Dr. Frank Lipman Reveals an Alternative Approach to a One Size Fits All Medical Mentality

you can sign up for outgrow at outro dot co forward slash tom that's outro dot co forward slash tom and get a special 30-day free trial with no credit card required start taking action today and check out outgrow right now all right guys take care and be legendary and when you stimulate mtor it inhibits autophagy which is your self-cleansing mechanisms so it actually works against you in terms of aging hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i'm here with dr frank lippman dr frank lippin welcome to the show thank you for having me i'm really excited man i read your book it was really prescriptive and that is something that i respect a lot i think taking you know with every day that passes it seems like health gets more and more complicated and the way that you were able to distill it down and actually tell people go do this i thought was really powerful and the new book of course are the new rules of aging well which i'm very excited to talk to you about but i actually want to start back in apartheid south africa the insights that you have around like what apartheid is and what it stood for and why it doesn't work when you begin to extrapolate into things like medicine i thought was incredibly powerful so what was it like growing up in apartheid and what did you take away as you went into medicine well you know i grew up in uh and i was born 1954 so i grew up in the 50s and 60s in south africa during apartheid but i grew up with very very liberal left-wing parents so i sort of grew up knowing that the system was rotten so you just start questioning everything and the medical system was just another system to question um one thing i heard you give a talk and you said that apartheid stands for separate and then coming into the western medical establishment you said that same notion of the separateness of not treating the body like a holistic thing and that same and i assume that's what you mean when you say that the system was rotten so one how did you begin to realize that did you hone in right away on that separateness the way that they were treating the the symptoms rather than the causes or was it when you got involved in acupuncture you began to learn a new way how did that happen i think you know you know i went to medical school you know my brother went to medical school and if you're a smart kid in south africa in those days you went to medical school i don't even question it um and in the beginning i got brainwashed like every other doctor thinking western medicine was the answer but then after my training i went to work in the bush and i got exposed to traditional healers called sangomas and i noticed that some of the patients we weren't helping that the sangomas were helping so it opened my mind a little bit to question the system or to realize that there may be other ways but i was still you know heavily brainwashed by western medicine and i thought that was the answer um and then you had to put your finger on what the brainwashing of the western system is how would you define it um i defined it probably as a cult you know what they do they in cults they deprive you of sleep they force all this knowledge into you and you've you're not really um asked or to question anything you just got to listen to to to the elders and you know follow the rules and that's sort of in a way i mean i know that's a bit of an exaggeration but that's sort of the way we trained in western medicine this is the way it is and you don't question it and and really the only tools we have in western medicine are you know pharmaceuticals or surgery so you don't think out of the box we're not really taught to question or think about are there other ways we're not really taught to really look for the underlying causes of a problem and we're not really taught to keep people healthy we taught to treat disease or serious disease so there are many shortcomings in western medicine now western medicine is fantastic if you're acutely ill or you break a bone i'm not knocking western medicine but to take that model and use and extrapolate that model for all you know all our problems in in the culture today is you know we end up with a very limited way of treating people in a very narrow way and if you're not prepared to see the shortcomings of the system then your patients suffer so all right we're back in the bush what were they doing that right i haven't got a clue i mean they were throwing bone they were doing weird stuff which i thought was quackery but because i was intrigued by the culture to me this was more interesting from a cultural perspective than a medical perspective um but i did notice that some patients that we couldn't help you know were sometimes getting better so it sort of was there at the back of my mind and then after that but i still thought african medicine was [ __ ] and there was nothing to it and then i went to work in a private practice in in the suburbs in white suburbia and i actually happened to work with a very hip doctor who happened to be the doctor for a lot of the detainees he was also very progressive and liberal um and uh he was also a little bit open and the the he had a part of his practice with sort of the artsy community of johannesburg so we'd have these artsy people coming in to me and they had seen the homeopath and they had gotten better come in and they'd tell me well my migraine i went to the homeopath and got better i went to the accu but there was one acupuncturist in johannesburg i went to the acupuncturist and my back got better so i was you know realizing that when i was seeing these people they were coming in with problems that i couldn't help in western medicine and they were telling me they were going to these quacks and they were getting better and i went to paul who was my mentor the doctor i was working with i said paul what the hell is going on you know and he laughed at me and he said you know people get better in spite of what we do your job is is to actually listen