00:00:00
cardio is not effective for weight loss why isn't it helping me lose weight it seems like a bit of a head spin there
00:00:06
are two reasons number one is bad news isn't it that is bad news Dr
00:00:13
Philip lavadia the world renowned heart doctor has conducted over 3 000 heart surgeries this book stay off my
00:00:19
operating table fighting to make America healthy again when you were 40 years old you described yourself as being morbidly
00:00:25
obese I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today I was going to end up on my own
00:00:30
operating table I came to realize the true root cause of our health problems
00:00:35
sugar is more addictive than heroin processed food is addictive 88 of adults
00:00:41
are not healthy and 600 000 people die from heart disease every year if we
00:00:48
don't change the course in the next 50 years we're not going to have a society left
00:00:53
a very young woman and a 30 year old ended up on my operating table and I had
00:00:59
to go tell her young children I'm sorry that we weren't able to save
00:01:05
your mother was her hot condition preventable yes
00:01:11
the surgeries that I do shouldn't need to be done in the first place I want
00:01:17
people to be healthy again doctor ovidia what is the diet that's
00:01:22
going to keep my health intact that's really the million dollar question so
00:01:30
before this episode starts I have a small favor to ask from you two months ago 74 of people that watch this channel
00:01:36
didn't subscribe we're now down to 69 my goal is 50 so if you've ever liked any
00:01:44
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00:01:50
bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this episode
00:01:56
[Music]
00:02:01
doctor ovidia tell me the mission that you're on and
00:02:08
also tell me why you chose to pursue that mission
00:02:15
so I am on a mission to normalize health I want people to be healthy again and it
00:02:24
really was my own personal Journey that set me off on that mission um I found myself at a spot that I was a
00:02:33
very unhealthy heart surgeon and it's going to sound pretty surprising I think to people you know
00:02:40
they think that here I was uh here I am a heart surgeon
00:02:47
in many ways at the Pinnacle of medicine um and trying to get people back from
00:02:54
the brink of death and yet I was headed down that same pathway
00:03:00
myself and I was so unhealthy myself and I had to figure out how
00:03:07
to save myself and that has really opened my eyes to
00:03:12
how much we need to save Society at this point because we are a very sick society and
00:03:19
we need to be saved when you say you were an unhealthy hot surgeon give me a picture of what that looks like in
00:03:24
reality yeah so um I was morbidly obese I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today
00:03:31
I was pre-diabetic and I was in my late 30s and realized that I was going to end
00:03:38
up on my own operating table so to speak I was walking the same path that so many
00:03:44
of my patients had walked down I had family history my grandmother died
00:03:49
of heart disease my father has had heart surgery and I knew the path that I was headed
00:03:56
down but I didn't know how to change that pathway and that's the problem that
00:04:02
I'm really trying to solve for people to get them to realize how they can change
00:04:09
what many of them see as their destiny when you think about our Destinies we
00:04:14
often look at our parents and think you know that's probably the clearest indicator I have of where I'm going
00:04:20
because of you know genetic and environmental factors what what when you look to your parents what did you see
00:04:26
yeah so my parents uh were both overweight uh had both struggled with
00:04:33
obesity their entire lives and as I mentioned my father had developed heart
00:04:39
disease and I was under that same impression that
00:04:45
there really wasn't much I could do because it was genetic but I think that's one of the biggest
00:04:51
myths we need to dispel around medicine today very little of the sickness that
00:04:59
we see so prevalent in society around us is truly genetic
00:05:04
and the reason that we know this is because human genetics don't change that
00:05:10
quickly yet in the past 100 to 150 years we've seen this explosion this epidemic
00:05:18
of chronic disease things like obesity diabetes even heart disease the very
00:05:24
condition that you know I have spent my life treating was relatively rare was
00:05:32
almost undescribed 100 120 years ago and so we know that
00:05:38
human genetics don't change that quickly yet we see these diseases developing so
00:05:43
quickly and that should tell us that it's not genetic yet almost everyone
00:05:48
when they go to their doctors and they ask why did this happen the common answer they're going to get
00:05:54
is because it's our genetics was there a was there a A Moment Like a
00:06:01
turning point a fork in the road a moment where you looked yourself in the mirror and thought today is the day
00:06:07
where I have to make a change you know there were many times during my
00:06:12
life when I told myself that and I would make changes and I would have some
00:06:18
short-term success I would change what I eat I would try and do different activities I would lose some weight but
00:06:27
like many people have experienced it didn't last over the long term uh my Turning Point really came a little
00:06:34
bit unexpectedly for me I was actually attending a medical meeting a conference of heart surgeons and uh
00:06:43
the speaker one of the guest speakers was a journalist by the name of Gary
00:06:48
tops and he had just written a book at that time called the case against sugar
00:06:54
prior to that he had written um good calories bad calories and why we
00:06:59
get fat and as I sat there in that audience listening to Gary talk uh and Gary
00:07:06
introduced some Concepts to me that I really hadn't heard before that the
00:07:12
types of food that we eat maybe more important than the amount of food that we eat
00:07:18
and it made a lot of sense and it sent me down a pathway where I started to think differently about my health
00:07:24
and so I read Gary's books and I eliminated sugar at first and started
00:07:30
changing the foods that I was eating and I had the same short-term success
00:07:37
that I had had before I was able to lose a bunch of weight and I said this is great but I realized that something was
00:07:44
different um because month after month year after year I was able to maintain it and I was
00:07:52
as I learned more as I walked down this journey I came to realize what is at the true
00:08:00
cause the true root cause of our health problems and understanding those true
00:08:06
root causes of our health problems is what has now led me to the long-term
00:08:11
success and I can sit here now you know eight years later and say that I know
00:08:17
that I have truly tackled uh my health challenges and now I can help others to be tackling
00:08:25
their health challenges as well what was the approach that led to short-term but unsustainable success
00:08:31
usually it was the counting calories it was eating less doing more uh it was
00:08:37
eating a low-fat diet it was all of the advice that we have heard our entire lives it was everything that I had been
00:08:44
taught in school in medical school about you know how to
00:08:50
educate people on being healthy and yet what I realized in retrospect
00:08:57
um and I didn't really recognize at the time admittedly but I realize now is that it wasn't working for me and it
00:09:04
wasn't working for my patients but I had fallen into I think one of the common traps that we fall into and when we give
00:09:12
people advice and the advice doesn't work we just assume it's because people
00:09:18
weren't following Our advice and we as individuals but certainly we as a Health
00:09:24
Care system are not very good at considering that maybe we're giving lousy advice
00:09:30
you're not just giving advice right as a medical profession you're also giving medicine
00:09:36
what's your perspective on medicine and how has that evolved as you've learned more about
00:09:42
what I guess you define as metabolic health yeah I think my view now is that
00:09:50
medicines should be necessary a lot less often than we use them
00:09:56
um when we look at our health we shouldn't really have the Baseline
00:10:02
assumption that we have today that if someone's in poor health it's because they're lacking
00:10:08
medicine it's because we haven't figured out the right treatment for them
00:10:15
um usually pharmaceutical based treatments maybe it's going to be a procedure or surgery but there's almost
00:10:22
a sort of assumption built into that uh that the human body is destined to
00:10:30
become ill that we're destined to develop these problems and that the only way that we
00:10:37
are going to be able to manage and head off these problems is by advancing
00:10:42
