Dangerous Ideas Around Our Health, Medicine & Food That We MUST Question | Eric Edmeades

What happened in my life, and it will touch a little bit on diet here, is that at the age of 21, I woke up and realized that I'd been sick for 10 years. And, you know, but the thing is, when you're sick for 10 years, you don't think you're sick. You just think you're you. Right? You know, you just are that person. You have those allergies, you have those pains, you have that weight. It's just who you are. And it's who I was. And then my doctor came along and he said, you know, the root of all your problems is your tonsils. We gotta take those tonsils out, you know, Cause God or evolution, depending on which end, or both you believe clearly made a mistake. These tonsils, what's that all about, Right? And so you're gonna cut them out, which, by the way, is not a minor surgery when you're 21 years old. It's not a minor surgery Anyway, but at 21, it's quite serious. In fact, I recently tried to talk a friend of mine out of having his tonsils removed. He wouldn't listen to me and died on the operating table. He came back. He came back, but he was dead for a minute and a half on the operating table from a minor tonsillectomy. And so I didn't want to have my tonsils out. But at that stage, somebody with a clipboard and a stethoscope told me I should have my tonsils out. So if they have a clipboard and a stethoscope and they got that document up on the wall in the nice frame, you gotta do what they say, don't you? And then another friend of mine said, you know, I'd like you to make some dietary changes. So I made some changes. Thirty days later, every symptom I had was gone, and I lost 35 pounds. And I became deeply curious, deeply curious how it was that I could spend 10 years with medical professionals getting injections and needles and creams and inhalants and all these different things that never helped. How I could spend 10 years doing all that. And then one friend without a degree in anything. He had a degree in women, if I remember correctly. So. But without a degree in anything says, hey, make these changes. And then I could get everything I'd ever been looking for by going to see doctors. And the problem was, there was no way to satisfy that curiosity, because you might remember that was BG before Google, you know, bg. You know, you couldn't just go up to Google and Go Google, what's with my diet? You know, you couldn't do that. And there was no way for me to answer this question. There was no possible way. And so what's really cool is sometimes a question gets so deep in your everything you see in the world, you start trying to connect it to that question. That question became so pervasive in my existence that when I then found out that my great grandfather had discovered the oldest Homo sapien skull in the history of Earth, and I started studying middle stone aged human history and evolution, I started connecting some dots. And the dots that I connected is that we humans use the word diet wrong. We use it incorrectly. It's grammatically wrong the way you use the word diet. In fact, I can prove it to you right now. If I say to you, what is an elephant's diet? Does anybody know? 200 kg of grass and bark and related things every day, 70 kg of water, that's their nutritional diet. If you take them off that diet and put them in a zoo, then they die within seven years. That's what used to happen. Then they started learning that because they were deeply worried about their elephants or their profit and loss statements, I'm not sure which. And then they got their elephants to live by 70 years. But here's where this shows us something. With every other species on Earth, the word diet means their way of life. With humans, diet means temporary alteration to your way of life to fit into that bikini for this event. Diet's wrong. If you look up the Greek and Latin origins of the word diet, it'll tell you right there, way of life, not temporary alteration to your existing life. And so I started getting fascinated by the grammar of that. I started getting fascinated by evolution, and I started getting fascinated by one fundamental reality. That there is that every species on Earth has a diet. Every species on Earth has a diet, including Homo sapiens. And the problem is we also have emotions. And one of our key emotions, one of the things we so want, is to feel important. And so when somebody comes along and tells you there is a special diet for you, then we go, oh, I found the right coach. That's what happens. The four blood type diet, it makes you feel special because you're in a given blood type. There are some subtle differences, particularly between men and women. But I will tell you that Homo sapiens has a diet. And I figured this out and it was incredible to me. And one of the ways that I figured it out was I went to go live with the Hadza Bushmen in East Africa because That's like getting in a time machine. Can you imagine? I'm off running. I run this leadership program where I take people up Kilimanjaro. And so I was there and my logistics partner, my logistics team said, I googled you and it looks like you're interested in anthropology. Would you like to go visit with some bushmen? What is the only answer to that question? Yeah. Yes and yes. And so we spent two weeks tripping through the bush with machetes and four by fours trying to find these guys because they don't have Snapchat. They don't even have Facebook, never mind Snapchat. They don't have cell phones, they don't have money, they don't have houses. They live and breathe in the bush, and they live from the bush. And so we can learn a huge amount from them about our diet and our lifestyle. We learn some fascinating things. Like take for example, what if you took a species and evolved