"THESE Healthy Foods Will Help Prevent DISEASE & Increase Longevity!" | Lewis Howes

So you've got me thinking, okay, well, if the patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? 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. And then it became clear to me that it's our.

How many different types of diabetes are there?

Okay, good.

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.

Your pancreas dies because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balance, keeps. That's the blood. It's sort of the gatekeeper, lets the glucose into your cells. Okay, so it's really important.

So how does that 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 or arthritis. 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 dise diseases, including type 1 diabetes. So that's a very small number of people. 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 urgent care center, and this woman comes in for back pain. She 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 that, soda? I'm like, what is that? She said, that's Coca Cola. No, I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She said, 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 8 or 9 months old. Baby having ice cream for the first time, having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream.

I light up the ice, and then.

The baby, like, grabs the thing and like, stuffed in his face. I was like, oh, my God, it was just so crazy. And it's. It's highly addictive. So. Yeah, so. So now we're seeing 1 in 2Americans suffer from either pre diabetes or type 2 or type 2 diabetes. And. 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 and 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. 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, like, 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. Well, how many.

How many are most of them? Is this like 50, 70, 80% of anyone that comes into the 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 Lyme or mold, you know, most of the time. Or 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 those. 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. And I'm 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, like, gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

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

Right. 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, Root cause. And why? And then it became clear to me that it's our agricultural system that's driving so much 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 can have food.

So we can have 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 crazy.

So you're basically, you know, 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, I got oil and, you know, gas and all this stuff, but what is it?

Is it the trucking? Is it the animal feed?

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 sink, so we lose that.

So they're not sucking in the bad air, sucking out good oxide.

Right? I mean, basically, plants suck out carbon dioxide. That's what they breathe. We breathe oxygen, they breathe carbon dioxide. So that the perfect antidote, right? And then the soil also, we're damaging, by the way, we're farming, we've lost a third of our topsoil. 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 for 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 the soil?

Because soil 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 3 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. That 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 that if you have, like, 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. Right. I mean, carbohydrates comes from the word carbon, which comes from carbon dioxide. Right. Ding, ding, ding. It all connects. And so we've lost.

So we don't have the soil for it to consume. Then we. 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 5 of the 5 million hectares of degraded farmland around the world, if we took just 2 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.

Wow.

Because of putting back the carbon in the soil. And not only that, it holds water. You see, you know, in. In Iowa, in 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 of 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. Soil. We're tilling the soil, we're turning over soil erosion. It runs off into the rivers. 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 when we thought this agricultural revolution was great. All these chemicals are great. Fertilizer is great. We can do all this good stuff. Trackers, 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, it's the soil loss, it's. You said at the deforestation, it's the factory farming the animals, which is should be banned. It's the transportation, storage, refrigeration and the food waste. I mean, food waste, a lot of waste. Yeah, well, we, we waste 40% of our food.

We believe it's not our plate, we don't need it.

Imagine going to the grocery store, buying a bunch of groceries and getting home and throwing 40% in the garbage. The average American waste 1800 dollars 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, like 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 change, 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. No. 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 with this research and information. No, because they got so much money sent to them 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, how do you fight that? So, you know, I always should deride it obvious, but I plan on, you know, 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 UK.

They don't have a lot of these dyes and. 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 Hammer.

Former.

She was, she was, you know, but then she was the FDA commissioner, but now she's former. And I was at the World Economic Forum. I said, peggy, how, how come, you know, we have so much trouble with getting advances in food labeling or dealing with toxic chemicals in our food or the antibiotics and 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 threatened to shut it down?

Yeah.

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

Well, they, 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 asked the question about Asia. We have this thing called grass which is generally recognized as safe. So they. 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. Like so Crisco, for example, trans fat was grandfathered in as a safety 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. Crisco shortening you know, shortened your life.

Oh, my gosh.

And so they, 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, butylene, hydroxytoluen, food additives, various dyes, and something called azodicarbonamide, which is a softener that makes bread more fluffy and soft. And it was just a Subway sandwich. Our friend Vani Hari outed them and said, this is your yoga mat material in your Subway sandwich.

And they got it.

Pretended 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 for putting it in the food.

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

In the U.S. in the U.S. 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. We have 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. It 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, they, they, you know, continue to do it and just laugh. You know, 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.

Like, 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 everybody, my biggest vice, right, Everybody. I love cookies and candies and cakes and brownies. And anything you can think of, I love it. Right.

You know, we programmed all this.

I don't know why I don't have diabetes. So much sugar. I've had my whole life. But I can't be having that much.

Because you look pretty good.

Well, I train hard too.

Right.

I go through waves and. But as a kid, I would drink like nine, ten Dr. Peppers a day. I remember what, like some days in the summer, you just sit there.

President. It's not whatever.

Exactly. I would just, I mean, I would run around and, and work out and play sports, but then I'll just drink because I thought that's what you're talking.

You were 16, 18. You're like.

No, 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 court. 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 Fix, 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 just. People just don't know.

The 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 Luther King's daughter, was all about it and she was excited. But once, once we got a schedule, a few days later I got a call that we couldn't show and 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? Why? Just because Coke funds.

No.

And one of the, one of the people on the board of trustees is one of the highest executives at Coca Cola, an African American woman. It's like. So they co op social groups and that's why they, for example, oppose soda taxes, because they're, they're in the you know, in the funding of these, these big soda companies. And then of course they, they fund research. So they fund 12 times as much research, $12 billion worth of research a year to study nutrition. So Gatorade gets studied by Pepsi.

Really?

Gatorade is the best thing in the world. It's not, it's just sugar. Right. You know. Right, right. So it corrupts and pollutes science. So people are confused. Why is there so much confusion about nutrition science? Third, they, 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 Freedom or the American Council on on Science and Health which by the way is run by a bunch of doctors who suggest that pesticides are safe, that type fructose cornp is great for you, that smoking isn't cause disease. And you know, why do they do.

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 and they're, I mean they spent $30 million fighting GMO labeling in California. This front group, it was all funded by Monsanto. Right. And then you, so you 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 so the Academy, 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 with people saying well, high fructose corn syrup is good and diet drinks are good and it's just completely corrupted. And so these professional societies give guidelines and they're corrupt. And Dr. Ioannides from Stanford, who's a scientist who looks at carefully at the research and conflicts of interest, says 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, 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 what they do. So you've got this massive effort and, and it's often subversive and illegal.

Fixing the heart medically can only take you so far.

Yeah, that's right.

We have to fix something else. And what is that?

Well, you got to fix why for instance, you got heart disease in the first place. And I was taught as all my colleagues were taught that heart disease is kind of inevitable. That, you know, that's the leading cause of death for both men and women.

It's inevitable for all of us.

Yeah, pretty much that's what we were taught. Yeah. And then even if you get it, let's say you get coronary artery disease, that the best we can do is slow it down, to slow the progression. And what I realized, thanks to Big Ed, who I talk about in all my books, who reversed his coronary artery disease.

This is a man who had 100. He was 100 pounds overweight.

Yeah, yeah, he was really overweight. He was late 40s. He had inoperable coronary artery disease. Everything was clogged up. And this guy went.

So you went, you opened him up?

No.

Well, he had gone to six different centers in the United States saying, do something. And everybody who saw him said, well, no, there's no place to do bypasses, there's no place to do stents because everything's clogged up. Have a nice day. And so this guy spent about six months doing this, and he went on a diet during this time, and he went to a health food store and he bought a bunch of supplements, kind of willy nilly, quite frankly. And so when I met him, he was still a huge guy, weighed 265 pounds. And he brings me his angiogram, the movie of his heart from Miami, Florida. And I look at it and I go, you know, I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I'm going to do for you. And he said, well, yeah, that's what everybody says. But here's the deal, you know, I've gone on this diet, I've lost 45 pounds in the last six months, and I've taken all these supplements and, you know, maybe I did something in here, you know, and I'm scratching my profession.

