The 7 DAILY HACKS To Lose Weight & Prevent Disease! | Lewis Howes

So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop, and that's the signal for your body to now start.

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You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. Okay? So when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job, is to tell your body to stop, store those calories. Okay? So you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop, and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. Storage, Right. And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night, is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping, and you're using calories. You're one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, when.

I'm eating, I. I'm storing, I'm not using calories, Is that right? Every time I eat down, store, I'm not burning body fat.

You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example, and that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar is coming in. Use the sugar that's coming in.

Don't burn anything off my body.

Yeah, exactly.

Keep on, store all that stored fat. Keep it, just keep piling it on.

Right, exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the Average. So if you start eating at 8am, you don't stop till 10:45pm that's on average. That's the average 14 hours.

You mean a 14 hour span of eating from the start to finish. Right. You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours. Within 14 hour window it takes about.

4 hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and by six o' clock you're done. Boom. Now you shift into using those calories and your mom would say, oh, you need time to digest, right? What she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times. And that was the secret, that they could stay relatively slim. Now if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem of course is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. Your body, so the high insulin for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores because your body's like the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem of course is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is if you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you eat within a eight hour window or a four hour window or whatever, what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat, predominantly. But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat like that. Body fat is not there for looks there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well. So again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and if you were a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So you went from 12 o' clock to 8am, 20 hours, you look good.

The next day you're looking clean, you got a six pack, it's burning fat.

Exactly. And nobody died. Not bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too. Right? And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today. Because when we were cavemen and cave women there, we didn't have food every day. Exactly. They couldn't. There might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you, your day to day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of. I rarely eat breakfast. And I'll tell you that it didn't come, I mean, I started this in medical school and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the door. You know, I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it's just that the way I was. Right. And so I don't eat breakfast now because again people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just going to keep doing it. Right. There's nothing wrong with it. So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of slightly six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24 hour fast which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's a tough one because a Lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example. And doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing. Which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal.

So, you know, everyone's doing it, so no one's feeling.

Exactly.

Because when they smell the food and.

They'Re like, ah, exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays if you fast and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly, but that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple years ago I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it and I could feel it and my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week. But I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation, I'm doing this. But at the same time I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And it gives you a great tool to use if you need it. Right?

Yeah. It's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style, sort of 8am to 6pm, which in a 14 hour, fast, every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours day every single night without even thinking about it. Like that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating. Right. But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater, you can eat at your desk, you can eat in a car. Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting, in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere.

Donuts.

Donuts and cookies, Right. Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right. It's like, well, why we're having a meeting here, right? So that's the, that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window. For 10 hour eating window, you can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right. So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time.

But no food.

No food. Yeah. So if you look, if you think about fasting, so the what the amount of energy that you need. So a pound of fat has 3500 calories, roughly, if you need about 1800 calories. So that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot, it takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days. You know, if you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get.

And survive.

And survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine. Because this is a very efficient fat, is an efficient store of calories. Right. It's very efficient. That's why we developed.

It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

Exactly. So use it.

Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your choline metabolism? What's affected there?

And this is the interesting part, is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming, of course, you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat, so people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle, it's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat, but the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive, right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it fire, like why would you be so stupid? Our body's just the same. It's not that. So you know and I know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place and some of that is often burned off. So, for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose £150, they get all this floppy skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein, your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using.

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So another big myth. So muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about is starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time.

Because why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat. Your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make $100,000 a year and you spend $100,000 a year, now you make 50,000. You don't keep spending 100, right? You're going to get thrown into jail. So you reduce your expenditure, same as a body. So it's. So it's going to use less. And that's the natural reaction. It's important because it's a survival response. It cannot do anything different.

So it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm going to eat a little bit less today. It's not going to do that much.

It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat. Just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food, and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here, so why do I need to cut, cut it down? And the point is that it doesn't, because assuming if you have no body fat, of course it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat because your insulin's here. Your insulin's high, you're using food, Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, you have a snack, you have a low fat muffin. You stay here, you can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say okay, instead of 2000 calories, I'm going to eat 1500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day, keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom. And then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO2, which, as you know, is something that. It's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found. So they measured the metabolic rate at time zero. Then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down, it's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that. And we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine, again, we're cavemen, and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never.

Going to eat again.

You're going to die. Because every day is going to be harder. You're going to circle the drain. So our body's just not that stupid. Right? So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in.

Boom.

I'm going to switch you over to body fat, and then I'm going to pump you up so that you have energy. You go out there, you go, kill that woolly mammoth.

You're focused, you're clear in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the mental aspects is actually fascinating, because people also say, well, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp, or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? Right. You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same Thing lions, they just eat. They just like lounging around. But if you're the hungry wolf, that is not. That is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like, if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down, lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who got. Who went to prisoner of war camp in World War II, Japan. And he's talking about starvation. And he. They were literally starving. Like, there's. They'd eat, like, almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he. So the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like it was so widespread, everybody was starving. And they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time.

What was the biggest.

Aha.

When you learned this thing changed everything for you?

You know, there have been so many instances of that. Like the scientists. I'm seeing new things literally on a weekly basis. Things are like, my jaw drops virtually. You know, like last week, Louis, I read about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human cell in our heart last week. Like, you know, like, that's like I hit my head. Like, oh, my God. Really? We. A couple years ago, we discovered a new brain cell called the rosehip neuron. Okay. And it seems to be linked to depression. So I'm always amazed. I mean, as a scientist, I'm amazed by the. By the marvelousness of the body and how much we don't know about it. And still. So we have to respect it. Did you know, by the way, that we had it also, this is just. This past year, 2021, there was a landmark discovery that changed everything we knew about our metabolism. What is that? Well, so everybody says that, you know, like, when you're a teenager, you're growing.

Tall, you got a high metabolism, you just burn calories.

Right? Okay. Totally wrong. Metabolism is going down when you're a teen. Okay. And then people say when you're in your 20s or 30s, you know, and you're starting to gain weight and getting out of Shape. And they're like, man, my metabolism is slowing down. And then some people basically say that, you know, I was unlucky because I was born with a bad metabolism. Look at my sister or look at my cousin. She's rail thin. She's so lucky. She's got a fast metabolism. Right? All that has been upended completely. It turns out that all humans go through only four phases of metabolism in their whole life.

Tell me.

Okay, actually, I'm going to show you this because it's actually right here on my desk.

Got a chart, you got a. You got a graph? You got a chart?

No, no, I got it. I got paper. This baby right here, it's in a journal of science. Okay. This is how researchers do it, like, all around my office, man. Like, I am reading this stuff, and this paper, I tell you, I got to look at this. It studied 8,000 people from like 30 countries, and it studied people from 8 days old to 90 years old across 20 different countries. All right? This is the largest study of human metabolism ever undertaken. And here's what they found. That if you subtracted out body fat, which is different for everybody. Okay. And you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism. Energy usage, energy generation. Here are the four phases. When we're born, we got the same metabolism as our mother. Makes sense. Synchronized. Okay. From zero or from the day you're born to one year old, your metabolism skyrockets. In fact, it's twice high when you're one year old, as when you're 20 years old. Wow. Okay, so from one year old down to throughout your teenage years in puberty, at time you think that you're eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high. It's actually coming down from its peak.

Interesting. Why does it seem like you're burning so many calories?

Well, you just, you, you. Well, you're more active and you're growing. Yeah. So you may be burning mortality, but your metabolism as a changing. This is the key thing. We are hardwired to go through these phases. Now it's going down to 20 years old. From 20 years old to 60 years old. Okay. From college to retirement, it doesn't change. It is rock stable. All right, so it's our. And then after 60, it starts to diminish, but not as fast as you think. It's a slow. It's a slow grade down. Okay. Four phases of human metabolism. We never knew this before this year. All right. This is how new it is. So here's the key thing. What makes all the difference between people, like how why is your metabolism different than mine? And why is somebody, why is a sumo wrestler's metabolism different than, you know, somebody who's on a Runway? Okay. And it has to do with the fact that our metabolisms are all the same, but the lifestyle choices that we make can actually push our metabolism one way or the other. So it, our metabolism doesn't cause us to be fat. Our fat slows down our metabolism. It's the other way around.

