it was more stress or the nutrition?

Primarily stress, I feel. Stress and then also the nutrition that was added in on the recommendations didn't help.

Right.

So we're going from something that's, quote, natural that humans have been having for centuries to something that was brand new and invented. You know, and all the fat. I remember my grandmother getting him, like, the low-fat peanut butter. And I remember once I got older, I went to their house, I looked at it. It said fully hydrogenated vegetable oil in the peanut butter. And so it's like, it's basically exposing it to more hydrogen to try to create, to extend the shelf life of it. It kind of makes like a, in a strange way, vegetable oil plastic out of it.

Yes.

But anyways, so bottom line is this, and I'm glad I got a minute to talk about this because it's tough to talk about. But she was around for a while. She was there at my wedding. I felt like she stayed.

Wow.

I felt like she stayed to make sure that I was in good hands.

Wow.

But shortly after that, she died from a overdose. She was depressed, I didn't know. Really? And with the story goes, I don't know if she did it on purpose or not, but she took her medication and she died.

Shortly after the wedding or?

Yes, not too long after the wedding. Maybe a year later.

Yeah.

But I lost the love of my life outside of my wife to depression. And when he left here, really her identity was so tied to him. She loved him so much. Man, yeah. So when I'm talking about this stuff, but also her health was going down as well. And I'm just now really starting to hit my stride in understanding this field. and helping a lot of people. And, you know, I didn't know, like my grandmother had diabetes, she had this, she had this, that issue. She had like the whole pill cabinet.

Oh man.

And for me growing up in it, it was normalized, you know, and yet we're treating symptoms. And so when we're not in a good state of health, the depression, it is just, it's more, it can be more invasive. It can be harder to deal with. They come together. It's hard to deal with. It's my point. It's hard to get out of it.

Yeah.

My point that I want to share is when we're venturing into these outward states of inflammation, because even our fat cells themselves are an inflammatory factor. Essentially, they're putting out a distress signal that's letting your body think in a sense that you're infected. And the fat cells themselves are creating inflammation. If we talked about that again, that systemic chronic inflammation, it's just literally checking all boxes for a bad event to take place. whether it's depression, which depression now we've got sound data on it having inflammatory component, depression, heart attack, stroke, dementia, the list goes on and on and on. And a big catalyst for this, about 400,000 people die each year from obesity-related conditions. And it's just a footnote.

Is that like they have type 2 diabetes or they have stress or they have heart attacks because of obesity or what are those things?

So these are comorbidities. So these are comorbidities.

They're obese, but they die from something else.

Right, right. But that's there.

400,000 people every year?

Every year, yeah.

You think if they weren't obese, that they wouldn't die?

The obesity is kind of fueling the flames of the inflammation, for example. It's fueling the flames of the metabolic dysfunction. Right.

You can still look healthy and die of a heart attack. You hear that sometimes where it's like.

But today it's the exception, not the rule.

Right.

The majority of the time. Right, right, right.

It's related to being overweight and obese. It's probably with stress or some type of inner stress. Maybe you don't look unhealthy, but inside you're not able to deal with anger.

Or resentment or stress or shame or whatever it is. Your thoughts are creating chemistry in your body. Man, it's crazy, isn't it? It is. It's powerful, man. It's powerful. But this really ties in well with this topic of cognitive function. Because we talked about neuroinflammation, but specifically the research was indicating hypothalamic inflammation. So that's inflammation. The hypothalamus is, it's really been considered the master gland of the human body.

Where is it?

So it's in your brain. It's in your brain. It's so I think the best description is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So we've got this HPA axis and there's so many other glands upon that axis, even a thyroid. And so the hypothalamus is kind of like in the boss's office in a sense, right? But I would argue that it's not necessarily the boss because everything is working together. But the reason that it's considered a master gland is that The hypothalamus integrates your endocrine system, the production of all your hormones with your nervous system, which is like sensing your environment, your internal, external environment based on that data and that feedback, integrating the two. And your hypothalamus is also controlling even calorie absorption. It's in constant contact with your gut. And so the vagus nerve is linked up here as well. And so based on your assessment, your brain's assessment and also your gut of your caloric needs, how much energy you have stored, your brain could tell your gut to increase the absorption of calories from the food or decrease the absorption of calories from food. And so we talked about this last time about these- So anyway, your brain.

Can tell your gut, when I'm eating all these calories, don't absorb these calories, just let them go out.

Essentially, it can be down-regulated. Or down-regulated. But it's not gonna be like you can just eat a donut and you.

Don'T absorb anything, you know what I mean? That'd be amazing.

Could your mind actually do that though?

Do you think the mind is in control and saying, I'm gonna have 1500 calories right now with this ice cream and donuts, and nothing is gonna be absorbed in my body? It's going to go out to me and you just manifest, you just decide and declare, no, it's not entering my body.

Did you firewalk?

I did, yeah.

Do you see what I'm saying? I did it too. I think it's possible. Yeah, and I actually, a friend of mine, she stepped on a coal. that was not in the fire pit and she- Burned herself.

Yeah, Jamie Masters. She wasn't in the right mindset probably.

Right, she wasn't, she just accidentally, it was like right there just kind of like sitting there for a minute. Burned her. And burned her. But anyways, and we walked across that stuff, man. So, hypothetically, it could happen. But here's the thing. Let's dive in a little bit deeper on what that looks like. Eliacrum out of Stanford at the time when she conducted this study, she wanted to find out how our thoughts affect our digestion, how our thoughts affect how we assimilate nutrients.

Give it to me. All right?

And this is called the Milkshake Experiment.

I love a good milkshake.

So they blended up a batch of milkshakes and they were all somewhere around 380 calories. And I detail this in Eat Smarter a lot more. So it might be 360, but I believe it's 380 calories. Now, so all the milkshakes are the exact same amount of calories are the same level in the same containers that they're passing out. Now here's the thing, they take it and now they put labels on them that they are different amounts of calories. On one set of milkshakes they put that they're 180 calorie sensible milkshakes. And then on others they put that this is a 620 calorie indulgence. indulge it. Oh my gosh.

But they're all the same.

They're all the same. They're all the same.

That's fascinating.

And so here's what happened. Well, I think we gotta get a little bit of the kind of endocrine biology here with basic satiety hormones. So leptin and ghrelin. All right, so leptin is a major satiety hormone. Makes us feel satisfied. We feel We're in our body, we're not ravenously hungry, right? When leptin is level and also leptin sensitivity, it's a whole other conversation. So we got leptin satiety hormone, then we have ghrelin, which is a bona fide hunger hormone, all right? But it's more than that, it's more than that. It also has to do with our metabolic rate and other things too. But basically when ghrelin levels are high, it's driving us to go eat something. I think about it like the ghrelin gremlin, all right? Don't feed him after midnight, you know what I mean? So the ghrelin gremlin. Now, with ghrelin levels going up, that's going to drive us to eat. But when they're going down, it's going to make us inherently feel more satisfied. So here's what happened. The people who were given the indulgent milkshakes that were, again, they were higher calories, same calories, but they thought they were higher. Their ghrelin levels went down three times lower.

What do you mean? They were less hungry?

