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what's your thoughts on milk it's problematic current Dairy is not something we should consume so you might
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not know this but that's crazy Dr Mark Hyman one of
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the world leading doctors in functional medicine and an expert in helping people understand how they can live their
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longest healthiest life what are your thoughts on his imp so we have a massive obesity problem and we don't have any
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good Solutions so something comes along that makes you lose weight that's a huge attractive thing but the side effect
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Prof file in this is scary people are not aware that and by the way they're thinking of giving it to 5-year-old kids
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which is just terrifying but we live in a toxic landscape of enticing addictive highly processed food which is why 93%
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of us have some metabolic dysfunction we know that causes mental health issues depression anxiety add gun violence it
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kills 11 million people a year but these are not inevitable problems so for example I had a kid with ADD who was so
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bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at 12 years old but after 2 months he went from having severe ADD symptoms to excelling and score and
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there's so many things that you can do but people have to understand that you cannot use willpower to control your
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food Behavior it's a problem of education for example if you eat sugar in the Morning cereal pancakes Bagels
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it's the worst possible thing we can do string training three times a week 20 minutes is really key for longevity and
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this is really important we call it the five FS for getting healthy but most of us do the opposite so
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it's congratulations Dario gang we we've made some progress 63% of you that
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listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe which is down from 69% our goal is 50% so if you've ever
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liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know
00:01:48
and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this
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[Music] episode Mark if someone's just on this
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podcast can you tell me why they should stay and listen great question great question the
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answer is quite simple you're going to be able to have a window into the future of your
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health and the future of medicine itself and the way to think about things the
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way you think about your health the way you think about symptoms you have or diseases you have or your family members
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have the way you think about optimiz her health you're going to have a window into what the next generation of
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thinking is about this a paradigm shift that's akin to Columbus saying the Earth is not flat or Galileo saying the the
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the the the Earth is not uh is not the center of the universe you know these are massive scientific Paradigm or
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evolutionary theory by Darwin think about physics at the turn of the last
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century and and how much that changed with Einstein's discoveries of Relativity we are now at that stage in
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biology where we're understanding for the first time in history of science and medicine the natural laws of biology and
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how the Body Works what is functional medicine how do you like I've heard the
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word before but I've never really understood the true definition yeah I mean I don't particularly like the word to be honest with you Stephen I think I
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think it has kind of you know confusing implications for people but essentially
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the way I would describe it as a new way of thinking about solving the puzzle of chronic disease looking at root causes
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seeing the body as a system as a network it's the medicine of why not what not what disease do you have but why do you
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have it it's a science of creating Health how do we create Health what are the things that are impediments to
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health how do we get rid of those and what are the ingredients for health and how do we provide those and it's not that big a list like we're biological
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organisms right and so functional medicine is a systematic way of thinking it's an operating system or
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methodology uh heuristic let's say to to unpack all of your body ology and all
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the inputs we call the exposome and make sense of what your personal story is and
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and personalized and approach to diagnosis and treatment so you know we always say in functional medicine you
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can have one cause that creates many diseases or one disease it can have many causes so for example gluten can cause
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everything from osteoporosis to autism to schizophrenia to R arthritis to
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anemia to hair loss alpia I mean it can cause a million things and it's one inciting
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event or you can have you know one disease like depression that can be caused by many things depression is a
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symptom right it's not a proac deficiency right it's caused by many factors it could be that you had a major
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trauma or or a loss it could be that you're vitamin D deficient it could be that you're eating gluten it creates inflammation in your brain it could be
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that you're not taking acid blocker for years for reflux because you're have the wrong diet and that causes be2
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deficiency that causes depression or it could be because you're eating a lot lot of sushi and that has mercury that
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causes depression or maybe it's because you hate sushi and fish and you don't eat any fish and you have omega-3 deficiency or you maybe have in some
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resistance and diabetes that can cause depression and inflammation in the brain so depression is just a name we give to
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people who share a collection of symptoms most of the diseases we have that we describe as obesity or diabetes
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or heart disease or cancer they're not really helpful to understand the true root cause they're just describing the
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symptoms it's descriptive right and so functional medicine is a really different model model uh it's also could
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be called Network medicine with the there's a textbook out of Harvard by larasi that talks about the network
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biology we have you know how we need to think about multia factorial causes of disease there's many factors there not
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just one and then multimodal interventions not just one we're looking at that one cure for Alzheimer's we're never going to find it you know but a
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study that looked at multiple interventions of diet and lifestyle and exercise and aggressive treatment of
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risk factors showed a regression of Alzheimer's not one drug but many many different modalities that optimize
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health so it's really to me the most exciting time in medicine it's this this
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Paradigm sh is happening it's happening fast and it's being accelerated through this sort of Advent of our our ability
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to do deep phenomic di Diagnostics so phenomics is essentially the expression
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of your biology any moment your genome is fixed right but your phenome is
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essentially the the things that your body expresses whether it's health or disease was there any personal
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experiences that made you more drawn towards focusing your life on health and helping people absolutely I mean I I've
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always been interested so I don't know why I think it was I visited my sister at ammer college and went to the veggie
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room and had whole grain bread and peanut butter and honey I'm like this is good I'm vegetarian so I just sort of got into it and then I studied Buddhism
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and got into that so I I think I all that was sort of seated in me and then I started n studies in yoga which is sort
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of a science of really healing the mind and Buddhism is healing the mind so always sort of got into that uh but
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there was something that happen after I went to work at this place called Kya Ranch it's a health resort and I got very ill I had lived in
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China and basically was breathing in Mercury Laden air uh in Beijing in the
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winter and I had an air filter I would clean it every day and that air filter was full of mercury CU it's in the S
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it's in the coal that they burn they burn raw coal in the city and I haed it every day and when I got back from China
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um there was something that happened I got some gut infection and my system just collapsed one day I was riding my
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bike 100 miles a day the next day I couldn't walk up the stairs one day I had 30 patients and I could remember
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everybody's name and story and everything without notes and dictate everything at the end of the day with no problem to not being able to remember
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where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started and I couldn't read a book to my kids out loud and actually
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understand it I could either read it and try to understand it or I could read it out loud and not know what I was saying my brain just stopped working my immune
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system not working my gut stopped working my whole body just collapsed I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and I
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felt like I was walking through mud and it took me years to figure it out uh
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really years and I got introduced to functional medicine at that time I heard about I said this either is lunacy or
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it's genius and if it's true I devoted to finding out whether it's true for me
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for my own healing and for my patients because if it if it was true everything was going to be different it's like you
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know like discovering the Earth wasn't flat well if that's true then everything is different and so I dove into it head
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first to heal myself and then I started using my patience and that that feeling
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of being sick drove me because I was I was clear that I wasn't crazy chronic fatigue syndrome was thought to be a you
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know sort of a psychological disease and now the data is really clear the NH just came out with a large paper I think last
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week talking about the biomarkers and the biology and the mology and the mitochondrial dysfunction and the
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inflammation and all the things that do go wrong and I I knew was I wasn't crazy and I knew I wasn't mentally ill and I knew I wasn't depressed and I knew I
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didn't have ADD and you know I knew I wasn't getting dementia at 36 years old and so I I I I really had to understand
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my biology internally on a cellular level and reverse engineer my way back to health and so that forced me just out
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of survival to to dig deep into the science of what was happening and then to attack that and then start to use it
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on my patients and when I would to use it on my patients I was shocked I would have someone coming with autoimmune disease they had for years and I say do
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this this and this based on the principles and they would get better or I would say I've had migraines for 20
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years and I would check and they would have a food sensitivity to eggs they stop and go away or I would take someone