to them and support them with whatever they're doing and but but that started really opening my mind and then i immigrated to america because my wife and i didn't want to live under apartheid and i had to to get a license in new york i had to do three years as an in an internship and i got a job in the south bronx because they sponsored me for green card the south bronx in 1984 was pretty burnt out area full of crack addicts and heroin addicts and american doctors didn't want to work there so they were able to sponsor me for a green card and i started my residency there and after a few weeks i realized that i don't want to be a doctor in america because the medicine was very different in south africa we didn't have the money to do all these tests on people we had to take a really good history talk to people examine them and come up with some type of treatment protocol in america you just very quick history very brief exam you do a lot of blood you do an ekg you do a chest x-ray and then you read up about it and present it to the professor the next day there was no relationship the relationship with the patient was not emphasized at all and there happened to be an acupuncture clinic attached to the hospital doing acupuncture for detox and because i was so disillusioned with with western medicine i went to check out the acupuncture clinic and i walked into this clinic in this burnt out area in this room with about 20 chairs with these heroin addicts sitting quietly with needles in their ears and i went this is interesting you know these were the same patients in the wards that were pulling out their ivs and they were swearing at you i don't know if you've ever been around addicts getting off heroin or crack and they're pretty tough patients and in the wards you know we're treating them and they were really difficult to treat because you know they were aggressive and they were you know shouting and screaming and um you you had to sedate them and here i walked into this room and there were these 20 odd addicts sitting quietly with needles in their ears so for the next three years because i had to do three years in the hospital i started spending my time between the hospital where i seen acutely ill and you know sick patients and then going to the acupuncture clinic and checking it out so um i saw then that the future would be the combination of the two because the one was particularly good at one thing and not particularly good at the other and this and and vice versa so it was like a no-brainer i didn't have to think about it it was like so obvious to me that the the future is somehow combining the two and that was sort of the beginning of my journey the interesting part of that story though is that you go and present this stuff to your peers and they basically do reject it and they say this is crazy and if you go down this path it's basically going to be the death of your career so that to me when i heard you describe sort of the different ways of thought like you said western medicine you're basically thinking of the body as a machine and what ends up happening is when you're thinking from a pharmacological perspective when the czech oil light comes on you put a band-aid over it so you can't see it and whereas in the eastern tradition you think of it as a garden and when a leaf is brown you don't paint it green you go figure out what's wrong with the soil or whatever and i thought oh my god that's really a brilliant analogy and understanding there are times where you're gonna deal with the body like a machine like i imagine in the bronx you must have at some point dealt with absolutely acute traumas and things like that so um i just thought that was interesting and i heard you speak sort of reverently about surgery when somebody is in a position where that's exactly what they need and it borders on sort of miraculous and so now with that in mind what prompts you to write the new rules of aging like so many other things in my career it just happened because i just written a book called how to be well where i thought i put a lot of my information from the last 35 whatever years of practice into a user-friendly manual and i'd been starting to explore a lot of the you know there's been more and more research on aging lately and you know becoming aware of all this new interesting research on aging so i said well let's do a book on aging and that's how it happens so as you dive into it what what were some of those early things in the new research that's coming out that really caught your eye that people should be aware of that are you know if they either heed the advice or ignore the advice you know it's going to have significant impact on their life well a couple of things i've noticed you know we do in in my practice i measure a lot of biomarkers which are sort of the downstream measurements of lifestyle changes for for the most part and for instance as a holistic doctor in the early days i was sort of semi-vegetarian mainly pescatarian coming from south africa eating lots of grains lots of fruits no red meat i thought that was the way to go and i became pre-diabetic eating what i thought was a healthy diet were you overweight at that point or not i mean i've never been overweight but i had a bit of a stomach for me yes i was overweight but i thought that was just part of what it was yeah i had a double chin yeah i was i didn't realize i was overweight until i went on a paleo diet and i just automatically lost weight and felt fantastic and i said [ __ ] excuse my language this is interesting this sort of goes against what my thinking is eating a lot of fat and you know protein and grains taking grains out and um so i saw what happened to me and then i started doing it with my patients and i saw the excellent results with my patients and then i was going along happily and i started when i started getting to the anti-aging research you know i started reading about you know what some people are calling longevity genes the research was showing that uh animal protein too much animal protein can actually