These 8 Things Are DESTROYING Your Health RIGHT NOW! | Lewis Howes

Cancer is caused by food.

Really?

70%.

70% of cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit.

People that are maybe eating a not so healthy diet, people that are overweight, if they do have depression, there very well could be a link between the diet, the lifestyle, the obesity.

Have olive oil, vitamin D, have lots of vitamin D. 3, D3.

D3.

And then what's next to live a long life? We don't always know about the foods we put in our body, how they affect us in a negative way. But this video has the top health experts in the world to teach you how to prevent yourself from destroying your health. Have olive oil and vitamin D. You have lots of vitamin D. Three. D3.

D3.

And then what's next to live a long life?

Next is you got to get some form of long chain omega-3 fat better known as fish oil. And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae based DHA and EPA. But here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you wanna call me a fat head, you know, I will.

You'll tattoo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can just see now the internet lighting up. Fat head. So half of the fat in your brain, is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA. So half, basically half of your brain is fish oil. And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, you look at people what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains, and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. She didn't know why it was, but we now know DHA is really what makes your brain.

So sushi is good.

Sushi is actually not a good idea.

Oh wow.

Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists. So, and particularly sashimi grade tuna. You just wanna, just kind of want to stay away from it.

Sugarfish is amazing though. Yeah. And it's got the grains too.

Yeah, it's got the grains, you know.

So, so no sushi. Yeah, so once in a while.

Yeah, once in a while.

Okay.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah. So fish oil is incredibly important.

Yeah.

And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking, you know, thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years, you want to get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil. I mean, you can go to Costco.

Right, right, right.

And you look on the back. and you find serving size and make sure it says one serving size. They love to fool you. They may say two or three and then you look down below and you see DHA and you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule and you add it up and say, oh okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule so I need to take four.

Wow.

Four a day. 1000 a day.

Yeah.

1000 a day. DHA.

We got olive oil. We've got vitamin D3, we have fish oils. What else do we need to live longer?

So you gotta have polyphenols in your diet. So, what the heck is a polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywanna phenol. Phenols are plant compounds, polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight. Just interesting fact, we know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol. The other one is quercetin or quercetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make because they.

Need more to protect themselves.

Exactly, it's basically suntan. You know, they've actually protected themselves against sunburn.

Interesting.

Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself. So polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberries, Raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries. And I take black raspberry capsules, by the way, and it's in the book.

There you go.

So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols, and olives that are stressed produce better. They are even better.

Wow.

Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.

So what about like, you know, leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens or do you want healthy thriving looking?

Excellent question. It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these creatures, these plants actually have to work harder and they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmer's market and the poor little organic vegetables have got potholes of insects, they're dying and they don't look very good, you go, I want that guy. That guy is struggling. He is going to just be so loaded with polyphenol.

Really?

And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing my signature product Vital Reds, it's pure polyphenols primarily and they're bitter. So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're gonna mass these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, had the pleasure of knowing Jack Lalanne, who you would know is really the godfather of fitness and nutrition in the United States. And I knew him in his later years. And Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good, spit it out.

Interesting.

Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things is actually what is going to give the bugs that are actually going to keep you alive, what they want to eat. And don't, you know, more bitter, more better. So, you know, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into you, the better.

But you can get that through capsules and other things, too.

Yeah, you can. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements, because we, if you look at even really good organic eaters. Most human beings only eat maybe 20 different plant species.

I probably eat like three.

Yeah, yeah.

Most people do like five, maybe.

Yeah.

You know, and, you know, ketchup is not a vegetable. It's a tomato. And we can't do that. So our, our ancestors and even looking at modern hunter-gatherers like the Hunza tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And you think about All those plants are grown organically. They're in six feet of loam soil. They've got their cool microbiome. So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols. And so, you know, if people think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy without supplementation, I've got oceanfront property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them.

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

I think food is extremely important.

Because.

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

That's my whole childhood.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Any type of exercise will help.

Exactly.

I do.

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

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

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

So.

Wow.

A little bit of stress gives you a lot of good stuff. Right.

Interesting.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

Never going to have blue eyes. I'm never, you know, so if I'm always like, well, only people with blue eyes are the prettiest, like, then I'll never be happy. So, like, that's an unreasonable expectation, right? in my mind. So, I mean, there are things where, you know, like, I'm never gonna be a billionaire. And if that's all I wanted in life to be happy, I'll never be happy. So there are things I think that you can, there's a certain balance between, and you want your expectations behind it in a way. You want to always aim for what you, you know, aim for the stars in a way and try to, like, work hard to get there. So what I'm trying to say is I think that self-love movement came from somewhere, right? I think there was something to that, right? But I think it sort of spiraled out of control and what's happened now is you're saying, well, accept things that I don't want to change rather than you can't. Because you can change that. You can lose weight. You can eat different foods and get different decisions. People that are eating refined sugar, people that are drinking these sugar-sweetened beverages, you know, and there's a lot of people, maybe not so many people listening to the podcast or watching it, but there are people that do. There's been studies that have shown refined sugar acts on the reward pathway in the brain, dopamine pathway, in a very similar manner to controlled substances, drugs like nicotine, methamphetamine, not to the same degree, but they're acting on the same systems and they're increasing...

It increases a feel-good hormone when you take it for the moment, but then it makes you decline afterwards and crash, right?

It does.

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

Of cutting out the sugar, you mean?

This has been shown with nicotine. I'm just drawing a parallel. I'm drawing a parallel saying, look, it's.

Not going to be easy the first month.

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

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

The hormones are going to regulate, right?

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

It's very challenging, but it's necessary to get healthier and happier, right? It is. I don't think people realize that depression, it's not just a genetic disorder. It's not just something that can't be fixed.

Ever.

You know, in some cases, you know, there are, you know, there are definitely genetic cases of depression. I'm not saying that that's not the case.

But can you hear depression through food and nutrition and exercise?

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

From defending itself, yeah.

From just having a great day from, I mean, energy.

So, just having energy.

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

Always tired.

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

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

Your family, your friends. Yeah, you have to have energy. I mean, it takes motivation to want to go to the gym. It takes motivation also to want to, to like do stuff or to talk.

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

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

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

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

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

Not always.

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

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

Lose weight.

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

Get along, get along fast and reset.

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

Three plus days. Yeah.

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

Oh my gosh. Tell me again the stat on diabetes. How many people have it or are pre-diabetic? And what I'm uneducated on this. So how many different types of diabetes are there?

Okay.

And how is it caused?

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

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin.

You need insulin. To do your pancreas dies. Because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced. That's the blood.

It's not like a gatekeeper.

It's the glucose into your cells.

So it's really important.

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

It's an auto, like an auto, like.

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

And I'm like, what is it?

Soda?

I'm like, what is that?

That's Coca-Cola.

No.

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

Oh my gosh.

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

Oh.

Having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream. I light out. And then the baby like, I want more. I want more. And then the baby like, grabs the thing and like stuffs it in his face.

I was like, oh my God, it.

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

Because it makes money, right?

Well, no.

Yeah, but I'm going even further. Why I got interested in this because as a, why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking about my patients diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food. Something will, well, if it's- How many.

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

I mean, unless it's like an environmental thing, like mercury or lime or mold.

You know, most of the things.

Cancer. Cancer. Cancer is caused by food. Really? 70%.

70% of cancer is caused by food.

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

The big Killers are by sugar and food.

Yes.

Yes. So if you change your diet, you should be able to prevent or cure sometimes.

Sometimes cure.

Depends how far along things are, I guess. Yeah. You can prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's.

Yes, 100%. I mean, the studies are there. Even people already have Alzheimer's, when they.

Improve their diet, they can get more functionality back.

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

Yeah, exactly, right.

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

You're not going to the source. Right.

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

So we could have food.

So we can stop food. And we were great at it. And we have cheap abundant corn and wheat and soy, which are the commodity crops that are turned into industrial processed food, which is now 60% of our diet. And for every 10% of that you eat, your risk of death goes up by 14%.

Yeah.