Interesting.

Completely.

So what, so how do we burn more fat then, to speed up my metabolism?

That's what I'm working on right now. And that is the topic of my next book, by the way, which I'm writing right now. Yeah, so stay tuned for that answer because I'm onto something really hot on that. And I will give you a little bit of. Yes, well, you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down. So. So what? While, while caloric restriction and fasting can actually also do, turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat that will trigger it.

You want to give me some of those?

I don't want to give you a too much. I don't want to give your viewers as a spoiler, because I'll have you invite me back on the show.

We'll have you back on for sure. We'll have you back on for sure. You can give us the whole debrief. But what would you say, a couple of these foods, at least that you think, that are now researched and proven to be powerful fat burning?

I'll give you one that's actually just a surprise. Is seafood actually seafood? Yeah.

Helps burn fat.

Yep.

Does it help burn fat or it starts to trigger and activate the fat.

Burning process it triggers. So there are, there are certain elements in food that are newly discovered in research. Like I just told you, I just told you some new stuff that's coming out of the hot off the presses. But I can tell you, like, this is where. This is what I do. The research that if I told you about research about biotech developments, it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years, maybe every. You never. Okay. But when there's, when there's research about food or about your health, a lot of times there's stuff that you, that has immediacy, you can put it to use right away. So cancer, starving foods, regenerative foods, gut health foods that can also help your brain, foods that slow down cellular aging, foods that lower inflammation and boost your immune system at the same time. You know, that's what I'm talking about, because the power of healing rests inside our body. And health care is not something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor's office.

Right.

Every year you go once. Healthcare is everything in between that we do for ourselves. And food is a medicine that we take.

Absolutely. I've talked about this many times on my show before that. I grew up in a specific religion called Christian Science where it was more the practice of. Of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas, and less on using medicine to heal, but more using the mind and awareness to heal, you know, thought, which would then heal the physical body. So medicine was never really a thing I studied or really took growing up. It was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened. We used thought prayer, spiritual prayer to kind of remind ourselves of who we are. But the. I'm curious, do you think that people could live without modern medicine if they eat properly? Like all the things that you talk about in your book Eat to Beat Disease. Do you think we could live longer lives, healthier lives, without the need of certain medicines? Or are you saying we should be using well here and eating food when we need them?

Well, we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time we're young all the way until our last breath. And that should actually be able to tackle about two thirds of all the chronic diseases. And by the way, about a third of all cancers are thought to be due to diet and lifestyle. One third of cancers we ought to be able to dodge. But you got to start early, right? I mean, this is not one of these things where I've been smoking my whole life and now I'm going to actually turn over. And it's never too late to quit, by the way. However, the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, like, so you grew up, you know, in Christian, in the Christian Science framework, which you're in.

You're in the Boston area. So you.

Yeah, that's where the hub is.

The Mother Church is in.

Yeah.

Is in Boston. Yes.

It's. It's amazing. It's an amazing place. Really spectacular, spectacular place to visit and a very special place, actually. But I will tell you that the idea of having formative years groomed in a healthy mindset, which is, I think what you're talking about is so important so that if you've got kids and if you involve a teaching and if you're involved with a business where you can actually impact on kids, think about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health 30, 40, 50, 60 years from now. And that, to me is big responsibility. It's a giant opportunity to make a better society.

That's beautiful. I'm curious, We've got a few more minutes left. What do you think? You're telling me that every week you're essentially finding these aha moments based on the research papers you're finding and things that you're discovering yourself. And what do you think in your mind, if you could predict the future 10 years out, five, 10 years out, what are gonna be the groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next five to 10 years that is gonna transform our health?

Wow.

Based on what you've seen in the last five to 10 years. And we are like, these are unbelievable. Every one of your findings. What do you think is on the horizon for us?

Well, one thing that I think is most one of the big aha. Jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that I've actually had in my career is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves. Okay. And I never thought that was even possible. I had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine and, you know, it's a real struggle, it's an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate the heart or the brain or nerves, and yet the body does it every single day. And when I discovered that you could regenerate tissue by barley, eating barley, which has beta D glucan, or with chocolate, as I mentioned to you, cacao, polyphenols, or even olive oil, there's something called hydroxy tyrosol, it's a natural chemical. And extra virgin olive oil, it helps to kind of make that distinctive olive oily taste that, that can actually help to protect your stem cell or if you are not a vegan, but you eat seafood and you're really adventurous, you know that black pasta, squid ink that they have sometimes on menus? I happen to, I, you know, I like to explore different kinds of food. Squid ink actually protects your stem cells. It's like a shield. Okay. And so the fact that you. We can actually eat to regenerate. So I'm very excited by this idea that we can eat foods. And we're still discovering what foods can help our propel our body's regenerative capacity. I think that's going to actually be groundbreaking. And then something that I'm actually working on that is really, you know, future forward. Right. So you're asking like, what, what's going to be mind blowing in the future?

Yes.

All right, well, look, I'm a. I'm kind of like a pretty down to Earth guy. Like, I believe that we should be protecting our planet, doing everything we can, we can to take care of, nurture this ball that we live on, and we should be doing better for our community. But I also, I think from the time I was a kid, I appreciated and I was excited by this idea of space travel, which is now happening more often. Right. All right, so here's something I think is going to happen over the next decade as humans become extraterrestrial. We're going to be the first extraterrestrials we're ever going to meet is ourselves. And we get beyond near Earth orbit, we're going to be. Our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and have the effects of negative gravity changing our body. We got to find out what kinds of foods or supplements that we got to eat to protect ourselves.

That's crazy.

So I'm working on that.

That's cool.

So I've been meeting with astronauts, I've been talking to people in the space program, flight surgeons. And what I'm figuring is that if we can figure out what we're going to need in the future for that, we could probably bring that right down to Earth.

Why are some of the longevity experts who talk about mitochondria and telomeres and all these other things.

Yeah, yeah.

That they, they're saying. I guess they're saying that the studies are showing the more plants you have, the longer your telomeres. And if you're eating more meat, maybe it doesn't work as much.

Let's talk. I love.

I'm so glad the studies.

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, let's define longevity.

Okay.

Longevity is defined as what, living as.

Long as you can, I guess.

Right.

Living longer than expected.

Okay, so that and living healthier. Okay, so. But now that's not longevity. Okay, so now that is a health span issue and not longevity. And I think we have to be very careful about how we talk about longevity. Are we talking about living six hours longer? Are we talking about living six weeks longer? What does that mean? And I will tell you as a trained geriatrician from Washu, it is about the quality of your life.

Yeah.

You don't want to suffer for 10 years.

Nothing is going to determine more quality than muscle because you must be able to do your activities of daily living. You must be able to be mobile. You must be able to do the things that were once that you once had the capacity for your own autonomy. Right now. And let's take a look at the longevity expert or whatever we mean by that. The one thing that we know and have control over directly is what we eat and how we move, right? In order to protect muscle, you need high quality protein. This is in the literature.

You can't build muscle without protein.

No, you cannot. It would be very difficult.

Just carbs or it would be very difficult.

There is an essential a need. So protein is an essential nutrient. There are 20amino acids and of those 20, there are nine essential. And you must get those nine essentials. Now, I will say that of those nine essentials you require. And I'm so glad you brought this up, because in those early nitrogen studies and the RDA now, it is not taken into account that we have individual amino acid needs. It is looking at protein as a whole. That is incorrect. I just mentioned that there are 20 different amino acids. The information on nutrition as it relates to protein is archaic. When you look at the back of a label, you will see carbohydrates. And carbohydrates will be broken down into sugars and fibers and all kinds of things. You look at the back of a nutrient label and you'll see fat. And fat will be broken down into whether it's trans fats or saturated fats or whatever. You look at the label and it says protein. But not all protein is equal. Let me give you an example.

