The 5 Signs You're NOT HEALTHY In Life & How To FIX IT! | Mark Hyman & Lewis Howes

Cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit. Diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, the big killers.

Are by sugar and food. This video is brought to you by Policy Genius and I'll share with you more about them in just a minute. There's a lot of sick people, especially in the US.

Yeah.

How many people are sick? Oh, it's terrible. And what do we categorize as sick?

That's a great question.

So what's obese, what's sick, what's...

So at the top level, we have to understand that over the last 40 years, a tsunami has come that we weren't aware was coming, that we weren't prepared for and still haven't grappled with. And that tsunami is chronic disease and food-related illness. In 40 years. In 40 years.

Did we have chronic disease prior to this?

We did, of course we did, but not to the magnitude. We used to have like 5% obesity rates in this country in the early 60s. It's 40% now in most states.

I thought it was like 30, like.

A few years ago. Nope, nobody, nope. It's like 40%. Many states are 40%. and many are just pushing 40. So it's 35 to 40, depending on where you look at it. Like California's probably less, Colorado's less, but Mississippi and Alabama are, you know, 40 plus. So we have six out of every 10 Americans who's got a chronic illness, four out of 10 who have more than one. By 10 years from now, we're gonna have 83 million with three or more chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, dementia, you name it. We are having 11 million people, and this is, I think, a conservative estimate, 11 million people around the world die every year from bad food, from ultra processed food and not enough good food. Now, I think it's more like 50 million when you look at all the related conditions and so forth. It's a staggering number that beats out smoking, war, violence, accidents, you name it, nothing else comes close. Not malaria, TB, AIDS, all that is a fraction, a third of the deaths that are caused by chronic illness and they're mostly preventable and they're mostly caused by food, and they're mostly caused by the ultra processed food that our food system produces en masse. It's the biggest industry on the planet. It's $15 trillion, about 17% of the world's global product, and it is controlled by a few dozen CEOs that are in monopolies around seed production, agrochemicals, fertilizer, processed food companies, It's staggering how the system has sort of just over the last 40 years completely transformed. And I remember like I was in some store or cafe and I saw this picture of Woodstock and I'm looking at the all the sea of people.

And the 60s, right?

69. There wasn't one overweight person. I watched this movie, I think it was called Amazing Grace about Aretha Franklin, African-American church. Now African-Americans, 80% of African-American women are overweight. It is, you know, 80% today. 80%.

Why is that?

Well, because they're targeted by the food industry, because they're in a vicious cycle of economic stress, of social stress, of unfair targeting and manipulation by the food industry. This is well documented by, for example, studies from Yale, where they look at the amount of advertising and targeting to poor and African-American and Hispanic communities. It's staggering. and there was not one overweight person in the sea of African Americans in 1970. And so it literally just happened. I was 11 years old in 1970. And in my lifetime, you see this change. So we have this staggering problem of chronic illness, which people suffer from, as bankrupting people, as bankrupting our country. I mean, think about the amount of economic stress.

We talked about insurance too. so much insurance money that's involved in this too. People are having to go to the doctor so much more probably now because of these issues, right?

Absolutely. And then many people are not adequately covered. So there's a lot of co-pays. I mean, people can have $10,000, $20,000 in co-pays. I had a patient the other day who had diabetes and I fixed his diabetes through food. And he says, I saved $10,000 a year in co-pays for my insulin. Just the drugs. And when you look at the amount on diabetes spent in this country, which is basically one out of every two Americans has pre-diabetes or type to diabetes. One third of Medicare spending is on diabetes. One third of Medicare is on diabetes.

Yes.

Medicare, if it was a company, would be the biggest company in the world, a trillion dollar budget a year. Shut up. Yes. One third of our total federal tax revenue expected to grow to 100% of our mandatory spending by 2048. And in six years, Louis, six years, the Medicare Trust Fund, which is sort of the bank account that we use to Make sure we cover Medicare. It's a little complicated how it works, but the Medicare Trust Fund's gonna be out of money. So that means that we're gonna have to get a trillion dollars a year out of our tax revenue. We're not covering it. Oh my gosh. This is a threat to our economy. It's a threat to our political stability. It's a threat even to national security, those because seven out of 10 kids who apply for the military get rejected. Can't get in. Because they're too fat or unfit. Yes, there's 700 admirals and generals that published a report called Unhealthy and Unprepared. about the threat in our military and national security. And not only that, soldiers are overweight. So we're feeding them crap. They go in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number one reason for medical evacuations was not war injury, was obesity related problems. Yes, 100%.

Obesity related problems. What does that mean?

Like they're- Injury. Like a heart- Injury, injuries from being overweight. Wow. And you can read about this. I didn't make this shit up. Right. In that report, unhealthy and unprepared, just googling. you can read it yourself. Wow. It's staggering. So we have, you know, $22 trillion debt. We have, you know, this threat of chronic disease exploding. It's getting worse and worse. Medicare for all is kind of a silly idea. And so is repealing Obamacare. Now they're going to help the problem unless we figure out how to stop.

People from going into the system in the first place.

Into the system, meaning getting unhealthy.

Yeah. If they don't need medical care, it's cheap, you know. So let's come back to diabetes for a second. Tell me again, the stat on diabetes, how many people have it or are pre-diabetic? and what, I'm uneducated on this. So how many different types of diabetes are there?

Okay.

And how is it caused?

Okay. Okay. So type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Pancreas fails. It's called, it used to be called juvenile diabetes. And you need insulin.

It's just, you need it. You need insulin.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin. You need insulin. To do your pancreas dies because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced.

Keeps, that's the blood. It's not like a gatekeeper.

The glucose into your cells. So it's really important.

So how does that die? What happens? Die from that? I mean, how does the pancreas die? Oh, well, how does it get to that point?

It's an autoimmune, like an autoimmune, you get mouthful of sclerosis or pancreatitis. It's basically your body attacks your pancreas. Is that from eating a lot of bad foods? Well, there's been links to dairy and actually as a driver of type 1 diabetes. Gluten, 29% of people who have type 1 diabetes have celiac that are undiagnosed. So celiac is a big cause of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes. So that's a very small number of people. Very few. One out of two Americans have what we call type 2 diabetes. We used to call it adult onset, except now kids as young as three are getting type 2 diabetes from drinking soda from the crib. Oh my gosh. I was working in when I was a resident in an urgent care center and this woman comes in for back pain. She's got her baby in a carriage and I see her feeding this baby this brown liquid in a bottle who's seven months old. And I'm like, what is this? Soda? I'm like, what is that? That's Coca-Cola.

No.

I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She said, well, he likes it.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my God, listen, my wife showed me this video on social media the other day. It was of a baby, looked like it was maybe eight or nine months old baby, having ice cream for the first time.

Oh.

Having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream.

I light up.

And then the baby, like, wraps the thing and like stuffs it in his face.

I was like, oh my God, it was just so crazy.

And it's highly addictive. So yeah, so now we're seeing one in two Americans suffer from either prediabetes or type 2 or type 2 diabetes. And that is when you eat too much sugar and starch and every time you do that, it raises your insulin, your body becomes resistant to the insulin and so it doesn't work as well. So you need more insulin and insulin does what? Insulin makes you hungry, it makes you store belly fat, it locks the fat in the fat cells and it slows your metabolism. It's like a quadruple threat for your body to gain weight. So it's why we're seeing, you know, and that goes back to what we're growing, right? So why are we eating all this food? That it's because that's the food we produce, right? And so that's the other part of the problem. So we have the chronic disease, we have the economic impact, and then we're like, well, why do we have this food? So as a functional medicine doctor, I'm always asking why. Well, why are my patients sick?

Because it makes money, right?

Well, no, yeah, but I'm going even further why I got interested in this. Because why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking about my patients' diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food. Something will, well, if it's- How many.

Are most of them? Is this like 50%, 70%? 80% of anyone that comes in to the hospital or your patients. by some type of disease or some type of sickness.

I mean unless it's like an environmental thing like mercury or lime or mold, you know, most of the time. Or cancer. Cancer is caused by food. Really? 70%.

70% of cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit. Heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, the big killers.

Are by sugar and food.

Yes.

So if you change your diet, you should be able to prevent those.

Or cure sometimes.

Sometimes cure. Depends how far along things are, I guess. Yeah. heart disease, Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's? Yes, 100%. I mean, the studies are there. Even people already have Alzheimer's, when they improve their diet, they can get more functionality back.

This is a quick reminder that life can change at any second. And I've seen this happen so many times in my life, whether it's been a happy and exciting change or a change that tested my strength and perseverance. Now, either way, these changes have shown me that sometimes things happen that we just can't control. But what we can control is how we prepare and how we react to situations. And I'm well aware that something could happen to me at any moment, which is why it's so important for me to know that if some unfortunate event did occur right now, my loved ones would be covered. If there's someone who relies on you for financial support, whether it's a child, an aging parent, or even a business partner, you need life insurance. And luckily, Policy Genius, the sponsor of this video, makes it easy to compare quotes from over a dozen top insurers all in one place. And you could save $1,300 or more per year on life insurance by using Policy Genius to compare policies. And getting started is super easy. First, head right over to policygenius.com/lewis-howes. In minutes, you can work out how much life insurance coverage you need and compare personalized quotes to find your best price. And once you're ready to apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle the paperwork and scheduling all for free. The licensed experts at PolicyGenius work for you, not the insurance companies, so you can trust them to help you navigate every step of the shopping and buying process. Head to PolicyGenius www.genius.com/lewis-howes to get started right now. Policy genius. When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right.