So the video was from six months prior.

Prior.

Wow, okay.

And I said, well, good for you for losing weight. And, you know, I know. Know what you did with those supplements, you made expensive urine, which I fully believed. And he said, well, you know, why don't we do another angiogram? You know, what would it hurt? So I go, don't get your hopes up. But okay, so this guy has cleaned out in six months time, half the blockages in his coronary artery, you know, gone shrunk. And you go, I've never seen this before, that, you know, that that doesn't happen.

And so this is what, after 30 years of doing this?

After 35 years? Yeah, that doesn't happen. You know, come on, that's impossible. You don't clean things out.

The only way to clean it out is through surgery.

Right?

Yeah.

Or put a stent in. So let me give you an example, and this is kind of off the subject. So if you work out with weights and you happen to wear a wedding ring or an aura ring, you get calluses. Right. So calluses are your body's response to protecting itself against an irritation. And you build up layers and layers and. Right. So it turns out that these plaques inside arteries is a response to an irritation, and you build up calluses. And think about it. If I took off this ring and started working out with weights, this callus would go away because there's no longer any irritation. And what Big Ed showed me was he had removed the irritation, so he no longer needed calluses.

His heart started to heal, and it literally goes away.

And so that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years, is teaching people how to remove the irritation to the inside of their blood vessels. And the calluses miraculously go away. They don't miraculously go away. You don't need them anymore.

Right.

Jacqueline used to have this expression, is that if it tastes good, spit it out. He actually meant that you should not be eating for this 2 inch by 3 inch piece of muscle, your tongue, but you should be eating for the microbiome, for the bacteria and all the other cute little viruses that actually live in your gut, live in your mouth, live on your skin. And if you eat for them, they will take care of you because you are actually their home. We're merely a condominium for bugs.

And how many bugs do we have in our body?

We have well over 100 trillion bacteria. And since the human microbiome project was finished about five years ago now, I mean, we didn't know that these guys really existed. In fact, Dr. David Kessler, who was head of the FDA in the Reagan years, who made the guidelines for the labels, the labeling laws on the back of packages that, you know, show saturated fats and carbohydrates. And the labels, by the way, if we get into this, are completely wrong. They were forced on the Reagan administration by big food companies. And so anyhow, you. If you feed bacteria what they want to eat, and that's is all in the longevity paradox, they will take care of you. They will not. They'll take care of the wall, the lining of your gut, and you will not actually age, which is kind of cool.

So if you take care of them, of the bugs in your body, you will not age.

Right. So you got 100 trillion bacteria, you have over 10,000 different species of bacteria, and just last year they discovered another thousand. So who knows, right? So 99% of the genetic material that exists in you and me is non human genetic material. We're only. Our genes are actually so unimportant, it's kind of humorous. And when people take a family history, what they're actually finding out is if you, if your parents taught you how to eat, and most people's parents teach kids how to eat, and your parents had diabetes, or your parents had high blood pressure, or your parents had coronary artery disease and you ate like your parents did, the odds are that you will do that for two reasons, the food choices that you made. But more importantly, you inherited your bacteria from your parents and actually your siblings.

And so it's not the genes of your parents that mean you are susceptible to heart disease or Alzheimer's or whatever, right? It's not the genes of your parents. It's typically the foods they ate that you're probably eating the exact same foods that cause the same type of problems, Correct?

Yeah. I mean, there are, there is an Alzheimer's gene, and my program, according to DL Bredesen, is the best way not to activate that gene. And there are certain genes that people inherit that make the world's meanest, nastiest, stickiest cholesterol that most doctors don't even measure. And oh, by the way, if you're prescribed a statin drug, you know, a lipid lowering drug, it actually worsens the other particle. So, yeah, there are genes, but there's such a small part. Nature magazine had a big article in late 2018, I think, proving that only about 7 or 8% of what will happen to us is based on our genes. And 97 or 98% of what's going to happen to us is based on our environment and our food choices.

Our decisions.

Our decisions. Yeah.

Now you said we can, you know, aging is essentially a choice is what.

I'm hearing you say.

But if someone watching this saying, well, Dr. Gundry, you've got white hair, you look older than when you were 10 years old.

Yes.

How can, so how can, how can you say that you're, you can eat certain things that can reverse aging or can make you not age when you look older than when you were younger.

That's true. I'm definitely chronologically older. But recently on my podcast, I had Dr. Terry Wahls, who I think is very famous, rightfully so for reversing her ms, her multiple sclerosis. And she did it via diet. She did it initially by eating nine cups of vegetables a day. And I, I dare people to try to eat nine cups of vegetables.

A lot of fiber, right?

A lot of fiber. And we'll get back to fiber, because I think that's probably the key. And this is actually what Jacqueline was trying to say. If it tastes good, spit it out. And Terry became famous for telling people that when you look in the toilet every morning, you should see a very large coiled snake looking back up at you. And in fact, in the plant paradox, in the original manuscript, I had said, when you look in the toilet, you should see a giant anaconda looking back up at you. And my editor, Julie Wills called me up, said, do you know there's a movie where an anaconda coming out of the toilet? And I said, oh, yeah. She said, I don't think we want that visual in your book. And she said, let's, let's take that out. So, but what we didn't know, what you, you didn't know. I didn't know, is that that giant coiled snake is not the fiber and the roughage that we ate. It's actually bacteria that have eaten the fiber.

No way. And bacteria inside of us. That's coming out.

That's coming out. So most of your poop, my gosh, is, if you will, baby bacteria.

No way.

And so the more.

So we want to get the bacteria out of us.

No, you want them to grow and prosper. And the more they grow and prosper.

It sounds like aliens in our body. It's like beauty.

You're absolutely right. And one of the things that is kind of hard to embrace is we, we probably only exist as a place for bacteria to live on Earth.

Wow.

And, you know, intelligence.

If there was no bacteria inside of us, we're done. We would die.

So we know that we can breed germ free mice. And interesting fun fact that I put in the longevity paradox. My fifth grade science project was to build a germ free mouse environment. This was in 1980. 1960. And so this isn't my first rodeo. So, so we can build, we can raise germ free mice that have no bacteria in them, have no bugs in them, and they live short lives, really. They have horrible immune systems.

They get sick. They.

They get sick. Yeah. And they. So they're the basis of so much of what we know. And so you can. So bacteria are incredibly important. And we know now that these bacteria actually teach our Immune system from day one. In fact, scary. We used to think that the placenta, where, you know, the baby, the womb, the uterus that feeds the baby is sterile. Of course, it has to be, because the baby has to be sterile. The placenta is full of bacteria feeding, feeding that baby. And it turns out that the bacteria in the placenta actually give information to the baby's immune system before the baby even pops out of the womb.

So we need these viruses, these good viruses.

We need these viruses and bacteria. We need them. And in fact, fun fact, long ago, the only way to treat bacterial infections were viruses that could actually infect bacteria and kill viruses. And Eli Lilly Co. From Indianapolis got its start, this giant pharmaceutical company as what's called a bacteriophage company. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. And it turns out that viruses actually are really useful in us as well. We have trillions and trillions and trillions of viruses in us right now.

What's the difference between a good virus.

And a bad virus if the good virus is doing what it's supposed to do? Okay, let's do a deep dive into microbiology.

Okay.

And what is the definition of virus?

Okay, so a virus is probably the smallest reproducible form of life, however we want to define life. So most living things are capable of reproducing themselves one way or another, dividing or multiplying, multiplying one way or another.

Just like humans.

Exactly.