What's the highest grade of protein and what's the lowest?

So eggs would be considered one of the highest forms of protein. Eggs, beef, chicken, fish, whey. Protein is the gold standard.

Wheys, yes.

Not plant protein? No. And listen, so when we. Plants are notoriously low in the essential amino acids. Really, they are. You can eat a diet that is plant based, but you will require 35% more calories. So, for example, let's say you wanted to get your protein from quinoa. You would need 6 cups of quinoa to equal the amino acid profile of one small chicken breast. That is a metabolic disaster.

Why?

Because in order to stimulate muscle, you need the essential amino acids. Well, you need all the amino acids, but in order to stimulate muscle, you need one of the branched chain amino acids. Now, branched chain amino acids, they are leucine, isoleucin, leucine and valine. Leucine is necessary in a meal threshold amount to stimulate muscle. And you're like, well, the listener is like, well, what does that mean? That means you need to get 30 grams at a minimum. As you age, to stimulate muscle tissue because you need two and a half grams of leucine. And this, you know, I earlier talked about Don Layman, these were some of his discoveries, this is his contribution to science is that we have an amino acid meal need of leucine which eludes people. Let's say you are going to have 15 grams of a protein for breakfast, 15 grams of protein for lunch, and then 15 grams of protein for dinner. And the majority of the rest of your meal was carbs and fat. You will not stimulate muscle, so you.

Need more protein to stimulate muscle.

It either happens or it doesn't. From a nutritional perspective, you require a certain bolus amount at one time to reach the bloodstream, that is two and a half grams of leucine to begin this. As you age, if you are eating sub threshold, you will not stimulate the tissue nutritionally.

What do you say to the people that these athletes that were extreme meat eaters then went plant based and they talk about how they're stronger, they recover better, they sleep better. What do you say to some of those cases that are out there of these athletes?

I would say everyone is individual and if they feel better, that's great. I would say that the science doesn't support that in that way from a muscle recovery, from a body mass, body size, skeletal muscle size. But again, everyone is individual. And I wanna be very clear that I am not anti plant. I'm not and I am not at one extreme or the other. I do believe in eating high quality protein. I know it's important. And I think what's happened now, and part of the reason I was so excited to, to come and talk to you is that what we need in order to have a healthy world is we need transparent conversations.

So you're not extreme either way. You're saying where's the science? I am saying how do we lean into the science?

I'm saying what is the truth, what is supported by the science, what do we know to be true? And then we can make decisions whether an individual is plant based or an individual is eating a high protein diet, which I believe in because I've seen it for decades. And also it's in the literature, high quality evidence in the literature. I believe that to be true. And what's happened now is you're saying.

It'S also hard to be high protein diet, plant based.

It is difficult and it can be done, but it needs to have very careful nutrient complex. You know, again, it's not just about a macronutrient. Food is A matrix. You know, for example, in beef there's creatine, there's components that you won't get from plants. In beef you cannot get it otherwise. There's no creatine in plant products.

Really?

No, it comes from. Come from me, right? The bioavailability of iron is much higher in red meat, B vitamins, zinc. These are things that are what is offered. Taurine, these.

They're not in plants.

They're just not in plants. So we have to be able to have intelligent conversations. And right now what we hear is a lot of narrative and a lot of don't eat me because it's bad for the planet. Well, the reality is in the US if we care about global warming and we really look at what are the biggest drivers we're looking at, 80% is industry, electricity and transportation. This makes up a huge chunk, 80 some percent or more. Agriculture in the U.S. makes up what, maybe 9%. Wait, maybe 9% of that 9%? How much do you think is related to cattle or animal? Maybe it's 3%. So what are we talking about those. So the statistics is just not. It is a lot of discussion when the reality is, if you look at this book, right? So there's a book here, and you take one sheet of paper and that's the entire world, okay? And then you fold it down to a postcard, like let's say it's half that. So the entire world, the land mass is one postcard. You take that one postcard and you give me your business card, Louis, and you say, okay, here's my business card. Now we tear it two thirds and one third. Okay, so we're now down to, we're talking about land mass. We are now down to one business card. And two thirds of that business card is called marginal land, which means we can't grow anything on it. It can only be used for cattle. One third of that land can be farmed. So I bring the point up to this saying, are we looking at the right things? If you care about the environment and you live in Minnesota, then you shouldn't eat avocados. Why? Because of transportation. Those are ways that individuals can make a big impact rather than reducing high quality nutrients. Because ultimately you live in a beautiful area, you're on a coast and you know, I'm on the other coast. But it's the people in the middle that we affect the most. So if we tell people to go more plant based, which they're already eating 70% plants. This is according to the NHANES data. Right now people are eating 70% plant based. Who is it going to affect?

Well, I guess if you're focusing on your vision, which is to help people live a healthier, longer life, you need more quality protein. You do, based on the evidence, yes. And so it's not about having less or more plants, it's about having more quality protein to build skeletal muscle. If you want to eat more plants, eat as much plants as you want, go right ahead. But it also makes you get the quality protein is what I'm hearing you say. Because that is one of the main factors to healthy longevity and healthy aging. And healthy aging.

And we need more protein as we age, not less. We actually require more protein to build.

A muscle, to stay healthy, to maintain.

It, to just keep it. So basically, if you don't stimulate that tissue right, you're going to lose it.

And it's harder to gain it back when you're 50, 60, 70.

I mean, I wouldn't know, but yes. Yeah. Yes. If we take the narrative that we are looking at right now, eat less protein, eat less red meat, do all these things, things while you are young, you have a much greater margin of error.

What about the inflammation or disease conversation around, I guess, whey with milk, you know, milk products and dairy. I grew up drinking about, I don't know, eight glasses of milk a day growing up in Ohio. I think it's the reason I'm a foot taller than everyone in my family because of the hormones probably in the milk and the beef and everything I was eating. But I, I also had a runny nose every day.

So this is something separate.

And it was like inflammation from the milk and from these types of proteins potentially, or maybe there's a number of causes. But I got rid of the milk and I got rid of the.

So that's just one source of protein. Right. And milk we know is really, I mean, I personally don't drink milk, but dairy is really important. Dairy is very bioavailable for the bones. A lot of people don't tolerate it, but you know, I'm not sure that we can equate that with inflammation. So you can equate that with mucus production, but perhaps non inflammation.

But does any red meats cause inflammation?

There is no quality evidence to support that.

Okay. And I will tell suggestion but not evidence.

So you bring up a really good point.

Or clogging arteries or these types of conversations.

Absolutely not. When calories are corrected. Absolutely, absolutely not.

What do you mean calories corrected?

The biggest driver of inflammation and obesity is Excess calories.

Too many calories.

It's. Yeah, it's not protein and it's not red meat.

It's probably sugary drinks and sugar.

It is excess. You know, it is not inherently bad. If you have healthy muscle. It's not inherently bad because your muscle.

Will be able to process it and.

Just flush it out.

So let's go back to red meat being bad for you. There was a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a head researcher named Bradley Johnston, and he looked at a tremendously large number of people and he questioned, well, should we reduce the amount of red meat that we're eating? And right now, I think on average, people are eating 1.6 to 1.8 ounces a day. Do you think that's a lot?

It's not that much.

That's like. That's like this much. Okay, so to say that we need, you know, so are. Is this data true? Is. Do we really need and believe these negative influences that we're hearing? So he went through the literature and he. He did something and put it through something called the grade system. The grade system is the global gold standard for evaluating evidence. Doesn't get better than that. And do you know what he found? That there was no reason for us to be cutting back our red meat consumption.

Interesting.

And it created so many issues.

When was this?

This was 2019.

Okay, interesting.

Pretty recent. They went out after him. People went after him. They tried to not get it published.

Wow.