So you're basically feeding Americans a diet we know is going to kill them. The research is so clear on this. There's no scientific debate and yet we don't do anything about it because we have these dysfunctional food policies. And then the way we grow the food causes climate change. We'll get into that. But the number one cause of climate change is our food system.

Really?

People don't realize that. I didn't know it. I'm like, oh, it's oil and gas and all this What is it?

Is it the trucking? Is it the animal feces?

End to end. Okay, so first of all, deforestation is devastating. Not only do we like destroy the soil on which we cut down the trees, but the trees are carbon sinks.

So we lose that.

So they're not sucking in the bad air. They're not sucking in the good air. They're putting out carbon dioxide. Right. I mean, basically plants suck out carbon dioxide. That's what they breathe. We breathe oxygen, they breathe carbon dioxide. So that's a perfect antidote, right? And then the soil also We're damaging by the way we're farming. We've lost a third of our top soil. It's responsible, people don't know this, but of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of soil organic matter, like healthy rich soil, is responsible 30 to 40% of all greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Does that mean, why is that?

Does it suck up, does it suck up? Because soil It can hold more carbon than is in the atmosphere right now. There's a trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, which is a lot. I don't know, trillion tons. I don't even know how to measure that. And the soil can hold three trillion tons of carbon. And how does it do that? It's an ancient carbon capture technology that is available all over the world. That's free. Free. can be more effective than all the rainforests on the planet, than all the forests and trees on the planet. It's called photosynthesis. And if you have grasslands, for example, like we had big prairies in the United States, they suck down carbon, they breathe it, and they put it through the plants into the roots, feeds the mycorrhizal fungi, which then make healthy soil, feeds the bacteria, and you get this incredibly rich live soil that holds tremendous amounts of organic matter that is carbon. I mean, carbohydrates comes from the word carbon, which comes from carbon dioxide. It all connects. And so we've lost.

So we don't have the soil for it to consume, then it just bounces off back into the air, I guess, and we're just consuming it in other ways. Yeah.

And the soil can hold so much carbon. The UN estimated that if we took the five of the five million hectares of degraded farmland around the world, if we took just two million of that and spent 300 billion, which is the total military spend for 60 days around the world, which is not much, 60 days, two months of everybody's military spending, we literally could stall climate change by 20 years because of putting back the carbonate in the soil. And not only that, it holds water. You see that in Iowa and the Midwest, there was floods that just destroyed a million acres of cropland that otherwise could have been fine if the soil could hold the water. But it just sits on the top where it runs through and we lose all this water. So that when you have an organic matter in the soil, it holds 27,000 gallons for every 1% organic matter in the soil. per acre. So it's an incredible water sink, it's a carbon sink, and we've lost all these soils and it's because we're growing these commodity crops in ways that destroy soil. We're tilling the soil, we're turning over soil erosion, it runs off into the rivers, and we kill all the life in the organic matter by poisoning it with fertilizer, with pesticides, with glyphosate herbicides, and it's staggering. and then we have all these sort of unintended consequences. We started growing all this food and we thought this agricultural revolution was great. All these chemicals are great, you know, fertilizer's great, we can do all this good stuff. Tractors, big farms, more food, feed the world. It's backfired on us. And it's producing the worst food on the planet that's causing devastating environmental damage, staggering climate change. So it's the soil loss, it's deforestation, it's the factory farming of animals, which is, should be banned. It's the transportation, storage, refrigeration, and the food waste. I mean, food waste in a lot of waste.

Yeah.

Well, we, we waste 40 of our food. We believe.

That's not our play.

We don't imagine going to the grocery store, buying a bunch of groceries, take and getting home and throwing 40 of the garbage. The average Americans waste 1800 of food a year and is about a pound a day. and that goes to landfills. The landfills then it rots and creates methane. So you could be a vegan throwing out your food waste and scraps and you could be contributing to climate change. If food waste for our country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China.

Wow.

Yeah, it's methane to produce and we need to compost, we need to have community garden. It's always to fix it, but it's like when you look at the whole end-to-end food system, it is the number one source of climate about 50% of greenhouse gases. And people just don't appreciate that.

So why, I mean, if this information is public and it's out there and policymakers are aware of it, they're not aware of it.

I spent two hours on a sailboat this summer with a senator, a smart senator. He wasn't aware of it. And I literally, his jaw was hanging.

Open the entire time. And then I presented it with this research and information. No, because he got so much money.

Sent to him by the lobbyists probably. Right, I mean listen, if all the people who are walking in their office are Monsanto and Cargill and, you know, McDonald's and Pepsi and like, and they're all donating millions of dollars, I would say billions of dollars, they're not hearing the other side of the science and, you know, how do you fight that? So, you know, I always said deride at obviouS, but I plan on, you know, I'm creating a food fix campaign, which is a non-profit. along with an advocacy organization to start to literally lobby senators, congressmen, key people in the administration around these issues and start to drive policy change. Because in the UK, and you were.

Talking about, I think, in Australia, New Zealand, or in, I think, in Asia, you were saying that you can't do certain things with the food, otherwise you'll go to prison, you'll go to, you.

Know, you'll get killed.

You'll, well, yeah, I mean, like in.

The UK, they don't have a lot of these dyes and, you know, Right? Yeah, so it's so funny, you know, the FDA, you know, is so influenced by the food industry. And I was once with the former head of the federal drug administration, Food and Drug Administration, Peggy Hamburg, former. She was, you know, but then she was the FDA commissioner. Yeah. But now she's former. And I was at the World Economic Forum. I said, Peggy, how come, you know, we have so much trouble with with getting advances in food labeling or dealing with toxic chemicals in our food or antibiotics in animal feed or, you know, it's like, she's like, well, when we try to make too aggressive change, Congress threatens to shut down our funding because of the food lobby.

They threaten to shut it down?

Yeah.

And then what? If they shut it down, what would happen?

Well, they're limited in their ability to do their job. And so the FTC, the same thing happened. In the 70s, there was a movement by the Federal Trade Commission to have negative education campaigns around sugar and how bad it was. But the Congress says, we're going to pull all your funding and shut you down if you do this. And so they pull back.

So.

For example, you ask a question about Asia. We have this thing called GRAS, which is generally recognized as safe. food additives. We have, you know, we have, you know, thousands of food additives. Only about 5% have actually been tested for safety in the US. Some of them are grandfathered in.

Right.

So Crisco, for example, trans fat was grandfathered in as a safe food to eat. But it took 50 years for researchers to finally prove to the FDA that it wasn't safe because it was the basis of all processed food, right? Crisco shortening, you know, it shortens your I was like, oh my gosh. And so they literally had to be sued by a scientist in order to actually turn it into a non-safe substance. And then of course they gave their food industry years and years to get.

Out of the food.

But in this country, there's so many things that are used in our food supply that are banned in Europe, like BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene food additives, various dyes, and something called azodicarbonamide. carbamid, which is a softener that makes like bread more like fluffy and soft. And it was just in Subway Sandwich, our friend Vani Hari outed them and said, this is your yoga mat material and your Subway Sandwich.

And they got it to eat her.

Yeah.

And she got it out. But the FDA still says it's fine to eat. And in Singapore, if you use it and you're a food producer, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail. putting it in the food.

That same ingredient. The same ingredient that anyone can use.

In the US right now. In the US, yes. And most of the things that are safe, quote, safe here are banned in Europe. So it's like, yeah, they're not doing their job. And then antibiotics, you know, we have 30 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal feed, about 37 million total. So about 7 million for humans to treat disease and 30 million for animals. Why? For growth. It's a growth factor. Makes them fat and it makes humans fat too. And it is used for prevention from overcrowding. And the FDA says, well, this isn't a good idea. I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea. But they go, Would you please, pretty please, not do it? It was a voluntary guideline that the FDA produced. Not mandatory. Please don't do it, yeah. You have to have a vet certify that the animal's sick before you give them antibiotics.

Oh, man.

