The Cholesterol Myth That Keeps People in Fear (And What Actually Matters)

What do people get wrong around cholesterol and heart disease?

Total cholesterol has as much to do with your risk of heart disease as your hair color. It is meaningless. Total cholesterol. Ladies and gentlemen, if your doctor is prescribing a statin based on total cholesterol, please change doctors.

Joni Bowden, welcome to Rooted in Wellness. It's such an honor to call you a new friend.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah. It's so nice talking to you before the show. So we have a lot to dive into.

We do.

Before we do that, I want you to know that this podcast is all about becoming more rooted in ourselves. And what I believe is this inherent knowing that we have the capability to heal ourselves, heal our own bodies. So, to start things off, I would love to ask you, what helps you. What are two or three rituals that you have every day that help you feel more rooted in your health, your happiness, and who you are?

Great, great opening question. Wow, that's a good one. I don't. I have aspiring rituals. I have rituals that I do that I aspire to, and I often don't do them. So I. I need to acknowledge that right away that you should follow what I say, not necessarily how well I. I follow it myself, but, you know, I find some of the simplest, dumbest things can serve as rituals. I mean, even just like, I get up and I make my electrolyte drink and I put my stuff in it and just that. And I get my vitamins for the week ready and, you know, in 15 minutes of meditation. And it's. It's not. It's just some of these basic things that. That are. You know, brush your teeth. You do this. If you do them in a kind of conscious way and. And just celebrate every moment of doing them, they become a source of what you're talking about. So I don't think it's so much in the action. One of the things. I've studied Zen a bit. I'm no expert, but I've dabbled enough to know that one of the tenets of Zen is the Zen of everyday life. That's why you see these books like Zen and the Art of Archery and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because you can take a simple task. And I went to. I was invited to speak at Beijing University, and during the time I was there, they treated me like they had the tea ritual.

Yeah.

And it is nothing more than making tea and serving.

Absolutely. Yeah.

But it is done in a way with such consciousness and such awareness and such being in the moment that it becomes almost a spiritual opportunity.

Absolutely every day.

So that's how I kind of think about rituals. I don't think there's anything magical in the thing that you do. I think it's in the doing of the thing. You know what I mean?

I love that.

Does that make sense?

And I love your honesty about it, because I feel like often people that I work with, or maybe even our listeners, they expect us to have this protocol that we are rigid about every single day, and that's the blueprint. But the people that I've worked with over the years who've had success in stepping into health and happiness, the rituals become you. And some days it looks like this, and other days it's like that. And you naturally do the things that make you feel good.

That's exactly how I look at it. That's very, very true.

There you go.

I mean, up until the dog died, I told you about recently, I mean, every morning, the first five minutes are spent in hugging and kissing the dog. I mean, I just go over there and cuddle him and annoy him and love his dog. You know, we wouldn't call that a ritual, but it's a very grounding kind of thing. I connect with an animal which is part of my family, and it's. These everyday things can be very meaningful, is what I'm. I guess I'm trying to say.

It's an act of love. I love it. And the reason why I start with that question, one of the reasons is to really point out in this world where health and wellness has such a hefty price tag, every incredible educator and practitioner lists things that are free. So that's the highlight of that moment.

Oh, that's very good.

The second part of this is to really understand. You've been in this game for such a long time.

Don't remind me.

I know, right? It feels. Are you saying I'm all, no, no, no, no.

But you're saying, I'm waiting. Next year I'm going to get elder statement of nutrition. There's no die. I'm turning 80 next year, and I'm expecting. That is, you know, that industry. So I'm. I'll be getting a lot of that. No, I don't know how I feel about being the elder statesman of something, but at the same time, you do learn a lot of shit. And. And you really do.

That's so true.

I can't say anything right. You. You really do. And you get you. I think you walk into that a little bit more. So I. You know, my first 20, 30 years in the. In the industry, it was, like, in awe of anybody who had a degree.

Yeah.

And now it's like, I don't care what you have. I. I know what I know, and I know what I don't know, and I'm very comfortable with that, and I'm very comfortable speaking truth to power. You know, I had a tagline, the nutrition mythbuster, from the time in the 90s when I called BS on the. On the food pyramid, you know, I mean, and. And on soy being a health food, and in all incarnations at all times. You know, there were a lot of that I did not agree with, and I called BS on, but I didn't really have the credentials to do it. And then I got the credentials, and I still call BS and now I'm just comfortable doing it. I don't care, you know.

Oh, yeah. Take that as the highest compliment. I'm at a point in my life where I'm seeking wisdom. People who have wisdom to share, who have experience, who've gone through the learnings, that you've come to full circle to be able to speak confidently about it. And I'm sure with that, you know, in your own healing journey as well, we're talking about things that you're experimenting with to optimize your health today. Yeah.

Always.

Do you notice when you feel uprooted in your life, you know, if you get too stressed or are there options or practices or travel?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I always. And I beat myself up for it, and I think a lot of us do. Because you think when you get to those extremely stressed areas where you really are ungrounded and don't feel balanced and stuff, you think I should be able. With all this stuff. I know I can't figure out a way out of this. And sometimes you can't. And sometimes the wisdom is knowing you're going to have some days like that.

I love it. No beating yourself up over it.

You know, you're gonna have days like that, and then you're gonna have days where it all comes together and you just. I had a therapist once who had a wonderful expression. He called it meantime between failures. So what he would evaluate progress as is, like, how much if you have. Let's call it, you have an incident. And whatever your incident Mona is. Is different than my incident, but it could be overwhelmed with anxiety. It could be something that's reactivated from childhood where you think you. It's unfair and you're not being treated fairly. But some Gets activated and you're like in your head. Right. You know that. And you would think you could bring that back to this more easily. When you have. And what he, what the therapist used to say was, look, the way you look at it is everybody's going to have those. You try to make the distance between them longer.

Yeah.

The mean time, which, the average time between the failure, which is you're in overwhelm or you're in anxiety, you're in any of the human emotions that sometimes overwhelm us. You try to make those times less frequent and less long with longer times in between. And that's the way maybe you evaluate it, not by the absence of those things. Stella Adler, one of the great teachers of acting. I was in musical theater before I was in all of this. So I have 20 years of music and acting and Broadway in my background. So one of the great acting teachers, Stella Adler, used to tell her students, you have voices in your head and they chatter and most of them tell you you're a fake and you're an imposter and you're a shitty actor and you don't belong on stage. They will never go away. Here's what you do. You have to learn how to talk to them. So you get to go that little voice on my shoulder this time, would you? I hear you. Thank you for sharing. Now be quiet while I go out on stage and act.

It's probably the most powerful tool. Yeah. When we put that through the lens of health, it's those moments that cause us to uproot and make poor choice. And for a lot of people, I'm sure the people that you coach as well, it's the decisions during that time, those gaps where you're choosing to self sabotage with shitty food, too much alcohol, too much sugar until you pick yourself back up. And a lot of my clients, they accept that as like, oh, I fell off the wagon. Right. This elusive wagon that exists. Instead of recognizing the control that can come over with just recognizing what that voice in that moment of self sabotage is. Right. It's really powerful.

Yeah. I, when I stopped cigarette smoking back in the 80s, they actually had a wonderful metaphor where they said, you will always get these little voices come along and they say, God, a cigarette would be so great right now. God, I know exactly how I feel after sex, after coffee, when something is being discussed, it's difficult, you know, if a cigarette. And he said, they'll always come, but you don't have to jump on the train. You can just let them. That's an interesting thought. Isn't that an interesting thought? That. Yes. I could go back, buy a pack of marbles. Interesting. Thanks for sharing. And you just don't bite into it. And maybe that's where the action is. Trying to stop the thoughts is kind of a fool's errand. It ain't going to happen.