They were. People were so up in arms again. Food science, we should just call it. We should replace this with something else.

Emotion.

Exactly. And they were so up in arms. And we have yet to see one randomized controlled trial with humans to support red meat being bad. It doesn't exist. There's a lot of epidemiology data talking about this is where all that information comes from. But epidemiology is not high quality data. And we have many randomized control trials talking about the importance of protein, whether it's from Don Layman's lab or Stu Phillips or Doug Patton Jones or Kevin Tipton. These guys are like people that have been looking at it or Heather Lydie. These. There are some really good researchers out there that are putting together information for the. That, you know, that's available.

Sure.

And again, it's not to say that plant is bad or animal is bad.

Which problems are each case more prone to have perfect eating, but not. Not proper half the amount of sleep, four or five hours a night, but you're taking care of physically you're taking care of spiritually and nutrition versus you sleep perfect. Maybe you won't be able to sleep perfect if you're eating that bad, but you sleep eight hours a night, nine hours a night, but you're eating horrible. Who has it worse off?

So firstly, I think you should be a sleep scientist because it's a fantastic question, it's a great study and it's an incredibly complex but important study to do. The first answer is that no one has actually done that type of experiment. We've done a diluted version, a kind of, you know, diet lite version of it, which is we look at sleep and we ask what is it in terms of the mortality risk and the health consequence risk when you're not getting sufficient sleep? And then we take all of those other factors that you've described, smoking history history, diet history, mental health history, etc, etc. And we add those as additional factors into the analysis and we absorb them and control for them so that we can say independent of those things or in spite or in the face of those things, sleep still carries a significant vote in determining your mortality, your rate, your date of excess expiration, as it were. So that's the only evidence that we have right now where you can at least control for those. But we haven't done what you're describing, which is the much more elegant, smart thing to do, which is, you know, can we put them sort of almost in a Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Challenge, kind of Dr. Pepper challenge phase and see which one wins out? You know, diet, exercise or sleep, when those two other things are held constant, but you manipulate one of those, then hold the other two constant and manipulate one of lovely experiment, love to do it, it's not been done, so we don't know.

What would your hypothesis be?

My suspicion is that sleep will still probably carry a larger influence than those two other factors. Now, there's a lot of assumptions I'm making there, but I'll give you another quick example. A study done back in the 1980s which will probably never be repeated because of the moral and ethical issues. They took a group of rats and what they found after sleep depriving the rats was that rats will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. So sleep is that essential. Those rats were dying usually within 20 days. So sleep seems to have a deathly consequence to it. What was also fascinating, however, is that they then, and maybe I'll back up a little bit, human beings and most mammalian species will have two main types of sleep. What we Call non rapid eye movement sleep or non REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep. And what they found was that total sleep deprivation will absolutely kill a rat. If you just selectively deprive the rat of either deep non REM sleep or REM sleep or dream sleep, they found that the rats would still die of either one of those two. So both of those types of sleep are essential. But rats were dying almost as quickly from dream sleep deprivation as they would from total deprivation. Well, they died within about 40 days, whilst the rats who were deprived of deep non REM sleep, they died after about 60 days. So, you know, we can almost then, not that I would wish to pit the different types of sleep head to head and ask which is more important. Now I should say all stages of sleep are critical. That's probably the one of the biggest messages that we've learned. Different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night. All of them are important. But it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death risk, dream sleep may be more important than deep sleep on the consequence basis of how quickly you die. But you need all of them. Bad things happen when you don't get any one of them.

Gotcha. Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams?

Yeah, we've done quite a lot of work in this area and the belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epiphenomenon, they were just a byproduct. And so the analogy would be, you know, think of the, the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you in that lovely background. You know, when you, when you create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep, called REM sleep, when you create light in that way with the light bulb, you also produce this thing called heat. It was never the purpose of the light bulb, it's just what happens when you create light in that way. And the belief was the same thing for dreaming, that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions, one of the conscious spinoffs, one of the byproducts is this thing called dreaming. And that never made sense to me for the simple reason which is this, when we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding than not dreaming, is my assumption from a brain based perspective. And any time mother Nature burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule, Then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words, if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit. And we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions, really. The first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy, that dream sleep is, is emotional first aid.

Interesting.

And it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult emotionally charged experiences, sometimes even traumatic memories. And it acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences. And in that way, it's not time that heals all wounds, it's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence, as it were. And it's not just dream sleep, it's also even what you dream about, not just that you dream. In other words, I'm talking about your dream content being important because there was a study done several years ago and they looked at people going through a really tough time, a traumatic experience, such as a really painful and bitter divorce. And at the time when that was happening, they were recording their dreams. And then they tracked those individuals for a year and one year later, about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression and the other half did not. And then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups. And what they found is that those people who were dreaming, but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves, they didn't get clinical resolution one year later. Those people who were dreaming, but dreaming of the event, they got the clinical resolution. So in other words, dreaming is necessary, but it's not sufficient. You need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those.

How do we influence dreaming what we want to dream and not nightmares?

That's right. Yeah. Well, this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming.

Yes.

And for most people, lucid dreaming from within my field, within the scientific field is actually a more simple definition. It's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming, that you're in a dream whilst you're dreaming. Correct.

Does that exert more energy when having the dream creates. Exerts more energy. If you're conscious and aware while dreaming, is that another level of energy that you're exerting?

Like you need to be a sleep scientist? This is absolutely.

That's why I've got you on here.

You don't need Me, actually. So the answer is, is in part yes. But what we've. So for most people, though, lucid dreaming really means not only I'm aware that I'm dreaming, but now I can control what I'm dreaming about.

Do you often have lucid dreaming?

Do we often, as a, as a group, individually? No. I personally, I've only experienced lucid dreaming probably, you know, six or seven times. And it's great when it happens. But right now we know based on the population statistics, about 80% of the population does not lucid dream. 20% of the population does lucid dream. Which then brings us on or back to your astute question, which is, can we control our dreams and is that a good thing to gain lucidity and to gain control and to give over the driving seat to me, the individual, rather than to Mother Nature's blueprint that she's worked out. And I can play both sides of the, the theory equation here. On one side, I would say if lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being, as an organism, then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now. That would just. There's. That statistic would be reversed, if anything.

Well, I mean, if sleeping an extra couple hours a night is more beneficial, which it is, then more people would also be sleeping more.

Well, that's, that's the hard part, is that with lucid dreaming, it's very difficult to control. But to choose not to sleep, that's unfortunately very easy to control.

A lot of, A lot of, a lot of people think it's difficult.

Well, we'll come back to it. I mean, there's really two separate things with insufficiency. There is you either not giving yourself the opportunity to sleep or society not giving you the opportunity to sleep despite you being able to sleep very well.

Right, right.

Versus you giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep. But just because you have a sleep disorder or you have sleep issues, you cannot generate the sleep. So the difference is opportunity is present, but you can't create the sleep versus you can create the sleep, but you don't have the opportunity to do so. And those two things are quite different. But from the lucid dreaming perspective, I could come back and argue the other side, which is to say my assumption there, the belief that Mother Nature would have had us all doing it if it was good, makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving. In other words, what if that 20% of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of Evolution. They are the superhumans who will come next and succeed. People like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers. So I can play both sides of it.

Interesting. Is there a way to train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more?

There have been some attempts. So there's a scientist called Stephen LaBerge who actually has an institute of lucidity and he's got different courses and classes. How effective they are, it's a little bit unclear. And there are some simple techniques where you can firstly, before you go to bed at night, and it sounds hokey and strange, is just repeat like a mantra to yourself. I am going to try and become conscious in my dream. I'm going to try and become conscious and then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream and you can do this when you're awake. So right now, you know, I am looking at my laptop and, you know, if it's a physical entity and I'm in the real world and I'm awake, if I were to tap my screen, I can feel it physically. And you can go around and keep reminding yourself, you know, I can go over to the light switch and turn it on, turn it off. Do I have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment? Because often you don't have in your dreams. And then by doing that in your waking day, you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping, dreaming life. And at that point when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything, or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it, then you think, oh, hang on a second, this isn't waking. You know, this is clearly a dream. So there's different ways that you can test the reality of waking life versus dreaming life and adopt that mindset. The other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more. So in the morning when you wake up, that's the first step towards a path of lucidity. Don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try and remember your dream. Instead, wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down, don't try to dictate it, just rehearse the dream. Because dreams have this funny nature to them. Were as soon as we wake up, they almost evaporate so quickly from our brain.

