Simple Fixes For A Good Night's Rest - Shawn Stevenson (4K)

Andrew hubman mentioned in an interview that I did with him recently that the potential mental health epidemic that we're seeing at the moment could be Downstream of poor Cadian Rhythm uh disregulated sleep disrupted sleep how much truth do you think's in that o circadian medicine is really top tier science right now we're synced up with the 24-hour solar day all of our hormone production our neurotransmitters we're synced up with what the universe is doing and the funny thing is can kind of hide out from that that interface but our our genes are really expecting us to be in constant communication with what's happening outside and humans are really interesting we can create our own habitats we're kind of like big hairless beavers or many of us are hairless um but even when we're creating it's still nature because we're a part of nature but we can essentially hide out and create a 24-hour day artificially and so our circadian Timing System is getting really screwed up so absolutely I agree with him and here's the rub right now in the United States estimated about 115 million Americans are regularly sleep deprived to boot out of 330 yeah so it's a sizable amount and we're talking about on a regular basis like essentially daily and my big thing is always looking for what is the connective tissue why should people really care about this and I always like to tie to metabolic health and how we look right and and a really fascinating study was done this was actually published by the American Academy of sleep medicine and they looked at people's Biometrics and use CT scans to look at their belly fat for 5 years tracking a group of people and they found that people who were sleep deprived gained over twice as much belly fat in that 5-year period and sleep deprived in this particular study was less than 6 hours a night all right so kind of there's something about six as being that sweet spot and by the way there is no cookie cutter amount of sleep that's one of those things that you know we just kind of drink eight glasses of 8 ounce water a day like it's very superficial is that the same for Shaq and for Simone bils it's going to be different and the same thing holds true with sleep it's not just the number of hours is the quality of those hours it's a lot like the calorie conversation you know yes calories matter but the quality of those calories definitely matter and I've been a big proponent in pushing into popular culture this term epic caloric contr controller recently which we can Circle back to and talk about but in particular with sleep I want to share one other piece too because especially right now in this energy equation and how important this is and some of your friends and colleagues as well like doc Dr Gabrielle L really good friend of mine we're looking at how important testosterone is not just for maintaining our muscle mass and our energy but for longevity and this is critical for men and women it's finally really shifting gears to be all-encompassing of humanity how how important testosterone is now listen to this this was published in 2011 in jamama the journal the American Medical Association top tier medical journal here in the United States and they tracked young men average age about 24 all right and they brought them into the lab and they put them in it's award study so they sleep deprived them for just one week all right so they basically got 5 hours of sleep for one week that one we period their testosterone dropped 15% all right now that might not sound like a lot but suddenly that's as if they're 10 to 15 years older as far as their testosterone production is concerned this is the power of sleep testosterone is right next to HGH our most sleep duration dependent hormon it's kind of like you're a human Tesla jacking into your charging station at night and filling up the testosterone there are things we can get little spikes during the day but basically when we get up testosterone's just going down and when we go to sleep it starts Rising again so if you are not performing in the bedroom or in the gym in the way that you want it might be because of how much sleep you're getting on a nighttime absolutely and it's always the first thing to go unfortunately you know and it's just part of our culture but fortunately things are are changing you know this has become a big part of our popular conversation especially in health circles and it tends to trickle its way out to the larger culture scape eventually but you know my first book book came out in 2015 I believe and it was the first sleep Wellness related book to become an international bestseller it had never been done before it's just like the public wasn't necessarily interested in that topic but I argue against that it wasn't that we're not interested in it we didn't know how much it mattered and it wasn't framed in a way that made sense and that's kind of my story going to a conventional University and having biology and having Kinesiology and nutritional science but really not understanding how how that is applicable to me as a human being right so when we're in biology and we're looking at the human cell my professor did not know nor had they made that Revelation nor did any other the students that as we're looking at the mitochondria that mitochondria is made from our meals as we're looking at the cell nucleus that's made from the nutrients that we eat as we're looking at the cell membrane it's made from our menu all of the things we're looking at is made from food and that inter space between our diet our sleep our movement all of these things are impacting the cells that we're actually building right down to the the level of the genes and for probably about 10 years now I've been really keeping my finger on the pulse of something called neutr genetics and neutr genomics so these are fields of science looking at how our nutrition is impacting our genetic expression and one of my mentors incredible incredible thinker uh Pioneer in epigenetics Dr Bruce Lipton he's a cell biologist and he really impressed that the term epigenetics into popular culture he's the guy and one of our early conversations he was sharing with me that you know when they did the Human Genome Project we just knew there was going to be like a million different genes for humans right because there there's bananas that have more genes than us there is corn that has more jeans than us they found about 25,000 jeans and and the question was how are we so diverse how do we look so different how our personality so different our different levels of health and functionality all these different things what's so remarkable about us that he highlighted for me is that with one epigenetic influence like a bite of food it can change a Gene's because in in school we were taught DNA to RNA to protein So eventually we're printing out proteins one bite of food can change what proteins are getting printed out to the variety of about 3,000 different options of what type of proteins are getting printed so basically copies of you that are getting printed out 3,000 options with one gene so that's the power of food it's the power of sleep these are the top tier things to pay attention to but we tend to run out let me get that new supplement let me get that you know whatever we're looking for all these external you know inputs but truly for my money I'm putting it on optimizing your sleep first and foremost and then let's work on the other stuff so you can be a badass while you're awake yeah the performance enhancer that you're looking for is not in a supplement store but it's at your bed time and your wake time what are what is it that's causing this Mass disregulation like I can throw Bro Science out there and guess what I think is going on but is there any longitudinal research looking at the average amount of time that people used to spend as sleep do now quality of sleep micro Awakenings REM deep Etc what are we looking at kind of uh across time with regards to sleep over the last 50 years o such a good question so as you know things have changed dramatically in the last about 50 years and one thing to to kind of transition into that and part of the reason that my first book sleep marter was so successful is that I understood the missing link between all this incredible insight and all the science we've gained the past 50 years and making it applicable for people which is we need to make this simple because it is and so coming from a conventional education I started off my career I've been in the field for 21 years now speaking in the language of Academia and a a little not so fun fact is that it takes upwards of about 15 years for us to have like a gold standard randomized Placebo control double blind study all the things it might affirm you know what we're talking about today with improving your sleep quality before it gets like put into conventional education all right it's a huge lag this is in the age of the internet all right it doesn't make any sense and so what I did was because of working with people which is very different than just again working from Theory which that can be true but it's different when you sit face to face with somebody and they're depending on you to