Hormone Therapy Isn’t Working? Here’s What You’re Missing with Dr. Nayan Patel

With one body signal screaming, your hormones need attention that people constantly ignore.

Management of stress, the cortisol hormone. People have gone overboard today. I don't see so many people stressed out with cortisol because they have way too much adrenaline. And now we are seeing generation of people that have bypassed the adrenal functions, the adrenal glands, this cortisol hormone, stress regulating hormone. Just let it go. It's done. Just move up to the next level, which is adrenaline. People are all junkies. They want adventure-seeking behaviors and things like that. That is so damaging to the body because there is no negative feedback in the body to stop it.

Dr. Nayan Patel, welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

Thank you for having me here today.

I'm so excited to be with you today. So, you know, let's anchor in first. We're sharing a little bit about the intention of this podcast. You're the Pharmacist that I've ever had on. Okay. I want to know, first thing in the morning, what are 2 or 3 things that help you feel rooted in who you are, your health, and your vitality?

Oh, absolutely. This is— that's what I live for. I get up in the morning and the first thing I do is I want to be grateful today because I just woke up. So my thing that I do is I wake up, I do my breathing exercise, which is literally meditation. You know what it is, right? Meditations. And I'm— purposefully thinking about at least 3 things I'm grateful for today. And by the 3rd thing, I say, oh my God, I've missed, I've missed, I've missed, I've missed. So I had like 4 or 5 things that just keeps on happening, which is all good because I want to fill my heart with all this greatness that I've experienced in my life. And since I woke up today, I have a chance to make a difference today. And so by the time I'm done, it's about 10 to 15 minutes total. It varies, it depends, right? And I don't block my thoughts coming into my mind. I just let it go. I say, hey, thoughts are coming in, there's a purpose for that, and let it pass through. But at the same time, I want to set intentions for the rest of the day. I say, hey, today, like today I woke up, it's going to be a long drive to come here to see you today. It's in the rains. But I said, hey, my intention today is to come over here and give it all and give it to the point where people understand that in order to achieve life, the fullness or the greatness of this life that we have, we got to do less for ourselves, not more.

Beautiful.

Because we were not born with scarcity. We were born with abundance. We already have everything we need. And so my mindset today coming over here was to say, I'm going to get this message out to people that, hey, we are more than what we need. Let's do less for ourselves so we can enjoy more of the body we already have.

Oh, let's go! That is great. Oh my gosh. And you know, I really asked this question from the get-go to experts sitting in that chair. This is a reminder for listeners: every modality that everyone sitting there says, 99% of the time is free. And you just painted a beautiful picture of how you feel every single day. And you're also the first person to say the intention around You know, I have the chance to make a difference in somebody else's life today. That intention, which helps you feel rooted in who you are, I think is huge. And I think that this year more than ever, that is something that we need because we are spinning in our own stress and worry and health and everything that when we focus on other people, that just dissipates. The grip lessens a little bit.

It is. And the thing is, we are born as— we are social animals. We don't live in isolation. And the only way we get energy or fulfillment is if we help somebody else. And so we kind of do that all day long.

Well, that's the intention of this podcast. So you already nailed it. Now, you've been doing this for so many years. I'd love to know, in your journey, do you notice what causes you to feel uprooted in your life and what happens?

Never lose the focus. The focus is the most important thing for me is to why people come to me as a pharmacist. They came to me for medications, but they really came to me to feel better. They didn't come here for the drugs. Even though I would love to sell them drugs because that's the only way I made money by selling them drugs. But back of the mind, I'm going back to 1997 in Los Angeles. I was in the LA Times newspaper, this back then, as in this kid just graduated from pharmacy school in Southern California and is starting this pharmacy care management services in Los Angeles where he's educating people how to properly take medications by reducing the number of medications they already take. And what a novel concept. This was, I mean, we are talking about 20, close to 30 years ago.

That's not supposed to happen in pharmacy.

It was not supposed to happen, right? And I was taught, that we cannot talk about cure, we can only talk about management of diseases. That means we don't get rid of medicine, we just manage the problems for the rest of their lives. It's like you're buying a subscription from us for the rest of your life, not to feel better, just to stay status quo. That was not a good deal for me. And so, earlier I had a vision that I really want to do something different. I want to create something because people don't listen to a pharmacist who is a lone wolf out there. I had to do something different for people to understand that, okay, he is for real. He's, he's out there helping people.

Incredible. For you to have that insight from the get-go, I think is huge. I have doctors and pharmacists in my family, and I really feel there's like this degree of brainwashing. They really think that the, the drug is the cure. And I'm trying to advocate for the drug is the cure for a certain period of time. But wouldn't it be so beautiful if we lived in a world where with every prescription came a prescription for getting off the medication because of healing, right?

If we would need prescription drugs, I'm sure the body would have built, figured out how to create one. All the medicine we need in the world is already manufactured inside our body. Everything. From the beauty to taking care of the problems to getting rid of infections. I mean, we, our bodies are completely built how to do everything the person's supposed to do. The prescription drugs were only there to take the edge off, not to heal anything. It's just to take the edge off. And instead of taking the edge off, we've been accustomed to, used to having that edge off all the time. And so we are at the stage of life where we have put so much faith, and I should not badmouth just prescription drugs. I can talk about even the nutraceuticals.

Exactly. I was going to say, same thing for supplements.

Supplements. People have put so much faith in there that we are the largest consumer of prescription drugs and supplements, and we don't even the healthiest nation in the world. We don't even the top 10.

Yeah. We're gonna dive into that because even, you know, if you don't have a scientific brain, it just kind of makes sense. If you're taking the same supplement day after day, year after year after year, you're telling your body not to produce it anymore. Right? So you're turning off the wisdom and the intelligence of your body to do what it's already built to do.

Exactly. People always told us, right? If you teach them how to fish, you don't have to give them the fish every single day. Right? We are not teaching a body how to fish. We are giving them the fish every day. Yeah. So to me, this doesn't make sense. Our intelligence, the signaling molecules, or all this, the smartest of how the whole human physiology works is depending on getting the signals, interpreting the, the signals, and adapting to what the body needs. That's how we have grown for, I don't know, 300,000+ years now. Yeah, not because we had drugs back 300,000 years ago. Yeah.

All right, let's dive into all of this. To kick things off, because I want to get a lot of info from you, we're going to do a couple rapid-fire questions.

Sure.

So whatever comes to mind, let's see what comes out, and then we're going to dive deeper.

Yes.

What's the most dangerous hormone myth circulating on social media right now?

Okay. Uh, I'm not sure what's on social— I don't follow social media that much, but I'll tell you what the biggest myth that I think it is, that if you use natural hormones, that's safe.

Oh gosh. Okay. We have a whole bucket on that. Next, if you could add one hormone test to every annual physical, what would it be?

That's a tough question. I'll tell you why. Because hormones are in a balance. If you test it once, I'm not sure if you test when they're in balance or when they're not out of balance. And I don't know. So, really testing is probably to me in my dictionary is not as useful unless I'm testing against a medication I'm already giving you.

I think that's exactly what we wanted because we're not doing full spectrum testing. We're focusing on, on something very specific without looking at the body as a system.

Yep.

All right. Hot take. Is the fear of hormone therapy more harmful than hormone therapy itself?

Is the hormone therapy harmful?

The fear of hormone therapy. Is it more harmful than the hormone itself?

So, hormones are just part of our body. So, it is who we are. So, that's not going to change. So, the fear of hormone therapy is there because of artificially derived messaging to us because of they use the wrong prescription drugs, they got bad results, and they blame everything is bad. It's like if you eat fish, and you got a problem, oh, all seafood's bad for you. Really? All seafood is bad for me? Not just the one particular fish that I may have been good for me? But that's what the hormone therapy is all about. So you could be right. The fear is probably more dangerous right now than the hormones itself.

Yeah, I wonder if you don't have the right practitioner as a partner in this, who may still have that stigma of fear behind it, you're naturally gonna be taking that hormone with a sense of fear behind it. Okay, we'll get more into that. With one body signal screaming, your hormones need attention that people constantly ignore.

Management of stress, the cortisol hormone. And it's— people have gone overboard today. I don't see so many people stressed out with cortisol because they have way too much adrenaline. And now we are seeing generation of people that have bypassed the adrenal functions of the adrenal glands, this cortisol hormone, this stress-regulating hormone.

Yeah.

Just let it go. It's done. We just move up to the next level, which is adrenaline, which is now people are all junkies. They want adventure-seeking behaviors and things like that. That is so damaging to the body because there's no negative feedback in the body to stop it.

I call it being plugged into an electrical socket. We're just so addicted to that feeling. All right. Overrated or underrated hormone pellets as a delivery method?