And now they continue to do it and just laugh. They had voluntary-- the FDA FTC put in voluntary guidelines around junk food marketing. Would you pretty please not advertise the bad stuff and advertise more good stuff? It was just voluntary and the food industry went ballistic and had it overturned so even the voluntary guidelines are nullified.

No, wow.

And it just, it's, I mean sugar.

I mean, it's like, I'm the first one to raise my hand when I say, like, I love sugar and it's my biggest vice, right? I love cookies and candies and cakes and brownies and anything you can think.

Of, I love it, right?

You know, we programmed a lot of it. I don't know why I don't have diabetes, so much sugar I've had in my whole life. You can't be having that much, 'cause you look pretty good. Well, I train hard, too, right? I go through waves. But as a kid, I would drink like 9, 10, Dr. Pepper's a day, I remember.

What?

Like some days in the summer you.

Just sit around and drink Dr. Pepper.

I'm the President, is that what I'm president? Exactly. But I would just, I mean I would run around and work out and.

Play sports, but then I would just.

Drink because I thought that's what presidents do. You were 16-18, you know? And I was like 9-10, right? So I was like, but it was, you'd see it on commercials like your NBA superstar drinking Dr. Pepper or Sprite or whatever after, on the basketball recourt. And I don't know if it was just like subconscious or just it tasted good and you didn't think about it.

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

Celebrity endorsements.

Right.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Really?

Gatorade is the best thing in the world. It's not, it's just sugar, right? Right. So it corrupts and pollutes science. So people are confused. Why is there so much confusion about nutrition science? Third, they create front groups, call them spin doctors. So they create front groups that seem like they're independent groups like Crop Life.

Yeah.

Or, you know, like they're tweeting. Center for Consumer Consumer Freedom, or the American Council on Science and Health, which by the way is run by a bunch of doctors who suggest that pesticides are safe, that high-fructose corn syrup is great for you, that smoking doesn't cause disease, and you know, why would they do that?

Because they get paid a lot.

They're funded by Monsanto and Big Food and Pepsi. Just look at their funders. I mean, they spent $30 million fighting GMO in California, this front group. It was all funded by Monsanto, right? And then you, so we got these front groups, and then you have.

Them.

Co-Opting scientists and academies. So the nutrition academies, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, their funding in large part comes from industry. And, and so the Academy of Nutrition, Dietetics, which is our main nutrition association, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. They have sponsored lectures at their meetings that are, you know, with people saying, well, high fructose corn syrup is good and diet drinks are good and like...

Right.

It's just completely corrupted. And so these professional societies give guidelines and they're corrupt. And Dr. Ayyanaidu is from Stanford who's a scientist who looks at carefully at the research and and conflicts of interest says, you know, these professional societies like the American Heart Association and Diabetes Association should not be making guidelines. And then, so you've got all these ways in which they sort of screw things up. And then, of course, they are aggressive in advertising and marketing, which is illegal in most countries. And then they have lobbyists running around Washington driving policy that supports all of what they do. So you've got this massive effort and.

It'S often subversive and illegal and they.

It's, you know, it's kind of shady.

You uncover all the lies about food, right?

That's right.

All the lies that the food industry tries to feed us and tell us which is actually healthy for us, but when it's actually really bad.

That's right. And so, you know, my mission has always been about educating the public about the chemicals in the American food supply. In my first book, the Food Babe Way, was all about the chemicals. How do we get the chemicals out of our diet? And this book actually takes it a step further and goes behind the scenes and shows you exactly the playbook that the food industry uses to continue selling us these chemicals, to continue to confuse us about what's truly healthy so that we continue to buy their products.

Really?

So it's like false marketing.

Absolutely.

The packaging, it's the marketing, the language, the words they use.

The things you read on social media, everything you see. you see in the media.

They'll have a fit like healthy looking woman or man on their packaging just to say this is how you're gonna look even though it's not good for you, whatever it may be, right?

That's right.

It's all marketing.

A lot of it is.

Okay. Yeah. Even if they have the ingredients that show that there's always chemicals and bad stuff in it, they're saying other things on the front.

That's right.

On the face, it looks nice, but on the back, it's like all dirty.

Yeah, a perfect example of this is Diet Coke, right? Diet Coke, Diet, right, is part of the name, right? It makes you think that you're gonna stay lean and trim and that you can get away with eating zero calories and still enjoying this buzz from this caffeine and the sweetness from this drink. But what's really happening behind the scenes in your body is you're consuming artificial sweeteners that trick your brain into thinking that, hey, I'm receiving some nourishment because this thing is sweet and it tastes like something that has calories. and nutrition, but in actuality, you're not getting any of those calories. So your body's like, Wait a minute. I still need some nourishment. I still need nutrition. And so your body continuously craves additional food. And so you end up eating more than you would otherwise do. And so you end up in this yo-yo cycle of dieting and never being able to break free.

How many chemicals are in a diet Coke, you know? Or how many ingredients is a lot?

Or is it? It's not a ton of ingredients, but.

The ingredients are awful.

They're bad, yeah. I mean, one of the ingredients is caramel coloring, right? I mean, caramel coloring is not the kind that you would make when you burn sugar. But it's made in a laboratory. There's been studies that show that animal studies have shown that it's linked to cancer. This is a caramel coloring.

You definitely do not want to be consuming on a regular basis in a drink. Have you been seeing the commercials for Diet Coke? no, there's some. There's these amazing commercials I was watching a couple months ago that was like this kind of chill looking girl. I think I saw two of them. One was a guy and a girl. It was like this, like, cool, casual girl who's like, life short. Have a diet cook. Like, have one because you can. It wasn't like this. They was kind of almost saying, like, this is bad for you. Life short. Just enjoy some diet cook. Like, have fun. Like, do this, do that. you know?

Yeah, they're losing, I mean they're losing the battle right now, I mean in terms of...

They're not trying to say this is good for you anymore.

Yeah, well they've gotten away with a lot of different things and there's many different stories that I share within the book that show how the Coke industry, the soda industry, whether it's Coca-Cola or Pepsi, you know, they have tried to change our perspective about health and diet in this country. They've said, You know what? It's not about sugar or carbohydrates, which our food is mainly made up of. It's actually about fat. You should eliminate fat in your diet or, Hey, why don't you exercise more? And there's been evidence where, you know, not only have they colluded with the CDC and other government officials, they've colluded with, you know, professors at some of the highest degree universities in our country to try to persuade the public that we have a problem with the fact that we don't exercise enough when really we're consuming too much sugar and too many empty calories, which is their products.

So how many of these companies are actually living by this kind of feeding you lies mentality?

That's a good question. The majority of companies that are legacy big food companies, the Kellogg's, the General Mills, the Campbells, the Coca-Colas, the Pepsis, the Mondelēz, the Kraft Heinz, those are the ones that have really gotten away with, and I don't want to say murder, but they really have. Because what has happened is that they're using the same playbook as the tobacco industry when it comes to determining what people crave, what makes them addicted to food, and what makes them continuously buy them. the majority of chemicals that have been invented in the last 50 years or so have been invented for one reason, to improve the bottom line of the food industry. Not to improve our health, not for our nutrition, not to make us healthier, not to help us achieve our health goals or to avoid disease. They've only been there to improve the bottom line of the food industry. So you just think about that. So when you look at an ingredient list and you see all these different chemicals in there, They are not serving a purpose for your nutrition or your body or to make you feel really great. They're just serving the interests of the food industry. And this example can be shown in a really unethical way when you look at our food versus other food in other countries. So for example, McDonald's french fries. Here in the United States, they're made with a slew of different chemicals. One of the chemicals is dimethylpolysiloxane. It's the same ingredient in Silly Putty. It's also an ingredient that is preserved with formaldehyde and an ingredient that the FDA has not truly even studied or.

Approved to be in our food system, right?

It's going to be in McDonald's if it's not FDA approved. Well, it's a gross, it's generally regarded as safe, but the ingredient itself is actually deemed safe by the food industry themselves, not the FDA. So there's this underlying assumption that our ingredients are being managed and tested and safety tested by the government, right? But the FDA doesn't have any of the mechanisms to do that, so they rely on the food industry themselves to say, hey, this stuff's okay. Now in Europe, they have different standards. They say you need to prove this stuff safe before you put it in your food. So in Europe, when you look at McDonald's french fries, they use three basic ingredients.

