The Top Foods To Avoid & Which Ones To Start Eating Today EP 1345

So yes, top 10 foods would be like the ones we talked about. But then in addition to that, which is really hard for people to understand, the number one food to avoid for you is.

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. There's so many new Frankenstein foods out there, new manipulated foods, processed foods that people think are healthy that maybe aren't healthy. So I wanted to dive in first and talk about really what you think the top five or ten foods or the categories of foods we should be thinking about eating for optimal health. in all sense of the word from mental health, brain health to physical health to spiritual health.

Yes.

What would you say are those top 5 to 10 foods we should be thinking about and categories?

Yeah, so first of all, there's no difference between physical health and spiritual health and mental health. If it works for the body, it works for the body, right? And It depends on where people are. So the number one rule would be to eat real food and people don't even know what that is anymore. 60-70% of calories consumed are white. White flour, white sugar, and flavorless semi-synthetic seed oils that have been over-processed. There's no food value, nutritional value in those. It's all empty calories.

60% of calories are from that.

Yes, awesome number. 60 to 70% of calories are from fake food. And the rest of the 30-40% aren't necessarily that great either. So the first part is just to teach people to eat real food. food. And if the earth produced it, if it walked the planet or it grew on the planet and you don't screw it up, then it's pretty good food. Mm-. Right? And then what I talk a lot about is low carb, because not because everyone has to have low carb. Like China and Asia, they got around, they got along for centuries eating a bunch of carbs.

Rice.

But they didn't add sugar on top of it and they didn't eat six meals a day with constant snacks and they had physical labor. Right. So we have to put it in perspective, in context for the whole lifestyle.

So the sugar, the calories, the empty calories with sugar and white carbs and then low carb. is what you're saying is to think about to start.

Yeah. And the reason I talk so much about low carb is that somewhere around 80, I think Ben Bikman quoted 88% of the US and probably a large part of the world's population is insulin resistant today. And if you are insulin resistant, that only means one thing, you ate too many carbs for you. And that could be 20 grams for one person or 200 grams for another. But if you're insulin resistant, you ate too many carbs. And that's, it's not a few hundred million, it's most people on the planet, really. I mean, it's billions. In the US, it's probably somewhere around 88%. I think if you go around the globe, it's probably still 60%.

Are insulin resistance.

Yes.

And what does insulin resistant mean? What happens to the body if you are that?

So it's an adaptation. Okay? The body will adapt to circumstances, to whatever conditions you throw at it. The body will make an intelligent adaptation. And if you eat a carbohydrate, it will raise your blood sugar more than other types of foods. and if you raise blood sugar, now the way to control that blood sugar and get that blood sugar into the cell is to release insulin. So if you eat carbs, I use my hands a lot, so this is what I tell people that if you eat a carbohydrate, your blood sugar goes up and then your body produces insulin to get that carbohydrate into the cell. And now if you wait a few hours, that insulin will come back to baseline and you can start all over. But if you eat that carb and you produce that insulin to bring the glucose down, but then you eat again while the insulin is still high, now it's a stair step. Now you're just driving it higher and higher and higher. So insulin resistance is simply an adaptation where your body starts resisting insulin. And I've done a couple of videos where I liken this to a salesman or a friendly neighbor. You're new in your house. The neighbor comes knocking on your door and says, welcome to the neighborhood. Here's a pie. It's like, you go, great. I'm so happy. I feel welcome. Someone brought me something I need. It's like the cell wants this fuel if it's occasional, if it's appropriate. But then you have a thousand neighbors and they're all just lining up outside your house and every one of them brings a pie. So after a couple of hundred pies, you're pretty tired of this. You start developing a resistance to neighbors bringing you pie.

Right.

Right? So anything that the body gets too much of, it starts resisting. It's just, it's the way it's supposed to work.

And when it resists the thing, what happens to the body? Is that when you store fat? Is that what that's meaning?

Correct, correct. So insulin is a storage hormone. It's an anabolic hormone. Its job is to get the glucose from the bloodstream into the cell and whatever glucose the cell can use in the moment it will use. But anything that's in excess of what it can use in the near future is going to be converted to fat because we can only store a tiny little bit of carbohydrates and then the rest has to be stored as fat. So we can store somewhere around 1500 calories as carbs, but we have an unlimited storage for fat. Really? So like half a million calories. And I call that a fortune of energy reserves, right? Because the body is smart. It wants to put on some extra weight for the winter when there's less food. So the body is super, super intelligent. And if you put on fat, there's a reason. But a lot of people would like a little bit less of a fortune.

Exactly. So I wanna talk about losing fat in a bit. But let's, I could go off course there, but I want to stick to what I was originally asking about the top foods we should be eating and the foods we should be eliminating. So we talked about eating real food, low carb, and eliminating kind of the white, I guess, sugars. What would be the top foods you think are necessary?

I believe humans are made to eat meat, all right? So I think that's a foundation for humans. I think our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and it doesn't really matter what you eat. I think meat, lamb, pork, fish, poultry, it all has roughly the same protein and nutritional value. I think variety is really good. But then I think there are lots of other things that we can eat. I think we should be very limited on grains. Humans, I don't believe, were really made to eat a huge amount of grains.

Why is that?

And I think it's because there's this thing called paleo that most people have heard of. And paleo, some people turn it into a religion, and a lot of diets become religions, like keto and low-carb and paleo become religions, but it's a philosophy. And the paleo philosophy says that humans have been around on the planet for a while. And during that time, wherever our ancestors were, how far ever you want to go back, to the African savannah, whether you want to put that limit like a couple of million years back or a quarter million years back, our DNA is mostly unchanged. since that time period. So the DNA is what determines what kind of enzymes you can make, what kind of digestive tract you have to break down those foods. So if we go a quarter of a million years on a certain type of food, and then all of a sudden we change it, the body has no idea what to do with that. That's foreign. It's an experiment. So agriculture with grains was basically introduced some 10,000 years ago. And for most of those 10,000 years, we had what's called ancient grains, which were rye and spelt and einkorn and so forth. But then we got into the last hundred years or even the last 50 years, which in the big scheme of things and in the evolutionary scale, it's not even a blink of an eye. And now instead of four ancient grains, we have 25,000 different kinds. Really? Yeah. So when they've started hybridizing all these modern wheats, they're not looking for health benefits. They're not looking for what humans can tolerate. They're looking for what is sturdy to grow and what has the highest yield and so forth. Wow.

So, you're not a fan of grains?

I'm not. I think some people can tolerate some grains. And I think if you do reasonably well with them, then I think you can eat some. But if you have any sort of sensitivities or digestive issues or allergies or brain fog or anything that isn't quite right, I think grains would be the first thing to go. Really?

Where does oatmeal fall into that?