Overrated.

What's the most surprising place hormones show up in the body that no one talks about?

Huh. Surprising place a hormone shows up in the body. Well, the hormone is part of the endocrine system, so it's there everywhere. But most people underestimate the power of the cortisol hormone and how to regulate the brain functions. Because nobody talks about brain diseases because there's no cure for it as of today.

Right.

But how do you manage stress to optimize your brain functions?

Yeah, we're missing the boat on talking about hormones as the messengers within the body.

It's just a messenger.

Yeah, they're communicating with every part of the body.

Yeah. And by the way, the messengers needs to be Quiet or loud? It doesn't matter that you're going to get better message. It's just that you're shouting in my ear. So let's tone it down a little bit.

Good analogy. All right. Fill in the blank. If I could make every patient understand one thing about their hormones, it would be?

It's a balance. And don't put your faith in just one hormone. It's a it's a slew, it's a stew of all the hormones that needs to come in a proper ratio. So they all have to be, have an equal importance in it.

Beautiful. All right, so let's just dive into this hormone piece first and stick around because I want everyone to know we're going to shift this into understanding oxidative stress within the body, getting back to cortisol and adrenaline and really getting to the root cause of all this dysfunction that we're seeing. But I was— when I was doing my research on you, so the American Menopause Society estimates that over 1.3 million women enter menopause every single year in the US, and yet most of them will spend years suffering before anyone connects their symptoms to their hormones. And this isn't just for the women. When we think about men, men are also suffering in this category. Testosterone levels in young American men have dropped nearly 25% in less than two decades. Not older men, but younger men, which is something that I think, you know, as a mother, gosh, all of our eyes and ears should have attention on this, right, for the future of our health. So can we talk about what is actually happening? I think this goes so much more beyond the fact that, you know, there's more testing, there's more awareness now, there's more education, and of course Women's Health is, is having their right. But let's understand what most period What are most people experiencing that might be behind this label of hormone imbalance?

So, this is— I can talk for 1 hour right now.

I know you can.

I can literally talk for an hour. Well, this thing goes back so far. But let me just break it down for everybody to understand this, please. If you look at the whole endocrine system, it's like a pyramid. So, the pyramid is what— if you look at the food chart, it's also a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is your proteins and your carbs and all the good foods comes in there, right? So the pyramid for the endocrine system, the base, which is 40% of the solution or the problem, either way you look at it, is stress management, cortisol. The next 30%, right above that one, is insulin, which is your diet management. So literally 70% of total solution, all the problems arise from your own stress and your own eating behaviors, right? The next 20% is thyroid, which is a simple blood test to figure out what the thyroid levels are. And the last 10%, is sex hormones, which is estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, all these different hormones. And what I see is people put a lot of faith in just 10% of the total solution on the hormones, but the issues begin from the stressors. Now, what affects the cortisol, right? And 50 years ago, the only thing, there's a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. The reason is because the only stress a zebra has is the lions chasing them. The lions chasing them, the zebra runs as fast as possible. There's two things going to happen. One, the lion gets the zebra and is dead, didn't get an ulcer, or the lion got another zebra and you're free to go.

Right.

Either way, the stress is gone. You're done. Today, the lion's everywhere and it's not going away, right? And a lot of people have the lion on their cell phones. We call them social media. You assume that it's gonna give you an excitement, but in reality, it gives you resentment and stress. And so we are in a slew. I mean, the numbers were staggering. I heard that people spend 3 to 6 hours a day on social media. It is, the numbers are absolutely staggering. And you're basically telling your body that get me in stress, get me in stress. And then when the stress comes in, oh, my hormones are out of whack now. And now my eating disorders and all these things popping up. So when you said that the 1.3 million people go into menopause every single year, the issue is not the menopause. The issue is 10, 15, 20 years before they go into menopause. It's called the perimenopause or the PMS or the PMDD, or you can label whatever you want to label it. It's just the same issue is hormone imbalances.

You got it.

Yeah. And so I want people to look at that and say, hey, you know what? This hormone imbalance is self-induced. Check your stressors, check your diet, there's your answer.

Yeah, yeah. And you and I working with, with these clients, disease, hormone imbalance, it doesn't just show up overnight. We have an understanding that it's an accumulation of everything over the years, right? Everything that we're exposed to in our modern world. And, um, maybe we can do this, and I've asked this question before on this podcast, but I really want listeners to, to walk away feeling a little bit empowered because chances are the lion on the phone is not going to go away anytime soon, right? The stressors are not going to just disappear. So I ask this question to everyone, one of my clients: on a scale of 1 to 10, what is the number that you would rate yourself of stress that you have every single day? So 10 being really high. You're an exception to this. You have an incredible morning practice and you're— you said you stay off social media.

So I want to people to know there are two types of stressors. So, they should understand those two stressors so they can differentiate which stress they are talking about. When you talk about stressors, everybody talks about mental stress, which is either my boss is not happy with me or my wife or my kids or my outside environment that is affecting me or the pollution that's killing me or the alcohol that I'm drinking. These are all environmental stressors and they only affects your adrenal glands and your cortisol functions. Maybe a little bit of adrenaline and things like that. The second stressors is the oxidative stressors, which I know we can talk about later on, but the oxidative stress is self-induced internal body and the body is under attack, has nothing to do with outside. The body inside is getting under attack and it produces a lot of oxygen species. You breathe oxygen every single day. If your body cannot clear that out, clear out, it creates the stressors. And you do everything possible to make it even harder for the body to clear it out sometimes with our own habits. And so these are two different types of stressors. So let's talk about the first one. The second one is too difficult for people to understand what to do right now. The first stressors is, for me, that stress is probably less than 5 for me. I would say less than 5 because I have young kids and they put their hands in front of me. Well, they don't, but in their mind they are, right? I said, Dad, don't talk to me right now. I'm busy, right? So to speak. Or when I dress up in the morning, they said, Dad, what are you wearing? I said, these are dad clothes. Come on. I'm not a teenager right now at this point. Right? So they have all these things. So maybe that brings me stress, but I've learned to accept the way it is.

Yeah.

And my stress goes down from 5 to maybe 2 or even 1 sometimes.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that people with practices like yours, that's a new way to adapt. I think for a lot of people listening, and certainly a lot of people that you've worked with, I wonder how many people have adapted to higher levels of stress. So the way that I help listeners to understand that, my clients to understand that, is, all right, if I were to step into your body, would I feel the same number? So let's call it a 5, 6, 7, or 8, or would I feel like my body's plugged into an electrical system because that's your new baseline, right? So when we address that, I think I'm— more often than not, I'm met with tears because people realize, oh my gosh, yeah, I do feel a lot of stress and overwhelm, and this is my new baseline, and I am addicted to caffeine or nicotine or whatever it is every single day to kind of keep me going. But when we trace back, gosh, if I— when I say to my clients who are going through like hormone imbalance or through the perimenopause phase I would love to track back and recognize what the subtle symptoms were. And in my world for nutrition, I think of digestive issues, I think about sleep issues, I think about brain fog, fatigue. But what would you say are some of the subtle symptoms that people need to pay attention to? Because right now I think we're focusing on a lot of the dramatic symptoms. What are the subtle symptoms?

Number one, number one reason is sleep.

Sleep.

That's the number one reason for everybody in the world. If you cannot sleep, if you don't have a good sleep habit, a routine, something that guarantees you to have that hour and a half or 2 hours of deep sleep every night, there's nothing you can do pharmacologically or nutritionally to fix that. And so, All my problems arises. I know people talk about gut all the time, and that's my step number 2. The second biggest thing is, of course, the gut, but the number 1 thing is the sleep pattern.

Because you have to rest. Your body needs the rest to be able to restore.

And these days we have so many sleep aids available to put a ring or put a boop or to put neural things in. I don't know. Just go to sleep.

Yeah, I broke up with all of those things because I found it was becoming something, another point that I could judge myself. On, which I don't need.

If you ever see me, I have nothing on me. I don't carry anything. Only thing left on my pockets is a phone right now.

Yeah.

But I don't carry wallets. I don't carry rings. I don't— nothing on my body whatsoever. I even try all my clothes. I try to wear all natural fibers too. Beautiful. Yeah. So that way, I don't want any resonance around the body to be affected.

Beautiful. So let's help listeners then, because a lot of people do suffer with sleep, right? Either they have difficulty falling asleep or they're waking up multiple times throughout the night. Is there a time and a place that you would recommend pharmaceuticals?