So a virus, unfortunately, has to have. Cannot replicate itself. It has to borrow another cell and take over the cell's machinery to manufacture more copies of viruses. And that's how they get reproduced. But in the end, every living creature is here just to make a new copy. And you and I only exist was to make a new copy and hopefully actually only exist so my bacteria can make new copies of themselves.

Blood sugar management or control, is one of the key factors of either being healthy or potentially linking to one of these other, I guess, diseases. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah. And what it really comes down to, which kind of gets at your question of what is metabolism? Metabolism is fundamentally the way that we make energy in the body. So we eat food, and food has fat and glucose in it. And either fat or glucose. Glucose is sugar, can be used to convert into a type of energy that our cells can use, which is called ATP. So we take in this substrate, but we have to convert it through our mitochondria in our cells to a form of energy we can use a currency that our body understands and can Use that process of conversion is metabolism. And this is happening in every single one of the 37 trillion cells in our body. And it has to work properly.

So break it down for me. Then fat or glucose or I guess carbohydrates enters the body through the foods we're eating. Right? What happens after that? How is it processed in the body through the cells, through the mitochondria, how is it processed?

Yeah. So looking at carbohydrates, for instance, they go into our digestive tract, they're broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream, broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. These go into the bloodstream, and let's say we're talking about glucose, which is blood sugar. This signals to the body, particularly an organ called the pancreas, to release insulin, which is a hormone. That hormone allows you to take that sugar out of the bloodstream through the cell membrane, into the cell. Once it's inside the cell, it's broken down even further and then goes into the mitochondria to go through a chemical processing that then creates ATP, which is this molecule that can be then used to essentially power all the millions of cellular processes that are happening every second.

So ATP is the power, is the fuel.

It's the fuel. It's the battery in our body.

Okay. And so the way it's processed is it's based on the foods we eat. Whether it be fat or sugar that comes through, does that determine how the quality of the energy or what does that mean within? Is it all equally the same when it converts an ATP or.

Well, I think the way to think about it is to really focus on the mitochondria. This is the energy factory of the cell. This is the powerhouse of the cell. And the thing that people really need to understand is that our diet and our lifestyle in the modern Western world, so past 50 to 100 years, so much of it is actually damaging the mitochondria of our cell and creating problems in that conversion process. So, for instance, when we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days, the average American is eating a lot of sugar, like a hundred times more than we were, like, 100 years ago into the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes stress on the mitochondria and creates damage. And one analogy I sometimes use is, like, imagine you had a factory that was making something like cheese, and all of a sudden you get 100 times more of the raw product, like milk delivered to the factory. The Workers would be like, we don't know where to put this. We can't work. Like, they go on strike. There's nowhere to store it. There's no refrigerators. It would all go bad. All of a sudden, you actually produce less cheese, even though you have more substrate, you know, and so it's like we are giving so much of the substrate to the body that it's gumming up the system. It's breaking down the factory and creating problems. And the molecular way this is happening is that each time you have these glucose spikes from eating these refined products or added sugars, your body's releasing more of that insulin. It's saying, okay, more glucose in the bloodstream. So we have to produce more insulin to get it out of the bloodstream. And over time, the body sees all this insulin circulating, and it's like, we can't bring more of this into the cell. There's too much. And so it actually puts up a block which is called insulin resistance, which is that cellular process that leads you towards problems like diabetes. And so what's happening now is the.

Body, and that's why you're storing fat or you're storing other dead cells that you don't need to keep in the body, I guess. Right, right.

Because insulin is the signal saying tons of glucose around for energy, so we don't need to burn fat for energy. So insulin is also a block on fat burning. So it's this chemical signal saying too much glucose around, blocking it from getting into the cell, and also telling the body not to burn fat. So, of course, for people who are dealing with trouble losing weight, insulin is the hormone we hormone we really, really need to be thinking about. And so we reduce our insulin sensitivity. Now we have lots of glucose circulating in the bloodstream, but it's not able to efficiently get into the cell. And then you've got all these other things that can hurt our mitochondria. And really, a mitochondria energy centric view of health can really help us. Some other things that can hurt the mitochondria are oxidative stress. I know you talked about this a little bit on the podcast with David Perlmutter, but aside from glucose eating too much fructose, this comes with, like, sodas or fruit juice or things that have really high concentration of fructose. It's not going to actually stimulate insulin in the way that glucose does, but what it does is it goes into the cell and it's converted into something called uric acid. And that uric acid creates oxidative stress, which is sort of this sort of damaging, reactive molecule in the mitochondria and creates mitochondrial damage. So now again, you've got more trouble processing energy through mitochondria. Environmental toxins are actually a huge problem as well. They can directly damage the machinery of the mitochondria. So we're thinking about things like pesticides and a lot of the fragrances in our personal care products and a lot of the fragrances and chemicals in our home care products. These things actually go into our bodies, damage our mitochondria, make it difficult to produce energy effectively. Chronic stress can damage our mitochondria through cortisol and through our stress hormones. So it's interesting to think about how all these different aspects of modern life fundamentally feed down into damaging this precious part of our cell that creates energy.

So blood sugar management and metabolism management, is that right? So the main things we think about, how does blood sugar and metabolism work together?

Yeah. So the way that those sort of things link up is that if your blood sugar is quite erratic, like let's say it's going up and down, big spikes in fat every day.

Yeah. You're having lots of sugar, you're just eating poorly, you're stressed, you're overwhelmed.

Yeah. And the majority of foods on the shelves in our grocery stores now have added sugar, like well over 60%. So it's not unusual for an American to be on that blood sugar roller coaster. Up, down, up, down, up, down. And that's called glycemic variability. And that process of glycemic variability is very damaging to our metabolism through the mechanisms we spoke about of causing insulin resistance by stressing the body to make too much insulin over and over. But those high blood sugar spikes in their own right can cause damage as well. When your blood sugar acutely goes really high, like after eating a pop tart or eating a pastry or something like that, or a big bowl of pasta. That spike can lead to, to inflammation, it can lead to oxidative stress because of the way that it's overwhelming our systems and creating free radicals. It can also cause a process called glycation, which is where sugar sticks to things in the body. And so if you can imagine if your concentration of blood sugar is really high, it's kind of going to just stick to things more like your blood vessels and proteins. And that's not good. That's like a signal for the body that something wrong. And so all of these things kind of coalesce to just creating problems. So the more that we can Minimize our glycemic variability and go from spikes and valleys to more gentle rolling hills. The better we are, the better we're going to basically be treating our cells. And it's not just, it's not just the sort of like cellular optimization we're trying to do. It's also the way you, you feel. I think a lot of us have had that experience where we have a really high carb meal, a big dessert, and we feel like we kind of have a crash afterwards. It's like that post meal crash, we feel lethargic, like we may need to have another cup of coffee or even feel jittery after like a big high carb meal. That's, we really understand how that works. The body sees a huge load of glucose from a high carb meal. The body then surges out. That insulin overcompensates, soaks up all that glucose and you crash. And in that crash state is when we feel fatigue, potentially some anxiety, and it's when people usually feel cravings. So by letting you want more when you crash, you want more to bring yourself back up because you've kind of crashed and then you're on the vicious cycle. And I think the majority of American bodies are on that cycle. Because you think about what we eat, it's like breakfast, it's cereal, juice, toast, pop tarts, pastries, you know, sweetened coffee, beverages that's all refined sugar and refined grains. Then you go to lunch and it's bread, tortillas, wraps, chips, you know, all of that stuff. And then you go to dinner, pasta, potatoes, whatever, and then it's, and then it's dessert. And it's like, if you're not, if you're just going along the normal American cultural treadmill of what's normal to eat, you're on a glucose roller coaster. And that means that your day might be highly labile in terms of be, energy, mood, performance, cravings. And so learning just simple ways to balance out that glucose rollercoaster can be an amazing life hack and really a superpower for essentially getting your day under better control, making you feel better in the moment.

