"Food Today has 90% LESS Nutrients Than 50 Years Ago!" - Chris Kresser

We'd have to eat eight oranges today to get the same level of nutrition that our grandparents got from just eating one orange. We have the challenge of our food just not being as nutritious as it used to be because of declining soil quality. So you look at content of magnesium and other minerals and vitamins in fruits and vegetables today versus just 50 years ago, and it's dramatically lower Organs, as it turns out, are the most nutrient dense foods we can eat. More than tenfold difference, sometimes 20, 40, 50 difference, between the amount of nutrients in liver and even other very nutrient dense foods. Our ancestors knew this. Native Americans used to throw the muscle meats, which is pretty much all we eat today, like steaks and chops and things like that. They used to throw those to the dogs and just eat the heart and the liver and the organs themselves.

The Western medical camp. It's really not health care. It is disease care. It's sick care. Can you extrapolate that for somebody that's maybe just finding your work?

Conventional medicine is disease management, essentially. So it's suppressing symptoms with drugs and surgery. And really, if you think about a spectrum of disease or health, where on the left you have health and on the right you've got death, then conventional medicine is really focused on intervening at the far end of the spectrum once disease has already progressed to a significant state and using again, mostly drugs, sometimes surgery, to try to address the symptoms. Whereas functional integrative medicine is much more concerned with preventing, first of all, preventing disease before it occurs, and second, intervening at an earlier stage, if that's possible. And then, even if neither of those two things are possible, someone already has a condition. It's identifying what the root cause or root causes are and then addressing those causes. And the symptoms will then tend to resolve on their own. So it's a really fundamentally different approach than the allopathic conventional model.

Yeah, the word functional comes to mind because many of the supplements. Quote, quote. And for y' all looking on Spotify and YouTube, I'm doing bunny ears right now, because supplements were always supposed to be a scaffolding that's helping the body's natural regulatory system. In other words, homeostasis is the beautiful place that we all get to live in. But what throws us out of that is environment. And I'm actually going to pull the time machine lever. Chris, five years ago, you said genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. And I just got a full body chill because so many people have resonated with that quote. I mean, it was probably One of our most shared social media pieces five years ago. Can you talk about what you felt when you said that then and also any new learnings that apply to what you said now?

Yeah. So what's behind that is now even more research showing that 90% of the risk of chronic disease comes from environmental factors, not genetics. So there was a lot of excitement when we first sequenced the human genome, like, oh, this is going to be the key to curing disease. And now that we have unlocked the genetic code, we're going to be able to create all these genetic therapies that will, that will cure disease. And the reality is that it has led to some, certainly some interesting new research and lines of exploration, particularly in cancer treatment, but it has not created the revolution in healthcare that a lot of people predicted. And the reason for that is that genetics only account for about 10% of the risk of chronic disease. In some conditions it's a bit higher, in some conditions it's lower, but that's an average.

So.

So if you put that another way, 90% or 9 out of 10 things that we could do to reverse or prevent disease involve just the choices we make on a day to day basis about what we eat, how much sleep we're getting, how much we exercise, our emotional state, how we balance and regulate the impacts of stress, our sense of meaning and purpose, our of sense, our relationships with others. Those are the things that drive our health and our longevity. And I would say that I've only become more certain of that in the last five years. And I think the research actually has continued to validate that and extend that concept even further.

I resonate fully, you know, my maternal side, lots of CHD and bipolar, gut brain axis issues. My paternal side, same thing, excessive weight gain, obesity. And I remember it was a few years ago, it was at a Thanksgiving dinner, Chris and one of the relatives in the extended tree said, oh, we're Trents. This is just what it is. We have chronic heart issues, we'll probably have to all get statins in our life. And I just simply looked up from my plate and I said, yeah, I don't believe that. And the conversation kind of stopped there. Have you had patients and maybe in your communities globally, has this conversation started to really make people awake to the fact that truly what you said about the gun is real? How has this shown up in your circles, this conversation?

Yeah, I think there is a growing awareness of this. You know, certainly there are still large sections of the population that are kind of resigned to their fate as you as you noted, every functional medicine clinician I know who's, who's good is full and has a wait list. And I think that speaks to the growing awareness in the general population that there are things that can be done to reduce the risk of chronic disease, even reverse chronic disease, once it's occurred, to extend not just lifespan, but health span the number of healthy years that we live. I think people are getting the message that degenerative brain conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's are not just fate, which is kind of what the conventional medical establishment has led us to believe. Like, hey, sorry, this is just all in your genes and if you have the genes for this, you're going to get it and there's nothing you can do about it. So we have pioneering research by Dale Bredesen and others in the field who've categorically proven that to be false and have shown that even early stage dementia and Alzheimer's in some cases can be either slowed or sometimes reversed. So I think what's happening, Josh, is there's just too much contradictory evidence that flies in the face of this idea that you have no agency and no sense, no ability to control the outcome of your health and your life. For people to be able to maintain that fallacy any longer.

Well, see that that fallacy is propagated because the model is set up where a doctor traditional gets three to four minutes with a patient so they literally have to do a slam dunk diagnosis. And typically 99.9% of the time it's pharmacological intervention. And the thing that makes me really sad about that is I've seen that with many members of my family, friends, even in my life. I've shared this on the podcast before. I mean, I've probably taken every single antibiotic out there with which now has exacerbated into Marcon. So with my knowledge and network, I'm able to seek out the healing resources I need. But look, I'm fortunate. I'm very fortunate. Like you said, functional medicine is not accepted by insurance carriers most of the time. Is it ever going to be accepted? And, and what do you think about the revolution that's needed for Functional Med to truly be accepted widely?