So the thing is, if they are like a lot of my perimenopausal or PMS patients, not the menopausal so much, the menopausal, they know they all have sleep issues. All of them have it 99.9% of the time. Which is easy to fix because the hormones are out of whack. So, I give them some progesterone capsules at nighttime, they fall asleep. But more than that will just get them to fall asleep but not to stay asleep. So, I still have to work on the habits. I tell everybody, "Get off the alcohol as much as possible." Some people listen, some people don't. That's up to them to decide. But then, if they choose to do so, then they may feel a little bit better. For my perimenopausal patients or the PMS patients, it's also similar things. I also put them on progesterone therapy only. And so, I do use pharmaceuticals to balance out the hormones, but I'm also using the same hormone to help them sleep as well because it's a calming hormone. I can also do the PMS or perimenopausal treatment with estrogens and testosterone, but that's the upper. It's going to make them all crazy again. And I don't want crazy women out there. I want them to be nice and calm. So, and so, I use progesterone as a calming hormone to help with all the hormone balancing.

So I want to say this loud and clear. Progesterone has been a game changer for myself included for getting deep restorative sleep. In a chapter or a season right now where a lot of people are experiencing overwhelm and fear around hormone changing and aging, if we can just, and as your, your words, prioritize sleep and restoration. If you spent even one month focusing on improving the quality of your sleep and just see what happens, turn down the noise on everything else on supplementation on what you think you should be doing on biohacking, but just spend an entire month with somebody in your house if you have to, or your partner if you need to, and then just see what happens within the body once you get more sleep. Like, what a concept, right?

Oh my God, it will change your life because what's going to happen when you sleep deeper, you're actually— your brain, oxidative stress in your brain goes down. That's only the oxidative stress in the brain goes down.

Yeah.

Unless you take pharmaceuticals, right? And so when that goes down, the mental clarity gets up so much higher the next day. You can think, you can remember stuff that you forgot a long time ago.

I think, yeah, changes in mood, just waking up thinking, okay, today would be a really good day. Yeah. And I just wanted to hover on that for a second because I know that a lot of people, they do suffer from issues with sleep, but stress as a precursor to all of that. Sleep really just does make a lot of that just dissipate quite a bit. So it's important.

So I have a lot of clients that CEOs and actors, and they're in different time zones every single day.

Right. Good point.

And so what happens is that their sleep is completely distorted. And my first goal for them is to make them fall asleep. I can't give them sleep aid. If it's a guy coming to me, I can't give them sleep aid because that's going to get all them wired up. At nighttime. So, I look at people's patterns and behaviors and I figure out that their sleep is destroyed because of time zones, of stressors, but the stressors has moved from cortisol to adrenaline. And so, what I've used, and this is completely against medical thing, right? What I use if I know that there's too much adrenaline in the system, which is they're tired but they're wired up, the heart rate's higher a little bit. And if I see that, I use thyroid. I use active thyroid to bring the heart rate down. And, if you talk to any doctor, the doctors go, "Wait a second, thyroid is going to give you more heart rate." I said, "Yes, it does in the absence of adrenaline, but you have a lot of adrenaline, guess what? It calms them down and in 10 minutes, they're falling asleep." Fascinating. So, again, we use pharmaceuticals for particular reasons like these, but again, I will not prescribe this to anybody else until I know the history and how we use the medication. Now, this is the downside. Guess what? I tell them change the lifestyle. Instead, guess what they're doing? Just give me the drugs.

Give me the drugs. I want the quick fix.

They want the quick fix. I said, you've got all the money. I have billionaire clients. You got all the money in the world. I said, it's not enough. I have a lot more things to do still.

Well, we're living in that era, right? And especially now with AI, things are getting faster and speeding up that everyone just wants, well, no, that'll I don't want to heal my body. I just want the quick fix. And I think too, you know, a lot of people— this is a unique conversation, but a lot of people out there, when they go to their doctors, they're often met with fear. Fear around, you know, whether it's the pharmaceutical path, fear around what the next step of prescription would be, the information that's going to come from the white lab coat doctor and getting a diagnosis or any of those things. So for the people who are listening who are living in that fear, maybe they're kind of working with a doctor that's getting misinformation out there, what do you propose for them? Like, how do you help them understand that there's an opportunity to understand their physiology outside of the white lab coat?

So all my clients are doctors. I don't see patients anymore. So most all my clients are doctors. So, so my job, my, my mission in life is to educate doctors because I can only see so many patients a day. So, I've moved from seeing patients to only helping doctors achieve the outcomes for their patients. And so, under me, I have trained another 8 other pharmacists besides me. And so, we all work as a team and we help doctors design plans for their patients. When the patient comes to me, I say, "Hey, this doctor gave you this plan. Just make sure this plan only works if you follow all the non-drug-related issues, which is the sleep, the waters, the no caffeine, no alcohols, and eating whole foods and things like that." If you do all If you do all those things, the medication will work and it will get you to a point where you won't need any medications afterwards. But if you're taking medication from me for over a couple of years, that means you have not learned it yet. So, my job is to teach them and hopefully they do the right things for them, but they can only do it if they see success. So, I was my first patient myself. I got to do it myself and show them what I've done. I'm down to one supplement a day now.

Incredible. So let's dive deeper into that if people want to understand. You mentioned, so, assessing heart rate. A lot of people are doing cortisol tests, and I see these cortisol tests come back and they look pretty normal, and yet the, the client will report feeling wired and tired every single day. So what else should they be asking their doctors for?

So the doctor should be spending time and getting a complete history. Because no blood test, no scans could tell you what's wrong with you. Nothing. By the time something comes up in the scan or a blood test, you're 15, 20 years late. Not early, late. That means the body has been readjusting and recalibrating on its own, trying to keep you in homeostasis. And if once you stop doing that, it will start making changes in your blood tests or your scans. By the time the doctor picks it up, it's 15 years late. So, the idea for me is I want doctors, I want all healthcare providers to listen to the patients and trying to find the root cause, right? And then work with them, try to identify and say, "Hey, why can't you give up alcohol? Let's talk about that." "Oh, that's the only way. That's all my social gatherings are like that and things like that." So, what other alternatives can we have? So, giving them options and choices on how would you do that part. Use AI for betterment. Ask your chatbot. I said, hey, how can I fit in culturally without drinking alcohol? I think probably you'd get like 10 ideas, right? Pick one.

Absolutely.

Pick one. That's just one example, right? Or you know what? At nighttime, that's the only time I have to watch TV before I go to bed because I'm working all day long. I have kids, I have dogs to take care of, and I come home. The last 1 hour is me time and I want to watch a sitcom or something, no-brainer shows. And that's the worst time to do it because now you are trying to relax your mind. Instead of doing that, you're activating your mind. So having those habits is the key, right? So blood test is not going to pick that up. So I personally do not believe in blood test for hormones. I will test in a blood test, after I give them hormones, because I want to see how the hormones are responding to the body. I'll test afterwards, but initially I'll probably spend an hour just to understand what's going on in their life.

Yeah, I use blood labs for the same thing. I think a lot of people need the labs as evidence to take action. That's one aspect. Or two, if they're using a supplement, let's see if it's working or not, or hormones especially. But what you're talking about is actually part of a much bigger picture, and it's something that we started talking about before we were recording. And It was this concept of just like remembering that your body is meant to heal. And when we think about all of us, when is the first time that you felt stress in your body, or when you felt lack or judgment or insecurity, and you kind of go back to that moment? I became an NLP practitioner, neuro-linguistic programming, to really understand the power of my clients' languaging and belief systems. And Honestly, Dr. Patel, whenever I trace back someone's belief system, it goes back to childhood.

Yes.

So then we put that through the lens of addiction today. No one is really addicted to whatever the substance is. They're addicted to the feeling that gives them the void of whatever the stress is. And I think that's the pinpoint that we need to address, because if you find freedom in that, you give freedom to the body.

It is the feeling. And that's why I said, if you won't drink alcohol with your friends group, find other ways to meet that exact same need of feeling, of belonging to the group without consuming, without damaging your body.

Beautiful.

So it is the feeling. I understand NLP, and that's exactly what I'm thinking. It's the limiting beliefs that you have that you put on yourself, right? And that's exactly what this is. So my goal is to, again, that's another reason I don't want to see patients a whole lot because it's too time-consuming.

Oh, yeah.

I'm glad you're doing that part. I cannot do that part. It's just too time-consuming for me. But, if I can train enough doctors, if I can educate like this on a podcast, I think I can reach much larger audience and start doing baby step. You're not going to achieve everything you want in one day or one year. But, if you make it a mission that this is the way I will live my rest of my life, you can make a change today and stick with it for 20 years from today.

You got it.

Because you made the change because you want to do something better in your later part of your life.

That's Healthspan.

Yeah. Yeah.