No. I think it's a lot.

You all have, you know, Jewish. I come from a Jewish background. I used to say mishigah. We all have mishigah stuff in the head that is chattering at us. And you can't really make it go away. You can just learn to live with it in a way that's empowering so that you don't get sucked into it and you don't have to take. Take action on every dumb thought that you have in your head.

And it's.

Maybe that should be the goal.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I gave that voice a name. Her name is Monica.

Perfect.

She's a. Yeah, of course she is. I can't see longer.

Good for you. Forgiving. I should do that.

That's good. But when you're in your worst moments, it's so hard to, you know, recognize it. Right. It kind of feels good sometimes to, to be there. So. All right, we're going to dive into how all of everything we're discussing really impacts our physiology. We're going to do this. You have so much insight. We'll start with some rapid fire questions. All right. One health myth that drives you crazy.

Oh, one of my health. Oh, God. Well, this you want to get. Do we. Are we talking about meta myths? Like just general stuff, or are we talking about this? Let's go the specifics. Let's go to the specific. Saturated fat causes heart disease.

That's a good one.

Saturated fat clogs your arteries. Cholesterol clogs your arteries and causes heart disease by itself. That one's a tricky myth because we could talk about that a lot. Wrote a book about that. It's. It's one of those truths that has a. It's one of those myths that had a tiny bit of truth in it.

Yeah, yeah.

Like in the Exorcist, there's this great line where the older priest is telling the younger priestesses the devil will miss will mix just a little bit of truth in with the. With the stuff so that you think, well, that is true. Maybe the rest of it is true. It's very insidious. So some of the cholesterol myths, there's something there. It's just not what we think it.

Is, we're gonna break that down. What is one supplement that you'd never skip?

Actually, I have three. I do private practice and I was trained in biochemical individuality. So we don't believe that there is one diet that's right for everybody. We don't believe that there is one supplement regime that's right for everybody. We don't believe there's one dating type on match.com that's right for everybody. We totally that every individual is different. We're alike in some ways and we're more unalike in others. That said, people ask all the time what supplements should I take? And if their tolerance for supplements is low, which most people are, you know, they're not going to take. I take 50 things a day. I realize that's crazy. I get that. Nobody, I'm not telling anyone to do that. But if you had to pick three things, I usually go with magnesium, omega 3 and vitamin D. Love it. And I throw in the multiple because so many people don't get enough selenium or zinc. So if you can find a good multiple that has the right amount of selenium and zinc, you cover all the other bases. But those are the three that I never skip. Like my wife and I go on vacation, we travel a lot. We were talking about the Saint Martin in Paris and I used to take my packs of morning and afternoon for the 19 day. It's just, it's a suitcase with this. So we now take. One of the companies that work for Brain MD has packs called Brain Body and Brain Power and we just take much easier. Yeah, yeah. It's not, it doesn't do all the things especially if you have a condition like I have arthritis in the children, I take a lot of anti inflammatories, a lot of joint things. If you have heart stuff you might want to take extra Cohen, some Q10. But if you're just looking for the basics to get them covered, those packs are great.

I have to tell you about my latest obsession. Im 8. This is not your average supplement company. Ima was born from a collaboration from top scientists and medical experts and even David Beckham. They created a line of products that take a holistic science backed approach to health. And I am hooked. Let's start with their daily essentials drink. This supplement is packed with 92 premium ingredients including clinical doses of things like CoQ10 for heart health, MSM for joints and muscles. It's basically like getting all of your daily nutrition in one delicious scoop. I love mixing it into a smoothie. It has this great chocolatey berry flavor that I look forward to every day. Plus it gives me sustained energy without any jitters or crash. They also have a daily longevity capsule that supports healthy aging at the cellular level. It has ingredients that help with DNA repair, clearing out damaged cells and it boosts mitochondrial function as well. I've been taking it consistently and I can definitely feel a difference in my mental sharpness and my overall vitality. What I love about im8 is their commitment to quality. Every ingredient is meticulously sourced, non GMO and free from any harmful additives. They use advanced technologies like liposomal delivery to make sure that your body is actually absorbing the nutrients. As a pending B corp they prioritize sustainability and ethical practices. I can't recommend imate enough. It has simplified my supplement routine without compromising on effectiveness. Head over to im8health.com and use code monasharma10 for 10% off your first order. That's im8health.com code monasharma10. Trust me, your cells will thank you. So you have a lot of experience working with companies consulting on supplements. We were talking before we, we started around the hype that's out there. So last rapid fire question. What's one supplement that you'd always skip?

That I'd always skip?

Yeah, just like don't go there. All that hype.

Oh lord. The ones I skip I don't think about. So that's hard. Now I think about what have I, you know, not let. Can I come back to you?

Yeah, let's come back to that.

I'm sure after I leave here I'm going to think of 50 totally like why didn't I think of that one? Because that's really BS but why don't.

We say it this way. You brought up something before we started filming. If it's a company that's brand new that has a lot of fancy websites and taglines and money behind them but doesn't have the clinical study skip it.

That's unfortunately becoming the majority. I'm not talking about the old fashioned companies like Thorne Research or Designs for Health. These are great companies that have been doing great things for years. But I have run into more than my share of bro tech companies, you know, Silicon Valley, a couple of guys, they read something about an ingredient, they have a great marketing plan, they know how to hire influencers and before you know it they've got investors and they can sell anything. And that's most of what I see in the supplement market. We were talking about that before. I mean, if I go on TikTok and I look at or Instagram and see some of these things, I'm tempted to buy them. The marketing is brilliant, but it's sizzle without the stake. In most cases.

In many cases, we don't need any more proof. If it sounds too good to be true.

Oh, I have one that I've skipped. Ketones.

Ketones.

Exogenous ketones. I do believe and have written and have said many times, a ketogenic diet is a huge lifesaver for many people. It's an intervention that is very helpful at certain times in one's life. It may not be a diet that you have to stay on for the rest of your life. It might work really well for three months. There's all kinds of reasons why it might work. I am not at all convinced that taking ketones externally is the same as your body making them.

You got it.

Your body makes them under very specific circumstances. And when there's no glucose around or when there's not enough glucose around, it turns to this alternative fuel cycle source, which it makes. If you take them, your blood sugar could still be high. Now you're taking ketones. I'm not convinced they work the same as when that's the source of fuel that your body is now making because you don't have any sugar coming in in your diet.

Oh, that's a good one.

So I've never been. And I know that there are people who I have great respect for. You may have had them on the podcast. Dominic d', Agostino, huge advocate for kidney, knows what he's talking about. He's smartest. I just don't agree with it.

The magic comes with putting your body into the therapy of creating them.

It's like with sweat, they used to say, well, you know, if you sweat from exercise, it's the same. Just go in a hot. In a hot tub or a day, you're still sw, but it's not quite the same as the one that's engendered by all of that activity and all of those other metabolic things that are happening when you're exercising. So I'm not sure that you can just look at the sweat and say, well, it's sweat. What's the difference? It's ketones. What's the difference? One is made under certain physiological conditions and the other is bought at gnc.

You got it.

I don't think it's the same.

I love that you remember that. All right, let's get into the juicy Stuff all the big myths that you've debunked over the years, and it's a big one. You know, with everything that we know about cardiovascular health today, it remains the number one killer, especially among women. And a lot of these issues or imbalances with cardiovascular health are preventable. So you have spent years challenging a lot of the mainstream ideas around this and around health. What do people get wrong around cholesterol and heart disease?

How many hours did you say we had?

We're going to lead to hdl. We're going to break down the HDL and LDL and particle sizes and debunking all of that.