So you've got me thinking, okay, well if the patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? It's the food system. They're like, well, what's causing the food system? It's our food policies. I'm like, what's causing our food policies? It's the food industry that's lobbying Congress. It's got money. It's the biggest Lobby group in Congress is agriculture and food. By far, like by twice as much as the next Lobby group. By gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if I'm gonna help my patients, I can't do it in my office. Like, I can. It's like. It's like I'm, like, in the boat bailing the boat with a hole instead.

Of plugging the hole.

You're not going to the source. Right. So then I'm thinking, okay, well, what do I need to do as a functional medicine doctor? I need to go to the root. cause, right? The root cause and why. And then it became clear to me that it's our agricultural system that's driving so much of the problem. And what we grow has been based on good intentions that were in the 50s and people were hungry. There wasn't enough food. There was a lot of poverty. And so we figured out a system to produce an abundance of starchy calories.

So we can have food.

So we can have food. And we were great at it. And we have cheap abundant corn, and wheat and soy, which are the commodity crops that are turned into industrial processed food, which is now 60% of our diet. And for every 10% of that you eat, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Yeah, so you're basically feeding Americans a diet we know is going to kill them. The research is so clear on this. There's no scientific debate, and yet we don't do anything about it because we have these dysfunctional food policies. And then the way we grow the food causes climate change. We'll get into that, but the number one cause of climate change is our food system.

Really?

I'm the first one to raise my hand when I say, I love sugar. It's my biggest vice, right? I love cookies and candies and cakes and brownies and anything you can think of, I love it, right? I don't know why I don't have diabetes. I have so much sugar I've had.

In my whole life.

You can't be having that much because you look pretty good. Well, I train hard, too. I go through waves. But as a kid, I would drink like 9-10 Dr. Peppers a day, I remember.

What?

Like some days in the summer, you're.

Just sipping on a president, is that what it was?

I would just, I mean, I would run around and work out and play sports, but then I would just drink. Because I thought that's what presidents do.

But you were 16-18, you know?

And I was like 9-10, right? So I was like, but it was, you'd see it on commercials, like your NBA superstar drinking Dr. Pepper or Sprite or whatever. after on the basketball court. And I don't know if it was just like subconscious or just it tasted.

Good and you didn't think about it. I mean, this is where the food industry is so, I mean, I talk about in my book, food facts, but the food industry is so strategic about how it advances its mission and goals. And it does it through multiple channels. And I'm just going to go through them because it just, people just don't know.

The celebrity endorsements, right? Yeah.

First, you know, obviously, you know, celebrity endorsements, which is the obvious one. they co-op social groups. So they fund groups like the NAACP and Hispanic Federation, the African American and Latino communities are the most affected by diabetes and obesity. And they co-op them by funding them. I wanted to show the movie Fed Up at the King Center in Atlanta. And Bernice King, Martin's daughter, was all about it and she was excited. But once we got it scheduled a few days later, I got a call that we couldn't show it. I'm like, why? She's because Coca-Cola funds the King Center. No.

Yeah.

I went to Spelman College, you know, which is African-American women college in Atlanta. And the dean said to me half of the 18 year olds coming into college have a chronic illness, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, 18 year old women. And I'm like, why is there soda machines all over the campus? Why? She's because Coke funds. No. And one of the people on the board of trustees is one of the highest executives. I Coca-Cola. Oh, man. an African American woman. It's like, so they co-op social groups. And that's why they, for example, oppose soda taxes, because they're, they're in the, you know, in the funding of these, these big soda companies. And then, of course, they, they fund research. So they fund 12 times as much research, 12 billion dollars worth of research.

A year to study nutrition.

What would be the first steps that someone could take to help? Well, I think, you know, it seems like such a big, it is. It is a little bit. So let's talk about some of the solutions. So we know, you know, food is causing chronic disease. It's destroying our economy. It's crippling our environment and killing all the pollinators and all biodiversity. And it's causing social injustice because it targets poor minorities who suffer from problems. It prevents kids from learning in school because they're eating all this crap. It threatens our national security, creates political instability. So we know all these things. But the good news is that by fixing the food system, we can solve these. And how do we do it? Well, it's going to need citizen action. it's going to need business innovation and it's going to need policy change and of course other philanthropists and governments to help get on board. And I think that's what's really exciting to me because there's so much hope. So for example on a personal level, you can shift what you eat and what you do to drive change in the marketplace. Why are companies like Nestle and Unilever and Danone creating regenerative ag programs within their supply chain? Why are they trying to up the quality of their food and take out chemicals because consumers are demanding it.

Well, they're buying companies like Primal Kitchen.

Yeah.

They have like health.

Like Primal Kitchen, which is basically a Whole Foods, really high quality nutritious product with no junk in it.

Exactly.

Right.

I'm curious, you said something about nut milk and about dairy.

Yeah.

Dairy, has dairy been declining?

Yeah. Dairy in the last five years. Yes. Dairy consumption has been declining dramatically.

Do you know the percentages or is.

It like, yeah, I think, you know, over the last few years, like it's gone down about 25%. Borden, which is a big milk producer, has been around since 18, I think 87, has gone bankrupt. What?

Yeah.

A lot of these milk producers, now people are still eating cheese, they're eating yogurt, they're eating milk, but actual milk consumption has gone down and then nut milks have gone up.

Why is that?

Is that because of education? Is that because of the, you know, I think probably a lot of reasons. I mean, 75% of the population is lactose was intolerant.

Yeah.

So I don't feel good.

I used to drink so much milk every day.

And how did you feel? Fine.

I always had like a stuffy nose.

Right, right.

I was always tired in workouts and practices. Like, I was always blowing my nose.

Actually, milk is nature's perfect food, but only if you're a cat.

Right?

I mean, we're the only species that consumes milk after weaning. There are very few populations that seem to thrive on milk, the Masai. and from the Northern Europeans. The other problem, the dairy we're eating today is not the dairy we ate. Right. So there are heirloom cows. I mean, you travel around the world. You travel.

I travel.

And you go see these really weird looking cows in other countries. Like, what is that? And it's a cow. Right. But these are, you know, complex breeds that have different types of protein in the milk, different types of casing, and the, the Holstein, the sort the homogenized cow, I don't mean homogenized milk, but.

They'Re all the same.

Not this. Fertilized by like this three bulls, I think they get the sperm of the bull. And it's like they're all the same and they have bred out the beneficial or the safe casing, which is A2 casing, and then A1 casing, which causes more inflammation, more congestion, more irritable bowel, more autoimmunity, more skin issues. So, people are getting that milk isn't always the best. and I think then people are eating nutmegs.

Now, they're not really-- Are those good for you though? Because a lot of people have still skin problems.

Yeah.

Well, nutmegs are problematic.

So, one, almond milk is great, but almonds are-- you- can't have too much of it.

I started to get a rash after I switched from milk years ago. I started to get eczema, a little eczema right here and there. And then I stopped drinking it and it would go away and I was like, huh, maybe I'm drinking so much almond butter.

All our milk, everything. Well, all of that had carrageenan in it, which is causes leaky gut. You get leaky gut, you get eczema. So it's a thickener they put in into these milks. They put a lot of sugar in these milks. They put a lot of gums in these milks.

So you have to be very careful about which one you're having.

Just because it's healthier doesn't mean it's healthier. Yeah, and I don't remember, again drinking tons of soy milk. It could be GMO soy, it could be phthalate. If not, it could be, you know, getting huge amounts of these phytoestrogens, which our bodies aren't really meant to get. Eating traditional foods, and traditional mouths are fine. Tofu, miso, tempeh, those are fine. Really? Those are how people have consumed soy over millennia, but not 10 pounds a day and not three gallons of- no, I had a stepdaughter once, she loved soy milk, just drinking it all day. And she started like at nine years old getting little breasts. And I'm like, well, that's not good. And so yeah, we have to be smart about it. And I think if you're using a little here and there, but I don't recommend people drink it as a drink.

Really?

You know, if you want to put.

A little coffee, almond milk or soy.

Milk, there's soy milk, coconut milk, don't drink it. No, I mean, I think you have it sometimes.

You have a glass once a week, maybe it's okay, but not like drinking glasses every day.

Yeah, probably not. But you could add it to things. Sure, you know, put in a smoothie, you know, you can mix them up, you know, it's macadamia milk, you know, cashew milk, there's, you know, hazelnut milk, there's all kinds of milks now. So, I like, you know, I like macadamia. Macadamia nuts so good. It's like sweet tasting. Yeah, you can make your own nut milks. I have cookbooks, like food, what should I cook and others. Teach you how to actually make your.

Own nut milks at home.

You soak the nuts, you put them in a blender with some water. There's no additives, ingredients, sugar. It's great. But not too much of it, is what you're saying. Yeah, that's the challenge. Like anything. Except for water. Drink a lot of water. That's yeah. I mean, listen, anything, it can kill you, right? Water can kill you. you know, Marathon Runners who over hydrate, their body is diluted, their blood is diluted with too much water, and they get what we call low sodium or hyponatremia, and that causes seizure and death. So, yeah, you can die from drinking too much water. So it's all about, like, eating stuff in complex amounts and in a complex variety of foods.