That is Healthspan. Yeah. You know, we're so focused on food and supplementation when everyone knows what to eat. It's why you won't choose it for yourself, which is the, the instigation. All right, so optimizing our sleep, recognizing your stress and your stress patterns, trusting in your intuition to know how stressed you are and how much you're holding on to. Now let's get into the actual hormones. All right, so the fear that comes up around HRT, um, there's obviously the famous study that was done in 2002 where You know, it sent shockwaves through the industry because they were using synthetic hormones, and this was part of the doctor's belief system that those hormones would cause things like cancer. So for our listeners, help them understand why has HRT become so polarizing? The landscape of HRT is now changing. What do we need to be mindful for? How do we know when to start? You know, we have some practitioners saying start earlier for prevention. Um, a lot of Eastern doctors that I've talked to say no, your body you will not go through it as severely if you optimize the internal system of the body. So, hold on it. Where do you stand?

So, okay, let me just go back into decades ago because that's when it first started about the hormone replacement therapy. The way the animal kingdom is, we are here on this planet to, when we are born, adulthood, we procreate, and we die. That's the only stages we had. God didn't create us to have human beings on this planet at 200 years of age. Right? We have people, they're born, they get adult, they procreate and produce more babies, and they die. That's the cycle of life. Yeah. Thank God for science that we are still alive today because—

It's kind of fun.

A couple hundred years ago, we should be dead by now, right? So, well, I should have been dead by now, not you. But so I'm happy that the science have progressed this far out so I can I still keep on doing my work as of today. But if the body was not designed to live forever, and we figured out that if I can replenish what the body is missing, and if I can help them get to the stage, we can have a healthier life. People in menopause or andropause have at least 40, 50 more years to live once they're done having babies. God says, no, you're not supposed to be alive for that part, but we have to figure out a way to stay that healthy, right? So the question that becomes is that why is it so many issues? First of all, again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, guys, but if you put 4 men in charge of menopause society, which is only filled by females, there may be some biases. I'm not sure, but I would assume there would be some biases right there, right? Because there are 4 men Told women how they should feel. Alright. That's the president of and the chairman of the North Menopause Society. That's gone now. Thank God. The second part is that they did a study on horses' estrogens and synthetic progestins and the results were not good. So, they basically put the whole class of medications out of business. For example, I'll tell you, there was a story about this 25 years ago. There was a drug that was approved by FDA, which was great for arthritis. It was a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, which is a subset of COX-1, COX-2 type product. There was one product that was approved and they found out that that causes heart attacks. So, they pulled the drug out. But guess what? Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are available over the counter.

Yeah.

What if they said that, oh no, all NSAIDs are bad for you. You have no Advil today. Think about it. That's what they did with hormones. That's exactly what they did with the hormones. And it was a political, completely political warfare is what I feel like it, because they didn't look at the science. They look at if one drug is bad, the whole class of medication is bad for you. Then the drug is not even the natural human hormones. Okay. On the flip side, FDA has already approved all the human identical hormones, estrogens, progesterones, testosterone, everything's approved by FDA as a chemical to be used in humans. The only downside is that it's not that easy to give you hormones because your body, somebody has to literally have to listen to you. Understand all your problems and they try to figure out, I said, I cannot give you all the hormones. I can only give you maybe 1 or 2 and let your body adjust to what it needs to be. And in menopause, that is not true because in menopause, all the hormone levels are low. So, if I give you all the hormone levels in a proper ratio, I can somewhat manage it artificially, your balance. But in perimenopause and PMS when you're young, I cannot do that. I cannot do that part. And so, and nobody has time. And about the same time, think about it, in early '90s, the insurance companies started paying for all the medications and all the doctor visits. We used to spend hours with a patient, went down to 45 minutes. I remember still 45-minute doctor visits was, oh my God, you want to do everything in 45 minutes? What's wrong with you? And today's 15 or 5 minutes. And we have been trained that, hey, you call a plumber in your house that you have no idea what's wrong with you and tell them, hey, you have 5 minutes to figure out what's wrong with you. Well, in the 5 minutes, all I can do is just turn the water off for you and I'll go, right? That's all he can do. We can't expect them, a plumber or electrician or anybody to do that for us. This is human body, which we don't know anything about it. And we're giving doctors 5 and 10 minutes to figure out what's wrong with you. It is impossible. And so, we have gone from finding the problems to shutting you up with some symptoms with some prescription drugs. And so, this is the issue that we are facing right now. So, it's not the hormones are bad. It takes time to figure out what the proper ratio is. And over my lifetime, I'll probably help doctors see over a million women patients and at least quarter million men patients. I can blindfolded, I can just by talking to you for 5 minutes, I can figure out exactly what your hormone levels are at right now and I can help the doctor prescribe the right therapy for you and then just go on from there.

This is our frustration now, my frustration as a practitioner, because the people that I work with, it's almost like women right now and men are being given this band-aid solution of the same cookie-cutter protocol to, to be on. And a lot of women don't understand, nor are they asking the questions, because they're either— they're suffering so intensely that they're like, just give me anything, or there's a bit of a fear factor where they don't understand where their hormones are coming from. They understand bioidentical, but, you know, I don't know how we necessarily check for that, and if we really do understand where everything is processed and manufactured and where it comes from, all also. So it's frustrating because I think that right now there's an epidemic of suffering where we're so desperate to be on these hormones, yet we're not pulling back the layer to understand how the body needs to function first. So from your lens then, are there questions that we should be asking this prescriber of these hormones to understand, one, that they're safe, where they come from? There's also— I don't know if you know this, but right now in California there's a 3-month backorder on estradiol patch— patches. Like, what?

Because the black box warning came out. Thank God RFK just, with his team, removed the black box warning so that women can now have access to the hormones. All the boxes have the black box warning on there. So now they're remanufacturing all these products again without the warning on there. So now there's a backlog over there. I said, let the patients get it even with the box that has a black box warning because they need the hormones. There's a labeling change that needs to happen. And so again, the rules have to follow what the head's telling them, but the rules doesn't come right away. So now who ends up suffering? Not the government. It's the people. It's the people. But you asked me a very good question. What can I ask my doctors? Nothing. Unless a doctor is willing to give you time. Right? And so my thing has always been, I said, and I'm glad that you're talking about this thing on a podcast like this because people should be listening to this podcast understanding that, hey, no doctor is going to be able, is going to save you. You have, you have the cure in your own hands. Yeah. The pyramid. Work on your stress. Work on your diet. And if you need help with those two things, listen to your podcast. I can assure you have plenty of those things in there, right? Because those two things alone is 70% of the solutions right there.

Yeah.

And if you can sleep, that's a 40% of the solution right there. The thyroid, if there's a good chance if this thyroid is not off, because if it was off, then either you are gaining weight, you're losing hair, you're really skinny, and the doctor will pick it up really fast. So that's not an issue. And the last thing is the hormones. It's just 10%. If I tell you that in order for you to stay completely, completely healthy, you got to eat all these different things, you got to eat lots of proteins, lots of good complex carbs, and just a lot of essential fatty acid and maybe a little bit of sugar. No, no, just give me a little bit of sugar because I need the energy right now. That's what people are asking for. But the whole proteins, carbs, and all those essentials are not— people are not, "Oh, well, that's too hard." Or too expensive, or they make up stories, right? And so I want people to understand that, yes, you can ask the doctor these questions, or better yet, start taking the health in your own hands. Start doing yourself.

Incredible advice. And I really hope that no matter what protocol you've been given, what hormones that you're trying, you have to assess how you're feeling because chances are if you're not checking your levels consistently and modifying according to your body and the season of life that you're in, chances are you might be on a ratio that's not going to help you feel optimized. So you've got to trace everything back. So understanding your stress, focusing on the power of your diet, and I think everyone knows what to eat, but it's almost like alongside this hormone campaign. We need to have a food as medicine campaign and what it means to eat like a human being again, where we focus on fiber and whole foods and ingredients that come from the earth.

Well, I have a simple rule. If I have to read a label on a food, it's not meant for me.

Yeah, good point.

That's it. No labels. My food has no labels on it.

So tell us a little bit about that then, because I know that you have a way of eating and fueling your body. That you know works and you've now gotten yourself down to one supplement.

Yes.

Right?

And the reason, because again, I can't get away from that magnesium supplement. The reason is because I don't ground myself. I'm not nature.

See, we're not in nature.

I'm not in nature. My whole house is a concrete jungle, right? And I have a dog at my house and my wife doesn't like to wipe his feet all the time. So all the remaining dirt patch we have is also with fake grass on there, which is not the same, right? And I want dirt. I want dirt to stand in the dirt for 30 minutes a day to discharge all the electrical charges, right? If you can feel electrical charge because of static buildup in there, that's external electric charges. I'm not talking about that one. I'm talking about internal electrical charges that your whole body works on that needs to be discharged on a daily basis. And if I cannot do that with grounding and the grounding sheets and the grounding mats No, gosh, no.