Here's where. Start how we measure it.

Yeah.

People come to me every day and say, I need to have a consultation because my cholesterol is really high. And my doctor wants me to go now. And the first thing I say is, how'd you get it measured? You know, it says, you know, HDL. Okay, that's 1963 medicine.

Yeah. Total cholesterol.

Oh, total cholesterol. Let me tell you the best quote I ever heard about total cholesterol, which people still come to me and say, my total cholesterol is 214 and my Kaiser doctor wants to put me on a statin because, okay, so total cholesterol. This is not me speaking. I wish it were. This is Peter Attia speaking. Peter Attia is a doctor, for those of you who don't know, one of the best in the country. Peter Attia wrote a wonderful book on anti aging. I will promote it. It's not my book. It's called Outlive. I recommend it to everyone. I wrote a book on anti aging. That one's better. So it's just a great book. And in it, in the heart disease section, he says, total cholesterol has as much to do with your risk of heart disease as your hair color. Tattoo that under your eyelids. As they say, it is meaningless total cholesterol. Ladies and gentlemen, if your doctor's prescribing a statin based on total cholesterol, please change doctors. It's a meaningless number. Now, LDL isn't meaningless, but it's kind of outdated. My personal cardiologist, Douglas Trifont Scripts, was giving a lecture and he was introduced by another cardiologist, Mimi Guarnieri, who you may have heard of is also out in Del Mar and brilliant, brilliant cardiologist. And she said, Dr. Triffin, I think we should call your lecture the death of LDL because let me tell you why in the 50s and 60s when they first kind of discovered cholesterol as a thing. And they would have health fairs, this is before you were born, when I was around. And they would have health fairs to introduce the public to the concept of, you know, exercise and health. And they'd have a little booth and cholesterol, and you get it measured with a little pinpoint. And they would measure, oh, Mrs. Jones, your cholesterol is 240. That's very good. Because 240 used to be the. They've been dumbing it down, lowering it, lowering. Each time they get millions of more statin customers. But 240 used to be considered good. Or they would go, It's 220, it's great. Or it's a little high. And people would get aware of this. As time went on and we got better at measuring and seeing, they said, well, cholesterol actually travels in the body in two different types of containers. One of them is an ldl, low density lipoprotein. The other is an hdl. And by the way, sidebar. The second biggest myth is that there's such a thing as good and bad cholesterol, because those two cholesterols, if you put them under a microscope, are identical. Identical. So the example I always use with clients and in lectures, I go to lax. Me, Johnny Boden. I'm a passenger. I choose to get on a plane to go to Hawaii, or I choose to get on a plane to go to Philadelphia. Two different directions. I'm the same passenger. The cholesterol is the same, the container is different, the plane is different. So that's number one. So we found out, yes, it felt it travels in two different containers. So they came up with, you know, good and bad. Anybody who does any critical thinking should think about the body and think anything that can be put into good and bad has got to be simplistic. It's just nothing in the body works that way. But for simplicity's sake, they called the high density ones good and the low density ones bad. We now know there's like 13 different subtypes. There's LDL 2a and 2b and HDL 2a. There's non functional HDL and functional HDL. This oxidized LDL, there's LP. There are a dozen different subtypes, and they behave differently. They also come in different sizes. Why does that matter? If you imagine the artery wall as chicken wire or a tennis net. Let's call it a tennis net. It's supposed to be pretty tightly. Right. If you took a Big fat beach ball, and you toss it with all your might at that big tennis net. What's going to happen? Nothing. Because the beach, there's no velocity. There's nothing's going to happen to the tennis net, right? If you took a golf ball and you set it on fire and you pitched it with the speed of a major league pitcher, what's going to happen to the tennis net? It's going to be damaged. That's why size of LDLs matter. Big, fluffy ones don't do anything. Little and inflamed, oxidated ones do a lot of damage. The latest cholesterol, the latest, they're 20 years old. It kills me that they don't give these tests out all the time. Will tell you, how many small dense particles do you have? How many LDLs do you have circulation? Why do we care about how many LDLs as opposed to how much cholesterol they're carrying? Okay, you're a traffic cop. You want to prevent accidents on a very busy corner. What's the first thing you ask the supervisors? What's the first piece of information? You want to know how many cars are on the road? Do you ask what's in the glove compartment? Do you ask what's in the trunk? You ask how many vehicles there are. Because the vehicles break up and that's where the accidents are. The vehicles of the LDLs got it? Not what they're carrying. Cholesterol's the cargo. When there's an accident, it spills out into the road. But you know, when there's a fire, fireman come. Firemen didn't cause the fire. They're there at the scene of the crime, but they didn't cause it. And that's the same thing with cholesterol. It spills out. It's right there. And you go, oh, yeah, cholesterol caused it. No, the LDL being damaged caused it. And that's what we should be looking at now. So this is part of the myths of cholesterol. Doesn't mean LDL doesn't count, because the bad ones do count. But you gotta know, are they the small dam, the inflamed ones, how many of them are there? You know, all of this is available in tests that are given by LabCorp and given by Quest, and you can get them everywhere. And doctors won't order them because insurance doesn't pay for them.

There you go. So you and I both know that the clients that come to work with us, their panel might include total cholesterol, LDL and HDL with not even ligand.

Blood, blood glucose. That's it. The four things. That's all they look at.

That's it. And, you know, let's just say this client comes back. LDL is really high. Total cholesterol is really high. Immediate prescription for a statin on top of the fear that comes with this, oh, my God, I have high cholesterol. What does that mean? And this could be a very young person. I have to say, I. With the people that I've worked with over the past 15 years, with the exception of one person, I've gotten off statins. And this isn't to say. To say that there isn't a time and a place for statins. I think there is. They can save lives. I think we can talk about genetics as well. But this one doctor, when I mentioned looking at particle sizes, it was like.

Oh, they don't know if they know what it is at all. They think it's not necessary. Yeah, I have a hack for that. I have a way around it. So if you can't get your doctor to order the particle test, and it comes in different names, by the way, they call it advanced Cardiac profiling Fractionated because they're trying to find out more about the LDLs and the HDLs and if they're functional, how many there are, all that stuff. So they may call it an advanced profile, they may call it, you know, fractionization, the NMR particle test, all of these things, they're all measuring the same thing. You can't get your doctor to order that. You get them to order the apob, they can't say no to that. So APOB is another test which many cardiologists who I admire are now. They're not even looking at the particle. And the reason for that is because they can't get doctors to order it. And the results seem to be somewhat inconsistent from lab to lab. Apob. APOB is in the cardiac best practices manuals. Every cardiologist knows it. It's an accepted test, and they won't say no to doing it. APOB is a protein that wraps around all the bad LDLs. So if you know how much your APOB is, you kind of know whether they always go in the same direction. You know, if you have a high particle number, you have a high APOB because there's an APOB around every one of those LDLs. So that's a very good way also to look at it. That's a hack to get. And if your APOB is out of range, that's Something you need to do something about.

And I hope for our listeners you're really. I want people to take away this information and feel empowered to go to their doctors to ask these questions. You mentioned lpa. I think that this is another one that's also really important to look at. It's like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Can you talk to us about LPA and E?

Yeah. The thing about lp, it's a form of ldl. Very bad and very big indicator, a strong risk factor. I'll put an asterisk on this because there's some evidence that this may not be 100% true. But for many, many years, we didn't even bother to test it a second time because it doesn't change it. Hardly ever now, I have seen people come back with changes in their lp, so I no longer believe it's unchangeable. I also don't know if it's lab error because they go to different places and get. It's mostly believed to be pretty much genetically determined, although there are cardiologists who say you can move it with certain esoteric supplements and certain things like, doesn't matter. I mean, it may be movable, but for the most part it's not. And it's an important risk factor to know about. But can we take a short deadline, a short detour on risk factors in general?