help them to get where they want to be and I knew this really interesting secret about humans which is we want change we want change we want the results but we don't want to change much to get it and okay I'm going say that again we want change but we don't want to change that much we might not be happy with where we are who we are but we're comfortable with that and so changing too much at once creates so much turbulence and so we really what we would ideally want is take who we are now and give us the new body take this person give me the money right I don't have to qualify myself to have it and so knowing that this is the case I started looking for what are the lowest hanging fruits right what are the things people can do to optimize their Sleep Quality without having to turn their life upside down and so I was looking for things that were science-backed but very simple now saying all this to transition this this into this question in the last 50 years we've seen the onset of hustle culture right there's always throughout Humanity there's always been a certain Guild of people who are B quote burning the midnight oil and looking out and you know standing guard for our tribe and whatnot but that's a small sect of humans for the most part nighttime danger we don't see like other animals do like that lion can see you at night you can't necessarily see it we're not really hardwired for nocturnal activity with that being the case optimizing what we're doing during the day is going to help us to actually sleep better at night and that's really the key so one of my tenants is that a good night of sleep starts the moment that you wake up in the morning and understanding we've kind of devolved from our state of seeking shelter seeking Comfort at night in a safe place and waiting for the sun to rise basically so that things are safer now we've created this situation where we can basically like I mentioned earlier create a 24-hour artificial day and we can just be up whenever so this is a new opportunity for us as as people yes there were people back in the day they got they had a lot of candles you know but it's still very different we evolved even with fire for quite some time and that candle light here's a really interesting study and this also points to like one of the things that we can do to improve our Sleep Quality some researchers at Cornell took a test subject and put them in a completely dark room all right they wanted to track their actual Sleep Quality so they were looking at their their brain waves they were looking at what their brain was doing and they put a light the size of a quarter behind their knee and that was a n enough to throw them out of their sleep cycles so it was disrupting their Sleep Quality just by that light exposure behind their knee is that something special photo receptor modulation behind the knee or is this the same as if you did it on the palm of my hand or the back of my shoulder it could be pretty much anywhere because our skin from head to toe has photo receptors that pick up light and send signals to every other cell in our bodies but because this particular subject was so deprived of any light the very small amount of light was we have no signal oh we do have a signal and it's behind the knee yeah and we will follow that based on and we will then run the Cadian clock off that because our all of our other CS are trying to figure out what time is it yep right there's this light coming in the me knows ni yeah yeah all right I knew a girl named ni so here's the thing when we understand this really remarkable influence if you talk even with you know Andrew huberman in our conversation really talking about this Advent this new term called light pollution and how light is top tier as far as really syncing up our our cells our biology with all of life right I mentioned that we're kind of lined up with a 24-hour solar day and so it's light is really the kind of tip of the spear and so using that to our advantage recently because we simply didn't know we just started consuming you know like there's a lot we're in the Golden Age of Television there's a lot of great stuff to watch we got our devices and you know we got fomo there's also there's so much going on we don't want to miss out and so we're constantly having this influx of light information and it's completely throwing our clocks off I know it when I'm in the studio for example all day under artificial lights I can have I see a noticeable detriment to my Sleep Quality that night it just it is what it is and I do but now of course I know little things that I can kind of help to optimize this and so pointing to a tip like what is one what are one of the things that we could do knowing that our SK and by the way let me give a very logical example when the sun is hitting your skin it can literally change the color of your skin all right you have photo receptors that are picking up light all the time all right and the Sun is very different though the the Lux the the the power of that light is so so otherworldly it is such a special thing man like it's like that's how we have life here and now we of course in our culture we've been sort of programmed more so to fear the sun right and so we need to have more balanced perspective but at the same time of course respect it is very powerful with that being said it's not Moonlight that disrupts in the same way that artificial lights do which the moon can seem kind of bright like it's a bright but it's the Lux of that light the way that it's the way that that light is emanated we evolved with that as well it's like cellular data that makes sense like it's nighttime Andrew said that fite doesn't disrupt Cadian Rhythm there it is very simple and so if we look at what we have had thousands upon thousands of years next to as far is a light that we create well not that we created but we can generate with fire that is a different Hue right it's kind of this orangish reddish like it's a it's a softer tone of light and so if we do want to have some form of light in a room maybe like a a good salt lamp or something on a low dimmer for NightLight versus the bright ass like NightLight that my grandmother gave me you know so here's my point one of the best ways and the first way that I noticeably improved My Sleep Quality and it was one of those launching pads to writing the book in the first place is when I got some blackout curtains for my room all right total darkness never really slept in total darkness before except when I was at like if I go to travel to speak at an event and they had like a really nice hotel room and the blackout curtains just like man this this and I would attribute it to the place like this place is great but it's the Sleep Quality that happened in that environment and so I got some blackout curtains and that night man my sleep was phenomenal and so if you are okay with the dark which most of us are but of course some people have you know some neuro associations where they want to have you know maybe a little bit of light that is one of the fastest ways to improve your Sleep Quality because melatonin requires basically two prerequisites one is darkness and the other is kind of a cyclical nature right being able to be produced at the same time essentially closely dayto day this is why we have this new term of social jet lag as well where you know again we kind of stick to a routine but on the weekend everything is like whatever and then we have that lag on Monday you know you got a case of the Mondays it's not the fact that we're going back to work it's that man my my whole [ __ ] is thrown off and I'm sleep deprived now we'll get back to talking to Sean in one minute but first I need to tell you about element element is a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium you need to stop having coffee first thing in the morning because your a Denine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt act on your adrenal system I used element for years before I started working with them because it tastes fantastic and it helps to optimize brain health it regulates your appetite and it curbs Cravings just because you're drinking water does not mean that you're properly hydrated you also need the electrolytes to carry that in your body best of all they have a no BS no questions asked refund policy where you can buy 100% risk-free And if you do not love it for any reason they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box that's how confident they are that you love it head to the link in the description below or go to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom Beyond light pollution which I think everybody can kind of see 50 years uh you know go back 100 years I don't even think that you would have had uh lights within the home be widely available Advent of radio which is stimulation but no No Light TV devices blue screens tons and tons of screen time what else have been the biggest changes I mean you mentioned even sort of cultural impacts like sort of the desire to hustle and grind um what else do you think have been the biggest movers and changes aside from light pollution over the last 50 years such a great question you said the key word you said the c word culture culture exactly let's Define culture