Their ghrelin levels, they're their hunger hormones went down three times lower than what they actually consumed.

Their desire to be hungry went down.

It went down three times lower.

That's crazy. Okay. Because they thought they were having a lot of calories.

They thought that they were having something indulgent that was very calorie dense. The people who had the ones that were labeled 100 calories SensaShake, their ghrelin levels barely budged. It just seems like they were having.

A glass of milk and they were just like, I need some more.

It's like they had water.

Water, wow.

And they're like, soon after they're gonna be back up.

Pour back up.

Yeah, yeah. Because they believed that the calories were lower in that particular item.

That's fat. Now I wonder if you believed you had 680 calories, would you actually add on a, is that a half a pound of fat? Or like a half a pound?

This is getting into the metabolic effects because it's not just about calories. and we talked about this last time, there are these epic caloric controllers. And I detail all of them in Eat Smarter, I detail them. But we talked about how the type of food itself controls how your body holds on to those calories or burns the calories off. We also go through how your metabolism works, how the process of fat loss actually works. Like where does fat go? We talked about all that last time. But so there's these epic caloric controllers. One of them is your brain. for example. But also beyond that is your beliefs about what you're eating because it's going to change the hormonal cascade. Gosh, it's crazy.

So give me an example. If I believe what I'm eating is high in calories, has lots of sugar, is, you know, bad for me. And I think this is really bad for me.

That's terrible. Yeah, that's terrible.

So don't, when you're eating this and say, this is horrible for me. keep eating the donuts. What should you be doing when you know you have something that's not the healthiest, but you're enjoying the sugar and the cheese.

That's the beautiful part about it. For me, being in this space and why I found, I think, a really great lane where we saw so much success with all the patients that we're working with is because that nothing's off limits. Nothing is, we can't, we get into this giving food morality where something is bad. And if you're eating a food that's bad.

Oh, man.

What does that say about you as a person? Ah, so I'm eating this bad food, I must be bad.

Oh man, I can't control myself eating this.

We get into these really complex psychological shaming ourselves. Yeah, so when you're gonna eat the.

Best thing, when you're gonna eat the not optimal foods.

Just enjoy it.

Just enjoy it.

Enjoy it.

I'm gonna enjoy this, I'm gonna have fun, taste good.

The best time. The best time to eat something that we would consider like a treat or like, you know, we'll just say pizza or ice cream or cake or donut. Yeah.

It's when?

It's when we're feeling good. But we tend to do it when we're feeling bad. Ah, it's so true.

It's when something's not going well in a relationship. It tends to be something at work where like, ah, I just wanna.

It tends to compound the issue, you know, but also they can be, if it's done with intentionality, it can be a part of the healing process. that's the thing too, because again, we get so black and white with stuff like, you know, you shouldn't be doing this, shouldn't be doing that. It makes us humans, we don't like rules in a sense. Like it makes us want to rebel against the thing, you know? And so it can be a part of the process, but we have to maintain integrity because, for example, carbohydrates, it's really interesting that, and I actually did a masterclass on this on my show recently talking about natural, clinically proven ways to increase serotonin production in our body. and so serotonin is a, it's a dual hormone and neurotransmitter. So it has multiple impacts on our endocrine system and on our nervous system. But serotonin is noted to be like this feel-good vibe to it. Like when serotonin is optimized, like a lot of antidepressants target serotonin. Okay. Selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors. But it's not making you produce more, it's just trying to reduce the metabolism of it so it stays in your system. longer in a sense. That's a whole other thing. So bottom line is this. Carbohydrates actually increase serotonin levels.

Makes you feel better.

In a sense. Now, this isn't 100% true across the board, but it's seen in peer-reviewed evidence that having a little whack of some carbohydrates can actually increase serotonin.

Little French fries, little, you know.

Yeah, make you feel get a little bit ahead of feeling good. So, but we have to put that in its proper place. We've all experienced this, but we think it's the sugar high. It's not just that, it's what it does to your neurochemistry. It's what it does to your hormones.

That's really it's what carbs do to your hormones.

Well, it depends on the type of carbs. The quality of carbs.

Yeah, you know what I mean? And what time of day and everything.

Yeah, so let's be clear. I mean, doesn't your brain run on carbs?

Like, doesn't it run on sugar and carbs?

So this goes back to, and I think this is an important place for us to to get here is that the brain, as I mentioned, the blood-brain barrier has a tremendous amount. I think about the blood-brain barrier being like a massively complex toll booth. And at each of the tolls, there's like the best security guard in the world, like Wayne the Rock Johnson or like whoever people want to put in their mind. Maybe somebody really tough, maybe I don't know, the Hulkster.

Right.

You know, I've been watching these A&E. Have you seen any of these?

I've heard they're amazing. The wrestling documentaries, I gotta watch so maybe it's macho man.

Yeah.

Maybe he's at the toll booth, but he's, they're only allowing certain things into the brain's very exclusive area. Sugar has speed passes to get into the brain. As I mentioned, Harvard researchers have affirmed your brain will gladly confiscate half of the sugar you consume in a meal.

All right.

Now, with that said, what is the blood-brain barrier? How does this play into the inflammation? Cold complex. So the blood-brain barrier, it is something that is basically around the blood vessels. It's made from endothelial cells. So very similar to our cardiovascular system. All right, so we have the endothelial cells. But the difference with the blood-brain barrier endothelium is that it is massively higher in mitochondria. So these are these energy power plants in all of our cells that are kicking off ATP. All right, so these are like the metabolic nuclear power plants in ourselves, right? So your blood-brain barrier has a tremendous amount of mitochondria. That's another reason it's so hungry for energy too. To protect your brain, it's running on a lot of energy, it's taking the energy to do that. So we've got the blood-brain barrier, but the blood-brain barrier is one of the major issues that's getting targeted and broken down by the way that we eat today. So now stuff is getting into the brain that shouldn't be there.

Really?

So now the question is, what is causing the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier? I'll give you a few of those things. Yes. And creating more inflammation in the brain. One of them, as we already talked about, is sugar. Rampant amounts of sugar. And I don't, I want to be clear, I'm not trying to demonize sugar. And some people might be like, you, should demonize it. It's a part of our culture. And we don't want to make it so that something is inherently terrible in this treacherous thing. and something else other than is the best thing, all right? So we know that sugar is not ideal for human consumption, this heavily refined, processed thing. We know that, okay? That we can look at things as good and not so good. It's not so good, all right? Now, with that said, the amount of sugar that we're consuming, it can actually kind of create this insulin resistance taking place in the brain, like I mentioned before. and create neuroinflammation and break down all surrounding tissues. So, and also cause a big fit for the microglial cells in the brain, the brain's immune system. So what takes place is it's even systemic. So diabetes with the rest of our body can cause also offshooting insulin resistance in the brain as well. But the brain itself, our neurons can begin to become insulin resistant. So now we've got this sugar just kind of roaming free in the brain and tearing up stuff. All right, so that's a big, big problem. So sugar, number one. Number two, alcohol.

Yep.

All right, now again... Man, you're gonna.

Upset a lot of people.

I'm not saying people can't drink, but we just have to be aware of this, that specifically, and there's a lot of peer-reviewed evidence on this now, alcohol is a known neurotoxin.