Please.

So risk factors, If you have a kid and your kid is in high school and he has a guidance counselor, and they want to kind of determine how's this kid going to turn out, they look at different things. They look at, for example, how many books are in the house that they grew up in, how many words do their parents use. These are all actual things that are correlated with success in later life. They also look, is this kid in a gang? And often your risk factors will point in different directions. Here's a kid who grew up with 13,000 books and parents who had PhDs, and they talked to him about everything, and they read, you know, they played Bach to him in the womb and all that. But he's also hanging out with a gang. That's a risk factor. Pointing in a bad direction. The others are pointing good. So we never usually have risk factors that all point in one direction sometimes, but most of the time you've got, this looks good and this doesn't look so good. And we get so crazy about one of these numbers being pointing in the wrong direction. You might have a high lp, but you also might have zero calcium in your arteries and a Wonderful lifestyle and your sleep is terrific and you have great relationships. But you got this high lp, it's not a fade accompli. So I would love people to understand that some risk factors are modifiable. You should work with the ones that you can work with and not be so crazed about the ones that are either fixed or you can't change your sex or your age. Those are two enormous risk factors and we don't go nuts about that. We do the ones that you want to get rid of the user errors. Right. So and one of the things that I've been on a personal mission to get across to every website that I get asked to talk about to or every lecture I get, or every podcast I'm invited on and every client I see, I leave with this information because they people don't know this and because they don't know it, they don't realize how powerful it is. So we're talking about risk factors and we're talking about what will predict outcomes. When we're talking about LP is high, you think you're going to get a heart attack and this is low and you think you won't get, get whatever it is, right? You have the Alzheimer's gene, so you don't have it, you're going to be. Everybody thinks that these are the ones that we need to be worrying about. So Peter Attia started this thing about the kick ass hundred year olds. Have you read anything about this? And we all want to be kick ass 100 year olds. So he said, well what does a kick ass 100 year old look like? What do they do? And he made a list. He's very obsessive. He's also a mathematician. So he made a whole Excel spreadsheet about. You lose this much balance every every decade, so you gotta work on balance this much each week in your 50s. And then you lose this much stability and then you've got cardiac and you gotta work this hard on the cardiac, but you gotta keep your muscles up because muscle is the organ of longevity. So you gotta do all these things so that you can be a kick ass 100-year-old, meaning somebody who can function, who can put a light thing in the overhead compartment, who can carry two, you know, do a farmer's carry for 20ft, can carry groceries. That's a kick ass 100-year-old. So we wanna all you have all these people doing all these biohacking things, the ice baths and the riding for the adrenals. So some researchers thought this is a great thing. Why don't we go interview some kick ass 100 year olds and see what they do, See if we can reverse Engineer. They're already 100. They're already doing what we're trying to do with the ice baths. What do they do? Do they do ice baths? They go to the gym five times a week. Let's find out what they do. So they go to Sardinia. Sardinia is one of the five blue zones and it happens to have the highest population of 100-year-old men in the world. Not hundred year old men on assisted living, but like shepherds. You know, they're out there and they're doing stuff right. And they look to see what their life is like and what lessons they could learn. And they came away with three and have to take these with a grain of salt because they're sort of joking but they're serious. So lesson number three, going in reverse order is live, where there's lots of stairs. Now if anybody ever watched White Lotus third season, it was filmed in Sardinia. You can't walk out of Sardinia to get a quart of milk without walking 10,000 steps. It's everywhere you walk, right? There's no option. So the lesson there really is walk everywhere and just be active all the time. That was the third lesson. Second lesson is, what do these guys do all day? Well, they're shepherds the most part. So think about what that means. That means that they are out in the Sardinian mountains in nature such as this. And this is information. I mean being in nature, even looking out of your window, that's information that's being processed through your brain, through your physiology, through your neurochemistry. And it's about balance and eternity and harmony and permanent. All those things are being into your brain. That's what they're out there doing eight hours a day around the gentlest animals in the world. The most docile, sweet animals, like your gorgeous little puppy. Imagine eight hours a day of that.

Connection with animals and nature.

So the second lesson was spend as much time as you can around docile animals. Yeah, you want to know what the first. And it was not just number one, it was number one in the sense that in real estate there are three important things to know. Location, location, location. Right? It was number one like that. It was so far in front of two and three that there weren't. There was not even a. Wasn't even close. Make friends and family your number one priority in life, period. And this isn't just from Sardinia. There's something going on. Four generations started In Harvard called the Happiness Study Guy, that's the current director, just wrote a book about it. They follow people since 1936. They followed these people to see what they do and what their outcomes are. How many of them get sick, how many of them die, what do they die of? What do they do? What correlations can we make? Number one with the bullet? The people who live the happiest, the longest and the healthiest were the people who had the strongest social contact.

Oh, wow.

So I say this to one of my clients, come in, and they come in with, I'm worried about my cluster. I'm worried about this and that. Always ask them, what's your family life like?

Yeah.

You have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a husband or a lover or a puppy or a AA group or what? What's your life like? And very often all the fear and stuff goes out of their eyes. Oh, my grandkids.

Yeah.

Oh, my. My wife or my husband or my lover or my Whatever. And. And they soften. They say, oh, we go fishing, we do this, we go to whatever it is. And I go, that is the biggest deposit you could possibly make in your health bank that trumps all of these lab tests.

God, I love that you brought that up, because I feel like today with health and wellness, a lot of people, one, they're treating their health like a checklist every single day. Two, are becoming very confused on what it takes to be healthy. And it doesn't mean VO2, max training with intensity.

Not three times bad.

Not that it's bad.

Not that that doesn't help. I mean. No, please understand, neither of us is saying that, right? No.

But you know how long spend cold plunging or in the sauna or whatever it is. It's like these foundational things for health first that will fuel everything else or maybe lessen the grip of what it takes for you to actually step into that and the way that that ties into the labs to bring us back to using it in front of a doctor. Often we've got that white lab coat syndrome where the doctor will read something back to you. And you probably work with a lot of clients as well, where instantly it's just. It's fear that comes over you. Of course, you identify with the lab report as opposed to the practices that you have in your life, areas of opportunity or improvement that are so foundational to feeling better.

And I don't think people realize how much. How much of a deposit that is. I think of it as a health bank. You know what I mean? Like, if you stay up 24 hours, that's a withdrawal. It's not good. It's going to. Right. If you go on a binge and you get off the wagon, as we were talking about before, and you eat junk food, that's a withdrawal. But the family and friends thing is a deposit that dwarfs the importance of those. Not that you should not care about those withdrawals. We try to not do 24 hours without sleep. We try to not go on junk food binges and alcohol binges and stuff like that. But we're also making deposits. And most of us don't even realize how much money we're putting in our health bank by. By just nurturing our relationships. Barbara Bush, who was married to the first Bush, who many of you don't even remember, but our Bush had a father who was president in 1988-1992, and he had a wife named Barbara Bush, who turned out to be a very wonderful person. She gave a very famous commencement exercise at Wellesley University, All Women's University, in 1992. And in it she said, not one of you women ever, at the end of your life will ever regret not closing a deal or not spending more time at the office. Every single one of you will wish that you had spent more time with your family and friends. So do it.

Goosebumps. These are the things. I wonder if it's a very Western problem to not prioritize these things in our life. Right.

Very well said.

Yeah, I'm half Danish, half Indian, and both cultures prioritize living in community, time with community, or living with our extended family. And it's foundational to health.