culture is defined as the shared attitudes values beliefs and behaviors of a group of people passed from one generation to the next all right culture is functioning as an invisible hand that's guiding our decisions here in the United States we have aspirations of Freedom we believe that we are totally free but our freedom is based on the choices that we've been exposed to in our culture there are certain choices that we don't even know exist y you're free within the constraints of what you're aware of exactly because even our Cravings are cultural the food that We crave is cultural it's based on the things that we've been exposed to there are people in other cultures who crave different things because that is what has been impressed upon them is human food like there are folks in Cambodia that will gladly eat a deep fried tarantula and it's real talk you know it's a real thing delicacy have you had it before no have you no I haven't no but apparently tastes good all right there are folks in Iceland eating fermented shark you know there's folks in Kenya eating yamacha barbecue goat meat all right the list goes on and on some of these things might seem very strange to us because here in our culture and you ask what another one of these big changes are according to the bmj and we're talking top top tier peer-review Journal approximately 60% of the average American adults diet is now made of ultr processed Foods all right humans have been processing Foods forever for thousands of years cooking a food is processing the food whether it's cooking a steak baking a sweet potato taking ovs and pressing pressing the oil out that's all processing but those are minimally processed they're not denatured so much that you can still tell where they come from they still have a essence of something real Ultra processed foods on the other hand is when you see a field of wheat and somehow some way that becomes [ __ ] Pop-Tarts you see that field of Wheat and it becomes Frosted Flakes right it's like where if I was to present that box of poptarts or those frosted flakes to someone living in Cambodia or like a rice Patty in Thailand and just like where did this come from they're not going to have any clue at all because it's like it's not real that doesn't come from anything real and so not to mention the processing that it takes yes but let's not forget about all of these newly invented synthetic ingredients that are added along the way how's this impact our sleep oh such a good question this is such a good question so there's two really interesting things that is coming out in the data so one part is what we're not getting all right there are certain you can have get sleep in darkness you can have the most fancy pants mattress you can you can check all the boxes for all the things but if you're deficient in the key nutrients that build your sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters you are still going to have disrupted Sleep Quality if you don't have the stuff that literally builds the stuff that makes the magic happen you're going to have problems and I saw this again and again and again working with real people in the real world just for example vitamin C so a lot of folks of course we know about vitamin C for your immune system all right now that is putting vitamin C in a very piffy box it's responsible for so many things for our skin Health it's a big contributor for our skin Health but it is a huge contributor to our Sleep Quality and one study was published in PL one Public Library of science one and they uncovered that folks with a vitamin C deficiency were more prone to disrupted sleep they didn't have problems falling asleep but they had problems staying asleep and so knowing this what we tend to do is like I want to make sure that I'm getting my vitamin C in and we get a vitamin C supplement I went to a conventional University I had the big Auditorium nutritional science class I paid for this [ __ ] I paid for this miseducation I'm about to tell you in that class we were taught very rudimentary things and for and foremost based on the food pyramid all right so I went to college in the late 90s that's when I first went to college and within this they said you know my teacher would be like get the Hallmark of the diet 7 to 11 servings of healthy whole grains and make sure also that you recommend for yourself and patients if you work with people to take a multivitamin to get all your vitamins and minerals and so I was taught that vitamin C is one thing and I can just get it from this multivitamin of course there's vitamin C and Foods as well but what we were not taught and what most people unfortunately have not realized and that's changing today in this conversation is that there isn't just one form of vitamin C there are multiple forms of vitamin C there are multiple forms of B12 multiple forms of vitamin D the list goes on and on multiple forms and we're we just know maybe like 5% of what's in food now there's so much we don't know so the question is are you getting the vitamin C that is actually usable by your CS now here's where this gets a little bit sticky so looking for that vitamin C to support our system or Sleep Quality a lot of times we'll grab those little packets you know those little Energy emergency whatever and we don't realize that over 90% of the vitamin C products sold in the United States are made from genetically modified corn starch and corn syrup it's Ultra processed in every sense of the word and one of the studies that actually share in my new book The E smarter family cookbook looked at what happens when we're taking real whole food based vitamin versus synthetic and this was published in the Journal of Cardiology the Journal of Cardiology and so what they did was they took people who were doing a behavior that would cause a lot of inflammation and oxidative stress namely smoking shout out to smoking Mark all right namely smoking all right and so they take these test subjects and they give them a concentrate of vitamin C in a form of this really I I super food has been really drugged through the mud all right truly this is the most vitamin c dense food ever discovered so if anything's going to fit in this category it's Camu camberry c muu c muu so they Ed a whole food based concentrate of Camu Camu or a conventional vitamin C synthetic supplement so they're continuing their behavior they're checking their biomarkers they tracked their data for a week they found that when the test subjects took the real whole food based vitamin C they had a significant reduction in inflammatory biomarkers you know things like C reactive protein oxidative stress and there were no changes with the synthetic run-of-the-mill vitamin C supplement it didn't impact them at all and as a matter of fact that synthetic form of vitamin C and this is another study that I mentioned in the book as well doubles the incidence of developing kidney stones all right so the question is can my cells relate to to this nutrient is it real is it recognizable just because the chemistry is the same does not mean that they are the same in the human body we evolved interacting with food chemistry but today we have all of these isolated synthetic versions of things and it simply doesn't function the same way I think a lot of people are pretty well aware or at least they've got an idea they're supposed to have a morning routine right whether it's the 15 minutes of sunlight in the eyes and the cold plunge and the grounding and the meditation the breath work work and all that sort of stuff far fewer people have a cool down sequence at the end of the day an evening time routine if you were to give the big movers for somebody who just spends a typical amount of time doing typical things sometime on the phone sometime on the screen exercise and adequate amount but it's not insane they're not a professional athlete what would you say when do you begin getting ready for bed for sleep time what are the dos and what are the don'ts and how big is this territory of time leading up to bed what would you how would you prescribe someone's pre-sleep ritual ooh we could get the sexiest juiciest sleep of Our Lives if we follow what I'm about to share it starts with dinner it starts with dinner that evening routine because the dinner table is potentially the most powerful down regulator of that kind of sympathetic fight ORF flight nervous system and this is based on some of the strongest science that we have period I'll share two quick studies one of them was a colleague of mine Dr Robert waldinger we had a f okay Robert waldinger there you go he is the the director of the longest running longitudinal human study on longevity and their data indicates that Beyond beating obesity Beyond exercise great diet all the things and these things matter the number one determinant on how long we're going to live is the quality of our relationships couple that with a new study that I highlighted in the eart family cookbook conducted by research at bringham Young University they this was a meta analysis of 148 studies 300,000 people and they found that our relationships led to having healthy relationships or what they called healthy social bonds led to a 50% reduction in all cause mortality so that means a 