It's a really good question. And you know, like I said, I wrote a whole book on this topic and I would say it's a double edged sword, the idea of acceptance in the insurance system. On the one hand, we want that, we want people to be able to afford the care that is going to provide the best results. I absolutely Think that's a functional medicine model of care because it's individualized. It treats people as individual humans, not as, you know, a participant in a drug trial. Basically, it's, everything is personalized. We're looking for root causes. You know, Mark Hyman at the Cleveland Clinic, they've done research showing that functional medicine care outperforms standard of care. So we know this to be true and we want people to have access to that care. The problem is if you integrate it into the insurance model, it's very likely going to be heavily watered down to the point where it's not really functional medicine anymore. For the reasons that you mentioned, the incentives are not aligned. The incentive in the traditional model is to get as many patients through the system as fast as you possibly can and to have practitioners spend as little time with patients as you possibly can because that maximizes their labor value. Right. If you have, if you're paying a practitioner a salary of $100,000 a year and they are seeing 2,500 patients in that year, then you're going to make, as the HMO and the insurance company, you're going to make a lot more money than if you're paying that practitioner to see 200 patients in a year or 300. What might be true if they're spending an hour on the first visit with each patient. So at this point, I don't, I'll just be honest. I don't know what the solution is. And I'm not sure that integrated, full integration into the, into our, at least our current insurance, you know, fee for service insurance model is the best way to do it.

Yeah.

You know, the good news is that at least with like, like in our clinic we, we can often get coverage for labs, you know, whether you're talking about blood work or other types of labs and certain procedures and in some cases patients with like HSAs, high deductible plans with HSAs are able to at least get pre tax use pre tax money to pay for the consultations. But it's a very intractable systemic problem where it's the sort of thing where you can't just fix one piece without affecting the whole web.

Yeah, it's almost like a Jenga. Like if you pull a block out, you might fall. The whole thing, it seems, seems to me the sadness around this is that I wonder, you know, for my mom with manic bipolar and a lot of people with really gut brain access or gut dysbiosis issues that manifest in degeneration in the brain and, and all kinds of ancillary stuff that really could be avoided. You know, I'm not saying that that's the panacea. As long as we heal the gut, then everything else is going to work. No, there's. There's other things that get to be healed as well. But, you know, I wonder if you could take a time machine ride back and think about the suffering that you personally had. I remember you were surfing in Indonesia, and that's when you, shortly after that, had Crohn's. The amount of pain, the amount of suffering that you personally were going through. I know, it's interesting, right? You're there in Oregon now, sitting in a nice, cozy office, but that was not the case many years ago, and that was really the impetus. That's the fuel source to drive a lot of what you do now. What you do now is not easy.

Right.

Being a business owner, being an entrepreneur and a father and a husband and just a human on a journey. Balancing all of that, integrating all of that can be challenging at times. So can you take us back to the emotional way that you navigated that, really sickness that takes out a lot of people? There was something in your soul that made you choose a different path?

Yeah, I mean, for better and worse, I've always been pretty determined and tenacious, and, you know, that. That was difficult for my parents, I think, when I was a kid, and maybe. Maybe for myself and people around me. But it served me well when I was sick because I just didn't accept the idea that I was going to have to deal with that for the rest of my life and just take medications like steroids and other powerful drugs to manage the symptoms and conditions. And I didn't even really accept the diagnosis that was given to me of Crohn's disease because I knew that I had multiple parasite infections and things that could cause significant inflammation in the gut that could look like, you know, in my mind, I was like, how do we know that it's not these pathogens that are causing the inflammation instead of, you know, this autoimmune condition?

Sorry to interrupt you. Was it from a food truck? Was it from the water? Like, did you ever trace?

I was surfing. And, yeah, so the very brief story is I was surfing at a place called Leki Peak on an island called Sumbawa. You know, very remote location, and locals who live there don't really have the same concept of sanitation that we do in the west. And so there was a whole bunch of cows in their herd that were milling around in a pool of Water right next to the river mouth. And they dug a trench between that pool of water into the river mouth. So all the defecation from the cows went out into the surf break through via the river mouth. And so There were probably 15 of us staying there in the village at the time. And I think at least 10 or 12 of the 15 people got sick and a few people, myself included, got very sick. So no, despite being careful and with what I was eating and drinking, that's. I actually got it from the ocean water. So my experience was not unusual in the sense that once I got back to the States and was starting to look for help and answers, I very quickly found that the conventional system was not set up to give me those answers. It was really designed, as we've discussed, for sort of late stage disease management. Much more familiarity with things like diabetes and heart disease and the problems that a lot of Americans face. Not very experienced at all with gut GI issues that would. Manifesting in inflammation and oxidative stress and intestinal permeability leading to autoimmunity and the whole constellation of things that you and your audience are familiar with. And I just made up my mind early on, like, I'm not going to accept, I'm not just going to become. To get into this, like get on this treadmill and accept a lifetime of medications and assume that this is how things are going to have to be for the rest of my life. And that decision, maybe that stubbornness and determination that I've always had served me well in that case and was able to recover my own health. And then once I did that, it was almost a choiceless choice to go back to school and formalize what I had learned and start helping other people. I often have told people this medicine was not ever on my short list of career paths. I wasn't the kid who, when you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, said, doctor, I never even considered it until I got sick. I mean, I was always interested in health, but more from a performance perspective. Like I was an athlete and you know, I was interested in it from that perspective. But, uh, once this happened to me and I, and I, and I experienced what I went through, I. It was a calling, it was a vocation from there.

Yeah, I can imagine how many people, and I don't know if you know, the, the statistics or not. I, I think it's probably 1 in 5, 1 in 4, maybe more curious what you know, from data of people that have severe leaky gut or even leaky gut that's leading towards other health abnormalities. Have you ever looked at the data on that? Like how many people in America, or maybe even America, what does the data show us about that for leaky gut?

