The 7 NUTRITION TIPS To Improve Health & LIVE LONGER | Lewis Howes

And they found that folks who ate two or more servings of green leafy vegetables each day had brains that were about 11 years younger on average.

In your mind, what's worse, meat or sugar?

We look at the root causes of disease, and there are many, right? But by far the biggest cause is food.

Today, you have the ability to change your health habits and extend your lifespan. That's why in this video, I've brought.

Together some of the top health experts.

To share the best nutrition tips to help you take control of your health. Make sure to subscribe to the channel, drop a like, and leave a comment with your biggest takeaway below. Do you think that all inflammation, chronic pain, and disease can be eliminated from the foods we eat or is caused by foods? I think besides having like a car accident or something.

Yeah.

You know, I'm a functional medicine doctor, you know, run the Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, and so we look look at the root causes of disease. And there are many, right? There's environment, there's lifestyle, there's genetics, all affect these systems in your body, right? So we always say there's five causes of all disease based on how they influence your genetics and combine with your lifestyle. Toxins, so environmental toxins, that's not your fault. That's just the fact we put 80,000 chemicals in the environment without testing them. We have 3,000 food ads we eat every year. As Americans, about three to five pounds of it, which is frightening. and there are heavy metals and pesticides everywhere. So we're exposed to a lot of toxins. They make people sick. Infections, which we can get, whether it's viral infections and bacterial infections, Lyme disease, tick infections, allergens, which are increasingly common, or food sensitivities, things where your body's creating an immune response, whether it's gluten or dairy, those are big. And then poor diet and stress. All of those are contributing to disease. But by far the biggest cause is food. By far. And it affects, I mean, what's amazing is it's not just like a little bit. It's like people say, oh, my migraines or my arthritis or my irritable bowel. People don't connect the dots between how they feel and the food they're eating. And then when you switch, people have transformations very quickly.

Yeah.

They notice it quickly.

Quickly, yeah. The pain goes away, the weight goes off, all these things. Yeah, I mean, I always say food is medicine. It's not just like a medicine. It works faster, better, and cheaper than almost any drug. I mean, we have people who are off insulin, who are type two diabetics, within a week. and get off all their medications. I mean, there was a huge study just published on a ketogenic diet intervention for type 2 diabetics. Now, I don't think ketogenic diets are right for everybody, but in an extreme situation where your metabolism is so broken, it can help reset things, basically reducing carbs to 30 grams a day, 70% fat, and in the context of a healthy plant-rich diet. And they were able to get 100% of the people in a year over diabetics off of the main diabetes medication and 94% off insulin or dramatically lower with an average weight loss of 30 pounds, about 12% of body weight. And this is unprecedented in the research because food, if you know how to apply it in the right way, at the right dose for the right person, it's the most powerful drug.

Yeah.

Here's the thing. You talked about in the book that you've been studying food for 35 years.

40 now. I can't believe 40 years. I was like, oh, I did the math. It's 2018. I was starting in 1978 in college. And I'm like that old.

Here's the thing. You've got 11 New York Times bestselling books. You've probably done how many books total?

14.

14 books. 11 New York Times including this one food, what the heck should I eat? And for 40 years you've been studying food and you say even the experts are confused by the science. They are. They are.

So how come, how can I figure.

Out, you know all the answers. I don't think, after 40 years.

I don't think I know all the answers, but I don't have a bone to pick. In other words, I haven't spent my life dedicated to the low-fat diet. I haven't been dedicated my life to veganism. I mean, I'm looking at like what works. the other thing I know is that I'm not an academic. I do research, but that's not how I started. I'm a practicing doctor. So what's happened over the years is the latest thing comes in, I try it, see what happens, see what happens to the patient. So seeing tens of thousands of patients doing thousands and thousands of lab tests over the years, seeing what happens when people change their diet and how their biology responds, that's the best laboratory you'll ever see. I even noticed it myself. I was a vegetarian for 10 years and I see pictures of myself when I was 28. and I am so scrawny even though I ate really healthy, I ran five miles a day, I did yoga all the time, and I look at myself now doing far less exercise and I am far more muscular and have more muscle mass than I did when I was 28 because I learned how to change my diet and we know that the right kind of high fat diet and adequate protein actually increases muscle mass.

Wow.

Yeah.

I literally just got off the phone with a friend who says, you know, I went on a vegan diet and three days into it, like I can't lift anymore.

Yeah.

You see some athletes that are all vegan who have gained muscle mass and gained strength in your life?

Well, what is the-- maybe they're taking steroids.

I don't know. Who knows? So you think living a vegetarian or vegan, fully vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, that.

It'S hard to gain muscle mass? I think it's hard. It's not impossible. I mean, if you really work at it and really work out, and there are great vegan athletes out there, but there's never been a historically voluntary vegan society ever. And when you look at, yes, when you look at- Really? -Gluzons or- no, they were never exclusively vegan, right? They always had some animal food, right?

Fish or something.

Yeah.

And you know, as hunter-gatherers, we ate 800 species of plants. So we had a very plant-rich diet. But we also included wild animals when we could catch them.

Right, exactly.

And so it's part of our evolutionary history, and our bodies are well adapted, and the protein in vegetables is different. So for example, There's something called leucine, which is an amino acid that is the rate limiting amino acid for muscle synthesis. In other words, in order to build muscle, you need this amino acid. And it's very low in plant proteins.

Very high in animal proteins. So why not just live a plant-based.

Diet and then have the supplements? You could. You could. And I have patients who are vegans, monks. I mean, I'm not going to force people not to eat it, but it's much harder to do and you have to know what you're doing. And I see people over time, initially, when they switch from a processed American diet to a whole foods vegan diet, they're going to get so much better. Of course. the real issue is compared to what?

Right.

Right?

What we really need to do is, and they've looked at over time these big studies looking at animal and plant proteins and stuff over time, looking at what people do. There's a vegan and vegetarian omnivore study which was 245,000 people. It was an observational study, but they didn't find any difference in outcomes. Another study, 42 country study, looking at food pattern consumption over long periods of time showed actually the people that had animal fat and protein did far better than people who focus on cereal grains in their diet, less heart disease. Another study, the PURE study, just came out recently, 135,000 people, it was five continents, I think 18 countries, 10 years, and there was actually an improvement when people had more saturated fat and more good fats and less cereal grains and more animal protein.

More animal protein or more animal fat?

More animal protein. It was not a risk factor. Now, these are difficult studies to interpret sometimes because they're observational, but you look at interventional studies where you intervene by giving people high fat protein diets with lots of plant foods, people do better metabolically.

Really?

Yeah, it's very hard to eat a low glycemic diet if you're a vegan. You can, but it's very hard. I have a friend who's a keto vegan and she's a type one diabetic and she's rocking it.

But you have to know what you're doing.

It's so disciplined. Yeah, super disciplined, super smart about it. That's challenging.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, and the data on meat, honestly, which I go into the book in great detail, is.

Confusing for people because this all depends on the factors of the meat.

Yeah.

When you get it, the environment it's in, how it's fed, how it's raised.

The stress of it.

Right. Exactly.

How it's processed, everything, right? Totally right. So, you know, people go, we shouldn't be eating meat because it's bad for the animals, bad for the environment.

Right.

Yes, we should not be eating factory farmed meat. This is really bad. It's bad for the animals, it's bad for the planet, it's bad for us because the quality of the meat is very poor. But let's say a wild elk or a grass-fed finished bison or even cow, very different. And it turns out that these animals actually have higher levels of omega-3 fats and higher levels of antioxidants and minerals and nutrients and beneficial fats and actually are a great source of protein and don't have the harm that we think they do. When you look at the studies that showed there was harm, the reason they show that is because when you do a study, observational study, you give people a questionnaire. every year. So you take 10,000 people, 100,000 people, and every year you give them a questionnaire, what'd you eat? What'd you eat last week? If you can remember. And people answer according to what they think they should answer a lot of times, right? So if meat is bad, they're gonna underestimate the amount of meat they're eating. So during the time of these studies, meat was considered bad. So people who ate meat didn't really care about their health. And the data show it. When you look at the factors of these people, their characteristics, which you can read in the studies, which I read, They were overweight, they smoked, they drank, they didn't eat fruits and vegetables, they didn't exercise, they didn't take vitamins, they.

Ate more processed food, more sugar. Of course they were sicker. Wow. Yeah.

Now, what are the three basic food rules that you live by?

Me?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I always joke, I used to teach a lot of churches and I go, ask yourself one question when you're shopping. Did God make this or did man make this?

Right?

Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did God make an avocado?

Yeah.

Pretty simple rule. And you can even take that to its logical extreme. Did God make a feedlot cow?

No.

Did God make a grass-fed cow?

Yes.

So you can kind of go down the line on all that. That's the first principle. Second principle is which we're eating mostly plant-based diet. We call it plant rich.

Plant rich. 80-20, right?

80%, 70% of your foods on your plate should be Lots of vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruit, whole foods. And the third principle is we need a lot of good fats, avocados, olive oil. I think there's controversies about certain things, nuts and seeds are good, but then there's the whole saturated fat debate, which we can get into where refined oils, but essentially we need a lot of good fats, low starch and sugar, plant.

Rich diet, and stay away from processed food.

Yeah.

Now should that be true for everyone or does it depend on your body type, your blood type, your genetics?

So I jokingly call this the Pegan diet, right? Because I was sitting on a panel with friends of mine, one was paleo, one was vegan, they were fighting, and I'm like, Listen, guys, you're paleo, you're vegan, I must be a Pegan. And I was joking. And then it occurred to me that there was more in common than there was different. And we could come up with these general nutritional principles that nobody's going to disagree with, right? Nobody thinks we should be eating a lot of starch and sugar. Everybody thinks we should be eating more plants. Everybody thinks if we eat animal protein that we should eat only sustainably raised or harvested or grass finished protein. That we should eat fish, but it should only fish this low in mercury and toxins that doesn't overfish the oceans, if it's farmed, it should be sustainable. We should eat lots of good fats. I mean, there are a few outliers who still are holding on to low-fat dogma, but the train has left the station on that one. And so there's this simple, that nobody thinks we should be consuming pesticides and herbicides and GMO, that we should be having three pounds of food additives per person every year. I mean, nobody thinks we should be eating those things. Like, nobody's gonna say, okay, I think you should have more butylated hydroxytoluene with your salad.

Right. Right.

Or red dye number 40, right? These are things that are sort of inserted into our diet. So those are principles that I sort of outlined and it's adaptable. What about grains and beans? Well, you know, some people do well on them, some people don't. And it really is individual. But I talk about if you are going to, here's the things to know about, here's the grains to eat, here's what you should or shouldn't do. Gluten, why is it a problem? Who is it a problem for? Is our current wheat, the wheat we used to eat? No, it's not. It's not. So that has an impact. What should we focus on? Could you have rye, which is a has gluten in it, but it's probably, if you're not gluten sensitive, a much better food. So it goes through every single chapter. I go through meat, poultry, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, grains. I talk about the controversies. What are the people fighting about? What does the science say? What do we know? What do we not know? There's still stuff we are learning, right?

You're still discovering every day. So it's really kind of a foundational principle book.

It's not extreme.

It's sort of the middle of the road.

This is kind of the Bible for you then. Kind of. It's all the things you've learned. Pretty much 40 plus years now.

14 books.

Yes, it is.

It's actually different than other books I've written because the other books are more topic specific. They're on the brain or they're on metabolism or diabetes or sugar. This is really, if you're an eater and there's about 9 billion of us, it's probably something that'll help. And I also talk about how do you eat, not just for your own health, right? But what is the overall footprint of the food you eat? What's the health footprint, the economic footprint, the carbon footprint, the environmental footprint, the educational footprint, the national security footprint, and even poverty and social justice footprint of what you eat because there are things we can't change as individuals. We can't end nuclear war. We can't single-handedly end climate change. But we can change what we eat because we do it all the time. And the choice we make matter. I mean, I was just with the Vice Chairman of Pepsi, who's my new best friend. You can imagine. We had a great time together and we don't agree on a lot of things. But it was fascinating listening to him talk about what's happening in the company as they're trying to shift to meet the consumer demand. Really? So they're like, how do we create special, and he introduced me to this engineer who was working for him, how do we create special types of packaging that's compostable, but that keeps the food fresh, we don't need to use preservatives or artificial ingredients, and we can have whole foods that we distribute globally. I'm like, wow, that's a great thing to be looking at.

Right.

So they're thinking, and he said, I was also asked to talk to the USDA, annual meeting, the agriculture department. And I'm like, yes, Pepsi. But they, they, he's talking about regenerative agriculture. He's talking about how we're losing water by our farming practices. We're losing soil. We need to change that. And they have enormous power because they're, you know, count their bottling facilities.

Yeah.

That they out, they're probably the number one food company in the world, up there with Nestle.

Right.

And they interested in doing this and I'm like thinking, wow, here's the Vice Chairman of Pepsi talking about regenerative agriculture.

I'm like, holy cow.

You know, that's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Does it make an impact? Yeah, they can have an impact, but it's, they're responding to the demands of the culture. They're responding to people who are voting with their forks. So, it's a hopeful message. You not only get to change yourself, but you get to impact everything. I mean, imagine if everybody in the world for one day had an eat-in where they only ate real fresh whole food and they didn't shop or buy anything in a package that's processed in any way and didn't go to any fast food restaurants and just ate at home and cooked a meal. It's a game changer. Totally, just for one day. Imagine if we did that for a.