50% reduction in Death from everything you know prematurely and so there's something special about human interaction and relationships and what it really is just a sidebar is that our relationships more than anything influence what we eat it influences our sleep habits it influences our exercise habits how we relate to ourselves where we think about ourselves how we feel our emotional stability it's the tip of the spear and so here's how all of this ties together around the dinner table the dinner table really functions as a unifier to bring people together this is something we evolved doing into the evening we're even even in tribal constructs and if anybody's in Hawaii for example they do this kind of dramatization of a luau right this the Kiki Beach I've seen the exact thing there you go like we we did this hunt we've got this food you know we're all dining together we're telling stories that's really how human history is passed along before the Advent of books and we're celebrating right through our Evolution we hunted gathered together procured our food together prepared the food ate together and celebrated together that was the time of human bonding it's deeply brain in our DNA we expect that our genes expect us to do this and so this is where dinner is the first Domino because when we're eating with people that we care about friends and families as well family and friends are included there's this really remarkable switching over from the sympathetic fight ORF flight to the parasympathetic nervous system that's what the data is indicating which is so exciting one of the reasons is we start to produce more oxytocin right and so oxytocin it's got a couple of nicknames cuddle hormone love hormone but why it really matters in this context is that it's been found to neutralize cortisol so to help us to downregulate and we're very good we're very very good at going zero to 100 all right real quick shout out to Drake but we're not very good at going 100 to zero at all being with people that we love does something for our nervous systems to help us to downregulate faster than anything anything so take advantage of that and how does this play out in the data do I have any data to affirm this you know I do all right so really quickly I'm going rattle these off researchers at Harvard track human eating Behavior family eating behavior and food intake all right for years and when I found this data I was like why doesn't anybody know this and so they found that people who eat together with their family on a regular basis have dramatically higher intake of real whole unprocessed foods and by nature significantly higher intake of vital nutrients that prevent chronic diseases and help us sleep better by the way and those family members consumed significantly less Ultra processed foods namely chips and soda what about for kids publish in the journal Pediatrics they found that eating with our children just three meals per week or more but three is that effect minimum effective dose which I'm a big fan of knowing that we want change but we don't want to change that much eating with our kids three times a week led to dramatically reduced incidents of those children developing obesity and eating disorders what about for us as adults Tech workers at IBM were tracked looking at their family eating Behavior around dinner being able to quote make it home for dinner regardless of how much stress they were experiencing at work if they were able to consistently eat dinner with their families their stress remained negligible it was manageable it was neutralized work morale and pred stayed high stress stayed manageable but as soon as things started cutting into their ability to eat dinner with their families stress levels be went up exceedingly High work morale went down productivity goes down all right there's something special about eating together with with people that you care about I mentioned oxytocin I mentioned the switch over to the parasympathetic here's the key word tying all this together the nickname of the parasympathetic nervous system is rest rest and digest do you hear me that is that's the nickname of this part of the nervous system and this is a binary system it's either this or that it's it's on or off you're either in sympathetic parasympathetic and so switching over being with people that we care about especially under the context of good food it is incredibly special last part here is a psychological benefits to be able to help to to to offload and downregulate when you are feeling we have a deep human need for significance and being able to see your child or your loved one and for them to feel like they matter versus you know what we're doing now is this because not only did we devolve from tribes to neighborhoods well we start to get more separate but when neighborhoods were the Advent of that we still had extended family in close proximity then we started to get isolated to our nuclear family only and then in just in the last couple of decades as we leaned into this whole conversation we become even more divided within our own household because of our devices our devices have divided us and not to villainize these things of course but we need to keep them in context we need real FaceTime with real people well my video guy before we got started was telling me there's a meme going around the internet that I haven't seen yet but that um like how would guys be able to eat if they didn't turn YouTube on like that what you need to do is turn YouTube on in order for you to then begin eating your food right and I remember uh an ex-girl friend of mine from ages and ages ago told me this story about one of her exes the first time that he'd come around for food with her family and he'd sat down and they were all sat around the table and he took his plate off the table onto his lap to eat it on his lab because he was so conditioned to his family sitting on the couch and watching the T watching the TV and eating food from his lap so he was sat at a dining table with no TV there had to slide back and put the the plate on his lap which is just such a funny bit of conditioning that he obviously didn't see but to everybody else sat around the table was like this is crazy um but yeah I I see it in myself uh um Dr K healthy gamer who is a uh psychiatrist classically trained in Western medicine but also did four or five years in eastern medicine too who's got this really lovely holistic View and he has a fantastic Community for young guys and girls that are into gaming some of them have got screen addictions some of them don't but it's it's mental health for you know young people that use the internet a lot and him and Hamza another kid from the UK started doing Zoom calls daily Zoom calls so that people could just eat food with other people interesting so they would jump on a call and sometimes people would say nothing yeah they'd just have a scream with a bunch of faces and they would do it together because it's all well and good saying being around people that you love uh being with your family so on and so forth like I moved away from the country that I was born in I'd love to eat food with my mom and dad but if they'd have to be up at midnight in order to be able to even FaceTime me I I've got my housemate so yeah I can do it with him but I do think that it's just so interesting to look at the solutions that people are coming up with to try and recreate what it is that you're suggesting that they do let's just slow down a little bit I'm going to guess as well that you would tell me that if you have to try and have a conversation in between bites of food that it's going to slow down the pace at which you eat which is going to reduce satiety it's going to ensure that you chew your food properly which is going to make it easier to digest it's going to give you more breath between it which is going to mean that your digestions got more time to you know all of these different things it's a full stack of improvement uh around what you do and then maybe everyone's sick of spending time indoors and goes why don't we go for a little walk once we finish up and the whole family goes for a walk and then you get all the benefits of the 10minute Walk there's no supplement that can do all the things you just mentioned there's no drug that can do all the things you just mentioned these are things that our genes expect us to do you know that's the really remarkable part about it so of course we do want to find some some transitionary tools like being able to talk on FaceTime or whatever the case might be but when I walked in here you were eating with your boys m you guys were hanging out eating eating some food but it's those moments you know but of course it might be a little bit rushed it might be this and that but there's something about taking a moment to pause and just be present eat and connect with people when it comes to timing here I remember and it's something that I follow just CU it's easy to remember a 321 rule for Sleep 3 hours before sleeping no more food 2 hours before eating try limit fluids and then 1 hour before uh 2 hours before sleeping try and limit fluids 1 hour before sleeping try and limit light when it comes to us going from eating on an evening time have you got a rough