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who's had diabetes and put them on the right approach with food is medicine and the diabetes would go away so I would
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started seeing all these what I thought were Miracles or things that wouldn't change or treating kids with autism or add or and we can we can share in the
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show notes but I had a kid with ADD who was so bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at 12 years old and after
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two months he went from having severe ADD symptoms and all these other health issues and I fixed his gut I optimized
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his nutrition I I get the lead out of his system I got all the processed food
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out and he went from being completely non barely non-functioning to excelling
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in school to having perfect Penman ship after two months and I'm like wow this is crazy if you just look at the image
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of this and can share it on the show notes if you want it was like okay something is going on here that that we
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don't completely understand and if it's something as simple as optimizing his gut and optimizing his nutrition and
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getting rid of the the toxin in his body and the Brain could function again then so many people who are suffering don't
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need to suffer and that's really what drove me was just seeing so many people suffering without need and how easy it
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was to fix them once you understood right we're at that stage in medicine where the answers are here the science
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and technology is here it's just not applied and so my whole life has been driven by The Passion of trying to
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relieve needless suffering for millions of people these chronic diseases that are now accounting for you know almost
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$1 in5 dollar of our entire economy that are bankrupting America and I think the
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NHS is not far behind us in the UK you know we're we're these are not
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inevitable problems you know heart disease diabetes many cancers dementia
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autoimmune diseases these are just exploding in the last 100 years they weren't around before it wasn't because
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we didn't live long it wasn't because of that it was because something changed and and and what changed was our diet
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was environmental toxins was our microbiome was our nutritional deficiencies because of the ultra
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processed food we're eating and so I've been driven you know to both solve problems individually for in for people
00:11:58
with their health as as well as take on the bigger issues of the root causes of our of our chronic disease which if it's
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food right so and and environmental toxins and I and I realized that I couldn't cure diabetes in my office
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right diabetes was caused on the farm and the factories and the grocery stores
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and the restaurants not in in my office and so I really had to go Upstream to
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deal with the root causes of why my patients were sick because I could change your diet and I could get them to be better and could fix a lot of things
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but it they would just kept more people just keep coming in I'm like this is ridiculous and so I realized I had to do
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something about it so I wrote a book called food fix which essentially lays out how food is a Nexus of everything we
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care about and create a nonprofit where I work in Washington to try to change food policies like child-friendly
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labeling and medically tailored meals and changing nutrition education and changing our dietary guidelines and changing the kinds of food they aable
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through Snap or food stamps you know why should we be giving you know 10% of our hundred billion do budget for food
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stamps for soda which we know kills people you know it's so so I've been kind of working on these issues both on
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the macro and the micro what what is the um current state of food in your point
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of view because it's difficult isn't it especially you when we come to America as Brits um I feel like we always get
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fat it's very very difficult to come to Los Angeles or New York where we frequent as Brits to run the show yeah
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and to not get fat I'm sorry so like what is but it's difficult like you know I do these podcasts about health in food
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all the time but then I I think okay it's all good having this all all this advice but when you walk outside and you
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walk into a convenience store you are doomed yeah yeah we live in a toxic
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nutritional landscape it's a nutritional Wasteland a carnival of of uh enticing
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colorful addictive highly processed food-like substances that drive our
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biology in all the wrong ways and and so it's very difficult to be healthy In America which is why 90 3% of us have
00:14:00
some metabolic dysfunction this is according to the we call the national health and nutrition examination survey
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the government does which is hundreds of thousands of people looking at their blood work over many many years and
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we're messed up you know and it's it's not an accident it has to do with with the food we produce how we grow it what
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we grow how it's processed how it's um made into different food-like substances
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how it's marketed sold in grocery stores restaurants so it's very difficult unless you really know what you're doing
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to stay out of trouble in America I mean I I do it because I'm highly educated but it's very tough and it's easy to
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make the wrong choice how do you do it oh well I I'm very sort of religious about what I put in my body I mean I
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don't eat anything that comes in a package or processed I just don't it's it's a it's a hard and fast rule if if
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it's basically I mean if it's something that's like a can of sardines or a can of tomatoes obviously if it's minimally
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processed Foods that's fine you know we've been Mally processing Foods forever sauerkraut is processed yogurt
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yogurt's processed that's not bad it's how it's processed and and so I I
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eliminate all Ultra processed foods I won't I won't even think of it as food if I go into a store convenience store
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and I see all these different things to buy it it just it looks to me like a rock like the way Pro that process in my
00:15:21
brain well that's not really food why would I eat that I'm not going to pick up a rock and eat it uh so I I tried to
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uh cook my own food and uh I bring food with me so for example today I had another podcast I
00:15:33
did earlier and I knew I wasn't going to have time for lunch so I had uh earlier
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bought some snacks and I actually have a a care package basically a emergency Snack Pack so I don't have a food
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emergency in my backpack all the time so it's like a day's rations and that was my lunch so basically even though I
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didn't have time to kind of go out to eat today I I pre-planned so it takes a little planning you know like you came
00:15:56
to the United States from the UK you didn't just like leave your house and go to the airport you thought about what
00:16:01
you're packing you brought the right clothes you brought your crew you want to bring your cameras or whatever you have to bring you have you have to plan
00:16:09
but somehow we don't think we have to do that for our health we we have to plan it and so I'm very careful about
00:16:14
planning and occasion I get stuck and you know usually I can find some nuts or something somewhere even if they're in
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oil that I don't like so it it's tough I got told the other day which helped me understand myself I got told that when
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we're hungry especially when it's sort of like late at night The Logical center
00:16:32
of our brain like the pre-renal cortex is less active and the amydala the sort of emotional part of our brain that
00:16:38
wants the dopamine is much more active and it helped me to understand why maybe late at night if I haven't planned my
00:16:44
food um I'm much more susceptible to make a bad food choice that I then regret I'm much more acceptable to lean
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in for sugar or something that's like yeah super high in carbs or whatever yeah that really helped me and this is
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the why the planning thing makes a lot of sense cuz I can use my prefrontal cortex my logic center of my brain to
00:17:01
make the food choice in the morning yeah so that I don't find myself making a mistake it's so important Stephen
00:17:07
because people have to understand that willpower is not the answer you cannot
00:17:13
use willpower to control your food Behavior it's part of your ancestral evolutionary limbic reptile
00:17:20
dinosaur brain and so when your blood sugar drops you're going to eat whatever
00:17:26
in front of you if there's a vending machine if there's a donut if it's cookies it doesn't matter even if you
00:17:31
know better and I I've experienced this you're just going to eat whatever because it's a life-threatening emergency your body doesn't know that
00:17:37
there's grocery stores and restaurants it means you're going to go out and try to hunt and gather and do something it's like an emergency so when you have that
00:17:44
food emergency and you don't have the right food on you you're in trouble I
00:17:49
have that all the time I have this like constant fight fight with myself where this one voice is like do the
00:17:54
right thing and then this other part of my brain is like just today break the rule and and but obviously that voice is
00:18:00
louder sometimes than others and typically late at night it's louder sleep deprivation stress stress sleep
00:18:06
deprivation all that increases your appetite it increases cortisol it increases uh grin which is a grin which
00:18:13
is a hunger hormone I we know you can take uh you know young healthy K college kids and sleep deprive them and they're
00:18:20
going to crave carbs they're going to crave sugar and they're going to gain weight it's not rocket science what
00:18:26
about for someone that doesn't have any money at all so they can't you know they don't have the ability to a lot of
00:18:34
the Privileges that me and you have what are some of the very Basics that they should be thinking about in order to
00:18:41
remain healthy in a world where every convenience store is trying to sell you something cheap and sugary yeah a really
00:18:47
good good question you know I think I think the economics of being healthy is a problem and and and we know that
00:18:52
there's a huge disparity in health um but it's not only economics it's education uh you know I met with woman
00:18:59
who is the doctor at the a clinic in bed Stenson which is in Brooklyn it's a very
00:19:04
underserved area and uh you know very um low social
00:19:09
economic status group very unhealthy and she said you know Mark you know the the number one predictor of
00:19:16
health is it money no is education so even people who are were wealthy but
00:19:23
haven't been educated still have issues so for me it was really about education and so people can be educated to do the
00:19:30
right thing and it doesn't have to be expensive and I was part of this film 10 years ago called fedup that looked at
00:19:35
childood obesity and our food system and the Advent of sugar and marketing and processed foods and we we visit a lot of
00:19:41
families and I work with a family in North Car South Carolina Easley it's one of the poorest areas in
00:19:47
America it has the worst uh called the uh uh food deserts one of the worst Food
00:19:53
deserts in America basically where there's not a lot of healthy options to choose from oh yeah and there's
00:19:58
something called the retail food environment index how many healthy grocery stores are there to fast food and convenience stores and there was
00:20:04
like 10 to one it was was terrible and his family you know was lived on $1,000 a month for food for a
00:20:12
family of five they lived in a trailer they uh were in disability in food stamps the mother was 100 plus pounds
00:20:20
overweight the father was very overweight had type two diabetes and was on already at 42 year olds old was on
00:20:25
dialysis for kidney failure which is amazing cuz you usually don't see that till later the son was 16
00:20:32
years old and 50% body fat guy should be 10 to 20 and was about di to be diabetic
00:20:37
was pre-diabetic and rather than kind of they were part of the movie I said why do you want to do this they were like
00:20:43
well in order for my dad to get the kidney transplant wait we're trying we don't know what to do we're doing all this lowfat stuff and we're doing all
00:20:49
this diet stuff we have in the house not working so I went to their house their trailer and I rather than giving a