it over a multi million year period to have an unbelievable craving for a particular food and then introduced that species to an equally yummy tasting, exactly the same tasting food that was lethal and toxic. What do you think would happen to that species within a short period of time? One in three of them would be dying of cancer. One in three of them would be dying of heart disease, and another one in three or thereabouts. The third or fourth largest cause of death in the United States is iatrogenic death. Do you know what that is? Do you know why they call it that? So that you won't know what it is? It's death by doctor. It's the fourth largest in Canada and America. Third or fourth largest cause of death on earth. Death by doctor. Iatrogenic death. So that you'll stay confused. And by the way, just to take this to another step, think about this. Do you think every accidental medical death is reported? Do you really? I don't think so. I'm going to go with. A lot of them are covered up because we all see this. Like, hey, they stick together. Ooh, it was a little mistake. We don't know if it was a mistake. Look, at the end of the day, I'm thinking maybe half of medical error gets reported, which means that at number four, we're only seeing half of them. Which means that if all of those, it might actually be the single largest cause of death in the western world, but only amplified by the fact that we've messed up our bodies so badly to begin with that we need their help. I do not believe in universal health Care. I'm sorry, it's not a popular opinion. I know many of you probably believe in it. And I'll say this. I will not buy car insurance from a company that sells car insurance to a 16 year old boy with four speeding tickets and charges me the same price. And that's what universal healthcare is. Only it's even worse because very often people at the higher economic levels that are paying even more for that health care are the ones taking care of their bodies. Because we make junk food cheap and health food expensive. It would be so much cheaper to simply give people free organic vegetables and fruit than to treat them for cancer for the last 20 years of their life. So we're talking about biohacking. And I think the first thing you have to understand in my version of biohacking, I'm not talking about actual computers in the buying, hacking. I'm talking about up here. You see, you have this app. You have this app and it's called how to Survive. It's an app that can self propagate and grow and we all grow it differently. It's like an app that learns. It's AI. You have it already inside you. Isn't that cool? It's how to Survive and it's been developing for a very long time. Help me out here. I want to figure out how many great grandparents you had 20 generations ago. Can you help me with this? So there's you one generation back. Two then. Come on four then, then 32, 64, 128, 512. 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 8,000 16,000. 30. 2000-640001-28256, 512. 1 million 20 generations ago you had 1 million great grandparents. That's 1 million. 1 million people had to have sex to make you like. You are the product in that generation. You are the product of at least 1 million orgasms. I'm hoping there were more. I'm hoping there were more. I'm just saying you're the product of all that. But here's the bigger thing, is that all those people had to survive the most unlikely conditions on earth in order for you to survive. Because they had 80% infant mortality. Those people survived the hardest things ever. They survived the number one cause of death of humans, which is starvation. It was before and it still is today. We are not dying of cancer and heart disease. We are dying of malnutrition. We eat too much and we still starve to death. And you are a computer and a hardware. You have hardware and software that was designed to prevent you from dying. Therefore, you do not have a piece of software that says, no, I won't eat that available food. You have to learn that. Because your ancestors would never have walked past available food. Why would they? They lived on the edge of starvation every day. Fruit. You love fruit because it was rare in nature and you had to have it, and it was only going to be there for two days. So you have a powerful craving for it. It's not in you to walk past sugar. It's not in you to walk past sugar. Oh, and by the way, sugar doesn't want you to walk past it either. Fruit stimulates your appetite because the fruit wants you to transport it. So you eat one piece, and then you eat another one, and then you eat another one. This is why in the United States today, 60% of food has refined sugar or corn syrup in it to make you eat more. Not so much fun, is it? But there's so much more behind this, because you see this app you have that's called Learning how to survive. I'm telling you right now, the software that we have inside us, the single biggest problem that we have as individuals and as a society is that the software that we developed developed in one version of society, and we're now trying to live with it in another. Developed in a time when food was rare. Developed in a time when men and women didn't have to interact all so much. Every bushman camp I've ever been to, two fires. One for the men, one for the women. They barely speak to each other during the day. Women are talking all day long. Men, not so much. It's just how it is. And by the way, I asked them, what are the women talking about? They're exchanging information. This person's doing this with this person. There's. The fruit's gonna be over there. They're exchanging information about the community. Then something interesting happens. The sun goes down. As soon as the sun goes down, the women stop talking and the men start