It's hard because there's a saying in medicine wnl, we're not looking. So when you're not looking consistently, it's very difficult to have reliable data on what the incidence of something is. So there have been a few cross sectional studies, observational studies looking at intestinal permeability. But I think whatever numbers are reported in those studies are far underestimating the extent of the problem. Because, I mean, you and I are a little bit weird because we live in this world and we know people who get tested for leaky gut. But the reality is 99.9% of people in this country or anywhere in the world have ever been tested for intestinal permeability. And even if they have had a test is probably not a good one. So I would say just anecdotally, from my own experience working with patients and just from what I know about all of the things that cause intestinal permeability, it's probably well over 50% of people who are dealing with it on some level.

Yeah. So I was undercutting it because I think of it like this leaky gut or autoimmune is like a pitfall that you. You're walking around in a jungle and all of a sudden you fall into a hole. So the goal would be to be so intelligent, Chris, that we never fall into the hole in the first place. But then if we find ourselves in the hole, to actually not outsource our power to someone else to get us out. In other words, we build our own scaffolding to get out of something that is causing us disease or causing us poor health. I think about in my life being £280 at one point and having lots of allergies. I can remember, Chris, from my lack of education when I was a kid, being the only kid that at 8am in school would be like hunched over in the bathroom having massive diarrhea every morning. And my parents just never understood why I had it. Well, obviously it was dairy, so there's just. I laugh. But like that suffering probably led to a lot of other things because, you know, the more that that gut wall and the more that permeability is in infiltrated, the more I assume the worse it gets. So how do we do this? Maybe if we could do a long form conversation here about how do we avoid the pitfall in the first place, because it seems like the gut intestinal and the gut permeability issue is really the cause of many things when it comes to poor health. How do we avoid the hole in the first place? And then maybe a second half of the long form would be how do we get out of the hole without outsourcing our power to someone else?

It's interesting you mentioned the connection between intestinal permeability and other things. Another way to look at the question that you asked about prevalence is looking at the prevalence of autoimmunity. So Alessio Fasano, who's kind of a legendary physician and researcher in this field, said that you can't have autoimmune disease without intestinal permeability. He believes that intestinal permeability is a precondition of developing autoimmunity. And some of the recent statistics suggest that up to one in six people now have an autoimmune condition. So, you know, before I answer that other question, I just wanted to mention that because it's a, it's another way of kind of getting at that. And it's an important connection for people to understand because autoimmune disease is so prevalent now that if you have an autoimmune disease, it's almost certain that you also have a leaky gut or intestinal permeability. So how it starts and how we can avoid getting in the hole, I mean, it can start very early, even potentially in utero or certainly in early childhood, not being breastfed or having access to those early colostrum and immune supporting compounds that are present in mother's milk. That's the way that the microbiome is seeded. It's actually even seeded before that in the birth canal during the birth process. So things like C section or being formula fed increase the risk of disrupted gut microbiome, intestinal permeability. And I know that in some cases, you know, many I, I've known, I've treated many women who, you know, in pregnancy and during their efforts to conceive. And, you know, almost in, in almost all cases, if they ended up having to give formula or not being able to deliver vaginally, it was not by choice. There was some complication that happened. So I want to be clear that I'm not criticizing or judging women when this happens, because in many cases it's not their choice. Previously, women were misled to believe that taking formula or giving their babies formula was better than breastfeeding. That was like, my mom was told that by her doctor. And so as a Result, I was breastfed for like two days or three days and then was given formula the rest of the time. That was actually pretty common in my generation. So it starts very early with the birth experience and then the early whether you're breastfed. And then, of course, with diet, as the child starts to eat and consume normal food, eating nutrient dense whole foods and not highly processed and refined foods like flour and sugar and industrial seed oil, which now comprise 60% of the calories that most people consume on a daily basis. And then you add in things like food dyes and other chemicals, environmental toxins like heavy metals, glyphosate, pesticides and herbicides and things that have become ubiquitous in our food supply. Those all cause intestinal permeability you mentioned, Josh. Antibiotics, of course, those are notorious for disrupting the gut microbiome and causing permeability. They also amplify the growth of fungal organisms like Candida. And we now know that those fungal organisms basically punch holes in the lining of the intestine and cause permeability. You have a whole range of medications that people take that cause intestinal permeability. NSAIDs like ibuprofen are notorious for this. And there's a pretty shocking number of people that take those on a daily basis, whereas they were only ever meant to be taken. You know, occasionally PPIs, proton pump inhibitors, and other acid stopping drugs can increase the risk of Sibo and other gut conditions that cause permeability. Chronic stress actually can cause intestinal permeability by upregulating cortisol production and changing hormone balance that affects the gut. So if we were to summarize all of those, Josh, it would be the modern lifestyle, right? It would be. If you just. Unfortunately, it's painful to say this, but if you just sort of follow the path that is set forth for us in the modern world, like if you just kind of eat what everybody else is eating, you just kind of do what the doctor tells you to do, you take the medications that are prescribed and advertised, and you just follow the. The stream that we're. That we find ourselves in leads. It's a stream that almost certainly will lead to intestinal permeability.

It leads us to the hole. It literally leads us there.

It leads us to the hole. It's flowing into the hole like a river.