science by coming up with more Pharmaceuticals and more surgeries to treat the problems instead of
00:10:49
considering the fact that it might be something we are doing to ourselves
00:10:56
there's a book in front of me that says stay off my operating table by Philip avadia why did you decide to write this
00:11:03
book what Was Your Mission yeah I wrote the book because
00:11:08
I struggled to find this information I as a heart surgeon I as a doctor I as
00:11:18
someone in the medical system that is supposed to be built around making
00:11:23
people healthy and keeping people healthy struggled to figure out the information that's in that book you know
00:11:29
when you say healthy what what is healthy like how does what how does a doctor
00:11:34
like you characterize health so I Define health today as our bodies
00:11:42
working the way they should um so you know I talk about metabolic
00:11:47
Health in the book what's that and the way that I Define metabolic health is
00:11:52
that our bodies are properly utilizing the inputs that we are giving it and the
00:11:58
primary input that we give our bodies is the food that we eat and so when we eat one of three things
00:12:06
is really supposed to happen to that food some of it gets turned immediately into energy
00:12:12
for us to fuel all of the activities throughout our day some of it gets broken down
00:12:20
so that we can build and rebuild the tissues in our bodies processes that are
00:12:25
always going on and then a little of it is supposed to be stored for times when energy is not available
00:12:33
and what has happened in our modern environment is that system has broken
00:12:40
down and we end up storing too much of the energy and we end up not being able
00:12:46
to ever use that stored energy and that has a whole host of Downstream problems
00:12:51
that it creates and these are things like heart disease that I treat every day these are things like diabetes
00:12:58
cancer Alzheimer's disease all of these chronic issues that we see becoming so
00:13:06
common in our society today you're a heart doctor
00:13:13
what's been the um the most emotionally challenging day of your
00:13:18
career as a heart doctor well it's actually the opening chapter
00:13:24
of my book it was the day that a very young woman ended up on my
00:13:32
operating table and she did not make it off my operating table she came to me with a devastating
00:13:39
cardiac condition me and my team spent over 10 hours trying to save her
00:13:48
life but ultimately we could not save her life and I had to go tell her young children
00:13:56
that their mother was not coming home to them
00:14:03
that was the most challenging day of my
00:14:09
career and that was a day that I realized
00:14:14
things had to change that was one of the days that set me
00:14:22
on this pathway that set me made me realize the mission that I needed to be
00:14:28
on to keep people off of my operating table was her heart condition preventable
00:14:34
yes can you give me some color yeah so she
00:14:42
developed a condition it's called an aortic dissection where her blood vessel
00:14:47
leading out from her heart tour and that comes from high blood pressure
00:14:53
and she had high blood pressure that wasn't adequately addressed wasn't adequately treated
00:15:01
and I believe that her condition was a hundred percent preventable
00:15:07
I believe that if her Physicians had understood that her high blood
00:15:15
pressure was because of the food that she was eating if they had given her better advice
00:15:21
around the food that she could be eating and the impact that this was having on
00:15:26
her life that her path could have been changed
00:15:31
she was metabolically unhealthy in your view she was metabolically unhealthy
00:15:37
clinically obese clinically obese high blood pressure
00:15:45
I would say she had probably all five measurements of her
00:15:50
metabolic Health abnormal and no one
00:15:56
although I don't know this for sure no one likely ever had that discussion with
00:16:01
her and she was young you said she was very young under the age of 50. yeah she was 38.
00:16:08
Jesus this is one of the most troubling things that I have seen
00:16:15
during my career as a heart surgeon understand that I started my career as a
00:16:21
heart surgeon 20 years ago and at that time
00:16:26
we would operate on 70 and 80 year olds 60 year olds it was rare that we would
00:16:34
operate on 50 year olds today just 20 years later I routinely
00:16:40
operate on 40 year olds and I occasionally operate on a 30 year old like that woman
00:16:47
have you ever operated on a 20 year old not for
00:16:53
you know not someone who wasn't there it's a different condition different
00:16:59
condition A congenital heart condition I've operated on 20 year olds I haven't operated on 20 year olds
00:17:06
um with atherosclerosis but I don't think we're far from that
00:17:11
point when we look at the fact that a third of the children
00:17:17
are obese that we see metabolic disease
00:17:24
increasingly in teenagers and even children as young as eight or nine years
00:17:31
old there are going to be 20 year olds on ending up on my operating table in not
00:17:37
too long a Time I was going to ask you earlier on why all of this matters you know sometimes I
00:17:43
flick around in my head and I I think well you know if I live to
00:17:49
60 70 you know if I live to 60 but I just have loads of fun and when I say
00:17:55
fun I'm kind of mischaracterizing fun is like doing whatever I want and being driven by my own physiological and
00:18:02
psychological like compulsions basically which means just you know junk food whatever whatever or I go
00:18:08
again I can live longer and um avoid some of those compulsions that
00:18:15
I might have with as it relates to diet but I think that example you gave of why it's so important because you you had to
00:18:21
walk out of that operating room and go and speak to a family presumably young kids young young kids yeah that were how
00:18:28
old the youngest one I believe was three or four you know the older ones were uh
00:18:36
eight ten years old I'm guessing you'll never forget that conversation
00:18:43
how how does how do you prepare to have that conversation with a 10 year old and a three-year-old about their mother not
00:18:49
coming back are you trained to do that is you know
00:18:57
there is no training to do that you know unfortunately I've as a heart surgeon
00:19:02
you know I have that conversation with family members
00:19:07
um not infrequently but having that conversation
00:19:13
um with children with such a young family
00:19:19
members [Music] um I don't know that there's any way to prepare for that I certainly wasn't
00:19:24
prepared for it one of the things that I've come to
00:19:31
realize is no matter how good a heart surgeon I might be no matter how good
00:19:37
all the heart surgeons out there are you're always better off if you never
00:19:44
needed the surgery in the first place and understand that you know
00:19:52
I'm essentially looking to put myself out of business you know I spent my
00:19:58
entire life becoming a heart surgeon preparing to be a heart surgeon I still
00:20:05
love being a heart surgeon but
00:20:11
I realize in the back of my mind every time I'm doing heart surgery essentially
00:20:16
that I shouldn't need to be doing this I believe I know that the vast majority of
00:20:24
heart disease is preventable the vast majority of the surgeries that I do are
00:20:30
preventable shouldn't need to be done in the first place and that's why
00:20:36
my mission is so important that's why I'm doing what I do that's why I wrote
00:20:41
the book that's why I'm here talking to your audience today
00:20:47
because it doesn't need to be this way when you when you go into that that
00:20:53
waiting room what do you say
00:21:03
I said I'm sorry I said
00:21:08
I'm sorry that we weren't able to save your mother
00:21:20
I said that your mother came to us
00:21:25
came to me with a devastating problem and I did everything I could
00:21:33
to try and save her but her
00:21:38
situation was not savable
00:21:48
and I just said that I'm sorry that your mother
00:21:54
is no longer with you
00:22:00
could you carry do you carry away from having to have that conversation over and over and over again yeah I
00:22:07
definitely carry that weight from all of the times that I've had that conversation
00:22:14
and you know whether it's an 80 or a 90 year old
00:22:21
that many people would say they lived a good life they did everything they wanted to do
00:22:29
or whether it's a 30 year old young mother who did not get to see her
00:22:36
children grow up and whose children need to grow up without her
00:22:42
the conversation is never any easier
00:22:47
and especially recognizing
00:22:53
that most of the time they didn't need to be there in the first place
00:22:59
that they could have made changes in their life that would
00:23:04