Right.

And so what it does is it is able to actually cross the blood-brain barrier. It's one of those things that can cross the blood-brain barrier, which a lot of stuff can't get into the brain. It's able to cross the blood-brain barrier. And one of the first things that happens though is the release of endorphins. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel good. So we know that alcohol is a well-established neurotoxin, but we don't see it like that. It's socially acceptable. Very socially acceptable. A significant amount of people actually pass away each year from alcohol poisoning. And they can be perfectly healthy and just have a little bit too much. And it can affect the parts of the brain that are responsible for breathing, that are responsible for beating your heart. These are some of the ways that we can die from alcohol poisoning. Now, it's very unlikely, it's highly unlikely that that will happen, but we just got to keep this in place. And as a matter of fact, this was published in the BMJ, one of the most prestigious journals, the British Medical Journal. They found that even moderate drinking can have these very similar effects to accelerating brain shrinkage.

Well, this is what Dr. Daniel Amen has in his brain scans that I think there was 80,000 brain scan and a test, don't quote me on that, but that's what I remember, where it's like he showed the brains without alcohol and with, and I think all of them were smaller, I think, or something like that. Some are way worse than others with moderate alcohol. Maybe it's like once or twice a week, one or two glasses a week or something, a shrinkage of the brain. And I'm going to find the exact stat of what that is. But, I mean, it's like if we know this information, why do we keep doing it to ourselves? And maybe we don't know the information and that's why we just think it's socially acceptable and we're going to be with our friends, we're going to have drinks and one turns into three, turns into five and then we can't wake up the next morning. But why do we do it over and over again? I've never been drunk in my life. And I'm not saying you're, you know, I have nothing against people drinking. But if it's hurting the brain, if you're doing it consistently more than once or twice a week, if you know it's going to hurt your brain, why continue to do it?

Yeah. That's a great, you just brought it up, which is, I don't think most folks actually know. We don't know on, we might know on a superficial level.

Right.

But we haven't had the same amount of education in these things where it's a part of the culture as much as ignoring health. We're just in an unhealthy state, period. So in this study, they actually used MRIs and uncovered that even moderate drinking over long term causes significant brain shrinkage, specifically the hippocampus, which is the memory center of the brain. Now, it appears that the amount of shrinkage in the study appears to be directly related to how much a person drinks.

So if you drink once a week, you should be fine.

Yeah, even a couple of times a drink. So moderate drinking would be even that can be get into the category of, we'll say even four to five nights.

A week, one to two servings of.

Alcohol depends on what it is, right? But for some people that might be too much. But for some folks, most of the data what we do know is heavy drinking, right? But even moderate drinking, we've got to be mindful of our brain. Yes.

You've got to take that into consideration. I mean, listen, I'm not here to shame anyone because I you know, probably more sugar than anyone should have in my lifetime. And that's my vice. That's something that it's like, on the.

Weekends, like, I'm spoiled.

You just murdered the cookies. You were just murdering cookies, man. I murdered your cookies. And what? I have, like, seven, eight cookies. I don't know. So it's like, I'll give myself a couple days where it's like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And I don't beat myself up for it because I know the rest of the time I'm not doing that. So some people might do that with alcohol, and that's fine. Sugar is gonna hurt me or create more belly fat. It's gonna be harder to, like, get rid of the belly fat. All these other things, and I'm aware of it. So it's like, how can I continue to optimize? How can I continue to let go of that habit and replace it with something more powerful and empowering for the greater version of myself, for my vision, for my health and happiness? And when I have it, enjoy it. But don't, don't do it too much, you know?

But that's the secret, too, man, is that we also had an abundance of, of real food as well, you know, so. At my place is where you first like, you didn't just, you tried guacamole recently, probably. I did it once before with a.

Friend and I was like, wow.

You just dabbled in it, but man.

Yours, I like, yeah.

And a lot of it, man. You got it, you got that guac in your mouth.

I liked it. And, you know, my wife made it amazing though. I was like, I don't think I.

Can have normal guacamole.

I think it was like, it's gotta.

Be seasoned the right way, you know? It's an East MArter. Is that the way the rest of the world does it? It's so good. I was very, growing up the way that I did, I never, I didn't know what avocados were. Like I had no idea. I was a burger, I was a hot pockets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, and I mean honestly man, you know, I ate fast food every day. As long as I had like $2 at least every day in college. Chicken nuggets. But it also is just in the environment, you know, the closest thing to me was a liquor store, then, you know, Lee's Chicken, Domino's, McDonald's, Burger King. Dairy Queen, Chinese food restaurant. But this was like bulletproof glass. Like, they're not cooking good stuff for you. Arby's, Krispy Kreme's, Jack in the Box. This is all within, like, a mile radius of my house. And I'm. That's not even all of them. Papa John's. I go on and on and on in multiple directions. There wasn't a gym around me. I didn't. That wasn't a part of the environment. You know, being from Ferguson, Missouri, that's where. you know, I spent my entire time, you know, in college and also just even when I got married, you know, we're still in Ferguson, Missouri, Ferguson, Florissant, for the majority of my adult years actually, was in Ferguson, Florissant. And so we just didn't have, we weren't exposed to what health looked like. The first time when I found out that Whole Foods existed, like it's so.

Far away from me, but there was only one in all of St. Louis, by the way.

Now you live like three blocks from one. You could, in LA, you can literally throw a rock and hit a whole food. I know. I mean, it's crazy. I'm not used to this. It's amazing. I'm just, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's upgrading. But the thing is also we can get this conversation of being fashionable and being about real health because there are some, definitely some challenges on what real health is here in this city as well. Sure, sure.

So.

But anyways, that's a, that's a little sidebar. So sugar, alcohol, which is a neurotoxin. What's another thing that increases neuroinflammation.

Another one, and this is really interesting, and this is very timely for this, what I was actually going to lead into was right now being aware of what real health is in the prevention and susceptibility to viral infections. Viruses can damage and break down the blood-brain barrier, create inflammation in the brain. I mean, a virus.

Listen to this.

So this was published in the peer review journal Trends in Microbiology, found that viruses can directly disrupt and damage the blood-brain barrier. But here's what I wanted to share with you, and this is new, I just, I'm sharing this for the first time. This was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, and they found that there's a troubling discovery recently that SARS-CoV-2 is able to interact with the blood-brain.

Barrier and enter the brain itself. What does that mean?

How do you get out of the brain? That's the thing. once it gets in there, it doesn't even matter. Like, what is, what are the downstream effects of that? So this, this virus is able to make its way to basically Traverse the blood-brain barrier somehow. Maybe the blood-brain. And this is for me, I always think of a meta perspective. Like, who are this, what are the samples?

Yeah.

Right.

What is the state of health of the person? What is their blood-brain barrier health? How is it able to Traverse the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain? Or is it just this, this virus is this particularly nepharious, you know what I mean? And so the question is, you know, what do we do about this in defense? We have to be as healthy as possible. We know that even though the marketing around this is that this particular virus is indiscriminately hurting people, but I think maybe we shared this when I talked with you last, I'm not sure, but I think it's an important point. You know, I've got many family member and friends who are in the healthcare industry and even working on the front lines.