Oatmeal is a grain. It is one of the friendlier grains because it does have some benefits. It is naturally gluten-free, and it's not the only thing that people react to in grains, but it's the number one offender, so to speak. So normal oats are gluten-free. But it's still a carbohydrate. It's still almost all starch. And again, it goes back to the 88%. If you're insulin resistant, then you need to avoid oats. If you're not, if you're super insulin sensitive, then you can probably have some oats.

Right. And so does all carbs turn into sugar at some point?

Yes.

Or most carbs or some carbs.

Yes, they do. Now, there's this thing, I might look into this and do a video on something called resistant starch, right? Because there's a lot of talk about it. I've kind of kept it in the background for a while. But yes, basically all carbohydrate turns into glucose. And what the argument with the resistant starch is that well, some of it doesn't get digested and becomes food for your bacteria in the large intestine, but the key word there is some. So if 30% reach the large intestine, that still means 70% becomes glucose. So again, it's the people who are insulin resistant need to watch it. And you need to understand where you are on that scale. so that you can monitor and if you're getting results, fine, then that's kind of what it's all about. If you're getting the results, then keep doing what you're doing. If you don't, then get a little stricter. Right, right.

So what about the, you're saying meat is kind of the main category you're saying or one of the top foods categories. What about all the different people coming out in the last five, ten years talking about vegetarianism and veganism and the benefits of that eliminating meat. Because I see different sides. I see people saying the lion diet only, it's like all meat and how they've gotten rid of certain diseases and skin conditions. And I see other people are vegetarian and vegan who eliminate things, but also people that go that far extreme and have more issues. So, what are your thoughts on that perspective?

I think people find the arguments that they want to find. Alright, so a lot of this is a philosophical and ethical. So I was a vegetarian for seven years.

Really?

Back in the late 90s. And I read a book and it was very convincing and one of the arguments was that, I mean there were lots of them but one of them that I later sort of had a different perspective was that look at World War II. There was no meat around, and people had way less heart disease, and they had way less problems, and they lost weight. Well, they didn't have much of anything. They didn't have any sugar, they didn't have any white flour, they didn't have any processed food. And that's the argument that is made erroneously so often. They pick something that's not a causative factor, but just a correlation. so vegans versus carnivore, I believe that plant food can have some cleansing properties, right? So if you have cancer, for example, and you have a toxic liver, that it's a fatty liver, it's an overwhelmed liver, it's just congested and toxic in so many different ways, I think that you should go vegan. All right, I think you should try that for three months, six months, maybe 12 months until you can reevaluate because I think there's some powerful cleansing properties. But animal products are more rebuilding. All right, so what are we looking to get from food? We're looking to get fuel to turn into energy. We're looking for building blocks to become tissue. because your body constantly breaks down and you have to rebuild it. So you need what I call genuine replacement parts. And if you're going to build a house and a tree falls on your house and the brick wall is damaged, you don't rebuild that with foam. You need the right stuff and we are built from the foods that the planet produces. So we need genuine replacement parts. And then we also need vitamins and minerals. Those are the catalysts that help us convert the fuel and the building block into energy and tissue. And we get way more of that from animal foods. They have a higher food value, much more of the genuine replacement. and it kind of makes sense if you think about it because you are meat. Your body is, your tissue is primarily meat and if you eat something that's close to your tissue it's going to be less of a transition for your body to turn that into your tissue. So yes, your body can turn vegetables and plants into protein and body parts but it It doesn't happen nearly at the same percentage of conversion or absorption.

I mean, you were an elite world athlete, champion of the decathlon, arguably the hardest sporting event there is in the world. You ate meat during that time, I'm assuming, and then after your career, you went vegetarian for six, seven years, you said. And now you're back on meat. you've probably, I'm assuming you've studied and seen all the documentaries about veganism and these elite athletes that turn into vegan athletes and they have this superpower and then other people that are meat eaters and you've done it yourself as an elite athlete, as a doctor and a nutritionist. So what did you notice when you became vegan for seven years or vegetarian and then now back on meat after that?

I did fairly well on it. The biggest challenge for me was that when you don't eat meat, then you tend to be more limited. So if you're out somewhere traveling, now you're eating a lot of bean burritos and french fries instead of real food.

Carbs, yeah.

Correct. But I don't think I really... I don't know that I really suffered. But what happens with a lot of people is that it might take 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years before they really become deficient in something before they become anemic, before they're missing vitamin D and B12 because you have reserves of most of those. And in my case, I wish I'd known half of the stuff that I know now because I was not an educated athlete.

Well, back in the 80s, they weren't aware of that.

Back in the 80s, you were taught to eat carbs.

Eat your Wheaties.

Yeah.

Eat your carbs over breakfast.

I kid you not, I probably ate more than 1,000 grams of carbs per day on average. I mean, I was working out four, five, six hours a day, eating 5, 6, 7,000 calories, and you burn it all off, so you think that, hey, there's no problem here.

But you stop working out, you keep eating that way, that's what happened to me. It's like, oh, I'm getting the.

Yeah, I never really gained the weight. I mean, I gained some, I got a little fatter than I was because I didn't maintain 3% body fat exactly. But I didn't really learn about food until much later when I was in chiropractic school and started putting it together.

Yeah, that's interesting. So you may not see the deficiencies in the first number of years, but what I'm hearing you say is you're probably eventually going to be more deficient. It's just going to be harder.

And what you see as a clinician is that there is no black and white. Everyone is looking for, well, just tell me what to do. Well, you can't do that. You have to understand where you are on the scale. And for some people, I'm sure there are super strong weight lifters who are vegans because their body can tolerate it, at least for many years. But then you have all these people have been vegetarian or vegans for 10 years and they start having all these issues, especially thin females who might have stress issues and digestive problems and so forth. So on the other, so yes, top 10 foods would be like, the ones we talked about. But then in addition to that, which is really hard for people to understand and which we test a lot in the offices, the number one food to avoid for you is the one that you react to. Because that creates inflammation, that wreaks havoc. It doesn't matter how healthy that food is for someone else. But if you can't tolerate it, if you have a reaction, a hypersensitivity reaction, that's the absolute worst food for you. Okay? Which brings us to the carnivores. And I don't, I think meat is a great foundation. And this is just like a personal feeling. I don't think that carnivore is optimal forever for most people. It might very well work, but I think for most people, I think a good variety is probably better.

You mean only carnivore? Only meat? Correct.

Correct. But the people who get results from carnivore, the reason it's such a huge movement and it undeniably produces results is that if you eat something you're sensitive to, you get inflammation. then those are the worst foods for you. And some people are so sensitive that they react to everything except meat. Right. Right? So it's the ultimate elimination diet. So now you've eliminated, like if you go paleo, you're going to eliminate dairy and processed foods and sugar and grain because our ancestors didn't have any of that. But if you're super sensitive, you might still react to lettuce and bell pepper and all of these things. So the people who get the tremendous life-changing results on carnivore, they're the ones who only tolerate meat. That's the ultimate elimination. So now for someone it might be that they ate meat and lettuce and it still didn't work. And when they cut out the lettuce, then they got the results. But it doesn't mean that carnivore is the best for everybody. I think anyone who has some issues that haven't been resolved and they have some autoimmunity, they have digestive issues and brain fog, I think they should try carnivore and see if it changes something. But again, then we go and we turn these things into religions and we say, It worked for me, so you should do it too.