Yes.

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

It's a healer. Right?

Right. If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation, if we got an infection, they would be deadly without inflammation. It's an influence, important part of our evolution in our health.

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?

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

Out of how many?

Right. Around 330,000. 300.

330 million.

I'm sorry, 330.

So 240 million.

Yeah. So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80%. How is that possible now exactly?

Should we gotten this far? Yeah. How is it just food is too accessible. The wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people. Now the, you know, social media, is it laziness?

Is it.

Why have we shifted from being a healthy nation, I don't know, probably 60, 70 years ago, to an unhealthy nation?

Yeah, it's really a perfect storm of, of all the things. So I, the first thing to look at and to ask is what's going on? Because our genes expect certain things from us. Our DNA expects certain things to have healthy outcomes or healthy cell replication, healthy expression. And so we've got to look at what are the things our genes expect of us. Our genes expect us to move.

Right.

For example, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity and recorded human history. We're the most sedentary culture to ever exist right now.

All of humanity or just USA, right?

Especially the U.S. we're the, we're the LeBron James. We're the king of sedentary.

We're the Homer Simpsons.

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

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

We'll just. Power, power pack, bullet point. These, number one. And this is because our culture, we are we. I always like to connect to something visceral and people we care about how we look, of course.

And so you're young.

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

Yeah.

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

Same calories. Yeah, everything.

But when they were sleep deprived, when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately, adequately rested, when they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just by sleeping more.

That's crazy.

It's. It doesn't even make sense.

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

What was it just like everything is the same. This is what I love too. It's a Ward study. So they're under the conditions where they can track everything.

Wow.

Now, here's another part of study I don't often and talk about is that they actually did biopsies. So they actually took fat cells. Fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions. And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too. Because when the fat cells were not. When you, when they weren't adequately, adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant, which should become like. That should put up a huge red flag because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs, is carrying more belly fatigue. Right. So the fat cells themselves Looking at them versus when you're well rested, versus when you're sleep deprived. Your fat cells themselves become insulin resistant and it's just going to lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on. So that's just one part, one thing. So number one, number two, the cognitive performance. And I love this study, this was published in the Lancet and they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task and tracked all their numbers and they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine, and have them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different like surgical type of simulation. They made 20% more mistakes doing the exact same thing and it took them 14% longer to do the exact.

Wow.

All right, so, and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective. Right. And so that's a number, that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance number three. And this it parallels with cognitive performance is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans and you know, we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep deprived brain Just again, 24 hours of sleep deprivation. And the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishment between, between right and wrong, social control. So the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally as we're more and more tired, just shuts down with the.

Lack of sleep, with the lack of.

Sleep coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sunshine. You just came back from Vegas. So these changes happen in the brain very quickly and that leads into number. Well, number three, reduced cognitive performance. So being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions, and then we'll go to number four, it's going to lean into this as well. With the brain function is I talked a little bit about this earlier. During sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system, waste management system, cleansing it all out. It's 10 times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake. So this. And your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's A lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself. And also insulin resistance in the brain we can talk about later. But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen? They do it on their own. Are we getting that?

The final thing, so four is the cleansing, right?

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

Wow.

They improved, significantly improved their free throw shooting and their three point shooting just by getting more sleep.

All right.

And these are things that we just kind of on a periphery. You kind of know that, but at the same time, are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain, Usain Bolt, same thing, it's a part of his training now. Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on. These things weren't taught to us when we were in high school. It was just like get up at.

4Am and lift, right?

Just go, just go run into somebody.

You know what I mean?

Make a play, make a play. But today, you know, it's really built into the, into the system. Also the strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis. Whereas now if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which I'm. It's so weird for Me to say this right now, this is like the coolest thing. I actually got chills. Ozzy Smith, right? So having the opportunity.

St. Louis icon, man.

Icon. When I was a kid, my two idols were Ozzy Smith and Michael Jackson.

Wow.

Yeah.

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

Crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right? He's out there back flipping with the glove on.

It's cool.

So powerful. But it's a big part of what our genes expect is to. Is to be strong in some different domain. And we talked about this before the show. That translates over into our lives as well, you know, so that strength, if you can train your body and your. Because your mind is in play too, life gets a little bit easier in many aspects. You know, like, you feel more physically ready to handle whatever life throws at you, you know, and so in the context that final one is being able to perform at a high level, to recover from the training that we do, all the magic happens when you're sleeping.

Absolutely.

When you're up in the gym and training or you're out on the field competing, you're just tearing your body up. That's all catabolic stuff. You get the anabolic reward when you go to sleep.

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

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

So thinking is a part of the mind. Is that right?

Also the brain as well.

It's both.

Yeah. It's kind of within the brain. Then we start to create as she shares. I don't know if she did this with. With you, but she brings up the.

Little trees and all these things, branches.

So we start to create these with a thought. Little thought trees start to bear fruits. But we can supersede it. Your mind is bigger than just your brain. We tend to think that because everything is kind of up here, but our mind is in our toe as well. And our mind is just. Yeah. In our gut.

It's Emeran Mehron.

Yeah.

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

It's so fascinating.

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

Yeah. So, for example, even our heart within the gut, the human brain itself is just an absolute universe of neurons. So it's like 84 billion neurons. Right. I was thinking about human cells overall. So we have about 84 billion neurons in the brain. We have about 100 million in the. The gut. All right, so these. This is like nerve tissue. It's like a mass of neural tissue in the gut. But the heart also has neurons as well. So when it's called, anybody can go to Dr. Google and look this up. It's called the heart brain. All right, so your brain, your heart actually has this kind of ability to think, and there's this electromagnetic energy that it's expressing. And there's a field also, it's called a tube torus that's been monitored that's expanding beyond our body to be able to see this. And if folks want to check out the work from HeartMath Institute, Heart Math. Heartmath Institute is phenomenal. I've been, you know, probably for about 10 to 15 years connected with heart math institutes. Just absolutely phenomenal.

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

So what does this feel?

An energy field?

We'll keep it real, real simple first, which is, if we think about the electrical energy that the heart is kicking off, like when you're in the hospital, Right. And you see the monitor, it's not reading the smoke coming off your heart, it's reading the electrical energy that's coming off the heart.

Right.

So we got EKGs and things of that nature. So we can read the electrical currency that the body is throwing off. Your body is just teeming with energy. And there's even a form of energy that we generate, it's called piezoelectricity. Right? Just for moving, we're generating energy and electricity. So just from a very simplistic level, the heart is kicking off energy that we can't see. That's the thing about it, right? It's emanating from beyond us. Even our skin is emanating energy. We just see a certain spectrum of light as humans, we see a certain spectrum of, of energy.

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from Heartmath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, it can be upwards of, Last checked, around 8ft from your body. And so now this is getting into some freaky stuff, right? And I'm a very, give it to me. I'm a very logical, analytical human. So seeing is believing for me. But then we get into. There's many things that are just. And also I'm very open minded, is well. And there's many things that we don't understand. But when we talk about people being in your space and you picking up people's energy and interacting and that stuff is very real. You know, you can pick up people's vibes, you know, bad, bad vibes. So we don't want to downplay that because other, other species of animals, they have that bigger connection and we can, we can attribute like bees, for example, you know, in this, quote, hive mind. But we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years I've been seeking to find, how can I explain this to people to make sense Because I'm a very solid thinker, you know, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers, they found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes all they had to do was create some rapport and their brainwaves starts to sync up.

Come on.

Their brainwaves started syncing up just by having rapport and talking about to another person. We start syncing up and this is, this happens all the time.

What does that mean that we sync up? The brain is what.

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

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

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

It's not the mind. So what is the mind that's put.