And.

We tend to think that, of course, number one, they're going to be hardest hit. It would be obvious if you think about it.

They're around it all day long.

Right.

And these are just absolutely amazing folks. However, what folks don't realize, and we can maybe put the link to this in the show notes for people, because this is what I do. I'm a research scientist, almost 20 years in this space. If you go to the CDC site and you look at who is actually being affected, because With healthcare workers, it is the biggest vocation being affected. If we're talking about job for job by SARS-CoV-2. But what's not shared and what's on the CDC site is that nine out of 10 of the healthcare workers hospitalized with COVID-19 had at least one pre-existing chronic disease. Ooh. It's not two out of 10. It's not five out of 10.

Nine out of 10.

Nine out of 10 had a pre-existing chronic disease. At least one.

Wow.

So it's not indiscriminate, okay? Because we've got, at this point, people have got the PPE. There's still a susceptibility. And the other part is about 75% of them were clinically obese. And it's right there. The CDC is where people, if you post anything, talk about it's getting directed to the CDC, but most people are not analyzing the data on the CDC.

I love it.

I love it. But also it's highlighting again the thing that's not getting addressed, which is Let's get our citizens healthier. When are we going to talk about helping to reduce this epidemic, these multiple epidemics, pandemics, is epidemic expanded kind of multiple places?

What is the epidemic? Is it neuroinflammation? Is it obesity? What is the main causes of your mind that is hurting us?

We have an epidemic of chronic disease, period. Chronic disease. We have epidemics of, for example, an average of 630,000 people die from heart disease every year. United States.

600,000?

630,000.

Die from a heart disease.

Heart disease.

And what causes heart disease? Stress, obesity, neuroinflammation, what else?

It's a complex disease. It's the number one killer. But here recently, and this is a, this is the unfortunate thing is that this is a footnote. It's not even talked about. 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 was the headline, almost 700,000 people died from heart disease. It jumped up significantly. Really?

Because of the stress.

Because of all things. All of it. Absolutely. Stress, disconnection from, you know, family. We're eating worse than we ever have prior to the pandemic. Because I was there, I was analyzing the numbers right out the gate. The first couple of months, I was looking at processed food companies. I was looking at their profits. Oh, they're probably spying. One of the big ones was about to go out of business. And then they're filing for bankruptcy. COVID saved us. Gyms closed, people weren't working out.

People weren't sitting around home, you're getting.

Postmates or you're getting Uber Eats or whatever it is to live to another day. Far worse. We are now far sicker and more susceptible to viral infections than when it all started. Because we still have not focused on health and we can do all the superficial treatments. We can do the distancing, we can do fill in the blank. But we also, because we were in fear, because people were so influenced by what the experts were saying. We could have also said, this is an important time for you to really make sure that you are getting your sleep because your sleep is a primary controller of your immune system. Even with medical interventions and people taking an array of drugs, whatever type of drug they might be, whether it's a oral medication, injectable, and their ability to actually prevent the disease dramatically goes down when people when they're sleep deprived. When they're sleep deprived. Why? Because your immune system is largely regulated. The vast majority of our immune system is taking place is located in our gut, for example. And one of the things that we've noticed is that there's even a changing of the guard that takes place with our microbiome, even as the day goes on. The microbiome is so easily influenced by small things. I mean, if you sneeze, like your microbiome is going to make a shift, you know, but When we're sleep deprived, there are some really negative things that take place. And one of the studies that I actually mentioned is they took test subjects and they wanted to see what would happen when they just cross a bunch of time zones and see what would happen with their microbiome. And so they took stool samples, you know, had them poop in a little nacho basket. That's how we do it. We could send you one in the mail. You could send it in and get a stool sample done. but they took stool samples and they analyzed their microbiome cascade. Because one of the things that we know today is that there's a microbiome cascade that's associated with obesity, insulin resistant. Interesting. So when people in my clinical practice, they can get a stool sample done, I can get the report, I can have a high probability of knowing what their body composition is just based off their bacteria cascade, whether or not they're obese. And so we know this now. And so what they did was, and these are healthy test subjects, and then they have them cross a bunch of time zones and they retest them. So it was like a 10-hour time difference. And they found that the bacteria basically get this kind of very strange jet lag. And their bacteria cascade started to shift more towards one that's associated with obesity and insulin resistance just in a day.

By traveling across time zones.

Just in one day.

So what should we do when he travels?

Because also, I didn't mention this, their sleep is disrupted as well.

They're not sleeping because of that.

Right, yeah. So their sleep is disrupted as a result. But the good news is just by them getting back onto a routine within a couple of days it normalized. So we can get better, but we know how quickly things can go wrong. And this is another big part of this equation because there was a lot of pushback happening in the beginning, even with many of my friends and colleagues who are just at the top level of the health space of like, well, you know, we just have to do these superficial things because we can't get people healthier overnight. And here we are, we're going on two years here soon. All right, we're about a year, we're over a year and a half into this and the conversation has not shifted to getting what are some of the clinically proven things, simple things people can do to fortify their immune system and help to reduce their risk of chronic diseases because we know that is the number one thing.

What are those?

The number one risk?

What are those? Respecting sleep, healthier foods, fasting, intermittent fasting. I'm giving you an example.

More water, what's the-- Based off peer-reviewed evidence. So researchers at Appalachian State University found that simply just going for a short walk in nature or-- Instantly, just anywhere. Just go for a 20, 30-minute walk boosts your immune parameters, most notably for neutrophils and also natural killer cells. Wow.

Right?

It's a temporary boost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what if you're doing this consistently? America, make sure that you, you know, you wash your hands socially distance, but also make sure you get in your 20 minute walk today, America.

Right.

We can create an absolute transformation in our culture because people will do it.

Get 1000 steps, right? Then screw 10,000, get 1000 steps in, right? Something.

If this is framed as a way to help you to defend your body from this nefarious condition, which it is. We know that the biggest susceptibility, I'll share this with you as well. And this again, it's on the CDC site. 90, over 95% of the people who passed away with SARS-CoV-2 on the death certificate had an average of four pre-existing chronic diseases and or comorbidities.

Really? 95%.

Not over 95%.

Had an average of four pre-existing conditions.

Comorbidities. So it's not just comorbidity. So this is, it could be they have SARS-CoV-2 but then they also have influenza. They have SARS-CoV-2 but they also have pneumonia.

Right?

So these are all comorbidities. Gotcha. But we know that at least one pre-existing chronic disease across the board is included in that. Now, what about the chronic disease? What we focus on though, unfortunately, is.

Just the people that are quote, perfectly healthy. Right. So less than five percent.

And showcasing these people and be like, look, this person died too. And so we don't talk about the underlying issue, which is again, getting people healthier. But here's the thing too, which the perfectly healthy aspect, that's all still going to be debatable because you and I can be as healthy as we want to be. If we are in a state where we're really stressed, we're in fear, we are in a position where we are sleep deprived temporarily, our immune system can absolutely get trampled, heightened or whatever. It's going to increase our risk our susceptibility to viral infection.