So a variety of food is.

Yeah, it's good. Huge.

We've seen 800 species of plants. That's good. Not having the same, like, Three drinks every day.

Well, listen, most of our diet is corn, soy, and corn soy and wheat. Most of our diet. You know, and in other countries, rice in there. And those are, you know, all mostly turned into processed food. How does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the UltraMind Solution about how the body affects the mind. we often know about the mind-body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And, and this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example, at Harvard of nutritional Psychiatry. There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast, the Doctors Pharmacy, the doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain and the mood. And we see depression, anxiety, irritability, stress. It turns out that when you eat the American diet, or otherwise known as the SAD diet, the standard American diet, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. When you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, particularly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our diet. I mean, 95% of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats. You know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues. that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders, often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone, your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber-toothed tiger. And that can create anxiety.

Internally, with the insulin. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you can be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal, but if you eat all that crap, your brain is going to feel it.

Your body's going to feel it. So what happens to the brain when you're eating? eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is, and it goes into your gut. Does it send signals to your brain? And then it starts to, you know.

What does that do?

Is it inflaming in that moment? Does it take time to inflame something?

So, so there's a whole Cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar. That's 60 of our diet, right? It's Ultra processed food. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar, which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time, you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course, it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten, sugar and starch and whatever bad fats, drives it into your fat cells. and it's a one-way street into your fat cells called your adipocytes around your belly, those belly fat cells. Those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones, inflammatory markers and messengers, neurotransmitters. It's quite striking when you look at they're not just like holding up your pants, it's fat there, it's actually doing stuff. And when you eat in that way, it drives hunger, it stores fat, it shuts down your metabolism, and it literally slows your metabolism. And even worse, it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one-way turnstile. I won't get in. And then on top of that, it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules. We call them adipocytokines. They go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's a kind of a downstream effect of our chronic eating this way. If you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you, right? But if you're constantly eating this stuff, and we're talking about the average American eats a pound almost of flour and sugar a day. Wow. A pound, like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up and it's, and I know I'm not eating that much and you aren't, so a lot of people are making up for the difference. Right, right.

So food affects your mood for sure.

Yeah, and not only that, it's not even just, you know, it was striking, and I don't know if you had David Perlmutter on the show, but He wrote a book called Brainwash and it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this American diet that we're all eating. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now, what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is a grown-up. It's the adult in the room. It's like you think you're going to punch that guy but you go, I better not punch that guy. Right? It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain. It's going to just run or fight or flee. And it's.

And.

And what happens is literally, physiologically, these parts of the brain are connected. But when you eat crap, they get disconnected. And so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grown-up in the room, which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred and, I mean, just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now, I think a large part of that has to do with. our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian insult that is driving behavior change. And when we look at the fact of other data to support, it's not just a theory. In prisons, if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons, which is pretty darn bad, there's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it's an 80% reduction.

Come on.

If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials, because they've got these people locked up. So it's a really great kind of study. Now, these kind of studies are hard to do, because mostly we're free, we call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want, they don't follow the study protocol.

When you're locked up, you get what you get, right?

And so they took these kids. The environment's the same for everyone, yeah, all that stuff. That's right. And they took these kids, and they, these were kids who were disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. By cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods, it was a 91% reduction in all violent behavior. Oppositional behavior, need for restraints went down, suicide went down 100%. I mean, it's the third leading cause of death in that age group. It went down 100%, no suicides. And so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry. And you go, wait a minute, maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems with chronic disease and the fact that COVID is landed on a perfect, you know, laboratory for spreading in America because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet. But it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing at rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health.

Oh, that's not hard. So, I mean, you know, in my book, the Pegan Diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming youg Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. And it's really practical and there's a bunch of steps at the end, but I think, you know, the real dangers are one, high fructose corn syrup, because anything with high fructose corn syrup almost by definition is a highly processed food. It comes with all kinds of other brad crap. So if you're reading labels, like if you just can eliminate that, that would be like number one. Number two would be trans fats, hydrogenated.

Fats, which-- what is that, what's that in? What foods is that in?

Is that processed packaged food? What?

Hydrogenated fats?

Is that fried food? Is that french fries? Yeah, what's that? So, hydrogenated frats have literally been banned by the FDA essentially ruled not safe to eat, but they're still out there, okay? You can still find them, it's less, but it's and they used to be really, that's makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any processed food. And the third thing would be, you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad?

No.

Which is also known as BHT. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. we have it in everything here. So, if you wouldn't have azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet, this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America, it's legal. This is an ingredient used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwiches.

Did they take it out?

Did they varietalize it? Yeah. So, our friend, our friend, shamed them into taking it out. But, it's still legal here. It's not illegal. She just shamed them publicly. by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15-year jail sentence and a $450,000 fine. No, you do not.

Yes, you do.

I swear to God. In Europe, a lot of these chemicals are banned. So basically, just eat real food. So get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then, you know, there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the Pegan diet is that one, food is medicine. Food is medicine and quality matters. And then it's not just calories, it's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes. You're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, your mitochondria, everything is controlled by what we're eating. So the book is really focused on two key principles. One is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine. Because, you know, I call it the Pegan diet as a joke between paleo and keto, right? Sure. You know, and I had a, I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist. Another one was a paleo doc, and they were just fighting. And I was in the middle, and I felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth. And I was sort of, I was, like, trying to break the, break the tension a little bit. And I said, hey, if you're a paleo and you're vegan, I must Pegan. And it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed. I was like, oh, wow, that was good. And then I thought about on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein, animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should whole foods. They both agree we should lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject, but they're pretty identical. Sure. And so the goal, the goal is book is not to create a dogma, but to create a Big 10 inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of eat healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems? And I think, you know, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. You know, a lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that, be raw. And the truth is, it depends on you. if you are, if I do keto, my body doesn't respond great. I mean, I do higher fat, but another person who's a diabetic, they might do great on it. One person on a vegan diet like Rich Roll may be able to run triathlons. I mean, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort, but he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine see are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted or they don't have protein in their body. their body doesn't like it. I just had a patient, for example, this week, who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan. She's basically a vegetable and sugar vegan.

And she didn't even like to.

So, she would eat sugar as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of people who are vegan eat sugar because the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So, it's not uncommon. And so, she wasn't overweight at all, but metabolically, she was super unhealthy. She had had, you know, acne, and she had, her gut was a mess, and she had very low protein, like very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. I mean, and, and, you know, she was extremely unwell, and, and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we've had, we had to sort of upregulated and changed a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes, which she needed. I had to up regulate her vitamins. I had to sort get her off the sugar. But, it takes a lot of work. So, the key is how do you personalize the diet and get away from the basically religious nutrition that we have.

Which is either all vegan, vegetarian, keto, or carnivore. There's all these extreme diets.

Exactly. And, I only encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body. Yeah. How do you feel?

Do you feel great?

Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How are you clear? Do you have energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So, I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition and how do you identify your particular needs by various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing, and how do.

You actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet? Everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way. But it seems so extreme in my mind, you know? And I, yeah, and I, I empathize with vegans and I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. And, you know, but then I've tried it for a while and I'm mostly like, gosh, but I miss meats. And it's like, yeah, yeah. What is the way? And what I'm hearing you say is.

That there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you.

Yeah.

The one size that fits all is quality. is understanding food as information. Just meat, for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's horribly cruel to the animals. It grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by these monocrop corn and soy fields we use to grow feed, the feedlots that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use, and the quality of the meat is very different. And the You know, so it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals. So it should be banned 100%.

What would you say are the three things you would keep doing for as long as you could to help you with anti-aging and living longer and staying, would it be the peptides, would it be something else?

I listen, I think it's like, those are like, there's the 80 and that's the 20. So that's the 20 is all that fancy stuff. The 80 is food, your food and fit exercise. And I've been doing more strength training and I've been doing more cardio and I think sleep and meditation. And then the other thing that people often don't think about for longevity is community love. Because love is medicine just like food is medicine.

Absolutely.

And I think- If you're stressing your.

Heart, you're gonna die. I mean, it's gonna make you sick.

It's really true. And what's really striking is when you look at the data, some of the most potent predictors of longevity is not your diet, actually. It's whether you are socially connected. So if you're part of a knitting club or a bridge club or a bowling club, like the longevity numbers just go crazy. Even. And there's a great study that was done years ago in a little town called, I think it's called Rosario. No, what was it? Rose. Rose something. Pennsylvania. And it was basically a community of Italians from this one little village in Italy that all kind of moved over to this one town years and years ago. And they kind of left their old Italian diet behind and adopted the American diet. But this community was so tightly knit and they're all different economic spectrums in the community, but they were always there for each other. They were at birthdays and parties and holidays. There was a sense of connective connection and love in the community. It was really unique. And what was striking is even though they adopted all the American lifestyle habits, they didn't get the same mortality as the rest of Americans because they had this incredible social fabric that was providing them a foundation of love and connection and meaning and purpose. And what's striking is I just saw an article even one of the major medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association, that was striking to me because it was so clear that meaning and purpose are also predictive of longevity. So if you have no meaning and purpose in your life, what's the point of being here? I might as well end it.