Week or a month, the whole system would change. Wow.

Yeah.

Now as a functional medicine doctor, I believe that you're more of like a therapist for a lot of people too. They come to you with all their challenges, they feel pain in one thing but there's something else that's affecting them, right?

Yeah.

What do you think is the main thing that they're feeding themselves, maybe that's not food. that affects them on the pain or.

Their body or... Yeah, I think people are feeding their feelings a lot of time. I mean, it's a... You know, food has such an effect on mood. It's so connected to how we think and feel. And so when we're feeling sad or depressed, we can stimulate our biology through food, whether it's caffeine or alcohol or sugar or other chemicals in food that actually stimulate our brain to sort of feel better for a minute, right? and so we do that and we're human and we don't understand the difference and we don't know what's going on. We don't see we're in this vicious cycle and it's tough and people have hard lives and hard situations but I believe in the power of community. I believe in the power of each other to help support the change. It's got to happen that way and that's what we do. We work with communities. We work in churches. We help people become empowered in schools to actually start to do this together and it's so much more fun. It holds people accountable. it inspires people to change and it works. And if we look at behavior change, which is the biggest thing we're talking about here, the hardest thing to do is on your own. I always say friend power is far more powerful than willpower.

It's way easier to stay consistent with something with someone else supporting you, an accountability partner, a coach, whatever it may be, than trying to do it on your own. It's almost impossible to do it on your own.

Right, and that's why people listen to your podcast and seek out these things because they're looking for some connection to something something that they can hold on to that inspires them, that uplifts them, that gives them an idea of how they can be better.

Is there more power in eating certain foods first or last or separating them as opposed to combining?

100%.

How should we eat then? What should be first and last? Well, should it be the protein first? Because hearing you say something.

Yeah, so this is a simple version. because this can get heavy. The simple version is fruit alone.

Don't eat fruit with a meal.

Do not eat.

Why?

Because it takes other digestive enzymes. And hydrochloric acids, especially if you have digestive issues, it can mess up different rates. So for example, when you're eating fruit, the digestion process aside from chewing.

So don't put peanut butter or almond butter on your fruits.

Listen, listen. I do that, too. I put Baruca.

Not.

Oh, I'm gonna send you some.

I want some.

I wish I had sat some with me, because, of course, I would have brought it. It is so good. But I do.

So.

So this is. This is something. If people. I would say this, if people are having any digestive issues at all. then I would do this for a period of time, fruit alone. Now listen, I love a bar of butter on a piece of apple, like oh my God, it's the best, right? So that's fine. But if you're having any digestive issues, fruit alone. And then if you are choosing, let's call it a protein. Because if you eat fruit alone, your.

Body should just be able to digest and get that out quickly.

Yeah, so if you're eating fruit, the digestive aside from chewing, because that's the digestive process, you have digestive enzymes called amylase that's breaking down the carbohydrates. So that's why we need to chew more. Not chew.

Chew, chew, chew, chew. That seems to be my life.

Right?

Yeah.

So we swallow.

One might get more in there.

Very difficult for the body to.

I used to have digestive problems for a long time. Probably like 20 years. It wasn't until actually I started to get Invisalign about a year and a half ago because my back teeth have actually never touched. I got eight teeth removed when I was 17, and then my jaw kind of grew in a certain way where my only my front two teeth touched, and I've never felt my back teeth until about four months ago touching.

Really?

And it's been mind-blowing how I've been able to digest and actually not feel constipated most of the time.

You haven't been able to chew.

Because I'm actually able to chew my food.

That's amazing.

And I'm feeling like it's able to go to the bathroom way easier. Like it's crazy when adjusting teeth have done for to digest as well.

Yeah, think about that. I mean, it's the most primal thing we need to do for our breaking down of food, but if we're not chewing 20, 30 times per bite, you're swallowing whole food and expecting this very delicate digestive process to have enough time to pull all of that stuff to break it down because it has to break down. Think of a think of like the protein, the animal-based protein, you gotta break it down into the amino acids.

The amino acids, yeah.

Yeah, and that's a lot of energy to do that. And so it's all food. So we really have to take responsibility, more responsibility to, that's a first line of digestive defense, is chewing more appropriately and not allowing that process to be just chew, chew, chew through stress and not to mention what you're doing while you're eating is also-- the tangent behind why you're eating. Yeah, the vagus nerve is connected directly to the brain and the digestive process and the like. So, if you're stressed, you're gonna throw off the microbial system.

That's why people pray before they eat or they say, let's give thanks for some gratitude.

Yeah.

Do some nose breathing, right? Drop you right down into parasympathetic. Even Dr. Huberman, the neuroscientist, talks about this to take a two breath in. So I would say breathe out.

Yeah, we had him on talking about that. It's really good.

A little gratitude.

Then eat.

Then eat.

So it's the separation. Let's get back to the separation. What should it be? You've got a mixture of foods on your plate.

Okay, so let's call it a protein. So let's say, Let's say-- so burritos.

Are the worst thing.

It can be challenging if you're already compromised. That's a challenge.

Our body's adaptive, so burrito's one of my favorite foods. So good, man. You got the rice, you got the.

Beans, you got the protein, you got the cheese, you got the tortilla wrap. It's like-- yeah, so listen, unfortunately, for anyone eating meat, it's a really bad combination.

Right?

Any plant-based proteins a lot easier for the body to break down. Even nuts, seeds, legumes, whatever, it's a lot easier to break down. Plus, everything, let's just say this, every plant, every fruit, every vegetable has protein in it. Everything. Your banana, your acai, your grapes, it is a full, it is a whole food.

Right?

So we have to stop this compartmentalizing and reductionism.

Protein and then vegetables.

Right. So if you are eating meat and all of that stuff, meat first. Like if it's on a, let's say you have a salmon on a salad, eat all your salmon first.

Don't eat the carbs first.

Don't eat the, no, don't eat the salads and don't eat the bread. Certainly don't eat the damn bread.

Right?

Me first, what does that do?

Yeah, so that gets you back into that dominance of hydrochloric acid and energy that the body takes and the longevity that it will take for your body to break down the meat. It's going to take six to eight hours for that other being that you just consumed to break down into amino acids.

So put the thing that's the hardest to digest in first.

Yes. And then you can follow it up with veggies and all of that stuff.

Potatoes, whatever you're putting in there.

Right. So that's the easy version.

Meat first. If you're fruit alone, if you're plant-based, what would you eat first?

Again, fruit alone. And then I don't worry much about it.

You can mix it all in, it's all plants.

Right, or for me, if I'm eating tempeh, which is fermented tofu, I'll eat that first. But listen, I'm coming from that where I had a lot of issues because of all the heavy meat. When I started breaking that down, cleared it up immediately. Now, since plant-based, I've never had that ever again, the digestive disruption.

And so, what do you speak to when the meat eaters of the world who swear by meat say, well, this is what our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years.

That's an easy point of view to... If you talk to the Paleolithic researchers, that's such a convenient conclusion. That is not true. You can run up to the Inuits because that is where they've been living and then use that as some stupid example. well, just because you've adapted to it doesn't mean that it's ideal. We have to keep going back to that. Just because the body is an amazing adaptive machine which has allowed us to, you know, populate anywhere and everywhere and eat almost anything doesn't mean that it's adaptive. Now, if you look at the longevity research, if you look at centurions, and if you look at that, I would lean on that more than I would lean on a convenient way to say, because you can easily make the argument. The diversification of the big brain also was the foraging ability. You're finding without less effort foraging plants and tubers and nuts and seeds way more than it takes to you getting a little clan together and running down a caribou or something.

Setting a trap or something.

It's just too convenient to say things like that. Do the Centurions eat meat?

Some of them eat meat, right?

Very little.

Yeah.

It's mostly fish or eggs here and there or something.

Yeah.

So it could be, you know, I've talked to some of the Centurions. And so the work of Dr. Longo and Dr. Pez and Dan Buettner's work, you'll find that again.

The blue zones.

Yeah.

You'll find very, very clearly that it's naturally 10 to 15%. They don't go over. And it's so interesting.

Meat of, of, of calorie intake.

Calorie intake for protein. And once, once is meat or no, it's just protein.

Oh, wow.

And, and every so often they may have It's neat, but it's not a daily thing.

No.

Maybe once a month out of a thing. So it's that. Again, it's like I look at that longevity and what the longevity shows up as. To say that you knew what the Paleolithic people were doing is we have ran around this globe and we've all thrived and we have all different ethnicities and to say this this overarching statement is kind of ridiculous. Cheers.

Oh man. You're passionate about this, huh?

Of course.

Yeah, and you actually say this in your Simple To Do List. Get no more than about 50% of daily total calories from protein. That's the first line you have here from your Simple To Do List.

You just opened that up.

The first thing, you went right to that line. Get no more, maybe that's on every page as a reminder. Make sure you only do this. What happens if we get 80% of our total calories from protein? Is it just creating more cancerous cells? Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Well, yeah, so I mean that's the work of T. Colin Campbell and Longo and a bunch of other people and that's where you turn on, so this is the epidemiology side of it. This is the DNA. What we're doing, the environment we're creating is turning on potentials of DNA are turning them off. And so what happens is it turns on these cancer promoting genes very clearly. Like people can argue with me all you want. I'm not going to argue with you. I'm going to point you to these guys that have dedicated their life to this research, unbiased. They're researchers. And what they're doing is they're pushing back against industry that wants to keep this narrative alive. and they're not looking at the research. It's the same thing of us saying right now, the censorship that's happening. Like, why do we need to censor anything? Just let it out and let people as intelligent people. It's like coming to you and saying, you know what? Cars kill. Don't go into your car today. Well, you can make that choice. You know that you could get in a car accident. and you could get hurt or injured or die, but you're making that choice. So let's get all of the information that T. Colin Campbell, that's what he's saying, that Dr. Ornish, Dr. Esselstyn, all of these guys are saying, look at the research. Don't shut this off. Look at what this research is, and that's the dogma that keeps alive. If you're not open-minded to look at the research, then let's not argue about it. I don't want to waste my energy. I don't want to talk to If you want to fight, fight with yourself against that wall. I don't want to do it.

What's your thoughts about, in your mind, what's worse? Meat or sugar?

Meat. Hands down. I mean, what do you mean by sugar? Because if I'm assuming you mean sugar. yeah, I would. I would. I would allow if I am not clogging my. Cholesterol is still a debate. Cholesterol. Let's be clear. Cholesterol and meat is not correlated to high cholesterol and you and killing you. It is the protein. Okay, so I would gamble. And the protein is gobbling up and challenging the insulin receptors and running us towards diabetes. And Robbie and Cyrus and Mastering Diabesity lay this out scientifically. The third of their book is science, right? Peer reviewed. I would gamble on not eating meat and taking in sugar more than I would.

Really?

I do not want to play that Russian roulette game. No way.

But sugar, it seems like also is causing a lot of.

You gave me too horrible. I mean, two challenges.

Yeah.

But, but if you're, for sure, I'll take, I'll take sugar for sure.

Really?

Yep.

Is sugar easier to burn off or it's not as damaging to the body in your mind as eating.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's, it's like if I have a healthy if I'm not being compromised for meat and my insulin reception, then I'm going to gamble on all the other things that I can do in the sugar realm and I can stay active, I can burn that off, I can keep plants active, I can keep the stress down from that plants, I can bring in my Schizandra, bring in my Chaga, bring in my Ashwagandha, bring in my Rishi, bring in my lion's mane to help the brain deal with the amount you know what I mean? So, there's a lot of other artillery I could use to combat the sugar side of it.

And, what about fasting? What's your views on that?

I'm a big fan of fasting, for sure. And, Dr. Bragg's way back, I will give kudos to him, his first books on fasting. I was fasting. When I started fasting, it was 20, 22 years ago or so, and I was doing one day, 36 hour fasts. So, I would pick a Friday and I would stop eating the Thursday all day Friday and start eating on Saturday. Because I wanted energy on the weekends. Yeah, of course. and I love now that I just call it fast, water fast, right? I do love big windows of, so now I'm a two meal a day person.

Okay.

So, I'm a huge amount of fruit, fruit bowl in the morning, around 10, I'm done and then I'll eat around 4:00 p.m. That's my second meal. and that's tons of plants, big salads, baruca nuts, hell, maybe I'll even make a burrito, right? And combine it all.

And then you're done.

Then I'm done, yeah.

Five o'clock, you're done, you stop eating until 10 a.m. fruit. My friend Jesse Itzler is all about that. He says fruit until noon.

I went on that, and this was back when I was fasting in that 36 hours every week. so I was doing 36 hour every week. And in that, when I was, when I was during the day, I would do all fruit until noon. But now I do that anyway. I just don't eat until 10, and then I do a huge, like a massive fruit bowl.

I get different people on who dive into the science, who are doing the tests. Dr. Rhonda Patrick talked about the, the spike of sugar when she had a grape, because I think she's wearing glucose monitor somewhere and testing this and other doctors talking about how to really make sure you have moderation in fruit because of how it could spike certain things. Again, I don't know all the science and I'm not the expert here. Can you speak into that from your perspective on why having a lot of fruits or a bowl of fruit is good for you and not spiking energy levels and not doing that based on what their scientific research is saying?

You know, again, there's a lot of experts around this category, too, that I would lean on. But when you, it, it depends on what you've been doing. If you are a keto person, for.

Example.

You are eating all this meat, which are stopping up your ability for insulin reception. When you stop that, you look at a grape and your insulin's gonna spike. You've changed and damaged your metabolism, right?