00:20:54
lecture about what to do I said let's cook a meal together but let first Let's do an inspection of your kitchen and
00:21:00
let's see what's in here and so we pulled out everything from the freezer and the fridge and the cupboards and
00:21:06
everything was packaged boxed processed everything was very high in high fructose corn syrup from the peanut
00:21:11
butter to the salad dressing everything had trans fat in it which is deadly and a lot of it said diet there so my basic
00:21:18
rule is if it has a health claim on the label don't eat it you know it's gluten-free potato chips doesn't make it
00:21:23
healthy right Coca-Cola is gluten-free doesn't make it healthy so um I showed
00:21:29
them what they were doing and I said let's just make a simple meal here's a guide called good food on a tight budget how to eat well for you for the planet
00:21:37
and your wallet and it's made by the environmental working group you can get up on ewg.org it's free and and and it
00:21:44
was like how do you choose the cheaper cuts of meat or the the beans or the grains or the veggies you know like onions and carrots and celery are not
00:21:51
expensive you know like a lot of veggies are not expensive so we made turkey chili we made a salad from fresh
00:21:57
ingredients olive oil and vinegar dressing not a dressing that was full of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup
00:22:02
and refined oils we I showed them how to roast his sweet potatoes I showed them how to stir fry vegetables we had some
00:22:08
asparagus they never eaten anything fresh they never cooked in the kitchen the kids came out who were playing video
00:22:14
games they came running in the kitchen like what's that smell like and it was like the roasting the sweet potatoes we
00:22:19
had this beautiful dinner together they love the food and I was like you know what I don't know if it's going to work but you don't they didn't even have
00:22:24
cutting boards they didn't have knives they like they literally had like we tried to cut uh the you know the um the
00:22:32
onions and the sweet potatoes with a butter knife cuz that's all they had it was like a butter knife it was really hard W uh so I bought them on the way
00:22:38
home I bought them cutting boards on Amazon and on knes and I sent it to their house next week the mom text me
00:22:44
she says Mark we lost 18 pounds this week as a family A year later the father lost 45 got a new kidney the mother lost
00:22:50
100 pound the son lost 132 lbs and and went to medical school first guy in his
00:22:57
family to go to college and he asked me for a letter recommendation for medical school and they lived in one of the
00:23:02
worst Food deserts they didn't have much you know economically and they were able to figure it out because eating real
00:23:08
food doesn't have to be expensive you don't have to have a $70 wagu ribeye steak right you can you can eat real
00:23:14
food and it's just as simple as not eating the ultr processed food it's so bad for us and it kills 11 million
00:23:21
people a year we know the state is so strong it causes mental health issues aggression violence depression and
00:23:28
anxiety uh gun violence I mean the studies are there I just I did a podcast on the Doctor's Pharmacy my podcast
00:23:34
about this talking about how our food is affecting our mental health not just obesity and diabetes but our cognitive
00:23:40
function uh add and memory issues I mean it's all linked to what we're eating so
00:23:46
we we have a you know like I said the best of times the worst of times we know what to do but we have the ability to do
00:23:53
it it it's just it's just a problem of Education a problem of a political will
00:23:58
to change the policies that are driving us to do the wrong thing and right now there's a bill being proposed in Congress that would limit as a pilot
00:24:05
Ultra processed food for kids with food stamps which I think would be amazing the food industry is fighting
00:24:13
back tooth and nail right so so we're fighting big forces food industry is the biggest industry on the
00:24:20
planet when I was growing up um and I was trying to be healthy one of the things I used to do was chug milk yeah
00:24:28
because I got told that it would make me tall like my brothers so I used to drink milk like crazy yeah straight from the carton
00:24:34
just as many gulps as I could take from the fridge did it work did you did you grow I have no idea I'm still shorter than they are so I guess not um but
00:24:42
that's one of the big myths that I think a lot of families still believe that milk is great for our bones and to help
00:24:48
us grow what's your thoughts on milk yeah so uh you controversial topic as well yes I mean the dairy industry is
00:24:54
Big um our current Secretary of agriculture worked for the dairy industry it's problematic because
00:25:01
because the science isn't there there was a there was a paper called milk in health that was published in the New
00:25:06
England Journal of Medicine top medical journal in the world arguably maybe the lanet if you're from the UK but it it basically was written by
00:25:15
two Harvard scientists that dissected all the scientific evidence around milk and whether the claims were right or not
00:25:21
and just maybe for the audience in Europe you might not know this but in the states you'll remember this there were all these got milk ads so there
00:25:27
were famous people celebrities uh you know Sports athletes politicians all
00:25:33
wearing a white milk mustache and they're like got milk as a promotion and
00:25:39
and and In Those ads it would say it's going to build better bones it's going to do this it's going to do that and the
00:25:44
FTC the Federal Trade Commission uh actually or I think it was
00:25:50
Federal say you can't do that because it's it's not true like you have to take
00:25:57
those ads out so the ads went away and it was the government promoting Those ads with the dairy Council so there's
00:26:04
something called Check Out programs that the government has where it's supposed to support agriculture well the government was paying in part for these
00:26:10
ads with taxpayer dollars and the science wasn't there and the the dietary
00:26:15
guidelines for Americans says that the average American should have three glasses of milk a day and kids should
00:26:21
have two glasses of milk a day to be healthy you cannot get money and funding for school lunches in America without
00:26:27
having milk on the menu now there is no evidence to support this in fact there's
00:26:32
opposite evidence that skin milk causes weight gain because it doesn't satisfy your appetite that milk can cause cancer
00:26:39
that prate cancer prostate cancer that U it doesn't create strong bones in fact
00:26:45
there's higher risk of fracture with high milk drinkers that it creates a lot of digestive issues for people it can
00:26:51
create autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes it has common allergies or food
00:26:56
sensitivities that people get and I remember I was I was in the um emergency room once and when I was
00:27:02
working in the ER and this mother comes in with this kid with like you know had like this 10th ear infection fews I was
00:27:08
like what happened like when did this start oh it started when he was like 12 months old I said what changed well I stopped breastfeeding and I started
00:27:13
giving him milk and all of a sudden he started getting these ear infections I'm like oh this is before I even knew about all this it was just kind of an
00:27:19
interesting footnote but we really have have to look at the data and be science-driven and the problem is we're
00:27:25
we're we have corporate capture in America we're where the food industry has captured our food agencies our
00:27:31
political um system from the FDA to the USDA they spend for example half a
00:27:37
billion dollars just on the farm bill uh which has you know for example food stamps and other food programs child
00:27:44
infant nutrition so it's it's really unfortunate but milk is not Nature's
00:27:49
perfect food it's only Nature's perfect food if you're a calf is there health benefits to milk
00:27:56
yes so so that's the other side of it now what milk should we be drinking right if we're drinking modern milk
00:28:01
modern milk is from wholen cows that are almost homogen ins same not homogenized
00:28:07
milk but homogeneous breed they have very few bows inseminating them they have like you know massive insemination
00:28:12
program from very few bulls that have a limited genetic stock and uh they're what we call A1
00:28:19
cows so most heirloom cows most sort of historical Dairy had something called A2
00:28:26
casine Which is less inflamm fatory less likely to cause gut issues less problematic for the body so sheep and
00:28:32
goat milk have A2 certain cows like Jersey or gery cows have A2 in them and
00:28:38
you can get A2 milk you can A2 ice cream now um and and so this A1 casine is
00:28:46
potentially very problematic so I think the current Dairy is not great and then we pasteurize it and homogenize it and
00:28:52
we you know and we add growth hormone to to the cows that goes in there we have EST Esten that we add into the cows it's
00:28:59
in the milk we have 60 different hormones in the milk some of them are naturally occurring but we milk uh
00:29:04
pregnant cows and that milk has a lot more hormonal effects so I think current
00:29:10
current Dairy is not something we should consume now if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk or A2 milks from
00:29:16
a cow that may be okay yogurts may be okay it depends on your genetics too 75%
00:29:22
the world's lactose intolerant many people have dairy sensitivities but uh I think you know if it's if it's the right
00:29:28
Source it's okay for example I use goat way as my morning protein shake so goat way is from goats obviously uh there's
00:29:35
very little casine in it but it's A2 casc if there's any and I don't react to it but if I have regular way I do have a
00:29:41
reaction I get congested I'll get pimples or I get regular stuff so I don't think Dair is something we should
00:29:46
be consuming in large amounts unless it's certain kinds of dairy what do you think of um this conversation at the moment around a zmac it seems like it's
00:29:53
just exploded in yeah culture I mean the share price of the company that maker zenek has gone through the roof yeah in
00:29:59
a way that I've just never seen in biotech before yeah um it appears that there's no apparent side effects if you
00:30:05
ask people they struggle to T any side effects but I actually think I saw you make a video about it if I'm yeah yeah
00:30:12
yeah to say about it what's what are your thoughts on his imp um you crossed
00:30:18
your arms are you going to get yourself in trouble just like well I'm trying not to
00:30:24
bang the table but first of all we have a massive
00:30:29
obesity problem and we don't have any good Solutions and so something comes along that's an injection you can take
00:30:36
once a week that makes you not hungry and bypasses your normal biological
00:30:42
mechanisms and you lose weight that's a huge attractive thing and that's why NOA
00:30:50
Nordisk is the biggest company now in Denmark it's the biggest uh part of the GDP of Denmark I don't know if they
00:30:57
leave allow it in Denmark they're the people that make oek yeah people that make OIC and uh recently the CEO of Nova
00:31:04
Nordisk who makes OIC publicly said he was getting calls from processed food
00:31:09
manufacturers very concerned because their market share was dropping and they were very concerned that it was going to affect their business think about that
00:31:18
so I think oing is effective it works with a natural part of your biology uh
00:31:24
called glp1 which is something your body makes uh and we can can make more of it by doing lots of different things from
00:31:30
certain probiotics and bacteria arot to certain foods uh to certain ways of eating but the effect of the drug is
00:31:37
very strong just for context for anyone that doesn't know what a zenek is let's give them some context well it's it's a
00:31:43
drug that's was first Ed for diabetes and then it it works by acting
00:31:49
on a pathway called gp1 glucagon like pep peptide one which is just a pathway
00:31:54
and it and it and it regulates insulin function it regulates weight uh and appetite and so it really works
00:32:00
to help with blood sugar but the side effect was weight loss so it was like we studied Viagra
00:32:06
for blood pressure but the side effect was it helped men with tions so it was like well it's like kind of like that
00:32:12
right it was like wasn't designed for this but it actually had the side effect and you know since obesity affects so
00:32:19
many people there's now two billion people on the planet who are overweight so you take this injection yeah and you
00:32:25
basically your appetite drops out so you don't you don't feel hungry you don't feel as hungry and you can feel nauseous
00:32:30
you can throw up you can not want to eat and and people stop it because of the side effects so those are short-term
00:32:35
side effects um what it so the plus side is that it works uh it it's uh it's
00:32:43
effective it has some metabolic benefits when you lose weight which can help your health benefits I don't think it's the
00:32:48
drug that's having the health benefits it's the weight loss but there's a lot of downsides one uh it costs not a lot
00:32:56
of money so if you were to put everybody who's overweight in the country on it it would be $5.1 trillion so it's an
00:33:02
enormous enormously cost how much does it cost like $13 to $700 a month 13 to
00:33:08
$1,700 a month a month which is like you know probably you know 1,500 pound or something it's a lot it's a lot of money
00:33:16
every month forever right when you stop it the weight gain comes back unless you
00:33:21
really rigorously change your lifestyle so it's not a lifestyle change program it's not a this doesn't help you change
00:33:27
your behavior or habits it's it's a pharmacological appetite straight jacket
00:33:32
and and that can be effective if you if some people really need it they need it if some people are mass overweight and
00:33:38
they don't want to get a gastric bypass I think it may be okay but here's the rup one you have to take it forever two
00:33:45
it's expensive three most uh uh of people are not aware that not only do
00:33:52
you lose fat but you lose muscle so about 50% of the weight you lose is
00:33:58
muscle and muscle is where your metabolism is it burns seven times the calories as fat and you need it for
00:34:05
longevity and health and so when you lose muscle your whole Health declines it's Center of your health and it's very
00:34:11
tough to get that back so you have to really increase protein and you have to hit the gym hard with weights if you're
00:34:18
going to be on a drug like OIC longer term and that that can be managed but it's it's most people don't right that
00:34:25
can be managed and you need to be tracked with dexas scans and body composition testing and really know what you're doing because it can really mess