Really?

Potatoes, oil and dextrose, which is just sugar. And then you can add the salt after you fry it so you can actually determine how much salt you have on McDonald's french fries in Europe. But here in the United States, totally different scenario. And I think one of the most unethical behaviors is when big food manufacturers, especially American food manufacturers, start to change their products overseas to meet regulations and not change them here. So a great example of it is.

The American food companies change stuff overseas because they have to. Here they'll cut corners to save money.

Yeah. And a great example of this was the Kraft petition that I started to remove artificial food dyes from mac and cheese. In Europe, if you use Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 in a product or any of these artificial food dyes, you have to put a warning label that says may cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children. Now this warning label is mandatory by the government.

If you use these ingredients.

Right.

But here in the United States, you can get away with using them. So instead of putting the warning label on Kraft Mac and Cheese in Europe, Kraft said, you know what? We're going to change the ingredients. We're going to put beta carotene and paprika. That's what we're going to use over there. But we're not going to change them here in the United States. So they know that their product could cause hyperactivity in children. but they choose not to change it because our government allows them to get away with it. And I feel like that's the most unethical food practice ever. Because as a company, as someone who is serving food to you, as two people, you have, I think, an ethical obligation to say, you know what? I should serve it the least harmful as possible to people. I shouldn't know this information about different regulations and just ignore it for different populations. because I can get away with it and make more money.

-Wow. Crazy. Now, how many... Now, you did a.

Campaign against Kraft a while ago, right? -That's right. It received over 300,000 signatures. Kraft changed. Yeah, Kraft has now removed artificial food.

Dyes from their mac and cheese as well as... -Yeah. -So, they moved the yellow 5 or whatever?

-Yeah, it's gone. -Oh, really? -Yeah. -So, 300,000 names, they removed one or two ingredients or... -Yeah, they actually, yeah, they rechanged it and it was really funny because they the way they launched it, you know, of course they wouldn't give the activists credit or, you know, the, the people out there that were demanding this, all the parent parents that wrote in and wrote letters instead, they said, oh, you know, this is, like, new and improved. And you, you've always just say mac and cheese. You've always loved, you know? And so they, they really just made.

Like, we heard your voices. Yeah. Yeah.

It wasn't like, you know, the customers wanted this.

Right, right. You did this with Subway as well. I remember you doing a campaign and a video about how it had like a yoga mat ingredient in there or something.

That's right. That's another example of an ingredient. It was called azodicarbonamide.

We dubbed it the yoga mat chemical.

Let me know what that means. What is it? What are these chemicals, you know? Yeah, it's a chemical that's used as a dough conditioner. So, you know, when you look at a piece of bread that's been manufactured and you see all those little itty bitty holes and they're like, this perfect realm. But if you bake a bread at home or something has a big hole in the middle, and if you get really good bread from a restaurant that they bake there, it's like all, you know, it's not uniform. Well, azodicarbonamide makes it really uniform. So when you're a fast food giant and you want your bread to all be the same and made exactly the same so people know what they're getting when they get there, you know, and it, you know, it does cheapen the process in terms of it makes it faster to produce as well. That's what they were using. And this ingredient was not only banned in Europe and other places around the world, you would get fined like, you know, several hundred thousand dollars in Singapore if you use this chemical because of the interactions it had with not only it being up in the air and you can inhale it, but also when it's broken down, it turns into a carcinogen. And so, you know, knowing that Subway was using this chemical here in the United States and not elsewhere across the globe, because Subway was like, was the largest, not no longer the largest fast food chain because of this campaign. They were the largest. They were the largest, yeah.

Bigger than McDonald's or bigger than...

They were, they had more stores than McDonald's at one point. No way, really? Wow. They did, yeah.

Four years ago they did.

They had more stores than McDonald's. Wow. They were worldwide. but they were choosing again to service these cheaper, more alarming chemicals here in the United States. And so, you know, I wanted, you know, these campaigns weren't about taking out this chemical or that chemical and suddenly having these products be super healthy. It was about showcasing what is in your food, making people become aware of it. And not only have people become aware of it, there's this amazing trend happening in the marketplace where people are wanting organic and natural foods now. And it's a continuous marketplace that continues to grow because people are becoming aware about what these chemicals are and they don't want to consume them. And it's just a beautiful thing. So we're in this amazing food movement and through this change and being a catalyst for this change and being a voice for this change, I received enormous pushback from several experts and, you know, quote unquote experts didn't know that they were hired experts at the time. I had my hunches that they were hired by the food and chemical industry. And I received a ton of backlash online for these campaigns, and it came out of nowhere. And at the time, I really didn't know how to handle it. And the only way that I knew what to do was just to, like, sit here and, like, not listen to it. So, like, I I canceled Google Alerts because not only... There was so much negativity. And I realized that my mission shouldn't be driven upon what people say about me, whether it's positive or negative. So when something would be happened positive in the press, I'd ask my mother and my team not to send it to me. And I'd ask also anything negative, don't send it to me. Because really, my mission should come within, right? It's really the reason why I'm doing this is not so that I can be popular or be featured in some mainstream magazine. It was so that I could get this message out. I want to talk about the chemicals. I want to talk about the food industry. I want to talk about how people's lives can change and not feel like a zombie anymore, like I used to feel in my early 20s when I was eating all of this processed food. And so, as a result, of me being an activist and me, you know, getting into this kind of spotlight environment. I mean, right after the book came out, you know, after I was on this podcast, I mean, my, my world just like blew up. I mean, you know, Time Magazine reached out, we're like, you know, we're naming you one of the most influential people on the internet. And I was just like, what? Like, what? Like next to Barack Obama, like, no, you're, you're crazy. Jimmy Fallon, like, you're crazy, right? you're crazy.

And.

I was getting these kind of accolades, right? But I also at the same time was being pressured and pushed by this agenda, this media agenda to paint me as pseudo-scientific or someone who doesn't understand chemicals or someone who just, you know, is being a fear-monger or trying to make people afraid of these chemicals in this processed food. they wanted to paint me as this. And so I found myself in this kind of like media frenzy of all these people wanting to interview me, but for the wrong reasons. And so I started to just take a look at what was driving some of these interviews, who are the people behind these requests, and then who are the antagonists in the story that they were interviewing.

And.

It became very, very clear that There was a campaign that was being funded by the food and chemical industry, driven by several different PR firms to attack me as a messenger of change and to do whatever they could do to get me to stop. And not only did they want to do whatever they could do to get me to stop, but they also wanted to confuse the public so that when anybody would listen to something, I would say they would try to question it and say, well, maybe she's just being a little outlandish about this.

I remember seeing this, like on Twitter, there was tons of responses to everything you'd put out and people just spamming everyone and all that stuff. Right.

And that was actually an astroturf campaign. And actually, this is a tactic that's not only used to take down activists, but it's used to take down ideas in the public. So when, when the food industry wants you to believe a thing or the chemical industry or a big conglomerate or any type of industry. They will hire not only astroturfers like, you know, groups of online trolls really.

Just to try to get you to shut up.

Just to try to get people to shut up or to make people who are trying to change the status quo feel stupid about it. So they'll do whatever they can to try to get you to stop sharing the truth. And so not only will they bully you online, but they'll go into comment sections of mainstream media articles and try to fight with people in there and try to showcase fake comments to take the side of the food industry and take the side of the corporations. And not only are there these online troll groups, but they're really being driven by these front groups that are, they look like third-party independent groups, right? They have these long, fancy names.

These associations.

Yeah, they have these long fancy names, but really they're just, they're really there being funded by Coke and Monsanto and all of these other, you know, giant food and chemical companies that are trying to drive the agenda. And one perfect example of this that happened recently is, I'm sure you saw it, headlines everywhere, coconut oil isn't healthy. It was on the front of the USA Today.

Wow.