This is the answer for everyone.

Yeah.

But that's not the case, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

So what are some other meats that you recommend that we should be eating? Meat is, I'm sorry, foods that you recommend we should be eating? Yeah.

I think then the next best would be tubers, like roots, sweet potato, rutabaga, parsnip, turnips, et cetera. Because they are, they're generally fairly low carb.

Sweet potatoes are?

Sweet potatoes are a little bit higher in carbs. They're way less than grains. But a lot of these, like the rutabaga and so forth, they're fairly low carb.

Sure, gotcha.

And they're also gluten-free and they pretty much fit into any regimen. So if you're on an autoimmune diet, if you're on a lectin-free diet, if you're avoiding nightshades, The tubers are still safe.

What are the top tubers? Sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes, potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips. What's the other one? The celery root. So those are generally pretty good. And again, if, so the sweet potato is generally more safe than the potato because the potato is a nightshade. So if you again have those sensitivities and you're avoiding nightshades, then potato has to go as well.

Okay, so we got the tubers. What's the next category you really like?

So then assuming that you're not sensitive to nightshades, then I would go with all of the non-starchy vegetables. So now we got eggplants and bell peppers. that I think for most people are good foods, but again, they have some lectins. Then I think the broccoli and cauliflower are like staples in my house for sure.

Those are very low calorie nutrient dense, but also low carb too, right?

Yes. Broccoli, cauliflower, they're like 4-5% net carbs. So it's very, very low. And of course, avocado, which is really a fruit by definition, but it has quite a bit of fat and very, very low carbs. It's like 2-3% net carbs.

Okay. And what's the deal with the nightshades? Because I know there's a big.

You.

Know, conversation about that right now where these foods actually are hurting you, you know, these nightshades, or it depends on your sensitivity level.

Correct. They're hurting some people.

The plant paradise, right?

Correct, yes. So, I don't know what the percentage would be, but I would not, I think gluten hurts everyone, right? But I don't think lectins hurt everyone, not at those doses. Again, it's all about smaller doses. Dosage. So, nightshades have lectins and if you are sensitive to something, if you have inflammation, if you have some issues, then I think sort of like the carnivore, carnivore is more extreme, but before that you want to try cutting out the lectins, cutting out the nightshades. But again, it's not, some people sort of pick their little niche and say, I'm gonna be the lectin guy, I'm gonna be the nightshade guy. And they promote that as the solution for everyone, but it's not. Got it. And low carb is not the solution for everyone. I have some skinny patients that need to eat carbs.

Carbs.

Yeah, yeah. They don't need to eat sugar and white bread, but they would probably do better eating 70, 80, 100 grams of carbs. Because they're very, very insulin sensitive. Their body has trouble putting on some weight.

Are there any other categories you think we should be eating?

The leafy greens are kind of in the non-starchy vegetables, but they're sort of a little subcategory. And then I think some people kind of count the the eggs with the meat. I think it's a separate category because very few people are sensitive to meat. A lot of people are sensitive to eggs.

People are sensitive to eggs.

Yes. Okay. Yes. And again, it's not a majority. It's not like with wheat or pasteurized milk, but I don't know, 5, 10, 15, 20%. And it's hard to tell because the people that come to my clinic, they're the ones who have the problems. So they're probably way more sensitive than the general population. Sure.

Are you a big fan of eggs yourself?

Yes, as a food group. Absolutely. And I think quality is huge. I think a lot of problems develop because people eat really, really poor quality. So I think if the chicken or the hen had a healthy life and produces a healthy egg, I think you're much less likely to ever develop a sensitivity. But if that chicken is eating chemicals and hormones and was raised under horrendous conditions, I think your body is much more likely to develop a sensitivity to that because of whatever might be in there.

Right, right. Any other final category you like? As a food group, the most nutrient dense foods.

Yeah, I do think even though dairy.

Is.

A very common allergen, I do think a lot of people do well with some forms of dairy. So I typically recommend yogurt and sour cream, because it's very rewarding. If you're doing a low carb diet, then adding a little sour cream to something is super tasty. I think cheese is okay for a lot of people, especially if it's like a good quality cheese, not the melty singles and all that.

Not the nacho cheese dip at the movie theater, which tastes so good, but it's not that good for you.

Yeah, I don't even know about that.

It's not even cheese, yeah.

Yeah, I think I've trained myself into just associating with that stuff.

I know.

But yeah, I try to get things as close to nature as possible. So if I have the option, I'm gonna get pasture-raised eggs, I'm gonna get raw cheese with as few additives as possible. Because nature made things for us. We are nature, right? And all the other animals on the planet, they graze off the planet. they don't process things, they don't alter things. So as soon as we change it, we increase the likelihood of screwing it up. And the more we change it, the more we screw it up. So the closer we can get to the source, the better. Yeah.

What would be three foods that you would recommend everyone eliminate? If you could eliminate or have very, very little every once in a while. But if you could almost eliminate these three foods from your diet, it would help you in a big way.

So I don't know if we can call them foods, but obviously sugar, sugar in the quantity, refined sugar in the quantities we eat is absolutely toxic to the body. Number two would be processed fats. So healthy fats are natural fats, butter, meat fat, pork, avocado, olive oil, etc. Because we don't change them, we don't mess with them. But anything that we make an oil from that doesn't come easily like a seed or corn, corn has just a couple of percent fat in it. So it takes a lot of heat and chemicals and processing to get any oil out of it. So it tastes terrible. And then you have to bleach it and deodorize it and all that. It's not a food anymore. And. And those foods are extremely toxic. So soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, all of those processed oils, and especially if they're turned into a food product like margarine or shortening or something like that. Okay, so I put, I'd say, sugar. and seed oils. And then something again, that's not really a food, but I would put it up there. And every time I make a video on this, I get a lot of backlash. And it's artificial sweeteners. Oh, man.

Why are artificial sweeteners not good for us?

Because they are chemicals. They're foreign substances. They were developed by companies who made pesticides. And the latest and greatest, so aspartame got a bad rap, so then they had to hustle to come up with something else, so they came up with sucralose. And they were very careful to name it in a way that sounded, yes, sucrose, sugar, sucralose. But the fact is, and then they said that, well, you know, it's just like sugar and then it just has some chlorine, just like sea salt. Well, in nature, sodium chloride is only bonded through like an electrostatic charge. I forget exactly what it's called, but it's not like a tight bond. So yes, sodium chloride, perfectly natural. But when we bind chlorine to a carbon. Nature never does that. Basically every form of a chlorocarbon is a pesticide. And one of the most famous ones was DDT, which was banned as a cancer-causing agent. It almost wiped out the national bird, the eagle. And it's so toxic, it's in our environment 50 years later. So, chlorocarbons are pesticides and that's what sucralose is. It's a chlorocarbon.