But if you're doing that on a consistent basis, your body's regulating more.

Potentially, but if you're eating meat, if you're eating a ton of meat, you're challenging, you are gonna spike more than I would. I've used glucose monitors. I eat a bowl of fruit. and I'm like, Really?

Yeah.

I can eat four or five bananas. Look at Mastering Diabetes. It will blow your mind. These guys are type 1 diabetic. Robbie just posted the other day, he ate, I think it was breadfruit, four bananas, mangoes, and these guys are type 1 glucose monitoring to the max and getting thousands of people down and off, type one off medication. It is what you're doing, not just at that time. Again, we're myopic in our views. What is the chemistry of going on in the body? If you're eating a bunch of meat, you're gonna spike more when you're eating a bunch of fruit.

When you have fruit, it's gonna spike more.

My body is dialed. It's dialed to the fruit.

How long would it take for someone to get more dialed?

I mean, they can, they can, Robbie. So it's, we gotta look at a wider view of all of this stuff. Because you could, of course, I can go run out and find, see, they spiked, they spiked, yeah, but what have they been doing for the last month? Do we have that information? Is it accurate? Is it, there's so much going on. Plus, you know, there's all this, New Research, Viome is a great company that's doing all this microbiological research into what's your system like because you're taking a snapshot of what you've been doing and what your microbes are set up as. If it's set up for flesh of another being and meat and all of that stuff. It's true though. Let's call it out.

I get it, man.

Right?

That's what it is. Or, If it's plant-based stuff, then your microbes are changing. It's an environment that you are creating by what you're putting in your mouth. And this is very important for this day and age right now. You are creating a terrain that is going to invite pathogens or invite it out. Because if you are strengthening yourself vitamin D, vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, whole plants, diversifications of tannins and phenolic compounds and antioxidants, clearly that's creating a terrain that is stronger for the immune system to thwart out disease, bacteria, cancer, all of that other stuff. But if you're shoveling anything and you believe that a needle is going to save your life, it can't. It's never worked that way. Dr. Zach Bush gets into tons of this. You need to have him on if.

You have Zach Bush.

Dr. Zach Bush. So, he's starting and we've talked and changing the narrative of how the body, it's like soil systems, like monocropping. If you create a soil system that has no more nutrients, you have to blow chemicals on it because it's going to get annihilated. The same thing with your own microbiological system. if you're creating a strong, diversified microbiological system that you are in co-host with, like it's, you're hosting it. You need those microbes to break down food. It is creating, it is creating enzymes, it is creating vitamins for you. Our microbes are with you, but if you're creating it so that the bad bacteria is dominating. Now you've created a terrain you can barely take care of yourself. You're getting colds, you're fatigued, you're all that stuff. So any other bacteria or virus that comes your way, you're compromised. You can't upgrade your system. You can't take in that information and then go, we all know that the start of life is the inoculation of your mother's vaginal canal. That is the start of your immune system. We can't sanitize our way through health. We cannot. We will kill ourselves. We have to have this incredible diversification of microbes and virome and viruses. We have to. We always have. And that is obviously that's a big topic. and Dr. Bosch gets into that quite a bit. But that is the lens that we have to start looking through to create more of this balanced health because that's where we came from and that's where we need to go.

Few final questions for you. I feel like we can go down many rabbit holes here. And you've got a lot of this information in your book, Super Life, the Five Simple Fixes that Will Make youe Healthy, Fit, and Eternally Awesome. so make sure you guys check this out. Very powerful. Supplements. Are you a fan of supplements? If you could only have five supplements a day, what would those be? And do we need supplements if you're getting these other great plant diversity on a daily basis?

Food first.

Yeah.

Right.

The ground, which is why I created this book. these basic tenants of taking care of yourself, sleeping, exercising, diversification of food, exercise, moving your body, having a good attitude, right? The outlook in your life. Side note, growing young. I just interviewed us. Marta Zarzycka, Growing Young. She, through over 600 research articles, the thing that influenced our health and our longevity more than anything was optimism, kindness, community, through science. This is not a woo-woo thing, through science. And she's got a great book called Growing Young.

I think I'm supposed to be interviewing her. Soon. Is that right? Kai? I can't remember if we have it already scheduled or if I should.

If you can connect me. I can connect. She is fantastic.

Yeah, okay. We'll have her on.

She's a bad ass.

Growing Young, yeah.

I did the book. So that's just as a side. So food first, all of these principles. So supplements, whole food supplements first. Just like I said, the spirulina, the whole foods, the careful growing. There is ways of like, okay, we're low in magnesium, we're low in calcium in times, we're low in iron. Those times when you know that your body needs it, when you've tested, when you've tested your microbiological system, when you've tested your blood, then that starts to make sense. But I just go whole food supplements, that makes sense to me. Strengthening because you can go big into understanding that in the early 1900s, we knew our soils were depleted. We knew that the food then is depleted. We knew this in the 1930s. The agricultural community delineated to Congress saying that this happened in the 30s. So through monocropping, through the crazy way that we're, instead of regenerating, we're not, we've depleted. So therefore, I that's created a career out of finding nutrient-dense whole foods, plants, herbs, botanicals. So I do believe that bringing it down to any individual vitamins, it makes sense if you're biologically, biochemically in need of those and you've navigated through those things.

If food tastes good, it makes it a whole lot easier. What if we make those vegetables taste phenomenal, right? And that's the thing that's missing oftentimes. And we also have this thing in our minds that if it tastes good, it's not healthy. There's like this little thing, like this can't be good for me. But it's actually, why do you think food tastes good? It tastes good for you to eat it. It encourages, we're hardwired to seek tasty things. But food manufacturers have leveraged that desire eat tasty things to our detriment, you know? And so I talk about that food science and the science of flavor because even flavors and foods are indicators of nutritional content. If we were living in a natural way, right? So we develop these flavor preferences based on we might be deficient in selenium and omega-3s. So we have these flavor associations. We know like, okay, I need to go and eat blank food. You know, I need to go and catch some fish because my body is wanting this thing. Now we just go to 7-Eleven. You know what I mean? But we can take back control of these systems and recalibrate them. And I was going to share earlier, one of the things that I wanted to do was stack conditions. So when I give you this food, it's not just one thing it's good for. There's another side with the cognitive function side. And this was conducted by researchers at Rush University in Chicago. And what they did was they looked at Folks who were beginning, you know, into their senior years and actually looked at their brains and looked at their diets. And they found that folks who ate two or more servings of green leafy vegetables each day had brains that were about 11 years younger on average.

Shut up. Yes. This is why I was so stupid in school. I said sugar all day. I never ate any vegetables.

Yeah, man. Me too. Me too, man. I'll get that personal pizza. Oh, man. Get the pretzel with cheese.

Oh, that's amazing.

I dipped the pretzel into the cheese and then dipped the pizza into the cheese. Oh, that sounds like my life. So I'm over there game day, you know, like the muscle totality dinner. When the offense is in, I'm doing my thing. Defense, I'm yawning, I'm tired.

I was so tired all the time. Working out, practice, always yawning. Never ate anything healthy. Did I think I told you this? When I went to Principia, the boarding school. There was a milk dispenser in our dorm. I was 13 years old. A five gallon milk dispenser.

What?

A milk dispenser?

Milk dispenser. Not 2%.

Whole milk.

That whole milk.

This is the cafeteria milk dispenser.

You know what I'm talking about?

Oh, yeah. For the cereal. They put the big bag in there, like big five gallon bag that you put in there, they cut it open and then you open it up. I got them to move it into my room. I swear to you, I swear to you, I would go through five gallons every week.

No, this is crazy.

You drink it throughout the morning, drink it at night when I'm studying, drinking it all day. Because this is how I was conditioned as a kid. My dad would give me a glass of milk every night. It was just like, drink more milk. Yeah, commercials, all this stuff. I had a five-gallon dispenser for a year in my dorm. Just drinking it all day. And I was like, man, why am I always tired? I can only imagine the quality of athlete I could have been had I learned nutrition when I was a teenager. Because I didn't eat anything quality. Yeah. Never. That's crazy, man.

Like, that's literally blowing my mind. You got them never put into your room?

My room.

You're free. Right next to my bed, just drinking it all day. Wow, dude.

That's crazy. And like you said, what could have been.

What could have been?

Same thing for me, you know, and I ran a 4'5'40 when I was 15.

Imagine eating healthy.

Dude, but it was at same season.

You'd be 6 feet tall if you ate healthy.

In the same season, in the same season, I was doing track practice, 200 meter time trial, and as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, you know this story, my hip broke. And my bones were so brittle, I was dude, I was 5'9 in eighth grade. Like I was towering, you know that you're in the back row and then everything just started to break down. You know my bones and it wasn't until I was 20 when I got diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease. So my spine was just deteriorating and nobody stopped to ask like how could this happen to a 20 year old kid or a 15 year old kid is breaking his hip at track practice and from there Mike My dreams of college football, everything started to become vanquished. I've got game films where I break away, like 39 sweep.

I'm gone.

I'm five yards from the end zone. Nobody's behind me. And then I start to fall, like breaking down.

No way.

Tearing muscles. Yeah, I've got it on game films. I'm limping into the end zone and falling down. It was a nightmare, man. And I couldn't stay on the field anymore because my body was just breaking down. and what I was exposed to is what's called standard of care, which standard of care means they gave me some NSAIDs, gave me some crutches, like, you'll heal up.

I did.

But I. Nobody asked, how is his bones breaking from running? And when this diagnosis happened, man, it was earth shattering because I was always, like, this fit guy, like, capable. And, like, now I can't even really walk right because of this pain in my. From my spine that's going into my.

Like.

And my physician at the time, he put the MRI up, and I was just like, okay, like, how do we fix this? You know, just working with the trainers and, like, okay, what do we do? We have that on the field, you know? And he's just like, pump. Basically, like, pump your brakes. Like, slow down, son. This is. This is bad. You know, this is incurable. And he told me that I had this. I had the spine of an 80 year old man. Wow. When I was 20 and not a healthy 80 year old either, you know, like, shout out to Mark. assistant, you know. Wow. But is he 80?

He's like, he's 70.

I think he's 72 now. No, no, no, he's got to be. No, no, I think he's in his 70s.

I think he's late 50s.

He doesn't make 60s. And he's definitely not 70s. He's definitely, at least in his 60s.

I think he's 70.

I don't think he's 70. That's amazing if he looks that great at 70.

Yeah, but this is what's also possible. Even wherever he is, he's a freak.

He's got a six pack.

At 60 something or seven, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, but I was the opposite. I was what you would think about with the 80-year-old person breaking down and, you know, a lot of chronic pain. And, you know, he sent me on my way, and that was that. You know, he gave me some medication, prescribed bed rest. Now, I want to encourage anybody, if you've ever, if you ever get a diagnosis with something life altering like this, do your best to get a second and or third opinion before taking any any dramatic action. And I did, unfortunately it was the same thing. And it was until two, and by the way, for the next two years, every doctor that I saw told me bed rest. So I just kept doing nothing.

Sleeping.

Yeah.

Just sitting around playing video games.

What's the worst thing you can do for yourself?

Not only was my spine beginning to atrophy in my hips and my bones, but now everything else is.

Muscles, everything. Your organs are not producing. Yeah.

Your body works on this use it or lose it basis. So I'm literally just decaying, you know?

You're dying at 22.

Yeah, accelerating that process. And two years later, man, it was a little over two years. It's tough to, man, it's tough to talk about. Incredibly, I was in fear. I got into a place where I was scared to stand up because the pain, I would have to like walk very gingerly because I know like the sciatic nerve has to I had to like hit and then I could walk normally like a normal gait. And so I just decided not to get up because I was scared to.

Wow.

And being that I'm eating the food that I was eating at the time, what I call the tough diet, typical university food, I was made out of this.

Oh.

My body was made out of this and I'm not moving now, so I.

Gained so much weight.

Pretzels and cheese, dude.

Yeah.

I eat fast food every day. Every day. Not a day went by.

Because it's cheap and tasty.

Tastes amazing.

Yeah.

And so. But everything changed. And it was. I don't remember if it was that day or the day after, but I went to see the last physician because I had hope. And I had this chronic question going on in my mind all the time. Why me? Why won't somebody help me? Just like. But I didn't realize it. And our brains are really run on the questions that we ask. It's this.

It's.

It's an. It's a reflexive thing. It's called instinctive elaboration. because our brains are like a servo mechanism. Even right now, we're exposed to trillions, hundreds and hundreds of trillions of bits of data and information that our brain has to filter and only present to us consciously the thing that we hold most important. Because even now, you'd be focused on your toes. And probably you thought about your toes a little bit for people that are listening. But were your toes not existing before? They're there, but it's not a top priority. And so that servo mechanism is guided by the questions you ask. And so if I'm asking all the time, why me? Why did this happen to me? Why won't anybody help me? My brain is just looking for a reason to affirm why my life sucks. And after I got that last diagnosis, he again gave me a new prescription, told me bed rest two years later and sent me on my way. And he meant well. He meant well, but I realized it was either that night or the next night. that I'm by myself. They're not thinking about me. Even though they mean well, they are not walking in my shoes and dealing with the suffering. And it was the first time that I asked a different question. I asked, what can I do to feel better? What can I do to get healthy? It's the first time I ever looked at, like, what can I actually do? Because I've been like, why won't somebody else help me? And it changed everything, man. That was the first night I slept through the night. in like two years without drugs. And I woke up with just a renewed sense of purpose because I had already, I went to school. I was in the auditory nutrition class.

