The Link Between Gut Inflammation & Neuroinflammation w/Shawn Stevenson PART 1 EP 1140

This is episode number 1140 with Shawn Stevenson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Robert Urich said, a healthy outside starts from the inside. And Mark Halperin said, sufficient sleep, exercise, healthy food, friendship and peace of mind are necessities, not luxuries. My guest today is my good friend Sean Steenson, who is a graduate of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he studied business, biology and nutritional science. He's also the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. He's the author of the international best-selling book, Sleep Smarter, which has been so powerful for me and so many people around the world. And is the creator of the Model Health Show. And today we're talking about his new book, Eat Smarter. Use the Power of Food to Reboot yout Metabolism, Upgrade yout Brain and Transform youm Life. Our conversation was so powerful. There's so much data research that we wanted to share with you that we broke this up into two parts. So make sure to check out part two coming out right after this one. And in this episode, we discuss why more than 60% of people have chronic inflammation and what the root cause how sleep affects your brain and when you have enough or have too little. Also, how our mental health is affected when we aren't taking care of our body and how they're tied together. The link between inflammation in the body and neuroinflammation, which I thought was fascinating and so much more. And if you're enjoying this, you know what to do. Make sure to share this with a few friends, text a friend, post it on social media, make sure to tag me and Shawn Stevenson as well. And if this is your first time here, click the Subscribe button right now over on Apple Podcast or Spotify so you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest From the School of Greatness Podcast. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness Podcast.

I'm very excited about our guest, Shawn.

Stevenson, in the house, my man, was humped about this. We're having you back on to talk about a lot of different things, nutrition, brain health, inflammation, all that stuff.

And I saw a recent stat I.

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

Inflammation is an underlying component of a myriad of different diseases. But we don't tend to think about it because inflammation seems like sort of like a ghost in the machine. It's like, ooh, inflammation. But it truly is, if you look at the root word coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to set on fire. And so there are these- Flame. And these are some of the outward symptoms we might think about, which is like pain, swelling, bruising, burning, aching, those type of things. But there's a massive, the majority of the inflammation that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed. There are these little kind of chronic low-grade fevers or little fires burning. that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders. And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to support in defending against infections and repair. And the list goes on and on. Inflammation is actually not a bad thing. It's a healer, right?

Right.

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

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?

Right, so what we generally think about is acute inflammation when we think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days. But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places, it can be devastating. And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation. And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components? What is creating the fire? What is throwing gasoline on the fire as well? And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 242 million of our citizens are overweight or obese. 240 million.

Out of how many?

Right around 330,000.

330 million.

I'm sorry, 330.

So 240 million.

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

How is that possible now?

Exactly.

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

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

All of humanity are just USA.

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

We're the Homer Simpsons.

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

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

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

Of course.

And so, you-'re young, you-'re beautiful. Right, nobody's waking up like, I wanna look so old today. I wanna get my George Burns on. I want to be as old as possible, or I want to feel bad today about the way that I look, or they're not waking up like, I just want to look terrible and feel terrible today. And in my clinical practice, I never met one person. And people might argue these things and get into a, because of our cognitive biases. I've never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy. Every single person wants to be healthy. Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, me being a nutritionist, I thought that food was everything, you know, because it was for me, it was my bridge, but there's many paths to the goal. When you're sleeping, it is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in. So it's just, you're just teeming with what we call these quote, anti-aging hormones, you know, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really, it's also known as the youth hormone.

Yeah.

You know, and also with, in that lane, lane of body composition and, and overall health and fitness, researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study. They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss. They put them on a calorie restricted diet, and they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well rested versus when they're sleep deprived. And so they put them under both conditions. And I love studies that do that. They put people under both conditions to see what would happen. And so They allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study. And they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, et cetera. And then they sleep deprived them for the other phase. So they was getting eight and a half hours, now they're getting five and a half hours.

Tracked all their metrics.