00:34:31
you up and then you you lose the weight but then your metabolism is slower at the end of that process than it was
00:34:37
before you started because you've lost your metabolic engine which is your muscle the other thing that happens and
00:34:42
we're now seeing this because it's it's not been around that long right there was it was an article in the New England Journal years ago that said be sure to
00:34:48
use new drugs as soon as they come out before the side effects develop right so
00:34:54
now we're seeing two three years out serious side effects so you know we in
00:34:59
medicine when we see an effect of 20 or 30% on a study we go that's that's a great thing let's you know statens lower
00:35:06
heart disease by 20 to 30% great number one drug in the world the side effect profile in this is
00:35:14
scary because bow obstruction which is not a trivial thing essentially where your bowels stop moving and you need
00:35:20
surgery to release them is is increased by
00:35:25
450% pancre pancreatitis which is not a fun condition which is where your pancreas becomes inflamed that affects
00:35:32
your digestion it affects your insulin affects everything and you can die from it is increased by
00:35:39
900% so these are not trivial things there's other side effects kidney and so forth so I think the longer this is out
00:35:45
there we're going to see more and more consequences of this drug and I think it misses the real issue which is how do we
00:35:50
fix the problem causing this it's not an OIC deficiency right like this is weight
00:35:57
weight gain obesity is not a zic deficiency is because of our toxic environment lifestyle food system lack
00:36:05
of exercise environmental toxins it's complicated and and and it's not it's not an easy fix and it requires policy
00:36:12
change it requires us to rethink our agricultural system our food processing and Manufacturing system it requires
00:36:17
massive education for people what to eat it requires us really to make widescale change in our society which is going to
00:36:25
cause significant loss for a lot of companies I mean like I said the food industry is the biggest industry in the world it's s
00:36:31
16 to 17 trillion dollar a year industry that's that's bigger than the GDP of
00:36:37
most countries or I think of like I mean the entire United States is is I think
00:36:42
16 trillion so it's it's a it's a big industry with a lot to lose and and so
00:36:49
there's a lot of push back about changing the things that have to change for us to become healthy so taking this drug seems great and and I think it's
00:36:56
it's it's got benefits but it's it's not just a risk-free solution it's funny
00:37:03
because it it feels like it's a window into the future of how we're going to treat things like obesity because the
00:37:08
the price hope not I well play this forward the price is going to come down
00:37:13
because more companies are going to release very similar iterations that cause the same effect on gp1 the price
00:37:19
will come down so quickly there'll be this kind of price race I'm sure I I imagine a zek got ahead of the pack
00:37:24
because they ran the clinical trials so they invested all that money which they got approved first that window's going to close and then the price comes down
00:37:32
and then I don't know if do they prescribe it here and conductors prescribe oh sure anybody can prescribe
00:37:37
it yeah oh really okay oh yeah so it can be subsidized by your insurance or something no no it can't be I mean the
00:37:43
most insurance don't pay for it they might pay for it if you're diabetic but for non-approved indications they they
00:37:49
typically don't pay for it now there rovi which is the approved version and and some insurance will pay some insurance won't but it it's not
00:37:56
something they're excited to pay about interesting why do you know this one those side effects that you named for
00:38:02
link to zek what is it about the drug that's causing that because I was
00:38:08
wondering as you're saying it I like is that because people start eating less or is it the chemical itself no no it's the
00:38:13
it's the effect of the drug it it thickens the bowel wall it it it has effect on the gut so it is working on
00:38:19
the gut in in a lot of the the hormones and the metabolic functions of the gut are affected by OIC in ways that change
00:38:26
its functions and and slow the emptying and do a lot of things So eventually it seems to
00:38:33
cause problems for a lot of people interesting because you know the narrative out there is quite is very
00:38:38
positive at the moment these drugs come along and it's it's like there's no side effects and they're super millions of dollars of advertising and billions of
00:38:44
dollars of Revenue at stake so yeah you nobody's talking about the bad side
00:38:50
interesting and by the way they're thinking of giving it to 5-year-old kids which is just terrifying to me uh for
00:38:56
life I do think with these things there's no such thing as a free lunch is there in life so I think we'll eventually figure
00:39:02
out what the trade-off is yeah and then people can decide for themselves if the trade-off is worth it based on their own
00:39:07
circumstan yeah I mean listen people go like I want to lose 5 pounds and I don't think that's a good idea if you're
00:39:12
severely obese person you have severe health conditions you're really struggling to get going you know it can
00:39:19
it be a helpful Aid absolutely you know should it be given to everybody who wants to look good for a party or a
00:39:25
wedding absolutely not what's your um position on fruit I love
00:39:32
fruit how much fruit I I think it depends right so if you're a diabetic uh and you're metabolically
00:39:38
completely out of whack um and you don't have any metabolic resilience you know eating a plum might
00:39:45
be a problem for you and now we have continuous glucose monitors you can track your blood sugar and see and i'
00:39:50
I've had patients like this ge I I I eat a plum and my sugar goes to the roof so but if I eat an apple it doesn't so I
00:39:56
think different fruits have different effects on you uh but for most part fruit is full of phytochemicals fiber
00:40:03
phytonutrients it does have a little bit of sugar in it uh I would say no fruit juice I think fruit juice is definitely
00:40:09
linked to obesity and kids and other things but if you want to have an apple or a peach or a plum it's fine I think
00:40:15
you shouldn't have it first thing in the morning I think protein and fat in the morning is important because it it
00:40:20
activates your metabolism and your protein synthesis if you eat sugar in the morning which is essentially what we
00:40:26
eat in the world today cereal pancakes waffles muffins bagels you know sweetened yogurts sweetened coffees I
00:40:32
mean it's the worst possible thing we can do for our biology it it jacks up our blood sugar and insulin and ends up
00:40:38
causing us to gain weight and be hungry and you know be craving more stuff so having having um fruit for example you
00:40:45
have frozen berries in your so I had Frozen cherries for example in my Whey Protein that's okay because there's
00:40:50
protein in there it mitigates the effect so what about eating times when to eat
00:40:56
yeah have you got any thoughts around when we should and shouldn't be to yeah for sure I think you know you know we
00:41:01
had something called breakfast before which was breaking the fast and now people eat all night they
00:41:07
eat till they go to bed and they soon they wake up they eat or have something sugary stuff in the morning they get sugary coffee and they don't get
00:41:13
themselves a window of fasting which is critical for our biology and I wrote about this in my book Young Forever
00:41:20
where we talked about how do we have our own repair re renewal system kick in cuz
00:41:25
the body think about it uh Stephen your body when you cut yourself heals the
00:41:30
skin closes it heals how does it know how to do that right it's it's so smart it's got a your bones break it heals
00:41:37
right I broke my a few years ago it just healed right what's going on I'm not going would you please heal in there it
00:41:42
knows what to do it recruits stem cells it recruits repair factors and growth factors and it it knows what to do so
00:41:48
the body has this innate healing repair renewal and regeneration system and we
00:41:53
need to learn how to activate it and most of us do the opposite we do everything in our power to deactivate it
00:41:58
and that causes disease so food is the most important thing we do to interact
00:42:04
with these regenerative renewal repair systems it's one one of the things we call the Hallmarks of aging and there's one called deregulated nutrient sensing
00:42:11
and it really relates to how our bodies relate to food how our nutrient sensing
00:42:16
systems are disregulated by our highly processed diet by high sugar and starch and not enough of the right Foods so so
00:42:24
in the in the long answer to your question you know it's important to give yourself a break of 12 hours so if you
00:42:31
eat at 6 at night you could eat 6 in the morning minimum but best probably 14 so if you eat dinner at 600 eat breakfast
00:42:38
at 8 that's okay that's a 14-hour fast and in that time your body is doing its
00:42:43
clean up recycling repair is there an evolutionary story here for sure absolutely you know when when uh you
00:42:49
know we didn't have grocery stores we didn't have you know Whole Foods we didn't have restaurants we didn't have takeout we didn't have convenience
00:42:55
stores so we had to go out and find food you I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter gatherers there the
00:43:02
kazza which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather and we went hunting and Gathering I was like man it's a lot of work to go you know dig up
00:43:09
some roots and kill a bird in the tree and like it was it was a project we ran around for hours uh and and so we don't
00:43:16
know where we're getting our next meal and so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before so
00:43:23
what it's got built into it is a system of conservation and and and repair when
00:43:29
we don't eat and so the system gets activated that improves our our blood
00:43:34
sugar control that recruits new mitochondria and builds new mitochondria that reduces inflammation that activates
00:43:41
um cellular cleanup and repair processes so you have all these old cells and damaged proteins your body has a little
00:43:48
like digestor almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes and sucks this all up and then digest it and then uses
00:43:54
the parts it's almost like a a recycling system in the body we need to activate that and so that fasting period is a
00:44:01
time to do that and we've seen even for example we know for example concentration camp survivors who live
00:44:07
really long like they live 90 100 plus years old many of them and it's because
00:44:12
they had this period of deep starvation that had an effect on their biology and we know this we know this from many
00:44:18
animal studies that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third if you eat a third less calories you'll
00:44:23
live a third longer now it's not fun right but you don't have to do that so timing of eating is important so give
00:44:29
yourself 3 hours before bed for no food and give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast how
00:44:36
do we know in the animal studies it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the um sort of longevity effect
00:44:44
it was oh it was the it was so what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting well you can do that uh I met a
00:44:51
guy who was from the calorie restriction Society there a calorie restriction Society yeah which is based on this this
00:44:58
research in animals where think about if you eat a third less you live a third longer so for a human that would be 120
00:45:03
years old now I said what do you have for breakfast he said well I had five pounds of celery and I'm like okay you
00:45:11
go do that I'm gonna figure out another way so you have to eat enormous amounts
00:45:17
of like low calorie food just to feel full right that's why he had all that food so he he was starving and and there
00:45:25
are a lot of downsides starving you lose muscle which is necessary there's certain things that go wrong and so it's
00:45:31
not really the optimal strategy you want to do things that mimic starvation so how do you mimic this period of
00:45:38
starvation that that causes something called autophagy which basically means to eat yourself to basically clean up
00:45:44
your cell it's like self-cleaning or self-repair right and and and so there's a lot of ways to hack that you can do it
00:45:51
by this longer term overnight fast you can do it by certain supplements and and
00:45:58
certain medications like rapamycin is being studied for longevity which is a a drug that's used for for cancer and for
00:46:04
other immune suppressing treatments but it works on this pathway called mtor which essentially is the activation of
00:46:13
cellular buildup right it causes muscle synthesis so if you want to build muscle you want to activate mtor with protein
00:46:19
which is good but you don't want to activated all the time so this drug inhibits mtor which is what happens when
00:46:24
you starve yourself so what mimics starvation and then you get this kind of benefit or
00:46:31
drugs like metformin are being studied which is another drug that's looking at how do we activate this longevity switch
00:46:37
called amk another pathway that's regulating your nutrient sensing so when you have enough you don't have enough
00:46:43
nutrients this activates but if we're running around eating well you can actually take this drug and it may have
00:46:48
an effect there's a large trial going on now I'm still agnostic about it I I'm I'm neither Pro or against it I think
00:46:55
the data is not in it for me to start taking it or for my patients to start taking it but it works on some of the
00:47:00
these sort of uh starvation mimicking hacks let's call them so starvation is
00:47:06
good for us yeah I mean yes I would say you have to be careful because you know
00:47:12
people go really to the extreme they go like I'm going to not activate mtor because activating mour causes me to age
00:47:19
faster and it prevents autophagy and it builds cancer and it's bad so I'm going
00:47:25
to become a vegan and I'm to eat less calories and eventually what happens is you lose muscle so it's it's like
00:47:31
Goldilocks you know you need both mtor activation and mtor ambition you need to
00:47:37
take a breath in you need to take a breath out you need to be awake you need to go to sleep your heart needs to beat
00:47:42
it needs to relax it's just how the body works it's a difficult conversation as well because of it can provoke
00:47:48
disordered eating yeah um various Eating Disorders which are obviously extremely bad in terms of
00:47:56