stimulate the mtor longevity gene which is not good for aging because that's the one particular gene you don't want to stimulate as you get older and i won't cause the cells to to divide too much what's the what's the problem the problem is animal protein the amino acid profile has got high methionine in particular lysine ii and a lot of methionine in particular stimulates this longevity gene and when you stimulate mtor it inhibits autophagy which is your self-cleansing mechanisms so it actually works against you in terms of aging until you're about 40 or 45 you're growing and you reproducing and you want to be strong and animal protein is actually a good thing um i'm not against animal protein if it's well sourced but once you start getting to 45 50 it's more about preservation and maintenance and the way to do that is you you actually want to keep that particularly important mechanism of autophagy going strong because a lot of things start your functioning starts decreasing as you get older a little bit so you want to preserve as much as you can so you don't so that functioning doesn't decrease as much as it normally would whether it's mitochondrial function or this self-cleansing mechanism self-cleansing mechanism is an important one so i started looking for what are all the ways to prevent that happening quicker you know first of all i started eating less than fasting you know i started looking for ways of of stimulating or triggering these longevity genes or the autophagy mechanism so i started fasting more now now i only eat two meals a day for instance um i don't eat as much and i still eat animal protein you know i'm not against animal protein i just don't eat as much so i don't think one has to stop but i do think you know it depends how old you are but when you get into your 60s you definitely don't want to lose muscle mass because muscle not only keeps you strong and and and vital as you get older but it also has a metabolic function you know everyone talks about losing um bone mass but sarcopenia the loss of muscle is really important as you get older so it's actually a tricky balance this protein issue as you get older but i think you've got to find that fine balance because you don't want to lose muscle mass and actually animal protein is is a good way of maintaining that so it's finding that fine balance you know i use a lot of collagen now because collagen animal protein coming from animal collagen um doesn't have high methionine so in terms of animal protein that's a pretty good protein to use for in aging so before we add anything new i want to go back through some of the steps so anybody listening can really begin to implement this so first we go from a pescetarian high grain lots of fruits diet causing pre-diabetic problems that we weren't really aware of we go paleo which i guess will sort of define as whole foods um higher maybe in protein and fat lower in the grains and carbohydrates we start feeling better i'm guessing your inflammation is going down your weight loss begins to happen sort of effortlessly um and now this thing around as we get older we have to be more thoughtful about mtor i want to i want to park there for a minute so if basically if there is something in animal protein in the amino acid profile of animal protein that triggers mtor and mtor disrupts autophagy for the first time i sort of really get why that then becomes problematic so i get why you say hey sometimes maybe animal protein but sometimes maybe not because of depending on your age sarcopenia you can go to the point where you're not you're triggering no mtor which means you're not building anything which means that now you can get yourself into a muscle problem and so you've really got to find that balance as you get older so right but i think what i do want to say because i don't want to you know we tend to reduce you know we're very reductionist in the way we think it's not just about mtor i just think that's a factor to think about rather than um the be-all and end-all i think it's just eff that's why i decreased my animal protein rather than saying animal protein is bad you know i don't think it's healthy when you're older just to keep growing and getting stronger and and building and building and building it's really that that idea of it's more about preserving and maintaining as we get older rather than growing stronger and stronger and precisely give your body a dangerous signal that could turn cancerous why would that be bad exactly so you don't want too many things that are abnormal to grow because if you're still into growth unfortunately sometimes cancers can grow too abnormal things can grow that's not exactly the idea so you want to sort of it's a fine balance and you know everything's working together how you sleep how you deal with stress how kind you are um if you have purpose in life um if you have gratitude so they're all these many factors working together it's not just about you know people who so rigid about their diet whether it's a paleo diet or a vegan diet i think it's probably more unhealthy i think just be smart about and be aware of it rather than be obsessed about it and why um you're saying that a vegan diet is more unhealthy than a paleo diet well for most people i would say that yes most of the vegans that i have seen as patients tend to be nutritionally depleted you know i have i have a couple of patients who are vegans and are really healthy i think that's more unusual than unhealthy people eating a paleo diet put it put it that way but you know once again i'm not i don't think there's one right diet for everyone i mean people fall into buckets though like yes it because i doubt it's infinite variability right so people begin to clump into types have you ever given thought to like is it five types 50 types i mean you're asking really interesting questions yet tom you know i think there are variations and i think it's affected by your age too i do think especially as we get older we need to eat less and as i said you know less produce i think the the general rule for