Yeah, it really is. And people don't understand it and don't give it the respect that it. It should be given, because if you're doing those things, you're doing as much as taking a jog every day, you know, or any of the things that. Which are great. But so is this. And they ask me all the time on podcasts and on interviews and on TV, what's the secret? Anti aging. I'm going to be 80. I guess I'm. I am unusual in that. And I never hesitate. My tennis group, we have a group of 20 people who play tennis. More than 20. But we have an extended. We have a group text. We're on the text every day. Who's in the park, who's playing. We're in la. A lot of them are performers, composers, conductors. We go to see each other's performances. We do lunches. We do celebrate. We have that tennis group is what keeps me looking this way.

Yeah, you are very youthful.

I mean, it's. But those. It can be your tennis group, it can be your eighth AAA group. It can be your sisterhood in the church or in the temple, or it can be whatever it is. Those social connections are really what keeps you alive.

All right, you've got one of the best practitioners saying maybe for 20, 26, community and access to nature. Time in nature should be the number one thing on your list of priorities when it comes to your health span goals.

I think it's right up there. It's right up there.

So how is it then, you know, you looking at this, more than 20 years of research, writing a book called the Great Cholesterol Myth. Why are we still coming up against the medical community and, you know, these simple practices that are game changers when it comes to health? You know, you literally wrote a book on this. Can you tell us a little bit of what Inspired you and Dr. Stephen Sinatra to make that happen?

Gladly.

Yeah.

So I was a trainer at equinox in the 90s. We talked about this very first Equinox that ever opened. I was one of the trainers, and I eventually became the dean of the fitness training institute where we taught trainers. And this was Low Fat Land.

Yeah, I remember those.

This is the 90s. And this is when Susan Powder was on the infomercial screaming, stop the insanity. And, you know, I don't know if anybody remembers that, but this was a. You know, this was the era of loaf that I was absolutely one of those people. I would order an egg white omelette, which, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, the stupidest nutritional idea in history. I order egg white omelette, and if it came with even a little bit of the yolk, I'd send it back because I knew that there's cholesterol on that yolk. So I believed all that. And we had clients who believed all that. And this was 1991. 92. Atkins had just published the third edition of the new diet revolution, the Atkins diet. It was three editions, and the 92 was the third one. So it was very much in the news. And they were talking about it. And we would have clients who did not respond well to the low fat, get on the StairMaster and do three hours a day of joyless exercise, where you're just sitting there hating your life and doing this, and nothing is working and it's not coming off. And we had clients like that, and they would come to us and they'd say, you know, I have Some neighbors who tried the Atkins diet and it really, you know, it really worked for them. And we go, you cannot do that. This guy's a quack. He's telling you that bacon, bacon chips are better for you than, you know, cereal. And you might lose a few pounds, but so do the models who are doing cocaine for breakfast. I mean, you're going to get a heartache. You can't do that. And guess what? They didn't listen to us. Can you imagine? So we would have these clients come back. And I remember one in particular was kind of my, the, the trigger from my aha moment. And it's the guy who, who was probably clinically obese, very successful business guy. Nothing, nothing worked for him. And he comes back after a while and he has visibly lost weight and his eyes are shining and he looks wonderful and his waist is smaller. And his doctor's saying, what did you do? You talked this right? So down and, you know, they dropped and all this stuff. And he said, well, I went on the Atkins diet. And the doctor would say, you can't do that, you're going to die. I mean, this is how much they were into the religion. And so I would look at people like that. And there's a concept in psychology called cognitive dissonance. It basically means you can't, you can't hold two contrary ideas at the same time. It's, you can't say, that's a glass of water, that's a brown, that's a cup of brown sugar, and it's one or the other. You can't say, well, in some cases it's no, it's black or white. So either this guy is lying or what we heard about the Atkins diet is bullshit, because they can't both be true. And it wasn't just that guy. It was many people. So I started to think, if what we have been told about low fat diets and the absence of fat producing great health, if that's not true, what happens to the ban on saturated fat cholesterol? Because the only reason we're told not to eat saturated fat is because it will raise your cholesterol.

Yeah.

What if cholesterol isn't the thing that's going to kill you? What if the fat isn't? We started thinking about that. I started asking that question, and it was that. And by the way, the minute we started asking that question, we were ostracized. I believe that I had been one of the most sought after and respected teachers of trainers. And the minute that I said, you Know, I'm not so sure what we were taught about saturated fat. What are his credentials? Why are we having him speak at this thing? He doesn't know. He's not even a doctor. That's what happens when you go again. So I had that piece of information going. This sounds more like a religion than it does science. If people are getting that upset when you question something, I mean, isn't the whole idea of science supposed to be. Supposed to try to disprove the existing hypothesis? Not so. I saw that. And I also started wondering about the truthfulness of what we've been told. I don't think anybody was trying to. There was a conspiracy, like, let's screw up the American people and tell them this stuff. But there was this general accepted belief that saturated fat was the enemy, animal products were never to be touched, and cholesterol was the enemy. It was causing all of this stuff. And what if that weren't true? And that's what got us starting to look at. Started looking at some research. I hadn't read research before. I didn't even have a doctor. I mean, I was basically. I had a degree in music and a master's in psychology. So I knew science from psychology. I knew how to do a study and how to read a study. But I didn't have any background in nutrition until much later. And I just started asking this and reading some of the research and I started reading. I remember one study. Serum biomarkers in a ketogenic population. While ketogenic diets were supposed to be. They were. Were supposed to kill you because you're eating a lot of fat. And they look at these things, serum biomarkers, meaning triglycerides, and they're all improving. How does that happen? If this diet is going to kill you, why are all these things getting better? So that's what started us on this. And by then I had gone back to school for nutrition and I started writing books. And I had a book called 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, which was still a bestseller in. Thank you.

Yeah.

And like most producers and publishers, they go, well, this is a hit. Let's make a sequel. So they wanted to do a series like 150 healthiest slow cooker Recipes. And we did a bunch of 100. And they called one day and they said, we have a great idea. The 150 Best Ways to lower Cholesterol. I said, well, that's a great idea, but I'm not doing it. And they said, what are you talking about? I said, because I Don't think lowering cholesterol lowers the risk of heart attack. I think we're up the wrong. They said, that's crazy. So I. I said, I pitched them the idea of the great cholesterol myth. And they said, not in a million years. Right. First of all, it's completely against the medical establishment. Number two, you're not an md Number. Just endless reasons why we couldn't do it. And they finally. I sent them enough stuff for them to think, maybe he's onto something, I don't know. And they made a condition. They said, okay, we'll Will. Will do this book, but you have to have an MD as a co author. It has to be a cardiologist, and it has to be a internationally known cardiologist who's going to.

Right, right.

So I call up Steve Sinatra, who I knew was on the same page as me with that. I said, you want to do a book with me? He says, yeah. And that's how we got together to write the Great Cholesterol Method. Steve was a rep for one of the statin companies. He actually. He was an insider. He actually got honorariums to teach people how great statins were.

You know, a lot of these trends that come out and the people that fund them, they're doing a lot of damage. We're still undoing the damage from that period of time. Let's put this into perspective for people who may have had their labs done. Their total cholesterol is high. Their LDL is really high. Their HDL needs improvement. Their LPA is elevated. The doctor says it's time for a statin. What should they do? I can imagine that a lot of our listeners, they know the saturated fat story. They're going to start cutting out eggs and go, that's a mistake.

And let me explain something very short thing on that. We have always known, the people who invented this theory have always known that eating cholesterol has zero effect on blood cholesterol. They knew that Ancel Keys, who's the godfather of this stuff, knew that. And the reason they didn't tell anybody that is they thought people are too stupid to know the difference. Which, you know, let's face it, they said, we can't make these distinctions. We can't tell them it's okay to eat cholesterol, but you gotta worry about your cholesterol and then just tell them it's bad.