Right. You kind of have nothing to live for, right?

So I think it's really quite interesting and I think we're in this moment where we're learning so much about medicine and well-being and health and we are in a massive paradigm shift. That's what functional medicine is. That's what this book is about, the Pegan Diet. It's really a functional medicine view on food and nutrition and health and longevity?

You talked about insulin resistance as one of the leading causes of chronic disease today. What is insulin resistance? How do we prevent it? And then how do we treat it?

Yes. Well, great question. And I think we hinted about it a little bit before. But 88% of Americans are in poor metabolic health. Right? That's staggering. That's almost nine out of 10 of us. And that is, poor metabolic health means insulin resistance. And I'm gonna unpack that in a minute. 75% are overweight, 42% are obese, 40% of kids are overweight. I mean, it's terrible. One in two Americans has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. All this is caused by the amount of starch and sugar in our diet. Right? Broccoli is a carbohydrate. That's fine to eat. But white flour is also carbohydrate. It's worse than sugar in your body. So the volume of starch and sugar that's predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health. And what happens when you eat Sargent sugar, which by the way, we really didn't have, right? For most of our human history, we basically were hunters and gatherers till 10,000 years ago. And then, you know, if we had grains, we had whole grains, the milling of flour didn't happen till about 150 years ago. And when that started and they started to actually refine the flour, is when we saw these nutritional deficiencies like berry berry and pellagra and these horrible vitamin deficiencies. It was really terrible. And they actually, you know, they actually discovered vitamins because they started depleting the food. So when we eat in a way that has all the starch and sugar, it causes our blood sugar to go up. That causes our insulin to respond to try to keep the blood sugar down. so you can have normal blood sugar if you go to your doctor. You can have a normal A1C, which is your average blood sugar. But if your insulin's high, you're in big trouble. I saw a guy who was 400 pounds. His blood sugar was perfect. His average blood sugar was perfect. His insulin was, like, 20 times normal because it was keeping everything down. Oh, man. Now, insulin gets that high because the body becomes resistant to the effects of the insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. So you need more and more and more insulin to get the blood sugar down. more and more insulin. What does that do? Well, insulin has a number of roles. In a small amount, it's good, keeps your blood sugar good. If you're healthy, fine. If you have no insulin, you get type 1 diabetes, you need insulin shots. But most people have what we call type 2 or pre-diabetes or insulin resistance. And it turns out that this is a driver of cancer, like the most common cancers, prostate, breast, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, heart disease. Most heart attacks are caused by this. diabetes, obviously, dementia, they're calling type 3 diabetes, depression. So many issues are driven by this insulin resistance that are burdening our society with chronic disease, which affects six out of 10 people. And so when you have this phenomenon in your body, it drives inflammation, it drives fat storage in your belly, it causes more hunger, it slows down your ability to lose weight, and it creates this vicious cycle of muscle loss and fat gain. It's like super fuel on the aging process. That's why you see diabetics have far more heart attacks. They're four times the risk of dementia. They're more likely to get cancer. It's just all related to this phenomena. And then if you're talking about the game of longevity, I remember this lecture I heard like 20 plus years ago from a Harvard professor who was talking about preventive cardiology. He said, Mark, if you could take.

A group of 100 year old people.

Who have perfectly clean arteries. They'd have one thing in common. I said, what's that? He says they're insulin sensitive, meaning they are able to easily regulate their blood sugar with very minimal amounts of insulin. But most of us, well, most because they're basically healthy or they have genetics that help them or they eat, you know, well. But the key is to keep your, the game of aging is to keep your insulin low.

Right?

And if you keep your insulin low, you're going to be activating all these anti-aging mechanisms in your body. If your insulin is high, you're going to accelerate all the aging.

So that's why starch and sugar are poison. When insulin is high, it's weakening immune system, it's increasing inflammation, which is making.

You age faster, essentially, and get sick. Right? Yes. And not only that, Louis, what, right, is happening now with COVID in America, why are we the worst country in the world with COVID It's not just political mismanagement. The fact is that we were the sitting duck perfect place for COVID to land and cause havoc. Why? Because we're obese. Because we're obese, we're overweight, we have chronic diseases, and these are all diseases of inflammation. So we are pre-inflamed. And when COVID hits, it's like gas on the fire. It just blows up your immune system, which is why you see these cytokine storms and this overwhelming inflammation in the body. It's not the virus that kills people. It's people's own body's overactive inflammation because it's primed because of our inflammatory diet. And so nobody's talking about this. I think Bill Maher, the only one I've seen talking about in the media, who says, Hey guys, the thing we can do, yes, maybe we need to be protecting ourselves and practicing social distancing, maybe getting vaccines, a whole rabbit hole, it shouldn't go down. But nobody's talking about... Getting healthy. Our diet. Or losing weight. Or immunorejuvenation. Or even things like vitamin D, which are so cheap and simple. I mean, if I were president, I would literally give free dose of vitamin.

D to every man, woman, and child in America. Just boom. Give it to them. There's a lot of research showing that.

Vitamin D is defending the body against COVID, right? Yeah. If your vitamin D is low, you're 80% more likely to end up in the hospital and die. If your vitamin D is high, 94% less likely to end up in the hospital or in the ICU. 94%. That's better than vaccines, right? With a lot less hassle and risk and side effects.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. So how do we treat it then? What are the things that we need to do when our insulin is high?

Well, it's guess what? I wrote a book. It's a really good book. It's called the Pegan Diet. And it helps you do that. And it essentially I think the principles are, you know, things that I'm almost embarrassed, Louis, that I have my career telling people to do stuff that's so self-evident, right?

We all know, yeah.

Eat real food. Don't eat crap, you know? Eat lots of vegetables. Eat lots of good fats. Get good quality protein. It's not that hard.

When your brain is troubled for whatever reason, head injuries from playing football, early Alzheimer's disease, you live in a mold-filled home, you have COVID-19, which we know affects brain function or Lyme disease, it damages your brain and then you're more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, temper problems. And people don't get that is there's all this talk about get your mind right. But if think of it like hardware, physical functioning of your brain, software, your mind, network connections, your relationships. If the hardware is not right, the software won't run and the network connections will be faulty. And so at Amen Clinics, we have nine clinics around the country where we see thousands of patients every month that it's like, get your brain right. And then we want to program it. Your mind's really important and we want to help you work on your relationships, but if your brain's not right, nothing else is going to be as good as it can be.

So, if someone is doing exercises or practices in their relationships, dealing with anger management, stress, anxiety, depression, they're working on the software and not the hardware, what will happen?

This is not as effective. I mean, it can be very helpful.

But.

Just like the computer analysis. And I didn't know this. It was 1991 when I ordered my first spec scan. and SPECT is the study we do at Amen Clinics. I'm already a double board certified psychiatrist. I'd been a psychiatrist for about a decade. And I always felt like I was throwing darts in the dark at my patients. There's a great book called the Structure of Scientific Revolution. 'Cause if what I'm doing is right, and I believe it is, it's really creating a revolution in brain health, mental health care. And the first step of the revolution Thomas Kuhn wrote about in 1962 is you notice a flaw in the system. And I was taught, was really well trained, I trained to be a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. And if you have six of these nine symptoms, you get diagnosed with depression, and then I give you a medication.

Right.

That's what you did for Prozac.

A while.

But some of the people I'd put on Prozac got better, and some of them became suicidal. Some of them became aggressive. Some of them became obsessive and anxious. And I'm like, this isn't working like it should.

Right.

And a small percentage maybe it helps, but not for everyone.

Well, maybe even a good percentage it helps, but a good percentage it hurts, which would horrify me, because I would always feel off balance. I didn't know this would work, that would work. Plus, I didn't care about my own brain at all because I hadn't seen it. And in 1991, when I started ordering scans, I scanned my mom. She had a beautiful, healthy brain. I scanned me and it wasn't healthy. But I played football in high school. I had meningitis when I was a young soldier. And I had bad habits. I wasn't sleeping. I was eating fast food. And when I scanned myself, I developed a concept. I wanted my mother's brain. And so I called that brain envy. Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. You gotta learn to love and care for your brain. And so the next 30 years, I've been figuring out how can I have a better brain, because when I have a better brain, I have a better life. And what I realized is depression is not one thing. That's why Prozac didn't work. didn't work for everyone. For some people, they have really low blood flow and activity in the brain. For some people, it's really high. And for some people, they had head injuries. In fact, if you go, hey, Daniel, single most important thing you've learned from 183, 000 scans, that's how many we've done, is that mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric illness.

Oh, man.

And nobody he knows about it because psychiatrists, by and large, never look at the brain.

What does psychiatric illness mean? Is it the same thing as mental health disorder, mental health disease?

What does that mean?

Right, I mean it's the same thing. It's people who struggle with anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, addictions.

So you're saying if we played football, we're screwed forever.

You're vulnerable. Since we played football and you're bigger and probably way better than me, so you got your head hit more.

Yes.

I was on the best position in the field, which is I was a backup quarterback. Best position in the field.

She wasn't on the field, yeah.