me is we eating as few sugars and starches as possible is is sort of generic um then once you get beyond that for some people grains are fine for a lot of people i find grains are a problem so my generic diet for most people is sort of a paleo or low carb diet once we go from there it's like some people do better with some more you know i saw someone today who is on a keto diet and i've seen so many people do really well on a keto diet you know she was on the keto diet she couldn't understand what was going on and we did a genetic profile on her there's a genetic test i did and sure enough it came up that she had a difficult time with fats too many fats so now we're going to cut down her fats and she'll probably do a little bit better so i think you know my standard diet would be a low carb diet for everyone and then after that it's you know sort of the balancing how much fat how much protein what do you want to do if you want to lose weight sometimes just a high protein diet will do it so it all depends on what your needs are but you know once we get older i think eating less eating very low carb and and sort of balancing that protein need with your your muscle mass is is probably the most important but i always like people to think of food as something they enjoy i hate putting people on diets you know i think people need to learn to enjoy and their food and find a way of eating that's sustainable for them and you know we we're living in an interesting time because a lot of this can be measured ourselves you know the self monitoring you know the whole biohacking world is interesting i hate the word biohacking and i find some of the biohacking world a little bit too young and masculine but the idea of monitoring yourself and making changes accordingly is very empowering and very you know so i think it's all good i think it's how you do it and how you are with that information because we can't lose that aspect of our humanity you know you've probably heard me talk about ubuntu you know that african term what makes us human is the humanity we show each other you know as you get as i get older i'm less dogmatic more aware of of the subtleties in life and how important being kind is how important you know someone finding their passion whether it's with their kids or either work whatever it is all these these um these factors that we don't really talk about or think about as powerful as or as powerful as diet i mean i think diet and sleep and exercise are really important but are they more important than you know your humanity and whether you're grateful whether you have purpose in life so you know as you get older you start looking at the world in a sort of idea anyway starting to look at you know looking back and and thinking about so many of the people that were healthy and were unhealthy even some of the people who are eating really well exercising would get sick what is going on in their lives you start looking at these patterns and the pattern i'm seeing more and more of what i'm becoming more and more aware of is you know these these um intangibles being probably even more important than you know what we we look for in in someone's health in terms of what they're eating how they're exercising how they're sleeping i think sleep is another huge issue my next book's on sleep that's interesting yeah sleep is something that's very near and dear to my heart um as somebody who's professing a lot about working hard and you know very yang as you say but i always am i take time to tell people i sleep as much as i need sleep like i prioritize sleep right um it is it is a unique form of misery to be tired all the time and you're just not productive i do not understand people that just constantly sacrifice sleep but i want to push in on this yin and yang idea that you were basically just walking us through maybe not a name but i i have a feeling that that's exactly what you mean you've got the yang of like exercising and you know tracking data and making sure that your mtor is in the right place you know like really going in on it and then there's are you loving somebody are you connected to people are you grateful have you learned meditation and relaxation and what's interesting is and correct me if i'm wrong but i think you look at that as important not in some ephemeral way but like it's actually impacting you physiologically absolutely no question about it yeah and i think what's interesting and what's you know what's happening now with measurements you know whether it's the ora ring and these new measurements where we can measure blood sugar and we're going to be starting to measure more you know the self monitoring i think we're going to actually start becoming able to see how these yen aspects or these softer aspects are actually affecting all these other you know our sleep and how we feel you know in the past it was hard to put it all together or to to ascertain was it are you doing well because you really love what you're doing and you got you know you're part of a community and you have love in your life or is it because you changed your diet or are you sleeping better and i think now with self-money and i'm very intrigued i think this new age of medicine is going to be this whole combination of the blood biomarkers self-monitoring your genetics maybe doing you know measuring your microbiome and i think then the next wave is how do we put this together in a really sensible way to help people take care of themselves and let the doctors take care of acutely ill patients because ultimately you should be your own doctor and monitoring um what's going on in your life and making changes accordingly and i think it's sort of heading in that direction my friends to be legendary you need to build and grow an audience through powerful assessments and personalized content you can educate and build trust with your audience while improving conversion rates outgrow is a growth marketing platform that enables marketers to grow their audience by creating intuitive no code tools such as calculators chat bots assessments