uh rule that you try to follow between uh food time and sleep time and then let's continue this sexiest night of sleep of your life protocol all the way up to getting into bed yeah that's a great question so um this is going to be situationally dependent it's going to be unique because there are some folks and now we have the Advent of like you know continuous glucose monitors where you could track this if I eat too far out from dinner for myself I notic that my blood sugar goes significantly low at night and it can pull me out of sleep all right so and I'm talking about like more than five hours before sleep which doesn't seem that's not a lot of time and so for me it's like finishing my last bite of food maybe 2 to three hours before I go to bed is ideal for me personally personally now I've done all kinds of stuff again 21 years being at this level I've experimented a lot so I've done all kinds of fast I've done 21 days I've done all kinds of stuff I don't want anybody have to go through but I found it I found my way to sleep like your body will sort stuff out but you got to find what's optimal for you all right so and to transition into this from the dinner table where where we left off and by the way all of those studies are featured in the new East marar family cookbook there's over 250 scientific references in a cookbook which has never been done but then also we talk about what are we eating so that we can get those good sleep nutrients in and I'll just throw this out here really quickly there's well I'll share two really quickly one of them dark cherries all right there there are a couple of studies looking at cherry juice as an Implement for improving Sleep Quality but that the sugar can be a little bit you know that can be sketchy but a couple of the studies I shared in the book first of all cherries are one of the most dense sources of natur occurring melatonin of any food cherries are dark cherries in particular pretty rich in melatonin on top of that one of the studies looked at the anthocyanins in these cherries and found that it they can have the potential to shrink fat cells and so it's cool like you found this stuff and I put my Emojis next to every kind of benefit so like for the metabolic Health like The Fat Loss there's like a little muscle Emoji there's a sleep Emoji there then you go back to the associated food like okay what do I do to eat this food and we've got like a couple of you know cool recipes one of them is a cherry frozen yogurt pop that you can have after dinner um my kids love it and they're fun it's like fun stuff to make too and they're very simple that's another thing about this is making it easy as well I don't want a recipe that's got 37 ingredients like let's just make this simple delicious and there you go but another food which is really a great kind of nighttime routine and there are many and you don't want to necessarily eat this dish every night but salmon is really something special when it comes to improving and supporting Sleep Quality Salmon's got a moment in the sun right now for sure a lot of people are aware of some of the benefits but those Omega-3s are one of those things where a deficiency in Omega-3s is clinically shown to disrupt our sleep cycles all right so it's not just this like oh it's good for your brain no no no like seriously your brain needs these Omega-3s they're responsible for creating structural fats in the body not as energy but like to build rebuild and support your brain cells so they can talk to each other it's kind of important and one of the studies use fmis and tracked people's like actually looked at their brains which is again instead of guessing and they found that people who ate less than four grams of DHA and EPA these are animal-based Omega-3s four grams or less had the highest rate of brain shrinkage four grams is that minimum effective dose and you can get that in a high quality wild CAU 8 O piece of salmon and every we've all had nice salmon filet that's great I've got I've got a honey Sriracha salmon in in the book which is great what about a salmon burger All right so that's probably one of my favorite foods right now these salmon burgers but like turning these great sleep supporting Foods having delicious food experiences have all the dinner table benefits and now we transition into the next thing and so again this is going to I'm going to say generally two to four hours before bed to finish your last meal ideally for most people but there there's going to be outliers all right so now what do we do do we get off do we finish dinner let's say the goal is to go to bed at 10 p.m. just in this context and I finish dinner at 7:30 all right now that do I want to go and jump right back on my screen watch a show whatever I could that could be part of my R the reward like I watch 30 minutes of a favorite show right or I go in game with my son play 2K bust his ass he's pretty good too right after again creating that post meal reward for sitting down and eating together right but now you might want to pop on some blue light blocking glasses you know you might want to do that so it's starting to think about light pollution 3 hours before bed depends on the person but I just that's why I put the word might just rough rough H her around about three hours before bed start thinking about the light you're exposed yes exactly start thinking about it at least and then from there you know again if we're popping back on whatever for me I'll just tell you what it is from my kind of light curfew is one hour it is and I've I might be the person who's impressed that in popular culture because again I wrote about this almost 10 years ago um at least that's the that's the minimum for me ideally 90 minutes to two hours ideally I think a lot of people would have a question of okay especially now right we're approaching uh winter uh you guys uh are losing daylight savings that's just that's getting axed uh evening times get dark pretty early yeah and the more Northerly you get I'm from Newcastle in the northeast of the UK which is the last City before Scotland so around about December mid December time it can be sunset at 400 p.m. right so it's it's really dark all the time it's not Sunrise until after rate so it's very very very short amount of time how am I supposed to exist I don't want to bump into things right I've got fear I'm also this let's be real here I'd want want to be bored I'd want want to be bored for the last 90 minutes of every single day if I want to uh you're saying it's probably a bad idea for me to watch a screen but if I read a book I need a light to light the book is an e-reader going to disrupt my Cadian Rhythm can I use my Kindle what if it's on warm like what can people do to actually enjoy the last two hours of their day if they also need to be conscious of the light pollution I love this this is what really I think is has made my teaching of this information more relatable and doable is because we've got to we've got to put the neurotic Behavior to the side all right and we all especially when we're working to get healthy and to achieve certain things we do go through a phase I think everybody does of being neurotic about these things we've got to chill we live in the modern world and there's stuff there's stuff going on and there are certain things that can help us enjoy that stuff even more if we feel better and so if we can create an evening routine for the majority of the time that works for us where we still can do some of our favorite things because that's what life is all about as well we've got to get that juice well yeah what's the point in optimizing your sleep if you sacrifice the enjoyment of your spare time in order to get it like what's the point of getting good sleep presumably so that you enjoy life and if you sacrifice the enjoyment of life to sleep well in the hopes that sleeping well will give you an enjoyment of life like you're shortcutting everything exactly you just said it perfectly you know so we've got to come into this with some balance with a balanced perspective and give ourselves some Grace and some wiggle room and some enjoyment and if we can do little things like again throwing on some blue light black and glasses we do have do you have any brands that you prefer I want to throw Brands out okay well raw Optics Matt Maroa from ra boom I I like raw Optics I know that he's done an awful lot of research they're not cheap but it seems like a lot of the blue blocking glasses that are cheap that don't have a very heavily colored lens if you can still see all of the normal colors with a little bit of a a blue tinge that's not really doing very much according to him you need to be it needs to be like offensively colored and you can get them in yellow or red and I noticed anecdotally if I put them on I know this is the same with and my other friends any highquality blue blocking glasses after about 30 minutes you almost feel this down regulation yep interesting a palpable effect that I noticed and I was using it in the UK remembering that it gets dark early in the summer uh in the winter but in the summer it really overcooks it so you can have sun set at 10:30 at night uh so for me I would pop them on and go for an evening walk maybe 9:30 and I would