And so if, yeah, yeah, if you don't feel it right then in moments or minutes, it's going to be gone.

It'S going to be gone. So Just wait there and try to crystallize it. Try to set the dream in amber by sort of, you know, going over it and rehearsing it. Rehearsing it in your mind. Build that picture, build the memory, ingrain the memory, and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside and write it down. And gradually, as you start to remember more of your dreams, there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity. But in truth, I'm not really, and I don't know anyone who is truly an expert in being able to, you know, increase the frequency with which you can lucid dream. From a scientific perspective, there's lots of people out there who claim, you know, I've got this course that you can do and. But the science doesn't support it that well. But the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt, by the way, that there is a thing called lucid dreaming. We used to think it was a charlatan science, that it wasn't real. And we can go into the details as how you prove it, but it has been proven lots of different ways.

Yeah, and what is the. Do we have any research on what lucid dreaming does for healing the body or hurting the body or the brain?

We haven't found evidence that it either hurts or helps. Right now all we have is evidence. Understanding what happens when you become lucid as a dreamer. And this comes back to what you were asking about, which is, is there an additional metabolic consequence of going into lucid dreaming? One of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep. Well, there are many, but I'll give you just two. The first is that when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown. And the reason is very simple. Your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely so that you don't act out your dreams, so you.

Don'T go move your body and.

Yeah, correct. And so what we know is that the mechanisms that control REM sleep and non REM sleep start deep down within the brain. In fact, in the brain stem. So if you were to take a purr, a fruit like a purr, and you were to turn it upside down, it's that sort of, you know, thin end and the stem of the purr, that's your brain stem. It's there where the principal battle for non REM and REM sleep plays out across the night to create the 90 minute cycle of non REM to REM sleep in humans. But as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during REM sleep, which activates lots of brain areas, but also deactivates them, there's a separate signal sent south of your neck, right down into your spinal cord, which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons, which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles. Now that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles, things like your heart and your inspiration, keeps going. Don't worry, they keep going. Otherwise we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly. But your voluntary muscles, those are paralyzed. The second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming, though, is that many parts of your brain, when you dream light up. The visual areas at the back of the brain, the motor strip, areas across the top of the brain, the emotional centers and the memory centers, all of these things light up. And some of them, in fact are up to 30% more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake, which in some ways is fascinating. But the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex. And this is sort of, you know, it's like the type, the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high level, top down executive control decisions and communication. That part of the brain, as we go into dream sleep, is actively inhibited. So your rational, logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up. No wonder dreams are bizarre, illogical, hyper associative, filled with memories, filled with visual aspects, often have kinesthetic aspects to them. But what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid. In other words, as we gain volitional control over what we dream, the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online, gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams.

I've had, I don't know, maybe a handful of times where I've had this dream where I wake up, my eyes are still asleep and I'm awake, and then I open my eyes, but I feel paralyzed and I feel like I'm screaming, yet nothing's coming out and I can't move my arms and I'm like, am I paralyzed? And then eventually like something comes out of my mouth and I can move, but it always feels very weird. It's like paralysis. I don't know if that's.

And what it, what it's called is sleep paralysis. It's a very well known thing. And normally what happens to all of us as were. So REM sleep and non REM sleep, as I said, will go in this 90 minute cycle. But what's interesting is that in the first half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep non REM sleep and you don't get very much REM sleep in the second half of the night. That's when the seesaw balance shifts and now you get much more of your dream sleep in those last few hours especially. And normally as we're waking up out of sleep and therefore typically REM sleep and therefore typically dreaming, the brain has this beautiful synchrony, this lockstep of increasing consciousness into wakefulness and increasing release of that brain body paralysis. So that as you are regaining waking mental life, your body is released from its physical lockdown, from physical incarceration. However, there are times when one leads too far in front of the other and it's called sleep paralysis. And you've experienced it. I've experienced it too. Can often happen when we're under levels of high stress or we're typically sleep deprived. And at that point you become a pseudo aware. You're sort of in this mixed state of consciousness in your between the worlds of wake and sleep, as it were, but your body is still in the paralysis. So you are, you can't lift your eyelids. Why voluntary skeletal muscles. You can't shout out. Why voluntary skeletal muscles? And it's often paired with a sense, understandably so, of dread and fear and a presence of someone else being there. And it turns out that this phenomenon called sleep paralysis accurately explains most, if not all of so called alien abductions. Because when you, you know, when was the last time you heard on the news an alien abduction story that happened in the middle of the day? And you know, people were outside at lunchtime with friends at work. You know, they're all eating their sandwiches and then all of a sudden they heard this sound, whoosh. And it's like, my goodness, you know, did you see that Tommy was just abducted by alien? You know, it never happens like that. It's usually at night. You're usually by yourself. You describe a presence or a sense in the room. You say that they injected you with some kind of paralyzing agent. You tried to fight back but you couldn't. It's sleep paralysis.

Paralysis. Yeah.

Right now, by the way, it's, it's not necessarily something to be worried about. If you have it. It seems to be somewhat normal, about 25% of the population will experience it. In other words, it's as common as hiccups. But just be aware that there's nothing wrong with you and it's not that you're being visited by anything strange or there have been some kind of worries in religious sort of domains that you require some kind of, you know, exorcism or there's sort of a long history of that in the past. We understand the biology. It's a basic science fact, and it's largely normal. So.

So when someone experiences it, what should they do? Just try to maintain calm and just wait for the body to wake up naturally.

And that's exactly right. You will come out of it and try to, if you can, having heard this, understand what's going on. Sometimes even I don't recognize what's going on when it's going on, despite knowing what I know. But gradually I get to the place where I realize what's happening, and then I just relax and I say, I'm just going to give it time. And I may fall back asleep or I may continue with my, you know, Runway jet propulsion, and I hit escape velocity of both consciousness and physical paralysis, and it will be just fine.

The first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is. And most folks have no idea, unfortunately. Like, we're at war with something we don't even understand. And so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. And a couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're going to go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue. This is a fat that's just below your skin. And so if you're trying to. If you think about, like, fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly. But that's the stuff you can pinch.

Now, I can pinch a lot right here.

The other type of fat is visceral fat, and that's also. It's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity.

Right.

So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs, you know, kind of putting. If you have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in.

Your core is the fat inside your. Not on the outside of your muscles, but inside your body.

Yeah. So it's like your abdominal cavity.

Gotcha. Your Visceral fat. And you want less of that.

Yeah.

This is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core. Everything, which there's so much around there.

Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything.

And this is the stuff. It's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. And so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay. So your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy. Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it, though, and it could be a little bit clingy.

You know, so you have to give.

The right messages, and that's part of the issue. So I just want to make that clear. And fat is also. It's not. We tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself. So that is an organ. It's an organ. It's an organ that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones. All right, so it's like making. Producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand. All right, so I want to preface by saying that.

Wait, is it an organ or is it, like, an organ?

It's an organ.

Fat is an organ.

Yes.

And just like, for example. So fat in our body is one organ, and it's all connected from the brain in my. Connected from the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe.

Now, there's different types of fat communities. All right, so this is another conversation. This. I go through all of these. I literally call it the fat communities in Eat smarter and break this stuff down. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about. It's called intramuscular fat. All right, Intramuscular fat.

This is the third type of fat.