and quizzes outgrow co-founders started by designing a mobile app cost calculator and quickly saw the power of interactive tools they designed a sas tool called outgrow that any marketer and entrepreneur can build calculators and interactive tools with to improve their customer acquisition today outgrow is used by over 5 000 companies like salesforce adobe and marketo as well as creators freelancers and entrepreneurs it has a powerful builder with a wide range of embeds over 1 000 templates along with the analytics and integrations every modern marketer would want you can sign up for outgrow at dot co forward slash tom that's outro dot co forward slash tom and get a special 30-day free trial with no credit card required start taking action today and check out outgrow right now all right guys take care and be legendary yeah the one thing that i'm very curious about in your work is as we move forward and we're balancing this yin and yang and we're looking at both sides what are the things that we should be looking at are there certain biomarkers is there amount of time in the sun is there you know number of times per week that you're meditating or is it strictly blood markers like what are the things that we should be paying attention to that tell us we're on the right path right so the way i see this downstream you have your markers that you can measure and then upstream is these lifestyle changes or whatever you want to call them that are affecting those you know now we have continuous blood glucose monitors i think they're going to get more and more sophisticated in terms of what you can measure i think the next wave is you're going to be able to do a prick and you can measure probably 15 or 20 biomarkers you know we do lots and lots in my office which may or may not be necessary but i think the biomarkers are something that is just one aspect to measure then you can measure your sleep you know you can have your fit but there are many things you can measure and then you can make your changes your lifestyle changes whether it's changing your diet how you exercise when you exercise how you sleep um if you're angry and and fighting with your spouse if you not happy at work um and i think a lot of this can be done out of the doctor's office and i think a lot of it will be done out of the doctor's office which is exciting yeah one of the the things in there that i think is really interesting is that idea of beginning to track pattern recognition as it associates with blood markers my wife struggled profoundly with microbiome issues for years and the only real breakthrough came when she finally got religious about tracking what she ate and how she felt and once she started doing that you just find patterns that you never would have guessed exactly and there were things that you know her doctor told her would bother her based on an allergy test and they didn't and then there were things that she was supposedly fine with but just every time she ate it she would have an episode and so finally she was just like i'm just gonna trust like i eat this there's a problem whether i can identify why there's a problem or not is totally separate and so we ended up finding out even though she isn't gluten um she doesn't have celiac and doesn't even register as gluten intolerant if she eats gluten it wracks her stomach and then okay so you know it says she has an interesting thing so now we have much more sophisticated or sensitive tests for gluten so in the old days you used to do a celiac test which just tests two or three or four antigen there's actually a test you can do now it's called the wheat zoomer by vibrant wellness that actually measures 13 different gluten antigens and a lot of patients now that we're doing it a lot of patients come back with acetic ones negative but they're still sensitive maybe the glyden or something else in it so your wife's experience is actually not atypical um and the other thing i find about um the microbiome is you know you can be censored to a food and think you it's a food but it's actually your microbiome and you alter the microbiome whether you use antimicrobial herbs or whatever you do your sensitivity to the food disappears so it's very so this whole microbiome story and the gut story is fascinating and i'm obsessed with it in my practice i mean that's what we deal with all the time but i'm i'm seeing now some of the testing and and people's experiences are correlating more so we're interested we're entering a really interesting time in medicine i mean even in the last couple of years i think things have gotten much much more sophisticated which is exciting that's exciting um there's no one size that fits all i'm totally with you on that but just like with diet you were sort of ah like here's the thing i start with it won't work for everybody but this is sort of as close universal as we're gonna get i'm gonna lay out what i think is as close to universal for solving microbiome problems as possible and you tell me if i'm totally crazy you've experienced a lot more so if i had to if i had somebody and they said look i'm having gut issues i would say okay first of all you're all sugar's dead and gone stop with those refined carbohydrates those are gone um you're going to kill your sort of you're going to kill your nightshades you're going to only whole foods nothing that is nothing's gone anywhere near glyphosate first of all and then no uh no grain fed in any phase so grass-fed grass finish the whole nine that actually really matters if you're eating animal protein no vegetable oil and no soy products and did i say gluten if i didn't say gluten already no gluten right now that's about as universal as i can think of and no dairy right i think that is almost right my experience has been um because you know just clinically i'm just seeing this all the time i mean my practice is now full of a lot of young women in particular with autoimmune problems and what i've noticed is a lot of the time there's a microbiome imbalance there's either an overgrowth or whether we call it sibo