Health Explained: What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? + 5 Defense Systems

So somebody asks you, hey, what's health? And you say, how do you know you're healthy? Well, I'm not sick.

That's all I have. A six pack, some illusionary model.

Well, so now I'm telling you that, well, that's kind of on the outside, right? So we're now figuring out what health is on the inside. And we earn our health because our health defenses actually are firing in all cylinders. We're born with them, and they're firing in all cylinders. From the time we're born until our very last breath, they're doing all they can. And so some people say, well, why did so and so get cancer? And I think a more interesting question is, why don't we all not get cancer so more frequently? And that's due to our body's defenses. And the amazing thing is that the five defenses that I wrote about are the, you know, the angiogenesis, stem cell regeneration, microbiome, DNA repair, and our immunity. These five defenses are all, all being focused on by the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs to go after the disease. So if you move that aside, but to say there's a lot of science behind that, you look at the other side, you can use those same five defenses to boost them up with food. So it really is just the other side. Look, you go into a grocery store. What do you see now, right? You got the food on one side, you got the drugstore on the other side. This is the same thing. Like in the five health defense systems. There's like the pharma side, the drugstore side. Let's go into the produce and the food side of things. We can actually really figure out it's the same defenses that get boosted. So, you know, they're quite amazing because they're interrelated. And what I tell people to think about is our health defenses are like a coral reef. Like, think about the Great Barrier Reef, right? It's not just one kind of coral, it's coral. It's fish. You know, and you've got the big fish. It's an ecosystem, and everything works together. And that's really what our body is. It's a gigantic ecosystem of health.

Wow. I love this because I think about the way that nature always wins. You know, one day we'll leave the planet. Until then, what are we doing here that actually complements and interrelates and gives back to nature? I can't think of a better way to do that. By food. Food is the way that we can honor nature. There's. We've had A guest on the show named Paul Check, and he talked about eating seasonally, eating the foods that actually grow in the right seasons. How does someone even know if their food that they're eating is causing them a lowering of these five defenses. Is there a start point with the food that people can eat that you talk about in your book? What is that first step when even looking at the myriad of nutritional choices?

Right. So to make it really, really simple, you know, all you got to do is go to a farmer's market because they're seasonal. They bring, always bring out, they cart out and they load up into baskets the stuff that it happens to be fresh at that time. And farmers markets are everywhere. You know, I mean, I think that they've come in a great way. And even if you live in a city, you don't have to go too far to find out where the farmers have come in to actually bring their stuff. That's one way, great way to figure out what nature is providing at that moment or that week for our bodies. So if you think about us as all interconnected, that's really one way to figure out what is the bounty that has come in. I'm thinking another way. If you live by the shore, you know, by the fishing docks, you know, what used to happen is that people used to gather up by the dock to see what the boats were bringing in, to see what the fisherman caught. Same thing for the farmer's market. I generally think whole plant based foods that you grow from good soil using ways that protect the earth and you bring it to market and you buy it. Like that's going to be a really great way to start. Now. It's true. Not everybody can get fresh food all the time. And that's really one of the big inequalities I think that we need to address as a society. Yeah, we need to get better food. I mean, honestly, I don't really care if a drone flies it to your doorstep, but if you're in the middle of, you know, if you're in a place that doesn't actually have fresh food, we need as a society to figure out how to get that to you.

That's such a great point. Because it's all out there. It's not like the food's missing. Like, how do you feed the world? You just transport the food to them, to the people that need it. There's farm box, there's butcher box, there's all these companies out there are ways to deliver this fresh food to people wherever they live.

And the irony is that there's a lot of fresh food that sits in the field rotting, not getting to the people that it needs to go to. So I think that that's one of the things that we need to be able to. We need to be able to find a way to improve our communities. Right. And also think about in the old days, right? Like in a simpler time, if you had a lot of abundance of food, what did you do? You gave it to your neighbor. So you shared your food. That's something that I think we're going to come back to thinking about is how do we share our bounty. But you asked about the basic rules of thumb. Whole foods, mostly plant based fruits and vegetables as fresh as possible, nuts and legumes, herbs and spices. This is really the bounty of health. And mother Nature gives it to us. Every season, every month is a little bit different. And frankly, when you ask even what about the wintertime, you get root vegetables, you get the plant based foods that can actually store pretty well. Carrots, potatoes, apples, they all carry over. And because we are in general fortunate to be able to get foods from different places, you can always find something fresh in a supermarket. And that's one of the things that I tell people they should be doing.

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