Nature's got it all for you.

Yeah, nature's all for you. If I cannot do that part, only thing I'm doing, I'm using magnesium discharge, whatever I can.

I love that a pharmacist is talking about electricity within your body and grounding. Yeah, I get really excited about magnesium because people don't understand that our bodies are electrical and magnesium provides an electrical component to how our body functions every day. Not to mention our food system and the fact that we have to recognize we're not getting these vital nutrients from our food anymore. So what do you eat?

Oh my gosh. My food, as I said, is all real food. So I have the same meal for 27 years. If you read my book, it'll tell you what my meal plan is.

Which book is that? This isn't the Glutathione.

The Glutathione Revolution.

Yeah. We've got that here.

Yeah. It's a 14-day boost of glutathione levels. It's not a 14-day plan. Don't fall for that. It's a lifelong plan. You know how it is.

Is.

But the marketing companies, you know, they want to sell, oh, I'll give you 14 days.

We need a protocol.

Yeah, we need a protocol. But it's a lifelong journey. But so my lunch has always been the same salad. And whatever I can find to put in the salad is every day is I'll put in the salad. Vegetables, leaves, tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever. I just, that's it. As long as there's no packaged goods, it's in my salad.

And are you plant-based?

Completely plant-based. I used to eat meat about, I give about 13, 14 years ago. And now, I'm completely plant-based. So, I do take amino acids to replace my protein intake because, yeah, it's hard to get a clean source of aminos all the time. With my lifestyle, it's just hard. So, that's something I do take, aminos in a powder form. That could be a supplement. I don't know. I don't see that as supplement because that I see as a food because I do measure my aminos in my body, my protein in my body. So, I do measure that part. So, I want to make sure that it's already optimized. But, that has been my diet. And, the evening, that's my lunch for 20+ years. It's the same lunch every day. Even while today I was recording this thing where my wife goes, "What time you going to be home because I need a salad ready already?" It's just just make it, put in the fridge, I will eat when I get back home, don't worry about it part. It's not, I can skip a meal. I have skipped more meals because I cannot find food than to eat meals. Because when this happens to when I'm traveling a lot, I'll go to the airport and I'm hungry as hell and I see on the airport there's nothing that I would consume, nothing. Sometimes I find a banana or an apple, now pick one up, And that's my whole meal. And I'll ride, I'll fight over 6 more hours to get back home and then eat real food. Otherwise, I'll go hungry. Trust me, you will not die if you go hungry for a few days.

Oh, yeah. That's so true.

So, it's okay. So, that's my meal. And my dinner has always been either cooked lentils or vegetables and rice. And that's it. It's just keep it very simple.

So, I kind of led you into this question because I wanted to debunk another myth out there. And, um, I've said this before, but the majority of the blood labs that I've looked at over these clients who are vegan, they've been the most beautiful set of labs that I've seen in a really, really long time because they're supplementing with things like aminos as well as, as well as some other things, mitigating their stress and stuff like that. And living in this world of protein, protein, protein, protein, protein No one's having the conversation around protein consumption at such extreme levels when digestion isn't optimized, and how that could put more stress onto the body when you're on a hormone protocol and you're not understanding why none of it is working, right? And I say this with such an open heart for listeners to go back to that same question of how do you feel when you're eating those foods? How does a specific food make you feel? How does the hormone protocol make you feel? How do you understand And then I have practitioners like you, Juan, who are plant-based, and you're not telling me to eat 120 grams of protein or 140 grams of protein for hormone optimization. Is this another myth that's going to get debunked in the next few years? Is this a trend that we're kind of—

I hope so, because in reality, the body is not meant to have abundance of food feeding it all day long. We are in this era of such an interesting time where we have so much abundance when it comes to food all over the world. Hunger has been eradicated pretty much, right? Yeah, we have people that don't have access to good food at this point, but the hunger has been eradicated pretty much everywhere in the world. But the thing is, we have an issue with nutritious food at this point because we have so much food which is not good for us. We have plenty of food just to fill the tummy, right? So, the future, I believe, and I'm saying myself, the journey, I started this about 4 or 5 years ago. Really, in the last 2 years, I even modified my diet even more, right? And so, I'm on a mission that trying to find out that, hey, if I do less for my body, can I sustain my body even longer? Right? And that's what our mission is. And thing is, I've done all my pre and post testing for the last 2 years. I have a lot of lab companies, they offer me free tests. Some charge me, some people give me for free. But regardless, I want to find all these things out. I check all my metabolic markers. I see my energy levels. I look at my oxidized cholesterol markers, oxidized oxidation markers in my body. And in the last 2 years, it's been like the doctor goes, "Oh my God, there's nothing. Why do you keep on spending money for these things? There's nothing in the body at this point." And I'm doing less than before. The question is, do I have energy? Yes. I can outwalk you any given day. 2 years ago, my son comes to me. I'm not a hiker by all means. I don't hike at all. I don't go for a walk. And my son comes to me and says, "Hey, Dad, I want to go to this Glacier Mountain in California." Dad, that's the only glaciers we have in California. I wanna climb the mountain. I'm gonna go for hiking. Do you wanna come with me? I said, oh, shit. I said, I don't hike. It's 28 miles.

Oh my gosh.

In 2 days, right? And I told my son, I said, you know what? You haven't asked me for too many things. Yes, I'll join you, right? And we were part of a group, the 21, these are all hikers by the way. I'm the only one who was non-hiker, right? 21 adults and a bunch of kids. We went for hiking. The next day in the evening when we were on top of the mountain, there were only 4 of us there. And I was one of them.

Incredible.

Yeah. And so as I said, and I had so much energy and the people looked at me and they said, you don't hike. I said, no, but I got plenty of energy. I can still go for another day or so. The thing is, the less you do for the body, When the body needs something, it'll produce on its own. And that's the whole point. You cannot give what your body wants. The body will, will, will do, make what it wants all the time. Just get out of the way.

Get out of the way. Yeah, I'm shutting this up, you know, and for people who listen to this episode, one, thank you. But now you're getting, you know, dozens of practitioners who are coming on just shedding light on the fact that there's another way. And I can still hear people who are going to listen and who are going to listen to this say, but Dr. Patel, I'm really scared of muscle loss and bone loss and sarcopenia when I'm older. What do you mean? Shouldn't I be protein focused? Right.

So, you know, I have a scale in my bathroom. I put myself on the scale every morning and I'm not looking for the muscle mass. What am I looking for? Skeletal muscle.

Yes. Skeletal muscle mass. Right.

Skeletal muscle mass.

Right.

But muscle mass. If you see me, I'm not a, I cannot go Arnold Classic for sure, right? I'm Mr. Olympia. I'm not that guy, the kind, but my skeleton muscle is above average. Yeah.

Incredible. Right? Okay, so the takeaway is, look, if you eat animal protein and you love it, more power to you if it makes you feel good. Yes. If your digestion is great, more power to you. But otherwise, be open to trusting your body to show you the way. And if you need evidence, don't listen to us. Go and get a DEXA scan. Get on an body scan, get a good quality scale at home where you can check in on these numbers every year to course correct if you have to. But again, just turn down the noise and trust your own body.

That's right. I don't believe in the expensive scales. Yeah. $20 scales from Amazon, trust me. But it's not the absolute number, it's a trend. If you see, if you weigh yourself every single day, it's a trend. You just wanna know, make sure that you're not losing anything or in fact you're either stable or gaining. That's it. So I'm looking for the trends and you know what? I don't— those expensive scanners will tell you absolute numbers. Oh my God, you're good or you're bad. But it's really, it's a trend. So get in a habit of daily measuring.

You said something interesting when you're working with your clients about not looking for normal lab ranges, looking for optimal lab ranges.

Well, normals could be Could be good, right? It just gives a false sense of security. But if not functioning optimally, then let's see what we can do to make it better. Now, I am not for all means that only high levels are normal or optimal. Some people feel optimal even at a lower number too. So, your optimum is how you feel. I'll give you an example for my dad because my dad went to the doctor and was prescribed testosterone. Because he was in his 70s, you know, prescribed some testosterone and his testosterone level was like 180 or 200, some of them, it was below the normal range. And so, he said, "Oh, we use some testosterone." I said, "Make sure you give him a very low dose because he's sedentary. He's not like out going to the gym every single day and things like that. He just yogas and walks and that's about it. So, low dose is all he needs." So, great. So, give him a low dose. He felt fantastic. Make, absolutely best. His level was 280. But he felt fantastic, right? If you give anybody 280, they say, "No, no, my level has to be 1,000." Oh, yeah. Right?