But you're clearly more vulnerable. So in 2007, Anthony Davis came to see me. He's the Hall of Fame running back from USC. He's called the Notre Dame Killer because in 1972 he scored six touchdowns against the University of Notre Dame.

And.

He was at the time confused. He had memory deficits. He had temper problems. He's getting into fights. He had no business. And one day he's driving on the 405 and he had no idea where he he was going. And he pulled over, called a friend of him at the USC School of Medicine. He says, you should go see Dr. Rayman. And when I saw him, his brain at 54 looked like it was 90 and bad for 90. And Anthony just did everything I asked him to do. And five months later, his brain is better. He's excited. He's like, Doc, we have to talk about this. And this is at a time the NFL is really an active denial that they have a problem. And so we did a study. He helped me with the Los Angeles chapter of the NFL Players Association. They co-sponsored my first study, high levels of damage in players. And what we found, they had four times the level of depression and significantly higher incidences of dementia. But 80% of them got better when I put them on a brain health program. So it's... Wow.

Now, do you think... I know from transitioning out of sports as a professional football player, transitioning where my identity was tied to that thing for so long, that when I left and that I had this identity, mini identity crisis for a few years of living in the past and will my life ever be the same type of mentality. Can the depression or anxiety come from the identity crisis as well or is it more tied to the traumas you hit? Because when I was in the game, I felt like I had a purpose, a mission. I didn't feel as stressed and overwhelmed but it was when I left the game when that came up. Is it a combination or is it...

It's always a combination. I always think of people in four big circles. What's the physical of your brain and body. So it's a biological circle. It's the psychological circle, which is your development. That really matters. And your ability to manage your mind. In my new book, you, Brain Is Always Listening, I talk about the ants and the dragons. The ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal your happiness. And the dragons, the big psychological issues from the past. like the abandoned, invisible and insignificant dragon, who is my dragon, that are always sort of breathing fire on your emotional brain. So biological, psychological, social, it's like, well, how's your money? How's your relationships? I mean, we're just coming out, hopefully, of a pandemic that has spawned another mental health pandemic.

Right?

So biological, psychological, social, and spiritual, which most psychiatrists would never touch. But 80% of the population believes in God and has deep-rooted spiritual beliefs. And it's ultimately, well, why are you on the planet? And you had lost your sense of meaning and purpose where you had one life and then, well, all of a sudden you don't have that anymore. And I'm a huge fan of Ariana Grande's song, Thank youk, because those three words are mental health. It's gratitude for what's happened in the past looking forward, gratitude for your career, and then like, All right, what's next? And if you had known me at the end of your career, you'd like go, Good, we're not going to hit our head anymore. We're going to take care of our brain so we can do something fun, which obviously you've done.

Yeah, it's been great. We have to acknowledge the season of our life and then move on to the next season. What would you say are the three worst things we can do for our brain? If the brain health is the foundation for our mindset, our heart health, the way we view the world, what are the three worst things we can do? Whether it be taking a substance, thinking a thought, staying in a toxic relationship, being around mold all day, like what are the, you know, trauma to the head?

Well, I mean, the worst thing you can do is not care about it, is not have brain envy. That's the worst thing. Have brain envy you can do. And I have a little tiny habit I love. I worked with B.J. Fogg from the persuasive Stanford Tech Lab at Stanford. and we worked with him for six months on how people change, and we created 50 tiny habits. But my favorite tiny habit is before you go to do something today, ask yourself, takes three seconds, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that question with information and love, love of yourself, love of your mission.

You.

Are going to be better. Because when your brain is better, you're better. So that's number one. If you don't care. Number two is you engage in behaviors that hurt your brain. Whether it's head trauma or thinking of marijuana as going green, it's not, it damages the brain, alcohol is not a health food, it's living in a mold-filled environment. You may know Dave Asprey. Dave and I are buddies. He got scammed about 15 years ago and it was like moth-eaten. It was terrible. But he was living in a mold-filled home. And he actually did a documentary called Moldy, that I'm in on the impact of an environmental toxin on your brain. And I would say the third thing, so brain envy, engage in behaviors that hurt your brain. The third thing would be you just never do anything to help your brain, such as we talked about this before we started, table tennis, which is just a great brain game because you got to get your eyes, your hands and feet all to work together while you think about this spin on the ball. So I think of it like aerobic chess. And people never think about their cerebellum. It's the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. Now, I'm horrified because many young people don't know who Rodney Dangerfield is. He was a comedian who used to say, I get no respect. And then he'd talk about why he got no respect. Well, in the back bottom part of your brain, there's cerebellum actually means little brain. It's 10% of the brain's volume, but it has half 50% of the brain's neurons. And it's involved in coordination, which is why table tennis is great for your cerebellum, but also thought coordination, how quickly you can integrate new information. And we know people have ADD, have sleepy cerebellums, people who have autism, awfully have damaged cerebellums. And so athletics are so important. These coordination exercises like martial arts is amazing. as long as you don't hit your head, as long as you don't hit your head, because the brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard, somewhere between egg whites and jello, and your skull is really hard and has sharp bony ridges. This is why the thousands of blows you took to your head are just bad. Helmets don't protect brain damage, protect you from brain damage, they protect you from skull fracture. fractures. But inside your brain, your brain is doing this repeatedly and that's not a good thing. You can't like take your laptop and just drop it repeatedly and expect it to do what it needs to do.

Oh my gosh, I just keep thinking of the decades of brain hitting over and over. But I think, you know, what I love about your method the message in your research is that it doesn't matter if you've been through that in the past, as long as you're aware of it and you start to practice habits and routines and really set your environment up, your relationships, these four circles up for Success, you can really heal a lot of the past trauma in the brain.

Is that right?

Absolutely. How much. That's the exciting thing. How much from these scans you've done where people have had horrible looking scans? I mean, whether it be brain trauma or sexual trauma, whatever it is that they were stuck in some type of brain trauma. And they went on a program of better lifestyle, better habits, spiritual growth, personal development. Were you able to see a significant transformation within a year, five years, 10 years? How long does this take?

Well, I have Anthony Davis's scans 10 years apart and dramatically better. Or one of my favorite NFL players, his Duvall love. He was an offensive guard for the Los Angeles Rams for 12 years. And when I saw him, he's obese, he's depressed, he's been to jail, he's a mess. And he just did what I asked him to do. And that's why I love my NFL players, because they're coachable. They're used to being coach.

Tell me what to do, coach. I'll do it.

Hey, coach, tell me what to do. And he he lost 110 pounds, and he's actually ended up getting his master's degree. I was like, oh, my God. And, you know, he's trim, he's happy, he's fit, and his brain is radically better. Now, it depends, right, on how much you played and how many hits and how damaged it is. And it also depends on the brain you brought into football because some people brought really healthy brains into football. They had parents who cared, they had reasonable nutrition and so on. And some people brought in terrible brains. But 80% of our people get better, especially if they do what we ask them.

Is this better in terms of like, okay, you're 80% back to a super healthy, perfect brain? Is it like, wow, this thing's unbelievable. Off the charts healthy. Like everyone can envy your brain, even if you went through trauma, or is it like it looks really good?

It depends on what you start with. One of my other players, Anthony Trucks, who I just love, his brain was suffering when I first saw him.

Really?

I hear Trucks from Oregon.

Oregon football player who played in the NFL for a few years.

I know Trucks.

Yeah, yeah.

I love him. Good guy. And he just did what I asked him to do. And a year later, his brain's hell.

Really? Yeah.

So, it wasn't healthy when he came in. A year later, it's healthy.

Right.

And that's the cool thing about the brain. Every day, your brain, and there's an area called the hippocampus. And so, I don't know if this is too much nerd neuroscience, but the cerebellum is really important. The hippocampus is really important because it's involved with mood and memory.

Oh, interesting.

And it's great. for seahorse because it's shaped like a seahorse. And every day the hippocampus makes 700 new baby stem cells or new baby seahorses.

Every day.

Every day.

In the brain.

In the brain. It's making new cells every day. So neuroscientists, when I was taking neuroscience in medical school, they told us, you know, if you hurt your brain sort of your scrood, then you're not getting it back. Well, that was a lie, that the brain continues to make new neurons throughout life. And every day you're growing those babies if you put them in a healthy environment or you're murdering them. And a funny story came out last year. I've been Miley Cyrus's doctor for about a decade and I adore her. And she was smoking a lot of pot, as everybody knows. And But she's also an animal lover. So when I told her the pot was suffocating the baby seahorses, she's like, Dr. Abram, that's so unfair. You know I love animals. You can't say that. Take that back.

Wow.

And now she's better to her brain. Just the information, no better, do better.

I'm gonna ask you some controversial questions. about brain health. How much does, is it a third of Americans are obese or is it two thirds?

No.

Two thirds of Americans?

72% of Americans are overweight.

Or overweight.

42% of us are obese.

Obese.

I published three studies. In fact, I did an NFL study. One of them was an NFL study. I took players at the same position who were at a healthy weight versus those that were overweight. The overweight had sleepy frontal lobes. They had decreased activity in the frontal lobe. I just published a study on 35,000 people. It's one of the largest imaging studies ever done. And there is virtually a linear correlation between as your weight goes up, the function of your brain goes down.

Really?

Morbidly obese was worse than obese, which was worse than overweight. which was worse than healthy weight.