This is what I was mentioning to you about. When I was a kid growing up, my dad wouldn't allow us to, he would turn the TV or he would mute it if there was ever medical commercials on. There was ever drug commercial, things like that, or alcohol. He actually would mute or turn the channel so that we wouldn't be susceptible to all the different messaging of the medical industry if you're feeling this, if you're feeling this, you need X, Y, and Z medicine. And he really believed that that was causing a lot more fear in us kids when we would consume and watch this commercial, this messaging, this influence over and over. Because there's pretty much every other commercial was like a drug commercial, from what I remember. Because he was always turning it off. He was always turning the channel because he wouldn't want us to be consumed by fear. What about the chronic disease, if that's even considered that, of fear in the country and in the world? You know, we could be as healthy as possible, but if you have fear in your mind consistently thinking, I'm going to get this or I'm going to protect myself, what about eliminating fear? How do we do that?

I love you. This is why, like, this is going to be right. Listen, listen, I have not shared this yet. This is from the CDC. And so they were looking at Almost 5 million, 4,889,447 hospitalized adults and 540,667 patients with COVID-19, of whom 95% had at least one underlying medical condition. But let me tell you the strongest risk factor for death when they actually contracted the virus. the strongest risk factors for death, and this is according to the CDC, and these for folks listening and even watching, some of this stuff is seeing is believing. So we've got to put this in the show notes for people to be able to go.

You can see the actual notes from the study.

You can see the study.

Yeah.

The strongest risk factor for death, number one was obesity, which we've already talked about. Number two was anxiety and fear-related disorders. Oh, gosh. Number three was diabetes with complications.

Oh my gosh. This is fear anxiety related issues. Wow. That was the number two reason for death.

Number two.

Based on the CDC.

Number two, risk factor. Risk factor. Associated with death.

Oh wow, risk factor. Okay, man. And how much of that has to do with the brain and mindset?

Nobody's talking about this. What happened during the past year and a half? Oh my gosh. Has our fear levels gone up or down?

In general, up.

Exponentially. Exponentially. And this gets into the place of ethical information with the media. And some folks might have seen some of the exposés done on some of the news organizations getting caught on a hot mic, for example, and admitting that.

They'Re putting the CNN, I think, or something.

I shared that. I was like the first person I packaged it up. I didn't do the report though. created like this viral thing because I did some of the science behind what was happening as well. So they admitted to putting up the technical director.

Right?

Yeah, the death toll ticker on their taking human lives and turning it into a death toll.

Anxiety, you see that going up like every moment.

He admitted to doing it because it drives fear and it keeps people watching. Oh my god. He admitted it with his own mouth, you know? And so, and also one of the things I put into the culture very early on I also had the counterbalancing thing, which is like, we can, I want to be informed, but we don't have to be inundated. Also share the recoveries.

Right.

Let's have a recovery ticker. Let's have a people who are, you know, who have asymptomatic, who might have contracted the virus, but they're not sick and they're okay. Their immune system did what it's supposed to do. Let's have that ticker as well. And I put that in the culture. And the person who was capturing the data, she asked him that, like, why.

Don'T you have a recovery ticker as well?

He's like, he thought about it for a minute. He was like, well, that's not scary.

That's not scary. People won't watch. We need to make money.

That's it.

We're trying to get eyeballs.

If we get down to what it's really all about and the corporate interest now, because news isn't news anymore, it's entertainment. And a lot of folks don't realize that nearly every, practically every major news station shares at least one board member with a pharmaceutical company.

It's crazy.

And the pharmaceutical industry invest billions, billions of dollars every single year into media. Billions of dollars. What are they going to do? Are they going to recommend, have me on, which I've been on all the major news networks, but people aren't tuning in for that. They're not tuning in to hear me talk about drinking water and getting sleep. Man. You know what I mean? But I still do that stuff just to plant some seeds, but truly people are tuning in to be inundated with fear. catch the sports and the weather. And he also shared that they also 90% of the content that they do is around fear, fear-based content, but then they have a one moment story. He says like at the end, and he said this was with his words, he was like to be like a little bit of ice cream at the.

End of the pain.

Oh my gosh. To help alleviate the pain, but we're about to hit you with more of it.

Oh, and this is the thing, it's why I don't watch news. I don't watch the news. I might flip it on for a moment to be like, okay, what actually happened here, but I can't consume it for hours. Otherwise it just makes me feel sick. It makes me feel sad, depressed, frustrated. And I think I'd rather be informed and educated and be able to take action on what I need to do personally in my life or if there's a cause I need to support from a place of mission and purpose and intention as opposed to reaction, fear, anger and reaction. And I think a lot of people have responded with reacting out of a place of fear as opposed to responding from a place of mission, love, solutions, community. And I think if we can start to shift that, we'll just feel better all in all.

This is all really pointing to one of the most important takeaways from this conversation, really just in our world today, period, is how we might think that we're controlling the way that we think. We might think that we are making decisions based on logic. But we have very primal programming as well. And we're very influenced by the world around us. We're hardwired because it's a defensive mechanism. It's helping us to get to this point. We have to be aware of threats. But the way that we live today, it's not normal threats. We're not in threat of starvation, necessity in our culture. We're not in, we're not, we don't have to worry about a tiger out there. What it really is, it's a lot of manufactured fear. Not to say that there aren't real world threats. Right. But the vast majority of people are safe.

Safe.

But you would never know that if you ever turned on the news. And so, now here's the problem is that when we're exposed to these things, we take it with us. This was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, and people were instructed to watch just 15 minutes of the news. and they were actually tracking their mood disturbances, tracking their metrics, and they ended up having increased levels of anxiety and mood disturbances. But that's nothing. Here it is. The most shocking part is even after distracting them with another activity, after watching the news, they were not able to return to their baseline levels of mood. They picked up that anxiety, the disturbance, and they took it with them. Wow. that's the thing that we don't really think about is that it really does, especially if it gets deep driven, it starts to change our chemistry, it changes our biology, and it also can change our brain because we're thinking thoughts when we're seeing that stuff. How thinking and things, thoughts really get created is it's like taking something that you don't know and connecting it to something that you do know. So a fear thought, a strong fear, It's going to connect with a lot of other fear instances that you have already in your filing cabinet.

Other fears.

It's going to stack. It's going to start stacking. And this is, we tend to see this happen like we play this out in relationship context, you know, like if you get into it about one thing, it gets tied to all the other problems that you have with the person.

Right.