Yeah.

But I got out of it because I hated it. I hated science, ironically, which you now love it. Science is my boo now.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? But it's the way that I was taught. It didn't really have an association. It didn't have that connective tissue.

Wow.

And I began to dive back into my training because I always did good in school.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, straight A's, but I would get into trouble. You know, I would. I didn't enjoy the process of like learning science because it just, it didn't stick. And so asking a different question, I did the low hanging fruit first, which is exercise. Like I just went and started like going on a cycle. you know, just got on a stationary bike at the gym, just started paddling.

It was hard.

The next week, I started doing a little walking and just built up from there. The first thing I did was I did Slim Fast first, because that's the commercial.

Yeah, right.

I'm like, I gotta lose weight. A shake for. For breakfast, shake for lunch, a sensible dinner.

Right.

But thank goodness, I quickly transitioned out of that. And because of that question, and somebody that I knew for two years, no, three years at that time. She was a, you know, somebody that I'd, you know, kind of hung out with for a while, you know, I was just hung out. Anyway, she was a chiropractor.

Wow.

You know, she was older. She was like, you know, 10 years older. And she took me to Wild Oats. I'd known her this whole time. We never went to Wild Oats. Went to Wild Oats. I'd walk into this entirely different dimension. Like, I'm like, why is there grass sitting up there on the counter? You know, like, people to buy this and eat it. But there was this nutrition prescription book. There was this massive, like, nutritional Bible there. And I began to look at all this, like, peer-reviewed evidence on this nutrient working for this thing. And I was shocked that this stuff existed. I had no idea. And this goes to the conversation of exposure. You know, so many people were born into these conditions. When I was growing up, man, you know, we were on WIC. We, you know, food stamp Christmas would come around, you know, the first and 15th, and we even got food from, you know, shelters and, you know, food pantries. And we didn't know that there was a difference with food. You know, it's just stuff that you eat, and I just want stuff that tastes good. That's the end of the story. I didn't know that it mattered. I thought that if you want to be healthy, you exercise. Because I looked fit, you know, but it was, my body was made out of straight Crab.

Yeah. Sugar, crab, processed food.

But going there, I started to, then I went from slim fast to becoming a natural pill popper, all right? Because now it's like all these isolated nutrients. But I quickly, thank goodness, again transitioned out of that.

You mean supplements.

Yeah.

And not to say that supplements aren't helpful, especially the right ones, but it's still looking at food through this allopathic lens that I was taught in school. which is like a pill for this.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, a pill for every ill.

Do you take supplements now?

Definitely not as many and there's a reason why too that we talk about in Eat Smarter which it went from about 7% of all liver damage to about 20% in recent years being associated with supplements.

Shut up.

Over consumption, yeah. Yeah, it's real. Because your liver has to handle the process of these isolated nutrients. Oftentimes it's not a very regulated system either. Not to say supplements aren't good, but we're taking like some people taking 20, 30 different supplements a day.

So what happens when we take that many supplements a day consistently over time? It affects our liver.

So your liver is responsible for number one, like drug metabolism. We have over somewhere around 70% of the United States population is on prescription drugs. Your liver is handling that first and foremost. And also your liver is responsible for food, you know, food metabolism, that interaction as well. which, man, you're lit. The name, Liv, err. It's responsible for you being alive, like, massively. We can't survive without your liver.

There's only one liver, right? It's two kidneys, one liver.

Yeah, you got two eyes. There's some pirates out there.

You can have, you know, but you can only, you can have one kidney and survive.

Yeah.

But you can only, it's only one. Even with your liver, like, you can lose portion of your liver and grow it back.

No way.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's regenerative. seemingly magical.

How big is the liver?

It's pretty big. I mean as far as like the internal organs. But here's the crazy thing is that with again, I want to reiterate it's not that supplements are bad. Especially the rights food-based supplements especially. But synthetic isolated synthetic chemicals. Mmm.

Right.

So about 20% of hospitalizations from liver problems is associated with supplement consumption now.

No, come on.

Yeah. Yeah.

From some of the studies. Not prescription pills, but actual over-the-counter supplements.

Yeah.

20% of liver challenges in the hospitals are due to this.

Yeah.

How do they know it's based on supplements and not?

They just do an intake and like look at what the person is consuming, you know. So again, this type of science is still like very, there's nuance.

There.

But just for us people to be aware that this exists that hey, wait a minute, maybe I want to pump the brakes a little bit on taking all these pills. So this was game changing for me, man. I asked the question, okay, so I've got degenerative disc disease. My spinal discs have degenerated. I have two herniated discs.

It caused me all this pain.

What are they made of?

I asked this simple question.

What are my discs made of? What are they made of? What are my bones made of?

Made of.

My bones are so, my bone density is so low, what it made of. We think of calcium. Calcium is what we think of because of the marketing. But there was like 20 other things that were as important, if not more important, for the formation of bones and our bone density that I had no idea about. Magnesium, even Omega-3s that we think about in associating to like brain health. Omega-3s are needed for bone formation as well.

All right.

So I wasn't getting any of that stuff in my diet, so I started taking pills first, but then I was like...

Supplements or...

Supplements.

Supplements, yeah.

So I asked, what foods are these things found in? And then I understood the seemingly magical aspect of food, which there are all these other things that are there too, these co-factors and bio-potentiators, and the game-changing insight was that what have we been consuming the longest? This supplement is new. This drug is new. Humans, we have millions of years of evolution. in relationship with eating foods that have supported our development. What do my genes expect me to eat? Where does it expect it to come from?

From a concentrated pill supplement or from food?

Yeah.

So I started to make my mandate then 20 years ago was food first and that was a game changer. So once I did that, man, six weeks after that moment, of decision and like revelation. The pain that I've been experiencing every day that had me in fear of standing up was gone. And I was scared. I was even more scared then because I felt like I'm going to do something that's going to happen. So, I'm like freaking out but I'm also like let me just keep going with this. Let me keep going. And I was feeling so good. I lost about 18 pounds at that point which is not typical but I was like the skinny kid in my family for a while and now like it just those you know fat, cold fat genes, these epigenetic influences turned on. So weight just came off of me. And the most wonderful part of why I'm sitting here today with my man, Lewis Howes, is my professors, students, you know, at the school, they started, they saw me. And it wasn't like I looked like somebody just lost weight. It looked like somebody who was like really healthy. And alive.

Yeah.

Because when I see my pictures of myself then, I look like freaking Casper the Ghost.

Wow.

I look like a shell of myself. Like there's something missing. the light is not there. And so people started coming up to me and the first person who like specifically asked me for help, she was somebody I went to high school with who ended up going to the college I was at. And she saw this transformation. She was like, can you help me, you know, to do what you did?

We're talking about health in general here. We're talking about the brain and food connection. right now in the world, it seems like mental health and depression is a hot topic. It's something a lot of people are talking about. They're having mental health challenges, depression challenges. And I'm sure there's many factors to this social media comparison, bad foods, a lack of exercise, a lack of sleep, anxiety, up all night, environment, lack of purpose, lack of community. There's a lot of social factors probably that tie into mental health challenges. How important is food by itself in relating to minimizing depression, social anxiety, and mental health?

I think food is extremely important.

Because.

It'S directly linked to obesity. And obesity itself causes low-grade inflammation. And foods that are really high Particularly when you combine a high saturated fat with a high refined sugar, so let's say you're eating your, you're drinking your glass of milk with your cookie. That's the worst because you're getting the.

Saturated fat and the sugar.

That's my whole job. And that's been shown to cause a very high, what's called postprandial inflammatory response. We've been talking about postprandial glucose response, which is after you eat, so postprandial. There's a inflammatory response that also occurs after eating. And inflammation itself has been shown to-- inflammatory molecules cross the blood-brain barrier, and they play a role in basically depressing dopamine signaling and serotonin and all sorts of, you know, affecting neurotransmitters and brain function. And there's been studies directly showing that if you inject a person with an inflammatory cytokine, it causes depressive symptoms versus really injected with saline.

Yeah.

So the more inflammation we have in the body, it increases depression.

Exactly. Inflammation. We used to think, again, the brain was separate from the body and that, you know, the immune system and all that didn't affect the brain. Turns out that was all wrong. Absolutely wrong. These inflammatory mediators do get into the brain and they get into the brain and they change they're changing the firing of certain neurotransmitters and things like that. They're also activating the resident immune cells in the brain called microglia astrocytes, a microglia, a type of astrocyte. And that also is linked to depression. And so we put out a little short video on this, on an animated video actually on inflammation and depression and talk about a lot of the studies because it's something I don't think people realize that the food you eat and not only the food you eat, your lifestyle, being obese and overweight, being sedentary. Being sedentary, exercise is one of the best anti-inflammatory medicines you can get, period. And it also happens to be one of the best lifestyle remedies for depression as well. I mean, randomized controlled trials showing that, all sorts of evidence.

Is this any type of exercise or are you a HIIT training, cardio, 30 minutes, 60 minutes? What's your opinion?

Well, there's been studies looking at.

I.

Would say the large body of evidence seems to show aerobic exercise is really important with respect to depression. That is because aerobic exercise leads to increases in what's called brain drive neurotrophic factor. BDNF, as it's called. It's basically a growth factor that's produced. After just 20 minutes of a moderate intensity workout, you can increase your level. You can find levels increase by up to 30% in plasma. It crosses into the brain and in the brain, it does a lot of things. Not only does it do what IGF-1 does, it actually grows new neurons, it helps you grow new neurons, and it helps your neurons survive. So, it plays an important role in preventing brain aging. But something else very unique that it does. It plays a role in what's called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is like your brain's ability to adapt to stressful conditions. You know, I mean, this is what children can do pretty, pretty good. As you get older, neuroplasticity goes down, as does everything. But it plays neuroplasticity is important for, for being able to cope with stress, like the stress of a pandemic, for example. You know, more neuroplasticity helps with those stressful divorce people are going through, you know, are losing your job. Lots of stressful things. But neuroplasticity helps the brain cope with that. And brain-derived neurotrophic factor helps increase neuroplasticity, which decreases with age. So again, aerobic exercise was important. But there's been studies linking strength training to lower depression rates as well.

Dr. Yeah. Any type of exercise will help.

Exactly. I do. But I really think that that aerobic, there is a place for aerobic with respect to the BDNF, the brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

I always tell people that every day I try to put myself through some type of physical pain that makes me feel discomfort, whether that's sweating for 10 minutes or a two-hour workout or playing basketball, hiking, whatever. I try to put my mind and body through something where I'm like, gosh, I don't want to do this, but by putting myself through pain, controlled pain, It sets me up to be more under control when there is chaos and pain. I think that's the key we should get to is controlled pain, healthy pain, so that you're not out of control when there is chaos and pain in the world.

What you're describing, scientists often refer to as hormesis, and that is basically a little bit of stress on the body, like exercise, basically because our body tries to maintain what's called homeostasis, a little bit of stress will cause our body to respond to that stress with a lot of anti-stress, anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant growing new brain cells, all these beneficial things. So a little bit of stress gives you a lot of good stuff, right?

Interesting.

Whereas low grade chronic stress all the time It doesn't do anything. You're not getting that. You're not getting that powerful.

Yeah, this is power. This is amazing. I'm going to say something that I hope I don't offend anyone when I say it. That I am all about self-love, self-care, loving yourself for who you are, accepting yourself for where you're at in your life, physically, emotionally, environment, financially, all that. the more I hear you talk about this, the quote unquote self-love movement of accept who you are and accept where you're at with your body and what you eat, and it's okay to eat whatever you want, just love yourself for who you are, is that self-love mentality, that specific type of mentality killing people and hurting them if they aren't willing to adapt a no, it's not okay. to continue to eat whatever you want all the time and just love yourself and accept yourself for who you are, you have to make sure you arm your body and your mind and your health with the nutrients, the tools, the exercise in order to decrease depression and increase happiness.

Dr. Justin I think that there's the, you know, absolutely if you're going to just eat what you want and accept being obese, that you will be causing yourself more harm, both physically and mentally. And that also probably affects your loved ones as well, that care about you or perhaps that you're interacting with and you're in a terrible mood. And so when your neighbor is happy, you're happy, right? So I think that there's part of this movement, I think there's a fine balance between you don't want to have your expectations so high that you can never be happy.

Yeah, right. I'm never going to look perfect and someone's always skinnier than me.

I'm never going to have blue eyes. I'm never, I'm never, you know, so if I'm always like, well, only people with blue eyes are the prettiest, like, then I'll never be happy. So, like, that's an unreasonable expectation, right, in my mind. So, I mean, there are things where, you know, like, I'm never gonna be a billionaire. And if that, if that's all I wanted in life to be happy, I'll never be happy. So there are things I think that you can, there's a certain balance between, and you want your expectations behind it in a way. You want to always aim for what you, you know, aim, aim for the stars in a way and, and try to, like, work hard to get there. So what I'm trying to say is I think that self self-love movement came from somewhere, right? I think there was something to that, right? But I think it sort of spiraled out of control and what's happened now is you're saying, well, accept things that I don't want to change rather than you can't. Because you can change that. You can lose weight. You can eat different foods and get different results.

Make different decisions.