Yeah. Unless we're conscious and there might be some cows defecating close to that hole. So unless we're conscious, then unless we have the drive within us to really be our own citizen scientists, to truly, truly embody the virtues of being an n equals 1. To, like, love and care and nurture ourselves, really, the cards are stacked against us. I'm not a doom and gloom person. I'm not here to scare people. I'm here to just provide wisdom through you and through my life experience and through so many people that have been mirroring exactly what you're saying, that all roads lead to gut health and how gut health extrapolates in the entire body, our brain, the enteric nervous system being the second brain. I remember I was talking with Dr. Michael Ruscio, and he was saying that there's more nerve endings in the enteric nervous system than there are stars in the sky, which is like, I can't even fathom that. I literally can't even fathom how magical the human body is. So where did we go wrong? And I do want to focus on getting out of the hole because you've done a really good job of painting how really, you know, desperate the hole can be. And my heart goes out to anyone I've been there myself that finds themselves in the hole. So I don't want to, you know, delegitimize them or their journey or their struggle. Like, they deserve reverence and respect. And if we just focus on the fact that we're in the hole, we'll never get out. We get to choose the path out. So what is the path out? What is the beginning steps of the path out of the hole look like? In other words, how do we fortify and start the healing process so that we never end up in that hole again?

And I want to reiterate what you said. You know, this, to me, it's not what's gloom and doom is just continuing blindly along the path that we're on that's almost guaranteed to lead to the gloom and doom outcome. If we want a chance at changing the course of our health and our lives, we have to be honest with ourselves and with each other about what's really happening. We have to be willing to look at things with clarity and recognize what we're up against. Because if we don't do that, we have no hope. We have no hope of actually changing things. So for me, that kind of honesty is the prerequisite to an appropriate response. And so let's talk about what that response is. If we sort of work backwards from all of the causes that we talked.

About.

If you're a parent and you're having a child and there's a way for you to do this, like having a natural birth and breastfeeding until two years old. There's various schools of thought on that. Some people will stop a little sooner, some people will go a little bit longer. That's going to set your child up for the best possible gut health. Now, of course, that's not always possible, as we discussed. And there are things you can do to mitigate some of the downsides that can come with not having a vaginal birth, not being able to breastfeed, but that's starting foundation. If you're already an adult and you're listening to this, or maybe a teenager, the first thing is a nutrient dense whole foods diet. At the risk of stating the obvious, what we put into our mouth every day is the foundation for gut health. Because not only the nutrients that our gut needs to function properly, but the nutrients that our microbiome needs. So every bite of food that I put into my mouth, I'm thinking of two things. How is this going to nourish me? How is this going to nourish my gut microbiome? And those are not necessarily the same nutrients. For example, fermentable fiber that's present in vegetables, starchy tubers, nuts and seeds and things like that. We don't actually absorb that. It's not a nutrient for humans, but it's food for the beneficial bacteria in our gut. So it's very beneficial to our health in an indirect way, even though we're not absorbing that as a nutrient. Whereas of course, nutrients like iron and zinc and calcium and vitamin D and B12 and folate, all of these things we absorb directly and benefit our health. So that's key and one of the most important steps we can take. So that's one of the four pillars that I talk about. Another one is sleep. And I know sleep has gotten a lot of attention over the last five, ten years particularly, and I think for good reason. There are studies that have shown that even one night of severe sleep disruption can cause a temporary intestinal permeability condition. It doesn't mean it's permanent.

Don't tell me this, because I have not been sleeping with my 2 year old and my 4 month old.

That's why I said temporary. It's not going to to have a lifelong effect. But it's important to try to get as much sleep as we can and get high quality sleep. That's pillar number two. Pillar number three is stress management. So we talked about that before. Cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, these hormones are stress response hormones and they're vital, they're important for helping us respond to Stress, but they're not meant to be released repeatedly, you know, all day long, every day. And when that happens, it can increase intestinal permeability. So taking steps to manage stress, whether that's, you know, a yoga practice, a meditation practice, breath work, spending time in nature, I think is really powerful. Having fun is one of my most. My go to stress management practices and one of the, I think an underrated one, because we always tend to think, oh, we have to do something that's just quiet and meditative and relaxing, and that's awesome.

But, yeah, I got to go lay in a float tank for three hours. Like, no, you don't.

It's not just that having fun releases endorphins. And when we're in that state where we're releasing endorphins, that's basically contrary to the stress response.

What's one of the best ways that you have fun right now? Like, what lights you up? Recently, I.

When we moved to Bend, Oregon, where I live now, I got into whitewater kayaking. So this is something I've never done before. I grew up surfing, so I've always been big water sports person, but I've never, never done whitewater kayaking. And so I. I started in July, and I. I had a goal to be able to get to the point where I could kayak down a section of the White Salmon river in Washington. And I was able to do that a couple weeks ago. So super fun, big smile on my face almost the whole time I'm going down the river. Great. And it ties so many things together, you know, like being outside in nature, being active, beautiful place, water. Like, all the things that make me happy and help me manage stress are there.

All right, so basically you're saying everyone needs to move out of a city, move to the country, y'.

All. I'm glad you brought that up. Like, so many studies have shown that just even urban green spaces, like going to an urban park, can have a profound effect on our stress response. And even things like having a plant, like, I see you have a plant behind you. Just having a little bit of greenery in your house can make a difference. So I've come to believe in my career, seeing thousands of patients and training thousands of healthcare practitioners. You asked earlier about an update. One update for me in terms of my philosophy and how I approach things is I really believe that big changes are often the result of a series of many small changes. We tend to think that in order to make progress, we have to do these big, heroic interventions. And I think this is just part of our American mentality that, you know, no pain, no gain. And like, if we want a big result, we have to do this big thing. And sometimes that's true, but in the case of health and well being, I've found that it's generally the compounding effects of a series of small changes that leads to the shift that we're looking for. So, you know, it doesn't have to be move out to move to the woods and spend all of your time walking barefoot in the wilderness. It doesn't have to be your diet doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. You don't have to get perfectly eight hours of perfect deep sleep as indicated by the war ring or whoop or something like that. Just making efforts in each of these areas and taking steps in the right direction has a compounding effect because you start to feel improvement, you start to feel better. And that increased energy that you get from feeling better can be then reinvested in another small step that you take. And it's through that process that we recover. So that was a little bit of a tangent.