have kept them from getting there that their doctors could have given them better advice to
00:23:13
help them make those changes how common is heart disease heart disease is the number one killer here in the United
00:23:20
States and worldwide here in the U.S 600 000 people die from heart disease every
00:23:26
year about a quarter 25 percent of the deaths every year are due to heart
00:23:32
disease so heart disease is incredibly common but it wasn't always that way
00:23:39
um it really only became that way within the past 70 years or so
00:23:44
and we have to ask why um because if we're going to take the
00:23:49
view which the Health Care System largely has that Health disease that
00:23:55
heart disease is inevitable um it's so common it must be inevitable
00:24:01
then why wasn't it always a problem and those are the questions that I think
00:24:06
we don't do a good job of asking we as Physicians
00:24:12
have become so busy taking care of all the sick people that we've kind of lost
00:24:19
the time and the ability to think about why there are so many sick people to start with
00:24:24
and so when I look at something like heart disease and I start to think about
00:24:30
why is it so common why has this become you know everyone knows someone with
00:24:37
heart disease everyone knows someone probably that died of heart disease that has is suffering from heart disease it
00:24:44
literally is all around us and I want us to step back and start asking why is
00:24:51
that why is that it's because of the food that we're eating
00:24:56
um I it's that simple uh when did this change like you know so there must be a
00:25:01
point in in history where you see correlation between our diets changing and heart disease increasing
00:25:07
yeah so here in the United States you know starting right around 1950 there
00:25:12
was a sharp increase in the incidence of heart disease and at the time
00:25:19
um we actually our sitting president while in office had a heart attack and
00:25:25
this set off the alarm bells and everyone started asking why you know where did all this heart disease come from uh because it's real interesting
00:25:32
you go back to some of the medical reports from 1900 50 years before and
00:25:38
heart disease is incredibly rare the leading Physicians of the time would go
00:25:43
their entire careers without really seeing heart disease so something changes in a in a pretty short period of
00:25:50
time and when we you know what does that correlate with it correlates with the
00:25:57
introduction of processed food things like uh you know sugar
00:26:03
the consumption of sugar starts Rising dramatically along with the incidence of
00:26:09
heart disease packaged Foods processed foods whatever you want to call them these are the
00:26:16
things that we see being introduced widespread into society around that time
00:26:22
I am an I am an idiot when it comes to cardiovascular health so when I ask this
00:26:28
question please explain it as if you're talking to a monkey what is heart disease like from a physiological
00:26:34
standpoint what what is it is it my heart just not feeling so good or is it might the the
00:26:41
I'm going to think of a big cardiovascular word here Atrium pretty big one ventricle bigger
00:26:48
ventricle Atrium are they blocked with with I almost if I was to guess what
00:26:54
heart disease was from a monkey mindset I'd say that the it becomes blocked by
00:27:01
something is that about a guess yeah no that's down the
00:27:07
right pathway so realize that there are a number of different forms of heart disease but when most people refer to
00:27:13
heart disease they're referring to what we call atherosclerosis and what that big fancy word means is exactly what you
00:27:21
were getting to something gets blocked the blood vessels on the heart get blocked so realize that the heart is a
00:27:28
muscle um like any muscle it needs oxygen it
00:27:33
needs blood to carry that oxygen to it so it can work now the unique thing about the heart as
00:27:40
a muscle is that it never stops working until the day we die so it needs that constant supply of
00:27:48
oxygen and blood and when the blood vessels that are carrying that oxygen to
00:27:53
the muscle of the heart start to get blocked start to get clogged
00:27:59
um there may not be enough oxygen making it to the heart anymore that's what we call
00:28:06
a heart attack basically that there's not enough blood flow that there's not enough oxygen getting to an area of the
00:28:12
heart and that's the most common cause of heart disease that's what most people
00:28:17
are referring to when they say heart disease what is blocking the flow of oxygen to the heart well you know that's
00:28:24
really the million dollar question so when you look at it under the microscope
00:28:29
what you see is uh plaque builds up in
00:28:34
the blood vessel and that plaque is composed of uh cholesterol fatty stuff
00:28:42
and it has calcium in it and you know when you really get into the microscopic
00:28:48
levels it has uh some of the blood cells both the red blood cells which are
00:28:53
oxygen carrying cells and white blood cells which are our immune cells are all
00:28:59
involved in these plaques so when we were first trying to figure out
00:29:06
what was causing heart disease and the early scientists the early Physicians were
00:29:12
looking under the microscope and they were seeing that there was cholesterol in these plaques and they said it must
00:29:19
be cholesterol and fat in the foods that we are eating
00:29:24
that are causing these problems made a lot of sense and we set down a pathway
00:29:31
to try and get people to eat less cholesterol we set down a pathway of developing
00:29:38
drugs that lower cholesterol and it would make perfect sense that that would
00:29:45
take care of heart disease and yet here we are 70 years later and people are
00:29:50
eating less cholesterol and people are taking medications to lower their cholesterol and yet heart disease isn't
00:29:57
going away and it's actually getting worse so we have to step back and say
00:30:03
maybe we were wrong about it being cholesterol that was causing the heart disease in the first
00:30:08
place and maybe it was and maybe it was something else uh so you know when we
00:30:16
look at what else might it be and again when we go back to the early days of this science the other thing that was
00:30:23
talked about was sugar and there were many leading scientists again going back to the 1950s who were
00:30:30
saying that it was sugar that was causing this problem because sugar damages blood vessels again we know this
00:30:38
uh that Sugar damages the lining of the blood vessel and maybe the cholesterol is there to
00:30:46
repair that damage that theory that hypothesis makes a lot of
00:30:55
sense we have a lot of scientific evidence to support that theory yet that
00:31:00
theory got buried it got the other Theory one out that it was the cholesterol in the diet and like I said
00:31:07
it makes sense to go down that pathway and we can see how we started pursuing
00:31:12
that but we need to step back now 70 years later seeing that it's not working
00:31:18
and maybe saying that maybe it was sugar all along maybe it was sugar in the
00:31:23
first place do you believe it was sugar um I don't think it's only sugar I think sugar plays a large part in the process
00:31:30
and the way that I look at it is we have to look at what leads to Sugar building
00:31:36
up in our bloodstream and this is another important concept to understand because most people think oh well the
00:31:43
reason that we get high amounts of sugar in our blood is because we're eating too much sugar
00:31:48
and that's indirectly true but the reason that we end up really getting
00:31:54
high amounts of sugar in Arrow bloodstream is because our metabolic Health what we kind of started talking
00:32:00
about earlier gets broken so we have to look at what's breaking our metabolic Health if we really want to get to the
00:32:07
root of this problem okay let's let's look at the what are the markers then that my metabolic
00:32:13
health is broken how do I know sat here now because I there's a Girl Scout outside the studio and I just bought
00:32:19
some cookies off her so I'm trying to figure out whether I should eat them or go get a refund
00:32:24
um so how do I know if my metabolic health is intact because there's often been a debate you know people might
00:32:30
think it's just based on my my waistline circumference of my waist but I remember
00:32:36
reading once upon a time that like sumo wrestlers are significantly healthier than like most most Americans so what
00:32:43
are like how does One Look by looking at themselves understand if they are metabolically healthy or not yeah so you
00:32:49
know there is just by looking at yourself you may not be able to tell um but it turns out that your waist
00:32:55
circumference is one good thing you can look at in yourself and in general having a larger waist circumference uh
00:33:04