Yeah. And so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my Conventional education. I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of. They have this dichotomy, like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, all right, that's.

That's.

That's your intramuscular fat. Now, that can get out of hand, too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles, all right, with the intramuscular fat. So that's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community. All right, so these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now, here's what's really amazing and a lot of folks might know about this. This next one, we also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue.

All right.

Or bat brown adipose tissue. Or brown fat. Now, brown fat. The reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria, right?

Mitochondria are good, right?

Yeah. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of our cells, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy. And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned.

All right?

So folks, don't. We're taught these, like, diet paradigms, like, where the. How does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? Your mitochondria actually are buried, the place where the triglycerides get shipped to, to actually burn them and use them as fat. So brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria.

Side note, how. How do I go to bed weighing a certain amount, and then I wake up and I lose two pounds? Where does that go? Is that just a burn through sweat? Is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating the air? What is happening?

This is such a great question. So in each. This is the first time in book, like, we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens. And it's just the. The question should be, like, where the hell does fat go?

Where does it go?

Does it go to.

You just poop it out? Do you sweat it out? Does it.

You've got that.

Do I breathe it in?

You've got that. Thanos keychain. Does it go to another dimension?

You know what I mean?

But what they did when this was so fascinating, they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated. And so what they discovered was that about 84% of the fat. Because. Okay, we have to preface by saying this for us, psychologically, in our culture, we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it. It's sweating.

Yeah.

Like, we're out there. We're at the gym. We're sweating it out. That's like. That's your fat cells crying, having a good breakup cry, you know, that's how we. That's what we think.

Yeah.

But in actuality, about 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

What?

Yeah, it's eliminated via your lungs. Yes. Carbon dioxide.

So it.

No way. So fat in the body and then it goes, what, into your lungs? It's like transporting through the lung cavity, and then you breathe it out.

It's an eliminatory organ. You know, we don't think about that. I tend to think about, like, our gastrointestinal tract, our bladders, eliminatory organs, your lungs. And so you breathe. About 84% of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens while you're. While you're sleeping at night.

So you breathe fat out. That's how you burn it.

Yeah.

How much?

Cesar Millan is the dog whisperer.

Exactly.

I burn it in my sleep. So wait a minute. How much fat do we burn through our lungs?

About 84% of it.

So all of her fat. So if I'm 100.

But this is not just your breathing. It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoot. It just comes through the mouth through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. So about, you know, somewhere around the ballpark, about 15%, 16 to 14% sweat and urine. Yeah.

Tears.

All of these things are eliminating products, you know.

Yeah.

Is the fat. It looks coagulated when you look at it in, like, in your body. Right. So how does it break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see?

Yeah.

It's like, you know, it's a very complex and beautiful process.

Body is fascinating, what it can do.

It is. It is.

And we go through.

We.

And it can be so overwhelming. But what I did was, I made it an analogy in the book of a Theater, making your body like a cellular movie theater. And there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to quote, kill fat or burn fat, but that's not really how it works.

Actually.

Your fat cells are storage containers, and what they're getting filled with, the fat cells, basically, when you're. When you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells, all right? You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel.

Right.

All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats, the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell, or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of its hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. Right. Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater.

All right.

And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing, you know, namely your. Your. Your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin, and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. All right. Insulin is so man. When you think of insulin, what do you think of, though?

Eating sugar.

Yeah, that's right.

Because insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar. Right?

Yeah. And most folks think of diabetes, too. It's, like, tied into that lexicon. But insulin is so important for our survival. It's just. It's a super amazing.

We need it.

Yes, you absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition, we have type 1 diabetes, and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making. Taking insulin, like, you can die. Your cells won't get energy. So now here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy and to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem.

It's storing too much fat.

Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. All right. And then you have something called this Kind of instant cell. Fat cell creation that can take place with the liver. It'll just start making its own fat as well.

So.

But we'll circle back to that a little bit later. But here's the thing. So you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to. To be used as energy. But glucagon cannot do its job when. Unless his brother sits his ass down somewhere and stops. Yes.

So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job?

That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want to stop. We just want to be efficient.

Efficient.

And it's. Now, here's another thing. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin.

Carbohydrates in general does, right?

Yeah, protein. But protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree, for sure. And even fat, in a kind of backdoor way, does drive insulin function, too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing. But we do know that in our culture, you know, on average, folks eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know, so that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over overactivity of insulin to the point that we have insulin resistance.

100 years ago, we weren't eating as much sugar, I'm assuming in process.

It's not even close. It's not even close.

But what is with the. The life expectancy increases every year. It seems like we're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

That's the. That's the misnomer, though. We're not necessarily living long.

Longer.

We're dying longer.

We're getting sick and being able to stay alive.

Yes, it's very different. And this is the first generation we. We are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us.

All right?

This is the first time we're seeing this downtick when we're supposed to be seeing folks. Well, basically, the life expectancy has gone down for the first time, really, in, like, recent history. Yeah, yeah.

So we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or. What do you mean?

So we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old. Now it's 79. Really, you know, so it's just going a. Life expectancy is going down for the first time.

Previous generation. Gotcha. It's interesting, I was asking Dr. David Sinclair about this.

I love him.

He was like, the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable. He's like, I've seen that in too many people. The goal is to live as long as you can, healthy, flexible, abundant, you know, not with chronic pain. And then die quickly.

Right.

It's to get sick and then die within a week. Not get sick, die within 20 years of misery. He's like, that's not a great life.

Yeah.

We don't just want lifespan, we want healthspan. And it all really boils down. And this is the most beautiful part about this and what I'm really hoping to impress upon culture, because when we tend to think of food, we tend to think of it in relationship. In our culture, we think of diet in relationship to weight. It's just like what's connected when in reality, food is one of the greatest, if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times. And this is what I really want to get across is, of course, I'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food, but also how does food affect your cognitive performance? And it's shocking when you find this data out how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people. Break that down as well.

What are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion? And what before.

Before we get to that.

Yeah, The.

The fat storage.

We.

There was one more.

Were you talking about brown fat?

Yeah, brown fat.

And there was another fat.

Yeah. So there's one other fat. And so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria. Right. So these energy power plants. That's why it's. Brown babies have a lot of brown fat. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia, you know, just to basically keep thermogenesis going. As you become an adult, you have a lot less brown adipose tissues, mostly located like around your collarbones, your shoulder blades, down your spine. And brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated. If you have enough brown adipose tissue, which you can create more, and the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition. So this type of fat is burning fat for you. If you know.

Brown fat.

Yeah. All right, so that's a. We got three Storage fats. And then we've got two other types.

Of fat and that's body fat that burns fat.

Yes.

And so this other one, and this is one a lot of folks might know, might not know a lot about yet, is beige fat.

This is the fifth type of fat.

Yeah. So this is beige fat.

Beige fat.

And so beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat. All right. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming, turning into a fat storing type of fat or fat burning type of fat and the browning of this fat. One of the things, and I'll just throw this out there for folks, since you asked about specific food when we go through so many different. But I'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy, A little controversial, is coffee. Coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And in fact, one of the studies that I cited in Eat Smarter found they actually used FMRI and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up, signaling increased thermogenesis. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 to 11% increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now there's a U shaped curve of benefits, Right. Some is good. Once we get to a certain place we can mess ourselves up. And also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with?

Right.

Is it just, is it coffee? Are you consuming coffee with donuts and crap and like, you know, these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals that's not good. And even the coffee itself, are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut. So there's a big conversation there and we dive into all these people pieces to see like there's so many wonderful things that we have access to. But in our culture we've been a little bit led astray. And it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad. It's been utilized for by humans for centuries. But it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make all.

The difference and the quantity probably.

And.

Yeah, yeah. And so just going back to your original question, when we're targeting that, you know, the belly fat specifically, and this is something that is not talked about enough. It's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning. Right. And this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as if we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this, but when I was in my nutritional science class in college, the very like the king, the monarch, the warden of diet is calories. And I say warden intentionally because it's a little. It gets into this kind of prisoner mentality.