Same group, same group, on the same exact calorie restricted diet. Same calories, yeah, everything. But when they were sleep deprived, when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately rested, when they were getting.

Enough sleep, they lost 55% more body fat.

Just by sleeping more. That's crazy. It doesn't even make sense.

Were they working out the same or was it like no movement?

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

Right?

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

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

Right, right. Cleansing. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different things that this can benefit. But I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform. We want to be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time. And one of the fun things that I talked about in my, in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford. And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their Sprint time just by increasing their sleep.

Wow.

They improved, significantly improved their free throw shooting and their three-point shooting. Wow. Just by getting more sleep, all right? And these are things that we just kind of, on a periphery, kind of know that, but at the same time, are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Now, Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on.

These things weren't taught to us when.

We were in high school.

No.

It was just like, get up at 4:00 a.m. and lift. Yeah, right. Just go right into somebody, you know what I mean? Make a play, make a play. Keep your head on a swivel. But today, you know, it's really built into the system. Also, the strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis. Whereas now, if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which I'm, it's so weird for me to say this right now. This is like the coolest thing. I actually got chills. Ozzie Smith. All right, so have an opportunity to--.

St. Louis icon, man. Icon.

When I was a kid, my two idols were Ozzie Smith and Michael Jackson. Wow.

Yeah.

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

Back flipping at the same time.

Right.

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

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

Absolutely. Have you seen any of this? The number one driving force of the human psyche is to stay congruent with the ideas that we carry about who we are. Every thought that we think, every action we take is really correlated with who we believe ourselves to be. And this is why change can be so uncomfortable. You know, when we start to think things that I don't think that way or these are things that I don't do, our physiology, this stuff really gets hardwired into us. And so it creates discomfort because we're literally going to start creating new neural pathways. potentially start to break down old ones. And a mutual friend, Dr. Caroline Leaf, man, I love this woman. She's great. And she's really brought to the forefront. And I talked a little bit about this in Eat Smart in my new book and how our thoughts really affect our biology, even how food affects us based on our beliefs about food. And so one of the biggest things to really come from her work that unfortunately, it wasn't embraced, even though she's been in the field for 40 years, she really knows her stuff. and has affected so many different lives. But it takes time for kind of Collegiate training to change, for the books to change. But one of the big takeaways is our thinking. Your. Your thoughts create your brain.

Really.

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

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

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

In our gut.

Yeah, in our gut.

It's called Dr. Emran Meyer on.

Yeah, yeah.

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

It's so fascinating.

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

Yeah.

So, for example, even our heart within the gut, the human brain itself is just an absolute universe of neurons. So it's like 84 billion neurons, right? I was thinking about human cells overall. So we have about 84 billion neurons in the brain. We have about 100 million in the gut. All right? So this is like nerve tissue. It's like a mass of neural tissue in the gut. But the heart also has neurons as well. So when it's called, and anybody can go to Dr. Google and look this up, it's called the heart brain. All right, so your brain, your heart actually has this kind of ability to think and there's this electromagnetic energy that it's expressing. And there's a field also, it's called a tube torus that's been monitored that's expanding beyond our body to be able to see this. And if folks want to check out the work from HeartMath Institute.

HeartMath.

HeartMath Institute is phenomenal. I've been, you know, probably for about 10 to 15 years connected with heart math institute. It's just absolutely phenomenal.

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

What does this field do?

Let's talk about the energy field.

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

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from HeartMath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, it can be upwards of last checked around eight feet from your body. And so now this is getting into some freaky stuff, right? And I'm a very, give it to me. I'm a very logical, analytical human, so seeing is believing for me. But then we get into, there's many things that are just, and also I'm very open-minded as well, and there's many things that we don't understand. But when we talk about people being in your space and you picking up people's energy and interacting, and that stuff is very real, you know, you can pick up people's vibes, you know, bad vibes. So we don't want to downplay that. because other species of animals, they have that bigger connection. And we can attribute like bees, for example, in this hive mind, but we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years, I've been seeking to find how can I explain this to people to make sense? Because I'm a very solid thinker, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers, they found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes, all they had to do was create some rapport and their brain waves started to sink up.