So healthy weight versus-- so healthy weight.

Would be the best activity and then overweight and then obese and then morbidly obese.

What consists as overweight versus obese? Is this body fat percentage?

Well, it's something called BMI or body mass index, which in NFL players actually doesn't correlate very well. For them, it's their waist to height ratio. So your waist should be half your height or less. So if you're six feet tall, that's 72 inches, your waist, and you gotta measure, you can't go by your pant size, because the clothing industry knows that we're unhappy. And so you guys gotta put a tape measure right around your belly button. and so if you're six feet, your weight should be 36 inches or less.

That's good.

If it's not, then it's good to work on.

Right.

You just see it as a problem to solve, but if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. I have a mnemonic for that I read about in the books called Bright Minds. Well, if you're overweight, that automatically means you have five of the risk factors.

Really?

Because being overweight decreases blood flow. That's what my study showed. It increases inflammation. It stores toxins, fat stores toxins, like if you smoke pot, it actually stays in your body for 30 days.

Wow.

It changes your hormones. And this is like shocking for me and my NFL work that these big strapping virile men are almost all low in testosterone because when you have subconcussive blows, it damages the pituitary gland which turns off the production of testosterone. Oh my gosh. And so, belly fat especially takes healthy testosterone and turns it into unhealthy cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. Ooh. you know, you have the diobesity, risk factor, blood flow, inflammation, toxins and hormones.

And so that's all from being overweight.

That's all from being overweight. It's just a thing we should be working on. And what I often say is the real weapons of mass destruction, ISIS has nothing on our food industry. They're highly fully processed, pesticide sprayed, high glycemic, low fiber food like substances stored in plastic containers. This is what's really killing the health of America.

Okay, so obesity is a, what I'm hearing you say, obesity is a big factor to mental health stresses and brain stresses.

And Alzheimer's disease.

And Alzheimer's. Obesity.

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

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

The don't worry, be happy people die the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. And I want people to love themselves, but doing the right thing is an act of love.

Now you are helping people essentially reverse autoimmune disease and become healthier, happier, whole human beings through nutrition. And you realized a long time ago that fixing the heart medically can only take you so far.

Yeah, that's right.

We have to fix something else and what is that?

Well, you got to fix, you know, why, for instance, you got heart disease in the first place.

And.

I was taught, as all my colleagues were taught, that heart disease is kind of inevitable, that, you know, that's the leading cause of death for both men and women.

It's inevitable for all of us, that.

Yeah, pretty much that's what we were taught. Yeah, and then even if if you get it, let's say you get coronary artery disease, that the best we can do is slow it down to slow the progression. And what I realize, thanks to Big Ed, who I talk about in all my books, who reversed his coronary artery disease.

This is a man who had 100 pounds of weight.

Yeah, he was really overweight. Late 40s, he had inoperable coronary artery disease. Everything was clogged up. And this guy went.

So you opened him up.

No, well, he had gone to six different centers in the United States saying, do something. And everybody who saw him said, well, no, there's no place to do bypasses. There's no place to do stents because everything's clogged up. Have a nice day. And so this guy spent about six months doing this and he went on a diet during this time and he went to a health food store and he bought a bunch of supplements, kind of willy-nilly quite frankly. And so when I met him, he was still a huge guy, weighed 265 pounds and he brings me his angiogram, the movie of his heart from Miami, Florida. and I look at it and I go, you know, I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I'm gonna do for you. And he says, well, yeah, that's what everybody says, but here's the deal. You know, I've gone on this diet. I've lost £45 in the last six months, and I've taken all these supplements, and, you know, maybe I did something.

In here, you know, and I'm scratching my personal.

So the video was from six months prior.

Prior.

Wow. Okay. And I said, well, good. for losing weight and I know what you did with those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I fully believed. And he said, well, why don't we do another angiogram? What would it hurt? So I go, don't get your hopes up. Okay, so this guy has cleaned out in six months time half the blockages in his coronary arteries. Gone, shrunk. And you go, I've never seen this before. That doesn't happen.

This was what, after 30 years of doing this? 35 years?

Yeah, yeah. That doesn't happen. Come on, that's impossible. You don't clean things out.

The only way to clean it out is through surgery. Right.

Yeah, or put a stent in. So let me give you an example, and this is kind of off the subject. So if you, work out with weights and you happen to wear a wedding ring or an aura ring, you get calluses, right? So calluses are your body's response to protecting itself against an irritation. And you build up layers and layers. So it turns out that these plaques inside arteries is a response to an irritation. and you build up calluses. And think about it, if I took off this ring and started working out with weights, this callus would go away because there's no longer any irritation. And what Big Ed showed me was he had removed the irritation, so he no longer needed calluses and starts and.

His heart started to heal.

And it literally goes away. And so that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years, is teaching people how to remove the irritation to the inside of their blood vessels and the calluses miraculously go away. They don't miraculously go away, you don't need them anymore.

Right.

Was there a moment when you were doing deep in your practice where you were like, I'm not going to work on another heart until they actually follow this plan and start losing weight and start eating the right things. And then if there's no hope, then maybe I'll dive in. But was there a point where you're like, Never again will I do... Well, yeah.

So, I mean, I wrote about this in the Plant Paradox that I had this gentleman in his 60s, bad diabetic, came in with a heart attack, Scheduled him for surgery the next morning. We're in the pre-op room and the guy is trembling like a leaf. And he says, I can't go through this. And I've learned enough that if somebody is that terrified, don't go put them to sleep and do it because something probably is not going to work out very well. Fear. So I said, okay, I'll make you a deal. I said, you, got to follow everything I do tell you to do. And if you do it, I can guarantee you I will not have to operate on you. But if you don't do it, you know, you're coming back here and we're going to do this. Well, that was now 10 years ago. He's not a diabetic. He has no coronary artery disease. He and, you know, he comes in twice a year now and just, you know, we do stress tests on him. and, you know, and he that he became one of my best patients. Wow. And, you know, so you were gonna do. Yeah, we were wheeling him into surgery, and the guy's shaking like a leaf. Go, I don't think I can do this. I said, okay, here's the deal.

Wow. That's crazy.

Oh, yeah. We always reminisce. He says, you know, it's been 10 years now, and, you know, I followed what you told me. And I said, yeah, here you are. You don't have a scar on your chest. I said, you,'re really bad for business.

So what were the few things you told him that he went out and did? Was there like some specific exact things he did?

Yeah, I do this in all my books. So were... Actually, my staff always told me, Don't say this story, because people get the wrong idea. Jack Elhaye, I got to know Jack Elhaye late in life. in his life. He was actually an advisor to our Arthritis Institute in Palm Springs. And so, you know, Jack was the godfather of fitness. I mean, come on, let's give him a stool.

The juicer.

The juicer, that was his big mistake.

But anyhow.

So Jacqueline used to have this expression is that if it tastes good, spit it out. And my, you know, I obviously like to sell books and my, you know, my staff, don't say that because then they think they're going to eat twigs and weeds and it's going to taste awful and, you know, you got to eat bad tasting food. Well, that's not what he meant. He actually meant that you should not be eating for this two inch by three inch piece of muscle, your tongue, but you should be eating for the microbiome, for the bacteria and all the other cute little viruses that actually live in your gut, live in your mouth, live on your skin. And if you eat for them, they will take care of you because you are actually their home. We're merely a condominium for bugs.

And how many bugs do we have on our body or in our skin?

Yeah, we have well over a hundred trillion. bacteria. And since the Human Microbiome Project was finished about five years ago now, I mean we didn't know that these guys really existed. In fact, I was on my podcast, the Dr. Gundry podcast, we had Dr. David Kessler, who was head of the FDA in the Reagan years, who made the guidelines for the labels, the labeling laws on the back of packages that show saturated fats and carbohydrates. And the labels, by the way, if we get into this, are completely wrong. They were forced on the Reagan administration by big food companies. And so anyhow, if you feed bacteria what they want to eat. And that's all in the longevity paradox. They will take care of you. They will not, they'll take care of the wall, the lining of your gut, and they, you will not actually age, which is kind of cool.

So if you take care of them, of the bugs in your body, you will not age.

Right, so you got a hundred trillion bacteria, you have over 10,000 different species of bacteria, and just last year they discovered another thousand, so who knows? Right. So 99% of the genetic material that exists in you and me is non-human genetic material.

Material.

We're only, our genes are actually so unimportant it's kind of humorous. And when people take a family history, what they're actually finding out is if you, if your parents taught you how to eat, and most people's parents teach the kids how to eat, and your parents had diabetes or your parents had high blood pressure or your parents say they had coronary artery disease and you ate like your parents did, the odds are that you will do that. For two reasons, the food choices that you made, but more importantly, you inherited your bacteria from your parents and actually your siblings.

So it's not the genes of your parents that mean you are susceptible to heart disease or Alzheimer's or whatever, right? It's not the genes of your parents, it's typically the foods they ate that you're probably eating the exact same foods that cause the same type of problems.

Correct, yeah. I mean, there is an Alzheimer's gene and my program, according to Dale Bredesen, is the best way not to activate that gene. And there are certain genes that people inherit that make the world's meanest, nastiest, stickiest cholesterol that most doctors don't even measure. And oh, by the way, if you're prescribed a statin drug, a lipid-lowering drug, it actually worsens this other particle. So yeah, there are genes, but there's such a small part. Nature magazine had a big article in late 2007 2018, I think proving that only about 7 or 8% of what will happen to us is based on our genes. And 97 or 98% of what's going to happen to us is based on our environment and our food choices. Our decisions.