You know, like it's this, it's one of the, but we can use that for our good as well in understanding how we learn stuff. And even how I teach, I like to take something that people might be aware of and then connect it something that is new. So in Eat Smarter, I take people through and teaching them how the fat loss process works by giving an analogy of going to the movies. You know what I mean? But on the other side, if we're not aware that this is taking place, that we're getting this exposure of fear, it's changing our neurochemistry and our perception of everything. It's coloring the way that we see the world and it's connecting to all the other fears that we have, not all the other fears, but other fears. especially when we're talking about imminent death, you know, for, you know, what the media perceives, the reality is very different. Now, this is something that we definitely need to be aware of, be cautious of, because even the origin of it is complicated. Like, we're still, there was a time where even if you talked about the origin being other than what was disseminated in the beginning, people were getting censored and all this crazy stuff, and we're not having logical, rational conversations. conversations about science. That's not science. Science is open. Science is constantly looking. And this is the key. This is going to sound absolutely nuts. And I. A big reason why I feel that I'm in this space at this level is because I'm willing to be wrong. Like, I'm coming into it. Actually, I'm coming into. You're wrong. Yes. I know that I have a cognitive bias. I know that I have cognitive biases towards what humans have done the longest. and so if anything comes up against that, right? So for me, it's just like, okay, well humans have been eating real whole foods for, you know, countless, you know, centuries and, you know, thousands of years. And now we got a Twinkie, right? So just like, well, maybe the Twinkie for me, my cognitive bias is that Twinkie is probably not ideal, but I could be wrong. And I'm open because this Twinkie might have unlocked some genetic, whatever, dormant thing where now we're like, I don't know, we can teleport or something. I'm open to being wrong, but my bias is there. But I have to come into it with my bias and look for the ways that I'm wrong. It's hard to do, but it's like a muscle. Eventually you get to a place where, you know, it's beautiful. It's like a joyous thing. And also, when you embrace that, funny enough, like you don't end up being wrong as often. because you're taking a meta perspective, you're looking at all the pieces. And so what I tend to share from is like, what does the majority of evidence say? And this is a big thing too. And I'm glad I get to talk to you about this and share this. Just about every single thing you can find that has peer-reviewed evidence on it.

You can find something that says the opposite. Sure. It's just like a documentary that shows like veganism is the way. And then it's like, well, carnivores are only eating meat and liver is the way.

You know, it's like there's science on proof.

And evidence on both sides of the extreme.

And each person, each front person for it is going to believe wholeheartedly that their way is the right way.

They're going to find the evidence that backs it.

And oftentimes they're not trying to be hurtful or nefarious. That's the thing we have to come into with a little bit more compassion for our teachers as well. And I know a lot of these guys, these are my friends and colleagues, but there's degrees of that, by the way, but also, They've seen the majority of time they've seen incredible results with patients they've worked with and they're trying to save lives and it might sound absolutely harebrained crazy to these other people over here, but that's where they're often coming from it from coming from that place. Not to say that's 100% true, but here's the thing. I know that there's also a lot of people that are doing their thing and they're not getting the results that the other people are getting. And this is because we're all so unique. There is no one human diet. The only thing that we know for certain is a human food is breast milk. Everything else we're just experimenting with. You know what I mean? And even, oh, this is a good segue actually because people are so, we're inundated with these ideas, for example, like saturated fat being so terrible for you. Human breast milk, there's a massive amount of saturated fat in breast milk. It could be upwards of 30 to 50% saturated fat. for building that baby's brain. Now as we get older, our gates for saturated fat from our food, like I said, we have the blood-brain barrier, the gates that allow unsaturated fat actually go down. But also breast milk has a significant amount of cholesterol also. And when there's a disruption with cholesterol synthesis for babies from their nutrition, this can lead to long-term degenerative neurological disorders. Cholesterol is incredibly important. So this gets into this conversation of these three primary fats that the brain is made of that I don't think a lot of people know. Three fats. Yeah. So we've been talking about inflammation, but the underlying thing is really looking at what are the sustainable materials that don't allow for fires to take place in the first place.

So three good fats to help the problem.

Three fats. These are three types of structural fats I'm going to share with you.

That, okay.

This is different from dietary fats specifically, but we can get the foundational elements from our dietary fats.

Got it.

So the human brain itself is primarily water, which we got to come back and talk about this right after. It's upwards of 79% water, 80% water potentially. It's the most water dominant organ next to your lungs, all right? It is a water-based organ.

All right?

So water really matters. But if the dry weight of the brain, all right? So water excluded, the brain is suffering of about 60% fat.

All right?

We are fat heads, all right? But what's, and some people realize this, a lot of people who are versed in health and passionate about health know this already. But what people don't typically know, a very small amount of people know, what are those three fats? The number one, these are not in any particular order, but there are three. The first one I'm going to share is phospholipids.

Okay.

Phospholipids is one of the primary structural fats that the human brain is made of. Phospholipids give our brain cells shape, they give our brain cells strength, they give our brain cells elasticity. And these are very important characteristics. We want our brain cells to be be strong and robust, to be able to handle damage, also to be able to generate and support a lot of energy. We want them to be, we want them to have an adequate shape to allow the functions to happen. We don't want brain cells like our brain cells might have, we've got like the glial, these are astrocytes or something. Maybe we can talk about this in a minute, but we've got some cells in the brain that might look like this star shape, but then this brain cell over here is like, I don't know, looking like an M&M and it's just like a peanut M&M. It's just like not matching up to the structure that would create robust health. And then also the elasticity, we want the brain cells to be adaptable. And so phospholipids help to support something called signal transduction, which is the brain cells being able to talk to each other, which is kind of important. So phospholipids. Now phospholipids, what are the foods that support? Sure, sure. I'll share that, but I want to share one specific thing because dietarily speaking, bringing in from our diet phospholipids, there's a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study and I map it out in Eat Smarter. This is like a gold standard of clinical trials because we got a specific implement and we're seeing what happens. Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study found that the inclusion of phospholipids helped to improve attention and reaction time when people were under stress. So they put them under acute stress and phospholipids helped them to perform better. So they had, they noted subjectively also reduced participation anxiety, right, with the inclusion of phospholipids. All right. So this is some really cool stuff. So, but these are structural fats that the brain is actually made of. Where do we get them? Phospholipids are made primarily out of omega-3 DHA and EPA. All right. and I'll talk about that in a second. But we can also get them directly from certain foods. You're going to find them in fatty fish, you're going to find them in egg yolks, you're going to find them in oats, you're going to find them in foods like spirulina, you're going to find them in, you know, fatty cuts of just different fatty type foods as well. So fatty cuts of things like beef, for example, if it's grass fed, and I don't want to get into a place of like what's better, you know, a plant version or animal version. I just want, I'm just sharing where you can find these phospholipids.

Nuts as well or no?

Yeah, certain nuts, also soybeans and for some people like soy is gonna be like the absolute joker or Thanos of this situation, you know, just depends on the, I'm just sharing where they are and please understand even with the conversation soy. I did a full, like, description and breakdown of the science around soy in the book. What we've done with soy is not what's been done traditionally. You know, people never ate soy dogs, soy ice cream, soy sandwich slices, soy nuggets, and like, all of that. All of this heavily refined processed soy is more used in cultures, you know, if you look at Okinawa, for example, you know, as a little bit more of a condiment. in a sense, you know, like used to make various things. But oftentimes also it was fermented whenever it was used primarily too. So that's a whole other conversation. So phospholipids is one. Phospholipids. But these are some dietary sources you can directly get phospholipids. But as I mentioned, they're primarily made of EPA and DHA. These are two types, docosahexaenoic acid and then eicosapentaenoic acid. So DHA and EPA. Okay, cool. And so, DHA and EPA are two of the most important. These are two of the most important. Like today, I want people to proactively get yourself an EPA and DHA supplement, specifically DHA.

It's not important for you.