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

Where is it like here? Is it around here?

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

It's not.

It's not. It's actually not. What is the mind is, as it.

Seems like you hear about it more and more recently, that so many people are getting cancer or the early stages of cancer. What are the main causes of cancer?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. And sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort of a cop out, because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer. And these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens. And the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people, you can look at the sort of. A couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer. And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of by far and away the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2015. So it was higher before when more people are smoking. But as a contributor to cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general, and far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or chemicals, sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer, but the contribution in a whole population is very small. What's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? And that's where things sort of bogged down a lot. Initially in the 70s, people talked about fiber. So people thought about, oh, hey, well, maybe if you Eat a lot of fiber. What you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat. So if you remember the 80s and 90s, there's this huge movement against fat that, you know, all fat is bad for you. It caused heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which is sort of been, you know, overturned at this point. But there's this thought, maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer. So we tested vitamin A didn't work. Vitamin D, B didn't work. Folic acid didn't work. Vitamin C didn't work. Vitamin D didn't work. Vitamin E didn't work. Selenium didn't work. Omega 3 fatty acids didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. So we were sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, no, it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity related disease. So what happened, of course, is that in the 70s, 80s and 90s, people didn't really think about it. But then we had this obesity epidemic. So it became a bigger and bigger problem. So obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, that was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, you know, obesity is actually a huge risk factor as well as type 2 diabetes. And both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer law. So it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking. Like if you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking. Or if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung. Again, obesity plays no role. But things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity related cancers. So that was the sort of big link. And to this, you know, at this point, the World health organization considers 13 different types of cancer as Obesity related cancers, which is huge because from 2003 we didn't even know. Like when I went to medical school, nobody thought obesity caused cancer. Really, it's almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. So therefore if you know that, that's super powerful because if you can maintain a normal weight, you're going to reduce, just like stopping smoking, right? You're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer.

But aren't there a lot of healthy people out there or non obese people that also get cancer?

Absolutely, because there's a lot of different things that go on and that's what I spend the first half of the book talking about is how the sort of cancers develop. So it's not just about obesity. Just like you can smoke forever and not get lung cancer, but it raises your risk.

So same as what, what are the other factors? If you're, say you're, there's people out there, they're super healthy, they're working out, they're eating well, but then they get cancer. They're under 15% body fat, 12% body fat. What are those other factors of people getting cancer? Main factor.

Yeah, the rest of it we actually know very little about. So we need to know more about those because certain. So smoking and diet are probably your biggest factors. And then there's a whole, there's like a hundred different other risk factors for cancer. These are the other carcinogens that we talk about, but also things such as background radiation and sun exposure, like if you get too much sun, for example. So there's all sorts of other things and genetics plays a role. But one of the big mistakes I think we made is that we focus so much on the genetics part of it, thinking that, well, this is sort of a random mutation that causes cancer. Not sort of, which puts the, puts the onus on sort of this random luck sort of idea that it's just bad luck.

My parents had this, my grandparents had this gene. So I have this. I'm gonna get cancer.

Yeah, exactly. And some people think that that's sort of a death sentence. Like if you take brca, which is a certain type of gene, for example. So this is the gene that Angelina Jolie, for example, got diagnosed with. Her mom had cancer think, or an aunt had cancer. So she got tested and she had the gene. And people think, well for sure you're going to get cancer. But it turns out that if you look at the incidence of cancer, if you have BRCA, if you have that gene in like in the 30s and 40s and 50s, that risk of breast cancer was like 30% compared to sort of like 80% in modern day America. So what's the difference? Even though you have the same genes, what's the difference between those two situations? And it comes down to the lifestyle. The point about cancer is that cancer is like a seed. So if you have other genetics, you have the propensity to develop cancer. And this seed of cancer actually exists in all of our cells, and actually not just all our cells, but in all multicellular animals have that sort of seed of cancer. So what's important then is you can't do anything about the seed, but what you can do something about is the soil, which is that if you provide a fertile sort of soil for that seed to germinate, then you are going to increase your risk of developing this cancer. And cancer is not a rare disease. I mean, it affects like 1 in 10 of us, 1 in 8 of us, something like that. So it's something that we really have to think about as we live longer, because it is one of these really important things.

And it sounds like, you know, in the next 30 to 60 years, if we don't figure out how to reverse this or solve this, or I guess create bad soil for the seed of cancer by creating healthy habits in other ways, it seems like this is going to accelerate. Where it was 30%, I guess, 20, 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, and now it's 80%. I guess it's going to be even more in 20 to 30 years, right?

Oh, absolutely. And the trend is very clear because if you look at the, the biggest killers of Americans, it's always been heart disease and cancer. So if you go back sort of to 70, so 50 years ago, you look at heart disease, number one killer of Americans, that's heart attacks, strokes, that kind of thing. Cancer was a fairly distant second. But the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very, very quickly. And the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very, very, very quick.

Why is that?

It's because cancer is a very complex disease. And the way we think about cancer, we just don't know what it is. So for such a common disease, it's a total mystery why we get this cancer. Because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us. That is, if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer, for example, that cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells. So why would it want to do this? That is, if you get cancer, then the cancer grows, and then it kills you, and it kills itself. Why would this sort of thing ever develop? It doesn't make any sense from a sort of looking at it that way.

But most diseases want to spread, but they want to stay alive.

Exactly.

Like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily. It wants to be able to spread, to infect other people.

Exactly. And if you sort of bystander, it just kills you along the way. But that's not its primary purpose. So the point about cancer is that we have never sort of understood what this is as a disease. That is, if you look at heart disease, heart disease is caused by blockages in arteries. So we develop all kinds of things. So we develop drugs, we develop blood thinners. We develop, you know, you go in and you use a balloon to open up the artery. You develop new technologies, such as imaging technologies. You develop ways to monitor patients. So, because you know what causes it. Because if you don't know what causes something, it's really hard to fix. Like, if you have a car and all you hear is a random plank and you don't know what the clanking is from, it is really hard to fix it. Same thing with diseases. If you have a disease like Covid, for example, you know it's a virus, well, now at least you have somewhere that you can start that is, okay, it's a virus. Let's develop vaccine or let's develop some antiviral drug. But if you have no idea what this disease actually is, then you have nowhere to go. So that's what I talk about, is how we think about cancer. The paradigm of cancer as a disease, what causes it? You have to first understand what it is. And that's been the real mystery, the medical mystery is what is cancer? And the way we look at cancer has changed significantly over the last 10 years. And most people don't even understand that. So it's a very interesting story from that standpoint.

Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned the heart disease. I saw Dr. Steven Gundry endorsed the back of your cancer code book, and he's been on my show a few times, and he's a guy who did 10,000 heart surgeries and realized that, like, the things that he was doing on the surface level to create temporary relief, people were coming back in because they weren't solving the root problem, which was a lot of it around diet and lifestyle. And that's what I'm hearing you say is that diet is a massive contributor to cultivating the seed of Cancer to grow and flourish with the wrong diet. Is it possible in your mind to reverse cancer by the right diet and by fasting, which is something you talk about a lot?