Come on.

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

What does that mean? We sink up. The brain is what?

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

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

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

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

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

Where is it? Like here, is it around here?

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

It's not.

It's not. It's what is the mind is. Okay. The mind. And we still are trying to dictate what the mind is. It's so big and it's so beautiful. It's expansive. So this is the adventure of all this stuff. It's like we get to learn, we get to discover. But as soon as we think that we got it figured out, that's when.

Everything starts to go wrong.

And also it sounds like if the.

Brain isn't optimized through sleep, through nutrition, through healing the inflammation, the chronic inflammation, if that's not optimized, your mind is not going to be optimized. you're going to be thinking poorly, you're going to be acting poorly, you're going to be tired, all these different things. So if you want your mind to be sharp, you got to make sure your brain is healthy and recovered and healed. So what I'm hearing you say?

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

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

It's just, it's all together. It's all comes together because of our, so much of our biology is driving our lives, you know, how we feel. But this is the thing, and everybody's seeing this example, we can think externally of our biology. We can change our thoughts and change what's happening with our biology instantly because every thought that you think has correlating chemistry that's released. Really? In our example. So right now, right now, your wife.

Yeah.

In a loving way.

So I'm gonna start releasing a little bit of oxytocin, you know, a little bit of maybe a little dopamine, you know, a little serotonin in the brain.

Yeah.

Which then releases. It also depends on the thoughts as well. If it's some sexy thoughts, it might be a little. Get a little adrenaline or epinephrine produced, you know, just like that. A little bit more aggression might come forward, you know, just depends. But also, if, for example, we have a. A. a thought where something bad is happening right now, where we're thinking about, you know, maybe we're worried about something that we care about. Maybe they've been in some type of an incident of some sort.

And.

But maybe we heard some news about it, but it's not true. Okay, so maybe we. We heard that somebody that we love got into an altercation. Right. And we're just like, you know, really upset. Like, oh, my. I can't believe this happened. I can't believe whatever. And we can start to produce these chemicals associated. with that stress. So much more cortisol, right? So a lot of people know about cortisol. Cortisol is not a bad guy. We've talked about this before. It's a big part of it. Consistently hurts you. Especially and chronically. So we start to release all these neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, hormones, all driving us towards worry, fear, anger, regardless if the situation is real or not.

That's the real deal.

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

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

So now we get into- Wow. I'm gonna bring her up one more time.

Yes.

Caroline's work.

She's great.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Eat it all day long. Everything.

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

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

Here's the beautiful thing. Humans have, we've always had a hankering for sugar, like through our evolution. We go towards, like I said, freshness. Yeah, we'd go for those things especially, but also is available for some cultures only certain times a year, for example. And so you would rack up on it as well. And now this is an important tenant. as well, because, and there's a reason for this. The human brain itself, if we think about the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain and only allows in certain things, certain nutrients, it only has gates for certain gases like oxygen, for water, only certain nutrients get into the brain. The brain has its own exclusive diet. But there are a lot of sugar gates. Your brain will gladly confiscate Harvard researchers uncover this, your brain will gladly sop up half of the sugar that you take in in the meal. You take 50 grams of sugar, 50%.

Of that, 25 grams going into the brain.

Going into your brain. Where is it going?

Does it go throughout all the brain? Does it go to a section of the brain? What happens? Is it-- then it's just filtered throughout.