health outcom yeah blue zones you visited some blue zones haven't you I
00:48:01
have what are blue zones and uh what did they teach you about the nature of being
00:48:06
healthy well well my friend Dan buner basically came up with this concept of the blue zones after visiting these
00:48:13
areas in the world where people had extremely long lives and somebody on the map circled them in blue ink which is
00:48:21
why they're called Blue zones and and uh I visited I iara and
00:48:28
also Sardinia how many of them are there uh there's five there's okanawa Japan uh Loma Linda California and uh theoa
00:48:36
peninsula in uh Costa Rica but there are many more I mean I was in turkey and I saw Villages where people were very very
00:48:42
old and and so those are the ones that have been studied how old are we talking well I mean one couple there was like
00:48:48
collectively 210 years old so they look to be 100 105 109 110 I
00:48:56
mean Emma Morano was 117 when she died uh you know
00:49:02
she and and so so the Cur the question is you know what is different about these areas and what's different is that
00:49:08
you know they're very isolated and remote so they haven't been burdened with all the modernization of
00:49:15
our food system they still grow their own food I mean I visited this couple he was I think 90 panotes he was like 97
00:49:23
his wife was a young 87 and and they had land and the farm
00:49:28
they lived on uh he he was more chill but she was out there showing us around all the fruit trees the olive trees the
00:49:35
garden she planted I mean this massive mini farm that she managed herself on the side of a hill when she was running
00:49:42
up faster than I could get to her at 87 years old cooking everything from scratch all it wasn't like organic but
00:49:50
it was because that's just what they did they used all heirloom animals like sheep and goats so they had heirloom
00:49:57
sheep and goat with what's arloom sheep it's not like some industrialized hybridized cow that's producing this
00:50:05
nasty milk which we shouldn't be drinking it's they're having goat milk and goat cheese but their goats are eating wild plants that have
00:50:11
phytochemical some of those you know cheeses and goat milks have actually higher phytochemicals even than green
00:50:17
tea which has a lot that comes from for example cakin that you can get from the goat milk which is from the goats that
00:50:23
are eating the plants that have these compounds that benefit their health they're also active like um patrao was
00:50:30
like U 95 years old and he was in Sardinia and he had to hike five miles a
00:50:36
day off this extremely Rocky mountainous terrain to hurt his sheep at 95 years
00:50:41
old I mean what most 95 years old aren't hiking the mountains right he was booming voice stood up straight ice
00:50:48
clear not hunched over uh funny as heck sang me a song you know uh and and then
00:50:56
you know so they move naturally they have amazing food phytochemical rich food uh food that's you know it's rich
00:51:03
in all these plant compounds that are found to connect to longevity for example uh in in Korea I was sitting
00:51:09
with this guy who was making milking the goats and and we're making goat cheese
00:51:15
together and he like he gives me this tea I'm like what is this he oh this is Wild Sage Tea and I looked at he said
00:51:22
what is I said what is the plant I looked it up and then I looked up the plant and I analyzed you know what it
00:51:27
was and turned out it's it's a extremely phytochemical rich plant that has a lot of these same longevity compounds in it
00:51:33
called cakin that know we don't drink a lot of green tea has it you can get from from Japan for example and then um you
00:51:40
know uh we we we we just basically see that not only do they have good food they have the the activity um they they
00:51:48
have very low levels of stress there was one guy Sylvio I'm I was having dinner with him he had this mountainous uh kind
00:51:55
of that his whole family had had for years and they had about 200 sheep and goats and they had a little kind of
00:52:01
restaurant they started for people to come and so they basically all the family cooked and you had everything from the from the
00:52:06
farm and I said silia after do I said silia do you any stress like in your life he looked at me like stress like
00:52:14
like he didn't almost didn't understand the word like you know when things are difficult and you know hard things are
00:52:19
hard and and get you feel stressed and he's like oh oh yeah well sometimes at
00:52:26
night a goat will get out and I'll have to go get it like and sometimes you know when the
00:52:32
goats are you know giving birth I have to go get up early so so they very low
00:52:38
levels of stress and then they also have something which is really important which is community so they they have a
00:52:44
sense of belonging and connection you know I met Julia who was 100 years old
00:52:50
well sorry 103 months she told me I'm 10 I guess it's like when you're five I'm a
00:52:55
5 and 3/4 like I'm 103 months you count in the months and and she was still working she was still making stuff for
00:53:02
weddings and doilies and all things and she didn't have any kids but her niece and her nephew invited her to come stay
00:53:08
with them and so she was living with them or another guy Carmine had lost his wife but he was living with family
00:53:14
members and was running this big Garden at ' 86 and animals and sheeps and rabbits so they all part of community
00:53:20
they have Gatherings they celebrate together there's a sense of belonging there's no nursing homes there's no loneliness loneliness is is the new
00:53:27
smoking really I mean we have an epidemic of isolation and loneliness in America and increasing around the globe
00:53:34
and and it's it's it's lethal it's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day how do we know how do we know that it's
00:53:39
dangerous yeah there's so much science around this the evidence of of this is is is immense in fact the Surgeon
00:53:44
General of America just released a statement about this and an initiative to redress loneliness because it's such
00:53:51
a driver of not just unhappiness but actual disease and death why why are we
00:53:56
so lonely what is it that's happening do you think it's what is it the internet or is it oh yeah I mean think about it
00:54:01
we used to you know rely on each other in communities to to live like like they do for example well I said you know how
00:54:07
did it work Sylvia when you have all these sheep how do you manage it well you know I have like all my friends they come over when it's time for to share the Sheep they come over and they help
00:54:13
and it's just life is just naturally connected and you go over to someone's house you walk down the street you you
00:54:19
know you sit in the cafe just you have a neighborhood you have a family we've lost that we're all mobile we're all
00:54:24
moving around we are all disconnected from our families were you know online most of the time you know we have face
00:54:30
we have Facebook instead of actually face real face Toof face time I mean it's great to sit here with you in
00:54:36
person right been the zoom call and it's it's something we've lost and we've we've lost the value of relationships
00:54:43
and our culture of achievement and success and it's just kind of disconnected us from what really matters
00:54:49
which is is the human Community is there any way back for that do do you think because I was thinking about this the other day listen I've talked about this
00:54:55
once or twice now but I tried the Vision Pro the other day oh you did yeah yeah yeah and um incredible in terms of the technology
00:55:04
yeah but terrifying in terms of the potential implications over the long term yeah you're just going to wear that all the time and forget about every
00:55:09
exactly and it was it was incredible like the fact that I can I can just sit there and just the things I do with my
00:55:15
hands that are on my lap impact all of these massive screens in front of me you can see when again when you play it
00:55:22
forward that this is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper more accessible the apps going to get better and then we think about
00:55:28
what that's going to mean for loneliness yeah when I could go hang out you know with my friends in a virtual world and
00:55:34
do my work in a virtual world and date in a virtual world watch pornography in a virtual world and all of these things
00:55:39
no I still like hugging and holding hands how do you do that you can't do that in there are you
00:55:46
hope like are you hopeful for us being able to turn around the loneliness and isolation epidemic I mean it's a tough
00:55:51
one I think we have to you know rethink how we live and what we do and the communities we build and I think there efforts of that happening all around so
00:55:57
just at the same time we're seeing this epidemic of loneliness we're also seeing you know a lot of initiatives of community building and connection and
00:56:04
belonging and so there's a lot of these communities that I'm involved with that are happening and and you know I'm on the board of something called the belong
00:56:09
Center which is really about addressing loneliness and creating ways and mechanisms for people to connect and be with each other in real time I think it
00:56:16
needs to be a systemic thing I think a lot with a lot of the issues we've talked about relating to longevity and diet the best answers are probably going
00:56:22
to be the really TR truly systemic ones that come from how we designed societies yeah like regulation and policy and how
00:56:31
we designed cities and green spaces and libraries and community community centers and all these kinds of things
00:56:36
yeah that seems to you know I I did a um I realized this was a problem a long
00:56:42
time ago and I I went to Haiti after the earthquake and I I went helping there when it was just a disaster one of the
00:56:48
first Medical Teams on the ground and uh in that process I met Paul Farmer who was an incredible Visionary doctor from
00:56:55
har Harvard who went to Haiti and helped solve the problem of TB and AIDS by building community health workers and he
00:57:02
then went on to build a network of community health workers of over 11,000 globally it was a model for the Clinton
00:57:08
and Gates Foundation and what he realized was that we didn't didn't have a lack of the right science or the right
00:57:13
medicines to heal these problems we we know what to do with TB andas it was it was you know a lack of people being able
00:57:20
to do the basic things that they needed to do like get clean water or have a watch know what time it was and so he built this network of community health
00:57:26
workers and realized that Community was medicine and so he he was their neighbors and so I I came back from that
00:57:33
very moved and I realized that chronic disease was also an issue that that chronic disease was wasn't wasn't
00:57:40
infectious but it was contagious right you're more likely to be overweight if your friends overweight than if your family members are overweight right that
00:57:47
your social networks are more important than your genetic work networks in determining your health right you're
00:57:53
you're basically you look around at your five closest friends it's probably kind of the way you are too right and and so
00:58:00
I realized that we needed to use the power of community to transform our health and our behavior and and and I
00:58:06
can tell you what to eat and what to do but if all your friends are doing the opposite it's going to be hard right so I I created a program with Rick Warren
00:58:13
called The Daniel Plan faith-based wellness program where we got 15,000 people to sign up in the first week at
00:58:18
quarter million pounds or lost in the first year we created a book called The Daniel Plan of how to do this in
00:58:24
community so it was it was we call it the five FS for for getting healthy right it's Faith
00:58:31
Friends food Fitness and focus which is your mindset so and and it was amazingly
00:58:37
effective we scaled it to thousand churches around the world and and it really was helping people in small
00:58:43
groups do this together so there there was no health coach there was no nutritionist it was just you know me and
00:58:48
another doctor and we basically created this program which could be delivered in a curriculum that people did in small
00:58:55
groups together and this Saddleback Church with Rick Warren had an infrastructure already of groups meeting
00:59:00
every week so we just hijacked that and put the curriculum in there and people did it and and it was really powerful
00:59:06
and we've seen that now at Cleveland Clinic where I work and we've done that with with groups there as well that lost
00:59:11
F Focus do you is that an umbrella word also for purpose purpose meaning and
00:59:18
purpose Yeah Yeah from reading your work I I came to learn that purpose is a sort of longevity Factor
00:59:24
100% to what extent I mean the data is really clear I was a recent paper in
00:59:30
Journal of the American Medical Association showed that those who had meaning and purpose lived seven years
00:59:35
longer and what do they mean by meaning and purpose in that context it's whatever your meaning and purpose is it
00:59:40
could be you want to be there for your grandchild it could be you're a scientist and want to make a discovery
00:59:47
it could be that you you're a novelist you want to write your next novel or it's not a job necessarily it's not no it doesn't have to be I mean for me you
00:59:54
know my purpose is ending needless suffering uffing for millions of people through the power of this new thinking
00:59:59
and model and and the new company that I co-founded function health is I think the tip of the spear that's going to be
01:00:04
able to do that at scale by empowering people with their own Health Data giving them an AI co-pilot to uplevel their
01:00:11
health and to help them understand what's going on in real time and to me building that creating that scaling that
01:00:17
getting people access to things that are really hard to get for people that it's not happening in your doctor's office or
01:00:23
your Healthcare System not happening in your annual physical you're not getting the latest science and medicine so how do we accelerate that change so for me
01:00:30
that that that drives me every day gets me excited to wake up and I'm very passionate but of course you know I'm also passionate about my friends and my
01:00:36
community I'm passionate about my health I'm passionate about having fun you know like and doing things that I love so I
01:00:43
think you know it's really important to design your life and in terms of your values what do you care about what
01:00:50
matters to you what makes you come alive what gives you energy what takes away your energy and and focus on those
01:00:55
things that that take you to where you want to go why would not having a purpose make us die earlier I mean you
01:01:02