So, eliminate refined sugar, eliminate processed fats, which is mostly seed oils and artificial sweeteners. Are there any non-sugar sweeteners natural that you like or recommend that in the right doses are okay for you?

Yes. So, I use quite a bit of Stevia.

That's not an artificial sweetener, it is?

No, no. So, some people bundle it together with artificial sweeteners just because it's a non-calorie sweetener, but it is a plant product. It's just a refined leaf, basically. And the thing to watch for though is that they don't mix it up with a lot of other chemicals, that it's the concentrated version.

It's one ingredient, not 10 ingredients.

And another similar one would be monk fruit. That is also very similar in the way it tastes and looks and so forth. It's super, super concentrated. And it's also a plant extract.

So if you're going to add something to a coffee or a drink or something, Stevia monk fruit, you say, is okay in the right doses.

Yes. And then in the gray zone, I would also put sugar alcohols. Interesting. Some of them are better than others. I think the best one would be erythritol because it is very slightly metabolized by the body, so it doesn't really affect blood sugar, but it doesn't really cause any other problems. Some of the other sugar alcohols They sort of stay in the digestive tract for a while and then those sugar alcohols become food for your intestinal bacteria and that's where you get a lot of bloating.

Gotcha.

So I would say sugar alcohols are okay if you eat them in moderation. So this is always the trick in recommending food. When you make a list and people want to know the best one and so forth and you categorize and rank them, And now they say, that is a good one, I'm just going to eat that. Or Dr. Ekberg said sugar alcohols are okay, so now I'm going to eat that every day. I'm going to bake with it, I'm going to buy the ice cream with it. And that's the thing, everything in moderation. So sugar alcohols, if you eat a teaspoon or a tablespoon here and there, I think it's totally fine. But if you start baking with it and doing the ice cream and you start getting half a cup a day, now you're definitely gonna upset the biome a little bit.

Now, what matters based on your age range? If someone's in their 20s versus I'm in my late 30s, almost 40, you're in your, I believe 50s, you said. Does it matter based on how old you are of what you should be eating? how much you should be eating types of foods or is it pretty consistent throughout the decades?

I would say it's pretty consistent throughout and one analogy would be that, I mean there's so many people they say that women should fast this way and teenagers should fast this way and women over 40 or under 47. It's like we love to complicate things. Right? But Are there different foods on the savanna for one giraffe versus another?

An older giraffe and a younger giraffe?

Yeah. Does the male and the female giraffe eat from different trees? It's like, not really. So I'm not saying that there's no value to that, but I think we tend to overcomplicate things. I think we, if we just understand that it's like 99% the same, and then that last percent is where if we want to really pick take it apart, then there may be some benefit there.

Gotcha. What about when it comes to fat loss? I think what is it? Over a third of the US is now categorized either pre-diabetic or obesity or something like that, right? Statistics?

Yeah. Obesity is somewhere around 40%.

40% in the US.

Yes.

Do we know what that is globally or is that just?

I keep looking it up, I keep forgetting, but it's increasing everywhere.

Because I thought it was 33% like five years ago and now it's 40%. That's kind of scary.

It is, it is. And what I talk a lot about though is the pre-diabetic, that's the gray area that nobody understands. So we have 10% diabetics. and over a certain age it's more like 25-30%. But that's 10% of the entire population is full-blown diabetic. And then they say, I forget the number, I think it's like a third of the population is pre-diabetic. But they base that off of blood sugar only. But the only way that you really know where you are on the scale is to do some form of insulin resistance test. And there's some complicated ones that you could do if you want, like oral glucose tolerance test and all that. But the simplest insulin resistance test is just to measure fasting insulin and see where you are.

Sure.

And this goes back to the model that I use my hands for, where glucose goes up, insulin goes up, and pushes glucose back down. So you could have a person who has a good glucose and a healthy insulin level, but then they eat too much carbs for them and 10 years later their insulin is 3, 4, 5 times higher, but their glucose is still normal. So that person is not going to make it into the statistics for the insulin resistant or the pre-diabetic, it takes 20 years to get there. So if we actually measure the insulin and we say we're a little bit more sensitive to the gradient, now we're going to see that probably 80% of the population has some degree of insulin resistance.

Gotcha.

Right? Wow.

So how do we eliminate that? Is it through, I mean, how do we, how do we burn, is it burning the fat? Is it changing the foods to eliminate that or what is that?

It's, it's reducing the insulin. Okay. Because the insulin is ultimately the fat storing hormone.

How do we reduce the insulin?

By eating less carbohydrates and because Carbohydrates are the foods that stimulate the insulin. And the other thing is to eat fewer meals. Because insulin rises in response to food. So when you don't eat, you're giving the body a chance to drop insulin. But most people, the only time they don't eat is when they're sleeping.

Otherwise they're eating all day long.

Right, so at best they get eight hours of fasting and then during their waking hours they just keep topping off the insulin. But if you can just extend that fasting window by a few hours, you've already made a huge difference. So if you go instead of eating your last meal at 11 and your first meal at 7, what if you just skip that evening meal? What if you don't eat after dinner at 6 o'clock? Now you've just extended that period where insulin could drop by five hours, more than 50% increase, right? So those are some simple tools and that's why intermittent fasting is so popular. And I would say it's even more powerful than low carb because fasting is zero carb.

Now, like most diets and trends we see out there in the health world, you know, all these different names of diets, is intermittent fasting going to be another fad for a decade and then go away? Or do you think this is something that people will actually use because there's so much pain with, you know, pre-diabetes and fat storage?

I think when people learn to eat real food, then intermittent fasting almost becomes natural. It becomes so easy, it's such a no-brainer. And everyone who tries it, who gets to the point where they might eat twice a day, they might have lunch and dinner, and then there is no temptation, there's no urgency to go back because it feels so so normal. And if we look again, we go back to our ancestors quarter million years, how did they eat? Well, they didn't wake up to a stocked fridge. They might have had some nuts or a little bit of meat left over from the day, but I don't believe that they would eat it because they had a healthy metabolism. They were metabolically flexible. So, they woke up and they went out to catch something before they ate again. So, I think it's very logical to assume that we ate once or twice a day for almost all of human history.

Until like 100 years ago or something.

Correct. And even less than that, and that's why we've had this explosion, even into Through the 1950s and 60s and even into the 70s, people ate mostly three meals. And then is when they told us to eat low fat. That's when the low fat craze came. And what do you do?

High carb.

Exactly. When you can't eat the fats, now you gotta eat something else. And those carbs are very transient, right? They raise the blood sugar and your body has to get it out of there. And as soon as blood sugar drops, now you're hungry again. So this is part of what got us on this roller coaster.