is an indicator of being in poor metabolic health is that the biggest indicator
00:33:10
um it's one of the five indicators um it's the easiest one for us to tell
00:33:16
just looking at it by ourselves the other indicators are our blood pressure
00:33:22
um so you know almost everyone when they go to the doctor they get their blood pressure checked every time and the
00:33:29
reason that we check people's blood pressure so commonly is because it is an indicator of health of metabolic Health
00:33:37
specifically some other measurements you can't tell just by looking at yourself you need to
00:33:44
get your blood work checked you need to see what the level of sugar in your
00:33:49
blood is what we call the fasting blood glucose level and then you do need to know what some
00:33:56
of your cholesterol levels are but importantly and this is one key thing
00:34:01
that I want people to understand is we're not focused on the cholesterol
00:34:07
measure that most doctors talk to you about what we call the LDL cholesterol or nicknamed bad cholesterol which is an
00:34:16
inaccurate nickname but not important right now we want to look at two of the other measures of cholesterol what we
00:34:23
call the HDL cholesterol again nicknamed good cholesterol and we want to look at
00:34:28
your triglyceride levels and when you look at those five measures those five
00:34:34
measures will tell you whether or not you're metabolically healthy or not but
00:34:39
the problem is as you were talking to you can't just look at yourself and know what those measures are you have to
00:34:46
put the effort in to figure out if you're metabolically healthy or not the
00:34:52
statistics are actually pretty shocking because we have statistics again here in the United States uh looking at data
00:35:00
from 2016 that show that 88 of the adults in the United States are not
00:35:07
metabolically healthy so when you look at those five measures they can't meet all five measures of optimal metabolic
00:35:13
Health that's nearly everybody that's nearly everybody and you can say well maybe it's all of the obese people
00:35:21
um but when you look at people who aren't overweight who aren't obese 50 of them are not metabolically healthy you
00:35:29
talk about this concept of being skinny fat yep in your book yeah I think my
00:35:34
friend called me that one day when he was trying to insult me um a couple of years ago what does what does skinny fat mean what is what is
00:35:40
that yeah so skinny fat um it will oftentimes be referred to as tofi thin
00:35:46
on the outside and fat on the inside and what that really means is that we have
00:35:52
internal fat around our organs specifically in our abdomen around our
00:35:58
liver around our pancreas around our kidneys that may not be obvious from the
00:36:03
outside um many of us kind of know what this looks like you know someone who's got
00:36:09
skinny arms and skinny legs not a lot of muscle but they have a little bit of the pouch in the middle
00:36:16
um that is skinny fat and again unless you're measuring it unless you're
00:36:22
looking for it specifically you might not pick up on that and
00:36:27
it is a big problem many people you know uh hypothesize that actually getting fat
00:36:35
getting obese on the outside is a protective mechanism um because it's really when you get fat
00:36:41
on the inside that we see the damage start to occur things like diabetes things like heart disease really start
00:36:47
to manifest when you get fat on the inside so you think being skinny fat is
00:36:52
worse from a metabolic Health standpoint than being fat
00:36:58
on the outside it very well can be and oftentimes the problem with the people
00:37:04
who are skinny fat is they don't get picked up on until we're much later in
00:37:09
the process until they're much sicker so that's one of the issues with being
00:37:14
skinny fat and one would only know if they were skinny fat really by going and getting some of those key metabolic
00:37:20
Health markers checked in terms of their triglycerides their their blood glucose levels Etc exactly
00:37:26
okay so I'm trying to be in that 12 percent
00:37:31
that of of people um that are metabolically healthy in that meet at least all five of the
00:37:37
criteria for metabolic Health there's I've had so many girls from this podcast recently that have talked to different diets the carnival diet keto you know we
00:37:45
talked about the Mediterranean diet a gluten-free diet vegetarian veganism it's a lot yep there's a lot you know
00:37:52
and my question to you and I know this isn't necessarily an easy question to answer but what is the diet that's going to
00:37:59
avoid my metabolic Health breaking down going to keep me off your operating
00:38:05
table and keep my health intact which diet should I go for Dr Philip
00:38:11
yeah so you know I go into it uh in the book and what I really tried to look at
00:38:17
was what are the common things amongst all those diets that will keep meta
00:38:23
people metabolically healthy or make people metabolically healthy and really it comes down to eating whole real food
00:38:31
elimination of processed food I think is the most important step if you want to
00:38:36
get metabolically healthy and remain metabolically healthy and within that framework there are lots of different
00:38:43
possibilities some people have great success as a carnivore some people have successes vegans you can do keto you can
00:38:51
do Mediterranean you can do Paleo you can do lots of things in between but
00:38:57
when you really look at what is the one commonality that we can point to that will
00:39:03
predict the best success of being metabolically healthy it's eating real
00:39:09
food eating whole real food what is whole real food yeah great
00:39:16
question because sometimes it's hard to tell these days yeah uh so the rule that I you know the the kind of rule that I
00:39:22
give people around eating whole real food is eat the things that grow in the ground and eat the things that eat the
00:39:29
things that grow in the ground um so these are going to be your plant products and these are going to be your
00:39:34
animal products so your pro animal products because I am very Pro animal products I actually think that when you
00:39:42
look at the balance between the two um you're probably better off eating more animal products uh than more plant
00:39:49
products and again that's something that goes very counter the mainstream narrative understand that as human
00:39:57
beings we evolved eating animals we evolved eating meat
00:40:03
our bodies are uniquely designed to process that meat
00:40:10
our bodies are not well designed to extract nutrients from plants and in
00:40:17
fact when you really look at the sort of evolutionary system what developed is
00:40:22
that the the animals especially ruminant animals with multiple stomachs they are designed to
00:40:29
extract nutrients from plants those nutrients end up in their muscle
00:40:35
in their meat and then we are designed to get the nutrients from the meat so I
00:40:41
do think that meat animal proteins are essential to
00:40:46
human health and yes being a vegan is going to be
00:40:52
healthier than eating a diet full of processed food the sort of standard Western diet but I don't think it's
00:40:59
optimal for human health ultimately quick one as you guys know we're lucky enough to have blue jeans as a sponsor
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been a fuel during Drinker for about four years roughly so much so that I ended up investing in the company and I
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play a role on the board of the company but they also very kindly sponsored this podcast and to be honest I've never said this before but he all believed in this
00:42:14
podcast before anybody else the CEO Julian um told me before we even launched the podcast how successful it would be and
00:42:20
that heel would back it and I absolutely have a huge amount of gratitude for them for that support but an even greater
00:42:26
sense of gratitude for the fact that they've helped me stay nutritionally complete throughout the chaos and hecticness of my tremendously busy
00:42:33
business schedule so if you haven't tried out here which I hope most of you have at least given it a go by now try
00:42:38
it out it's an unbelievable way to try and stay nutritionally on course if you have a hectic busy schedule and let me
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know what you think send me a tweet and a DM tag me let me know what you think back to the podcast
00:42:49
practice have you seen any recurring Trends based on people that have
00:42:56
consumed a vegan vegan diet yeah so I think a well-constructed uh
00:43:01
vegan diet a um what you know probably should be better called a you know Whole
00:43:07
Food plant-based diet um is a significant improvement over the
00:43:13
Western diet over the standard American diet over a diet with a lot of processed food and that's really what you see when