Yeah, yeah.

So we've always known that eating eggs does not move the needle unless you have a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia it affects less than 1% of the population. It's a genetic condition. It means your cholesterol is 500. If you look at a glass, you know, it's just, it's always elevated. Not in the way that like my doctor says it's 260. No, I'm talking 500. It's very, very, very high. And that is a separate condition needs to be treated separately by experts in that thing. But that's not most people. So for 99 and whatever percentage of people, you can eat all the eggs you want and will not budge your cholesterol, your body will just make less.

So let's talk about this then, panel. Then being a sliver in the overall picture. Right. So for, for somebo have that elevated score, their doctor isn't well versed in this. They're prescribing a statin, stay off saturated fat. What are some other things that you would recommend them to do outside of finding a new doctor?

Well, first, to get a better test than the basic four things. Hdl, ldl, total and triglycerides. To get the correct test so that you can really see what you are. Second thing is I actually, actually ironically, a good portion of the people who come to me kind of for validation on like my doctor said this and I'm not going to touch a statin. I go not so fast. We never said statins were the devil. We said they were wildly over prescribed. They were being prescribed for populations who were unlikely to benefit from them. They didn't necessarily reduce the risk of death and they shouldn't be given out by candy. And it was a $31 billion a year industry. That's what we hated. I often have to tell people statins aren't the devil. There are times when they are very useful. Yours might be one of them. So don't get as tribal anti statin as their tribal pro statin. Being tribal is the problem here. Being fanatic about a position. There are cases where makes a lot of sense, but you gotta know what you're treating. You gotta get the right test so you know whether there's really a problem. And you gotta look at other things. One of the biggest things we talked about in the revised edition of the Great Cholesterol myth was the importance of insulin resistance, which is the metabolic plague of the 21st century. I just gave a talk on GLP1s at supply side Global and all I talked about was insulin resistance. This is the reason people are obese. This is the reason people are going on GLP1s, if you don't talk about insulin resistance, you're not talking about the root cause of any of this. And insulin resistance shows up 10 years before the doctor says, oh, your cholesterol is a little high, your A1C is creeping up. You can see that with insulin resistance 10 years early. So why are we not talking about insulin resistance?

This is exactly where I wanted to guide you. If your doctor is talking to you about your cholesterol and going on a statin, you have to have the conversation around your metabolic health and understanding what your levels are and looking at your diet. Do you put your clients on a continuous glucose monitor to get a sense of.

I beg them to get it.

Yes.

I beg them to get it. And it is one of the great. It gets me. I hate bullying and the medical profession is a big bully most of the time. And the fact that you had to get a prescription for this thing and you had to go, it's like going to the priest in order to speak to God. Why do we need a prescription to monitor our blood sugar? How dare they? Now you can, you can buy them without a prescription, fine. But yeah, they're very valuable biohackers use them. And you all have 99. I shouldn't say 99. I get extreme symptoms. Most doctors, when you ask them for continuous glucose on saying you're not diabetic, they have no idea what knowing your blood sugar can do to performance, to athleticism, to body fat, to all these things, to mood, to sleep. And if you don't know how food is affecting you, you, how are you going to make changes in it? Just because the book says that it's probably bad for you when you eat something and your blood Sugar goes to 210. That's A. You don't need a book to tell you you're not going to eat that food again because you're going to see, oh, my God, that's bad.

Do you think the outcome would be really different if doctors merged? Speaking to insulin resistance and metabolic flexibility.

With cholesterol system in this country is so broken. The medical industrial complex, so to speak, is so broken, it's beyond my pay scale to figure out how to fix it? I think that you probably don't want to get into the politics of this, but I think that there's some really great doctors in Washington now. And if they can get there, if they can make the different J. Buduchari, these are people that we have idolized for years. Marty Macari, the head of the FDA now and Casey mean was. Yeah, I mean, dear God, she brings tears, I think about her. And now she hasn't been confirmed. But I mean if they get those people in, you may see the system change, but even they are going, this is just this, you know, it's like you have a house and they come in to fix something and then they, oh wait, the drive, it's all, wait, did you know there's termites in there and the electrical thing is all falling apart and we got to tear this whole thing down. It's that bad.

Yeah.

And I, I think that sadly, I mean the, the only the way out. We were talking about this earlier, things like function, health, where people are going and they're paying for concierge medicine, they're paying to get the tests your doctors won't order. And unfortunately that's not available to everybody because people don't. Can barely pay the, the rent and they're not going to be able to pay for extra tests and for. So this is a system that I, I couldn't even begin to figure out to unravel. I just try to one to one make the differences I can make with each person that is willing to listen to me and try to tell people sometimes you got to pay for your own health care. I mean, where we got this idea that it should all be free, I don't know. You know, but I've often paid. You know, before I had Medicare, I paid for a lot of my own because the stuff I wanted was just not covered by insurance.

Yeah. And look, I'm Canadian too. People rave over having free healthcare there, but it's a very similar antiquated system based on foundations that were probably funded by pharma companies who made a lot of profit on certain things. So the greatest takeaway from this conversation today would ultimately be ask questions. Ask questions when your labs come back a certain way. When you're given a prescription for a satin, when you're wanting to understand what are the long term outcomes of having that. I always say your doctor should be your partner in healing. And if it comes with a prescription medication, maybe there's a plan to get off the prescription med. If there's a potential or possibility to do that. And what you and I both see in our work is the fact that all of these numbers can change. When we focus on the whole person and recognize insulin resistance and inflammation and how that deals with cholesterol markers and putting the pieces of the puzzle together, then outcomes can really change. Yeah. And so let's rethink then what is a heart healthy diet? We're looking at the food paradigm. I talk a lot about, I pray that the future is about, about fiber also in terms of having diversity and things like that. And when I think fiber, I think a lot of people might think strictly carbohydrates or starches or fiber supplements but when I look at places like Sardinia and these blue zones, they consume a lot of plant focused fibers.

They do, yeah, they do. And I'm a big fan of fiber. Full disclosure, I consult with the company that makes this product but it really happens to be great. It's called Sunfiber.

Yeah, I love Sunfiber.

It's really because what we're learning number one is how important the microbiome is. So the microbiome, the good guys in the microbiome, the probiotics, the ones that do the good work, they need food and their food is called prebiotic fiber and sun fiber is prebiotic fiber. So not only is it giving you the fiber for all the digestive reasons, but it's also feeding the, the good guys in the microbiome. And this is incredibly important. And that's a fiber supplement. And another reason and I loved it before I became a consultant with them. So I'm not, I'm not. This is not marketing points. This is what I it mixes. If you ever tried psyllium husks, sawdust. Yeah, nobody's going to drink that stuff. And by the way, that's not even soluble, that's insoluble fiber. And it's right. This stuff you can add to anything. It is odorless, tasteless and it blends in anything. So there's just no excuse not to have that to be one of your things that you pour, you put into everything because you're feeding your gut and you're helping your digestion and gut issues are one as you know. I mean they're just legion in this country because of the food that we eat and what we don't eat, part of it being fiber. I think the recommendations for fiber, I never really by the government recommendations because they're always, almost always wrong, but this one is close to right. They say 25 grams a day for men and 38 for women. I'm not sure why they do that. But okay, let's say 25 to 38 grams, we get 4, 4 to 11. So we're not even close to the recommendations and we need supplements because our food doesn't have the fiber it used to have, you know.