When did diabetes become a thing in the US? Like, when did it start to becoming a real problem?

Originally, when they talked about diabetes, it was type 1 diabetes, right? Because that's a failure of the pancreas to produce insulin. And those people used to die. There was no treatment, there was no cure. if they ate extremely low carb, they could live a little longer. But basically, type 1 diabetes is, is starvation in the midst of plenty, that your blood sugar is 700, but you can't use it because you don't have insulin. So insulin is not a bad thing. But type 2 was unheard of. Even at the. Really? Even in the 1800s, there may They might have known what it was, but it was so rare that it wasn't like a concept or anything. And it really wasn't until the 1970s that it became like a problem.

The 70s. We're talking 50 years ago. Type 2 diabetes wasn't a thing before then.

They knew what it was and they had some insulin to treat it, but it was such a small percentage. that it was, I wouldn't say it didn't exist, but I mean it was such a small issue compared to what we have today. The stats are, it's exponential.

So do we have a metabolism problem where people aren't able to metabolize as efficiently what they're bringing into their body and their system, and that's why the, you know, the weight, the belly fat, the the obesity is happening or is it an insulin problem or is it a lack of movement problem?

They all tie together. They all tie together and the sad part is that it's so much harder to reverse the manifested problem. And I've talked about this in some videos. I call it your body has a Carbohydrate tolerance or a carbohydrate processing machine and It works to a point, but if you break it now you're out of luck.

Mm-.

Right? So if you've broken your machine now it you have to be so strict and this is where you're talking about the metabolism problem and Now, it's so difficult to get that body to start working healthy again, to become insulin sensitive and heal your metabolism. And that's why there's so many people who have trouble losing weight. So many people have stubborn weight. And stubborn weight is basically that you broke your carbohydrate processing machine, if you will.

So how do we get rid of this? stubborn weight then.

And that's the trick. And this is like the last few percent of the population. Like if you check the comments on my videos, there's all these people say, Hallelujah, this works, this is so great. I lost 60 pounds in two months. And all I did was just, I followed your advice. I cut out the sugar, I cut out the white bread. But then there's this other group that I really, really sympathize with, and they're the ones who go keto, they go low carb, they do intermittent fasting for years, and they lose like three pounds.

Really? Why is that?

Because their bodies are so stubborn. And part of it, I do sympathize with them. Part of it, I think, is that it is so tough for them that it's challenging to be consistent. That if they truly, truly were consistent on the low-carb and the exercise and the intermittent fasting, they would probably see some changes. But then there are these people who get close to zero results, even though they're meticulous. and now we get into some of the things I'm testing in my clinic is to try to figure out some of these patterns. And I find that there's these relationships between the stored body fat and the hypothalamus, for example, and between the pancreas and the hypothalamus, between the liver and the pancreas, where the organs are kind of stuck. They're just not talking to each other properly. And then of course, there's hypothyroid, which is pretty common. But yeah, I do feel for those people and there is a small percentage that just have so much harder time than the rest of them.

Interesting. And what about the connection to losing weight, healing the body with psychological traumas, emotional heartache or other things that have hurt you in the past. It was a great book, the Body Keeps the Score. Is relationship trauma, childhood trauma, breakups, breakdowns in life tied to losing weight as well?

Yes. Everything is tied to everything. It's like that's the first thing that you learn when you're in clinical practice and you do the stuff that I do is anything can cause anything. And what I try to teach people is the holistic approach. I call it holistic health. And some people, they say, oh, you lost me when you said holistic. Now they think it's about burning incense and crystals. but holistic simply means addressing the whole, right? You are a whole body. You want your body to be whole, so you need to look at all the aspects that tie into that. And some people, when it comes to weight, obviously they look first at the food, which is like the chemical, the biochemistry. And then some other people talk about the exercise, which is the physical, mechanical, and then now you're mentioning the third which is the emotional. We have to understand we are chemical, structural and emotional. It's like three legs on a table and for some people they might have enough of a balance already that they just address one thing and they get results. But to truly get optimal health we need to address all three for a period of time to get the results. When you do all of it for a period of time, that's when you can get that optimal health. Sure. So with weight loss, I don't think it's ever, well, I shouldn't say ever, for most people it's not the primary component, but it's definitely a contributing component because we know, for example, that stress contributes to a hormone called cortisol and the purpose of cortisol is to raise blood sugar. If you raise blood sugar, you're going to trigger more insulin, more insulin, you become more insulin resistant. This is so plain and so documented that you give someone cortisol and they become insulin resistant. So if you are stressed for whatever reason, Now, you will become more insulin resistant. It's more difficult to reverse these processes if you are stressed at the same time.

So, high blood sugar, let me make sure I'm understanding this, does not necessarily come from the foods you eat, but it can also come from the stresses you have with your thoughts.

Yes, absolutely.

Does it also come with foods also, or is it more from thoughts turned into stress? and emotions.

It's definitely more from food.

Okay.

And I don't think, I think it'd be a very, very rare case of someone who is metabolically healthy and insulin sensitive and has stressful thoughts to become, to create a metabolic problem. That by itself is probably not going to do it. Got it. But for people who are insulin resistant, Now, if they have stress on top of that, that becomes a very significant factor. And same thing with exercise. I've done some videos on this where too many people think that exercise is all about blood, sweat, and tears. That, yes, if you're going to be an elite athlete, you need to go through some pain. You need to challenge your body to become better. But that's not necessarily the healthiest way and more isn't better. So for the person who has stressed their body, they've depleted their body, they got this mid weight gain, midsection weight gain, those people should not go to a boot camp in the gym. Right? That's not gonna help them because this this midsection weight gain is too much cortisol.

Really?

Right? You can gain weight everywhere, but if you have it in the midsection, that's very indicative of cortisol. So now if you go join a boot camp and you got this motivated great trainer to whip you along, then you're just going to make tons of cortisol that's going to make the problem worse.

Really? So what type of physical activity should we be doing to lose the midsection weight?

We should do truly aerobic exercise. And aerobic means with air, which means that it's at an intensity low enough that we can breathe comfortably and supply the oxygen. So as soon as you start huffing and puffing, that's not a bad thing for short duration. But if you go and you do a 45-minute spin class every day and you're just huffing and puffing youg're gonna make way way way too much cortisol. Really? Yes.

So you might be hurting your chances of losing the weight.

Yes.

If you're doing that intense of a workout every day.

Correct.

If you're doing a HIIT training two three times a week for 45 minutes, is that okay? But you feel like that's still intense.

If it's 45 minutes, it's not HIIT.

Gotcha.

Yeah. High intensity means that it's so to me, my definition.

10-15 minutes. It's like...