00:43:21
you look at the scientific literature around vegan diets it's an improvement
00:43:26
over the standard American diet but it's not necessarily optimal and
00:43:33
especially over the long term so the story that I see uh on a recurring basis
00:43:39
is that someone will be eating will really not be paying attention to what
00:43:45
they're eating they'll just be eating the food that's around them the standard Western diet and they'll be in poor
00:43:50
health because of that and they'll decide to make a change and because there's a lot of messaging
00:43:57
around it oftentimes a vegan diet is going to be the first one that they try and they're going to feel better
00:44:03
initially they're going to improve their health initially their metabolic Health markers will improve
00:44:09
over the long run it becomes fairly difficult to maintain a good vegan diet
00:44:15
you have to be supplementing there are certain essential nutrients that we cannot get from plants and no one argues
00:44:23
that the vegans don't argue it they just say okay I'm going to take my supplements it's hard to get the right
00:44:29
amount and the right balance of proteins and amino acids from plants and again if
00:44:35
you're supplementing you can do it so the people that I see have a long-term
00:44:40
success on vegan diets are often working very hard at it and they're very
00:44:45
carefully planning and like you said it becomes hard to do on a day-to-day basis unless you're really putting a lot of
00:44:52
energy into it in chapter 8 of your book you say our ancestors didn't evolve to
00:44:57
take supplements so we shouldn't be taking them either yep you believe that I do believe it I do
00:45:05
believe that any diet that's optimal for humans shouldn't require supplementation and so when I look at the opposite end
00:45:13
of the spectrum when I look at people who are doing a carnivore diet and eating all or at least primarily animal
00:45:21
proteins they usually don't require supplementation and they uh are thriving
00:45:30
on long-term carnivore diets and I think it's a more ancestrally consistent diet
00:45:36
and I think that it is um
00:45:42
in a lot of ways easier to maintain uh you don't have to quite do all of the
00:45:47
planning that goes into a vegan diet but ultimately I'm happy as long as someone is getting
00:45:54
metabolically healthy and staying metabolically healthy on whatever diet they're eating and so I don't I'm not
00:46:01
dogmatic I don't tell all my patients you need to be carnivore I work with people on vegan diets ultimately I want
00:46:09
to help people understand how to get metabolically healthy how to
00:46:15
maintain metabolic health and if they do it as a carnivore if they do it as a vegan if they do it somewhere in between
00:46:24
I'm happy for that and I believe that should be our measure of success when
00:46:30
talking about metabolic Health you know you lay out these seven principles that will help us achieve that
00:46:36
optimal metabolic Health one of them and the first one you say is to reframe Health as a system not a goal
00:46:45
what does that mean yeah so I think this is a real important first step in this process
00:46:51
um it's really the mindset behind it and when I say I want you to think of your
00:46:56
health as a system not as a goal um what I mean is that I don't want us
00:47:03
so focused on the short term which is one of the mistakes that I oftentimes
00:47:08
see around health so many people you know we kind of talked about it earlier will say
00:47:15
they recognize that they're unhealthy and they want to make a change oftentimes this is around their weight
00:47:24
and they'll set a short-term goal they'll say I want to lose 20 pounds and one of two things is going to happen in
00:47:30
that scenario you're going to make a bunch of changes hopefully you're successful you lose the
00:47:37
20 pounds and you say great I accomplished my goal now I can go back
00:47:42
to what I was doing beforehand because that's just the natural uh inclination I
00:47:50
think that we have as human beings um we don't want to continue to put that work in
00:47:55
um the other possibility is that you don't meet your goal you don't lose the 20 pounds because it's actually hard to
00:48:02
lose 20 pounds and you get frustrated and you give up and you go back to your
00:48:08
old habits so instead what I encourage people to do is think about their health
00:48:13
as a system and think about the habits that are going to support that system
00:48:20
it's a more positive way to think what are the habits that I can adopt to
00:48:26
support my health more sustainable people can do that over
00:48:31
the long term because when we're doing positive things to improve ourselves we
00:48:36
can do that over the long term if we're taking away things if we're restricting
00:48:41
ourselves we aren't very good at doing that over the long term number four of
00:48:47
your seven principles for metabolic health is about exercise um in the book if I remember correctly
00:48:54
you say that exercise isn't the best approach isn't the only approach one should consider when thinking about
00:49:00
dropping weight and reducing waist size a lot of people might be surprised by that
00:49:06
yeah so um some of the concepts that I talk about in the book around exercise
00:49:11
um the way I uh phrase it is I want you to get more activity um one of the mistakes that I see people
00:49:18
making is that they um focus on doing periods of exercise
00:49:25
they say I'm going to go to the gym and work out for an hour I'm gonna go running you know for an hour and they
00:49:31
don't pay attention to getting enough activity throughout the rest of their day uh so
00:49:37
um I try to get people to refocus on just getting more activity throughout your day
00:49:43
and then when it comes to your exercise and your metabolic Health the most important part of building metabolic
00:49:51
Health through exercise is going to be building and maintaining your muscle
00:49:57
muscle is very unique when it comes to our metabolic health
00:50:04
muscle is metabolically active throughout your day
00:50:11
and so when you focus on building and maintaining muscle it's going to better
00:50:17
support your health your metabolic Health than if we're just trying to do the
00:50:24
cardio exercise and burning the extra calories during that time that we are exercising because you say here on page
00:50:31
72 keeping in mind that research shows cardio is an unreliable tactic for fat
00:50:37
loss that's a shock to most people because we've been taught that cardio is everything right
00:50:43
so when we look at the science around cardio um you know chronic cardio exercise uh
00:50:50
what most people think of as jogging or running at the gym we see that it doesn't help for weight loss doesn't
00:50:56
help for fat loss and that's why I don't want people to focus on cardio
00:51:04
um and you know when we look at the macro level of this we have more gyms today than we ever
00:51:13
have people spend more time at the gyms doing cardio than they ever have and yet we
00:51:21
have a worse obesity problem than we ever have so cardio is not effective for weight loss science
00:51:28
is pretty clear on that doesn't mean that cardio doesn't have benefits and I'm not telling people stop all the
00:51:35
cardio that you're doing I just don't want people to think that only by doing cardio are they going to be able to lose
00:51:42
weight and lose fat and have long-term success around that why you know I think
00:51:49
that surprises people because you know when I do cardio um I sweat yep and I can feel it just it
00:51:55
feels like the fat is melting and it's pouring off my skin so I'm like you know I must be losing weight right but so it seems like a bit
00:52:02
of a head spin that that that's not helping me lose weight why isn't it helping me lose weight yeah there are
00:52:07
two reasons that it doesn't help you lose weight number one is uh for most people after they do a lot of cardio
00:52:13
they get hungry and they eat more so they kind of counter balance whatever
00:52:19
extra calories they may have burnt off uh doing the cardio
00:52:26
is that is that inbuilt or is that just you know is that the brain I think it is
00:52:32
I think it's our body's sort of homeostatic mechanism um and the other problem
00:52:40
um with you know thinking you're going to uh lose weight
00:52:45
just by doing cardio is it's really relying on the calories in calories out
00:52:52
model so again the underlying assumption there is that if we just burn more
00:52:59
calories um that will compensate for the extra calories that we've been eating and
00:53:05
again we see that that doesn't work over and over again we know that our body
00:53:11
actually adjusts the amount of calories that it burns and if you go and you do
00:53:16
that hour at the gym during that hour you're going to have burnt more calories but during the other 23 hours of the day
00:53:24