No, it's a great tangent. It's a great tangent. I mean, we're out here in Austin, which is like five, six months of 100 degrees plus, and I have noticed that when I don't go outside as much, it drastically impacts my mood. Mood for sure. I mean, thank God I have like a plunge in my garage and a sauna and so I can get a little bit there. But you know, people that live in really challenging climates, like, I think about, you know, people that live in Wisconsin or the Great Lakes, where it's just so cold in those environments. Like, there's a way to fortify our wellness when we go through the seasons of life. We're on planet Earth. Our ancestors have been doing it for millennia. So it's not like we're needing to reinvent the wheel. I feel like we just need to understand how to spin the wheel properly. So spinning the wheel properly is this fortification. It leads to really what you've done with Adapt, because in order for us to go through the seasons of life, we have to have adaptability to do so. And if we don't have that adaptability, then it's almost going to be, not to be negative. It's going to be pretty freaking impossible to lead a life that's well. So this fortification process through, you know, the omega, the bioavailable nutrients you have in the ADAPT product and the whole product line, there has got to be some come to Jesus moment where you're like, okay, I don't. I don't see anything out there in the world that's going to help myself, my family, my patients in the way that I want. Like, what was the genesis of adapt?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think for me, it was largely what you just said. It was realizing from my 15 years of treating patients and training thousands of healthcare providers, who in turn treated hundreds and thousands of patients, and getting all of that feedback over that period of time just made me realize that we are facing a lot of challenges. Earlier, we talked about how the flow of that river is going into the hole. The flow of the river is not going around the hole, it's going into the hole. And we can do all of the things that we've talked about in this podcast to create the foundation of health, but the reality is, even then, we're still dealing with a lot of threats that are not completely under our control. For I mentioned before, environmental toxins, heavy metals like lead and mercury, cadmium and arsenic becoming more ubiquitous in our environment and our food supply, glyphosate and other pesticides and herbicides. We have the challenge of our food just not being as nutritious as it used to be because of declining soil quality. So you look at, like, content of magnesium and other minerals and vitamins in fruits and vegetables today versus just 50 years ago, and it's dramatically lower. There was a statistic I came across in one paper that said we'd have to eat eight oranges today to get the same level of nutrition that our grandparents got from just eating one orange. That's a profound change in a pretty short period of time on a relative basis. And so even when we're eating a healthy diet, we're not getting the same level of nutrition that our parents and our grandparents got, then you have the added challenge of our gut dysfunction and how that impacts nutrient absorption. So when you eat a food, you can look at a nutrition label and see the level of nutrients that that food has. But everyone should understand that we're not absorbing anywhere close to 100% of those listed nutrients for all of the factors that I just described, and also because of the differences in our gut health. So we have lots of studies showing that changes in our gut microbiome lead to significant differences in how many vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients that we absorb from the foods that we eat. Given the statistics I shared earlier on the prevalence of intestinal permeability and gut dysbiosis and things like Sibo and other GI problems. That's something that affects most people. So I wanted to create a way that people could. To help people to overcome these challenges, basically, to even the playing field, if you want to put it that way.

Yeah, it's a ladder out of the hole or it's a mat to make us not even drop into the hole in the first place.

Yeah, exactly. And that way it can amplify all of the other efforts that people are making and ensure that those are going to lead to the outcome that we want. And so I think of it as, like, I've described it as a raft. I like the ladder out of a hole, or even better, the mat over the hole or the diversion away from the hole entirely. So it's a fair fight, if you want to use that analogy. It's like we were really starting from a place where we had little chance of succeeding. And, and, and I want, you know, adapt naturals to change that for people.

All right, let's visualize this. The path to health, in my opinion, is living as close to nature as possible. In other words, living on a farm is going to give you the best health, the best micro diversity, the best biome. You're around cows and chickens and animals, and you're drinking clean water from a spring. Like that is a fraction of a fraction of the population. For the rest of us, we are navigating cities and suburbs and city water supply and soil, like you said, that produces oranges where we'd have to eat eight of them to get one of what our grandparents used to eat. Like, there are times where I feel into this and I'm like, wow, I literally just want to go get a ranch, have my family live on the ranch, raise chickens and animals and have a spring and have well water and just be done with it all. But not everybody can do that.

And then you'd be living like our ancestors did for 2 million years of hominid evolution. Right?

Yeah.

And so it's. But we're so. We're so far from that. And as you point out, Josh, just. That's not in the cards for the vast majority.

How can we live as close to that as possible? In other words, what tools, resources, and maybe talk about adapt, how it can bring us closer to that. I know it's not exactly like you and I living on a ranch, but, you know, from a, from a micro delivery standpoint and from the nutrients and vitamins and also the protectants, the gastrointestinal protectants, maybe even the neurological Benefits that adapt brings to us. This is new, unseen for me. I was really excited that you launched this supplement line because I thought, wow, you know, none of us, even if we're eating as perfect as we can perfectly eat, we're still not getting what we need. And I think to be a human being, unless we're living on a farm and maybe even then we would still need a supplement. The modern life is dependent on supplementation because our modern environment is so different than how we evolved.