It was everywhere. And as a person who's been studying health and nutrition now for over 10 years, I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa.

How is it not healthy?

Yeah, and it was every, I mean, I'm not talking, it was just in the USA, I mean, it was on everything. And it was because the American Heart Association was the one delivering the message, and people believe this association. Little do they know that the AHA seal used to be on Trix and other cereals that were, terrible for your health. And they've had their seal, you can buy their seal basically and put it, I mean it was on Subway, it was on a lot of different fast food chains. But not only that is, people see this American Heart Association and they just automatically believe it. They don't even know that a lot of it's being driven by the food and chemical industry and that their experts are being paid secretly behind the scenes from the corn and the canola industry. Dr. Crazy. Dr. So the corn and canola industry is driving this message that coconut oil is unhealthy because they see coconut oil sales take over their sales because people are becoming aware of, wait, how's corn oil produced? How's canola oil produced? Oh, it's produced with hexane and a very carcinogenic gas and oh, it's inflammatory causing in my system. It is an abundance of omega-6 fatty acids and no wonder I need omega-3 in my life and why my body's so out of whack and why I'm experiencing depression and Alzheimer's and all these other diseases because of this reason, right? So you see that you look something, you see a headline and you just automatically believe it. I mean, it was so believable that my mom is texting me and she's like, Mom, she's like, Vonnie, I told you so. I didn't like coconut oil anyways. She's always been like, she just likes good old-fashioned butter, which is good. But, you know, we've always, I've always told her, like, if you fry something, fry it in some coconut oil versus, like, you know, canola oil or corn oil or soy oil. And she's like, Look, it's all over the paper and she's even believing it. And meanwhile, if you don't look behind the headline, you don't look into who's driving this message and the experts who are being paid to promote this agenda, you are going to suffer as an individual because you're, you're going to believe this information, you're going to make these choices about your health and what you're feeding your family, and you're setting them up for failure. And so this is what Feeding youg Lies is about, exposing these tactics, exposing this playbook so that you as the consumer, you become a health investigator yourself. You can see beyond a headline now after reading this book, you can see when you see slews of comments believing one thing that just, you know, your intuition is like saying, I don't know about this. You can kind of dig deeper and see, whoa, is this an astroturf campaign? And I give you tactics on how to handle that if that happens to you. You know, if you're leaving a comment and people are bullying you about a certain belief or view. And not only that, but there are specific lies in there that affect us every single day at the grocery store when you see a label that says, gluten-free and you're on a gluten-free diet, does it mean that that product is safe? It doesn't.

It might be gluten-free, but it might be filled with all these other chemicals.

That's right. I mean, you know, the food industry loves a good diet, right? They love anything that they can use to market processed food in a different way that is fashionable and trendy. And the trendy thing right now is gluten-free, right? Actually, the next the next one is keto, right? And you even see like SlimFast getting into keto products and their products are garbage. It's absolute garbage for your body. I mean, there's, you know, they're full of synthetic chemicals, vitamins and minerals, you know, different artificial sweeteners that, you know, make your metabolism just completely, like, shut down because it starts to, like, create leaky gut. And, you know, you have all of these chemicals that really shouldn't be part of your diet.

You said American milk is something that we should not have in order to fix leaky gut. Is there such thing as non-American milk that is okay to drink?

Yeah, so most people can have sheep milk, can have goat milk. Interestingly enough, goat milk traditionally was called mother's milk.

Because.

The components in goat milk are very different than cow milk. They're far more similar to human milk. And so I actually tell mothers if they're going to give their child some animal milk, please make it goat milk rather than cow's milk.

Okay. Is there any other foods that we should not eat? to heal our leaky gut.

So the more you, and I need.

To talk about this in Plant Paradox as well.

Yeah, the more you, there are a few people that actually react to either the white or the yolk of eggs. Most people don't, but we test for those. And here's just something to throw out. I don't want to cause widespread panic.

Yes.

There is a lectin.

There's probably enough of that in the water right now.

That's right, yeah, we got plenty.

There is a lectin in spinach that I was unaware of, but thanks to a company called Vibrant America, they discovered that there are a class of lectins called aquaporins, and they're present in tobacco, they're present in spinach, they're present in corn, they're present in soybeans, in green peppers and I think that's it. Anyhow, they actually can cause leaky gut and they can cause leaky brain. And I stumbled upon this because I have a few people with really bad IBS and really bad autoimmune disease who are saints. They follow my program, they never cheat, why would they?

Why do they still have it?

Yeah, why do they still have it?

Issues.

And so when we had these new tests, lo and behold, almost every one of these people reacted to spinach. No way. And they ate a lot of spinach. And knock on wood so far, when we took the spinach away from them, that was the key. Now, don't everybody go home and throw out your spinach, but if you're following my program and my program does have spinach in it and we're still having problems, consider giving up spinach. There's no human need for spinach.

Now, you said, what was her name? Is she a doctor Terry?

Is that her name?

Terry Walls. You said she was doing like 10.

Or 12 cups of veggies a day.

For nine cups of vegetables. The snake looking back at you. Now, what should those, now, why is it important to have nine cups of vegetables and what does that do for your microbiome?

So, your gut every day? This is, So getting back to Dr. David Kessler, head of the FDA, we thought that carbohydrates were carbohydrates and, you know, and complex carbohydrates, Sarches were fine because they're complex carbohydrates. Everybody's wrong. Food manufacturers have figured out how to make a complex carbohydrate, a simple carbohydrate, and make you think it's a complex carbohydrate. So when you read a label, Number one, if you have to read a label, you're probably, you should put the package back because there shouldn't be a label on a head of lettuce.

Right.

To give you an example. But you have to take, and if the take-home point from this is, we'll save so many people's lives, read total carbohydrates on the label, then take away the dietary fiber. that'll be the next thing under it. So that will tell you the amount of grams of sugar per serving in that package. Do not look at where it says sugar. Do not look at added sugar. It is a lie.

So it says zero sugar, zero added sugar. Yeah.

So let me give you an example that he used on my podcast, which was a great example. He said, Let me, what would you find in a store? The label says it's 300 calories. It has zero fat. It has zero grams of sugar. And it has four grams of protein. And it has 35 grams of carbohydrates.

Is that broccoli? I don't know.

What is that?

It's a bagel.

A bagel?

A bagel and 300 calories. 300 calories.

Wow.

Zero sugar.

How is that zero sugar?

I thought the- that's just it. The label law lies to you. It's got 35 grams of carbohydrates. Now, to make that- It's turning into sugar, right? which is sugar. It is pure sugar. In fact, it is better than sugar the way it has been manufactured. So you take to figure out how much that is, there's 4 grams of sugar per teaspoon. So let's take his 35 grams of sugar divided by 4. Let's make it easy, make it 36 grams. That's 9 teaspoons of raw sugar in that bagel.

A bagel.

So that's number one. All of a sudden you have- How.

Many grams of sugar would that be?

That'S, well, so a Coke, a 12 ounce Coke is about 12 grams of sugar. So you're basically chugging a Coke when you eat a bagel. It'll actually get into your bloodstream faster than if you chugged a Coke.

No way.

How is it going faster when it's.

Just being broken down? Because it's been broken down, you actually have to digest the sugar molecule in the Coke. You don't have to digest the sugar molecule in a bagel.

Really?

Yeah, main lines. So that's number one. Number two, what nobody knew was the bacteria that most of your bacteria live down in your colon and your lower part of your small intestine. And they're waiting for the complex carbohydrates that you do not digest normally. They're waiting for their meal that always used to come. And that meal never comes anymore because everything's been so finely processed that we don't get those complex carbohydrates down to them. So they starve to death. Now, what's really cool is that those guys take that meal and they make all these really cool compounds that number one, keep the wall of the gut intact, allow the wall of the gut to heal itself. They make compounds that actually are text messages to the mitochondria in all of our cells and particularly in our brain that guys down in the engine room are working under full power. And we've got, you know, Scotty beam me up sort of thing, you know, give me warp drive and we've got the power and you know it's okay to go into hyperspace. If they don't make those compounds, your mitochondria go, geez, I'm not, I got nothing to work with here and we got no backup system, I'm going to sputter down to a crawl. And people wonder why they're fatigued even though they're eating more than ever and they're eating all these sports drinks and they're having 27 cups of coffee, and going, Where's my energy? And it's because we no longer have this beautifully designed symbiotic relationship and we starve the most important part of us. And that's why Jack Lalanne said, if it tastes good, spit it out.