or candida or there's is this imbalance in the gut that the diet alone will not address you need to use i start with herbs you you need to use antimicrobial herbs to sort of kill the bad guys that's very simplistic but it's let's leave it at that is there like over-the-counter stuff that we can get or is this prescription yeah a lot of this is over-the-counter this is where you start with um you know what we do is i usually use the a lot of the companies that are coming out with paired groups of these um well i use different companies but you sort of pair a mixture of antifungals antiparasitics and antibacterials together and you see how they respond because if you on the right track within two weeks or three weeks people will feel a lot better their gas will get better their bloating gets better um they start pooping better so you can actually tell clinically in a very short time it's not that you solve the problem within a few weeks but within two or three weeks you get an idea if you're on the right track and then once you see that on a path then you can maybe start adding probiotics maybe then you can maybe start adding prebiotics maybe or resistance starts uh the diet will always start off as you sort of talked about but you need to do more than the diet because the so many people come in with uh you know let's call it a severe imbalance in the microbiome that needs these antimicrobial herbs to actually treat them i'd say 70 percent of the young woman i see with autoimmune problems have a history of taking a lot of antibiotics as kids so my generation of doctors we over treated we used antibiotics so liberally when people when these young you know let's say 25 year old young woman was a kid she had so many antibiotics and that started altering her microbiome some people even probably start before if they weren't breastfed or caesarean section but for the most part it really starts with chronic use of antibiotics for chronic tonsillitis chronic ear infections chronic sinusitis acne urine tract infections on and on and on so that's a tragedy you know that's a real tragedy and you know i think it's changing you know doctors are less liberal with antibiotics but it has had you know severe negative consequences on a lot of people's health no question now there are a few things that came up in the book that i was surprised to see make multiple uh appearances one was mushrooms and one was cbd um yeah talk to me about i'm i'm more interested in in the cbd because of um i have struggled profoundly with anxiety and you mentioned that that can be pretty useful with anxiety um so if you give us like the the 30 second breakdown of mushrooms and then i want to get to cbd you know mushrooms are something that i've you know when you when you learn or you study chinese medicine mushrooms are have always been a part of um my training some of them have anti-immune effects some of them have brain like lion's mane is good for the bread so they have different effects i mean there's some interesting work i'm not i'm definitely no expert on mushrooms i'm just quite intrigued by them and um uh i use them a lot i use it myself and i recommend them but i'm definitely expert in one of my proteges one of the health coaches that worked under me father had pancreatic cancer and she went to help him and he's actually much better he's really done well and she was using a lot of mushrooms and cbd and thc so she also was someone who actually in combination like specifically mushroom cbd and thc together yes interesting so i know a little bit about cbd but not a lot when it's oral is it just a tablet well it can come in in various you know the various ways of getting it into you from from a cream you can put on to vaping to tinctures to tablets and the big things that i've seen it help with and and one of the few things that are as effective as cbd are for anxiety and sleep it also can help inflammation but the two big issues that i use it for a lot are anxiety and sleep it just sort of takes the edge off and certain strains and everyone's different the dosage people need and the strains people need seem to be different but when it when you get something that works it can be magic from the beginning i'm i'm less concerned with research although i think research needs to be done if i see something working i'll go for it and tell people to experiment i mean i've learned so much experience experimenting on myself and my patients you see what works the same thing doesn't work for the same you know for different people so you need you know why is an interesting thing but cbd is definitely one of those things the dosage differs um different strains i mean i have cbd next to my bed when i'm feeling agitated i'll pop some cbd if i wake up in the middle of the night i'll you know i'll put some under my tongue so i'm a yeah i love cbd so you take it in a liquid form yeah i take it because if you take it in a pill form it's going to take a longer time to be absorbed so it'll probably take a good hour to two before you start getting the effects if you take it with a liquid form you're going to get some sublingual absorption goes through the you know absorb through the mucous membrane so it works quicker and obviously vaping which i don't ever do will work the quickest and vaping is problematic because of the particulate matter going yeah exactly exactly so i have uh my wife has a loving relationship with thc i will put it that way and i've never understood it i always thought it was crazy i was like this just makes me feel like i want to be asleep and then now with the explosion of different strands and stuff here she had me try one that was supposedly like really creative and i'm obsessed anything that can help me be more creative i'm all for it so i tried it and i was like this is this doesn't even seem like the same drug that i had tried before and it's simply a different strand so i was like wow this is really interesting like there's so much to explore uh so i i've sort of renewed my interest in finding things that um that can alter your