see it all the time Stephen I mean you look at you know people retire literally in the retirement age here is 65 which
01:01:09
I'm going to be this year which is a little scary to say that you know I'm just getting started
01:01:15
and uh people think well you know if you look at people who retire the the death rate happens so fast like people who
01:01:22
retire die die like they there's a much higher death rate if if for example you're married and your spouse dies and
01:01:29
you've been together your life whole life you're likely to die very quickly after that is this STS to support that
01:01:34
100% 100% that's crazy yeah why what happens you know wonder
01:01:41
you stop moving you get depressed yeah you get depressed you stop moving I I had a patient who the most beautiful
01:01:47
relationship I I I it was such a deep love and they were together for like 40
01:01:53
years and his wife got breast cancer and she just didn't make it and when he died
01:01:58
and he was healthy guy he was fit healthy ate well he went into heart failure like literally heart failure his
01:02:06
heart couldn't pump and he he had a true medical condition that showed up on scans and imaging he was in trouble and
01:02:13
I was like wow you know I looked it up and and there's actually evidence for
01:02:18
emotional shock and loss heartbreak literally his heart broke and that caused his heart to literally break
01:02:25
physically not just emotionally and we were able to get him back and fix it by dealing with that emotional heartbreak
01:02:32
and by using energy healing and a lot of other things with him that that helped him overcome it but that's when I was
01:02:38
like wow you know the mind you know listen even the biggest and most powerful Pharmacy in the world is
01:02:44
between your ears you know and it can do all kinds of stuff trauma yeah does
01:02:51
trauma play a role in all longev 100% I mean you know um it's it's amazing how
01:02:57
in medical school we just did not learn this but there there there's such a link between trauma and everything in your
01:03:03
life but particularly disease there's a questionnaire we use called the ace questionnaire adverse childhood
01:03:10
events and it basically ask you a series of questions you can look it up online you can link to it in your show notes
01:03:15
it's free and it says well were your parents divorce was there alcoholism in your family did your parents fight in front of you did anybody hit you were
01:03:21
you sexually abused and he just goes through this whole list there any family members in prison you know and and the
01:03:27
higher your score the more likely you are to have health issues be obese have autoimmune
01:03:33
disease get cancer get heart disease get diabetes it's really striking and so
01:03:39
trauma is registered in your body and there's a book called the body keeps score and Carolyn mace was a sort of a
01:03:46
Mystic said you your biography becomes your biology and it works the other way
01:03:52
too from up down right your biology can become your bi graphy if you're eating
01:03:57
crap and you're nutritionally deficient and you have all these health issues and mercury poisoning well that can kind of
01:04:03
affect your mental health too in your story but but we know really clearly that your trauma is influencing your
01:04:10
biology and so we have to we have to deal with this in medicine whether it's depression or whether it's autoimmune
01:04:16
diseases or whether it's other health issues and we now have an incredible revolution in psychedelics which is for
01:04:22
the first time showing us that we have treatments for things like PTSD which
01:04:28
really were very hard to treat you can give people a sedative you know but that was it maybe some therapy which barely
01:04:34
worked if that but you you start to work with these these compounds that change the structure and function of the brain
01:04:42
which is really amazing to me it's not just uh like a normal drug where you take the drug and you have to keep taking it men you took OIC once and you
01:04:49
would stay losing weight forever right it's like taking these psychedelics you it once or twice and it changes your
01:04:55
physiological functioning in your brain response it changes compounds in your brain like bdnf that grow new brain
01:05:01
connections and repair and heal things in your brain and so we're seeing new ways to deal with trauma that I I feel
01:05:07
really exciting and Maps is an organization um The multi-disciplinary Association of psychedelic studies you
01:05:13
can share that link but it's it's sharing all the research about treating depression anxiety trauma responses PTSD
01:05:20
relational issues what you think of psychedelics have you tried them yes I have which ones have you tried
01:05:27
you know all of them which ones haven't you tried um I haven't tried Iain oh
01:05:34
okay yeah it's quite strong adct for addiction right yeah um but you know I grew up in the 70s so uh mushrooms were
01:05:42
psychedelic mushrooms were big part of my my Awakening uh and and my personal
01:05:47
Journey tried LSD I've tried peyote I've tried iwasa I've tried bufo I've tried
01:05:54
pretty much all of them because I just sort of an adventurer in my biology and and my mind and I can tell you that they
01:06:00
really helped me uh which one helped you the most and and give me a a story of
01:06:06
how it helped you my girlfriend's actually in uh in Costa Rica right now serving iasa and I spent a year and a
01:06:13
half um investing in and we took a um psychedelics company public called the
01:06:18
tie Life Sciences so I work in partnership with maps and Compass Pathways we at a tie we invest Inc
01:06:25
Compass Pathways which is so I'm quite heavily oh you're very into that yeah yeah yeah i' yeah spent about a year as
01:06:31
a year and a about a year as the creative director of the company purely because I I just was interested so I invested about seven figures in the
01:06:38
business then I joined as a creative director to stay close and then I my my contract was basically to leave on the
01:06:43
day of the IPO so it ipoed on the NASDAQ 3.4 billion and I left the next day
01:06:49
basically yeah amazing but it was so just it was because I was interested in mental health I heard about this
01:06:54
epidemic of Mental Health no good answers yeah and psychedelics and the clinical research that was coming out
01:06:59
around things like cybin which is the active compound of magic mushrooms were just really
01:07:05
interesting and I I didn't need to work so I just it's fascinating I mean you know there was this uh recently heard a
01:07:12
presentation by a Stanford scientist who's studying ibigan for trauma depression anxiety but addiction and
01:07:18
it's quite interesting it's a compound that you take from a bark of a tree from
01:07:23
West Africa the batry and it somehow shuts off the withdrawal so we know
01:07:31
medically that when you stop narcotics you go through physiological withdrawal which is a medical phenomena it just
01:07:37
stops that somehow it's like a one dose one dose now there is metabolites that
01:07:42
stay for a long time nor Iain that may mitigate those effects and block those receptors and we don't really quite
01:07:48
understand it yet but I did I did have a thought which is that when you look at
01:07:54
the Yale food addiction scale which is a validated metric for food addiction now
01:07:59
different people have various degrees right there are people who can't stop eating sheet cakes and there's people who you know crave ice cream once in a
01:08:05
while it's not true food addiction but you look at the data globally 14% of
01:08:10
adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria according to the Yale food addiction
01:08:15
scale for food addiction from Ultra processed food from sugar carb refined carbohydrates so I I actually talked to
01:08:22
one of the leading Ryan researchers I said wouldn't it be interesting to do a pilot where we took people who had food
01:08:28
addiction and we gave them iig gain and we saw what happened I mean it could be fascinating you know could shut that off
01:08:35
and and maybe there's going to be and I think there will be a nor ibigan which is a metabolite of ibigan that I think
01:08:41
may be doing a lot of the effect that's something you can take on a daily basis instead of OIC for example what I heard
01:08:46
about Iain is that the side effects are quite yeah it can be quite significant but it's it's the main side effect is is
01:08:52
a heart side effect it increases something called the QT and interval which can put you into an arhythmia
01:08:57
which can a fatal heart rhythm um and you'll have to be monitored when you're taking it but we found it if you take uh
01:09:04
High higher Doses and even IV magnesium which is actually what we use in the emergency room to treat arhythmia like
01:09:11
if your heart's beating like crazy and you're going to die we give you intervenous magnesium as the last resort
01:09:16
well you can pre-treat with magnesium and that stops that phenomena so there's a lot of ways to deal with it but I do
01:09:22
think we're in a psychedelic era and uh it's really hard to me because I think
01:09:27
there's so many problems as a doctor I can't solve you know if someone has a health issue but their trauma is
01:09:33
controlling their behavior and unless they deal with the trauma it's hard to address the things
01:09:39
that they need to do to fix their behavior in their life right so if you're if you're you're traumatized
01:09:44
because you were raped or had sexual abuse when you were a kid you know and I've had my own trauma I had incest when I was a kid I had you know kind of a
01:09:50
rough K childhood in many ways incest when you were a kid yeah yeah so I've had to deal with this myself and doing
01:09:57
that has really helped me to kind of recover and repair my own emotional
01:10:02
architecture and have a really a sense of security and safety which I didn't have before did you have symptoms of
01:10:08
that trauma in in your early life or your adult life 100% um you I was highly functional obviously I mean I'm doctor
01:10:15
I've written many books done a lot in the world but it was really affecting my um way of being in relationships and
01:10:22
your sexual health or your in your sort of not my Sexual Health but more my romantic relationships and even
01:10:27
sometimes work relationships where I I really developed a a pattern and my it was also trauma that I had from my
01:10:33
mother who was a wonderful woman but she was a child of deaf parents so she had to become their parent and she basically
01:10:41
was a what you call a parentified child and she was the adult so she never had a childhood and then she did the same
01:10:48
thing to me she made me her therapist because she was depressed and in bad marriages and chose men who were broken
01:10:53
CU she thought love was taking care of broken people and so I developed this place where I just felt this big hole in
01:10:58
emptiness in my heart and I couldn't really overcome that and so I did a lot
01:11:03
of work did medicine Journeys I did lot of different kinds of therapy and I was
01:11:09
able to really break through and release that and when I did it was like it was like
01:11:15
literally the programming changed you know you got little voice in your head all the time some has a very annoying
01:11:22
voice in your head and it just says stuff all the time that you know you just wish it wouldn't or it it dictates
01:11:29
your behavior in certain ways that you wish it wouldn't oh I I never thought this was possible but literally that
01:11:35
voice changed and what it said changed and how it was in relationships changed and it was physiologically different and
01:11:42
I didn't have that sense of trauma and I had another friend who had the same thing and he had you know a mother who
01:11:47
was a yeller and a screamer and and was traumatizing couldn't tell the truth and wasn't honest because he was afraid he
01:11:54
was going to get attack packed and hurt and so he was that little boy and so this part of his brain that wasn't working and we we helped him get MDMA
01:12:02
therapy uh which is you know MDMA is a compound that that isn't like a
01:12:07
psychedelic but it has effects on PTSD and he said as like that part of his brain just turned off and he stopped
01:12:14
having that feeling and he was able to tell the truth and speak what he felt
01:12:19
and you know was powerful and the symptoms that you experienced in your later life with relationship what was
01:12:25
that just like a bit struggling to find form attachments uh you know I had what was called an anxious attachment style
01:12:32
so um basically uh I I was anxious about the relationship and wouldn't be honest
01:12:40
with how I felt or what I was doing and it wasn't like I was lying like I'm lying but Omission or if I if I say how
01:12:47
I'm feeling or what I want then they're going to leave me or they're going to they're going to be gone and so I
01:12:52
developed this this hole in this emptiness that affected my relationships and and and it was bad you know like so
01:13:00
if if my partner for example I'm just this partner she she was a perfectionist
01:13:05
and she really had a hard time opening up and she had an avoiding attachment style so like one time I had seen her in
01:13:11
three weeks and she didn't really want to connect or hug or be together and and she's like I need to get used to you and
01:13:16
I'm like and so I I just could feel this like visceral reaction of panic and fear and hurt and like now I don't have any
01:13:25
of that you know what was it that you did that fixed it do your do your work earlier your life is going to be
01:13:32
difficult I think I wish you know it's like it's like when I was sick with chronic illness and I was had chronic
01:13:38
fatigue syndrome and I had mold issues and lime disease and I was so sick you
01:13:43
know and it was I didn't have a road map I didn't have a path you know I I I
01:13:49
didn't know what to do and so I was groping in the dark and finding a crumb here and a crumb there and I talk to
01:13:55
this person and that person I would P Peach to get patch together this whole approach that finally allowed me to get
01:14:00
well and I wish I'd known now what I knew then it would have been better in the year not 10 years that it took me to
01:14:06
get better or maybe even shorter and if IID done the work on myself when I was 20 and 30 and not waited till I was 50
01:14:13
and 60 I would have you know not prevented a lot of suffering and so my
01:14:19
my advice to people is to if you are struggling with any of these relational issues with yourself there's work to be
01:14:25
done there's great amazing paths out there to help look at things like Byron Katie's you know work called the work
01:14:31
which is a way of looking at your own thoughts and your own your own perspective there's so many things that you can do psychedelic medicine MDMA
01:14:38
assistant therapy psilocybon assistant therapy it's coming it's not available to everybody yet but it's coming fast I think maybe even this year the MDA
01:14:45