Absolutely. So I'll give a few examples of where I think we can kind of better align our current lifestyle with our ancestral heritage and roots and what we evolve for. So with diet, a simple thing is to shop at farmer's markets or grow your own, as, you know, grow some of your own food. So we know that as soon as you harvest a, a plant, it starts losing nutritional value immediately. And the problem with that is if you're shopping in a grocery store, chances are that carrot or whatever you're buying, it's been two weeks maybe since it was harvested, but it was stored in a warehouse and then it got on a truck and it was five days on a truck. Then it went into another warehouse and then went into the back of the supermarket and then finally get out, get out onto the shelf or the produce bin and it's losing nutrition that whole time. So if you buy food locally, if you live in a place where you can do that and it's a time of year where you can do that, it might be a day between when the food was harvested and when you're buying it and consuming it. And you can taste the difference. Anyone who's bought a tomato or strawberry from a farmer's market, you can tell, right?

Absolutely.

That's a relatively simple change. And one, it's pretty obvious, right, how that is closer to how we consumed food in the past. Like we would get it from our village or somewhere very close to where we lived and eat it very soon after it was harvested. So that's one example for sleep. Sleeping in a cool, dark room and eliminating sources of light, turning off, keeping your phone out of your room or at the very least turning off all notifications so it's not beeping or flashing as you sleep, controlling the ambient temperature in the room or even controlling the temperature of the bed surface with things like Ulur, Chilipat or other nifty inventions that have come out recently. That's how we, you know, if you think of how people, humans slept for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, it Was outdoors on cold ground with probably relatively cool air temperatures. And that's how countless studies show that that's how we sleep best. Also relatively dark, except, of course, on a full moon. But nothing beeping or flashing or interfering with our sleep.

Do you have trouble sleeping on a full moon? You personally?

Yeah, me too.

And I never thought that was real. And I'm like, wow, we literally are made of stars. Because there has been so many nights where I'm like, carrie, babe, I did not sleep at all last night. And she's like, yeah, it was the full moon, so it wasn't placebo. I didn't even know that it was full moon. And I literally can't fall asleep. What do you think that is? What is that?

I don't know. It's interesting. I mean, it affects the tides and water. Our bodies are mostly made of water. There's obviously the energetic component. And by that, I mean just that, you know, we're. We're all made of the same energy atoms and molecules. And I think it's something that we don't understand very well. But I've heard this from enough people now, including, and I experienced it myself, that I'm certain that we'll come to understand it at some point.

All right, so maybe some more L. Theanine. Those are.

Yeah, those are two examples of realignment. Right. And then in terms of nutrition and supplementation, we spent a lot. A lot of time talking about gut health and the importance of foundational gut health. One of our. One of the first products when we launched, we had five products, and one of them was Biovil Myco, which is a blend of eight of the best researched mush superfood mushrooms. So, like reishi chaga, lion's mane, turkey tail, cordyceps mushrooms that have gotten a lot of attention for good reason over the past few years. And one of the reasons that mushrooms are so beneficial for so many different aspects of our health is because of their beta glucan content. Beta glucan is a unique type of soluble fiber that selectively feeds our beneficial gut bacteria and also crowds out harmful bacteria and then powerfully activates our gut immune system. It's called a biological response modifier. That's a term that was coined by that Japanese scientist who really has studied beta glucan more than just about anybody else. And what that means is it helps to regulate and balance, activate, regulate and balance the immune system. That's amazing that there are no drugs that can do this. Drugs usually either stimulate the immune system or they suppress it, like a steroid, suppresses the immune system globally, or an immune stimulating drug will amplify the immune system. The problem with that is if you have Crohn's disease, yes, suppressing the immune system will help with the Crohn's disease. But what happens when you get exposed to a virus or a pathogen? You actually want your immune system to be able to respond to that biological response. Modifiers like beta glucan, they're similar to adaptogenic herbs like rhodiola or Eleuthero or things like that, because they modify and regulate the immune response rather than just suppressing it or stimulating it. And it's a property that really only foods or botanicals have. As far as we know, we haven't really been able to replicate it with drugs. And these mushrooms have been used for probably at least 7,000 years. The Reishi or lingzhi in Chinese was mentioned in the first medical text that was ever discovered in China called the Shennong Ben Cao Jing. And, you know, it's really kind of one of the first medicinal substances that we know of. If folks remember Otzi the Iceman, the remains of early hominid ancestor that were discovered, he had a mushroom in his pouch that was discovered on his body. And it was, you know, the anthropologists, archaeologists believe that it was. He carried it as a medicine. So these are.

Do we know which one it was? Was it like a cordyceps or.

We do. I'm not remembering. No, it was more like Chaga, I think. I can't remember if it was chaga, but it was from that part of the world. And, you know, back in ancient China and also Egypt, mushrooms were so revered for their healing potential that they were exclusively reserved for use by the emperor or the nobility or priests. In Egypt, they were not allowed to be used by the general population. So now it's amazing that we live in a time where we now have access to these, these incredible healing compounds and they really set the stage for optimal gut health. So Biovail Myco was. I knew when we launched Lyme we had to have a foundational gut health product. And that's it. Because probiotics really important. There are lots of other things that are important for gut health, but if you don't have, if your gut immune system is not regulated and balanced, you can take probiotics all day long. And they're either not going to help or they're even going to cause problems because your gut immune system will react against those bacteria as if they shouldn't be There. So that's why we ended up going with Myco as that foundational product. Now we also have Bioville Multi, which has almost 40 essential vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. Now these are the nutrients that support overall health and well being and gut health, but they're delivered in the forms that our body can actually absorb. So if you go into like Costco or Walmart or God forbid, GNC to look for a multivitamin and you look at the label, you're going to see words like cyanocobalamin, folic acid, these are all cheaper, inferior, synthetic forms of nutrients and they're not well absorbed. And in some cases they can actually cause harm if you take too much of them and they're not well absorbed. And the reason they're used is they're cheap. I know this because I formulate supplements. So I know what all the different ingredients cost. And they're often anywhere from two to five times cheaper. And that's great for profit margins for supplement companies, but it's not good for you if you're trying to optimize your health. And so one of the founding principles of Adapt Naturals, and because I'm a clinician and have treated patients, I know it works. I know what the research says is that we use bioidentical, bioavailable or naturally occurring ingredients in our products. And that means they are a little bit more expensive than the typical multivitamin. You know, you're not going to, it's, you pay, if you're paying 25 bucks for a multivitamin, I can tell you with certainty that it's, it doesn't contain the most bioavailable, bioidentical ingredients. It's impossible to make one for that price. That does.