consciousness is maybe the right way to think of it i'm way too big of a chicken to do what they call the hero dose of mushrooms uh that does not strike me as something i'm ready for yeah it's interesting to be honest what i think also opened up my mind when i this is when i was much younger you know we did some quite a bit at night a lot but some lsd in south africa when i was still at medical school and finishing medical school and i think that may have you know it opens up your mind you start realizing that whoa this is interesting and now there's so much research using you know some institution and then for for depression and for all sorts of things so i think there's a whole area there that needs to be explored and there's something there it's not something that i do or know enough about or use for my patients so um but i do think there's something there to me that's just another medication right but you know with anxiety and sleep i mean sleep is such a common problem anxiety is such a common problem and you know for so many years it's been you know getting people to meditate which is very difficult and trying to to you know get them to deal with their stress um using some nutrients like l-theanine and gaba and then cbd comes and like people start taking cbd and like you're getting these interesting results so that's you know i'm always intrigued by new products or things like that so that's why cbd got so much uh um you know got a quite a bit more space in maybe something else in the book because i do think it's an important and relatively benign therapeutic tool that needs to be explored further so knowing that lifestyle choices are your first go-to if just in summary you had to put together three or four things that everybody should be doing whether it's cutting out sugar or more sleep whatever what are sort of your top three or four things that if everybody did it would help them age better yeah cutting out sugar more sleep meditation or something you know meditation doesn't have to be sitting on a cushion you know with a mantra your meditation could be knitting your meditation could be um being in the garden taking a walk sir but sort of something where you're getting out of your you know that busy mind i think that is you know really really helpful and i would put you know those things we talked about being kind to yourself being kind to others um having meaning in life you know having a passion for something is so it's probably the most anti-aging you know when i think of all my patients who've aged well they've all had some meaning in their lives and the meaning may have been their grandchildren it doesn't have to be saving the world you know but whatever it was it was really meaningful for them you know obviously exercise two is really important but i do think um these those softer aspects and that having meaning to me is like probably number one but not everyone can have meaning but you know i i think you know if you angry all the time and um you're not able to forgive and um you know all these little things eat you up and have an effect on you it's the ordinary things that we do on a daily basis that have an extraordinary effect on our health so when you start making habits of these little things like taking a walk in the forest going for a walk on the beach spending time in nature listening to music you enjoy being surrounded by people you love now these little things that we don't realize on medicine are just as powerful as any drug um so you know i think fasting as we get older to be quite honest eating less and and time restricted eating i think is is is an incredible we've seen incredible results with fasting in in our practice with measuring biomarkers especially whether we do an advanced lipid panel i mean we've seen remarkable results with people fasting i mean it's really interesting now usually it's not fasting and in the time that they're eating they're eating crap it's usually going together with a a much healthier diet but i mean these little things that you can do that are not expensive and make a huge difference and you feel the clarity i mean i was always a huge believer in having a big shake for breakfast and i used to put all my peanuts do breakfast is the meal you got to have a big breakfast and you're going to feel great the whole day i never realized how much clearer i was until i skipped breakfast and i started fasting and how much like you know if you want to see me as a patient come see me in the morning i'm really on so you know it's very interesting how we all get brainwashed to think a certain way and something comes up and you change and you go oh that's interesting and as you say monitor yourself see how you feel the proofs in the pudding you'll feel better you'll either lose weight or you'll be more clear um your sleep better i mean things you you definitely experience changes in the way you feel and to me that's what's important very well said man this has been a lot of fun where can people connect with you online do you have a social presence yeah drfrank lipman.com is a website drfranklipman.com and i have a newsletter which is very good i am on twitter um i am sort of on instagram my health coach does my instagram i don't really do it um mainly my website i do i post a lot because i want to get information out but i'm not the one who sits and answers and gets involved in in in social media per se i like to just put the information out and i'm you know i'm too old for that so don't expect me to answer you back on social media that that is fine given how much information that you're putting out there and i will say that um you know whether you tweet people back or not given how much amazing information is in not only the most recent book the new rules for aging well but your whole catalog is extraordinary and you know best sellers among them so highly encourage everybody to check that out and speaking of things you guys should check out if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your 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