Yeah.

And so that's what they think, that the higher, the better. In reality, it's called a diminishing return. Once you go above a certain range that your body can handle Even though your levels are rising, you're feeling worse, right? Hormonic. So, that's the problem that I see in a lot of my clients. I see a lot of male patients. I have few guys, they're overachiever guys because they're always in the TV or always the spotlight all the whole time. So, they take a lot of testosterone shots and now they're hobbling, they're gaining weight.

Gaining weight.

Because what's happening, the testosterone excess is if you don't use it up, it turns into estrogens. And now you got a bigger problem to deal with it.

Yeah. Yeah. And women too, you know, even I years ago, I tried testosterone pellet therapy and my testosterone got up to 800.

Oh my goodness. That's a male dose.

Yeah. And I think I attracted these women who their numbers were over 1,000. And the practitioners that they were working with were saying, well, this is part of prevention for the future. And I just thought, that's malpractice.

That's malpractice.

We need to make sure that these people are not. And the journey to get off of pellet therapy is a journey. And, you know, working against the symptoms that they had from water retention, hair loss, poor sleep, moodiness, highs and lows. Yeah, there's a lot of suffering that could come with it.

Full disclosure, I used to make pellets for about 3 years. And I did not know any better at that time, you know, because I thought, hey, this pellet might be a good thing because the science was so sounding.

And when you start, you feel amazing until you don't.

And then I found out that this is not the right type. So in 2011, we shut down the whole part of business completely.

Incredible. I love the authenticity. So you're at this interesting threshold because a lot of people are going into their doctor and, you know, given this terminology that could feel overwhelming. And yet you're sitting here and you're on the back end kind of telling us about this partnership that I believe we should all have with a practitioner on the other end. Do you see this kind of being forecasted as part of the future of healthcare? You're such an advocate, obviously, in, you know, training other doctors now to go out into the world. But what should listeners know when they're, when they're seeking advice, when we're thinking, seeking a protocol, when they're working with a doctor? What should they know about taking change in the future?

Um, ask for advice, but take it with a grain of salt.

Right.

Ask for recommendation, but do your own research. You got to listen to 10 different things and more than anything else, listen to your own body. The body will tell you if it likes it or doesn't like it, right? If it doesn't like it, don't do it. If you take a supplement, nothing happens to you, that means it's not doing anything for you. Stop it, right? Do something because it does, it makes you feel good. Now, in certain cases, you may not feel good at all, or you may not feel anything at all. But there are certain cases like glutathione, for example, we can talk about that one next. But that particular molecule is a lifeline for any human being. But in some cases, if you're completely healthy, right, you may not feel anything. And to me, that's an insurance. To me, that's an insurance because now I know that my oxidative stress down is zero and I want to keep it that way. When my oxidative stress is zero, I don't feel anything, I feel fantastic, but I want to stay there. I don't want to rise again. And if you're about the age of 28 and 29, that will never happen on your own regardless because you're missing the prime time for procreation, right? That's what the body is designed to do so far. And now you're going downhill. We used to call 40 was the Over the Hill party with Serena. I remember that. I remember that, right? And the thing is, all these things came about because how the human physiology was all created, right? Now, people say the 60s are new 40 nowadays now, right? So, it's changed because the science has advanced. And so, most supplements, if you don't feel it, it's because it's not doing anything for you.

So, be curious but cautious.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

See, that's why we need you to say the punchlines. Yeah.

I'm listening. I'm listening. I'm always a student. All right. So shifting to oxidative stress, we spent some time talking about mental stress. Oxidative stress within the body. I remember when I was younger, my mom has had rheumatoid arthritis for as long as I can remember. And there was somebody doing live blood analysis in her doctor's office one day. And I saw what free radical damage What does the damage look like in the blood? So, can you tell us about what oxidative stress is? Is it happening at a higher rate than before? And what should we look out for?

All right. So, all right. I like examples. So, you know, if you put a nail out in the water, it starts rusting. So, but before the rust, it's oxidizing. But you don't see the rust. Once you see the rust, it's already oxidized. Okay? So, we breathe oxygen every single day, every single minute, right? We breathe oxygen. Oxygen gets inside your body. It's the lifeline for body. Oxygen is. But excess oxygen needs to be neutralized. That's where the antioxidant comes into play. Now, Now, besides we're breathing oxygen, we also, there's a chemical reaction that happens inside the body and the byproduct is also oxygen species. These, all these oxygen species are highly reactive. Now, when you're young, the body produces enough antioxidants to neutralize all of them. So, there's so zero, so nail inside your body will stay as a nail the whole time. But then, something about age 28, 29, I'm not sure why 28, 29. If you look at all the genetic markers, if you look at any human physiology markers, but 28, 29, there's a sudden shift in— when people were doing gene mapping study, there's a sudden shift in human physiology at age 28, 29 where the gene mutation starts increasing.

Oh, interesting.

Oxidative stress starts increasing. The body starts changing about the time, but you don't feel the change yet. But chemically, the body's already changing, right? So, what's happening is that the body's producing a lot more oxygen species and the body has less antioxidant. There's a gap. This gap is what we call oxidative stress.

Okay.

This gap. Now, the gap is very small, not enough to do any damage at this point yet, but the gap every single day, every single minute, every single hour is increasing and increasing and increasing. The gap, as the gap increases, the oxidative stress increases, right? That leads to metabolic changes in your body.

Okay.

And that'll take another 10 to 15 more years before it gets picked up by a blood scan, a blood test, or a body scan or something. And to me, that's the problem. But to measure oxidative stress early on, there's only a few markers of oxidative stress markers, and those can fluctuate sometimes. If you had a good diet and you produce enough, then it will knock you out for the next 20, 30 minutes or 1 hour. But then, you'll be back to the same boat again. So, it's really hard to predict that part. But, you start seeing the changes in the metabolic changes sometimes as well.

How can we test our oxidative stress?

So, okay, the test, the one that I have used is HNE. Then, there's MDA, which is maleic aldehyde levels. The two most common one we used all the time to see what the oxidative stress are. And sometimes they're normal, sometimes they're not normal. The other thing that we do measure is ApoB, which is the oxidized cholesterols. If that pops up, you're about 15 years into this problem.

This is what gets me really excited because it gives us another strategy of focus. It goes back to that, how your body's functioning, right? Does stress increase increase oxidative stress within the body?

It should not.

Okay.

It should not because you're dealing with mental stress. Mental stress is different than oxidative stress. Now, don't get me wrong. Your brain is only 2% of the total body weight, yet it consumes 20% of all the oxygen that we breathe in. So the highest amount of oxidative stress is also in the brain.

Wow. That makes sense.

The highest number of somatic stress is also in the brain. So, the brain is in a sea of all the stress hormones. Even though it's pretty much adrenal glands above your kidney, has a direct correlation to the brain function. Cortisol has direct correlation to DHEA, dihydroepiandrosterone dione, right? It has a direct correlation with DHEA. And, that correlation affects your brain function and your memory. So, all the stress markers, oxidative or cortisol stress, are in your brain, unfortunately.

Got it. How can we slow down the damage from oxidative stress?

So, you are asking a question where if you can do that part, you can live life in perpetuity. That's what the singularity term was coined.

Right.

Yeah, right? Dr. Ray Kurzweil and Dr. Peter Diamandis, they call the term singularity is what the life in perpetuity. Sensitivity, but they were thinking about what? Technology. They had machines, they have diagnostic tools that's going to be invented to cure all the problems. No. The real singularity is within our body. We need processes inside our body to basically self-heal itself. And the number 2, the 1 and 2 things that's there is reduce oxidative stress and improve immune function. Now, I already proved it. We did a human trial 3 years ago.

Okay.

When I first made the glutathione product, this was in 2007, it was way ahead of the technology. At that time when I first discovered this molecule, there was no published articles in the whole world. Nothing in any languages, nothing. And at that time, the internet was not very powerful, so I was still able to scour the internet find a lot of data, but not like today. Today, I can have my AI robots check any languages, translate the information, and give it to me whatsoever. It did not exist at that time. And so, when I found out that glutathione can reduce oxidative stress, I want to test it, right? So, I was giving a big whopping dose of glutathione based on what the— I was doing IV therapies back then. I say, "Hey, IV therapy, let's just I give 600 milligrams to 1 gram of IV push. So, hey, give 600 milligrams of this glutathione. And I had all kinds of reactions, rashes, diarrhea, headaches. And I freaked out. Stopped my research, stopped everything of what I'm doing. I said, I sat on it for 6 months. I said, what am I going to do now? And then, I called the doctor. I said, hey, one of the doctors I work with in Utah says, hey, don't worry about it. Hey, give me the product. I have patients who wants to use it anyways, and I'll test their blood before and after, and I'll tell you how much to give you. To my astonishment, I found out was that we only need like maybe like 100 milligrams only to get you the levels that you want inside your cells, right? So, we found out that the glutathione needs to be inside your cells to make it better. Outside the cells, there's no oxidative stress.