Let me, let me ask you this question then. So as far as the nutrients being delivered, that pathway, how they're transported, there's got to be something that is truly bioavailable or not. What is that something? In other words, what's the vehicle that gets the nutrients into the body in the most efficacious way? So they're actually absorbed.

Well, certainly gut health is the first step, right? Because if you can't absorb the nutrients because your gut is a wreck, then that's a problem. But then from there it really depends on the nutrient. So in the case of a lot of vitamins, what it is, is how active is the form that you're taking. So you know, in a lot of cases, like folic acid, for example, B9 or beta carotene, those are less active forms of a vitamin that then have to be converted into the more active form inside of your body to have the full effect. Now the problem is that conversion is very inefficient in many people and depends on things like their health status, their genetics, their epigenetics and also the presence of other nutrients. Every step in that conversion pathway involves an enzyme and every enzyme requires certain nutrients to be able to function properly. So if you don't have adequate nutrition, then you're not going to be able to do those conversions and you're not going to get the active form. So in most cases it's better to just take the active form. So methylfolate or 5 methyltetrahydrofolate, 5 mthf, which a lot of people are familiar with, I take that every day. There you go. So the reason that's more effective is because that's the end product. Like that's, that's, that's what the folate, the conversion cycle gets to. Whereas if you take folic acid, it has to go through several steps of conversion to get to methylfolate. And a lot of people have MTHFR polymorphisms that make it difficult for them to do that conversion. Another example would be iron. So heme forms of iron that are found in animal products are six or seven fold more bioavailable than plant based forms of iron that are found in, in plant foods. And this is one reason incidentally that you see higher rates of iron deficiency in people who are following exclusively plant based diets unless they're paying very careful attention to it and supplementing or doing other things. So Biovale Organ is one of our other products that we launched with. So this is a blend of five organs, liver, heart, kidney, pancreas and spleen from 100% grass fed grass finished cows organs, as it turns out, are the most nutrient dense foods we can eat ounce for ounce. There was a landmark study published in 2022, March of last year by Ty Beal, Frontiers of Nutrition and he works for an NGO that's concerned with ending malnutrition around the world. And so their mandate is what foods will give us the biggest bang for our buck. If we're going to advise governments on how to feed their populations and end hunger and malnutrition. What foods should we be using? Is it kale? Is it blueberries?

Probably not kale.

Is it all of these plant foods that get most of the attention? No, they're organ meats. In fact, four out of the top seven foods from a nutrient density perspective were organs. And they were not just a little bit ahead, they were hugely ahead, like liver on this scale. A lower score was better. Liver had a score of 11. And then you had some of the other foods in the top 10 were in the 6, 7, 8, 9 hundreds. So we're talking about even within the top 10 foods, more than tenfold.

More.

Than tenfold difference, sometimes 20, 40, 50 fold difference between the amount of nutrients in liver and even other very nutrient dense foods. So our ancestors knew this. Josh, like many of our grandparents, probably ate liver and other organ meats. Almost all traditional cultures that you look at consume organ meats, liver and onions as well. Big dish. Native Americans used to throw the muscle meats which is pretty much all we eat today, like steaks and, and chops and things like that. They used to throw those to the dogs and just eat the heart and the liver and the organs themselves. But we both know that not many people are eating organ meats these days. And I can tell you, unless you're.

The liver king, he likes to do that for show. But most people aren't going to put a heart on the plate and eat it.

Most people are not going to do it. I know from treating patients for my entire career, people would actually, it's funny, like people would come in and kind of sheepishly say I know you're going to tell me to eat liver. Because they had read my blog posts or books or something, they just like I can't do it, I've tried, I can't do it. So I wanted a way to give people access to the incredible nutrient nutritional benefits of organs without having to eat or prepare them because I knew that just almost nobody will do that. And so taking biovale organs equivalent to eating a four ounce serving of these organ meats a week, which is about what I would typically recommend, they're so potent that you don't need a lot of them to get the benefit. And you're getting them in their completely bioavailable food based, it's just food in a capsule. Basically it's freeze dried organ meats that have been turned, they're frozen, freeze dried, made into a powder and put into a gelatin capsule and that's it. There's no other ingredient. So it's basically superfood in a capsule. And that gets you the bioavailable, the most bioavailable forms of iron, zinc, copper, choline, many other B vitamins and amino acids and almost kind of gives you that unfair Advantage that we all want to have.

I want to reference something you said before, and I'm curious how this applies to organ meats. You'd said, for example, when carrots are sold in stores, it could be two, three weeks with them on multiple trucks before they get down into somebody's mouth. How does it work when you take beef heart, kidney, liver and you freeze dry it and you encapsulate it so that it still has its vitality inside of it? In other words, how do you get something from walking around in an animal to a capsule and still get the benefit of its vitality in your body?