So why nine cups of vegetables then?

Because that is actually giving those guys what they want to eat. Now Terry didn't know this. back then, but her first book was Minding My Mitochondria or Feeding My Mitochondria. But now we know it's actually, we gotta feed those guys. We have to eat for them.

Mitochondria.

We gotta eat for the bacterium.

You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too and still like be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things.

I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.

Absolutely, absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and.

Bringing out different sleep experts, but why just emphasize is sleep important for you? I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep, and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so such faulty logic.

Yeah.

It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I feel it, I know it, I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. So if I... 6:00 AM wake up or... Yeah, 6:30, 6:00 AM, 6:30. But if I were to go to bed at 1:00, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day. And I have this whole wind down process. So my wife and I will watch some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some binge watching catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a Jacuzzi. So I go into the pool's unheated. So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering. It's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the Jacuzzi. So my wife and I'll hang out in the Jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. It's very, we turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal cave caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed and I sleep like a baby as a result of that.

So that's the hot cold therapy.

Yeah, the hot cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down and that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have a lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment.

I always like to keep it cold. Yeah. Okay, and so if you do a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing?

I think it's a good thing.

It'll help you sleep better.

I think so. Try it. I mean, it can't hurt.

You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean?

Well.

There are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, sometimes training, waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes stress.

Sorry.

Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it.

Right, right, right.

Because you never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours. I got here in an hour and. Or I got here in less than an hour.

Right.

So it's good. Yeah.

But.

So. So you have these stresses and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks you're real. They're. They don't exist, you know, that our stress. mechanisms in the body where they evolved to handle true life or death situations. You know, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's going to kill you, a broken leg that may, you know, whatever have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I going to miss my kids' rehearsal or am I going to be late for work or whatever. Those cause stress but they're not life life threatening and yet the brain sees them as life threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now we talked about this before the show that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking maybe if you need a nap you can do that. But certainly that goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says I have to go do six miles today. If you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, the heart rate variability is wrong or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your log book, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout.

I was just rested.

Just rested, yeah.

Gotcha. Okay, the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key.

So in primal endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body is a very sort of temperamental, it's in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not and you can't really plan on when those states are going to be, so you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So it's when you feel good you can go hard, when you don't feel good back off. Take time off. We use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there.

Are.

Tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. you can break those further up into quarterly annual segments always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement.

Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis, train slow to race fast. What does that mean?

Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really to grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years, you basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's 75 to 90% of your max heart rate. And you see how long you can hold that, right? And so you're training to hurt. And it hurts. It hurts you. It does hurt you. But you feel tough as a result of it. But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen. Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now, that's the 80% that we talked.

About with the diet.

But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are... Typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you are 40 years old. so 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training, you're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now, you start out and at that 140, maybe you can only run 13 minute miles, even though you're capable of running 7 minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever. But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. And we know that at that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your or having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning you're building up lactic acid.

You're not burning fat.

You're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out you're running 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate bumping up over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run seven minute miles or six minute miles. But over time, if you stay at that high heart, at that maximum heart rate of, which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12 minute miles, and then 11 minute miles, and then 10:30s and 10s and 9:30s. And what it means is, even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through, now you're burning more fat. so you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym, now you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you.

So just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how... No.

So your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. and it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat, they can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without oxygen. So, you could run a 100-meter sprint with your nose plugged and there's no oxygen involved. It's all. Yeah, you'd still want to breathe. You'd want to breathe at the end of it, and you'd have to recover to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount.

Gotcha.

So when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat, and by the way, the heart, it's interesting, the heart, we're not training the heart to be stronger. The heart's already pretty strong. So the heart doesn't get stronger. The heart doesn't have a PR, right? You know what I mean? It does what it does. But what happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen X amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation.

Okay.

All right. So it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building. phase. And that's just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can already run seven minute miles. Why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably and across the board we see if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that now you're running seven minute 32nd miles and you're getting 92% of your of your energy from fat. So that when you do decide to run those six minute miles, now you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen to get there.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean?

It means partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting. Yes. But not a lot. Okay. This is if you want to be an endurance athlete. Yeah, if you want, even if you want to be an endurance athlete, One thing that athletes used to avoid, like the plague, was the gym. Or if they went, they would do 50 repetitions of a lightweight because they're thinking, well, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running 3,000 repetitions of leg turnover. So why don't I simulate that in.

The-- But you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well.

So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, is your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers have been exhausted and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max power. and you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights. It's typically 80% of your one rep max. and we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions rest 10 seconds, three repetitions rest 10 seconds, two repetitions rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds, and until you can't finish one good rep and then the workouts over. So it's not you just did one set and it might have comprised 200 repetitions, but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power.

Gotcha. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that?

Well, so now we talk about everything else but the training. So if you're, you know, it's spending time with your family, it's playing playing games with your, you know, playing frisbee with your dog, playing ultimate with your, with your, with your friends. It's, you know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured or I might, you know, I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist and twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.

Sure, sure.

Right?

So.

We want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You want to wake up in the morning and go, I got that 10K today. I gotta go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous, you know? But you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun. Do the right sort of training that builds this beast that when you get to the race, you're gonna enjoy it, you're gonna have fun, you're gonna perform probably better than if you've done the old paradigm of training. But you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean, so many of my ex triathlete marathon buddies couldn't have a relationship. It was just imagine-- They put all.

Their energy into one thing.

Yeah, I mean, it's like the wife says, Can't you stay home and cuddle on Saturday morning? And the husband goes, no, I got a 100-mile ride I gotta do. And then I'm gonna go run after that. Then I'm gonna take a nap because I'm gonna feel like crap. I did so much. So we try to look at the life in general and say, well, an awesome life includes participating in these events.

Participating in life.

And doing well, but it also includes participating in life.

Yeah.

Yeah, so not to the exclusion of everything else.

There's the social issues. People don't understand that the quality of the food we eat, the processed food, the refined oils, the sugars, the chemicals, the additives affect behavior. We know, for example, Louis, that in prisons, if you give people a healthy diet in prisons, they will reduce violent crime in the prison by 56%. If you add a vitamin supplement, it goes down by 80% because they're all nutritionally depleted. I mean, I had a patient, not a patient. He was a, I don't know, he was a guy who was in jail, was a murderer. He wrote me a handwritten letter years ago. I followed your program in jail. I realized I was a murderer. My behavior was so violent my whole life. And when I changed my diet, I became a completely different person. I realized it was what I was eating. And now I'm so thankful for having my life back. So, you think our diet also determines our behavior?

Absolutely.

There's clear evidence about that. I was just reading a study the other day that showed that people eat a lot of carbohydrates and sugars and starches. have much more violent behavior. We know that people eat refined oils, which we now have 10% of these as our calories from soybean oil. It's in everything. It's not just so we put it in our food, it's in every packaged processed food. That has led to increase in homicides and violence and suicides around the world. And we've gotten higher on these refined Omega-6s and low on Omega-3s. So the evidence of how it affects behavior, mood, poverty, it keeps poor communities down. and then the food industry targets these communities disproportionately. So you have all these things happening at the same time and then kids, kids can't learn in school because they're eating Doritos and Coke and they can't actually focus and learn and their behavior is all erratic and they're on these chemicals which alter their behavior. That's why one out of six kids has some neurodevelopmental problem, which is enormous, right? ADD now affects one out of 10.

Kids.

I think 14% 15% of kids have ADD and about 1 in 10 kids are on medication.

You think ADD can be moved if we have a better diet?