But this is the whole debate. How do we know we're absorbing it or not? How do we get it in the cell?

Oh. So, right now, I don't know if you know this, we have 13 patents right now approved on this technology. So, it's a dual technology. We took glutathione, got through your skin, which is a physical barrier. So, the size matters. We shrunk the size to too small. Once it gets inside your skin, The cell membrane is a chemical barrier. Size has nothing to do with size. So, the chemical barrier is we use— all the cells have lipid rafts to communicate. We use the lipid rafts. On the lipid rafts, there's ACE2 receptors. We use that receptor to accept the glutathione molecule through a sugar because the body needs a sugar to produce energy for the Krebs cycle. I say, hey, if I put the sugar and put the glutathione inside the sugar, Outside the body feels this is sugar, inside it's glutathione, and there's a Trojan horse. And, when we did that part, it was in. Now, here's the thing. This is— I had no idea about this one, and this is going to freak everybody else out right now, which is people think that in order for me to transport nutrients all over my body, it has to be in the blood, right?

Yeah, of course.

Of course. Guess what? I can apply on the skin cells and within seconds is my brain tissue. Because skin cell-to-cell transfer happens to the lipid rafts for nutrients. I did not know that part. And when I found out about this glutathione, I'm sorry. Yeah. It just went crazy. I said, wait a second, I can apply over here and my brain fog clears up, I can apply over here and I can sleep better. How is this possible? Again, out of rabbit hole, 14 years later, I said, you know what? I didn't release the product for 14 years, by the way. Wow. I keep on researching, researching, researching because it was just too fascinating, right? In 2021, the whole world was shut down at that time, I said, and people were begging me. I had people calling me from all over the world. The country. I said, "Can you please release this product? We need this product out to the public." I said, "Okay, I'll release the product." It took me a year because the whole world was shut down in 2020. I couldn't get bottles.

Yeah, of course.

So, we released the product in 2021. But then, in 2021, we started another clinical trial, in human trial. This time, we went to the IRB, got approval. We did another human trial. We found out that within 1 hour, I can bring oxidative stress down to bare minimum. Not zero, because you don't want zero stressors, otherwise the body becomes lazy.

Okay.

Right?

Right.

Bare minimum within 1 hour. Within 4 hours, I was able to basically improve all your immune markers. So if there's any infections, it can bring it down. And what we did was we took the blood And in the test tube, we infected with Mycobacterium infection, and the load of the Mycobacterium infection went down within 1 hour.

Oh my gosh.

Within 1 hour. So anyways.

I'm moving around so much because my mind is kind of blown at all of this. Because when we think about this, again, pulling back from the picture, along with the hormone discussion, how many women alongside with their HRT protocol experience the onset of autoimmune, experience the onset of thyroid antibodies. So if we're pulling back the layer to support the body, now looking at glutathione, Isn't— let's just, for our listeners, glutathione taken orally, let's just recap, we don't know that your body's actually absorbing it.

We do know.

And—

It's not absorbing.

It's not absorbing it. Okay, we do know.

There we go. So, there's a clinical trial done in 2011 at the University of Texas in Austin. And they took 26 kids, gave them liposome form of glutathione, which is, they thought it was the best form. They gave the liposome glutathione product. And what they found out was Because every glutathione molecule was actually broken down into amino acids. People were taking amino acids. The body absorbs amino acids. Amino acids enters your cell membrane and you can produce your own endogenous glutathione. So, you're basically depending on your own body to produce your own glutathione. Only thing you provided was just the building blocks. Okay.

Okay.

That's it.

So, when we're getting our IVs, are we adding glutathione or not?

So, when you do the IVs, there was 1991 research. That's a different research. 1991, 2 grams of IV push were given to 10 subjects. And, what they found out was those 10 subjects, 100% of the glutathione stayed in the plasma, zero in the blood cells. All the glutathione molecule was in the urine within the first 5 to 15 minutes.

Oh, my.

But, here's what they saw.

There's that expensive piece.

Well, kind of, but not really because what they saw was an hour and a half later, the body actually broke down the glutathione and absorbed the cysteine out of it.

Okay.

So, the cysteine was literally used up to produce own glutathione. So, 6 hours later, they saw rise of glutathione.

Okay. Okay. So, it is worthwhile then.

Yeah. It is worthwhile in the sense that If you just go for glutathione IV push by itself, no. No. Absolutely not. If you're already doing an IV push for something else and want to put a chase of glutathione, if you have all the money in the world, then go for it. But if you have all the money in the world, or if you don't have— sorry, if you don't have all the money in the world, then guess what?

No. No.

I can get you better results with less than $2. Same results, actually even better results with only 100 milligrams.

And how are we getting this?

Topically. That's unfortunate because when I first made the product, I had no intention of making this topical product. My intention was to make a product that is stable.

But it makes sense. You bypass digestion, right?

Well, the thing is we need that layer of protection sometimes.

Okay.

Right? You need a layer of protection. But, when it comes to digestive tract, it breaks everything. All peptides. Talking about peptides. All peptides gets broken down because there's a big craze of peptides right now. And, I work with peptides for 25+ years now. So, I know a little bit of peptides right now as what it can, what it cannot do. And, I want to make sure that people understand that these peptides will be broken down by your stomach. No matter what.

No matter what. Are peptides waste of money?

You don't ask true according to things, huh?

You're going right for it.

The number one peptide right now sold in the world is GLP-1s. And, I'll tell you why it's not a waste of money or why it is a waste of money. So, GLP-1s were first discovered 10, 15 years ago, did not work. Did not work.

Okay.

There was two drugs before this new craze that popped up, was Byetta and Victoza, and did not work for weight loss.

Did it work for anything?

Well, they were meant for diabetics and insulin management, for insulin resistance, but not for weight loss until this new drug came out. And now, forget the diabetes. Nobody cares for diabetes anymore.

Nobody cares.

I just want to be thinner. So the first drug that ever worked was this one.

Wow.

Some of the peptides were approved by— if you think about peptides, like insulin is a peptide.

Yeah.

Right? Insulin is a peptide. It's a signaling molecule. The signals. Is it safe? I don't think so.

Yeah.

Right? It's the most arthrogenic drug ever invented is insulin. Before that, we had Cermorlin that was approved by FDA as a diagnostic tool. That means if If you take the peptide, it's a stomach peptide. If you take the peptide, if your body improves your growth hormone, you don't have growth hormone deficiency. It's a diagnostic tool. Guess what we do it for with that product right now? We use it daily.

Every day.

Every day because, oh, it's gonna give me more growth hormone. I said, no, it tells you that you don't have deficiency. If you just reduce your carb and sugar intake, your body will trigger its own growth hormone production. But that's too difficult.

We have to normalize these. All roads of this conversation that we've talked about today goes back to the three pillars.

Unfortunately. And we're going to beat around that all day long because the more— being a pharmacist, I see how many prescriptions I filled every single day. I have 8 pharmacists working in my pharmacies, 8 of them. And we fill prescriptions all day long. And I told my staff, if you ever see me behind the counter filling prescriptions, please shoot me. I don't want to be part of that thing. But people want medications to take the edge off. Instead of taking the edge off, they've been taking this on a daily basis. There are maintenance drugs right now. And my heart goes out for that because all these drugs, it's not solving any problems.

You are a gift. And honestly, listeners, I get it. I get the dangling carrot. I see the peptide talk. I see the protein talk. I see all of these things. And we just— we're so desperate to feel better because we don't feel good. But when we really trust what our body needs, we just have to go back to that. And I always say to people, like, imagine myself or Dr. Patel, like, we're with you on your shoulder.

We're always there.

Always there. Question: what would you eat? What would you not eat? How would you optimize your day? What would you be drinking? And the carb and sugar thing, which you, which you mentioned, is a big one because a lot of people are eating more ultra-processed food with the label of paleo or healthy or organic, and yet it's just full of carb and sugar. So keep a food diary for 1, 2, or 3 days so that you understand, gosh, I'm, I'm consuming a lot of carb and I'm consuming a lot of sugar. So that you understand instead balance that out with fiber. You talked about the salads that you do. My mom would not serve a dinner ever unless there was a salad on the dinner table. It's like foundations that we know that our body needs and understanding what your body needs to feel better. All right, so glutathione, The Glutathione Revolution. I'm going to hold this up. I'm excited to dive into this. I really do want to know, why did you start with glutathione, not NAD? Oh, and then—

okay, okay, okay. This is the— this is the— I love this topic because As there's so many people out there and they're looking for the next big thing that's gonna—

What's the thing?