find while I was on this walk would get this down regulation so we're looking at some blue blocking glasses again if we're going to be exposed to light yeah I've got I have some from him as well yep and you know and you just said it there's going to be a varying degree of how effective this is but also part of it can be the neural Association as well to putting those on and because that's one of the things that I noticed definitely early on in testing these things is that as soon as I pop them on I start to get a little bit sleepier you know and human the human brain is always looking for a routine it's always looking to automate behaviors and so what's said is that neurons that fire together wire together and so that behavior of like I'm having this evening routine I care about my sleep I'm giving it some respect I'm popping these on I'm still you know dabbling and you know watching a show or you know doing a little bit of stuff on my phone I mentioned playing a video game with my kid right now we have to look at the other part of the stimulation though right and so this is where we do want to have give yourself that screen curfew of at least an hour to just like get off of the screen do something else and by the way there's thousands of other things you could do all right but we just like ah you know so there's thousands of other things that we can do and I'm going to share a couple with you so you mentioned like reading a book yes we can have some dim light you know read a book read a re there real books are still out here on the streets they still do exist but even more so this is a good time to just if you can chat with somebody you don't have to stare at a phone or a screen to to talk with somebody that you care about if you're not in person but if you're in a relationship for example and you're in the house together this is a great time for my wife and I just to chat catch up talk and also one of the chapters in sleep smarter which it just happened to be on page 69 was about sex I didn't know somebody who bought the book told me they were like Sean is slick he think he's slick but it was talking about orgasm and how that impacts Sleep Quality and so we've got some kind of um cultural memes about people falling fall in asleep whatever afterwards no like seriously you're producing a cocktail of different chemicals chemistry that does support Sleep Quality significantly um we've got I mentioned oxytocin before we've got prolactin for example and men one of the studies that I mentioned in the book actually produce like four times more prolactin when they have an orgasm with their partner versus having one by themselves wow and prolactin is very very heavy for optimizing improving Sleep Quality and making people sleepy that's part of the reason even like the going another round is like the prolactin equation and so what's so interesting here is that by the way like some people like you know have with the partner I go right to sleep versus like by myself I go eat a bowl of cereal yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so you've been watching me and so just understanding that the Big O is the chap the name of that chapter doesn't again in that time Gap maybe you could have sex yeah that hopefully hopefully that's better than you know I don't know Yellowstone yeah or whatever else you know people are watching but um you know just with that just being able to invest in your relationship which is again that pays back so much and that's just I'm just throwing out a couple of things there are so many things that we can do have you got any insights a lot of the people that are listening to this May uh listen to podcasts when they fall asleep I sometimes find if I'm listening to something that is too cerebrally compelling and demanding that it puts me into a kind of sort of leanin uh curiosity State on an evening time uh whereas if I get some nice uh fiction or some narrative non-fiction uh I like um you know stories of History documentaries about stuff like World War II and bits and pieces like that uh that to me kind of puts me into more of a what feels like a narrative story mode that feels like it primes me more for sleep have you ever is there any data to back any of this stuff there absolutely is fantastic I knew it wasn't bro signs yeah specifically fiction you know reading fiction listening to this is how we evolved is having those stories in the evening like our genes it's an input it's something we've done for a long time and we have this cultural you know kind of iconic thing of like reading your kids a bedtime story we're just big adult babies if you really bowled down to it but instead of a nice bedtime story now we're just stressed like we're just thinking about all kinds of [ __ ] to stress us out instead of giving ourselves the opportunity to like let me switch over like literally our brain is functioning differently when we are engaged in story you know and so absolutely there's some really cool signs it's already been affirmed on that but also you know this is an opportunity too as you just mentioned I love that of listening to a podcast as well because you don't have to stare at a screen to listen to a podcast the same thing holds true with there are people eating lunch right now watching us oh yeah all right and Shout out if you are leave a comment down below tell us what you're eating what you eating yeah exactly was it from the cook was it from the new cookbook oh right if that part if you're from eating something from the new cookbook but the thing is I've been known especially on a lunch break to like pop on something on YouTube like you know Co Conan O'Brien Clips or some random thing you know and so again it's not to be neurotic and I've structured my life in a way I've created a microculture in my household where I have real FaceTime and eat together with the people that I care about on a regular basis so it's a it's a both-end world this is the point we don't have to be either or we don't have to you know like be completely a a a a tech addict or a lite y it's a both-end world what we do need to do is listen to our bodies listen to our minds acknowledge where we are feeling this kind of dysfunction or turbulence within our spirit because often times it's like a guidance system because there are certain inputs that we are missing out on and other inputs that we might be getting too much of one of the things it's funny that you mentioned the ancestral disposition that we have or The evolutionary sort of priming that we have to hear stories around the campfire before we're about to go to sleep uh and this is absolutely Bro Science but if someone wants to do the study on it it works for me radio dramas as they're called technically so a full cast rendition of a story um there's my favorite author fiction author Pier Brown uh who does Red Rising is slowly releasing all of his books in full unabridged but with an entire cast and this is sounds scaped with all of the sounds and it's so immersive and there's a different character for each voice and I find those to be if I really really want to fall asleep if I'm on a plane or if I want to do whatever if I drop into one of those it's it's it's outrageous and I wonder whether that almost mimics in some regards the typical campfire uh surrounding um but yeah I mean from my side that sort of falling asleep listening to something I the problem is as with a lot of the issues of Technology it's so compelling that it can actually start to push that sleep window further and further away right I one more chapter one more whatever right so the discipline to be able to say no to it is also again neither the Lite nor the addict it's somewhere somewhere in between um what about this is something I think which is a very very common issue and hopefully earlier in the day people have exercised got sunlight done all of the things to wind down even having done all of that I've noticed periods in my life where I struggle to fall asleep if somebody is regularly getting into bed and having you know an hour plus of latency before they're able to fall asleep what are the what are the first few culprits or places that you would be looking at in order to try and this all right the it's like the Matrix right now there's there's a hundred different things that it could be you ran to the top five it's it's going to be situation dependent I I'll rank some of them but even with you mentioning that the the full cast and the story the ancient tenant is to know thyself know thyself like that's top tier importance because we're so unique and so I just want to throw in a little parenthesis as well of like by the way doesn't have to be a fiction it could be a personal development thing it could be a sermon it could be whatever helps you to make that transition in into sleep whatever works for you give yourself some space and some Grace to to try some different things now with sleep latency so I'm going to tell you the first thing period and you know this is it encompasses so much but often times it's just stress it's excessive stress and us not metabolizing that stress efficiently what you mean when you say metabolizing stress so being able to you know cortisol for example has kind of been drugged through the mud and given