Or is that something that's in the brain? Absolutely. No, it's not a brain problem. It's a body problem and the body problem is caused by our diet and by environmental toxins. And I've had hundreds of ADD patients who've transformed their lives. I mean, we were talking about the Broken Brain documentary series I did. I had a guy I was in a New York Russian bathhouse the other day. So I come in, I saw your series, I was on an AD medication my whole life and it helped me get off my medication. I mean we see this. So you've got health, you've got the economy, you've got social justice and poverty issues, you've got climate, you've got environment, you've got education. It's all connected and the issue is that most people don't connect the dots, number one, and most people don't realize that we're in this situation because of money in the food system that's driving our policies.

Right, you were mentioning how you were mentioning how, you know, there's some press hits that you do. I won't mention who, but that would say you can't talk about certain things because of a sponsor that's funding the program.

Oh, yeah.

So you can't talk negative about one brand or one product or. No, because of that.

Yeah, that's right. I was so. Well, you can't cover this subject because we get our funding from this sponsor. I can tell you a story from the past because the show's not on the air anymore. It was the Martha Stewart Show. And I was on the show and I worked with the producer and we were talking about getting healthy and working out and detoxing and Martha had her trainer there. And the producer says, well, we're gonna have to do a bit as part of the segment on dairy and how dairy is such a great sports recovery drink. No way. Yes. And so I was like, you know, I'm just sorry to tell you, but there's all this evidence that that's not true. so I downloaded all the scientific papers documenting the science behind the fact that dairy isn't a sports drink. And he's like, I know, but we kind of have to because this spot is sponsored by the dairy council. And then the, if you're ever on television, you know that the experts don't get notes. They don't get cue cards, they don't get teleprompters. They have to know their stuff. Well, this woman, who was the trainer, had all these cue cards that being held up about dairy with all the bullet points of why dairy is such a great food and sports drink. It's insidious. So we think we're getting news, we're.

Thinking getting authentic information. From experts too. From doctors or specialists or experts and.

We are influenced by these experts. Huge. I mean the evidence is so clear that, you know, industry is heavily funding science and they're funding corrupt science. So if you look at the data, for example, artificial sweeteners, 99% of the studies done by the food industry show that they are safe. 99% of the studies on artificial sweeteners done by independent scientists find that they're not safe. You know, if an industry funds a study, they're 8 to 50 times more likely to find a positive benefit for their product. Right, of course.

Right?

Whereas you look at, and then you look at the American Heart Association, the American Diabetic Association, the American Nutrition, I mean, the American Nutrition Dietetic Association, these are all funded by the food industry. And if you look, it's Coca-Cola, it's Pepsi, it's Cargill, it's frightening to see how much money is. You have Trix cereal for kids as a heart-healthy cereal, Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms. I mean, Trix has seven teaspoons of sugar, red dye, blue dye, yellow dye, you dye. It's all in there and it's a heart-healthy food. Why? Because they get $300,000 for every time they put that check on a box. No way. Yes, way. And this is happening globally. Globally, I mean, there's a huge battle going on in Malaysia now because Nestle has promoted this drink called Milo, which I never heard about, but it's a big drink in the developing world and in Asia and South America. And it's basically Ovaltine. It's basically a malted beverage with sugar that has the same glycemic index as Coca-Cola. And they have athletes on there and sports characters and how it's great drink for health. And they had this commercial which I saw which was a Filipino rock star singing this great rap song about how everybody who's a kid has an energy gap. Four out of five kids have this thing called an energy gap. I was at a medical conference. What's an energy gap mean? I was at a medical conference of 1,500 doctors. Anybody here heard of an energy gap that four out of five kids have? No. They completely made this up and they say these kids need Milo for the energy gap.

Yeah.

And this guy who lives over in Malaysia called them out on this and they came out with this huge propaganda campaign against him to discredit him and manipulating the facts and lying. And I was just watching this whole thing. It's unbelievable. So it's not an accident that we're in this situation.

Wow, the manipulation. Yeah. And do you think that all inflammation chronic pain and disease is can be eliminated from the foods we eat or is caused by foods?

I think besides having like a car accident or something.

Yeah.

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

They notice it quickly.

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

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

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

Here's the thing, you've got 11 New York Times best-selling books. You've probably done how many books total?

14.

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

How come you know all the answers? I don't think... After 40 years... I don't think I know all the answers. but I don't have a bone to pick. In other words, I haven't spent my life dedicated to the low-fat diet. I haven't been dedicated my life to veganism. I mean, I'm looking at like what works. And the other thing I know is that I'm not an academic. I do research, but that's not how I started. I'm a practicing doctor. So what's happened over the years is the latest thing comes in, I try it, see what happens, see what happens to the patient. So seeing tens of thousands of patients doing thousands and thousands of lab tests over the years, seeing what happens when people change their diet and how their biology responds, that's the best laboratory you'll ever see. I even noticed it myself. I was a vegetarian for 10 years and I see pictures of myself when I was 28 and I am so scrawny even though I ate really healthy, I ran five miles a day, I did yoga all the time and I look at myself now doing far less exercise and I am far more muscular and have more muscle mass than I did when I was 28. because I learned how to change my diet. And we know that the right kind of high fat diet and adequate protein actually increases muscle mass.

Wow. Yeah.

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

But then you see some athletes that are all vegan who have gained muscle mass and gained strength in your life.

Maybe they're taking steroids.

I don't know, who knows? So you think living a vegetarian or vegan, fully vegan or vegetarian lifestyle that it's hard to gain muscle mass?

I think it's hard. It's hard. It's not impossible. I mean if you really work at it and really work out and there are great vegan athletes out there, but there's never been a historically voluntary vegan society ever. And when you look at... Really?

Yes.

And we look at blue zones or... No, they were never exclusively vegan, right? They always had some animal food. Right, the canawinds.

Fish or something.

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

Right, exactly.

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

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

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

Yeah.

But the real issue is compared to what?

Right. Right.

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

More animal protein?

More animal protein, yeah. It was not a risk factor. Now, these are difficult studies to interpret sometimes because they're observational, but you look at interventional studies where you intervene by giving people high-fat protein diets with lots of plant foods, people do better metabolically. Really? Yeah, it's very hard to eat a low glycemic diet if you're a vegan. You can, but it's very hard. I have a friend who's a keto vegan, and she's a type 1 diabetic.

And she's rocking it.

But you have to know what you're doing.

It's so disciplined.

Yeah, super disciplined. super smart about it.

That's challenging.

So I think, you know, and the data on meat, honestly, which I go into the book in great detail, is confusing for people because it depends on.

The factors of the meat. Whether you get it, the environment it's in, how it's fed, how it's raised.

The stress of it. Exactly.

How it's processed, everything, right?

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

Ate more processed food, more sugar. Of course they were sicker. what should we be doing on a daily basis?

We've got to focus on a couple of things. One is that you have to know the truth and not a truth that was paid for. Okay? Because those truths, those aren't truths. Not in chronic illness. The truths that have been paid for, so someone says, oh, here's the truth about this illness, or here's the truth about Lyme, or here's the truth about Now, any truth has been paid for for that. That's not the ones you go with. Here's the truth. Truth is we have pathogens, we have toxic heavy metals, and we have to learn about the foods that feed these pathogens. And we have to learn how to remove these pathogens, kill them off. We have to learn how to remove toxic heavy metals out of our system, and we have to learn how to use foods as medicine to do it. But when everybody's playing guessing games because they're removing gluten but they don't know why they should, they'll end up eating gluten again because they don't know why they should even really remove it anyway.

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

The number one thing? is eggs.

Don't eat eggs.

Don't eat eggs.

What?

Because the pathogens.

Oh, no.

Yeah, the virus.