Is the next big thing.

Yeah.

So I'm not gonna badmouth NAD, but I'm just gonna tell you what NAD is. It's absolutely necessary. But so for example, let's see, over here we have few lights in this room, right? How many switches do you need for each light bulbs? At least one switch to turn on all the light bulbs.

Switches.

If you have 2 switches, you can put half and half, right? If you have 3 switches, you can have one for the fan, one, two for the lights. You have 3 switches. If you have 4 switches, guess what? You have one too many.

Right. Okay.

Right? Now, did the switch produce electricity? What is NAD? It's an electron transfer molecule. NAD to NADH to NAD again to NADH. It's like a spinning. Have you seen those wheels where you put the water and it keeps on spinning and the The wheel is not producing the water, it's just transporting the water and putting it into the stream. That's what NAD is. NAD is electron transfer molecules, just keeps on transferring from one form to another and just keep on pouring and pouring. The energy is highly regulated. So, we do need a little bit because for all of chemical process inside the body needs that energy source. Source. But too much NAD is actually not beneficial at all, at all. And to me, that leads to anything in the body, more is not better. So when I go back to glutathione, it's the same thing. The body can produce glutathione for the rest of your life. Until the last day that you're on this planet, the body can produce glutathione, provided it has the 3 amino acids, glycine, glutamine, cysteine, protein, it has the two enzymes that needs to combine those three amino acids together, two molecules of ATP, energy from mitochondria, and one molecule of NAD for electron transfer. If anything is missing, the body cannot produce it. And as you said, aging, the only thing that's reducing in concentration is the ATP energy of mitochondria because mitochondrial Mitochondria is kind of getting damaged as we get older. A lot of ROS is causing the damage of the mitochondria. And so, if you have not enough energy, you can have all the cysteines in the world and body will not make any glutathione. So, for 140+ years, our goal was to create a glutathione molecule that can actually enhance your levels. This was the first one. The Glutathione, when we make the first one, the topical Glutathione, that's the first product that ever got inside your cell membrane. And we found out what the dose was as to how much we need. And by doing so, I can literally reduce oxidative stress down to bare minimum. You cannot have zero ever because once it goes to zero, your whole defense system is shut off.

Are there any contraindications or anything that people should look out for when they do start taking glutathione?

So, I get this question literally every single day. I said, "Oh, if I have cancer, can I take this? If I have autoimmune, can I take this thing? I mean, I got this problem, I got that, but is allergic reactions?" There's so many different questions about this one. Let me be very specific. There is no drug interaction. There is no disease interaction whatsoever because what I'm doing, I'm giving you back your own glutathione where it was produced in the first place. Outside the mitochondria, in the cytosol within the cell membrane. That's where it's produced. And I'm putting it back where it's produced. So, I get this question all the time. I say, "Oh, my doctor, my oncologist told me that I cannot take glutamine because I have cancer. I'm doing chemotherapy." I said, "Hey, you do what your doctor tells you to do, but you do know that your body makes glutamine regardless of they take chemo or not, right?" Yeah.

We live in a world where everything that we say that we hear is good, we're gonna hear the counter science to it. Like right now there's a push online against antioxidants. You know, antioxidants, don't take them in excess. And I understand if you have autoimmune disease or chemo or going through cancer where that could be an argument, but I think what you're speaking to again is optimizing the function of the cells within our body.

True. And when you ask me another question, why glutathione? What are other antioxidants? Because I'll tell you, Let me put 3 buckets for you in front of— bucket number 1, all the antioxidants in the world. You can just name it and they go in bucket number 1. Vitamin C, vitamin E, CoQ10, EASE, there's methylene blues, and I don't know what else is out there. There's Amazon juice and whatever, right? They all go in bucket number 1. Bucket number 2 is the body produces 3 enzymes. Glutathione peroxidase, GPX for short, then superoxide dismutase, SOD for short, and catalase. That's why we get the gray hairs because of catalase. So, those are the 3 as the body produces, they act as an antioxidant. They're not produced for antioxidant properties, but they will quench the free radicals and act as antioxidants as well. So, that's bucket number 2. And, the bucket number 3 is a tripeptide called glutathione. On. And I'm going to make a profound statement because I got to tell you before I make it because I know people miss it, right? Glutathione, bucket number 3, is more powerful than bucket number 1 and 2 combined. Combined. That means you can take any and all the antioxidants in the world, combine them with your own enzyme production, glutathione is more powerful to bring antioxidants levels down for you.

Where do we find this?

Well, all they do is go to the website and put Mona over there so they get some little discounts over there. I don't know, but we want people to get that product. My goal is that get the product, try for 30 days. We offer 100% money-back guarantee. We don't ask any questions. Use it. If you feel like you're on a waste of your time and money, please give me a 1-star review, badmouth me on Instagram. I'll refund your money because that's the last thing I want is to not to make you feel good because everybody above the age of 28 has liver oxidative stress. They all have it. The question is, if I can reduce it down to bare minimum, are you going to see changes in your body? And I kid you not, I have the who's who of the world. I have people flying from overseas because I cannot ship it to some of the countries. They will come over here and pick it up. If they have to. That's how it has changed people's lives in their own personal health and management. But, that's glutathione, one molecule. And, why I choose glutathione? Because of this very reason. Because if I can reduce oxidative stress down, if I can conjugate in your liver to get rid of all the toxins from the liver, those two things alone alone have a cascading effect of better immune system, regeneration of all your tissues and your cells, rejuvenating all your organ tissues and all those things. It is triggering longevity in your body. It's not that the glutathione itself is a longevity drug. No. Glutathione is only doing two things, antioxidant and conjugations and helping getting liver clean of all the debris.

Yeah, I can imagine.

That's triggering.

With your immune system, the gut-liver access too, which no one talks about, right? When we're healing the gut microbiome, we got to work upstream also. So this is incredible. I loved this conversation so much. We've gone over and I can't wait to have you back on. Can you tell us your website?

Oh, it's aurowellness.com. If you go to the website, I just launched another product called copper peptide.

I saw that.

And it's just—

We're desperate for all the things.

It's just one of those things that, again, my goal is if it's not earth-shattering, I'm not launching it, right? It has to be earth-shattering. And when I found out that the body breaks down your plasma to keep your beauty, hey, wait a second, what does the body do again? The body breaks down plasma, and as the plasma gets old, when the plasma gets old, the body breaks it apart, and this GHK tripeptide gets one of the components, combines to copper, gets lodged into soft tissues, tissue repairs under your skin for your beautification. Hey, we have a technology for tripeptides. What if I can do that same thing? And, oh my God, the results. Ladies, I'm a guy and I don't use skincare. I love this product myself, personal use. I have not used any skincare for for over 50 years and now I'm hooked on it.

You look incredible. Thank you. You really do.

But anyway, so yeah, follow us, but please, I really admire what you are doing because I want to be on this podcast for a while because I resonate with your message about going back to basics. No drugs is going to heal us. Start doing what feels right. And I'm trying to do the same thing from a pharmaceutical point, but I bring a different perspective because I see the wild side of people and when they take drugs and how good they feel immediately, but then they can never get the same feeling ever again in their whole life. And so I want them to feel the other joy without any medication.

Well, it's an honor to have you. You've been on my list for a while because I wanted to have a pharmacist on who could actually speak on both sides. AIDS. And you do such a beautiful job. And I know the caliber of, um, clients that you work with also. We're so stuck on longevity and this concept of like living until we're 120 instead of living the most now with vitality and optimization now, not in the future. Otherwise we're constantly just chasing a version of ourselves that we'll never arrive to. And you have a beautiful way of educating your science and your audience about how to do that. So thank you for that. Thank you for this very refreshing conversation. Tell me something that you are most excited about for the future of healthcare.

Future of healthcare. Oh, science. Absolutely. So for me, it's, it's, I, there's one belief structure. We work so hard to make money. And if you have all, if you have all the money in the world, you have a thousand dreams. But if you don't have your health, you only have one dream in life, which is to get healthy. And so for me is I'm on a mission to help every human being get the message that, hey, I can help you get your health back. I have this one master antioxidant that can do that for you, provided you stop chasing the dollar right now. If it's in your way of getting you healthy. If it's helping you get healthy, go for it. If it's in the way, stop it. So that's my mission in life, and that gets me excited every morning to see if I can make a difference in somebody's life today.

Let's go. You are a gift. Thank you for being here.