Now you said we can, you know, aging is essentially a choice is what I'm hearing you say, but if someone watching this saying, well, Dr. Gundry, you've got white hair, you look older than when you were 10 years old.

Yes.

So how can you say that you can eat certain things that can reverse aging or can make you not age when you look older than when you were younger?

That's true. I'm definitely chronologically old. older. But recently on my podcast, I had Dr. Terry Walls, who I think is very famous, rightfully so, for reversing her MS, her multiple sclerosis. And she did it via diet. She did it initially by eating nine cups of vegetables a day. and I dare people to try to eat nine cups of vegetables.

A lot of fiber, right?

A lot of fiber. And we'll get back to fiber because I think that's probably the key. And this is actually what Jacqueline was trying to say. If it tastes good, spit it out. And Terry became famous for telling people that she, when you look in the toilet every morning, you should see a very large coiled snake looking back up at you. And in fact, in the Plant Paradox, in the original manuscript, I had said, when you look in the toilet, you should see a giant anaconda looking back up at you. And my editor, Julie Wills, called me up, said, do you know there's a movie where an anaconda is coming out? coming out of the toilet. And I said, oh, yeah, she said, I don't think we want that visual in your book. And she said, let's take that out. So, but what we didn't know, what you didn't know, I didn't know, is that that giant coiled snake is not the fiber and the roughage that we ate. It's actually bacteria that have eaten the fiber.

No way. And the bacteria inside of us. That's coming out.

That's coming out. So most of your poop is, if you will, baby bacteria.

No way.

And so the more, so we want.

To get the bacteria out of us?

No, you want them to grow and prosper. And the more they grow and prosper.

It sounds like aliens in our body.

It's like, you know, you're absolutely right. One of the things that is kind of hard to embrace is we probably only exist as a place for bacteria to live on Earth. And, you know, intelligent.

If there was no bacteria inside of us.

We're done.

We would die.

So we know that we can breed germ-free mice and interesting fun in fact, that I put in the longevity paradox. My fifth grade science project was to build a germ-free mouse environment. This was in 1960. And so this isn't my first rodeo. So we can build, we can raise germ-free mice that have no bacteria in them, no bugs in them. And they live short lives.

Really?

They have horrible immune systems.

They get sick.

They get sick, yeah. And they, so they're a basis of so much of what we know. And so you can, so bacteria are incredibly important. We know now that these bacteria actually teach our immune system from day one. In fact, scary, we used to think that the placenta where the baby, the womb, the uterus that feeds the baby is sterile. Of course it has to be because the baby has to be sterile. The placenta is full of bacteria. Feeding, feeding, and it turns out that the bacteria in the placenta actually we give information to the baby's immune system before the baby even pops out of the womb.

So we need these viruses, these good viruses.

We need these viruses and bacteria. We need them. And in fact, fun fact, long ago the only way to treat bacterial infections were viruses that could actually infect bacteria and kill viruses. And Eli Lilly Company from Indianapolis got its start, this giant pharmaceutical company, as what's called a bacteriophage company. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. And it turns out that viruses actually are really useful in us as well. We have trillions and trillions trillions and trillions of viruses in us right now.

What's the difference between a good virus and a bad virus?

If the good virus is doing what it's supposed to do. Okay, let's do a deep dive into microbiology.

Okay. And what is the definition of virus?

Okay, so a virus is probably the smallest, reproducible form of life, however we want to define life. So most living things are capable of reproducing themselves one way or another, dividing or multiplying, multiplying one way or another, just like humans. Exactly. So a virus unfortunately has to have, cannot replicate itself. It has to borrow another cell and take over the cell's machinery to manufacture more copies of viruses. And that's how they get reproduced. But in the end, every living creature is here just to make a new copy. And you and I, only exists was to make a new copy. And, you know, I hopefully actually only exists so my bacteria can make new copies of themselves. I'm a condominium for my inhabitants.

Duplication, yeah.

And if they're happy and I'm a good landlord to them, they will keep the place nice. And they actually would like me to stick around a very long time because I'm their home.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. Is it possible to leave to 200? Yeah.

Okay. Let me be upfront, it's completely irresponsible promise today.

Yes.

And I'm actually communicating and using this to 100 years by a number of reasons. One, if we want to change a lot of lives, you need to get an attention. So when you come into conversation saying, well, how about living 100 years? People are like, okay, you know, I've seen people who have done that.

Lots of people have done that. Yeah.

So actually, we have created this whole three horizons, like Horizon 1 today, Horizon 2 in 5 to 10 to 20 years for us to live 250. And then it was not enough. People were like, okay, the oldest woman on Earth lived 222, so 150 is almost there. So I created the third Horizon, like human avatars, human brain AI integration, virtual world, and saying, well, this is where we're gonna go if we want to live 200. But so again, I'm really mindful that this is irresponsible promise, but it's such a great aspiration.

Sure.

And as we discussed, like every morning, I'm 49, so every morning when I wake up, I have like three-fourth of my life ahead of me. So this is like the biggest source of energy for me. There's so many things I can do.

So just thinking that I'm gonna live to 200, it makes you start to change the way you think, your actions, your habits, your routines, your plans. You're not planning like, I'm going to start getting sick in 20 years and then retire and then just sit around. You're like, I've got 150 years left.

Yeah.

Well, that's, that's.

It changes your identity.

Well, all, well, this is, this is the term that we use, your psychological age identity. And obviously, by our lifespan and life cycle, So if I'm 49 out of my 200, I'm still a kid in a way, right? So the world is full of opportunities for me. So that's the aspect of that. And then your energy change, the way you look, the way you communicate, the way you dream, the way you share something with people. So that's a very important aspect of that. The other aspect is we almost. And this is one of our limiting beliefs. We always neglect the connection between our mind and body. We kind of, you know, think it's separate. It's not. So if you start thinking, I'm young and you have your psychological Target age, like 10 or 15 years below your calendar age, your body actually start to react and. And develop itself. in a different way. Because you're allowed to- More younger.

Just the chemistry of your- yeah, so.

If you look at biomarkers, right, the studies where we managed to reverse aging, literally, at a very small increment still, but it's just a lot of progress. Always had this psychological component, like psychological work stream, when people just think that they're younger. than they release.

When they think they're younger, they physically become younger. And we've been able to track that or research that?

Basically what is happening, we just done a piece of research last year, it's still pretty small group, but then the psychological aspect of aging, like thinking young, like almost think and grow young, just one of the sub-chapters in the book is always the part of rejuvenation routine and a lot of studies where we actually trying to reverse aging based on biomarkers that you have like 44.

And what's the best way to think young? What does that look like? Okay, so what's the practice of thinking like that?

Okay, so I can tell only from my own experience. Well, that's why we're having this conversation, right?

How do you think, young?

Yeah.

So first of all, you just need to almost, like, ignore your calendar age and allow yourself to be younger in terms of your dreams, aspiration, Behavior. Just ignore, like, a social standards for you and social conditions and pressure for your calendar age. And, and the best thing is think about the figure. So my figure is 25 years old.

The figure?

Yeah. Like a particular age that you think your psychological.

I'm this old. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm like 25 years old. Obviously, I'm having my conversation. Well, Sergey, come on. You might look like 35 years old. You're not that young. But then in the end, if you. If it's part of you for, like, many days, weeks, and month, it just becoming your almost identity. So having your target psychological age ridiculously below your calendar age is a great way to start.

It's a great strategy. So that's just saying you're 49, so you'd be saying like, I'm 25 years old, I feel 25, I feel and look 25. Just saying this to yourself, repeating a mantra, writing it down, priming.

So what I do, like, in the morning when I do priming. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna live 200 years. Actually, it's. It's better to add healthy and happy years.

Yeah.

Because Universe will give you, like, the figure. But the quality is probably more important than quantity. So I'm gonna live healthy and happy years. 200 years in the body of 25 years old man. And that's it. This is what I'm doing. And then in the evening when I have my. kind of gratefulness moment. I'm also, I'm just repeating that and that's it. And, and usually it takes like a week or two for you to accept that or start accepting that and just make it and see the changes. You'll be amazed. You're gonna behave like a kid. Your level of energy, right, is going to be completely different and level of aspirations and your mission and your kind of life plan is different as well.

So what's the, I know you have like two different visions. One is like, okay, for the next five to ten years, what are the things that are available to us now to help us age in reverse and then ten years and beyond all the other things that are coming that aren't here yet that we can look forward to. So what are something that someone who doesn't have a lot of resources and funds right now, they can to start aging in reverse besides psychological age.

Today.

Yes.

Okay, there's so many things that we can do. They might sound boring, but they work just in a brilliant way.

Right.

Okay? Just for the interest of time. So, in the book, I have like a bonus chapter. It's two times bigger than any other chapter in the book, and it's about 10 longevity choices. With your permission, I just want to go through five. Let's do it.

Yeah. These are five buckets.

Yeah, five longevity buckets. So, and let's start with the one, which is your importance of your annual health checkup.

Annual health checkup.