this bad name but cortisol is not bad it's I like to think of it like the Incredible Hulk you know it's like yes it can smash some [ __ ] and like but also it can get stuff done it is powerful it gets us up and going and it can get a little bit out of hand especially if there's a lot of Hulk you know and so we need Hulk to turn back into Bruce Banner basically this is a great analogy I just came up with that one just now all right and so to downregulate actually in the movie The First Avengers movie uh Scarlett Johansson's character uh black widow she would do this little kind of uh rhyme like this little kind of song this little kind of technique to help the big guy to downregulate and soothe him and bring him back down all right A lot of times we're just kind of running too hot we've got a lot of adrenaline you know epinephrine norepinephrine cortisol is not the only stress hormone but we've got a lot of that just pumping through our system based on our thoughts our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies instantaneously and a lot of times one of my really good friends Dr Daniel aan he calls them ants automatic negative thoughts and we just get on these Loops of these you know things that can just weigh on our spirit we've got to be able to when I said metab I really I'm talking about to to to neutralize to shift gears over to that parasympathetic and it it depends on you what that's going to be what the treatment's going to be so this could be a simple change in perception you know sometimes it's just a reality check and I'm a big fan of that one personally which is like I might be thinking about the 10 things that I need to get done like I just did Good Morning America uh a couple days ago and I was in with my publisher the day before and she was just like so you know are you excited da d da and she's just like I would be a nervous wreck I don't even know how hey thanks hey real good pep talk but for me it's just like because I just don't perceive it like she does and if I was to be like oh my God I gotta I gotta I have I have a very short window of time I got to get up super early and I need to whatever I'm just GNA be like there's nothing I could do about it right now chill just it doesn't matter I I'm here in my bed none of that matters just chill so I could speak I know how to speak to myself you know and again it's a reality check for me that these things that I'm might be pining over there's and here's a really cool thing too is that it's during sleep that so much of our problems are solved and we got some really cool data on this um even Rim sleep in particular in dreaming like dreaming is some freaky stuff man you know and we we we think we've got some good ideas about what's happening but during Rim sleep we know that this process called memory consolidation is taking place so like things from our short short-term memory kind of like or from the day of getting converted to our short-term memory and being becoming more retrievable but also there's just kind of like play as we're playing out it's kind of like our brain in a way is keeping us entertained while it's fixing [ __ ] and one of the things that I do and I'm just going to share this tip another way to to downregulate is if I'm if I'm dealing with the problem I'm not just G to sit there with it and worry about it and this is from thinking Grow Rich Napoleon Hill and it changed my life years ago and actually the person who introduced me to is Bob Proctor and I had multiple conversations with him it's just like man just to even say that stuff coming from where I come from to be able to share time with people like that it's mind-blowing but I I have a meeting with my board of trusted advisers so as I'm laying in bed if for example it's a challenge with uh let's just give an example of if it's somebody with their health all right if they're wanting to deal with a health issue they can pick maybe you know a table like a long table like this and there's three people on one side three people on the other and who are those trusted advisers that would sit at your table to offer you counsel you know maybe this might be um you know um Andrew huberman maybe this might be Dr Daniel aan neuroscientist maybe this might I I might be at the table with you and then on the other side maybe it's like you know your friend who's really into health or whatever the case might be and then you just go through and you ask them what what is their opinion on what you should do to get better or to feel better because the thing is you already know what they're going to [ __ ] say you know what they're going to say but sitting down and doing this practice and allowing them to speak to you through your mind is so remarkable well the Deep personalization of that tactic right of removing yourself from being both judge jury executioner uh the the evidence gatherer and the person that is supposed to coordinate this entire charade yeah is so important like I've got written on my on my fridge what would you tomorrow want you today to do and the reason that it's so useful is that gives you that perspective just a tiny tiny little bit of distance between what's happening now and what's happening tomorrow and what you would want to do and yeah I like that okay so we've got um looking at the stresses the kind of uh open Loops that as of yet we haven't finding a way for yourself yep to help to metabolize that stress to downregulate instead of you know going into the you know the I I think that most people when they're trying to fall asleep and struggling what's happening is they will ruminate aggressively very few people are struggling to fall asleep while their mind is perfectly peaceful and blank yeah right they are uh trying to keep the heart rate low whilst doing very intense exercise all mentally right I'm trying to keep myself calm and yet I'm doing the opposite thing of keeping myself calm I'm very active is there anything else are there any of the other main culprits for this uh sleep latency issue absolutely so just to put a cherry on top of that again stress is the number one thing and it comes in many different forms and Fashions so finding something for yourself to process all of that inner chat that's what my my mother-in-law uh calls it she gave me that lexicon got a lot of inner chatter and this could be something usually it's actually going to be before you get into bed by the way and I want to offer up so here's another way is to do a form of meditation even you know if anything because with meditation is one of those ways we can kind of glimpse into Theta and Delta potentially like if you're a really skilled meditator but this is a way so we can kind of start to tip the scales into more like anabolic in a sleep is truly the anabolic state that we're in but we can kind of tiptoe our way into it ideally because of the neuro Association you might not want to do that in bed itself but you can know thyself oh right so you're saying the bed is to be reserved for sleeping and having sex rule over again we're not watching TV we're not working we're not doing the thing yeah I like that but if a meditation in bed like there's a body scanning meditation you can go down and tense and relax and that kind of thing you could do that in bed but know yourself if doing a meditation in bed might not transition you to sleep the way that you want and I love a meditation for if we wake up and have trouble falling back asleep to lay and just yeah just try to keep bringing your attention back to your breath all right um but also okay so what can be another thing with sleep latency outside of stress the other thing which is a form of stress is nutrient deficiency period all right again you can have the best sleep routine if you're not providing your body with those raw those raw materials those building blocks to help with the conversion of Serotonin into melatonin which serotonin is the prerequisite for making melatonin by the way that all has to do most of your serotonin is is in your gut and so what are the things that you're doing nutritionally that can be screwing up that process what are the sleep Super Foods ooh good question I mentioned cherries earlier yep that's a top tier uh good sleep food salmon another top tier good sleep food and I'm going to share another one with you that you know it's one of these Foods been around for a long time but and also it has number one the mega 3s are there as well eggs great we identify it often times for it's like a morning food it's not the fact of any of these Foods you're just going to eat and fall asleep all right but eggs are remarkable in the the choline choline is involved in the Sleep process as well and those Omega-3s are really helpful and also just amino acids because when we're talking about when I've said hormones and neurotransmitters several times today these are essentially cellular DMS all right it's enabling your cells to talk to each other that's what a hormone is and at its core hormones are proteins if you're deficient in certain amino acids you can't even make that [ __ ] anyways so your body will do a patchwork job but if you provide your body with the amino acids it needs to build those things you're going to be in a much better favor okay another one