talking. And then I ask, well, what are the men talking about? Oh, they're talking about the biggest hunting trip and the most beautiful women and the huge lion and the big storm and the big war. They're talking about action. Women exchange information. Men talk about action. They've been doing it for millions of years. But why do the women talk in the day and the men at night, huh? Because the women. If we all were out in the woods right now and we were camping and then the men decided to go off hunting, what would we tell the women to do to keep the animals away make a noise. So the women are talking during the day to keep all the di Neural animals away. They talk to keep the diurnal animals away. The issue is this does not work for them at night because the nocturnal animals, that is lions. And if you would like to figure this out, a hyena can crush a giraffe's thigh bone with its jaws. And it takes 30 hyenas to take one male lion off a kill. That's how strong a male lion is. They are not afraid of female voices. In fact, female voices are much like a dinner bell to them. And so women stop talking, but they are afraid of male voices. And so men start talking. Now, where I'm going with this is that at an instinct level, we have a ton of instincts that got us here, but here is so different than where we wrote the code to begin with. Does this make sense? And so we have to start making some changes. We have to start recognizing that some of the things that society imposes upon us today is not what we're built for. Stress. This is my big one for you today. Stress. Does stress kill? Okay, how, How? Heart attack, hypertension, cancer. I mean, it has a number of different methods of killing. Right, but why does it kill? That seems odd. I mean, we all have stress. It shouldn't kill us. Stress is designed to take out the weakest link. It is only supposed to be the weakest link of society that is under stress on a regular basis. And then they're supposed to get voted off the island so that they do not pass on the. Their bad gene combination. If you look at a troop of chimpanzees, which they are more human than you could ever imagine. I visited this troop of chimpanzees. They had a good king and a bad king. One king challenged and he kicked the good king out. And this is real. Like, this is a real. The good king, he's the top of the chimp pyramid here. He's in charge of everything. And when people hunted, he would take the meat and share it around with the troop. But the bad king came in and kicked him out and wouldn't share meat. He would steal the meat from him and he wouldn't give it to the children and the women and wouldn't share it with his generals or. And one day, another king challenged him, another would be king challenged him, and they got into a fight. Now, in chimpanzee culture, it's not like lions, if you're the top lion, and the other lion challenges you for leadership. It's fight to the death or you leave. Nobody helps you. But if you're the chimpanzee, then the generals help you because you're the king. And so this bad king, he's defending himself, and he gets bit on the face. And he realizes he's in trouble, so he runs over to the generals, calling for them to help. And he runs super fast over to the generals, and he gets over to the generals and he's like, you gotta help me. And the generals grabbed him, pinned him down, bit through both of his biceps, snipped his Achilles tendons, and then killed him for an hour and a half. That's called revenge. We thought we were the only ones that could do it, but chimpanzees can, too, because they're like us. The software has been written for millions of years, and now we live in this society, and we need to start making some changes. Chimpanzees, they groom each other. You see this how they pick at each other. It also releases chemicals in them that reduces their stress. And they're only allowed to groom the chimpanzees that are higher in rank than they are. So the lowest ranking chimpanzees don't get groomed. They are under constant stress because they are not good hunters, and they are not good maters, and they are not good defenders. And so they die prematurely before they get to breed. Stress is meant to strengthen the species, but we have reversed things now where the most successful of us, in our material terms, are under the most stress, and. And that's why we have premature death. The next time you feel stress happening in your body, I want you to recognize that every minute of irrelevant stress is communicating a signal to your DNA that you don't want to be here anymore. That's what it is. That's the code. The number one tip in biohacking is stop stress. Because it is an ejection system. It's meant to end things for you. I'll give you an example of how powerful this is. Does anybody here still smoke? Anybody by chance, smoke? Anybody used to smoke? Yeah. So here's the thing. Is nicotine addictive? No. No, it's not. Let me put it to you this way. You quit heroin, you vomit, you get sick, you get fever, you quit alcohol, you vomit, you get the shakes, you quit caffeine, you get headaches. And you can even vomit and have huge withdrawal symptoms. You quit caffeine and what happens? Or nicotine, I'm sorry? You fidget, you're hungry. You fidget. It's an oral fixation. There's no physical manifestation of the habit. But the smartest thing in the world they did is they biohacked the world. First thing is, we have to figure out how to get women to smoke, because they wouldn't smoke women. So they hired a Nazi propagandist. They hired a Nazi propagandist. He came over to America and he said, what's going on with women right now? And they said, women are looking, they want to vote, and all this weird stuff. And they said, well, if we can tie cigarettes to their independence, then