Oh yeah, because the thing is that if you like once you have the cancer it's really hard because that's sort of like, you know, if you, if you don't change the oil in your car then your car breaks down, they say, oh, I'm going to start changing the oil my car. Well, yeah, that's good. But you need a lot more than that. It's the same thing. Once you actually develop the cancer, then it's really hard to fix. From a diet standpoint you really need the drugs that we've spent, you know, millions and billions of dollars developing over these last 30 years. But in terms of preventing cancer, there's actually no reason why you couldn't. Because you can look at sort of people who live in a traditional society, for example. So you can take a look at say the Inuit or the American Indians sort of before sort of they became westernized. Or you can look at the African people before they were sort of assimilated into a western culture. And interestingly those peoples were actually considered, some of them were considered immune to cancer. There was so little cancer that they thought that the Inuit for example, or what used to be called the Eskimos actually could not get cancer. So the university, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, they used to send an expedition up to the Arctic Circle every year to study why these Inuit couldn't get cancer. Of course, as they became westernized and started eating sugar and white flour, then they started getting all the same cancers that we did in Africa. For example, this fellow by the name of Denis Burkitt who is a missionary and doctor, when he got down there he's like, wow. He was like, look at the difference. The people who live traditionally in Africa get no cancer, no colon cancer. But the minute they transition to a western style civilization with their foods, with their, you know, the whole thing, they actually start to get cancer. You don't find cancer when that. So it was called actually a disease of civilization. So all of these diseases, obesity, diabetes and cancer were not found in people living traditionally. So the point is not that, you know, one is that they didn't live as long. But the point is that if you can find and understand what makes it protective from them, why this sort of soil like we all have to see, but the soil was different. What it is about that, if we can understand that, then you can reduce your Risk substantially to the point where your risk is very low. Again, as an example, if you take a Japanese or Chinese woman from Japan or from Shanghai and you move them to San Francisco, within a couple of generations, the risk of breast cancer approximately triples.

Crazy.

So it's crazy. Exactly. But that's great hope, because if you.

Know the root of it, then you can go back to a different way of living.

Exactly. Because if you can and remember Shanghai and Japan and so on, they're modern societies. So if you can understand what it is about the diet, about the lifestyle that's so important, you could actually take that woman in San Francisco and reduce her risk of breast cancer by a third. So that's very, very powerful knowledge.

So what would you say are the five foods we must eliminate to support us in preventing cancer? What are those five key things you're like? And if you can get rid of as much of this as possible, it's going to really support your chances?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. And it's sort of sugar is probably one of the very, very important things that we really need to lower because that really supports it, and it gets to how cancer develops. A lot of the refined foods and people talk, and the most that we eat, like, the one thing we eat more than anything else tends to be refined carbohydrates. So, you know, white bread and that kind of thing. That's probably the most important thing is the sugar and refined grains. Refined anything is probably bad for you. So even if you're not talking about carbohydrates, but refined, say oils, you should eat natural oils, eat foods that are sort of in the natural state. And refined meats, like eating bologna, for example, People talk about meat all the time. There's a big difference between bologna and grass finished beef sort of thing. There's a huge difference because one is jam packed full of chemicals and other crap, and one is just beef. Right. And people have been eating beef for thousands of years. So those refined foods are refined carbs, but also refined fats and refined proteins. Probably those play a decent role, although the evidence is lower. And then the other thing that is really important, the fifth thing that's probably very important, is likely the frequency that we eat. That is, eating all the time provides that sort of fertile soil. So to understand why this is, you have to get back to sort of how cancer develops. So you have to understand that cancer almost develops, evolves almost as a separate species from us. So when you have a breast cancer cell, for example, it originated From a normal breast cell, but after evolves, it grows or doesn't grow, Depending on growth factors. And it's almost a separate species from us. That is, it will grow and it won't. The normal breast cell or a normal lung cell, they will do everything to, you know, play on the team. Right. So they're always supporting the body. Your partner, team player. Those cancer cells are not team players. Basically, they're out for themselves.

And it's the enemy coming to attack you.

That's right. It's like the guy who's just trying to pad his stats, you know? Right. It's like, you should have passed.

It's like.

But that's the point, that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival. That is, it will grow, and it will grow at the expense of its neighbor. So it will keep growing, and it will destroy everything around it. So it will move around. For example. So a breast cancer cell Will move around the body, and that's not for the good of the whole body.

Right.

It's for the good of itself. It's trying to spread itself around. So you got to realize that the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism. And it sounds very strange to say, okay, we have this foreign organism Almost like an infection in us, but that's actually how our body sees that cancer, that is our immune system actually detects Is a very powerful. You know, it kills stuff, but it's very powerful. So it has to be reined in because you don't want it destroying normal parts of the body. So it recognizes certain cells as foreign, and certain cells itself. And cancers are actually innately seen as foreign cells. So it is a foreign invader, almost, that has evolved from us. But during the development of this cancer, it will grow or not grow, depending on growth signals. So our body has certain nutrient sensors. So nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available. So when you eat, certain hormones like insulin and mtor will go up. That tells our body that food is available, we should grow. Because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food. It's just natural. If there's no food, you, got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells. So if you're eating all the time, and you're always activating these nutrient sensors, you're actually telling your body, grow, grow, grow, grow. So if you eat six, eight times a day, you're telling your body your cells in your body grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. If you eat fewer times, like, three times a day, or you do intermittent fasting. If you don't eat at all, what you're going to do is shut down those growth signals and the cancer will have a to grow. So if you grow breast cancer cells in the lab, for example, you can't do it without insulin. It will actually wither up and die. So therefore, if you know that, then you can say, well, if I. And that's one of the secret.

Insulin. Insulin comes from eating any food, or is this only sugar?

Obviously it's carbohydrates and protein. But the nutrient sensors come from different foods. So different foods will activate different nutrient sensors. But the point is that if you don't eat, like fasting, for example, one is you're going to lower your insulin levels, which will, you know, lower the growth. Overall growth signaling in our body, which is a good thing for adults and adults, growth is not good. Generally you'd stay the same size. You don't want to be growing too much because the, you know, growth, a high growth environment, of course, lets the cancer sort of grow out of control. And that was the secret to why vitamins, for example, was not a good thing. Because it's basically growth. It supports growth of cells. And what they found in a lot of studies was when they gave people these vitamin supplements, they actually got more cancer. They didn't get less cancer, they got more cancer. So in fact, it's just like if you spread fertilizer on an empty field, you want the grass to grow, but what grows are a bunch of weeds because you've put down all this growth signaling stuff. So therefore all you get is the weeds. Same with the body.

So are supplements and vitamins bad for us then?

There's no evidence that it's really bad for you. When you give high doses in these studies, you do get certain ones. So folic acid, for example, and beta carotene, which is a precursor to vitamin A. In those two studies, there is actually a suggestion that you actually get more cancer from them. Because in our current situation in North America, most of us are not vitamin deficient. Most of us actually have too much. You actually want to slow down the growth, really. And this is why obesity and type 2 diabetes are so intimately linked with cancer, is because both conditions are conditions where we have too much insulin in our body.

So we want to lower insulin overall because insulin is one of the main causes of the fertilizer for cancer to potentially grow.

Exactly. And there's several ways to do that. One is to change either the foods that you eat and that is the sugar for example, the refined carbohydrates that make up the bulk of our diet. And the other thing is to change the frequency with which you eat, because you can affect both things. So just like if you're, for example, to pay $10 and you pay it every day adds up quickly, right? If you have a coffee every day and it's like, you know, five or seven bucks at Starbucks every day, Every day, every day, it adds up. So just like that, it's not just the amount that you're paying, which is not much, but it's the frequency, right? Same thing with the foods. It's not just the amount that you eat or what it is that you eat, it's how often you eat it. So if you're eating now six, eight times a day, well, that's a lot worse if you ate once a day, right? That's just basic math. Like you can't get around that. And the problem is, of course, that if you, if you look at how people eat today compared to sort of 1970, it's very different. So in 1970, people ate three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. No snacks. Nobody ate snacks back then.

Now it's snack culture. Snacking all day.

Exactly. And people say it's good for you. People say, oh, you should eat multiple times in the day, six times a day, it's good for you. But nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do. Right. It's not like your great grandparents working in the factory, taking off every two hours to make themselves a little, you know, ham sandwich or something, right? It was like, there's work to do, you eat when you have time. So, you know, in the 70s, it's funny because I always say you had breakfast, lunch and dinner and that was it. If you wanted an after school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. And if you wanted a bedtime snack, she would have said, no, you should ate more at dinner. Right?