The reason for this, dude, listen to this. And again, working with Daniel Amen over the years and gleaning some of this information, but the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had folks who include some DHA supplementation. Just within a matter of months, they dramatically improved their memory, explicit memory, so like remembering events and things like that. And also, they were able to improve their reaction time just by increasing the DHA. Now, here's the other part. In the journal Neurology, they used MRIs to actually look at the brain and they found that people who had the lowest intake of DHA and EPA had the highest rate of brain shrinkage.

Oh, man.

All right. what they found the number is less than four grams a day was associated with accelerated brain shrinkage. Okay, six grams and up had the most shrink proof brains. So the EPA, specifically. So where do you get that? Fatty fish, salmon, salmon roe, but also with phospholipid, same thing, eggs, egg yolks.

Yeah.

And I learned this from Lisa Mosconi, neuroscientist. Again, I love her because she's looking at the brain. and not just like guessing, but she shared with me that in the egg yolk itself, there's 10,000 milligrams of phospholipids per 100 gram of product. It's the most power-packed source of phospholipids. But then also she shared with me that DHA and EPA, you're going to find far more in the fish eggs than in the fish itself.

Caviar.

Caviar, salmon roe. So it's not, again, this is not to say to go out and drop a heavy buck on some caviar and be like, I don't know, lifestyles of the rich and famous. But for some people, that might be the thing. That's the phospholipids.

What's number two? So EPA, DHA.

So fatty fish, salmon, mackerel, sardines. Gotcha.

We've got. Well, EPA, DHA is two.

Right.

And phospholipids too.

I thought it was one. Okay, so one.

DHA and EPA make phospholipids. Gotcha, gotcha. We can also get that from our diet. Okay, cool. so, and I'll just rattle off a couple of other ones for the phospholipids, because it's important. Like, also for folks that are vegan, we've got to include everybody. Yes. So from there, most of the peer-reviewed studies are done using fish oil. Now, that's a. There's a little bit of controversy there, but I just want to make that clear that most of these studies are done using fish oil. So we can also, from here, Krill oil. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah.

K-R-I-L-L Krill oil. that might be a viable option for folks that might be on that borderline with vegetarian. And it's a microscopic, keyword microscopic shrimp. This is what whales are consuming, for example, to create their massive brains. But the reason krill oil can be so remarkable is that it's high in astaxanthin, which helps protect the DHA and EPA and keep it from oxidizing. So it's really bioavailable and we have peer-reviewed evidence that it works. the step from there that's truly vegan is an algae oil. So at minimum, I want folks to get that like today. Because again, if you're not getting in DHA and EPA, your brain is going to have accelerated shrinkage.

Oh man.

All right. It is that important for the structural integrity of our brain.

Got it.

When I was running my clinical practice, I knew how important omega-3s were. We'll just say 15 years. 15 years ago, people are coming in. I'm getting everybody on chia seed oil, flax seed oil, hemp seed oil. I'm getting, like, you got to get these Omega-3s in, everybody. I was missing part of the story. That is ALA. It's not DHA and EPA. It's a. The plant version does not. It's not the structural components of the brain. Okay. But it's so important. Your brain can. Your body can convert some ALA into EPA and DHA, but you can lose upwards of 90, 95. the conversion process. So you're going to have to be shoveling chia seeds and hemp seeds all day to meet your needs and it's just not viable. Yeah, yeah, okay. So this is why algae oil is so important. And of course, I love chia seeds and flax seeds, all the stuff you can add that stuff in, but don't be mistaken that it's the same thing as DHA. Okay. Because it's not. So that's number one is these phospholipids and number two I want to share with everybody is something called sphingolipids. How do you spell that? That's S-P-H-I-N-G-O-L-I-P-I-D-S. Okay. So it's the second part of the second fatty part of the cell.

Second type of primary fats found in the human brain.

Okay. So we've got phospholipids, sphingolipids. Sphingolipids really function as building blocks for our cell membranes. Okay. So this is the membrane around all of our cells. cells. And by the way, this isn't just for our brain. It's also our entire physiology. These are important, but primarily for the brain, especially for the brain. Let me say that. So the sellman brain, if we go back to like biology class, which I hated by the way, all right? I was not passionate about science until I had to figure stuff out for myself. But we're taught that the nucleus is the brain of the cell. All right? This is where all the where all the intelligence is. But working with cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bruce Lipton, who's like the person who really impressed epigenetics into popular culture, he shared with me very early on that in his lab he was just doing, he was removing the nucleus from cells and the cells just keep doing stuff. They keep operating, they do a lot of their same functions without their so-called brain, right? So it's called enucleation. So if that's the brain of the cell, why does the cell not die? If I take your brain out, you're dead. That's it. That's the end of Lewis's story. You know what I mean? So it's not as cut and dry. The membrane, it's brain in the name a little bit, but the membrane has a lot of intelligence and it's working and constantly assessing the environment and sending data to the rest of the body. I mean, the rest of the cell, all the internal mechanisms. so there's a lot of intelligence in that membrane. And that membrane, a big part of that is sphingolipids.

All right. Okay.

So now here's where this plays out. Sphingolipids can literally change the architecture of the cell, of the brain cell. So what that means and why that is important is what it can help. It can adjust the cell so that it can do things a different way. And that's important. Like, what if you need to. What if you have an injury? How does your brain come back? Your brain can find another way. It can adjust because of sphingolipids are a big component of helping to adjust the architecture for the brain cells to still do processes. All right, so that's sphingolipids. The other big role that they play is in actually cancer prevention because they're regulating cell replication. So cells are supposed to replicate to the Hayflick limit is kind of one of the the ways that we look at it. But cancer cells go replicating indefinitely. So, sphingolipids help to regulate and check cell growth and in particular we're talking about in the brain. So, thank you sphingolipids for that. There you go.

Okay.

All right. So, that's the second type. But sphingolipids also help to make oh, dietary sources. Eggs, butter, yogurt. Eggs again, man. Eggs are there again. Cream, beef, funny enough, rice and sweet potatoes as well, have some interesting amounts of sphingolipids. All right, so those are a few sources dietarily. But sphingolipids are used to make something called sphingomyelin. Now this is going to be important for you as an athlete, or what I'm about to talk about now. So sphingomyelin, so myelin is the protective sheath around our nerve transmissions. So what that means is, as we do a behavior, right? So the first time that you throw the handball, right? There's a certain way that you did that and over time you got better and better and became more automatic where you can do it from all these crazy angles. You could do it diving, you could do it behind your, you know, between your legs and all the flossy stuff that you do. But the thing is, over time, more as you're doing the thing, More and more myelin is getting laid down over that nerve transmission, basically insulating it and making it fire faster. So this is how Steph Curry, for example, the first time he's shooting a basketball versus what he can do today, he's laid down more myelin where the nerve transmission is automatic and he can do it from all these different anytime, anywhere. So same thing with swinging a golf club. It's not practice makes perfect, it's practice makes permanent. All right, so the more you're doing this thing, you're laying down more myelin. All right. So it's really, really important for everything, not just for athletic performance, but everything that we do. Sure. Sphingolipids help to make sphingomyelin, but myelin is combined. The sphingomyelin works with the other, the.

Third type of fat that the brain.

Is primarily made of, which is cholesterol.

Wow. All right.