It's not... Well, maybe the total duration would be 10-15 minutes, but if you do interval, high intensity interval training is what HIIT is, then the intervals should be so intense you can't even do them for more than 30 seconds. Like, they should be so intense. provided you're fit enough to do that, of course. But if you do 30 seconds and then you do 30 second rest and then 30 seconds, you should be able to bring your heart rate up to maximum in maybe four or five intervals. That is HIIT. Now you're done. You've created your positive hormones. your growth hormone to stimulate fat burning, your growth hormone to stimulate muscle building to produce and to stimulate new brain synapses to enhance learning and focus. All the good stuff in the brain depends on hormones. And two of those hormones are human growth hormone and BDNF, which brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And those two hormones are necessary to make new synapses. So your brain is constantly remodeling and every time you learn something, whether you're 20 years old or 80 years old, you make new synapses. And the synapses you use, they get stronger, the ones that you don't use go away. But these two hormones, which some of the strongest ways to produce them is high intensity exercise and fasting are pretty much required to build a brain and to learn, really.

So, what type of high intensity exercise are you doing on a weekly basis?

My favorite to really get the heart rate up is I go to my favorite mountain close to where I live where there's a trail and it's like four miles around and I walk a little bit, I jog a little bit, I walk a little bit, jog a little bit. Just kind of enjoying the movement and my heart rate probably stays around 100 to 120, 130 maybe. and then there's some hills and then I do some sprints up the hills. So now I push it a little bit and 30 second push and my heart rate is 160. And then I walk a little jog a little there's another hill and I push it a little bit more and my heart rate hits 165-170. And I might do that in 30 seconds or it might take a minute to get to that heart rate, and then I'm done.

You do a few hills.

Yes.

What if you did 20 hills? Then too much, a 10 to 30 second.

That might be okay if you're 20, 25 years old, you're an elite athlete, and that's part of your event. But if you're 45, 50, 60, and you just try to stay as healthy as possible, I think that's too much. Really? And in any event, it's unnecessary because it's not about the quantity. Quantity is good for fitness, but not necessarily for health.

Interesting. So, you only need a few sprints every couple, is this every day or every few days?

It's, I would say it's no more than twice a week.

Twice a week.

For the average person, now. And we have to, if you're watching this, you have to understand if you're in the elite athlete category or in the 50 year old trying to stave off living life, degenerative disease.

Yes, yes. So if you're more of a, you know, if you're an athlete, even in your 40s and 50s, you could push it a little farther. If you're competing in stuff or doing triathlons or marathons or just wanted to stay lean, it's important to be doing that a little bit more.

Yeah. So there's no doubt. I mean, I talk a lot of my videos about moderation. Like you do these HIIT exercises, you do it twice a week, you keep it short. But obviously that doesn't apply to someone who has a goal in an event. If you're going after fitness, There is no substitute for punishing yourself.

You gotta do it.

Yeah, because if you're gonna perform in an event, you need to do something similar to that event at that level of intensity and duration.

So fasting and high intensity exercise, but it's not doing a crossfit every day, five days a week, because that creates too much cortisol.

Correct.

Especially if you're older, past 30 or something, it's probably not as good to do that. Is something like that, a 45 to 60 minute CrossFit type of training once a week, you think okay, or is it still creating too much cortisol?

I think that's, I think once or twice a week for the average person, if you feel good, I think is fine. But again, when I have people come in to my clinic, those are people who have been to 20 different doctors. They have tried vegan and carnivore and low carb and, and yo-yo dieting and gluten-free they've, they've done all that. So the, these are people with, with challenges. And now if, if you're a little frail now, that's where you really have to be careful and get everything right. But, yeah, if you're, If you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, you're feeling fine, then go for it. Do one or two of those spin classes. And what I would caution though is pay attention. Notice how your body is reacting. How do you feel after the class? Are you exhausted? Are you stiff in the morning? Do you have trouble getting out of bed? Do your joints hurt the next day? then you're probably doing too much.

Doing too much, yeah. And what about, you know, we talked about fasting a little bit here. What are the top three benefits of intermittent fasting or longer fasting, you know, 24-hour, 48-hour fasting that you've seen in your research?

So number one is lowering insulin. Number, and with that, lowering blood sugar, losing weight, etc. The other big thing is that you induce something called autophagy. But that's with longer fasting. Autophagy is called self autophagy stands for self eating. And that's where if you're putting food in your body, if you're putting especially protein in your body, there's plenty of resources. your body knows, hey, there's some. There's some more coming. I can just use that to. To build tissue and to. To do the stuff I need. But if you stop putting it in, now it becomes a very, very scarce resource. So now your body has to figure out where else can I get this? And that's where autophagy, self-eating comes in. So now your body up regulates. its recycling mechanisms.

How long does it take to fast before autophagy starts?

So again, that's what everybody asks. And it's not a black or white. It's a continuous, it's a gradient. I would say that it barely starts around 16 to 18 hours. That's where you get like a trickle. But then it increases pretty fast where there's a significant change between 18 and 24 hours. And then it sort of takes off from there. So 48 hours into it, it's very significant.

48 hours into it. So the longer you can go every extra few hours, it continues to self-eat.

Yes.

The fat stored in your body more and more.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the self-eating now, part of what it eats is fat, obviously, because you're not adding any fuel. But the key with autophagy is protein. Because you need protein to build tissue. Your cells have so much of a lifespan, they break down, and then you have to make new ones. And you need protein for that. so when you don't add any now you have to go look for some and a lot of people will say oh well that's where fasting is dangerous because you're going to eat up your muscles. The body is too smart for that because you need your muscles to go on the next hunt. So we have all these mechanisms to spare muscles and that's why growth hormone increases also exponentially along with autophagy. and growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's basically telling the body, one of the mechanisms that tell the body, don't use the muscle, go find something else. So now it gets much better at recycling these broken cells. It gets much better at finding any kind of resource like virus and bacteria and parasites that may also be made out of protein. Really?

And kind of eating those things, the bad things first. -Correct.

-Interesting.

What's the longest you've gone fasting?

-The longest I've done is 5 days. -No. -4 and a half. -No food, water only.

-Just water.

-Yeah.

I've done 3 days. -Yeah. -And you see the benefits a lot after a day and a half. You really start to see and feel the benefits. -Yeah. -By day 3, I went the total right up to 3 and I was like, okay, I need... I was starting to get a little tired.

And I think I pushed it because.

I worked out twice, which I'm probably not supposed to do, but I did like an incline walk for an hour, which I don't recommend, but I was trying to be extreme.

Yeah, that's probably too much. And this is where we come into this muscle sparing thing, that I'm all in favor of doing some exercise while you're fasting. Because you're going to increase your ketones, you're going to increase your growth hormone, but if you're not adding any protein and you do something intense enough to break down muscle, now your body has to sort of juggle the resources. It has to repair those muscles and where's the protein going to come from? So it might break down some other muscles to repair that.

Interesting.