You should have finished your meal.

Exactly. And that was the point. And nobody ate, not a lot of desserts and all that. Nowadays, of course, when you look at the studies, people are eating five, six times a day. You even look at schools, it's like, oh, they're gonna have breakfast, then they're gonna have a mid morning snack, then they're gonna have lunch, then they're gonna have an after school snack, then they're gonna eat dinner. And then if they play soccer in between the halves of soccer, parents think that you need to feed Them like cookies. It's like, hey, well, you know, I played soccer growing up and nobody chased me around with a bunch of cookies. He had a great time. You didn't need it, right? And, but, but that's six times a day, every single day. And it's ingrained into us.

How does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the Ultra Mind Solution about how the body affects the mind. We often know about the mind body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of, of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And, and this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example at Harvard of nutritional psychiatry. There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast. The doctors Pharmacy. The doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain and mood. And we see depression, anxiety, urgent irritability, stress. It turns out that when you eat the American diet, otherwise known as the SAD diet, the standard American diet, that, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. You know, when you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our Diet, I mean 95% of us are deficient probably in omega 3 fat fats. You know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play role in mood like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. When you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who are eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders, often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example. When you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone. Your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber tooth tiger.

Wow.

And, and that, and that can create.

Anxiety internally with the insulin.

Internally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal, but if you eat all that crap, your brain is going to feel it. Your, your body's going to feel it. So what happened?

What happens to the brain when the, when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain? And then it starts to, you know, what does that do? Is it inflame it in that moment? Does it take time to inflame something?

So, so there's a whole cascade that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar. That's 60% of our diet. Right. It's ultra processed food. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol. Cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It, it drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten, sugar and starch and whatever bad fats drives it into your fat cells. And it's a one way street into your fat cells called your adipocytes around your belly. Those belly fat cells, those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones, inflammatory marker markers and messengers, neurotransmitters. It's quite striking when you look at. They're not just like holding up your pants. It's fat there. It's like it's actually doing stuff. And when you eat in that way, it drives hunger, it stores fat, it shuts down your metabolism and it slows, literally slows your metabolism. And even worse, it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one way turnstile, only get in and then on top of that it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules, we call them adipocytokines that go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's kind of a downstream effect over chronic eating. This way, if you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you. Right. But if you're constantly eating this stuff, and we're talking about the average American eats a pound almost of flour and sugar a day. Wow. A pound like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up and it's. And I know I'm not that eating that much and you aren't, so a lot of people are making up for the difference.

Right, right. So food affects your mood for sure.

Yeah. And not even that. It's not even just, you know, it was striking. And I don't know if you had David Plummetter on the show, but he wrote a book called Brainwash. And it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this American diet that we're all eating. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now, what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is a grown up. Is the adult in the room? It's like, it's like you think you're going to punch that guy, but you go, I better not punch that guy. Right. It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain. It's going to just run or fight or flee. And it's. And, and what happens is, literally, physiologically, these parts of the brain are connected, but when you eat crap, they get disconnected. Connected. And so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grownup in the room, which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred. And I mean, just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now, I think a large part of that has to do with our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian insult that is driving behavior change. And when we look at. And we look at the fact of other data to support it's not just a theory. In prisons, if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons, which is pretty darn bad, there's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it's an 80% reduction.

Come on.

If you look at kids and this is in juvenile detention centers. They've done clinical trials because he's got these people locked up. So you've got. It's a really great kind of study. Now these kind of studies are hard to do because mostly we're free. We call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want. They don't. You don't follow the protocol when you're locked up. You get what you get. Right. And so they took these.

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

That's right. And they took these kids and they. And they. These were kids who were disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. It was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods was a 91% reduction in all violent behavior. You know, oppositional behavior, need for restraints. Went down suicide. Suicide went down 100%. I mean, it's the third leading cause of death in that age group. It went down 100. No, no suicides. And so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry. And you know, wait a minute. Maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems of chronic disease and the fact that Covid is. Is landed on a perfect, you know, laboratory for spreading in America because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet, but it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our. And our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing at rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health?

Oh, that's not hard. So, I mean, you know, in my book the Pig is diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. And, and it's really practical, and there's a bunch of steps at the end. But, but I think, you know, the, the real dangers are one, high fructose corn syrup. Because anything with high fructose corn syrup, almost by definition is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other bad crap. So if you're reading labels, like, if you just can eliminate that fat, that would be like number one. Number two would be trans fats, hydrogenated fats. Which. What is that? What's really.

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

So hydrogenated frats have literally been. Have Been banned by the fda, essentially ruled not safe to eat. But they're still out there. Okay. You can still find them. It's less, but it's. And they used to be really. That's makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any, any processed food. And the third thing would be, you know, you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard, can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad? You know, no. Which is also known as bht. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. We have it in everything here, here, you know, so if you wouldn't have, you know, azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America it's legal. This is in ingredients used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwiches.

Take it out.

Didn't vary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our friend, our friend ashamed them into taking out. But it's still legal here. It's not illegal. They just, she just shamed them publicly by, by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the Subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15 year jail sentence and a $450,000.

No, you do not.

Yes, you do. I swear to God, in Europe, a lot of these chemicals are bad. So basically just eat real food. So get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then there's another hierarchy of how do you even operate? Upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the Pegan diet is that one, food is medicine. Food is medicine, and quality matters. And then it's not just calories, it's. It's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes, you're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, your mitochondria. And everything is controlled by what we're eating. So the book is really focused on two key principles. One is food is medicine, and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine. Because, you know, I call it the Pegan Diet. As a joke between paleo and keto. Right, sure. You know, and I had a. I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist. Another one was a paleo doc. And they were just fighting and I was in the middle and I felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth. And I was sort of. I was like trying to break the. To break the tension a little bit. And I said, hey, if you're a paleo and you're vegan, I must be pegan. And it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed and I was like, oh, wow, that was good. And then I thought about it on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein, animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject. But they're pretty identical.

Sure.

And so the goal of this book is not to create a dogma, but to create a big ten inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems? And I think, you know, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. You know, a lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that, be raw. And the truth is, it depends on you if you are. If I do keto, my body doesn't respond great. I mean, I do higher fat. But another person who's a diabetic, they might do great on it. One person on a vegan diet like Rich Roll may be able to run triathlons. I mean, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort. But he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine see are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted or they don't have protein or their body, their body doesn't like it. I just had a patient, for example, this week who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan. She was basically a vegetable and sugar vegan. And she didn't even like to.

She would eat sugar as well.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of people who are vegan eating sugar because the body starts to Crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So it's not uncommon. And so she wasn't overweight at all, but metabolically, she was super unhealthy. She had, you know, acne and she had. Her gut was a mess. And she had very low protein, like very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. I mean, and, you know, she was extremely unwell, and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we've had. We had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes, which she needed. I had to up regular vitamins. I had to sort of get her off the sugar. I mean, but I think, you know, it takes a lot of work. So the key is, how do you personalize the diet and get away from the basically religious nutrition that we.

Which is either all vegan, vegetarian, keto.

Right.

Carnivore. There's all these extreme diets, Right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And. And again, I always encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body.

Yourself, Right? Yeah.

Like, how do you feel? Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How you're clear, you have energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition. And how do you identify your particular needs? By various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing. And how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet?

Everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way, but it seems so extreme in my mind, you know, and, yeah, and I. I empathize with vegans. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. And you know, but then I've tried it for a while and I'm also like, gosh, but I miss meats. And it's like, yeah, yeah, what is the way? And what I'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you.