I love eggs. Look, take, take shingles virus for one. Like, Spirit of compassion has taught me about what that virus does, right? As far as what symptoms it creates. The shingles virus. And science research doesn't know this. It creates trigeminal neuralgia. That's what it creates. So the shingles, you don't even have to have a rash anywhere in your body, and you can gum pain, jaw pain, neck pain, ear pain, head pain on the side of the head. You can have body pain. You can have all the shingles can do all of this, right? It can make your gums feel like they're burning. It can make your face feel like it's on fire. It can cause all these different things. And shingles virus feeds off of eggs. So when you're eating eggs every single day, you're eventually going to get The shingles virus if you have it because everybody has the shingles virus in their system most everybody has got to be heightened. It's got to be high. Maybe you had an emotional experience that knocked you down really good. Maybe your immune system has been down because you're zinc deficient. That's a huge thing. That's why I'm always recommending zinc. And then you're eating eggs all day. Not all day. Some people eat them all day, but you eat eggs every day.

Three, four times.

That's the first food.

Here's the thing.

So eliminate and never eat eggs or have them once in a while.

There's a big part of, there's a big part of Big Pharma that's really dark that people are unaware of, okay? That dark part of Big Pharma is 80-90 years ago, they raised these viruses in labs using eggs as the virus's food. That's how it's done.

Okay.

So you got your fibromyalgia, you got your autoimmune diagnosis, you got your chronic fatigue syndrome, your multiple sclerosis, you got your Hashimoto's thyroiditis, your eczema psoriasis, your rheumatoid arthritis, or whatever you got going on, your Lyme disease now, because that's an autoimmune now. You got all these things that- From eggs. No, what, well, the bugs that create all these illnesses were raised in labs and somehow escaped those labs 80, 90, 60 years ago. And because, and these bugs were raised on eggs. Eggs was the food. So they took a really great survival food, right? You like eggs? Yeah, I love them.

You love them, right?

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

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

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Look, if they're your own chickens, Organic, great. Free range, great. All that's great. It's better, but it's still gonna feed if you-- if you don't have a chronic symptom, you don't have a chronic illness, you feel great, nothing's going on at any level.

Eat the eggs.

Eat the eggs. And then if something comes up down.

The road, get rid of the eggs. Okay, so that's number one. What's the next food we should never eat?

Dairy products.

All dairy.

Feeds viruses. It feeds the bugs. Feeds the bugs. Goat's milk, sheep's milk, whatever you want. It just, it feeds, yeah, kefir, it feeds the bugs. Okay. Yeah, milk, cheese, butter, a whole bit.

Butter?

Yeah.

Come on, man. So get the butter out of your coffee. It's the worst thing you could do if you're sick. Even ghee?

Yeah.

Ghee is bad.

Yeah, it's not gonna be good. The thing is, again, if you're not feeling any symptoms. None of this stuff is really bad. if you don't have any of the symptoms. Symptoms. If you're not dealing with all the pathogens everybody has, if you're not dealing with the streptococcus and the different groups of strep that everybody has in their system, and if you're not dealing with the different Epstein-Barrs and all of that, if you're not, I mean, if you're not dealing with anything, then you could probably get away with this stuff and you can eat it. Is it bad for you in other ways? Some of it could be, maybe, you know, whatever. And of course, you could always find a paid for study that says Eggs are good or this is good or that's good.

Tons of milk.

Of course. You can always find a paid for study. But that paid for study and everything else around it all, nobody knows why women and men and children are suffering like they are. With the heart arrhythmias that are mysterious and the heart palpitations and all the different body pain and the migraines and the tingles and numbness and the ticks and the spasms, nobody knows. how any of that and the fatigue, nobody knows what's going on or causing all of that. So then, you know, hey, wait a minute, but there was a paid for study saying that eggs are really good for me. And my doctor recommended them because it's a great protein source. Let me just eat them and then try to do my keto diet with eggs. Let me try to do this diet, maybe stay away from gluten. But in the end, and I have total respect for everybody that's trying to experiment. and you know, you'll see it on YouTube too. You'll see like a few years ago people being like, okay, I'm doing this and then all of a sudden they're getting sick. Like it's showcasing now because we have a documented record we never had before with people with symptoms. It's showcasing things now like on social media. We're seeing it now where someone's like, okay, I'm loving my eggs. I'm doing it for like, you know, a year or whatever and then a year later, you know, they're getting C. And psoriasis, and they don't know why. It's like things are, we're seeing it now when we never even could see it before. Because, you know, social media showcasing this, documentation of everything.

Okay, so we got no eggs, no dairy.

What else?

Okay, those are, those, these are the two. These are the basics.

These are the two big ones.

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

That's your third. Those three. So anything that tastes good, eliminate it.

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

Whether you're, you know, gluten, dairy, eggs.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But you're saying meat is okay or plant-based is okay. And or what's the ideal meat?

Here's what a Spirit should tell you. Here.

That you should be.

I'm a big supporter.

Plant-based huge supporter.

Okay. Is Spirit of Compassion a big supporter? Absolutely. Okay. plant-based one. I mean, total big supporter. Okay. But I'm not. I'm not anti the animal product crowd and what they're doing because I'm not against meat either. And I think it gets the plant Pro, the plant based people mad at me that are. That love me. They're like, wait a minute. He's not against him. How come he's not against him? How come he's not fighting for staying away from, you know, animal products and stuff? Because the animal products, like. say meat, right? Doesn't feed a pathogen. So it doesn't feed a pathogen. So I can't take personal, I can't take it personally. You know, personally I like plant-based, you know, better, like on a personal level, but I have nothing against animal protein. Here's how it works. Like years ago when I used to do all the readings, you know, I worked on one-on-one individuals, 250,000 individuals for the last 35 years.

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

Yeah, and it doesn't matter if I like an animal product or not. It's not about what I like, it's about what is going on inside the body. So, Spirit of Compassion will be like, this person has this, so they need to get rid of this food. So, this person has, you say, For example, an HHV6, cytomegalovirus or Epstein-Barr or they got a streptococcus and everybody's walking around these bugs by the way. And yeah, oh yeah, they are. It's just, it's really, it's unbelievable. And so Spirit will say, you have to remove this food. So it's not a personal thing where I have to all of a sudden pick a style.

Just black and white.

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

There you go.

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

They might do butter. Yeah.

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So those are the three main things.

Is there anything else that we should be? And then it's about taking out the toxic heavy metals, taking out the mercury, aluminum, the copper.

Yeah.

Was that fish or is that? If you don't have a lot of metals, you probably eat fish. You could have sardines, you could have trout, you could have salmon, you could have fish if you're not dealing with a lot of metals. But if you've got symptoms and you're dealing with issues and you're struggling, yeah, keep the extra metals out. Exactly. Keep them out. It's important. But getting the metals out of the body, bringing in the, if I can give tips to anybody out there watching this podcast, you have to get on the celery juice.

Why does celery juice have more benefits than water? Why does it help you? to cleanse the toxins, I guess.

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

Yeah.

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

I mean, those are just a couple of things. Okay, so celery juice being one, what.

Else should we be adding? Get the heavy metal detox, the medical medium heavy metal detox smoothie in you so you can remove the metals. So if you're somebody with asthma or psoriasis or lichen sclerosis, or any kind of skin problem of any kind, rosacea.

Vitiligo, acne, metals out.

Yeah, sure, definitely. It even helps with that because streptococcus causes severe cystic acne and that's what's behind that and it does feed on metals too a little bit. But what happens is that you want to get the metals out. Celery juice helps to flush the metals out once you've loosened them up with the heavy metal detox smoothie. So you want the medical medium heavy metal detox smoothie to pull that stuff out. That's one example. And these are just a couple of things you can do. Get rid of your gluten, get rid.

Of your eggs, get rid of your dairy, whatever side of the aisle you're.

On, whatever belief system you're in.

Just get rid of those things and add celery juice and then in the smoothie. -Yeah.

-And you should be healing yourself a lot. -You're moving forward. And then of course, there's a bunch of other stuff you can do and there's tons of information that I talk about all the time adding to all of this but those are some starting points if someone's just going to listen.

To this and then just be like, well, what do we... -Get started here.

Yeah.

You want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health.

Make sure to watch watch this video right here. Humans who eat two cups of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease. And it's because-- Two cups of any type of mushroom?

Any type you want.

Go to the grocery store.

Go to the grocery store. Get some mushrooms.