So cholesterol is the third one. Okay. And this is another of the brain. Yes. It's another dirty word, apparently, in Nutrition, unfortunately, because things have become so black and white. But cholesterol is so important for the brain that the brain actually makes it itself. The brain is the most concentrated area of cholesterol anywhere else in our body. About 20% of our cholesterol is located in our brain. It's just making it on demand because it's so important. And cholesterol is actually, if we, for me, I'm like, well, how the hell does the brain do it? If it's making its own cholesterol, how does it do it? It's the astrocytes. I briefly mentioned them earlier. They're these star-shaped glial cells and they can be connected to like 2 million different synapses for different neurons and just they're making some magical stuff happen. But anyways, with these astrocytes, they're one of the places that we believe are primarily making cholesterol for the brain because it's so important. And so obviously building blocks of cholesterol we can get from our food. But as I mentioned, your brain is primarily making it itself. Why does this matter? Last piece is cholesterol is a big component. It's primarily working with your myelin. And if you're not, this is also seen in like MS, for example. There's issues there with the myelin sheath.

Right?

So this can lead to different health issues, but also can improve our performance when we have the building blocks to make these compounds. so I know this was a lot, but just understanding these different three types of fats, how important they are for making up our brain, our brain is made of this stuff, we got to get out of the politics about which food is better than other, what dietary framework, and just look at what have humans been doing the longest? What does our brain require? What are the foundational elements for that? And just focus on what's best for us. Experiment, have fun, share, teach, have a good time and let's get our families healthier.

Oh, man. A lot of information here. And you have even more in your book, Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain and transform your life. Make sure you guys get a few copies of this. There's more in stock now. We as a community, everyone sold out on them quickly. We bought them, so you got to make sure you guys buy a couple more of these. If you want recipes, if you want the research, science, everything. If you want to learn the guacamole that I had and enjoyed for the first time in my life, it's in here. It's amazing. Lots of good stuff in here. So thank you for putting this. We're gonna have to get. You have to give me some of these notes that I can put in the description on YouTube as well so that people have the kind of the footnotes for all this stuff. So I have a lot more questions, but I think this is a lot to digest for people. So we'll leave you guys with this.

Unless there's anything else you wanted to add here for this interview. I mean, the big thing for me is, you know, I'm so grateful for you, man. Like, if people who haven't had the chance to actually hang out with you and to, you know, to eat guacamole together, like, you are. You are the real deal, man. Thank you.

Thank you.

A great human being, you know, with the biggest heart. And the thing that I admire most about you is that, you know, you're passionate about learning and connecting. You are the most incredible connector of humans that I've ever met as well. so many great people in my life because of you. And being here with you today, for me, it's just a big part of the mission that we both have, which is to get people feeling empowered.

Absolutely.

Right now, when there's so much information that is disempowering and help to not just balance it out, but to create a tipping point to where we can really become healthier as a culture where it's not the exception, it's the rule. And I believe that we can do that in our lifetime. It starts with us. Not the education is one thing, but it's finding a way to fall in love with it. Finding that thing that connects with you. It might be through food, that might be a bridge, it might be through dance, it might be through handball, it might be through, you know, it might be through sleep. Maybe you got a passion, like you found a passion for sleep. But we've got to find a bridge to get our citizens healthier because truly, right now we're the sickest society in recent human history. And we're also with all of our advances, this should not be the case, you know, but what it really is, is just creating a bridge for people to get educated, to feel empowered, and to make this the norm. So I just want to ask everybody to make sure that they, you know, take something and apply it. We don't want to just be human filing cabinets.

Right.

And also share what you learn with somebody else, you know, look out for somebody, give them a word of encouragement.

We can use that more than ever today. Absolutely. And I think the greatest thing you can do is be the example of the people around you. by setting the example for yourself, how you show up, how you change your habits, how you change the way you think, the way you talk, the way you take care of your health, the food choices, the activities you take on. Doing that will inspire people around you to start asking questions, Hey, you look like your energy is different, you're more magnetic. So start attracting people by your example. I think that's a great way and make this the standard, not, you know, what is it, 60-70% is obese right now? It's like, how do we, Let's get that to 50% and then let's get it even more. That would be incredible if we could reverse this, I guess this, what is this? What do you call this? An epidemic?

Multiple epidemics under one umbrella.

Chronic diseases, obesity, fear, all this stuff, right? It's just like, if we can reverse some of these things.

We're so much better than this. We are. We're so much bigger than this. We are.

But we have to realize it. Is it just laziness, you think? I feel like we know Eat better. Like, don't eat this, we should eat this, workout. I feel like people understand that. Is it, do you think it's laziness?

Isn't that word is very inflammatory. Even that word is inflammatory because absolutely can be a component. But where does this come from? You know, it's the low energy from the way that we eat. It's the low energy from the lack of movement. It's the low energy from the messages we're taking in. You know, there's so much right now that is unfortunately designed to keep us in that low energy state. You know, we people know about, you know, this there's been big movements now towards having a better relationship with social media, you know, this film like, you know, the social dilemma, for example, and demonstrating how people are behind the scenes working to control you and keep you distracted from being your greatest self. So we can't just say it's this one small thing. It's really a societal issue. Yeah. and we have to, it still goes back to empowerment. Because people, we tend to think that we are making the decision about being on our phone, for example, all day, you know? But in reality, there are forces that are working to keep you separate from your goals.

There are some influences for sure, so you gotta protect your mind, protect your habits and everything. Make sure you guys get a copy of this, get a few copies, give it to some friends, spread the message of health, wellness, all the good stuff, eat smarter. Sean, you shared your three truths in the previous episode. So if you guys want to see Sean's three truths, check it out there. But your final, before I ask your definition of greatness, I want to acknowledge you for constantly showing up, man. You're one of the most dedicated researchers I know in this space. Constantly obsessing over the research, the science, finding the holes and the information out there, and then giving us the answers. So this thing is chalked with pages of cliff notes at the end with all the research as as well, citations and everything. So make sure you guys check this out. Again, appreciate you for always showing up, man, and being a, you know, being a representation of the way your background, the way you look, your attitude, and how you can kind of attract more people to this information as well. So appreciate you. My final question, what's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness is just going off of what you just said, being the model, you being the example, the greatest example that you can give, the greatest way to teach is being it. You know, because when you walk into a room, you are a demonstration, you change that energy in the room that you walk in, as we talked about earlier with that tube Taurus, you know, so being the model and you can help to uplift and bring a light into dark places, you know, and also as we grow ourselves, we become less influenced by the negativity around us as well. well, I know you've noticed that in your evolution too. So you can really become impermeable to a lot of the craziness that's going on. So really work on yourself, build yourself up, become the best version of you, and let that speak and speak values of you before you even step on the scene. That's for me, that's the definition of greatness, is being the model, being the example, and also accepting that you don't have to be perfect in being that example. just be in process. Just be working towards getting better because there's always going to be somebody who is at a more trying place than you are right now. So just being that example because just one person, if you're just five steps ahead of somebody with your health, you can help and reach a hand back and lift that person up.

That's it my man. Make sure you guys get the book, check out the Model Health Show, YouTube, podcast, social media, we'll have a link down below. Sean, my man. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks, man. Love you, bro. 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. 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.