And you're just on a sugar high? Yeah, so even that term sugar high, like it sounds, it's kind of funny, but that's not funny. It's not funny because what happens is, so there are these protein gates that allow the sugar to trans for over through the blood-brain barrier into the brain itself. And yeah, because many of the neurons run off of glucose. So your brain is like, give me that, we got stuff to do, let me take all of it. But what happens is over time is it starts to create insulin resistance in the brain as well. So this is one of the biggest issues facing our world today. And if we get into the conversation about inflammation, neuroinflammation, I believe is the most troubling issue that we're facing as a society, but it's a hidden, overlooked issue because the brain is so protective. We don't really know that this is going on until oftentimes it's too late because the brain itself, we talked about the symptoms of inflammation, pain, swelling, burning. The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors. So your brain can tell you about pain in your pinky toe or on your, you know, pain in your neck. but pain within the brain itself, it doesn't have pain receptors.

What about like a migraine or something? Is that not?

Migraines are not the brain directly expressing pain. It has a lot to do with.

Now.

This is a little bit more complicated. There are some offshoots of things happening within the brain with migraines. Let me be clear. So let's just take the borderline, Migraines are different also. People who experience migraines, they know that it's different, but from a headache. We'll just take that borderline experience, maybe like an acute migraine or maybe a tough headache. What it really is is the blood vessels that surround the brain, that surround your skull, not the brain, but that's surrounding your neck and your shoulders. And so muscle spasms and things of that nature can start to kind of cause restriction.

Right?

So, but there can be some electrical storms taking place in the brain for sure. Interesting. Anyway, so the brain itself doesn't experience pain. So this is why, for example, there's, you know, you can have a brain surgery and not feel like, yeah, you're awake. You can be awake.

Yeah.

And it's just like, it's pretty nuts, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's so weird. Wasn't there someone who was like playing violin on a brain surgery? They're like, yeah.

They were just like, to see if.

She could still play or make sure.

It was, that's like some total recall. That's crazy, man. Whereas Arnold, that Crazy. I'm like, yeah, it's amazing, man. But these are really overlooked simple principles. But going back to that tentative inflammation, so if the brain can't experience the pain, how do you know when it's on fire? How do you know when it's in the brain? You don't know.

Yeah.

Until it's too late.

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

Arm, my back, like something, my gut doesn't feel good. There might be a- It's a constant superhighway of the brain-body connection, right? So these researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, they found that neuroinflammation is a double-edged sword for nutritional diseases, metabolic diseases, all right? So what that means is inflammation in the brain is one of the primary causative factors of obesity.

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

And obesity is a causative agent for neuroinflammation.

So, they both hurt each other.

So, you're getting into this double-edged sword or vicious circle. And this is why again, we tend.

To.

Downplay or belittle people who are struggling with obesity, for example, and not knowing how many programs out there are telling you we need to target the inflammation in your brain for you to get well, for your metabolism to heal.

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

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

Nice.

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

That's crazy.

Right? So we see that and particularly the gray matter of the brain is going to be inhibited.

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

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

I was-- you- had other painful side effects than obesity. You're right.

By eating pork. Expressions. But that fat, my fat genes kicked in.

Yeah, eventually after 25, 30 years, when.

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

Now, I'm going to ask something that might be controversial. There's a big movement of the accept yourself, self-love, no matter how big you are, small you are, just love yourself for where you're at.

And.

How do we love and accept people for where they're at without shaming them, but also encourage them to improve the quality of their health so that their brain gets bigger and healthier, so that they can live longer, so that they can perform better. Because from what I'm hearing, obesity is not something that's going to make you live longer and healthier.

Yeah.

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

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

You.

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

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

What do you mean by that?

When we fall into these places, I lost my grandmother, the love of my life, the love of my life. My grandfather, her and my grandfather were an entity. And so we just had some friends over yesterday and they were like, you guys are the only married couple that we really know that are like, and I'm just wondering how we have, my wife and I, when I didn't have any examples of a healthy married couple. Like, I just pretty much never seen it, never saw it. But I lived with my grandmother when I was a little guy, when I was, when I was, you know, between the age of about, we'll say, four to eight years old.

Right.