they'll smoke. Well, how can we do that? You've come a long way, baby. And then it got to the point where more women were smoking than men. Here's why people smoke. Try this out. Just for a minute. Think about something stressful in your life. Go ahead. You got something. What's his name? Whatever. So you got something right? Now take your imaginary cigarette. Are you with me? Come on, give it out. Imaginary cigarette. Light it up. And then take the first breath like any smoker does, right? That's the addiction right there. The addiction is that it reduces stress in their body. And in a weird twist of fate, they kill themselves by making themselves feel good. And it has nothing to do with the chemicals. We have all kinds of these tiny little things, and if you don't figure them out, the marketing world will figure them out for you, won't they? And let's talk. Evolution is so damn specific. My dad said to me once, I told him I didn't want to have my tonsils out. And he's like, well, why not? I mean, if they're so. And I had now figured this out. I'd gotten into this whole evolutionary thing. I'd figured this thing out, and I'd said there's a purpose behind them. Because when we are sick, we should not be eating liquids. Water, yes. Stay hydrated. But your body has 200,000 calories of energy, can last a month without food. If you're sick, let it heal. And your tonsils are designed to make you do that. They swell up and they make swallowing difficulties. Now what do we do? Cut those suckers out and give you ice cream and jello? Does this make sense? So here's a couple of other things. The average human. I went to go stay with the Bushmen in December, and this time I did an extended stay. I was with them for a week, and I took no food with me. I did take water, but I thought, you know, I'M going to go hunting with them on the first day. And they're not carrying water, so I'm not going to carry water. I carried my pedometer with me. I had no power there, but I had a solar charger. So I carried my pedometer with me. And we did 27 miles that day. It was 40 degrees and I want you to understand, oh, 40 degrees for the other people, it's really hot. For Americans, very hot. I don't know what it is, like 110 or something. And. And it's not like 27 miles on a track. It's 27 miles up like this, down like this. Crawling on all fours. I'm shredded by thorns. And I didn't take water. It wasn't the smartest thing I'd done. But you know what's really fascinating is that that's how they live every day. They minimally do 10 to 15 miles a day. And we do escalators in America. There are escalators that lead up to the gy. So what I want to suggest is a couple of things. Like, you know, I have my little pedometer thing here and I have it set up that if ever I'm sedentary for 30 minutes, it vibrates. If I don't move for 30 minutes, it vibrates. I get up and I do some stretches or some push ups or something, or I go for a walk. Because in nature it wouldn't have worked that way. It wouldn't have worked that way. And so what I'm a big fan of all the time is taking a look and saying, why is it this way for us now? What was the origins of that and how do we let it go? One more I want to share with you is this that this app you have running in you, it's called how do I Survive? What happens is that if you conduct a behavior at some point in your life and then you don't die, your body goes, oh, that's a good behavior, I'll keep it. But that's not working so well because we all survive. Now. You understand how difficult life was before 80% infant mortality. And most people that even made it beyond that died very young. So survival was tough. And so now we have this app inside us that says, hey, if I'm surviving, what I'm doing must be right. And so all those weird little quirky things that we picked up as kids, like some event happens to you when you're six years old and you make up a belief about the universe, don't you, you make up a belief about the universe at that point because you have no life experience. When you're six, how much life experience do you have? Not six years. Cause your only cognitive memory starts at four or five, right? So you've been really truly memory wise alive for a year. And then your mom walks out the door and leaves and you go, why did she leave? Well, there's only one reason for that. I'm not worthy. And that becomes your guiding principle of life. And because you survive it, it gets written into your how could I survive? App. And so for the rest of your life, you might have a I might not be worthy. Is that interesting? So my big message for you is to take a look and say, hey, is this really functional? Is this behavior really functional? Is this belief really functional? Nobody's broken here. We're not broken because we have tonsils, man. We could get into cancer. Cancer's intended to save your life. It's not meant to end it. Think about this. How could it be hereditary? How could it be hereditary? Evolution passes things on that help the breeding process. Evolution passes on sickle cell anemia because it provides immunity to malaria. So why would it pass on cancer? That's another question for another day. Here's the key thing. The key thing is to recognize that you have software in you that evolved over millions and millions of years. And it evolved in very difficult times, very different than we have today. And so food marketing companies and toy manufacturers and movie companies and so on are speaking to that with full knowledge. And what we need to do is have our own full awareness so we can have almost like in Harry Potter terms, defense against the dark arts. So if I can help you with that, I will be here for the rest of this incredible experience. Thank you for welcoming me into your tribe. Thank you. Thanks very much.