People that are eating refined sugar, people that are drinking these sugar-sweetened beverages, you know, and there's a lot of people, maybe not so many people listening to the podcast or watching it, But there are people that do. And, you know, there's been studies that have shown refined sugar acts on the reward pathway in the brain, dopamine pathway, in a very similar manner to controlled substances, drugs like nicotine, methamphetamine, not to the same degree, but they're acting on the same systems and they're increasing a.

Feel-Good hormone when you take it for the moment, but then it makes decline afterwards and crash, right?

It does.

And, you know, I think the important point to realize with that is that when you take that away, when you stop, what happens is there is a withdrawal. And it's been shown at least with, for example, with nicotine studies, that your dopamine's getting constantly fired, fired, fired. And so, what's called dopamine receptors, which basically dopamine acts on to make you feel good, those start to decrease because your neurons are going, oh, well, I have so much of this around, I don't need so many of the receptors. So when you take away that thing that's causing the dopamine all the time to go away, you have fewer receptors and now you don't feel as much. I mean, it's just really bad. You're not feeling any amount of dopamine, right? But it's been shown that that sort of normalizes within three months. And three months is a long time.

But it's actually not that long.

I've cutting out the sugar, you mean? This has been shown with nicotine. I'm just drawing a parallel thing. Look, it's not going to be easy the first month.

It's going to be so hard.

It's not going to be the first month. It may not be easy the second month, but it's going to get easier. And it's not only is it going.

To get easier, you're going to be happier. Your body's going to regulate itself.

The hormones are going to regulate, right?

Things are going to self-regulate. Yeah, things start to get back to normal, exactly.

It's very challenging, but it's necessary to get healthier and happier, right?

It is.

I don't think people realize that depression, it's not just a genetic disorder. It's not just something that can't be be fixed ever. No, in some cases, you know, there are definitely genetic cases of depression. I'm not saying that that's not the case.

But can you hear the question through food and nutrition and exercise?

Dr. Well, there have been studies that have shown that exercise can be a treatment for depression. There have been studies that shown changing someone's diet can also improve depressive scores. And particularly the combined two is even more robust, which makes sense. You know, so there's something for to realize people that are maybe eating a not so healthy diet, people that are overweight, you know, overweight, definitely obese. And if they do have depression, there very well could be a link between the diet, the lifestyle, the obesity, you know, fat cells itself, they also increase, they produce inflammatory cytokines. So independent of the whole eating the diet and the postprandial inflammatory response, just having fat, particularly visceral fat around your organs and stuff. This stuff is causing low-grade inflammation. And do you know what low-grade inflammation is? It means that you're basically activating your immune cells a little bit all the time. Activated immune cells require a ton of energy. So, you're taking energy away from your brain.

Dr. From defending itself.

From just having a great day for, I mean, energy. It's like a sink. Exactly. Just having energy. It's a sink, low-grade inflammation. I mean, you were telling me this, we were chatting a little bit earlier about how you were eating this terrible diet back when you were doing your arena football and you were always tired.

Always tired.

Low-grade inflammation, it's an energy sink. It requires so much energy to activate your immune cells. There's only so much energy. It's like a triage, right? It's triaging there.

It's taking it somewhere else. It takes you away from your mission, from your vision of your life, from your career, from your energy with your family, your friends.

Yeah, you have to have energy. It takes motivation to want to go to the gym. It takes motivation also to want to do stuff or to talk to people.

Is there a genetic thing that or DNA thing that holds someone back from losing that weight if they've tried for years? Or is this still, you know, they're just lacking the discipline? What is that?

Dr.

There's absolutely many genes that regulate obesity. And, and my, like, I'll just tell you, my mother-in-law she's also little, not obese. She's, you know, has in the past had an overweight problem. and has tried, I mean, she's the kind of person that tries and goes all in and she has tried every diet, just everything and just nothing seemed to work.

So, I mean, how does someone like that, if they've tried, tried, tried, and it's just like, you know what? I'm beating myself up. The diets I'm trying, the exercise is not working. What do they need to shift?

Well, I just, you asked about genetics and that it, there is a really important role for genetics as well, but I think that that in order to know that, you're gonna have to measure biomarkers in your blood. So you're gonna have to measure lipids like your LDL cholesterol, different particle sizes of those cholesterol, inflammatory biomarkers like high sensitivity reactive protein, your triglycerides, your HBA1C, which is a long-term measure of your long-term blood glucose levels. Measure those things and also you can get a genetic test. There's a variety of genetic testing services out there, 23andMe, AncestryDNA. I do have a that basically we look exclusively or looking at genes that are affecting basically interacting with diet. So people that are eating a high protein diet and some people with a certain SNP, which is a one change in one nucleotide of DNA in the gene, basically can gain more weight. And the opposite is true, like I mentioned, or eating the ratio of saturated fat to polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats or saturated fats found in foods. like dairy, red meat, fatty cuts of red meat, polyunsaturated fats found in fish, monounsaturated fat is found in olive oil, olives, you know, nuts. So these things, like even the ratio of those things can affect, depending on someone's genetics, their ability to gain or lose weight. And more so, like even people, there's some people have it where they eat a high carbohydrate diet and they gain more weight.

So is there a, is there So, it's not as simple as what I'm hearing you say as just eat less calories a day and you should lose weight.

Not always.

If you suppress the calorie intake, you're going to burn more and eventually you're going to burn.

I think that's the one thing that's pretty tried and true is that your caloric restriction, most of the time, people will lose weight.

Lose weight.

Okay.

But the question is, how sustainable is that? So maybe what you would need to do, the other thing is that a lot of times obesity, there's a dysregulation in hormones. Hormones like insulin, leptin is another big one. And you have to reset those hormones in order to have a normal biology. And sometimes resetting those hormones takes a reset that's kind of a strong stressor, like a long fast. A long fast. fast, you know, where you're basically, you're basically resetting those things. And, and that's what did it for.

My mother-in-law so that was my long story.

Did a long fast and reset a couple of them.

So she did.

Now, by the way, you know, when I say a long fast, typically, intermittent fasting is, is anything less than 48 hours. A longer fast would be longer than 48 hours.

Three plus days.

Yeah.

Now, she did the first time she did a three-day she started out by doing sort of a caloric restriction, low calorie diet to kind of get her into it. And then she did a three-day fast where she didn't eat anything, a little bit of salt, she would take a little bit of salt in and drink some water. And then she did four days. And she did this, like, you know, separated by like a month. And that reset her metabolism and all of a sudden she started losing weight, you know? And this has also been the case for a few, a few other friends of mine, particularly one that was morbidly obese. obesity and he lost like 180 pounds.

Kind of your mission is to end disease and then you're saying it all comes through the gut. Starts and ends with the gut.

Correct.

Everything what we eat can solve the disease we have within us, right?

Correct.

Based on the foods that we put inside of us.

It can actually extend our lifespan to potentially things that people can't even imagine. and wow. And it actually has to do not with you and me and what we conceive of our bodies, but it turns out that 90% of all the cells that make you and me, me, are actually non-human cells. They're bacteria, viruses, funguses, worms that live in us and on us. And the shocking thing is that 99% of all the genes that make up you and me are non-human genes.

What are they?

They're bacterial and viral genes. And what we've completely missed from the Human Genome Project is that we have actually very few genes. And our genes are about 99% the same as a chimp or a gorilla. And we're very different different than chimps or gorillas, and yet we have virtually the same genes. What makes us different is actually the bacteria and viruses that live in us.

Different bacteria and viruses.

And you can actually show when humans evolved from the other great apes that our bacteria actually changed. And we can actually identify that point in time that the bacteria made us rather than our genes made us.

So the bacteria made us human or bacteria made us... Yeah, they actually, as.

Shocking as it may seem, most of what happens to us is determined by the state and the variation of our bacteria, primarily in our gut. I'll give you an example. You can take a bowl movement from an obese individual and feed it to a skinny rat. Skinny rats love to eat poop. And those skinny rats will become fat because the bacteria have actually manipulated their feeding habits. They actually send text messages to the brain to go look for foods that they would not otherwise that those bacteria want. And we can actually, there was a cool study in a marathon runner. You're a great athlete. So there's a woman marathon runner in England a couple years ago who developed a very severe infection or colon called C. Difficile. A lot of people have heard of it. And the modern treatment of this now is a fecal transplant. taking poop from somebody else and shoving it up your ass.

Wow.

And you try to get a fecal transplant from a family member because believe it or not, family members tend to share their bacteria. I share a lot of bacteria with my dogs and they share with me. So they found a cousin who was a good match for her and she got the fecal transplant and everything went well or seed defecate went away. We can go into why that happen. But in the next year, this Marathon Runner gained 32 pounds.

Wow.

Without changing anything. And it turns out her niece cousin was actually 30, about 32 pounds overweight. And so she was inoculated with obesogenic bacteria and her bacteria, these Little one-cell organisms controlled her behavior.

Wow.

Think about that.

So, it made her more hungry or desiring certain foods.

Yeah, exactly.

So, she changed the way she was eating because she was triggered and being manipulated.

Being manipulated.

Wow.

It's kind of like when you're, you know, I love candy and sweets. I've never been drunk and I don't drink, but my vice is like I could eat cakes and candy and brownies all day long. if I choose to. And then when I go off of it, it's hard because I just want to keep going back to it until I change the habit fully. And then I'm like, I don't need it anymore. But it takes that time to kind of transition out of it, right?

Yeah, these are very addictive foods and they're addictive because what happens is simple sugars like in candies and cakes and saturated fats like on the icing and you coating on the donuts and all.

Oh, so good.

Yeah, yeah.

Used to love them.

And so these things actually, the obesogenic bacteria can actually live on them. They love it. They love simple sugars, they love saturated fats, and they go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me more. And they actually tell our brain to do that. It's kind of like, you remember the movie Little Shop of Horrors with the, with the bloodsucking plants? It's a very famous Broadway show. So Rick Moranis starred in the movie and there's this blood-sucking plant that he grows and Audrey keeps getting bigger and Audrey has to have human blood. And long story short, Audrey, whenever it's Audrey is the speaking part, and Audrey says, Feed me Seymour, feed me. And it turns out that this whole concept is actually true, that our bacteria control our behavior. For instance, you can take depressed mice and put their bacteria in happy mice and those happy mice will go hide in a corner and come out. In fact, in the 1930s, they did an experiment in a, back in those days, the most really depressed people were institutionalized. So they did an experiment where they gave them all colonics and cleaned out their colons and then they gave them fecal enemas from happy people.

No way.

And about two-thirds of the depressed people got happy and were released in the 1930s.

Wow.

So, I mean, it's just you start looking at this and go, whoa, you know, we're probably looking at the wrong stuff. For instance, one of the things that I'm talking about in Berlin in October at the World Congress of Microbiota, that's what the study is, we now know that you can take bacteria from young animals' guts and put them in old animals' guts and the old animals will become young again.

No way.

I mean like, it's the Fountain of Youth.

No way.

So they'll like, their cells will get younger or they'll have youthful energy or what?

All of the above. They will actually extend their lifespan by about 30%.

What?

Yeah, because here's the deal. What I'm trying to get people to understand is this is not about you and me or what we conceive as us. We're just a condominium for the people who really run us. And these are all these little one cellular organisms. And what we're beginning to realize is we're a condominium for these bugs. And we're their home. We've exchanged them living in us and actually taking care of us for food and shelter for them.

And that's crazy, I know.

And the really cool thing is, so we can take bacteria from young animals, you know, and put them into old animals. And the bacteria say, man, this place is decrepit. You know, I need to do a complete total renovation here because this is where I'm stuck and I better make the best of it. And I want everything to be nice, you know, it's like, you know, yeah, gentrification of the neighborhood. And this actually.

So what do they do?

So they actually instruct. rocked. Here's the take home message. They actually send text messages to the mitochondria, and you probably know all about mitochondria, the little energy organelles.

In the brain, right?

In every one of you, but the brain has the most of them. And these produce energy. These mitochondria are actually engulfed bacteria. And as strange as it may seem, the bacteria in your that send text messages to the mitochondria that say, Guys, new sheriffs in town, clean up your act. We want you guys working and humming on all eight cylinders. It's kind of like General Kelly coming into the White House and total disarray and it was going, okay guys, no more of this silliness. And so we now have discovered some of those compounds that the bacteria in your gut signal the mitochondria to regenerate themselves. And it's. I mean, it's opening up a whole new areas that we never even dreamed of.

Wow. So you're really, like, 170 years old, huh?

Yeah, well, people.

You've just been manipulating all this for the last 15 years.

I'll show you a picture when we're all done of me and memedoz standing together when I did a show a few weeks ago. And one of us is 12 years older than the other. and you would not guess by looking at our skin who's the old person and who's the young person.

Wow.

And I was showing this picture to David Sinclair from Harvard who's one of the great anti-aging researchers in this country and actually in the world and we were discussing some ways to manipulate mitochondria in the brain and I said, let me show you a picture and he's looking and he says, okay, so Memhet's a lot older than you, right? And he said, let me show you my driver's license. He said, wait a minute, how old are you? And he said, can I have this picture? And I said, yeah, he says, I'm going to put it in all my talks. Because what I've been doing for the last 17 years is giving my bacteria what all the research that I've done and many other people have done, would predict that my bacteria are pretty doggone happy with what I'm doing for them. And they're exchanging that happiness to say, man, this is a great place to live and we're going to keep this place nice and nice and just happy. And so, yeah.

And so you lived in a blue zone, is that right?

Yeah, Lomalinda is a blue zone. That's But when I was living in that blue zone, I was eating a low-fat vegetarian diet. I was running 30 miles a week. I was one of these Clydesdale runners. I weighed 70 pounds more than I do now. Really?