Yeah.

And diets are really revolving around this. And I, I'm always asking this question and I'm so grateful that I've kind of hard wired myself to do this. Where did it come from? Where the hell did this idea start? And so I went back and examined the entire history of calories. And it actually, for me, it's just like when we find like Egyptian pyramids, like they didn't have any about calories. Nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it even when it was discovered. And it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition. It was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering. Yeah. And this was in 1800s. And then it made this transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named Wilbur Atwater. But he's just kind of a little side note as well. And I basically, I go back and talk about all the people involved. But this is what changed America. This is what changed the world. Really was a physician. She's a pioneer, for sure. Her name was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters and she's the one who popularized the term calorie. And she sold. This was back in the early 1900s, she created a nutrition book, a diet book. And it sold 2 million copies back then, which is basically everybody and their mother had this. All right.

Now, what was it called?

This was diet and health and the key to calories. Something like that. The key to calories. But I went back and read these old fangled writings. There's like a lot of pieces of it online. And this began the indoctrination of our culture and starting to look at food in terms of numbers. It's no longer this dynamic multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems. Now it's numbers. And she specifically said, we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread. You won't say us one slice of bread, you'll say 100 calories of bread, you will no longer say a slice of pie. You say 350 calories of pie. And so we stopped looking at food as food. We started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers. And she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake. And now let me also make this clear. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters battled with her weight for her lifetime. All right? And it's that term of like, teach what you want to learn kind of thing. Now, this is also crucial. And some people, this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit. This was also the beginning of this indoctrination, associating food with character, associating food with morality. And so she basically asserted that it's a character defect. If you're not able to manage your weight, there's something wrong with you. And started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food. And this was also during the time of, like World War I. So food rationing was a big thing. And she said, one of her quotes I put in the book, and I'm paraphrasing, that for every pang of hunger you feel, you should have a double joy, knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or, you know, with soldiers. And what. So she's basically saying this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss. If you're hungry, you're doing it right. And this started to really change the psychology of dieting.

Right?

And so calories began to become the king and the big focus. Now, I want to say this. Calories matter for sure. It's a. It's a measurement of energy in food, just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same.

Same distance.

However, calories are different. Completely ignore. When you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function. It's going to be different every day, the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body.

Because our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing, our timelines are changing. What we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now, and we're 40 or 50 exactly, let.

Alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And it's, I'm sick of it, man.

Wow.

Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them.

How does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the Ultra Mind 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 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, otherwise known as a sad diet, a standard American diet 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. You know, when you cut yourself and you get 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 nose 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, predominantly 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 role in mood like folate, magnesium is credible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, 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, 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 tooth tiger.

Wow.

And that can create anxiety internally with the insulin. Internally?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean you could 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, your body's gonna feel it.

So what happen, what happens to the brain when the, when you're 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 inflame it in that moment? Does it take time to inflame something?

So, so there's a whole cascade of things that happen 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 like 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 slows, 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, only get in. And then on top of that it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules, we call them adipocytokines, that go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's a kind of a downstream effect over 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 that 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 Plummetter 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, it's like you think you're gonna 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 gonna just run or fight or flee. And it's. And what happens is, 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. And 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 he's got these people, people locked up. So you've got. 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.

The environment's the same for everyone. Yeah, all that stuff.

That's right. And they took these kids and they. And they. These were kids who are disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. It was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods, there was a 91% reduction in all violent behavior. You know, 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 know, 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 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 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, in my book, the Pegan diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. And it's really practical, and there's a bunch of steps at the end. But I think the real dangers are one, high fructose corn syrup. Because anything with high fructose corn syrup, almost by definition, is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other bad 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 really.

What's that in? What foods is that in? Is that processed packaged foods, hydrogenated fats, or fried? Is that French fries? Yeah.

So hydrogen frats have literally been. Have been banned by the fda, essentially ruled not safe to eat. But they're still out there. Okay, there's. You can still find them. It's less, but it's. And they used to be really. That's basically Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a Baked good or any, any processed food. And the third thing would be, you know, 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 hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad? You know, 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 ingredients used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwiches. Take it out. Didn't Vari get it taken out? Yeah, so our friend ashamed 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.

No, you do not.

Yes, you do. I swear to God, in Europe, a lot of these chemicals are bad. 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, and I had a, I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist and 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 be pagan. 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 eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat 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 of this book is not to create a dogma, but to create a big ten inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different beliefs 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, you know, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort. But he may be a unicorn or maybe he's. 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 or 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.

Vegan.

And she didn't even like to.

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 acne and 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, you know, she was extremely unwell and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes, which she needed. I had to upgrade other vitamins. I had to sort of get her off the sugar. I mean, but I think, you know, 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.

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

Exactly, yeah. And I always encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body. Yourself, Right?

Yeah.

Like, how do you feel? Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How you're clear, 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. 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 also 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 is information. Just meat, for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's. 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 fills we use to grow feed the feed loss that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use. And the quality of the meat is very different. So it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals.

What are the insane benefits of water only fasting because you've Been doing this for 38 years with over 20,000 patients that have done water only fasting. What are the main benefits?

Well, you know, one of the first things that we look at is that there are certain conditions that are really common today. So cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, type 2 autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body. The rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, the psoriasis, the eczema, these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you, and also certain types of cancer like lymphoma. And these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable because, I mean, if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they're going to give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta blocker or whatever or a combination of medications. And they're going to tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you'll never get well.

Really?

You'll be on these meds for the.

Rest of your life?

Absolutely.

They'll tell you you'll never get off these meds. You'll be on drugs forever. Because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure. The root you're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root. And so our approach is a little different because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill, potion or powder and tell you, well, that's it. Just take these drugs and suffer the consequences.

Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and you'll be on these drugs for the.

Rest of your life.

We'll live normally.

Yeah.

Right.

Normal the way it is today. Right.

Well, two thirds of people are now overweight or obese. So being overweight is normal if you want. It doesn't mean it's healthy. You don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy. Because normal or average right now is in trouble. And it's in trouble because people are under the influence of the pleasure trap. There's this hidden force that's undermining people's health and happiness, and they don't even realize it.

In many cases, delayed gratification is the key. That is the way, in my opinion, not living in the instant pleasures of today, but how can I distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier happier ways.

The problem I think is though that you are biologically designed for short term pleasure seeking, self indulgent behavior.

Those hits, those dopamine hits.

Absolutely. The brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction. And those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive, to get enough to eat, to not get eaten, live long enough to reproduce. And that dopamine driven short term response worked great through most of human history. But more recently it's become a bit of a trap. And it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity where it was really hard to get enough eat people. And now we live in an environment of abundance. And these highly processed foods are so appealing because they, they play off those ancient mechanisms, the salt, the sugar, the.

Process, nature of it. It's just delicious, but it's not good for you.

Well, you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long.

And well, yeah, not survive unwell, which is what we've trained ourselves, society to do. It's like how can we extend our life on machines? That's not a well of life. But how can we be happy, healthy, fulfilled and then have a quick, quicker death? Right. It's like not suffer for as long as possible, but live as long, happy and healthy and then turn off the lights.

Well, we talk about having a good life, good, hopefully long life, but also a good death. The death where one night you go to sleep, sleep and you don't wake up. Rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move, lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you've had a stroke or you've had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two, perhaps the best, most enriching time of your life rather than the worst, dependent on others around you, unable to really function properly. And that's the price we pay for short term pleasure seeking self and depends behavior that doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem, but definitely causes longer term problems.

So what are these crazy benefits of water only fasting? What are the main things you've seen people transform? Of these 20,000 plus cases, one of.

The biggest things that fasting does, it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess. So people spend a long time accumulating the consequences of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse Many of those.

Consequences, such as what, what are the main things you see?