So I will say when My health was at its worst. I was actually on the Atkins diet, but I was doing Atkins all wrong. Do you remember when they have the bars and the packaged foods and stuff like that? Plus I was doing low fat everything. No fat, no sugar, no sugar.

Atkins is a high fat diet, not a high protein diet. It's a high fat diet. And there's nothing wrong with that if you do it correctly. But you can do these diet. You can do them. Junk versions of them. Yeah, junk, keto it. You're not getting any carbs, but you're eating nothing but processed. So there's always ways, even intermittent fasting, you can sabotage it. Okay, I'm going to do the 168 program, but from those eight hours, I'm going to eat every piece of junk I can. Yeah, you'll sabotage it. It's not going to give you the results.

Yeah, I wanted to bring that up just in case listeners feel like, oh, there's that dangling carrot of me going on this restrictive program again. But when we think about a high carb diet that's automatically heart healthy, there's some debunking that needs to happen there. So I, I often kind of describe, let's put it this way. If you were to tell our listeners how to build a plate, a plate for a meal, what would it look like?

Well, I take a somewhat contrarian view. It's not a contrarian, but a different view of this because I think it's almost a fool's errand to try to come up with the perfect diet. There are just too many factors. There are too many individual ways to respond to things. I'm not a big fan of veganism. I think there's a hundred reasons why it's not great. But I don't deny that there's a guy named Joel Furman who's a vegan. I don't know if you've met him, but he's healthy as a rock and he looks 20 years young. I mean, he, it works for him. Doesn't work for most people.

Yeah.

And by the way, he didn't start it when he was a kid. He started when he was 20. There's a big difference because these parents who are like, I'm going to feed my kid a vegan dent, they should, you know, that's criminal. My point is that there really isn't one thing that works. So my way out of that of dodging that question is the best advice I ever got in nutrition in my entire career, and the best advice I've ever given. In nutrition in my entire career is very simple. Eat real food. Now that sounds like, whoa. People don't even know what real food is. Kale chips, real food. No, kale is real food. Kale chips are not. It may not be the worst of the not food, but let's understand what real food is. It's food. I used to say the four food groups. The Johnny Bowden four food groups. Food you could have fished, hunted, gathered, or plucked. If you were naked on the African Serengeti with a sharp stick, what could you eat? It's probably good for you. The rest is details. So heart healthy starts with eating food that your great great great great great great grandmother would have recognized as food. They took some of food to the blue zones, to the elders, the old grandmothers who did the cooking and stuff and would show them this, and they literally said, what is this? They didn't even know what to do with it. So it's gotta be food that your great great great grandmother would have known what to do. Oh, this goes in there. This. I cook this this way. Food that would not spoil if you left it outside for a night. Yeah, I mean, it would spoil if you left it outside for a night. Not food like Twinkies that would be there in six generations.

Same.

Right. So that's where I start with healthy anything. Is it real food. And then from then you can go, well, these people would do better with a little less carbs. A little more. We'd all do better with a little more protein. I think that that is a relatively new finding in the last decade or so that we've been eating not enough protein for maximum health. You know, we've been eating enough to prevent protein deficiency disease. But I've been in practice 30 something years and I've never seen a case of protein deficiency disease or sp. Scurvy or rickets. So half of these recommendations are to prevent vitamin deficiency. They're not for optimal living.

You got it? Yeah.

Optimal amounts of protein are not the same as the kind that prevent the distended belly. Optimal amounts of vitamin C are not the amount that prevents scurvy. When's the last time anybody saw scurvy?

Yeah, no longer.

So we. And, and same thing with vitamin D. They used to say 400 IUs a day, that'll prevent, you know, osteoporosis. Dude, you know, I take 5,000 a day of vitamin D. I mean, you know, the days in which we just gave the minimum amount to prevent a very rare deficiency disease that's not optimal living yeah, yeah. You know, that's minimum wage nutrition.

Yeah. It's not just about preventing disease. We talk about prevention a lot, but it's about how you feel.

Yes.

Optimization. You want to be thriving. Yeah. And I wanted to really kind of zero in on that because I think a lot of people are still stuck on looking for lower fat and fat free, and they think that it's a better choice if they see it on the shelf. When we know that it's not the case, it's a lot of brainwashing that we've got to still undo. So thank you for that. All right. When we think about inflammation as being the real killer, and today, it's frightening, as we get older, we hear more about heart disease and stroke, a lot of it being preventable as well. So when you speak to inflammation and how that ties into heart health, how it ties into longevity, what are some practical things that people can. You can start dialing in on right now to lower inflammation?

All right. Well, the first thing to understand is that inflammation comes in two flavors, acute and chronic. Acute inflammation hurts. That's when you bang your knee against something and it swells up, or you get a bee sting or you get an abscess and it really hurts, and you can see it's inflamed. That's kind of a pain in the ass. But it won't kill you. Chronic inflammation doesn't have symptoms and it will kill you. Chronic inflammation is happening under the hood. This is what's happening in the organs and the cells. And, you know, these are the things that we're talking about when we're talking about inflammation. And no one is inflammation free. So it's all a matter of degree and all a matter of kind of managing the risks involved. So what are inflammatory things? Most medicines, recreational drugs, seed oils, sugar. One of the most inflammatory things in the American diet, right next to vegetable oil. All of these things cause great amounts of inflammation. We have two essential fats, omega 6 and omega 3. Essential, meaning that they're not found, that they can't be made in the body. They have to be gotten. And those omega 6s are pro inflammatory, the omega 3s are anti inflammatory. Now you might say, why do we need anything that's pro inflammatory? Because inflammation's part of your immune system. It's part of how you heal. When you get a temperature, that's inflammation. When you, you know, when you, you get a sting or a puncture thing and it swells up, that's inflammation. Because the white blood cells are surrounding the area trying to prevent an infection from happening. And so, so you need some inflammation. So you think of these two things as two armies in the body. They both need to be funded. We're funding the ant, the inflammatory army with trillions of dollars and we're starving, having the, the anti inflammatory army. The ratio. They've looked into this in, in studies of existing Paleolithic people in the 80s they were able to find some, you know, kind of primitive tribes that are still living in the way that they did in the Paleo. The Paleo diet was about 1 to 1, omega 6 to omega 3. We consume about 25 to 1. Because omega 6s are in every processed food in the world from hamburger buns to everything, anything, even the healthy ones like beer. So all of these omega 6 fats are just overwhelming our diet. They're not bad by themselves in proportion to omega 3. They'd be fine if they were 1 to 1, but they're 25 to 1. So we really need to increase, we need to do two things. Reduce the inflammation load by the user. Errors that we, we can correct like less recreational drugs. Stress is a huge inflammatory.

Yeah, probably the biggest.

So bringing down stress, those things that we need, less things that we know are causing potato chips that are causing inflammation. But we also need to up the anti inflammatory army. What's the most anti inflammatory substances in the world? Omega 3s, quercetin, curcumin, you know these, these are very anti inflammatory substances molecules and we need to increase those and decrease the processed food. And if you stop eating processed food, guess what happens to your Omega 6 intake? It's dropping because that's where half of the food is coming from.

So key, you know, a lot of the things we've talked about today, they seem so foundational. But I think for many people it's too easy to practice things like meditation, lowering our stress, focusing on more fiber, eating real food. It's almost like it's too easy. We've become conditioned to looking for hard things that are challenging. If it doesn't feel hard, I'm not putting that health into the bank. I'm not saving up for later.

I'm not so sure it's as easy as you say.

Tell me.

I think in, in, in a society that, that literally fosters ADD that is.

Yeah, that's true.