Okay, I haven't seen specific research on this or anything. It's just kind of common sense. What would the body do?

Sure.

So, I would exercise, but I would keep it to purely aerobic. I wouldn't even do HIIT, not even brief HIIT during those times. Right, right.

What did you do for those four and a half, five days?

I probably didn't do much of anything. Probably just Yeah, maybe a little bit of walking but basically just my everyday activities. Yeah.

Did you feel pretty sharp after two, three days? We start to feel a little slower towards the end.

I don't feel as great as people tell me they feel.

Yeah, I feel so much energy.

Yeah, so I do okay. I don't feel any any dramatic improvement in focus. But I do know that it happens because I get the testimonials and I do know, especially for people who might have insulin resistance, when they fast, they're going to increase their ketones, which becomes the alternative brain fuel. Right.

And it also kind of helps heal certain things. If you've been driving the insulin, it's allowing that to recover more, right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, you're your whole carbohydrate processing machine is recovering because you're not you're not adding anything. And one more thing about autophagy and fasting is for brain trauma. And this I've hardly ever heard it spoken about that the brain It's kind of its own little world up there inside the cranium. We have the blood-brain barrier and a lot of things that go on in the brain are different than the way they work in the body. So the reason, for example, that spinal cord injuries are so devastating is that the nervous system is really poor at repairing itself. It's encased in bone for a reason. It's not supposed to to get damaged. You're not supposed to crack your skull or break your spine. And that tissue is a little different, it's sensitive and it doesn't have the capacity to repair itself very well. But if you have a concussion, for example, you get some tissue brain trauma, you get some inflammation. And about the only way that the brain can clean that up is through autophagy, the self-eating. Interesting. So when people have a brain trauma, traumatic brain injury, that's the number one time that they want to absolutely not have any sugar. Really?

Fast at that time?

Yes. And if they can throw in a 24-hour fast or something, then that's going to be huge to reduce that inflammation.

What about when you hear, like, you know, sometimes you might feel lightheaded or a little tired or lethargic and people hear people say, well, I have low blood sugar. I need to like have a piece of candy. It gives me more energy in that moment. Yeah. What is that scenario?

That's when you have trained your body to depend on carbohydrates, right? If you go year in and year out and feed your body sugar or carbohydrates every two hours, your body is going to upregulate all of the pathways to deal with carbohydrates. It's going to downregulate any pathway to pull from fat. So now after so many years of that, you cut out the carbohydrates, you have no fuel source because the backup system is dormant. Your body doesn't know Now what do we do? Right. Right. So it's because you trained your body in to depend on carbohydrates. And it's so easy for most people. The vast majority of people can get out of that in three to four days just by cutting out the carbs, eat more protein, eat more fat, teach your body to upregulate the other system, which is fat burning, and that is where you have metabolic flexibility.

Gotcha.

So most people probably gonna take a few months to get totally back to metabolic flexibility, but you'll break a huge part of that carb dependence just in a few days.

What would you say are the top three ways to increase human growth hormone?

They're pretty simple other than injecting it, which I'm not a fan of.

Right, right. Naturally.

Yes, naturally. So, fasting is the most powerful.

Human growth hormone occurs when you fast over, I think you said 18 hours or roughly around there?

It's the same as autophagy. It increases gradually. I think you hit the maximum somewhere after four or five days.

Okay.

Or up to seven days, then I think it's pretty much plateaued at a high level.

Gotcha.

So fasting and the other one is the exercise, the high intensity exercise.

Sprints.

Yeah.

Is that also with like heavy lifting or is it just more sprints?

Yes. So here's how we want to think about this. Why and this is what I encourage people to do. This is what I'm trying to do with my videos is try to think like the body. what would I do if I was the body? Why is the body doing this? So what's the purpose of growth hormone? Right? It's to grow tissue. And why would the body want to do that? Because there is a need. Right? So if you're sitting on the couch and you're eating potato chips, why would the body make growth hormone? Right? But. if you challenge your body, if you push it, if you do push-ups until you fail, like you get a million dollars if you can do one more and you can't do it, that's pushing your body till it fails to exhaustion. And now what's the message? The message is, I gotta get better. The body says, if he's going to do this again, I want to be prepared next time he does this. I better build some muscle. And to do that, I need some growth hormone. Same thing with fasting. Okay, they're not putting in any other fuel right now. I have to be smart about this. I have to get my energy someplace else from fat. So growth hormone is fat burning. I have to protect my muscles. so I can go on a hunt tomorrow. So let's protect the muscles. So when you challenge your body, when you scare your body, you're telling it, what you're doing right now isn't quite good enough. You got to get better tomorrow. That's it. And there's so many other little ways like Wim Hof breathing, that's a stress. Anything that's stressful is going to increase growth hormone. You can even just sit and hold your breath for as long as you can and you're going to increase growth hormone. Interesting. Yeah.

Don't pass out, but yeah.

And it's probably not at the magnitude that you get with fasting and high intensity, but there's all these different things where you challenge your body, your body has to get better.

What about cold showers, hot steam?

Same thing.

Anything that stresses the body, but you don't want to be stressing it for hours is what I'm hearing you say.

Correct.

Because that creates cortisol, which is spikes your insulin.

Yes. And there is, there is eustress and there's distress. And the founder of, the guy who came up with the stress and the adaptive stress response was Hans Selye. He did tons of studies on this. And he found that short-term stress, I mean, used stress is good stress. Your body needs stress to get better. If your body constantly breaks down, you have a turnover of cells. So It's going to break down. Now you need a reason to make new cells. That's the U stress. You need to use your body, you need to use your brain, you need to use your liver. Every tissue needs to have a purpose, use it or lose it. So that's the U stress. We need a moderate amount of different kinds of stress like gravity and weight bearing and so forth. that gives the body a reason to make new healthy tissue. But distress is when we're stressing the body too much or in a chronic way. Now it becomes, instead of adaptation, it becomes maladaptation. And it's like exercise. So many people, they say, they think that exercise is what makes you strong. But it isn't. Exercise breaks you down and it gives the body a reason to build a better body. So it's not the exercise that does it, it's the recovery.

Yeah, the sleep recovery.

Yes. So after a really, really hard workout, like if you beat your body to pulp in the gym, you need 72 hours to recover before you do that again.

72?

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean, it depends on how. How much do you break it down? Like, how many fibers do you break? But you can typically tell. And I'm sure you. You know this. That the day after you're sore, the second day you're more sore.

Exactly. Right.

The third day, it starts to go away. Your body hasn't healed in that time period.

So you shouldn't push it again the same muscle groups.

Correct.

The next day or two.

Correct. Depending on the intensity again. Right, right.

You can do some, if you're doing a leg day, you can do some, you know, walking and stretching, I guess, the next couple days, but you don't wanna be doing another leg day back to back.