So the conditions like that are caused by dietary exercise. So high blood pressure. For example, we did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications. The medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough, fatigue, impotence and premature death. And yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized. Recognize that blood pressure is reversible and containable process. Really fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure. Now the problem is you can't fast forever. You have to feed. So you also have to learn to eat a health promoting diet in order to sustain those results. But in terms of eliminating the risk factors, eliminating the need for medication, normalizing blood pressure, you can do that very predictably with medically supervised water only fasting.

What does it mean, medically supervised when you're just drinking water? I mean, what do you need? Why do you need someone there to watch you? Is it like testing with your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not fatigued? In starvation mode?

We recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours, depending on their goals. If they're trying to lose weight or gain weight, it may depend on the duration. But we recommend a period of, of 16 hours a day of fasting, eight hours a day of feeding. And by limiting the feeding window, as people like Valter Longo and others has pointed out, you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long term fasting cumulatively and also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess. So everybody can and should fast every day. In fact, everybody does fast every day, right?

When you're sleeping, you're not eating, and.

You break it with breakfast in the morning. It's an interesting process. So we're talking about maybe extending that natural period daily so that you aren't necessarily eating. Three or four hours before you go to sleep. May improve your sleep quality, may improve digestion, may improve your muscle to fat ratios over time, and may induce changes that are beneficial. The thing that we do in addition is we'll extend that period much longer. The problem when you start talking about long term fasting and we're fasting people anywhere from, from 2 to 40 days on water only, is that first you need to make sure that the person is an appropriate Candidate for that longer term intervention. People that have certain pathology, people on medications, people that have risk factors, may be better off with a different approach than long term water only fasting. So first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or medications that would contradict what.

Happens to the kidneys or the liver if you're water only fasting.

So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys if kidney function isn't at least at some minimal level. In our clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker. If kidney function isn't adequate, then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting, where the body mobilizes and eliminates both endogenous exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys. If the kidneys function is inadequate, you could overload the kidney function and create problems there really. And so it's very important that people have minimal levels of clearance. And that's also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration. So we're monitoring people's electrolytes so to make sure that we don't get into problems with, with potassium or sodium or other things which could become a problem, especially in these longer fasts when we're going two, three, four, five weeks or longer.

Wow. What's the longest someone's been on a water fast with you?

Well, in our clinic we limit fasting generally to 40 days. We've had a few patients, we've had to go a little bit longer than that. But there's evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically controlled settings for as long as a year or more. So not that we would recommend that.

Is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things.

There was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating supreme obesity with long term fasting. But even a thin male, say a 70 kilogram male, could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days if they're resting during the process. Not that they should necessarily.

Doctor could survive.

But as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy, the body is pretty amazing. You know, the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain.

Is what, just thinking or what like.

Cognitive activities, the brain. We have this ridiculously large brain in humans, two and a half Times that say of a chimp, it's huge. And it's our main burner of glucose. In fact, if it wasn't for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to fat, we couldn't have survived as a species the way we have. Because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so, if spring came late, we would have died. In fact, we did. The humans that didn't have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren't able to survive. We know that because today, virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar, which is the normal fuel, to burning ketones, or beta hydroxybutyric acid in particular. And that would suggest a biological adaptation, such an important adaptation that the species had to have it. So today, humans can wander away from the tropics, spring can come late, and we can survive despite our very large brain and its huge burning of glucose, because we have this ability to fast. All we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation. And that is the situation of dietary excess. No other animals maintain obesity. I mean, even whales, who you think of as kind of fat, are 9% body fat okay.

Really?

Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their lean meat machines, like all animals do, unless they get access to hyper processed foods like humans eat. So if you feed human style hyper processed foods to animals, they also get fat. We add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain. Those chemicals are salt, oil and sugar. These are not foods, they're food byproducts. They're hyper concentrated food byproducts. They're essentially chemicals we're putting in the food, stimulate more dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food. That's what good tasting food means. It stimulates more dopamine production. And the consequence of hyper stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese. And that's why 2/3 of people are overweight, is because they fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat, then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like Covid. The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences.

What about olive oil or avocado oil? I hear these good oils, these fatty oils are supposed to help you in certain ways.

Is that, well, you have to be careful when we define these good oils. There are oils that are more harmful than say olive oil. So an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good, it's just less bad. So oils are all highly processed, fractionated foods with 9 calories per gram and limited satiety feedback. So if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from whole food. So I would advocate if Putty wants avocado oil, eat avocado, not necessarily process it down, remove the fiber, a lot of the good components and be left with the oil. And the same thing is true with sugar. You need carbohydrates as a primary fuel. But you eat whole food, whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches, not necessarily the highly processed, hyper processed byproducts. If your goal is to avoid overeating, dietary excess, obesity and the diseases of dietary excess. Right.

What are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water Only fasting? Three biggest things that you see, whether it be seven or 70 days, well, you know, they look younger. Is it the clearer skin? Is it they're burning fat, is it that internally their cells are changing? What's the three main benefits you see.

It'S hard to different. There's so many benefits, it'd be hard to say which are the three dominant. But I can talk about some of the benefits that we see. Certainly you see weight loss, you can't help that. The laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. We know that weight loss is about a pound a day. Now, that pound a day average weight loss is a pound a day. Now some of that's water, some of it's protein, some of it's fiber, some of it's glycogen and some of it's fat. And of that fat, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it's visceral fat.

The visceral is what you want to burn, right?

Well, visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology, in fact, probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat, visceral fats, what happens when the body has no place else to put fuel? And so you'll store some Additional visceral fat. And the higher the visceral fat, generally, the worse you are, simplistically speaking. And so we just did a study where we took a DEXA scanner that has software that allows to do precise whole body composition. So not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral.

Fat fat there is internally and externally.

Right, exactly. So visceral fat, typically you think about an apple or strand in the belly and around the organs, that internal fat.

So a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well.

Right.

That is not good for you.

Yeah, that's not thought to be very healthy.

It's not good. I mean, the belly fat that people see is not good, obviously, but the stuff that's surrounding all the organs is you don't want to have a lot of that fat, right?

That's correct. And so the question is, what can you do to get rid of it? Any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes, but the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting. Fasting is the highest ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue mobilization. For example, typical patient in the study might lose 20% of their fat, but would lose over 50% of their visceral fat during a couple weeks of fasting, even though they only lose 4% of their lean tissue. And what's even more exciting is we look at, okay, what happens during fasting. Let's say, for example, a person loses 10 pounds. And we know some of that is water, some of it's fiberglagen, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it is visceral fat. Then what happens after fasting? So you lose 10 pounds, you might regain 5 pounds. You're gonna gain about 2 pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that'll be depleted within a couple days of fasting. You're gonna rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration. During fasting. You're going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had fiber being added to it. You're going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed, and you're going to theoretically put back on fat. But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS free diet, what we found was weight comes off, weight comes back on but the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber and protein, not fat. Fat continues to drop.

I like that.

So we've been able to show, and this study will be coming out later this year, exactly what happens. And then we followed people at six weeks, brought them back in, reanalyzed them, and we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat, but they can continue to lose their fat, visceral fat, even free living, eating, health promoting.

So the scale will go up some, but the fat will not go up.

That's correct.

So you gotta, you gotta trick your mind and say, well, I'm not gaining all this weight. Like you're gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things, but not the fat back.

Keep in mind it's not weight per se, that's the threat, it's excess fat. So for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue a over time. That's not necessarily compromising your health just because you, quote, gained weight. Now if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat, particularly visceral fat, gain that same £20, that might be a problem.

Right.

So we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight, but in terms of body composition.

Okay.

So the idea is to lower the fat, not necessarily lower the muscle number one. One nut, and we'll talk about this.

In a little bit, is pistachios.

I love pistachios.

Pistachios have so many crazy health benefits.

And their number one health benefit, spoiler.

Alert, is they are the highest source of melatonin.