Yeah.

I was a Clydesdale.

There's a lot of unhealthy people in blue zones too. Oh yeah. And they have the vegans that just.

Are overweight and you're like, how are you this overweight? Yeah, well it actually is because you're giving your bacteria the wrong stuff. And that's really part of the plant paradox. The plant paradox is that there's certain plants that absolutely positively do not want us to eat them.

At all, in any circumstance.

Under any circumstances.

They took them or chopped them or sliced them or skinned them, doesn't matter.

They were here first and they had it really great before animals arrived because nobody wanted to eat them. And my research at Yale was in human evolutionary biology. so plants have the same evolutionary drive as animals. They want to grow and they want to have babies, seeds, they want to protect themselves. And they want to protect themselves.

They don't want to die.

Exactly. So when animals arrived, they had a problem because animals can run, they can hide, they can fight, but plants are stuck. But plants are chemists of incredible ability. So they can turn sunlight into matter like around your wall here. And so what they use is chemical warfare to actually defend themselves and to even make animals do their bidding. Because for instance, just throw out an example, most plants want you to eat their fruits because the fruit can reseed to go reseed them. So you'll eat their fruit. the seeds and the fruits are inedible and you'll either spit them out or if you swallow them, they'll survive going through your intestines and you'll poop them out someplace else.

Fertilized.

Fertilized. It's perfect. And they're away from mom and dad. So for instance, if an apple falls underneath the apple tree, that poor kid doesn't have much of a chance because mom or dad is going to shade them the next year. But if it gets carried off, you know, even 100 feet away and then gets dropped, the plant does this on purpose. And in fact, you and I love fruit because you and I were designed to eat fruit once a year in the summer to gain weight for the winter. So it was a really good trade-off between for instance, great apes and plants. But the fascinating thing is manufacturers, food chemists, know this and we are drawn with color vision. And only animals that are fruit predators actually have color vision because you want to know when the fruit is ripe, when it has the highest sugar content. And the plant wants you to know when it's ripe because because that's when the seed finally has an impenetrable shell and it doesn't want you to eat it before that time. So it tells you, okay, now's the time.

Shiniest object, it's time to eat it.

Yeah, yeah. So what colors does it use? In general, it uses reds and oranges and yellows to denote ripeness. So the next time you're going down the snack aisles, for all the great munchie stuff. You'll be shocked that most of the companies use oranges, reds, yellows to get your attention because it goes direct into the deep center of your brain and says, oh, that color means I should eat it. I'm gonna get a lot of calories and I'm gonna be the big winner for the winter.

Wow.

But if you're doing that every day, baby, for many years in a row, you're always storing fat for the winter.

That's exactly exactly right. And that's part of the plant paradox, is that once upon a time we only had fruit in a very limited time period.

Now we have it accessible all the time.

There were no 747s bringing blueberries to Costco in February. They just weren't. So one of the weird things about our computer program is, like Tony Robbins, it's always fun to say. We were on version 1.0 of our operating system. We've never had an upgrade. And the same goes to the foods and the plants and the fruit we eat. So we were supposed to eat fruit once a year. And when we were eating fruit, our brain says, oh my gosh, it's summer. Winter is right around the corner. You know, we should eat this stuff because winter's a tough time, whether it's dry season or rainy season or cold season. And we better store fat, just like a bear. You know, bears eating all those blueberries and huckleberries and they're storing fat for the winter. So if you're eating blueberries at Costco in February that came from Chile, your operating system doesn't know it's February. It says, heck, it's August and winter's right around the corner, so I better eat some more of this stuff. And this is one of the things that's happening to us in particularly in American society, but now most of the western country. We're eating things that we have no business eating 365 days a year. And most of us are just getting ready for the winter that never comes.

Especially if they live in LA. It's never getting cold.

Yeah, never comes.

You don't need a store like that.

You really don't. Yeah, but that's part of the problem.

So, huh, what are the main plants that we should never be eating then.

Okay, real quick, up until 10,000 years ago, we lived primarily on the leaves of trees and we ate tubers that grew in the ground, like a sweet potato for a yam.

Love those.

Yeah, they're actually pretty darn good for you. You were actually designed to eat them. And 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we switched over to things that we had never eaten before and those were the grains of grasses and beans. Now, the reason we'd never eaten them before is number one, we didn't need to. There's never been a documentation of an ape eating grass or grains. Beans are so lethal that five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood. What? Five raw kidney beans.

Raw kidney beans.

In fact, you know, most people have heard of the poison rye and ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official. Yeah, lots on the way to Washington. Yeah, that's another subject. So, ricin is the lectin of the castor bean. And we'll talk about lectins next. A lectin is the plant defense system. These are proteins that are designed to basically kill us in one way or another. And so, ricin is so powerful that about four molecules of and will kill a human being instantaneously. There's a great study that was written up in one of the journals about a few years ago. They decided to have a healthy eating day in Boston.

Yeah.

And they served the kids beans. And because it's so healthy, right? Part of the blue zone. Yes. And they had 30 or 40 admissions to the hospital with severe diarrhea, hypotension. And it turns out that it was all the fact that the beans were undercooked. And beans are a plant baby and we're not supposed to eat those. And so no beans. No beans.

Zero beans.

Unless you use a pressure cooker. Pinto black.

None of it. We shouldn't be eating it.

Shouldn't be. You weren't designed to eat it. You have no defense system.

No matter how it's cooked.

If you pressure cook. Pressure cook it, it's fine.

Pressure cook it.

What does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. The modern pressure cooker is as easy as a rice cooker. Got it. It's one touch. It's not your grandmother's pressure cooker that blew up in the kitchen. So then it's okay to eat?

Yeah.

So you can pressure cook beans. Now the other thing, we weren't designed to eat grains.

Just a quick question before you start there. How much of it can we eat? Doesn't matter once it's pressure cooked. Obviously everything in moderation, but I mean, yeah, well, like I was presenting 20.

Beans are gonna kill me or what?

No, if you pressure cook them, they're fine.

It's all good.

Okay.

And we talk about how to do this in the plant Paradox. Got it. But my personal feeling is the only purpose of eating a bean is to get olive oil into my mouth. And we can talk about that as we go along. Okay. So grains. For instance, everybody heard about gluten.

Yes.

All right, so gluten is lectin. And again, a lectin is a plant's defense system. It's a protein that actually is designed to act like incoming guided missile attacks on the inside wall of our gut. And these things actually pry open the lining of our gut and actually break through the border.

Really?

Yeah, they really do.

That's what causes eczema and bingo breakouts.

Exactly, acne, brain fog, irritable bowel. This is actually all part of that process. And so it's fascinating to see people who either have come to see me or have even read the book and then write on Amazon, oh my gosh, I had this horrible eczema and now a month later it's all gone and all I did was take grains and beans and nightshades away from my diet and everything got better.

Modern medicine doesn't know what's ailing you so instead of going after you personally and saying your body's faulty and it's destroying you or your genes are faulty and they're bad, why can't we just admit we don't know what's wrong what's wrong with you and we're gonna keep on looking. We're gonna keep on looking.

Ego. Ego gets in the way.

It's gotta be something.

They gotta be like, I know exactly.

What it is or I think it's this.

It's gotta be something. And so right now we're in this disempowering age on a level no one's ever even understood or known about. Spirit of compassion has taught me this. I haven't found anybody that realizes it yet. I mean, until I explain a little bit and fill them in, then now you're like, whoa, right? I mean, does this make sense? It makes sense, yeah, yeah.

How do we, I mean, there's so many mysterious symptoms, you're saying, right? There's so many mysterious symptoms, there's gonna be even more, it sounds like, in five to ten years that are coming out. It's unbelievable. How do we prevent these things to the best of our ability so that they they don't affect us physically.

Yeah, we have to know that behind everybody's symptoms, there's a pathogen involved. A virus. A virus or even bacteria in many cases. Bacteria and viruses are the cause of all symptoms.

Yeah, all of it.

It's why it's not food that causes our illness. It's not food. See, it's a virus that's- so everybody's fighting over this. You like you got- Plant based. Yeah, plant based. the animal protein people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're killing yourself with that food or your other food, but they all agreed no gluten, but yet how come someone can eat gluten and be fine? I know people that are like 85 years old, they don't have the pathogens that everybody's getting and has and is passing around.

They're eating bread all day.

And they're eating bread all day, okay? They're fine. Sure, they get heart disease in the end, they get something else in the end because of accumulation of all kinds of different factors, but they don't get all these different symptoms that young people are getting. We're talking about young people in their 20s and their teens, younger than that, children, you know, in their early 30s that can't get out of bed, they can't function, they have to live off of caffeine. You got to live off your matcha tea, your chocolate all day long because if you don't have your chocolate all day long and your matcha tea and you don't have your caffeine, you don't have your coffee drinks, then you don't have energy. But why don't you have that's a symptom all on its own. That already is a symptom. But then, if you got to be on your coffee, drinks and caffeine and chocolate and you don't have energy that you're trying to fix that with there, but you're also getting other symptoms all the time, like you're getting, you know, hot flashes and heart palpitations all of a sudden. Migraines, a little bit of fatigue, or you're getting some strange symptoms in different ways, or you're getting a skin problem like the eczema or psoriasis. then wait a minute, you know, that's what everybody's dealing with. Then everybody's playing the guessing game. Do I go off of gluten?

Do I go off of dairy?

Do I go vegan? Do I go plant-based? Do I go on paleo?

Do I go on some other normal protein?

Not plant-based because the nightshades are gonna kill you. Do I go off the nightshades? Do I food combine? Do I do this? Do I intermittent fast? Yeah, exactly. Tomatoes, no tomatoes, what do I do? it becomes this big guessing game. Then you go to your alternative doctor now because you're going to your conventional doctor. Like, hey, he doesn't have the answers. He wants to just offer me a.

Steroid and a drug or antibiotic.

So then you go to holistic doctors. Then you go to holistic doctors and they're like giving you this food allergy test and they're saying you're allergic to everything under the sun. You're allergic to banana, you're allergic to fruit, you're allergic to cilantro, you're allergic to this, you're allergic to that. Now you're really head screwed and then you leave there but you still you don't have answers because you still got water.

So, you just drink water all day and that's it.

You drink water. But wait, that's a good question too. Everybody tells you drink more water, that'll fix you. It never fixed anybody that has chronic illness ever. That's what's funny about the celery juice. They'll say, hey, AW, you know, your celery juice is all water. That's why people are getting better. And I'll be like, that's funny one because the first thing everybody does that's.

Chronically ill is they increase their water and it doesn't fix them, you know?

And so.

What does more water do for you? Does more water help in general? Should you be having a certain amount of water to help flush out certain toxins or is that just a myth?

More water? No, more water.

The more hydrated you are.

The more.

Diluted the disease or the symptoms potentially.

It's like how come, you know, I've always recommended the lemon water for, you know, since I was a kid from Spirit of Compassion, I've always recommended it saying, because it it flushes out the liver. Spirit of compassion has always said the lemon water flushes out the liver in the morning. That's what it does. It flushes out those toxins and it flushes out the liver in the morning. And it's because it's so important but does it fix you? It's a great tool for helping you and there's all these other great tools for helping you too. Stay off of gluten. Stay off of dairy products. But why stay off off of gluten. Why stay off of dairy products? Because, because this is what nobody knows. They feed bugs, they feed bacteria, streptococcus that causes everybody's like severe acne, cystic acne, where they're broken out all over their back and their neck and their face and they're, they're everywhere. And it, it, it actually causes that. If, when you feed the strep, you get the lymphoma, you get all kinds of different problems. You get you get swelling throughout the body, you get different symptoms, you get sinusitis, you get UTIs, chronic UTIs. So the gluten feeds streptococcus, which is behind the UTIs, the bladder infections, the bladder sensitivities for a lot of women, and sinusitis and that whole thing too, and the sties that people get and the conjunctivitis that's all streptococcus. So stay off of gluten, but no one knows that's why you should stay off of gluten. And that's why the medical medium information is so interesting and it's helped so many people because they get answers. It's like, wait a minute, they're reading the books and they're reading liver rescue and they're, you know, and they're reading them all and they're like, he's giving answers. But here's the funny thing. I'm not giving any answers. Spirit of compassion's been giving all the answers. I'm just writing them down.

Right.

And the information is untampered. There wasn't a thumb on a scale in some bogus study. Because investors, they hire scientists. Scientists tell me all this time, tell me all about this. Investors hire people with white coats and labs to try to come out with an outcome to suit the investor. But you got to be careful because.

If you.

To disappoint somebody, then you may never work again in the field of.

So you have to give a favorable outcome.

Something has to come. So what happens with research and study, it's all kind of tampered with in so many ways because it's all about, hey, it's about this product someone's trying to sell, so they want to get science behind it, so they get, you know, favorable in a favorable outcome, or it's conventional science, and then you've got the science Conventional science doesn't believe in alternative science, so they're at war. Conventional science doesn't believe food does anything for anybody, and that's the science that puts rockets into space. But yet, alternative science, you know, like there's a science war, too. So who do you believe? I'll tell you who I believe. I believe the person who's sick, who can't get out of bed, who can't drop their kids off to school, school. Okay. I believe that person, when they say, I've been to 10 doctors, I still don't have answers. I'm still sick. And science and research has let me down. That's the person I believe. I don't buy into studies and all that stuff that's had thumb thumbs on the scale and all that because it has been tampered with through, you know, Financial, either gain or financial influence. I don't trust that. I trust the a person who's been on their hands and knees suffering and struggling, been through hell and back, and no one cares and no one gives a crap. No one cares about them. They don't care about them sitting in their home in Mattress Island. They don't care if they can get in their car, if their anxiety, if they have crippling anxiety, how many women and men have crippling anxiety where they can't even function or brain fog. Oh my God. the amount of women that have brain fog that makes it so they can't even work their job or their career or they can barely work any, they can barely function and take care of their families.