your body is actually going to burn less calories to make up for that
00:53:31
well that's bad news isn't it that is bad news uh and you know the extra point
00:53:37
there is when we build muscle muscle build muscle burns more calories
00:53:42
throughout the day so that's the other reason that the focus on muscle building
00:53:47
is really the most effective way uh to exercise your way to weight loss so
00:53:55
okay so weightlifting you would advise as a preferential way to lose fat and
00:54:02
improve our metabolic Health versus just like going for a jog right even if I'm burning 500 calories on my jog versus
00:54:09
500 burning 500 calories doing weight lifting you think that the weightlifting
00:54:14
calories burnt are more important for weight loss than the jogging calories yeah so when we look at the science
00:54:20
around uh building muscle resistance exercise as I said we see two unique
00:54:28
benefits to building muscle number one is that that muscle is going to be more
00:54:34
metabolically active tissue that we're going to have on us all the time so we're going to be burning more calories
00:54:40
throughout the day despite you know the activity that we're doing but aren't we just going to get
00:54:46
more hungry um we don't seem to get more hungry from those uh I guess from that metabolic
00:54:54
activity it's not the same as doing the cardio making us more hungry
00:55:01
the other unique thing about muscle though to understand is that as we age
00:55:08
the more that we are able to maintain muscle the better quality of life that we have
00:55:14
and the longer we are going to live and again this has been shown in uh repeated
00:55:20
studies many different areas heart disease included that building and
00:55:26
maintaining muscle as we get older is one of the best strategies for living longer and for living better it's a bit
00:55:33
of a downward spiral though isn't it because you know I get older maybe I'm a little bit more inactive maybe I retire
00:55:39
um and then I lose muscle and as I lose muscle I become more inactive and the spiral the cycle continues
00:55:47
so that you know but it doesn't need to be that way we can maintain muscle uh
00:55:53
throughout our older age and the key is to doing that is to maintain your metabolic health is to be eating enough
00:56:00
protein is to be eating whole real food and is to be continuing to do resistance
00:56:07
exercise resistance activities throughout your lifespan and we can
00:56:13
actually maintain muscle as we get older one of the ways in your book that you I said we should
00:56:19
um maintain on metabolic Health one of the tactics to maintain our metabolic health and stay off your operating table
00:56:25
is to sleep more and I wondered why why does sleeping more improve my metabolic
00:56:33
health yeah so sleep um really has again unique benefits
00:56:39
related to metabolic Health um when we sleep
00:56:44
um that's the time that our body is really doing that rebuilding uh process
00:56:50
that is so key to us maintaining Health um
00:56:56
we see a unique sort of uh two-way relationship between
00:57:03
sleep and metabolic health and this is important for people to understand this
00:57:10
when we are metabolically unhealthy our sleep suffers if you're not sleeping
00:57:16
well it can be a key indicator that you may not be metabolically healthy we also
00:57:22
know that people who sleep less are more prone to being metabolically unhealthy
00:57:29
um many different reasons why that might be but ultimately what I focus on is that
00:57:37
in order to be metabolically healthy you need to be getting enough sleep and if you're not getting enough sleep
00:57:43
it very well may be a sign that you are not metabolically healthy
00:57:48
can you give me maybe one hypothesis as to why that is why my metabolical health will cause my sleep performance to
00:57:56
decline well one obvious uh thing that we can point to is sleep apnea uh sleep apnea
00:58:04
becomes very common as you get metabolically unhealthy what's sleep
00:58:09
apnea uh so sleep apnea is basically when you stop breathing for short periods of time while you're sleeping
00:58:15
and we know it's very closely related to uh metabolic disease
00:58:22
I now have worked with many patients who have improved their metabolic health and
00:58:28
their sleep apnea goes away and again the traditional view on sleep apnea in
00:58:34
medicine is that it needs some procedure sometimes that's a surgical procedure or
00:58:42
it's things like wearing masks to treat the sleep apnea and what we don't do is
00:58:48
ask why we have that sleep apnea in the first place and again it seems to be related to our metabolic health and one
00:58:56
of the fairly consistent things that I see in people as they improve their metabolic
00:59:02
health is their sleep gets better and those that have sleep apnea it oftentimes improves or even goes away
00:59:09
completely when they improve their metabolic health and there's a weight loss component to that but we even see
00:59:17
this in people who aren't overweight they have sleep apnea they improve their
00:59:22
metabolic Health they don't even necessarily lose weight as part of that process and yet their sleep apnea goes
00:59:29
away when you were 40 years old you describe yourself as being morbidly obese yep did you have sleep problems
00:59:36
um I probably did I was never really diagnosed with it but my wife would
00:59:43
certainly tell you I I used to snore a lot right and you still have this any sleep
00:59:49
problems at all now no I don't um I no longer snore and I feel well
00:59:55
rested every morning when I wake up so I no longer have sleep problems you think
01:00:00
you no longer so we can never be certain for sure a chapter two of your book you
01:00:06
say that there's 12 deadly food lies and you highlight the 12 deadliest of those
01:00:12
food lies um one of them we've talked about already which is and that's the first one in the book which is that only obese
01:00:18
people are metabolically unhealthy um we've talked about that a little bit one of the the surprising ones
01:00:24
um out of the list is that you seem to have a have had a real
01:00:31
I guess perspective change over the years about the role of the profession that you're in and at times in your book
01:00:37
you seem quite critical of doctors I think even when you when you talk about the seven principles of metabolic health
01:00:44
number seven of those principles is you're encouraging people to get a doctor that understands it get a doctor who
01:00:51
gets it yep do you ever receive pushback from your own industry for being somewhat critical
01:00:58
of the way that this the system is designed in the perspective they have towards medication and medicating things and whacking them all once them all read
01:01:04
its head versus preventative measures yeah I certainly do get pushback
01:01:11
um but um and as you said I am critical of my
01:01:16
own profession because we as a we as the Health Care System we as medical
01:01:22
practitioners need to be asking ourselves are we doing good enough and
01:01:28
when we look at a society that everyone is unhealthy we touch on
01:01:34
the statistics before we can't absolve ourselves of that responsibility
01:01:43
for getting us to this point big food big food is part of it what is big food
01:01:50
in your view like what's how do you define that um it's the processed food industry uh
01:01:55
that's all around us it's the vast majority of what is presenting presented
01:02:00
to us as food these days when we walk into the grocery store when we walk into
01:02:07
the supermarket the vast majority of what's in there is not whole real food
01:02:13
it is not designed to support our health what's it designed for
01:02:19
profits for the food industry that's um that's pretty much alludes to
01:02:25
point number four in your 12 deadliest food lines you say the people who produce our food want us to be healthy
01:02:32
you say that's a lie they do not want us to be healthy well it's not that they do not want us
01:02:37
to be healthy it's that that our health is not a concern of theirs
01:02:43
they are an industry as an industry their goal is to increase
01:02:51
their bottom line is to support their profits they don't care whether or not we're
01:02:57
healthy is part of that and quite frankly they don't have a reason to
01:03:03
if you are a food company your goal is to get people to buy more food to eat
01:03:09
more food so what are you going to do you're going to design foods that make
01:03:14
people hungry more often and that's exactly what processed food does
01:03:19
the problem with these processed foods is that they're supplying us with
01:03:25
calories they're supplying us with energy they're doing that look basically
01:03:31
cheaply and yet they're not providing our bodies with the nutrients that they need so our
01:03:38
bodies are constantly seeking those nutrients
01:03:43
and therefore we find ourselves always hungry and that is the main problem with