So it's very formative. And for me, that was my earliest memories. And they're an entity, and they, and I'm sure they had disagreements, but they never, I never, all I saw was love. All I saw was them, like, his arm around her and just. he was affectionate. She loved him literally to death. And so he ended up having multiple open heart surgeries. And he was, you would think again, he was hunting, he was foraging, very like outdoor guy, but he was living under chronic stress in the city. He was a country boy, right? And so he was, you know, in this environment, but also when he first, when he was noting like, okay, you got a high blood pressure, he also was a very angry guy, you know? Well, he dealt with anger.

Yes.

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

Oh, man.

To having open heart surgery. To him dying early.

Is he obese or no?

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

Do you think it was more stress or the nutrition?

Primarily stress, I feel. Stress and then also the nutrition that was added in on the recommendations.

Didn'T help.

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

Yeah.

But anyways, so bottom line is this, and I'm glad I got a minute to talk about this because it's tough to talk about, but she was around for a while. She was there at my wedding. I felt like she stayed, wow. I felt like she stayed to make sure that I was in good hands, you know?

Wow.

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

Shortly after the wedding or?

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

Yeah.

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

Oh man.

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

It's my point.

It's hard to get out of it.

Yeah.

My point that I want to share is when we're venturing into these outward states of inflammation, because even our fat cells themselves are an inflammatory Factor. They're essentially, they're putting out a distress signal that's letting your body think, in a sense, that you're infected. And the fat cells themselves are creating inflammation.

Right.

If we talked about that, again, that systemic chronic inflammation, it's just literally checking all boxes for bad event to take place, whether it's depression, which depression now we've got sound data on it having inflammatory component, depression, heart attack, stroke, dementia, the list goes on and on and on. And a big catalyst for this, about 400,000 people die each year from obesity related conditions. And it's just a footnote.

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

So these are comorbidities.

Right.

So these are comorbidities.

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

Right, right. But that's there.

400,000 people every year?

Every year, yeah.

Yeah.

You think if they weren't obese that they want to die?

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

Right. Right.

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

Where is it?

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

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

Essentially, it can downregulate it. But it's not going to be like you can just eat a donut and you don't absorb anything.

You know what I mean? That'd be amazing. Could your mind actually do that though? Do you think the mind can control and say, I'm going to have 1500 calories right now with this ice cream.

And donuts and nothing is going to.

Be absorbed in my body? It's going to go out to me and you just manifest, you just decide and declare, no.

Ooh, such a powerful first part of the conversation. And we're going to end that first part right there. And if you want to hear Sean's answer to that question, you'll have to check out part two coming out here in in a couple of days. So make sure to stick around for part two. This is your first time here. Click the Subscribe button right now so you're notified when that comes out. And we're going to dive deep into strengthening the immune system, the three important fats for brain health that you need and so much more. So thank you so much for listening to this. And if you enjoyed it, make sure to share this with one or two friends that you think would be inspired to help them improve the quality of their life as well. And again, subscribe if this is your first I'm here. And if you enjoyed this, please leave a review. If you haven't left a review yet, I think we've got like 10,000, 11,000, maybe 12,000 reviews already over on Apple Podcast. I love reading your thoughts, the parts that have inspired you. I love reading all your reviews. So please go leave a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know the part of this episode you enjoyed the most. And I want to leave you with this quote from Edward Stanley who said, those who think they have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness. Ho! That is the truth, sadly, and it's unfortunate, but there's too much suffering and pain happening in the world. A lot of it is due based on our choices of what we eat, how we sleep, how we think and feel about ourselves, and many other things as well. But food and nutrition heals, my friends. I hope you're doing your best to make the best choices. We're all human beings. You know, I'm a guy that loves to have some candy, some cakes and cookies every now and then. But if you can do your best.

I'm telling you, have some quality meals.

Throughout your week that will help you improve the quality of your health. It will improve the quality of your life. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter, I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.