Yeah. The one size that fits all is quality, is understanding food, is information. Just meat, for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's horribly cruel to the animals. It grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by These monocrop corn and soyfields we use to grow, feed the feedlots that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the. 100%.

What would you say are the, the, the three things you, you would keep doing for as long as you could to help you with anti aging and living longer and staying? Would it be the peptides? Would be something else.

I, I listen, I think it's like those are those. Fit exercise and I've been doing more strength training and I've been doing more cardio and, and I think, you know, sleep and meditation. And then the other thing that people often don't think about for longevity is community love. Because love is medicine, just like food is medicine.

Absolutely. If you stress in your heart you're gonna die, I mean it's gonna make you sick.

It's really true. And what's really striking is when you look at the data, some of the most potent predictors of longevity is not your diet actually. It's whether you are socially connected. So if you're part of a knitting club or a bridge club or a bowling club, like the longevity numbers just go crazy even. And there's a great study that was done years ago in a little town called, I think it's called Rosario, what was it? Rose. Rose something, Pennsylvania. And it was basically a community of Italians from this one little village in Italy that all kind of moved over to this one town years and years ago. And they kind of left their old Italian diet behind and adopted the American diet. But this community was so tightly knit and there are all different economic spectrums in the community. But they were always there for each other. They were ate birthdays and parties and holidays. There was a sense of connection and love in the community. It was really unique. And what was striking is even though they adopted all the American lifestyle habits, they didn't get the same mortality as the rest of Americans because they had this incredible social fabric that was providing them a foundation of love and connection and meaning and purpose. And what's striking is I just saw an article, even one of the major medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical association, that that was striking to me because it was so clear that meaning and purpose are also predictive of longevity. So if you have no meaning and purpose in your life, what's the point of being here?

I might as well end right.

You kind of have nothing to live for. Right. So I think, I think it's really quite interesting and I think we're in this moment where we're learning so much about medicine and well, being and health. And we are in a massive paradigm shift. That's what functional medicine is. That's what this book is about, the Pegan diet. It's really a functional medicine view on food and nutrition and health and longevity.

You talked about insulin resistance as one of the leading causes of chronic disease today. What is insulin resistance? How do we prevent it and then how do we treat it?

Yes, well, great question. And I think we hinted about it a little bit before, but, you know, 88% of Americans are. Are in poor metabolic health, right? That's staggering. That's almost nine out of ten of us. And that is poor metabolic health means insulin resistance. And I'm going to unpack that in a minute. 75% are overweight, 42% are obese. 40% of kids are overweight. I mean, it's terrible. One in two Americans has pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes. All this is caused by the amount of starch and sugar in our diet. Broccoli is a carbohydrate that's fine to eat, but white flour is also carbohydrate. It's worse than sugar in your body. So the volume of starch and sugar that's predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health. And what happens when you eat Sargent sugar, which, by the way, we really didn't have for most of our human history. We basically were hunters and gatherers till 10,000 years ago. And then if we had grains, we had whole grains. The milling of flour didn't happen until about 150 years ago. And when that started and they started to actually refine the flour is when we saw these nutritional deficiencies like beriberi and pellagra and these horrible vitamin deficiencies, it was really terrible. And they actually discovered vitamins because they started depleting the food. So when we eat in a way that has all this starch and sugar, it causes our blood sugar to go up. That causes our insulin to respond to try to keep the blood sugar down so you can have normal blood sugar. If you go to your doctor, you can have a normal A1C, which is your average blood sugar. But if your insulin's high, you're in big trouble. I saw a guy who was 400 pounds. His blood sugar was perfect. His average blood sugar was perfect. His insulin was like 20 times normal because it was keeping everything down.

Oh, man.

Now insulin gets that high because the body becomes resistant to the effects of the insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. So you need more and more and more insulin to get the blood sugar down, more and more insulin. What does that do? Well, insulin has a number of roles in, in a small amount it's good, keeps your blood sugar good. If you're healthy, fine. If you have no insulin, you get type 1 diabetes. You need insulin shots. But most people have what we call type 2 or pre diabetes or insulin resistance. And it turns out that this is the driver of cancer, like the most common cancers, prostate, breast, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, heart disease. Most heart attacks are caused by this diabetes, obviously dementia. They're calling type 3 diabetes depression. So so many issues are driven by this insulin resistance that are burdening our society with chronic disease, which affects six out of 10 people. And so when you have this phenomenon in your body, it drives inflammation, it drives fat storage in your belly, it causes more hunger, it slows down your ability to lose weight, and it creates this vicious cycle of muscle loss and fat, fat gain. It just, it's like super fuel on, on the aging process. That's why you see diabetics, you know, have, you know, far more heart attacks. They're four times the risk of dementia, they're more likely to get cancer. It's just all related to this phenomena. And then if you're talking about the game of longevity, you know, I remember this lecture I heard like 20 plus years ago from a Harvard professor who was talking about, you know, preventive cardiology. Said Mark, Mark, if you could take a group of 100 year old people who have perfectly clean arteries, they'd have one thing in common. I said, what's that? He says they're insulin sensitive, meaning they are able to easily regulate their blood sugar with very minimal amounts of insulin. But most of us, well, most, because they're basically healthy or they have genetics that help them or they eat, you know, well, but the key is to keep your, in the game of aging is keep your insulin low, right? And if you keep your insulin low, you're going to be activating all these anti aging mechanisms your body. If your insulin is high, you're going to accelerate all the aging. So that's why starch and sugar are poison.

When insulin is high, it's weakening immune system, it's increasing inflammation, which is making you age faster, essentially, and get sick, right?

Yes. And not only that, Louis, what right is happening now with COVID in America? Why are we the worst country in the world? With COVID it's not just political mismanagement. The fact is, is that we were the sitting duck. Perfect place for Covid to land and cause Havoc. Why we're obese, because we're obese, we're overweight, we have chronic diseases, and these are all diseases of inflammation. So we are pre inflamed. And when covet hits, it just. It's like gas on the fire. Right. It just blows up your immune system, which is why you see these cytokine storms and this overwhelming inflammation in the body. It's not the virus that kills people. It's people's own body's overactive inflammation because it's primed because of our inflammatory diet. And so nobody's talking about this. I think Bill Maher is the only one I've seen talking about in the media who says, hey, guys, the thing we can do, yes, maybe we need to be protecting ourselves and practicing social distancing, maybe getting vaccines. That's a whole rabbit hole. We shouldn't go down. But, but nobody's talking about getting healthy our diet or losing weight or immuno rejuvenation or even things like vitamin D, which are so cheap and simple. I mean, if I were president, I would literally give free dose of vitamin D to every man, woman, child in America. Just, boom, give it to him.

There's a lot of research showing that vitamin D is defending the body against vitamin Covid, Right?

Yeah. If your vitamin D is low, you're 80% more likely to end up in the hospital and die. If your vitamin D is high, you're 94 less likely to end up in the hospital or in the ICU. 94. That's better than vaccines, right? With a lot less hassle and risk and side effects.

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so how do we, how do we treat it then? What are the things that we need to do when our insulin is high?

Well, it's. Guess what? I wrote a book. It's a really good book. It's called the Vegan Diet. And it helps you. Helps you do that. And essentially the principles are, you know, things that I. I'm almost embarrassed, Louis, that I, I have my career telling people to do stuff that's so self evident. Right. Like we all know, yeah, eat real food. Don't eat crap. You know, eat lots of vegetables, eat lots of good fats, get good quality protein. It's. It's not that hard.

Food is something that you take three times a day from the time we're born to our very last breath. And when it comes to food and health, there is. It's not just about the food. It's actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it.

So that's the real kind of underlying secret.