01:03:51
processed food that we end up taking in an abundance of energy without meeting
01:03:58
the nutritional needs that our body is looking for what about fasting you've talked you know I I've often been I
01:04:05
think recently because we've had a few health food related fitness related guess on the podcast I've started thinking a lot about fasting so for
01:04:12
example yesterday I had one meal for the whole day um and I've stuck because I I sometimes
01:04:18
reflect I go in search of Answers by looking at how I assume our ancestors used to live right and I can't imagine that we were necessarily grazers do you
01:04:25
know what I mean I can't imagine that we were like cows in fields just eating all day every you know throughout the entire day exactly so it's accurate in your
01:04:32
view yeah I think that's very accurate and we you know ancestrally and even you know again we don't have to go that far
01:04:39
in history if most of us ask our grandparents or our great grandparents
01:04:45
depending on how old you are um how often they eat they're usually going to tell you two times a day maybe
01:04:52
three times a day the average person today consumes calories eight times a day
01:05:01
um and you know do the math if you're asleep for eight hours and you're eating
01:05:06
eight times a day you're eating every couple of hours what's the hum um the harm is that our bodies uh never
01:05:14
get the opportunity to burn the stored energy that we have and so we just end
01:05:19
up building up more and more stored energy and we reach that point where our bodies can't do that any longer and the
01:05:27
metabolic processes start to break how could you how good are you at
01:05:33
following your own advice um I think I'm pretty good at it these
01:05:38
days because I'm giving myself better I'm giving myself better advice in the past I wasn't good at following my
01:05:46
advice like I said you know I would tell myself all the time eat less move more count your calories eat a low-fat diet
01:05:53
and I wasn't good at maintaining that today I'm good at maintaining the advice
01:06:00
because it's better advice that I'm giving myself so I'm not going to sit
01:06:06
here and tell anyone that I'm perfect um you know this isn't a hundred percent of the time but it's pretty darn close
01:06:16
one of the things that I often hear when we have um you know Health experts or doctors or anybody that understands kind of our
01:06:22
physiology um our health at a deeper level or is qualified in that department What I Hear
01:06:28
often in like the the comment sections or from our audiences um I think they Search for nuance in the
01:06:35
advice that they're being given like they want to know you know can feel like you can feel like an expert a health
01:06:42
expert is saying don't eat the [ __ ] birthday cake your birthday's canceled yeah you know and no one wants to cancel
01:06:47
their birthday everyone wants to have the cookie from the Girl Scout that I just bought earlier on yeah like what
01:06:52
where is the like you know is there is there a middle point if we're talking
01:06:57
about this cardiovascular epidemic and this heart disease epidemic where is the like middle middle ground where I can
01:07:03
live my life I can eat the cookie from the Girl Scout but I can still be
01:07:09
metabolically healthy yeah so I think um that's going to vary
01:07:15
uh depending it's going to vary person to person this is why I think the metabolic Health measures are so
01:07:22
important um this is why tools like a continuous glucose monitor can be so powerful uh
01:07:29
because depending on your situation that answer is going to be different
01:07:36
um I can certainly tell you that you know nine years ago when I was morbidly obese
01:07:42
Every Girl Scout cookie I ate uh was making me more metabolically unhealthy
01:07:48
today uh now that I am metabolically healthy yeah I can have an occasional
01:07:54
Girl Scout cookie and it's not going to break the system do you want one um not
01:07:59
right now I bought three packs she was so persuasive anyway sorry yeah they are
01:08:05
um so you know ultimately this is why I Rely so much on
01:08:11
the metabolic Health measures um this is why I want people to be paying attention to these things uh
01:08:18
because each of one of us needs to figure out how we can improve our metabolic Health
01:08:25
um what I find what's most interesting I guess I'll say about this and this is
01:08:33
personal experience and this is also the experience that I have with my patients is the more metabolically healthy you
01:08:41
get the more you want to remain metabolically healthy when we figure out how to properly fuel
01:08:49
our bodies and we figure out what we should be feeling like on a day-to-day basis we don't want to go back to being
01:08:58
unhealthy we don't want to go back to feeling like we used to when I think about what
01:09:07
the struggle it used to be for me to get through a day as a busy heart surgeon I
01:09:13
would be tired all the time I would be in a bad mood I would be hungry all the
01:09:19
time and today being metabolically healthy that's no
01:09:24
longer the case I have abundant energy to make it through my day people will
01:09:29
listen to this advice the information you give your book you know this podcast the listen to it and then a lot of
01:09:36
people will make zero changes as a result of it I mean you must have seen that in your practice over and over
01:09:41
again where maybe you have recurring patients you're saying the same thing to every day and you you know that them the
01:09:48
health markers as it relates to metabolic Health are getting worse and worse and worse why don't we listen
01:09:56
ultimately I think we don't listen because we don't believe that it's
01:10:03
possible to be healthy anymore I think one of the biggest problems I see is we look all around us
01:10:12
and we see that everyone's unhealthy and we just assume that we can't be any
01:10:19
different well if you if you're one of those 88 percent who look around and see you know people
01:10:25
everyone I mean everyone you must look out nine and ten will be metabolically
01:10:30
unhealthy so you must think that's the norm the bar must be lowered per se exactly
01:10:36
um what I want ultimately you know we started talking about the mission that
01:10:41
I'm on and the mission that I'm on is to give people hope for them to understand that they can be
01:10:48
healthy that they don't need to end up on my operating table that they don't need to be relying on the pharmaceutical
01:10:56
industry for the last half of their life
01:11:01
um on that point though if the forces that stop us from heeding the advice we're given and that we know to be true
01:11:06
it's not that I think a lot of time people know this stuff like they know that certain foods are good certain foods are bad we're at that point now in
01:11:12
the kind of public Consciousness as it relates to health where if you walk me through a supermarket I think I'm
01:11:19
probably at the point now where I can say listen I know that's bad I'm gonna get it anyway but I know it's bad um but also you could walk me through
01:11:25
and say you know the aisle where you have whole foods that have been grown in the ground or the aisle where animals
01:11:32
who eat the stuff that's growing in the ground are and I know that's good for me but as it relates to like the forces the
01:11:37
psychological forces that are stopping me from eating that food every day what are those forces I'm assuming
01:11:44
there's a chemical component to it there certainly is we we have the data you
01:11:50
know that processed food is addictive you know sugar is addictive
01:11:55
um you've probably heard you know uh that sugar is more addictive than heroin
01:12:00
and that comes from studies uh where they look at uh you know the addiction
01:12:06
centers in the brain and how much they light up uh with these different uh chemicals and there's evidence that
01:12:12
sugar is as addictive if not more addictive than heroin and sugar is like an everything sugar is in everything the
01:12:20
food industry again they know this um it's not an accident uh that the most addict what
01:12:29
may be the most addictive substance on the planet is in everything they're
01:12:34
trying to sell us it's there for a reason if I give up sugar today
01:12:40
like a drug like heroin is does it does the desire for me to have it again Wayne
01:12:48
over over time to the point where I won't have the compulsion to go grab
01:12:53
the cookies anymore my personal experience is yes it does you know I can I can certainly say today uh you know 10
01:13:02
years ago if you had asked me do you want the Girl Scout cookies the answer was always yes uh today I can say I can
01:13:10
live without the Girl Scout cookies um so yes I I I do know that that uh
01:13:17
like any other addiction um after a period of time uh it becomes uh
01:13:26