Begging for your attention every single second and instant gratification and TikTok videos and 144 letter messages and just everything like that just firing at you in all syllables. Just sitting five minutes with Your own thoughts ain't easy. Schopenhauer said that every one of man's problems can be traced to the fact that he can't sit alone with his thoughts for five minutes.

Yeah, definitely.

So I don't know that those things are so easy. Most people tell you meditation is brutal. I thought it was. I didn't start till my 70s. It's not easy to have a mind that's chattering all the time and just sits still.

Yeah, so that's a good reframe. Because what I'm thinking of is when I went back to the ashram, we do all these things that you've been talking about, but the difference there is that the stage was set. The stage is not set in the Western world whatsoever. So although they are easy, our environment does not make them easier.

No, that's a very good point. That's a really, really well said point. I agree.

And I think it's so important because despite everything that we know around health and wellness today, the fact that it's continues to be a massively booming trillion dollar industry. We're getting sicker. We're getting sicker faster. I pulled up a study this morning and 99% of people who suffer heart attack, stroke or heart failure, they already had at least one of four modifiable risk factors that was either blood pressure, LP cholesterol, blood sugar, tobacco use. I'm assuming marijuana can go into that as well. So waiting until you feel feel sick is actually too late.

I would have to agree with that. One of the statistics that I show in my slide presentations that I talked about at the GLP, one talk, was that there's a figure which is that 88% of Americans have some marker for metabolic dysfunction, namely pre diabetes. And everyone is shocked to hear that. And if you go online right now and you put into Google, only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy, you'll see a whole bunch of stuff all comes from the same research in North Carolina. And the shocking part of it is that it's obsolete because now the number is 7%. 93%. According to the latest research, 93% of us have one or more markers, as you were talking about, and it's usually for metabolic syndrome. Pre diabetes. They are the same thing. Exactly the same, same thing. So either triglycerides are high or the HDL is too low, or abdominal obesity is a big one, or insulin resistance. 93% have some market for that.

So what are your thoughts on GLPs then? I know. I'll give you this here's a two.

Hour conversation, the ten second summary of what I said in an hour at supply side. Enormous potential.

I agree.

Several major risk factors. I call them Trojan horses. You know that yes, they will help you lose weight, but yeah, if you handle those three things, we're looking at a drug that, that can, you know, really change people's lives. If you don't handle them, you just swap in one set of problems for another. What is Ozempic butt? What is Ozempic face? It's loss of muscle and that's the biggest problem. People lose up to 40% of the weight they lose is muscle. And as you know, it doesn't when you gain it back, you ain't gaining back 40% muscle, you're gaining back most of that which changes your metabolic rate. So now you need less calories to maintain the same weight you had before you went on the damn thing.

Yeah.

And the 600 muscles in your face, of course you have ozempic facing lose muscle. So they have huge potential and they have considerable side effects that need to be addressed. Nutrition depletion and we have research on this now. How many nutrients are missing? People don't suddenly go on a healthy diet. They eat the same crap but they eat less of it. So if you don't change that, and that's why my message to that group, to the industry that makes the in the ingredients and the supplements and the programs is we have got change the conversation about GLP1s from weight loss to metabolic health. Yeah, it's not about weight loss, it's about metabolic health. The weight loss is a consequence of the metabolic health because you can get the weight loss without the metabolic health and you will not be happy with the results.

Now Johnny, last year I had a woman who was becoming so malnutrition from being on this. She was having so much success in terms of the weight weight but everything.

Else was on not the weight to judge it.

Yeah.

And that's what we have to get you brought up.

Kasey means in her book GOP should come with the book hand in hand so that you understand how your body works as a system that communicates together. So with that said, you know, for listeners today, what would you say is one, one major change for the month that they could make if they wanted to step into, you know, looking and feeling great at 80, 90 and beyond.

I'm going to go back with the eat real food thing. There was during the pandemic and we didn't even talk about that. And this so rich Such a rich brew of stuff. We could talk about the medical complex and just the way medicine is done in the country if we talked about that. But there was a program during the pandemic called Whole30. I don't know if you remember. It was basically what I'm saying about real food. There were no restrictions on you can't eat dairy and you can't eat this. Long as it's real food, you can eat it. You can eat it. And people saw it's all anecdotal. They didn't really do a lot of clinical studies on that, but the anecdotal evidence was, you couldn't deny it. People were getting so much better. Oh yeah, they were having such. The only problem with that program is they had no follow up. What would you do after the 30 days? I may not be doing justice to it for all I know. They have all kinds of. Of generally they didn't. It was a 30 day program. But it. What the results they got in that 30 days would show you how much is possible if you just follow that one instruction, which is to actually eat real food. That every single thing that goes in your mouth was either grown or gathered or plucked or hunted or fished. And I'd say if people made that change, that would be the biggest roi, the biggest return on investment that they could get for the smallest number of changes, which would be.

Then when people ask me what. What was the thing that brought me my greatest healing after my heart surgeries, I say, I ate real food. That's it.

It's not sexy, it's not expensive, it's not. I mean, it's not glamorous. It's a plain thing. It's like you eat the way you would eat, you know?

Yeah, it's pretty powerful.

Yeah, very powerful.

Johnny, you're amazing. You're such a great educator. I love the analogies and the stories to really own in on these points.

Thank you.

How do you communicate with your audience? You're such a great teacher. I know.

On Instag, I put up stuff on Instagram. My assistant puts up stuff on Instagram. I make videos and I see private people and I love doing that.

Wonderful.

Because they're conversations like this and you can really see the impact that they have on people. So people can reach me through my website, johnnybolden.com, noach and Johnny, or on Instagram @johnnybolden.

Beautiful. I'll see you at some conferences this year. And to wrap things up, I'd love to know what's something that you're most excited about with the future of medicine.

I'm really hoping that the new people in Washington, I'm not talking about the politics part, not talking about Trump, I'm not talking about any of the other stuff that we're seeing and hearing, but in that, this, in this one area of medicine, I'm really, really hoping that those five people are going to make a difference in the way because all of the things we talked about are related to that. Insurance companies, hospital associates. We didn't even get into that. The profession of being a hospital manager and how that, that's why they charge $300 for a band Aid and you can't even see the bill.

Right.

So all of this is part of a system. The regulatory agencies like the fda, those people do those jobs for a couple of years as an audition for industry. So they're regulating the industries they want to get jobs in. The whole system is just horribly broken. And I'm hoping that things like this and this podcast and people that are, are trying to make things different in Washington and, and, and stuff like that will actually happen. My one of the people I work very closely with is Daniel Amen, the great psychiatrist and brain md. And Daniel has got a mission on brain health and he doesn't care about the politics. He doesn't care who's involved, whether it's Republican or Democrat. He wants brain health to be on the agenda and he's got the ear of station. Maybe that will help.

Incredible.

You know, so people like that doing things like that, I think is, is the only hope for changing the system other than that we're just talking one to one and hoping to do like a greening of America one person at a time. And if you can bring one person around, they can influence their family and that can influence their friends. And because I don't know that there's going to be a single movement where all of this is going to be, this whole system is going to just be blown up. I think it's going to happen with people being educated quietly, persuasively, without a lot of, you know, adversarial anger and all the stuff that happens with tribalisms when we break up relationships because we don't agree on politics. It's crazy. So I think that the change is going to happen in a more gentle way, more of a Jane Goodall way where you just talk to the people who you don't agree with and you understand what they're saying and they understand and some movement is made. I think that's kind of the hope of the future.

Amen. It shouldn't matter what side you sit on. I think the greatest gift of this year is recognizing. Can we just have a conversation and look at all of the data that's coming to surface? If we're truly going to democratize healthcare and change the trajectory of our future, it comes back to exactly what you were saying. So thank you for that reflection. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. Bye.

Bye.