assisted therapy will be FDA approved so I feel like you know everybody's on their own Journey but you don't have to
01:14:52
stay stuck in the biologic iCal or psychological framework that you are now
01:14:58
like there is a way to heal at any time right whether you're 65 or 25 I think
01:15:03
this isessential to the concern a lot of people have but also the resistance is we kind of see ourselves as being fixed
01:15:09
especially the older you get you kind of assume both our health our motivation our trauma our mind it's all kind of
01:15:15
this who I am this is who I am now I can maybe act differently or whatever I can learn tips and tricks to like I don't
01:15:21
know become better at sales or speaking but fundamentally my is my it is me yeah exactly and that
01:15:28
holds us kind of imprisons us yeah so my my message is number one we now have the
01:15:33
science and technology and medicine to upgrade your biological software and reverse chronic disease reverse your
01:15:39
biological age my biological age is 43 even though I'm 65 how do they know your biological age
01:15:45
oh well it's a kind of fancy technology that looks at something called The epig genome which is the above your genome
01:15:51
the regulator of your gene expression which changes based on different insults and things in your life whether it's
01:15:57
diet toxins lifestyle so we can measure that now so that's what it was uh so you can upgrade your biological software and
01:16:04
you can upgrade your psycho emotional spiritual software it's really possible and I've seen it happen and I've seen it
01:16:10
happen with many people I think the Psychedelic Revolution is probably like OIC for mental health you know but with
01:16:17
a lot of side effects I mean that there's there's really an incredible safety profile for these compounds
01:16:23
they're really really safe and they don't really have side effects and you don't need to use them that
01:16:29
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01:16:35
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01:17:27
and of course terms and conditions apply when you think about biological age if you are giving me some advice on
01:17:33
lowering my biological age I'm 31 now yeah you're 31 I'm 31 just a baby but
01:17:39
I'd like to be 25 biologically or 21 biologically yeah so I know you had
01:17:44
Brian Johnson on the podcast he probably G me some advice yeah he's got a eat
01:17:50
breakfast and eating my 11 go to bed at 8 uh no no when I speak yeah speak to J
01:17:55
Brian Johnson I have to buy some like $5,000 Contraption and strap it to myself in the morning and I just it's
01:18:01
it's it's a lot two blades of grass for lunch yeah yeah but the simple things that have had the biggest impact on your
01:18:08
biological age what are those what's the 8020 on this yeah yeah yeah uh well I wrote a book about it yeah you did
01:18:14
called young forever yeah uh and it it's not that hard uh you know as we talked
01:18:19
about the blue zones it's eat real food I would say eliminate Ultra processed food y dramatically reduce or limit
01:18:27
sugar and starch from your diet flour products particularly make sure you exercise so I
01:18:33
think you know in terms of of and by the way in terms of eating just to make a few more points give yourself 12 to 14
01:18:40
hours overnight from eating first meal should be protein and it should be 30 to 40 grams of protein that'll help you
01:18:46
build muscle which is the currency of longevity so if you want to live long and be strong and be able to do stuff
01:18:52
and not you know have trouble getting up out of it chair or TI your shoelaces you need to build muscle and that protein is
01:18:58
critical in the morning you need to have a phytochemically rich diet which means lots of colorful vegetables lots of good
01:19:04
fats and and the right kinds of protein so that's that's pretty straightforward again I've written lots of books I talk
01:19:09
about the diet in there but it's those are the sort of the main things in the Young Forever longevity diet you talk about the the 75% of your plate should
01:19:17
be vegetables yeah this point about limiting the protein to sort of 25% of
01:19:22
your plate is there a risk in having too much meat products because this is I mean you know
01:19:28
this is a interesting question you know we looked at for example uh the Plains Indians like the Lakota at the turn of
01:19:35
the last century 1900s they were the longest live population on the planet they were 100 years old plus and all
01:19:41
they ate was bison that was their diet pretty much and a few berries and maybe a few things
01:19:46
they could dig up from the ground well they was bison pretty much yeah they they could eat the liver they'd eat the
01:19:52
organs they'd have the bone marrow they would eat the meat and they would have I
01:19:58
think some some veggies from the berries or roots or things that they would have
01:20:03
but it was very limited and they had lots of longevity um there there's I
01:20:08
mean meat is a very nutrient food so I think the challenge with meat and this is a whole another tangent that would
01:20:14
take us an hour to go through but you know vegan or is not vegan meat not meat meat's one of the most
01:20:20
nutritionally densest Foods on the planet it's the best source of protein to build muscle and we should be eating regeneratively
01:20:27
raised meat which is hard to find but there's places like force of nature where you can get online you can get elk
01:20:32
bison benison and uh even beef and and um you can eat good quality fish
01:20:39
pasturised chicken you know we need that kind of protein particularly as we age to build
01:20:45
muscle because we get something called anabolic resistance our bodies resist building muscle and you need more
01:20:51
protein and you need more exercise and and and so you know the the amount of
01:20:57
meat depends on what you're doing and your size and your your your lifestyle so if you're very active and you want to
01:21:03
build muscle and you want to lift weights and you which you should you probably need between you know you know
01:21:09
a half to a gram per pound of protein per day that's that's more than people think
01:21:16
so the way we sort of say protein needs is based on deficiency diseases so the
01:21:21
recommended dietary allowance is point 8 G per kilo I'm talking about double that
01:21:29
now8 gr is the amount that you need to prevent a protein deficiency disease not
01:21:34
how much you need for Optimal Health and functioning so you need to be able to have the right protein at the right time
01:21:40
you also need fasts and times to not have protein so your body can heal and repair but it's it's like golden nox
01:21:47
phenomena you need both and so I would say depending on your activity level and how much you're doing you need more but
01:21:53
you know roughly about you know 30 gram three times a day which is not that much you know I I just had a bag of bong
01:22:00
which is a little bag of beef right it's like beef yeah it's a South African like beef jerky and I was like after I ate it
01:22:05
was like looked at the package I was like oh it's only it's 32 grams so I had 32 grams of protein for lunch right
01:22:11
that's so hard I could have a 30 or 40 gram protein shake what I had this morning that's I'm already at like you know uh 70 grams so I think the the body
01:22:20
needs that protein so I think food is really important and and I talk about how to activate longevity switches with
01:22:25
food and phytochemicals in the book the resistance training is really key for longevity so if if you if you want to do
01:22:31
cardio that's great and I think we need to both but but strength training three times a week minimum 20 minutes is the
01:22:38
key to Health and Longevity it will keep your muscle strong it'll prevent what we call sarcopenia which is muscle loss one
01:22:44
of the biggest things that happens as you get older you lose muscle and that leads to metabolic issues inflammation
01:22:49
pre-diabetes you know just all kinds of Health consequences sugar oh yeah said get rid of the sugar okay what about
01:22:56
artificial sugars like in dark sweet yeah I mean there's so much you know
01:23:02
debated about this I was actually reading a couple of papers yesterday Stephen and I was because I was not related to this but something else I was
01:23:07
working on and there were these two papers that were basically discounting the fact that artificial sweeteners had
01:23:13
any bad impact on health and I was like oh interesting because you know there's some biology around this and I and I and
01:23:21
I said let me see who funded this study and it says this stud was entirely funded by the American Beverage
01:23:27
Association formerly known as the American soda pop Association oh wow and the other study was similar
01:23:34
study said funded by so and so who's funded by Coca colola and who works for
01:23:39
the international sweeteners Association so follow the money you know is it better than
01:23:47
drinking soda yes is it better than drinking water no are there potentially untour consequences I think so because
01:23:53
of it's on the microbiome and other things so if you're asking what are the things to do for my biological age how I
01:23:59
eat it's exercise it's it's community so I really focus on community friends
01:24:04
relationships love it's like medicine love is medicine and also making sure
01:24:10
that I manage stress I meditate I mean I like this app called newom which basically is like a binaural beats and I
01:24:17
put it on it just takes you into a altered brain wave state uh and uh you
01:24:22
know having fun man have fun is okay longevity enjoying life yeah it makes
01:24:28
life worth living as well doesn't it I guess we talk about longevity a lot but you have to I guess you have to like the life you live exactly yeah it has be fun
01:24:36
expose them expose them expose them yeah what is that I I mean tell yeah never
01:24:43
heard the word before so first time I heard it was researching you yeah so it's it's a scientific term that you
01:24:49
know like your genome right your metabolome your microbiome your exposome is the SU total of everything that
01:24:56
you've been exposed to in your life and how it's impacted your biology in this moment so it's really interesting thing
01:25:03
about this though that I was particularly interested in was that this includes what's happened to your ancestors yeah yes well the epigenetics
01:25:11
is really fascinating but but the expose them just to quickly Define it and I'll I'll lump back to the ancestor thing in
01:25:17
a minute but but the exposome is what you eat it's exercise it's your thoughts your feelings your microbiome
01:25:23
environmental toxins uh everything your relationships all of that is your exposome right so all that
01:25:29
influences your expression of your genes and it turns out the 90% of disease is related to the exposome not the genome
01:25:36
which is a good news because we have control over that so how the things that happen to us impact the expression of
01:25:42
our genes exactly and how it affects our biology right how it turns them on and off and yeah turn on and off genes
01:25:49
regulates our hormones our brain chemistry or microbiome everything right it's everything you're exposed to
01:25:54
determines the quality of your life and your health in terms of ancestral effects there's a phenomenon called
01:25:59
epigenetics which is how we measure biological age which is the effect of this uh think of it your genes as the
01:26:07
keys on a piano there's 88 keys and you can create any kind of music from that think about that you can
01:26:13
create classical music rock music jazz Rock rag time reggae whatever you want and it's just 88
01:26:19
keys the epig genome is the piano player
01:26:24
that controls the songs of your life right and and and it is determined by
01:26:31
your life experience and what you do and what you eat and what you how you think and your your uh stress level and your
01:26:39
relationships and your gut microbiome all everything is affecting this in real time and it's a dynamic process so we
01:26:46
now know that using different interventions of lifestyle or diet or various supplements that you can reverse
01:26:52
your biological age that you can turn back the biological clock that you can get biologically younger as you get
01:26:58
chronologically older and so it's really exciting research there's even there's even uh scientist from Japan who won a
01:27:06
Nobel Prize finding these transcription factors that regulate our gene expression that can be inserted into us
01:27:13
and reprogram our genes and our epigenome to become younger in other
01:27:18
words can create an original stem cell what we call a plur potent stem cell so it'll take back the all the way back to
01:27:25
embryonic like Benjamin Button all the way back now you don't want to go all the way back CU you're you know but but but we have these systems built in us
01:27:32
and so we we now can actually regulate this through epigenetic uh Behavior changes that we
01:27:39
know work and there are drugs that do this too there are pyrochemical that do this so it's it's a new era of study do
01:27:46
you believe that we inherit the trauma of our ancestors I I don't think it's a belief Stephen um the data is really
01:27:52
clear if you look at Holocaust survivors their children have way more issues in
01:27:59
terms of psychological stress anxiety 911 there were a lot of women pregnant during 911 in New York City and those
01:28:07
Offspring Have reprogrammed genetics based on the trauma that their mother
01:28:12
experienced during that time and those can be measured different genes are expressed different pathways are
01:28:17
expressed that cause for example a higher level of anxiety a decreased ability to process the stress hormones
01:28:25
and many other phenomena that happen that are programmed epigenetically we know that if you take in animal studies
01:28:30
if you take a for example glyphosate which is sprayed on 70% of all crops it's a weed killer Roundup we call it in
01:28:37
this days and if you give it to let's say a grandmother Mouse but not to the the daughter and
01:28:44
not to the granddaughter or grand whatever kid of the I don't know what you call grandkid mice anyway that there
01:28:51
will be changes three generations down caused by that toxin that that original
01:28:58
ancestor was exposed to that will cause increased cancer metabolic issues kidney issues a whole series of phenomena that
01:29:05
are caused by epigenetic changes so you spray the grandmother and then she has
01:29:11
one generation of kids and then then the next generation of kids are still impacted by spraying the grandmother
01:29:16
yeah so you might have heard of Lamark have you heard of Darwin Darwin okay you heard of Darwin Darwin basically had the
01:29:23
theory of evolution which is that species evolve through natural selection and they change slowly based on
01:29:30
environmental pressures over time they change their genes Lamar basically said you can change genes inherit things very
01:29:38