Their energy is drained.

Their energy is drained, right? I believe that, that's who I believe. I believe that that person has brain fog and can't get answers because studies in research and science has dropped the ball for women's health, disasterly. That's who I believe. I think I'm gonna believe research in science when all these women are suffering and struggling and they got brain fog and their migraines, they're debilitating pain and their body's in pain and they can't get answers and they may look normal. Like they may look okay. Friends might say to them like, hey, you know, you look great today. But deep inside that person's heart and soul who's been suffering and doesn't feel at their best and they have this brain fog and they're really hurting They know that that's not the reality of it all. So people then judge them on how they look. They seem like they're in their 20s. Okay, yeah. I believe those people, that's who I have the back of. And I take heat for it, sure. Take heat for the guy that puts out medical information to save lives and has been saving lives for years. I take heat for it, and I've learned along the way that there that the not sick people who have a problem with where I get my information, they don't like it and they don't want to see people healing with this information. And I've gotten used to that. But when you see the millions of stories out there that are just everywhere globally, the millions of books that have been sold globally and they're saving lives and they become people's Bibles because they've seen what it has done. and because they've been through hell and back, those are the people I got their back. You know, that's the people I look out for. But I want everybody to have the answers.

So what is the answer? What should we be doing on a daily basis?

We've got to focus on a couple of things. One is that you have to know the truth and not a truth that was paid for. because those truths, those aren't truths, not in chronic illness. The truths that have been paid for so someone says, oh, here's the truth about this illness or here's the truth about Lyme or here's the truth about... No, any truth has been paid for for that. That's not the ones you go with. Here's the truth. The truth is we have pathogens, we have toxic heavy metals, and we have to learn about the foods that feed these pathogens. And we have to learn how to remove these pathogens, kill them off. We have to learn how to remove toxic heavy metals out of our system. And we have to learn how to use foods as medicine to do it. But when everybody's playing guessing games because they're removing gluten but they don't know why they should, they'll end up eating gluten again because they don't know why they should even really Remove it anyway.

So what does Spirit of Compassion tell you are the three to five things that you should never eat? Or eat very limited amounts like once a year.

The number one thing is eggs.

Don't eat eggs.

Don't eat eggs.

What?

Because the pathogens.

Oh no.

Yeah, the virus.

I love eggs.

Look, take Shingles virus for one. Spirit of Compassion has taught me about what that virus does, right? as far as what symptoms it creates. The shingles virus, and science research doesn't know this, it creates trigeminal neuralgia. That's what it creates. So the shingles, you don't even have to have a rash anywhere in your body. You can have gum pain, jaw pain, neck pain, ear pain, head pain on the side of the head. You can have body pain. You can have all the shingles can do all of this, right? It can make your gums feel like they're burning. It can make your face feel like it's on fire. It can cause all these different things. And the shingles virus feeds off of eggs. So when you're eating eggs every single day, you're eventually gonna get the shingles virus if you have it, because everybody has the shingles virus in their system.

Most everybody has it.

It's gotta be heightened. It's gotta be heightened. Maybe you had an emotional experience that knocked you down really good. Maybe your immune system has been down. because you're zinc deficient. That's a huge thing. That's why I'm always recommending zinc. And then you're eating eggs all day. Not all day. Some people eat them all day. But you eat eggs every day. Three, four times.

That's the first food. Here's the thing.

So, eliminate it. Never eat eggs or have them once in a while. There's a big part of, there's a big part of big pharma that's really dark that people are unaware of. That dark part of big pharma, Karma.

Is 80-90 years ago.

They raise these viruses in labs using eggs as the virus's food. That's how it's done. Okay. So you got your fibromyalgia, you got your autoimmune diagnosis, you got your chronic fatigue syndrome, your multiple sclerosis, you got your Hashimoto's thyroiditis, your eczema psoriasis, your rheumatoid arthritis or whatever you got going on, your Lyme disease now, because that's an autoimmune now. You got all these things. From eggs?

No.

The bugs that create all these illnesses were raised in labs and somehow escaped those labs 80, 90, 60 years ago. And these bugs were raised on eggs. Eggs was the food. So they took a really great survival food, right? You like eggs?

Yeah, I love them.

You love them, right? Great survival food. They're easy, you make them in the morning, you know, you just fry them The protein? Yeah, the protein, right? All of that, they took that food, they ruined it for us. So that's one example, stay away from eggs.

All eggs, even if they're like your own chickens, it doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Look, if they're your own chickens, it's great. If they're organic, great. If they're free range, great. All that's great. It's better, but it's still gonna feed if you look, if you don't have a chronic symptom, you don't have a chronic illness, you feel great, nothing's going on at any level. Eat the eggs.

Eat the eggs.

And then if something comes up down the road, get rid of the eggs.

Okay, so that's number one.

What's the next food we should never eat? Dairy products. All dairy. Feeds viruses. It feeds the bugs. Feeds the bugs. Milk. Goat's milk, sheep's milk, whatever you want. It just feeds, yeah, kefir, just it feeds the bugs.

Okay.

Yeah, milk, cheese, butter, a whole bit.

Yeah.

Come on, man.

So get the butter out of your coffee. That's the worst thing you could do if you're sick.

Even ghee?

Yeah.

Ghee is bad. Yeah, it's not gonna be good.

The thing is-- Again, if you're not feeling any symptoms.

None of this stuff is really bad if you don't have any of the-- Symptoms. Symptoms. If you're not dealing with all the pathogens everybody has. If you're not dealing with the strep toccus and the different groups of strep that everybody has in their system. if you're not dealing with the different Epstein-Barrs and all of that. If you're not, I mean, if you're not dealing with anything, then you could probably get away with this stuff and eat it. Is it bad for you in other ways? Some of it could be, maybe, you know, whatever. And of course, you could always find a paid for study that says eggs are good or this milk or that's good. Of course, you could always find a paid for study. But that paid for study and everything else around it all, nobody knows why why women and men and children are suffering like they are with the heart arrhythmias that are mysterious and the heart palps and all the different body pain and the migraines and the tingles and numbness and the ticks and the spasms. Nobody knows how any of that and the fatigue, nobody knows what's going on or causing all of that. So then, you know, hey, wait a minute, but there was a paid for study saying that it's really good for me and my doctor recommended them because it's a great protein source. Let me just eat them and then try to do my keto diet with eggs. Let me try to do this diet, maybe stay away from gluten. But in the end, and I have total respect for everybody that's trying to experiment. And you know, you'll see it on YouTube too. You'll see like a few years ago people being like, okay, I'm doing this and then all of a sudden they're getting sick. Like it's showcasing now because we have a documented record we never had before with people with symptoms. It's showcasing things now, like on social media. We're seeing it now where someone's like, okay, I'm loving my eggs. I'm doing it for, like, you know, a year or whatever. And then a year later, you know, they're getting eczema and psoriasis, and they don't know why. It's like things are act. We're seeing it now when we never even could see it before because, you know, social media showcasing this. Every documentation of everything. people's lives.

Okay, so we got no eggs, no dairy.

What else? Okay, those are the basics. Those are the basics.

Those are the two big ones.

To eliminate that, you should be. Yeah, and gluten's your third basic.

That's your third. Those three.

So anything that tastes good, eliminate. Whether you want to stay animal protein, whether you want to be vegan and stay vegan and plant-based, that's what you get rid of.

Whether you're, you know. Gluten, dairy, eggs. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But you're saying meat is okay or.

Plant-Based is okay or what's the ideal? Well, meat, here's what I should tell you. Here, that you should be.

I'm a big supporter of plant-based. Huge supporter, okay?

It's spirit of compassion, a big supporter.

Absolutely. Okay. Plant-based. I mean, total big supporter, okay? But I'm not anti the animal product crowd and what they're doing because I'm not against meat either. And I think it gets the plant the plant-based people mad at me that love me, they're like, wait a minute, he's not against him. How come he's not against him? How come he's not fighting for staying away from animal products and stuff? Because the animal products like, say, meat, doesn't feed a pathogen. So it doesn't feed a pathogen. So I can't take it personally. you know, personally, I like plant-based.

Yeah.

You know, better, like on a personal level, but I have nothing against animal protein. Here's how it works. Like years ago when I used to do all the readings, you know, I worked over, worked on one-on-one individuals, 250,000 individuals for the last 35 years.

Yeah, people would come into your office, you would do a reading with them.

Yeah, and it doesn't matter if I like an animal product or not, it's not about what like. It's about what is going on inside the body. So, Spirit of Compassion will be like, this person has this, so they need to get rid of this food. So, this person has, for example, an HHV-6 cytomegalovirus or Epstein-Barr or they got a streptococcus and everybody's walking around with these bugs, by the way. And yeah, oh yeah, they are. It's unbelievable. And so Spirit will say, you have to remove this food. So it's not a personal thing where I have to all of a sudden pick a side.

Just black and white.

I get it. Everybody's trying to get on somebody's team with a diet or a program that's working for them and then they stay with it and they try it and then they go against the other side, right? You see it. Everybody's trying to get on somebody's team. That's human nature. That's the way we are. But I can't do that. I can't get on just the plant-based team because I know through Spirit of Compassion that meat won't feed a virus. There you go.

Dairy will.

So then I'm like, no, both sides. Well, of course vegans aren't gonna do dairy, but both sides.

They might do dairy.

I don't. Yeah. But they may wanna do dairy someday. And they may want, I mean, a lot of vegans break and they go on to cheese or they go on to something. It's like, but if they know no, wait a minute, this feeds this. The same thing with people that are eating animal protein, stay away from dairy so you're not feeding your pathogens to keep your Hashimoto's going and to keep your, you know, fibromyalgia going and your chronic fatigue syndrome going. So it's really important.

I can't take a belief system. Like, I can't side up with a belief system.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So those are the three main things. Is there anything else that we should be... And then it's about taking out.

The toxic heavy metals, taking out the.

Mercury, aluminum, the copper.

Yeah.

Is that fish or is that?

If you don't have a lot of metals, you'd probably eat fish.

Right.

You could have sardines, you could have trout, you could have salmon, you could have fish. If you're not dealing with a lot of metals, but if you've got symptoms and you're dealing with issues and you're struggling.

Don't eat the fish.

Yeah.

Keep the extra metals out. Exactly. keep them out. It's important. But getting the metals out of the body, bringing in this, if I can give tips to anybody out there watching this podcast, you have to get on the celery juice.

And, why does celery juice have more benefits than water? Why does it help you cleanse the toxins?

I guess it's herbal medicine. It's an herb. It was missed by everybody and everybody thought it was just good for crud okay, right? Or maybe throw a celery stick in somebody's smoothie or juice or something if it's kicking around. And Spirit of Compassion has taught me going all the way since I was a child that it's a miracle medicine. Really?

Yeah.

Because it's an herbal medicine and has power that people don't know about, just like so many other foods have power. But this one particularly, it has a sodium cluster salts. So something called sodium cluster salts. That's a pathogen killer. That's different than salt. It's different than sea salt or anything else. But it's a pathogen destroyer. It starts to break down the membrane that's around the pathogen. The virus has a sheath around it, its cell sheath. And the sodium cluster salts and celery juice start to wear it down and break it down. And that's just one thing. I mean, celery juice binds onto it binds onto onto byproduct that people have in their bodies. So toxins from pathogens, it binds onto it and pulls it out of their body. So that's just a couple of things. I can go, I wrote a book all about it. I mean, those are just a couple of things.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. [The hUte is not available for me.

The cell on your cheek is the same cell, but your body completely breaks down and rebuilds your.

Wow.

Rebuilds itself about nine times in your lifetime. So it really matters what you eat because, like, if those new cells are being made from old cells and what you're eating, I know. Mic drop.

No.

I mean, that's why people probably look younger, older when they take care of their health throughout their whole life, because they're eating good. foods and so they stay younger looking.

Exactly. I obviously really love this stuff.

Wow.

Yeah.

So this four day fasting thing, you did it with Chelsea Handler. After day two, you're like, oh, I'm not hungry. I'm fine.

Yeah.

Your body adjusted to it. How did it feel after day four?

Well, I was like, you have an emotional connection to food, so I was like, what am I gonna have next?

Planning the meal.

Yeah.

And we were we're in Santa Barbara.

Yeah.

I pulled in. There's an Aeron in Calabasas on my way back, which is, like, fancier than Whole Foods. Really? Well, the Aeron over here.

Yeah.

It's the. It's the same store, so I just, you know, got everything.

Yeah.

I was like, well, I didn't eat for four days, so technically, how much money would that have been? We'll just spend it all.

Right.

It was. It was good. It was really. I felt great. It was just kind of one of those things. I wasn't, you know, you have to be prepared for something like that, and I. I wasn't emotional about it. I was just like supporting... I had to support Chelsea in this process because it's something I told her about maybe in October. She's like, I really want to do that thing in January. Okay, we'll give it a try.

I'd never done it either. Now what does it do? So it helps with the immune system, rebuild it.