Well, actually in, in a way it might be superior to eating it if you're like cooking it at high heat, for example, because the organs are harvested and they're very quickly frozen. And then once they're frozen, you're basically locking in that nutrition. The process of freezing it does not just deactivate any of the nutrients, whereas higher temperature cooking, you're still going to get a lot of the nutrition from eating cooked organ meats, but there is some degradation in the case of some nutrients. Whereas with freeze drying, you're getting that nutrition in a very fresh and vital way. And once you freeze and then freeze dry the capsules or the powder, you're just locking that in. So I'm not suggesting that people don't eat cooked organ meats. I think if you, if the taste is amenable to you and you're in the texture and you're able to do it, absolutely, it's a phenomenal way to get that nutrition. But freeze drying is a great way of locking in the nutritional value of many foods, not just organs, but it's interesting, lots of foods.

NASA does this with their astronauts because people don't realize this. When astronauts go into space, they lose so much lean body mass because of the lack of gravity that they have to train really hard. I mean, these, these astronauts train like athletes up there, Chris. They're doing deadlifts. There's like special machines. It's on the screen right now. There's a special machine of an astronaut doing a deadlift in outer space. And you know what? They feed them. They feed them, I believe, and y' all can quote me on this, I believe they do feed them organ meats and they also feed them specifically freeze dried food. So if it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for me because there's a lot of money that's pumped into these astronauts. And I think that's a really good corollary. To us here, you know, where there is gravity on planet Earth.

Absolutely. And it's also about consistency. You know, it's pretty easy to take a supplement every day. But I have a lot of patients, even patients who like to eat organ meats. It's hard to stay consistent with, with doing that, especially if you have a family and you're not on your own. You know, like you and no one else in your family likes to eat liver. If you, if you cook up liver, you're gonna have to do it separately. And some people really don't like the smell. And so, yeah, it's just an easier route.

Wow, we've covered so much ground today, man. What do you think we missed? When it comes to optimizing the human body, right? The mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. The ways that for almost 10 years now, I've been learning, how do I live my life well, first and foremost, how do I share that with the world so that we all can truly live life well and just be vital? I almost visualize life as like an orange. It's funny you mentioned the or orange with our grandparents. Like, how do I bite the orange and have my life dribble down my elbow so that I really feel alive? Like, what did we miss when it comes to the conversation of vitality?

I mean, there's so many ways to answer this question, but what's coming to mind right now is just the value of attention. One of my teachers used to say, the quality of our experience is determined by the focus of our attention. So the quality of our experience is determined by the focus of our attention. So if our attention is being pulled in 50 different directions all day long, you know, notifications on our phones, scrolling social media, bouncing around from one thing to the next, or we get sucked into a bunch of stuff that somebody else feels is important and is trying to get our attention with, rather than really directing our attention to the things that are most meaningful and rewarding for us based on our own values and priorities, then our life is going to be far less rich. And so I think that learning to cultivate our ability to direct our attention where it's most needed and most rewarded is one of the most underrated capacities to develop. And I think it's even harder to do that in this. Talk about river going into a hole. If you just go along with the current zeitgeist of you get a phone, you install a bunch of apps, you just leave every notification on, your attention will be stolen from you every moment of the day. And so this is something that I think we all benefit from just paying attention to where our attention goes and cultivating the ability to direct it in the most meaningful places, man.

So well said. I remember I had a conversation with a woman named Kyra Bobinet, Dr. Kyra Bobinet, and she specialized in neuroscience and product formation for a lot of companies in Silicon Valley. And off the podcast she goes, yeah, you use your phone and you have these apps. She looked at me through the camera and she said, you're being trained, you're being groomed, you're being, we're all being trained and groomed by this phone. So it's not a fear conversation, it's a consciousness conversation. And I love that you brought it to, you know, where are we spending? Literally our bank account of finite attention. That is so huge, man. I've really, really enjoyed this. I, I love your presence. I love the wisdom that you bring. I always have. And so even more now, five years later, just congratulations on this company. And by the way, thank you so much. You gave our audience a beautiful discount. I know that creating all these products and sourcing the mushrooms and, you know, paying the people to go out and harvest these things, it ain't cheap, y'. All. But Chris, thank you for the discount. So it's on the screen right now, joshtrent.com adaptnaturals and it's for 15% off. All you have to do is use the code WellnessForce, which is amazing. So thank you for that. It'll be linked right here in the show notes and our articles and on social for all of us, Chris, as we say goodbye. I asked you this five years ago and I don't expect you to remember, but what's true for you now about wellness, you know, how would you define, how would you encapsulate wellness? How do you live your life?

Well, for me, Josh, right now more than ever, it's being of service. And I find that when I direct my attention, speaking of directing attention to that, like how I can show up and serve people in my community, my family, and all of the people who have followed my work and depend on me for guidance and research, everything just flows from that. I find that that directs my own efforts on a day to day basis in ways that support my own health, health and well being. And then I get that. I feel like I'm in a virtuous cycle of feedback where when I'm able to contribute in a way that feels meaningful and rewarding, then life, life is just so rich and full.

That's solid wisdom. I've heard that from many behavioral specialists. If you're feeling anxiety or depression, be in service to someone else. Watch how quickly you snap out of it. So thank you for coming on the show, man. Really appreciate you what you've created in the world. Again, it's on the screen. Joshtrend.com forward/adaptnaturals and the discount code which is amazing to get this delivered right to your house, which that's a whole nother thing. Back in the day we would had to go harvest this stuff ourself, freeze dry it and encapsulate it. So thanks for doing that. The code is wellness force for 15% off. Chris, until I see you again man, I'm so grateful for you that you're in the world and thank you for all the beautiful reminders that you gave to us on this podcast. Appreciate you being here man.

Thank you, Josh. It's a pleasure and I really appreciate all the work you're doing for the world. It means a lot.

Feels good to receive that. Until Chris and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.