Correct. And this is the trick for athletes to find that balance of, yes, you have to break it down, but then they get into the blood sweat and tears mentality, no pain no gain mentality, so they always think that more is better. better, which it isn't. It's like it's the recovery. Yes, you need to break it down, but it's the recovery that makes you stronger.

So much has happened in the last decade in the health, nutrition and exercise world that is seem to be evolving, new science, new research, different fads that have come and gone. What do you see is coming over this next decade with nutrition, the science of health, optimizing the body, all these different things. Do you see anything new emerging that is actually going to be beneficial? Or do we just need to keep doing the same, you know, eat real food, work out consistently, recover well, and take care of your emotions?

If I have anything to do with it, which I hope I will, then we're going to start developing some common sense. There's always going to be fads, people want the quick fixes, which is why the yo-yo diets, they think that you can, I've abused my body for five years, now I'm going to do something for three days to reverse all that, I'm going to lose my 20 pounds because it says so on the tabloid, and then I'm going to go right back to abusing my body and I'll be fine again. That makes no sense to anybody and yet we do it. so I think my, my, my mission is to teach health, to teach some common sense. And that's where we want to go back to historically, what have humans done? What is our DNA designed for? What does a human body need? Right? It needs the replacement parts. It needs fuel, it needs vitamins, minerals. It needs stimulation, use it or lose it. It needs a productive mindset. It needs a purpose. It needs joy. And it doesn't matter if it's a rat in a lab or it's a human. If you stress it continuously, it will break down. You cannot get health in that situation. So again, chemical structural, emotional, and then we need to find that that balance.

I love it.

And it's not optional. It's not like do this if you get around to it. It's a human requirement. It's a law of nature. You can't fight it or ignore it any more than you can gravity. Like the human body has requirements in the chemical, structural, emotional aspect and if we understand what those are then we can do something good with it.

Absolutely. I've got a couple of final questions for you, Dr. Egberg.

All right.

But I want people to follow you first over on your YouTube, Dr. Egberg and also your website, Dr. Egberg as well.com youm're all over social media but YouTube is the main thing in your website. You've got so many great informational educational videos teaching how to optimize the health, diving into the research and the science of these things. So I want people to follow you over there. We'll have it all linked up as well. How else can we be of support to you today before I ask these final questions?

I would say look at my YouTube channel and Take an active interest and then share that information. I tell people often in the office that... See, here's the thing with health. It's like air. We don't value it until it's gone. Right? But when it's gone, nothing is more important. So people will give lip service to the fact that you want to be healthy, is healthy important? Everyone's going to put it number one on their list and then they're going to ignore it until they get a scare. But all these processes that we're talking about, the insulin resistance, the cancer, the dementia, they hit people at an epidemic scale in their 60s and 70s but they start in the 30s, and yet we don't care until it's too late. So that's, that's what I would like for people to understand is that these things take. Here's the problem. They don't kill us fast enough.

Right?

Yeah. The, if you eat poison and, and it kills you, if you have an anaphylactic shock, to peanuts, you'll know about it. But this stuff takes 20-30 years, so everyone ignores it until it's too late or much, much harder to change. And all these things, a hundred years ago, people died from infections and poverty and starvation and natural disasters. Today we don't die from that. 95% of there's still some unfortunate places, but most of the world, we die from man-made conditions. We die from things that 95% of them are degenerative disease that could be avoided if we just understood what to do. And why don't we care about health? Because we shouldn't have to. the body is so magnificent, it is so incredibly smart that it fixes almost everything for us. It's just not invincible and it takes 30 years to break it down. But the reason that we can't afford to just trust the body anymore is that the world has changed more in the last 50 years than it has in the previous 50,000. There's no other animal on the planet that has to worry about it because they live in their natural environment and they graze off the planet. We don't do that. We spend half our lives in front of a screen. We eat chemicals and processed foods. We have no connection with nature. We have changed the world so much we can't afford to take health for granted anymore. and that's the message that I want to get out there. But I don't want to sound like a doomsday prophet either. I want people to understand that if you do something with this while there's plenty of time, I think we can have quality of life into our 90s and beyond. Instead of people say that we live so much longer today, it's like, No, we don't. We die longer. For so many people, life is over at 60, even though they hang around for another 30 years.

They can't move the way they used to.

Correct.

They don't enjoy life the way they used to.

Exactly. They can't go do things. They can't play with their grandkids. They can't reach up and take something off a shelf. And there are huge numbers of people who just don't have that quality of life. But we have to understand that it's in our power to do something if we just learn what the body needs and we don't take it for granted. Wow.

That's beautiful. Well, I want people to follow you on your YouTube, DrEgberg.com as well. We'll have it all linked up. But I've got a couple of final questions for you. This is called the three truths question.

Oh, wow.

So imagine a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on earth, many years away. You live as as long as you want to live. But you got to call it quits on this world. And you've accomplished all of your dreams, you've created everything you want to create. But for whatever reason, we don't have access to your creations, all your content, your videos, anything you make. For whatever reason, it's gone in this scenario. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world, three things you know to be true. And this is all we would have to remember your information. what would be those three truths for you?

You have been gifted the most incredible healing machine ever devised. Your body is a representation of infinite intelligence. And I don't know if I can come up with three things, but the second would be respect it and understand what it needs. And this carries over to prosperity in every way, because they're not isolated principles for health or wealth. It's like when your body is working, when you feel good, you're more productive, you feel more worthy, you can pursue things better. So it's like everything ties together.

Yes. That's beautiful. Was that the third one or was that the second one? Respect your body. Is there one more?

Well, here's, we kind of talked about this, and it's sort of a repeat, but I tell people that healing is a law of nature. so it's sort of like water flowing down a hillside.

That.

The water is going to flow because of gravity. And it's going to keep doing that no matter what. It's not optional, it's not going to do it sometimes, it's going to do it all the time because that's what it does. That's how healing works also. Now, you can build a barrier, you can build a dam on that hillside and you can slow the water, you can keep it from running for a while. And that's what the obstacles, the stress, the toxicity, the lifestyle that we have. But if you, on the hillside, now if you remove that obstacle, from the hillside, the water is going to start running again. Healing is going to just pick up where it left off. You don't have to teach the water to do what it does. It's built in. It's the only thing it knows how to do.

That's beautiful. Just remove the obstacle. Allow your body to heal. Dr. Eggenberg, I want to acknowledge you for a moment for everything you've created in your life and how you were an elite athlete, you know, and then you use that knowledge to continue to serve and help more people become athletes of their own life. You know, maybe not as elite as you, but the athlete of their life.

Correct.

To realign to their natural habitat.

Health champions.

Health champions. Yes. I love that. And I want to acknowledge you for your consistent dedication. You know, you continue to learn, you continue to develop, continue to serve so many people. So I appreciate all that you do for the world and how you help so many of us get back to that habitat. My final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

When you are honest with yourself and you realize what you can be and you go after the ultimate version of you. There you go.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.