It helps, I'm assuming you lost some weight or... Yeah, I mean, and it was... I tested body fat percentages, inches. I had a glucometer. I was testing her blood sugar. I had a ketometer. I was testing her ketones. She was making sure she felt good. You know, you don't... I'm not into torturing people.

Of course not.

So it was an interesting thing and there's a lot of really cool research out of USC on it. But yeah, it's a one-off.

How did she feel afterwards? How did you feel? I mean, it was like... She was.

Really proud of herself. I mean, it's one of those things where she would never go do something like that. I would never go do something like that. and the research was there. And it's really nice sometimes, especially when I have clients who, and Chelsea wasn't a yo-yo dieter by any means, but I have had clients that have yo-yo dieted and they lose weight and feel great, and then they eat their way back up or drink their way back up into a range that they don't want to be in. And I think after a certain number of years, the commitment to it and and the excitement and really just sticking to something, it doesn't last as long. What maybe you would do for a month and a half or two months, then becomes six weeks, then becomes four weeks, then all of a sudden you can't complete something for a week. And so it's a short enough period of time where if you have the support or whatever, you can commit to it and make it happen. And she left with a lot of confidence. And I'm all about people completing something. Yeah, I'm all about people completing things, I'm feeling confident. And that's why in my book I talk about breaking the day up into thirds. Because people always try to do a wholesale change of their life. I'm going to change everything. I'm not going to eat gluten, I'm not going to eat lectins, I'm not going to eat beans, I'm not going to eat dairy.

So hard.

And you're like, okay, until you go to sushi. Or until you're on vacation in Paris. Or, I'll just do a little bit of here.

Right.

And then that just lends itself to, I cheated a little, let me just cheat everything. Yeah, you either blow it out and binge, or you lose confidence in yourself. And I think they're both detrimental, especially when we're in a world that social media is involved and people want to look and feel great and there's a lot of information on the internet. And if you can't complete something, that's just you not believing in yourself again and again and again. And it kills your confidence. And I think when it comes to being successful in this world, you have to be building up your confidence and believing in yourself the most. and it even comes down to your decisions around food.

So, absolutely.

Decisions around everything. Now, why do you think our self-worth is so tied to our body image?

Well, I think that we have to address the fact that there is an innate sexuality that people who like Giselle or supermodels or Brady, you look at these like fit football players and sexy models and their body is appreciated. It is beautiful. And we can't knock them down for having that body, but we also have to embrace what is our natural figure as well. And I think what we, what it is, is pretty animalistic because men and women are attracted to eat, like you're attracted from the outside first and then the attraction stays from the right? The outside is what gets you attracted and the inside is what keeps you attracted. And it's unfortunate sometimes because people get really caught up in the way that they look. And what I try to coach my clients in is not having these goals that are so outside of reality, but to really celebrate the wins, whether that is gaining two pounds of muscle and being stronger and feeling more energized or clearing a little bit of skin or even just sticking to a plan for a little while that can build confidence around how we feel. Or maybe you're, you know, you've worked out and eaten clean for a couple of weeks and you treat yourself to a new romper or a dress or a pair of heels. I mean, it really can be or you treat yourself to a massage or a facial or whatever it is that like you're into. I think it's really important to celebrate your body because so many of my clients will look at these people like a Victoria's Secret model or the Insta model in the bikinis and the girls who follow them and they wanna be just like them and they want that body. But the problem is if they don't have that body, then they don't feel confident. If they don't feel confident, they don't feel sexy and then they don't give off that confidence and sex appeal and it's detrimental to themselves because a lot of guys and think they're attractive. And the same goes for guys. If they don't put off that they feel confident and sexy, then the girl is going to vibe off of whatever that aura is or that energy is that they're putting off. And that has a lot to do with not being perfect, but putting in the effort and like loving what you got and getting, you know, taking what you have to the next level, whether that's taking yourself to the next emotional level by meditating, taking yourself to the.

Next.

Mental level by education and learning and going to the school of greatness or whatever it is that you are doing to better yourself. I think all of those things you do to better yourself can make you more confident in who you are and more comfortable in your skin. And whether you're a size two or a size 12, you gotta rock what you got.

Yeah, easier said than done though.

It is. It is, but there's a lot of society pressure.

For that.

And it's not going away. Yeah, get off Instagram.

Yeah, that's another thing too.

You can just look at people that.

You wish you were like. Exactly. And judge yourself based on, you know, compare yourself constantly, you know.

Exactly. There's so much of that. You compare yourself to your community. There's a friend of mine, Danica. I have a couple of plus-size models.

I know Danica. Yeah, she's in New York.

The model eats or model foods. Yeah, model meals. Model meals. Yeah. And she's like, she is so beautiful inside and out and like rocks her curves and like, I think that's the perfect example of exactly how you should be. And I mean, she's totally in love and landed a super hot boyfriend. And it really has to me more to do with who she is as a person and her self-love. Really more than anything.

Yeah, she's got a great energy about herself.

Yeah.

Shines.

You know?

Absolutely.

Now, some of this genetics, because I've got some. I got a friend, Steve Weatherford, who's, like, literally the most ripped human I've ever met. And he's just so big and so ripped. Sure. And I'm just like, he's just like, I think it's genetics.

He trains harder than anyone I know.

Yeah.

But I'm also like, some of that is just genetics, hormones, all of it.

Yeah.

He's got a lot of testosterone or human growth hormone. There's a lot of things at play there.

How much sleep is he getting?

What's the stress levels?

Yeah.

How do we increase, I guess, testosterone and growth hormone naturally?

Intermittent fasting.

Really?

Yeah.

Intermittent fasting.

Is that the only scientific research proven?

Those are the two really strong ones.

Really?

Yeah.

Intermittent fasting does. I've heard so many different things that it doesn't do anything for people and other people that swear that it does.

Well, you have to remember there's bio individuality for every everyone. But, but, yeah, an intermittent fast can, can release human growth hormone and testosterone to hold on to lean muscle mass in a fasted state. So that's why people get lean gains and that type of a, when they do intermittent fasting. When it comes to fasted workouts, I think those are the best.

What do you mean, fasted workouts?

Like wake up and do a hit training or lift before you eat anything. Don't eat anything.

Yeah.

Those are good. They're hard.

Yeah. Because you get that same, you get those same results. And I think the interesting thing I work with a women. And I, when it comes to intermittent fasting, it can lend itself to eating disorder type behaviors where then, well, I haven't been eating for 12 hours. Now I won't eat for two days. And I'm gonna just put a little asterisk on my four day situation. That will never happen again this year. Like, I'm not gonna go back and do that. That's, that was a scientific thing to figure out how it worked for my body. Do I think it's successful once a here. Absolutely. But I don't practice intermittent fasting unless, you know, I feel. I listen to my body. If I'm not hungry, I won't eat. But a lot of times for me, if I get up and eat, then I eat better throughout the day.

Really?

Yeah.

So when you eat within the first couple hours? So I have a smoothie. It's called the Fab 4 Smoothie. So it incorporates the four things that turn off hunger hormones. So protein, fat, fiber and greens. So I'll use either a pea protein or I'll use like a, there's actually a grass-fed beef protein right now or a collagen protein. So it's not whey, it's actually- You've seen the bone broth protein? Dr. Axe, I have one of those. I got a bunch of his products the other week. Yeah, I mean it's something like that. I'm not picky as long as it's minimal ingredients. Then I'll do fat, so coconut oil, MCT oil, avocado, whatever. One to two two tablespoons depending on how hungry I am. And then fiber, chia, flax, acacia, throw in a tablespoon or two of that. And then a big handful of greens. And I pretty much limit fruit. Like if I want to put fruit in, I'll put a fourth a cup.

Really?

But you go to these smoothie places in LA. You might as well be having rosé. Honestly, it's two cups of fruit, a date, a banana, and they're like, here's a sprinkle of chia seeds and some almond milk. yeah, like, that's gonna put me on a blood sugar roller coaster. I'm gonna be crashing 90 minutes later, three hours. I'm gonna be shaky, hangry, irritable, and no one's gonna want to be around me. So there should be no fruit. So it just limit it. Like, every meal that you eat should lean more protein, fat and fiber to turn off hunger than maybe, like, pizza, cookies, cake, wine. Because that just increases hunger, increases blood sugar, kind of puts you on. blood sugar roller coaster, if you will, where you're eating, you're crashing, you need to eat again. I mean, if you're eating predominantly carbohydrates, you will need to eat like every three hours versus... Or feel tired.

Yeah.

Inability to concentrate, brain fog, full of insulin, insulin resistance, leading down the road to metabolic syndrome and all of that. So, but obviously everyone's different and you have to be able to incorporate those things in your life. You can't say you're never gonna have them. them, right? Because that's not realistic.

Yeah, exactly. You said you break your day up in three parts.

Yeah.

So the first part is the smoothie.

Workout smoothie.

Workout first, then smoothie.

Yeah.

Hit workout or lifting or. Honestly, it's totally dependent on what I feel like. The mood.

Yeah.

So I'll hit a spin class. I'll go to velocity, the gym, and do some, like, type of weight lifting. I'm not afraid of weights. A lot of girls think they're gonna get bulky, and I'm like, no. you're gonna get lean and all of your fat is gonna go away.

That's it.

So I'm super into lifting. I love yoga. I randomly got a certification back in the day when I thought I needed to have be everything for everyone. Like, I can train you. I can make a meal plan. I can talk about. And then I was just like, no, I'm a geek on science. Let's stick to what you're good at. But yeah, really, I think consistency more than anything is the most important thing. Because about 48 hours our muscles start to break down. So you want to be moving or putting some tension on those muscles about every 48 hours at the least.

Okay, that's part one. Part two?

Part two is so you get through and then it's talking about lunch to dinner, which the three o'clock, four o'clock hour can be the witching hour for a lot of my clients where they want a coffee, they want A brownie.

Yeah.

Bar.

Exactly.

And so making the right decisions at lunch that aren't gonna make and learning what you need, because some people can put, you know, protein, fat, fiber, and greens. Maybe they're doing like a lettuce wrap burger on a side of broccoli. Maybe they're doing an arugula salad with shrimp and avocado. Maybe it depends on the person, but you gotta think like and try out the types of meals and make sure that you're not super tired after you eat.

Yeah.

Because that means either you're eating too much or you're not eating the right things for you. you want to feel energized without feeling tired because when we start to feel tired, that's when we reach for the things that we don't really want to eat at three or four o'clock.

More candy or something.

Yeah, sure.

A little bit of energy.

For sure. Exactly.

Red Bull.

If you like Red Bull, you should switch to Runa. That's guayusa leaf. And if you haven't heard of it, it's the superfood leaf. It's like a tea leaf. but it has. They have a little can, like a Red Bull. That's how I get the Red Bull people off Red Bull.

Oh, really?

Runa.

Yeah.

It's like getting smokers to vape, but.

It'S still not that good for you, is it? No, it actually is. It's full of antioxidants, and it's.

It's almost like a green tea, but it's not good for you. Still, I'm like, my brother, at least he stopped smoking a few years ago.

But he's, like, vaping.

He's like, no, it's just this.

I'm like, no, dude, it's still not good for you.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't. Maybe not as But it's something else.

That'S bad too, you know?

Yeah.

Sometimes I like to replace and then remove, depending on the client. So like if they're a real ice cream person, I'll be like, okay, let's switch to this ice cream. A lower in sugar, higher in fat. Exactly. Love coconut ice cream. Already coming in with the answers. Right, so ice cream to coconut ice cream. So then like that decadent really just, I'd rather have you have a bite of decadent coconut ice cream than go to yogurt land and leave with like.

I don't know, a sand bucket full of froyo and tacos. tough.

That's what I mean. No, you don't need that.

So is there a way to train our brains to just not even like sweets and bad foods?

Honestly, the less you eat them, the less you crave them. Yeah.

The more you eat them, they're just gonna be like, I want more.

Yeah, exactly.

So.

So you can go, like, 90 days where you're just really not eating them at all.

Yeah.

A little bit every now and then. I feel like I'm an all in or all out. Like, there's a lot. It's challenging to be like, I'll just have one little bite of an ice cream. No, give me the whole pint. Or I'll deal without it.

Sure. I think I have some strategies for that and for wine. Say for example, you go.

I don't drink.

That's easy.

Everyone else drinks. If you go to abroad and say for example, you're in Italy and you're like, gelato. I love gelato. So I would say for every city, say you're in one place for three days, you can have gelato on the third day. So like that way when you don't have it the first day.

You're not having it every day.

Every single day and then by the last day you're having one after lunch and one after dinner.

I would have like multiple scoops and just go on the plane just like crash, you know?

I mean it's a little bit different for guys especially men that have been athletes because I mean my husband was the same way. Like him and his brother talk about his mom bringing home one of those huge containers from Costco with the Red Handle ice cream and finishing it in like like one sitting. Sounds amazing. But you guys have, you know, a lot more muscle mass, human growth hormone, testosterone, and you can sometimes handle that a little bit better. So, yeah, it's just about like empowering people to like make a little healthier choices, not saying, Sorry, you're never gonna have ice cream again. It's like, what world would that be okay?

It's not what I tell you to eat that's important. It's what I tell you not to eat. So, first thing is We don't eat grains, period.

No grains.

No grains. And that includes rice, that includes corn. I just gave a paper at the American Heart Association three weeks ago at the Lifestyle and Epidemiology Annual Meeting, where we looked at.