less of a temptation we'll see how you respond to the cookies when the cameras stop rolling and we
01:13:32
have a a new little tradition that we have started on this podcast these are
01:13:38
called The Diary of a SEO conversation cards right so at the end of every podcast our guests for the last couple
01:13:45
of years have written a question for the next guest in this book we've now turned
01:13:50
them into these conversation cards you can see on the back of the conversation card a QR code where you if you scan it
01:13:56
you can watch the answer and find out who answered it and on the front it has
01:14:02
the question written and the name of the person that wrote the question so you can play these at home with your friends if you want to have the kind of
01:14:07
conversations we have here on the Diary of a CEO get a little bit deeper with them and hopefully build your
01:14:13
connections with them now usually what I do is I spread them out in front of you and I let you pick one but I'm actually
01:14:18
going to stitch you up so I'm gonna pick one for you to answer are you up for it I'm up for it okay let's do it let me go
01:14:26
for one that I think will be difficult okay here we go this is the one I've
01:14:32
picked for you I might pick another one we'll see
01:14:39
so the question is tell me something you have never told anyone before and that
01:14:46
was asked by Gary Neville
01:14:53
I am not sure that I can
01:14:59
solve the problem that I'm trying to solve I'm not sure that I can complete the
01:15:05
mission uh that I now know I was put here
01:15:11
to fulfill our problem
01:15:17
around health might be too big for me to solve
01:15:24
but I'm not going to stop trying do you think it's too big for us to solve like at your core do you think
01:15:31
we're going to change direction as a society do you do you honestly believe that based on everything you know big food
01:15:39
big Pharma the way the human brain is wired the direction of travel of humanity
01:15:44
do you really believe people are going to stay off your operating table
01:15:50
yes or no answer yes I do believe it
01:15:56
but I am concerned the effort
01:16:03
I'm concerned that we have gotten too far down the pathway that we may not be
01:16:10
able to truly solve this problem I think ultimately
01:16:20
not everyone is going to be able to
01:16:25
extricate themselves uh from the situation that they're in are you
01:16:30
married I am married have you you live in Florida right I do go to a nice house in Florida I imagine you do as a heart
01:16:36
surgeon it's pretty nice house if I had if I asked you to bet
01:16:42
the person you love and your house in Florida on whether we'd be in a better position
01:16:49
in terms of the Health crisis and our overall metabolic Health in the
01:16:55
Western World in a better or worse position in 50 years time
01:17:01
which way would you place your house and your wife in 50 years I'm gonna bet we're gonna be
01:17:07
in a better position because if we're not in a better position in 50
01:17:13
years we're not going to have a society left and that I truly believe what do you
01:17:19
mean by that I mean that we are literally collapsing
01:17:25
under the weight of our own health problems and if we don't change the
01:17:30
course in the next 50 years I worry that for my children
01:17:39
there isn't I worry that for my children
01:17:45
there aren't going to be enough healthy people left in the world to maintain Society for us
01:17:54
have you ever had any psychological support for because because if I had
01:17:59
your job I think I'd have a lot of sleepless nights and I reflect on that conversation you had to have with that
01:18:05
30 year old mother with the kids have you ever sought out psychological support or had therapy to support you
01:18:12
with the weight of that what I would describe is trauma
01:18:17
I haven't um the way that I think I am able to
01:18:22
deal with it is there are lots of positives you know there's another patient
01:18:30
whose life I can save uh or whose life I can improve and
01:18:37
fortunately I guess this the statistics are in my favor
01:18:42
um the vast majority of the time the surgeries that I do turn out well and the patients do survive and I have
01:18:49
improved their lives and I get that positive feedback you know
01:18:55
they come back and they see me in the office um they
01:19:01
are able to express to me their thanks for improving their lives
01:19:08
so in the end I know I'm having a net
01:19:13
positive in the world but it doesn't change how hard
01:19:19
it is when we don't get the positive outcome that we're looking for
01:19:25
Philippa I would have to agree I think that you you definitely are having a positive impact in the world and I think your your approach to targeting the root
01:19:33
causes of the problem as opposed to just the problem itself once it's sometimes too late
01:19:38
um is an important conversation that we need to be having and you know people people must wonder why I've had so many
01:19:43
of these like health related food related um conversations and on this podcast and
01:19:49
it's because I'm I'm on that Journey as well I'm on the um on the road to learning more about
01:19:55
how I can live a not just a longer life but a fuller life
01:20:01
you know life extending my life is one thing but adding quality to my life over
01:20:06
that extended period is in my view probably more important because I have no interest in living to 100 if I'm
01:20:12
gonna be um if I'm not going to have Mobility if I'm not going to be able to walk up the stairs and if I'm not going
01:20:19
to be able to enjoy the life that I've extended and so I really love having these conversations about how we can all do
01:20:25
that together and as I said recently I think when I'm speaking to a health expert or speaking thing I'm speaking to
01:20:30
Simon sinek I said all of these things you know food Health cardiovascular health all of these things are
01:20:36
fundamentally related to us being better as humans whether it's as entrepreneurs or actors or artists or whatever we want
01:20:42
to be the the foundation the First Foundation of Our Lives is is our health without it we have nothing and if my
01:20:49
health were to to go because of decisions I've made or because of chance or luck or genetic heritability whatever
01:20:55
it might be um everything I am everything I've built everything I love my dog
01:21:00
my team this show would unfortunately come to an end I'm sure they're trying to replace me
01:21:05
but I would all unfortunately come to an end and so that means that your work is
01:21:10
um the most important work anyone can do in my view because it is our first foundation so thank you for doing that work Philip we have a closing tradition
01:21:17
on this podcast you've answered one of our Stitch of questions already but the last guest always leaves a question for the next guest in the diary of the
01:21:24
CEO and the question that's been left for you is
01:21:30
what advice did you get from someone earlier in your
01:21:36
career that you followed but now
01:21:41
in hindsight wish you hadn't and why oh I love that question
01:21:48
that is a great question call them out Philip Magic
01:21:55
so I'm gonna say that the advice that I had followed earlier in my career that I
01:22:01
had gotten from my mentors that I wish I hadn't followed was
01:22:08
to stay in my Lane um many times in medicine we
01:22:18
are we pick our specialty I chose to be a heart surgeon
01:22:25
and the advice was always
01:22:30
just to focus on doing the heart surgery and what I realize now is that
01:22:37
I need to be treating the whole patient I need to not only be thinking about the
01:22:44
heart surgery that I'm doing or that I've done on that patient
01:22:49
but I need to be thinking about the whole patient and why they got there in the first place
01:22:56
and what we can be doing to change their course working further Upstream working further
01:23:04
Upstream addressing the root cause of their problems and
01:23:10
even after they've been on my operating table I don't want them coming back I don't
01:23:17
want heart disease to continue to be a problem in their life so
01:23:24
I realize now and I try to implement now uh that I am
01:23:32
addressing that whole person and I'm not just addressing their heart disease
01:23:38
well Philip I hope you're the best of luck in your mission and I I am I do believe that in 50 years time because
01:23:45
I'm an eternal optimist I do believe that will be in a very much better place as it relates to metabolic Health in
01:23:51
part because of the education and the information that people like yourself are committing their lives to sharing um
01:23:56
your book is fantastic thank you for writing it very accessible um for someone like me who might not know the most about cardiovascular
01:24:03
health but I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed our conversation today so thank you thank you [Music]
01:24:16
oh [Music]