When I have 30 seconds on longevity, even on the passport control, when people ask me like, you know, what brought you to United States? I'm like, you know, I'm on longevity mission. I want to change one billion lives.

And I was like, what?

So, what do I need to do? so when I have 30 seconds, I'm saying the most important day every year in your life is the day of your annual checkup. So yesterday for me, I went to Human Longevity Center in San Diego. It was most important day for me this year. When you have your annual, annual medical checkup, it should be as comprehensive as possible, and it should be as expensive as possible to the extent you and forth. Okay. But then, and one of the things.

You'Re doing at that checkup, what do you do? Is it drawing blood?

Yeah, so, you know, like checking your.

Site, your hearing, your heart rate.

Yeah, there's so many things that you do there. Like, I give, what, 21 blood samples just to go through all of my biomarkers.

Yeah.

But remember, I'm kind of a crazy guy. This is my mission.

You could do like three probably.

Yeah.

I just want to mention that you don't need to go to extreme. What healthcare system has to offer to you on whatever level you are in society and in terms of your wealth is enough to detect the biggest risk factors and problems in your body, right? So don't think, well, of course Sergey can do it. He's a longevity investor, he has an access, he has a knowledge. Yes, I do, but a lot of people around me, it's just hospital next door and having a dialogue with your doctor or with healthcare provider saying, you know, annual checkup and, and your risk are heart disease, cancer, diabetes and not really neurogenerative disease because we really don't know now where it comes from and how to treat that. So that's, that's the thing. So what I do is like full body MRI, 21 blood, CT, ultrasound check of your arteries here, your heart. I actually put the heart monitor. I'm a big fan of wearables.

Yeah.

And so what is that?

That sticks in your chest? Yeah.

So actually, this is just a lot of fun. Yeah.

How's it feel?

Yeah.

So for, you have audio.

Yes.

Audience as well.

Yeah.

So that's, that's like a small piece of wearable right on your chest next to the heart.

So you can, looks glucose monitor a little bit.

It is, yeah, I actually have glucose monitor here. So it's internet of body, we'll come back to that. So you put it on your chest, you wear it for probably seven days and what it does, it does is monitor performance of your heart on, you know, every minute within this seven days. So then you ship it, it's right here in the chip and it's much more kind of scientific, precise and data-driven. That everything is tracked.

How are you sleeping?

What's happening during the day, in the morning and night? It's tracking all of it.

Yeah, and it's tracking and the major focus is performance of your heart, right? Because heart disease and cancer are two biggest reasons for that. It's like more than 50% of deaths after age of 50, happening because of these two reasons.

Okay. Heart disease or cancer.

And cancer, right.

How can you prevent those things?

Okay, so coming back to your annual check-up longevity bucket one. Think about cancer 20 years ago. People thought it's a case of death. People were actually deferring their cancer check because If you knew you had cancer, I mean you're going to be dead in just a few months. Well, it's not the case anymore. We are right in the middle of winning the war against cancer. It's still very expensive. It's still extremely dangerous disease. But if you detect cancer and we invest through a longevity vision fund, we invest a lot in early cancer diagnostic. Early on, like stage one cancer, your chances to recover is 93 to 100%, depending on the cancer type. Imagine.

If you detect it early.

Early.

So that's why having the health check up once a year will allow you to catch that early.

Exactly.

And technology is really progressing in this field, right? I'm not sure to what extent you're comfortable speaking about colonoscopy, but that's the main kind of tool and intervention for us. to check like a colon cancer.

Colonoscopy. Yeah.

Yeah. So then I call.

How many of those have you done?

So I was just delaying my.

I was like, I don't want to do it.

Yeah, I don't want to do it. So do you do it on the sedation? So I've done two in the last five years. So I call Human Longevity up and say, guys, do I need to do one this year? And they said, no, we have the colon guard, like a new product, and it's like $19. one nine.

Calling guard. Yeah. It's like a supplement or something.

Yeah. No, it's. It's test. It's actually difficult. I'm not sure I need to go out on these details for the audience.

But it has a tracker store.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you send it in.

Yeah, yeah. And then it's.

Wow.

But just using the, uh, newer Network built by artificial intelligence on the basis of 100, 000 samples. for the price of $19, you have almost the same detection results, detection rate, like this invasive, awful and scary procedure. And if you buy 20 tests, I mean, you don't need to buy it, it's just part of your plan, right? But for 20 tests, you pay $100. Imagine, so every technology that we invest in the longevity vision fund, don't change the current state and it's not improving this by factor of 10 or 20%, it's decreasing the cost of healthcare for people by a factor of 10, 20, 50 times. And we invested in affordable ultrasound diagnostic, we invested in different wearables, early cancer diagnostic as well, like $19.

Wow.

That's amazing. And it's more than 90% and you'll discovered very early signs of the colon cancer in combination with full body MRI. And I can speak forever about the importance of early detection and the same with heart disease. Just in the last 10 years, you have special surgical robots, you know, like whatever the problem you have in your heart system, it's going to be fixed with enormous degree of reliability. by human doctor who's just operating this through computer and this beautiful robots who's just doing so, you know, again, I can talk about this forever. Bucket number one, the most important health checkup.

And where can someone go wherever they are in the world? Do they just go to their local doctor? Do they go and say, I need.

An annual health checkup?

Yeah, and my focus is health disease, cancer, diabetes.

So ask test you on those things and go from there.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's number one, the annual health checkup. That makes sense because knowledge is power. Exactly. And if you're not, I think most people are like, how do I delay this checkup the longest until they need to do it? Because they feel like something's off, then they check up. But preventative care is probably the best thing you can do.

By a number of reasons.

It's like just do the things to prevent it so you don't have to get sick.

Exactly. 10 to 20 times cheaper.

Yes.

Right. It's much more successful.

Less painful. Yeah. Yeah.

It's less painful. And you don't need to wait until your body will manifest itself with disease. Because at this stage, it's almost like stage four.

Right.

And your recovery chances, like, if looking at cancer is what, 20 to 30%?

And.

And in terms of the call. And even if you survive, like, my father had a lung cancer back. 2005 he survived, but he shrunk in size by one third.

His body.

Yeah, yeah, and his quality of life never recovered to this extent. So this is where my passion for longevity starts.

You are living longer and more quality.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay, so that's number one.

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

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

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

Right?

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

Crazy.

Yeah, it is.

You'll look younger, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But then the question is how you do it, right? Because you know what? It's. For me, it's a nightmare just to. Three days a week.

Sorry.

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

I've been starting to do that from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning.

Yeah.

And I feel great.

It's amazing.

I just did this a couple days ago.

Yeah.

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

So, yeah. Yeah, well, I also like your choice of weekdays because I'm kind of trying, I'm killing the blue monster in the beginning, right? So, I'm like the most difficult part is like do it on Monday and.

Tuesday and then for the rest of the week.

Yeah, enjoy. You enjoy yourself.

Yeah.

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

Max.

And that's it.

Yeah.

I just did a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen.

Do you know?

Of course. Yeah.

I interviewed him for the book, Amazing Guy.

I just got my results back. Literally last week and did three brain scans. Supposed to go back in four months. He wants me to give me, he's giving me some supplements and some hyperbolic chamber.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did my first one yesterday. I'm doing another one tomorrow. Supposed to do 40 sessions. Yeah, it's at Next Health here and in the chamber. And he said, I asked him, I go, we just had an interview come out with him, but I asked him, Of smoking marijuana, cigarettes or alcohol, which one is worse for the brain? And he said marijuana based on 80,000 I think scan results, those that had marijuana had far worse brains than looking brains than those who didn't. He said obviously smoking and alcohol also affected but marijuana is the worst. And so if we know these things that smoking alcohol, marijuana is bad for the brain, bad for the long longevity. Why do we keep doing them? Why do we keep doing it?

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

This of this world.

Things.

Yeah.

Of the world. Right. The. So much stimulation, so much opportunities, challenges, adversity, pain, suffering, media. Like, it's a much simpler life 100 years ago.

Exactly. Exactly.

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

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

Okay, so that's the diet.

And also the final, you know.

That was three, right?

Yeah, yeah. Final piece on the diet is the importance of like take out the sugar drinks. So like we drink in water today. So that's super important. We have way too much sugar that we should and we can't process in terms of how our body works. The fourth is physical activity. And we have a funny view on physical activity. So, I mean, as humans, everything is like black and white. Everything is binary extremes. So it's a group of people just sitting and watching football on TV, the other group of people are, okay, I need to run a marathon. But there's so many things in between. The easiest thing you can do is just wear your Whoop or Fitbit or Apple Watch and count the steps. 10,000 steps a day is enough actually to transform your metabolic state to support your longevity, like a healthy state of your body. If you look at science starting from 6.5,000 steps or 7,000 step is actually enough then it's a plateau but you usually say like 10,000 steps a day because we tend to under deliver in terms of our target and it's very easy, it's gamified, you can have immediate feedback like a badges, congratulations, prizes and that's the whole thing.

It's not what I tell you to eat that's important, it's what I I.

Tell you not to eat.

So the first thing is don't eat grains, period. No grains. No grains. And that includes rice, that includes corn. I just gave a paper at the American Heart Association three weeks ago at the Lifestyle and Epidemiology Annual Meeting where we looked at.