quickly and so they were kind of both right in a sense Lamar was more talking about epigenetics and dman was talking
01:29:46
more about uh you know genetic Evolution and mutations over time which you know
01:29:52
both are true both are true and knew about genes but they were both observing phenomena that are explained by exactly
01:29:58
what I'm talking about what is the most important thing you've discovered through your years of work as it relates
01:30:03
to longevity and health and all of that that we haven't talked about we we we
01:30:08
spend so much time um Being Human doings and not being human
01:30:15
beings and the thing that I observed in the blue zones was there was a lot of being going on there was a lot of just
01:30:22
being you know and and how important slowing down is to actually Savor the
01:30:29
things that really matter that make life beautiful like we were we I was with this Italian ladies that were taking me
01:30:35
around these tour guides and we were driving down out of this little village on the side of this mountain and L this
01:30:40
car stops in front of us and just like stops and kind of stops us and waves and says get out of the car like okay what's
01:30:47
going on so we got out of the car this old man he was relatively Young by Sardinian standards he was 86
01:30:55
named Carmine and and he said come and we sat down on the side of the stone wall on the side of the street and we
01:31:02
talked for two hours he talked about his life he asked me questions we were talking about philosophy politics
01:31:08
religion what it was like when he was younger we we went to and then he took me on a tour of his farm and showed me
01:31:13
his sheep and the olive trees and the fig trees and the vegetables he was growing and and I couldn't keep up with
01:31:19
him he ran up the hill I was he was like so fit and you know he tell me the story of his life and you know when was the last time someone did that they might
01:31:26
give you the finger if you shot in front of them you know like and we don't have this this sort of value system anymore
01:31:34
that values you know deep uh relationships and deep conversations and
01:31:39
deep connection and that's beautiful what you're doing you're you're creating a space for deep connections and you
01:31:44
know you've gotten to know me in this last two hours in ways that know most
01:31:50
people don't because you've asked questions and you spend time and you're curious and I've been feeling safe to
01:31:55
share it with you and like you know I haven't said a lot of this stuff in public before and so it's it's really
01:32:01
something beautiful that that can come out of that and then I feel oh somebody sees me I'm seen I'm heard and that
01:32:07
that's a powerful medicine so being seen is a powerful medicine love is a powerful medicine connection belonging
01:32:14
is powerful medicine I wonder how the lives we live now are really changing our brains as well you know we talk
01:32:20
about ADD and ADHD and autism all these kinds of things but you know the pace at which I live my life at I often think
01:32:27
like I think I'm developing a disease yeah 100% 100% I me I I just got back
01:32:33
from um from pagonia and you know I do a lot of stuff I have multiple companies
01:32:38
businesses I have a clinic I have patients I constantly dealing with million things every day and uh you know
01:32:45
I sometimes I I do I feel like some I have ADD and I was in there in pagonia
01:32:52
in the middle of nowhere there's no sell service there's no Wi-fi there's just mountains nature and me and my wife we
01:33:00
hiked over 10 12 hours a day sometimes more and I felt my nervous system
01:33:06
completely changed and I realized I don't have ADD I have ND which is nature deficit disorder yeah
01:33:13
you know and I felt everything calmed down I felt everything kind of settle I
01:33:18
saw my heart rate variability which is a metric that we can measure that checks our stress response double I'm like oh
01:33:24
God you know like and I I don't think of myself as stress but it's like it's just this phenomena from being in our society
01:33:32
and it takes a will to stop and pause and breathe and to go slower and to you
01:33:38
know smell the roses it's a cliche but it's really it's a thing my friend one of my best friends called Dom he we used
01:33:45
to roast him a little bit because his heart rate variability was very very low and so we he was being roasted for a
01:33:50
couple of weeks on end couple of months really cuz we we all have this like heart rate variability League table and
01:33:56
and then he went on his honeymoon from month to Australia yeah and his heart rate variability went from like
01:34:01
something like 20 or 30 to 140 wow and all that was happening was he was basically just spending his time in
01:34:07
nature in the sunshine as well which is an important factor yeah and now and since then he's managed to maintain his
01:34:13
heart rate variability predominantly by staying out in nature and I thought God that's so interesting yeah that it like
01:34:18
regulates our immune system in such a profound way it does you um before the
01:34:24
conversation started we were talking very excitedly about your new company called function yeah sounds incredibly
01:34:29
exciting for someone that's curious about function what is it and and where can they find it so you know most of us
01:34:37
don't have access to what's happening under our skin right uh we have to go to the doctor we have to get an appointment
01:34:44
we have to hope they order the right test we have to hope that they know how to interpret the important tests we Hope
01:34:50
they've kept up with the science we hope they are you know doing all the right things but the truth is they're not and
01:34:55
and medicine is is is unfortunately delayed in its adoption of new science and so function is really an
01:35:03
attempt to help you get access to your own biology to be the CEO of your own
01:35:09
health to create a health database of your own data that will take everything
01:35:14
eventually right now it's your blood test but eventually your biosensor data your whole genomics all your medical
01:35:21
records Imaging data your metabolome your microbiome and and interpret all that in
01:35:28
a way that helps you get a personalized picture of what's going on in real time with your biology and then through
01:35:35
evidence-based science and through the influence of expert opinion that also has value and through the wisdom that
01:35:43
comes from the patterns in your own data being able to create a personalized road map for your health over time and it's
01:35:51
not a one-time test it's it's it's being a member of function allows you twice your testing for like
01:35:57
$499 you get over 110 biomarkers you track them over time you see the changes and what we're seeing Stephen is
01:36:03
striking we're seeing doing we're doing tests that are not part of your regular checkup right we're doing for example
01:36:09
for cholesterol we're doing lipoprotein fractionation which looks at the particle number and size it's less than 1% of all cholesterol tests it was
01:36:15
discovered 40 years ago but 99% of people don't get it right and it tells us that 95% have problems with that 89%
01:36:23
have small particles which shows poor metabolic Health we're seeing 46% of
01:36:29
people have inflammation with a high C reactor protein we're seeing 133% have autoimmune thyroid disease that's
01:36:34
undetected we're finding cancers that nobody found through liquid biopsies we're finding that 67% have nutritional
01:36:41
deficiencies and this is a very health population because we're still in beta and we're seeing they didn't even know
01:36:46
we're affecting their health so I had so lead athlete for example who's great but he had low iron and he had low vitamin D
01:36:52
and he had low B vitamin and it was affecting his performance so it was like he had a disease so we're able to map this for people and provide a basically
01:37:00
AI co-pilot for your health based on the learnings and you know AI is a scary thing for people but the the truth is
01:37:07
that in medicine it's the best use case would you rather have a dermatologist who's seen a few thousand lesions look
01:37:12
at your skin and see if it's a cancer or not or an AI that sees billions of lesions and can actually know what's
01:37:18
really going on so we're going to be able to do this in a very safe way for you to to you own your data and you can
01:37:25
personalize your approach you can upgrade your biological Health you can do that biological upgrade that I talked
01:37:30
about and and you can share the data with your doctors and it's going to I think transform medicine uh and right
01:37:36
now you know we've just started uh in betab but we have almost 30,000 members we've had seen over three million data
01:37:41
points of people's biology um we have this available now at function
01:37:47
health.com if you go to function health.com Mark you can learn more about
01:37:53
it and you can get off the weight list and get to see CU we have 100,000 people on the weight list and get to learn
01:37:58
about your own biology and what people are discovering is really life-changing for them I'm very excited for you and it's so wonderful to see how AI is
01:38:05
creating new opportunities within health and and wellness that weren't previously available so it's you know it's all been
01:38:11
happening over the last sort of 12 months in the world of AI and from I hope some incredible solutions emerg
01:38:16
that bring down the cost and access the cost to access of healthcare well that's the thing is so affordable for most
01:38:23
people it's like less than you spend on a cup of coffee every day it's like $130 something a day you know and for most
01:38:29
people you know that that's affordable some people not but when you think about the what's your wealth your health is
01:38:35
your wealth like I said earlier in the podcast a healthy man wants many things a sick man wants one thing I think it's
01:38:41
a Chinese proverb right you have an incredible podcast
01:38:47
called The Doctor's Pharmacy which is one of the top health podcasts where you discuss the sort of intersection between health food and and policy which I
01:38:52
recommend everyone to go and check account you've written a lot of books A Lot 19 too many I'm done for a minute I'm going to I'm going to recommend one
01:38:58
and then I'll let you recommend another one yeah yeah which one would you recommend if you have to recommend one I Young Forever is my latest book and it's
01:39:05
where I poured my entire knowledge base and tips and ideas and strategies about
01:39:11
how to optimize your health and it's not just for longevity for any area of Health that you have issues with it's powerful I was going to recommend that
01:39:16
one as well but I'm going to say food fix um because that book is fantastic and that's one of the ones um the book
01:39:23
longevity That You released recently Young Forever is fantastic book but the food fix book as well is really clarifying for a lot of people that are
01:39:29
probably confused about food um we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question
01:39:35
for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is interesting because it's a little bit similar to what I
01:39:40
asked you earlier but with a slight variation what is the most interesting
01:39:46
and revealing question Steve should have asked you but didn't oh and this is for
01:39:51
the next guest no this was left for you and they didn't know who they were leaving it for oh I see okay
01:39:58
um I would say you know who were the biggest influences in my life living or
01:40:03
dead so Mark who are the biggest
01:40:10
influences you're gonna have to answer now people are Wonder all right uh so I would say living is a gentleman who's an
01:40:17
unsung hero uh a man named Jeffrey Bland who's a nutritional biochemist studied with lonus Pauling who won two priz is
01:40:24
really the father of of nutritional science in in the modern way who uh
01:40:30
really established this field of functional medicine and he he's a nutritional biochemist but
01:40:35
he he's a genius he he's he's a synthesizer so every time I would see
01:40:40
him for decades he would have a pile of scientific papers this thick like you know a foot thick carrying with him all
01:40:46
the time and he would Hoover those things up and he synthesizes it and he's seen patterns in that data for decades
01:40:54
that have pre preceded the revolution we're seeing now in me medicine so most things I talked about today he he
01:41:00
basically understood by seeing the intersections across Specialties so he's sort of a polymath in science and he
01:41:07
influenced my work he saved my life personally by learning about this model I I was able to save my health he's
01:41:13
helped me help millions of people so he's a huge influence uh the other I
01:41:18
think main influence on my life was Henry thorough who was a transcendentalist lived in the 1800s
01:41:24
wrote a book called Walden I if you've heard about it but it's a profound book uh it was basically a guy who Walden
01:41:30
Walden how do you spell that w l d n and it's it's it's a classic book
01:41:36
about this man in the 1800s who went and lived on a lake outside of Boston Walden
01:41:43
Pond and lived there by himself in a cabin with nothing almost and wrote about wrote about it and he had you this
01:41:50
beautiful way of writing and describing nature and life and philosophy and it
01:41:55
really also included a lot of Eastern philosophy embedded in it which I didn't realize at the time and so that book uh
01:42:02
really impacted my childhood profoundly Dr Mark hman thank you so
01:42:08
much for taking the time today and thank you for all of your wisdom and honesty and openness it's incredibly important
01:42:13
and uh the work you've done over the last couple of decades has changed lives save lives and in more so than I think
01:42:19
you'd probably ever realize and more so than we could ever count so thank you for that incredibly Noble and worthy
01:42:24
cause that you're you've been on but are on as well with function and all that's going to come with that so I wish you the very very BL thank you so much for
01:42:31
your time how do you guys manage your stress this month is Stress Awareness Month and
01:42:38
it's a topic that I'm super passionate about and we talk about a lot on this podcast I personally manage my stress by
01:42:43
prioritizing my health and well-being going to the gym is my number one form of therapy and I couldn't be without
01:42:49
those two things as you guys know whoop is a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company as well for
01:42:54
those of you that don't know we've actually created a stress monitor within this device not only does this help me
01:43:00
to identify periods of high stress in real time throughout the day but it also provides me with the tools I need to
01:43:05
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01:43:11
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whoop let me know how you get [Music]
01:43:52
on a