tryptophan all right tryptophan that's where it gets the association with the what we call from where I'm from itis like being sleepy after you eat food especially on Thanksgiving and the turkey and all the things yes turkey is a rich source of tryptophan but there are you know certain plant Foods as well but yeah turkey we'll just put throw that on the list there so chicken turkey is a song that has that in it but those are going to be a couple of other ones because tryptophan amino acid all right and it's deeply involved in our sleep process and so what is that is that four of them five cherries salmon tripto fun and turkey okay we said Turkey already let me give you a drink there's so many here again we're not talking about guzzling a a pint of water we're talking about like a a serving of like a teacup we know about chamomile for down regulating for relaxing we know about kavak Cava one of my favorites is Rishi Rishi Tea a dual extracted Rishi Tea so this study was published in the journal pharmacology biochemistry and behavior and the researchers found that drinking re just prior of bedtime we could say an hour before bedtime 30 minutes an hour maybe a little bit longer was able to number one improve sleep latency meaning you fall asleep faster it improved overall sleep time and it improved the quality of test subjects sleep namely improving their non- RM deep sleep time all right so that's pretty remarkable en rishi's been utilized for thousands of years do you have a brand that you prefer for that for sigmatic my gu for sigmatic it's a dual extraction of the Rishi that's why primarily so that means it's an alcohol extract and a hot water extract because different things are going to get pulled out of the mushroom based on the extraction method and if you're just getting one you can be missing out on like the hot water extract get a lot of these antioxidant components beta glucans things like that but the alcohol extract can get some of these more hormonally uh pointed compounds you've mentioned the window there how important is eggs does eggs have to be be later in the evening does salmon have to be later in the evening does it's just throughout the day we can create the building blocks that are good for exactly your body knows what to do to to store things away when it needs cool Okay so we've looked at stress and we've looked at nutrients I think that those are two pretty big movers we've already touched on some of the new work that you've done your book came out this week congratulations um talk to me about the current state of American adults Health from a a metabolic and a weight perspective all right this was probably this was published by the CDC in 2022 so just about a year ago as of this recording they determined that 60% of American adults now have at least one chronic disease at least one and 40% have two or more all right so just a kind of overarching perspective look at this now one of our top tier journals that's looking at metabolic Health recently publishing data and it's been making the making the rounds on the internet and they established that only 12% of American adults are metabolically healthy so 88% of adults are not metabolically healthy and this is looking at certain biomarkers you know whether we're talking about hormones whether we're talking about the role of insulin and leptin and the list goes on and on and so now to to what does this look like in the real world like what do we see well prior to pandemic related shutdowns we were at about 42.5% of American adults being clinically obese and it was projected to reach 50% by 2030 but when things shut down there was a mighty jump the data hasn't come out yet completely but we're we're probably very close to that 50% already and if we're talking about overweight and obesity then we're looking at about 75% of the population right now something dramatic has happened because and also we can't leave our kids in this conversation by the way there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and it looked at 200 years of diabetes as a title of the paper and essentially di type two diabetes which used to be called adult onset diabetes because kids didn't get that [ __ ] but now a lot of kids younger and younger and younger populations are getting heart disease are getting diabetes are developing obesity and so but it was within about a 40y year time span just like in the last 40 to 50 years rates of type 2 diabetes essentially quadrupled in the US population and along with that childhood obesity just in the last 30 years has tripled all right let alone us as adults like this is trickling its way down to our little ones which is incredibly abnormal and so just a couple of other Quick stats um I mentioned earlier about the sleep deprivation stat but right now our number one our leading cause of death is is still heart disease and I got to throw this in here as well a lot of people don't know this but Alzheimer's is number six it is just charging up into the top five leading causes of death in the United States it's an epidemic and it is scary and a lot of times we don't think about like how is that killing people like loss of our cognitive function like that man like that is such a terrible way to die and researchers are now calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes because it's so related to insulin dysfunction in the brain that's literally what Max said yeah that's literally what Max said yeah and so I wanted to mention that but heart disease being the number one killer now according to again published data about 60% of American adults have some degree of heart disease onset already like that can be that can be tracked simple blood test we could see okay you're on your way to die from a heart attack is the most common precursor to heart disease obesity or or being overweight that's a great question there's definitely some interplay here let's talk about obesity because you know right now we're living at a time where people are there's a framing around obesity and working as a clinician and working with real people who are struggling with their weight for many years A lot of people are try they are trying very very hard to lose that weight M but they're existing in a culture that is fighting against them and so we place a lot of judgment cognitively if we are healthy or of a healthy weight and don't understand the struggles of people who are really trying hard now there are some people who don't give a [ __ ] and I'll tell you what even with that even as I'm joking about that I've never met one person who doesn't want to be healthy if they had a choice the person who app apparently doesn't give a [ __ ] and they're 350 lbs if they had a choice they would be healthy they would be of a healthy weight they would have an ideal body and energy and all the things they want what happens is we develop something called learned helplessness on top of that we have these stories like sometimes it's literally about worthiness it's about what's possible for me it's about access it's about money it's about all these things my mother for example you know I grew up in a a low-income environment a lot of times like my mom would sell her blood she'd go to the blood bank sell her blood get $20 and get us some fast food a lot of times and she you know we got food from Charities you know there's a place called The Hosea house we get we get food you know government assistance all the things but she was working she worked overnight at convenience store and one of those nights somebody tried to rob the store and she was stabbed multiple times but my mom is different she's alive and well today she actually detained the guy and he end up getting arrested yeah I mean no I'm not I'm not kidding at all I'm not kidding at all man picked on the wrong mother like listen I'm not kidding I got I got so many stories listen I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to hold back and tell you some of the crazy [ __ ] she's done but here's here's why I'm sharing this story is that when she went in for you know surgery get the stitches and all the things afterwards The Physician was examining her and he said that if you were not overweight he said these these were words if you weren't a heavy set woman you probably would have died because the depth of penetration of the knife would have been closer to vital organs so her story is my fat is my safety yeah I can see I can see how that's a a double-edged sword for one of a better term damn so here's the thing too again we have these stories and for some people that excess that they're carrying is protection maybe it's protection from an as salent maybe it's a protection from a family member maybe it's a protection from attention unwanted attention there are so many different reasons why folks are in the state that they're in and I want to remove the judgment and just talk about the biology fat cells are phenomenal it's enabled us to be sitting here today is because of our ancestors and these badass fat cells we evolved our capacity to utilize stored energy in times of famine and something a little fun fact about our fat cells is that our fat cells can actually grow and contain about like a thousand times their own volume like the the size of it itself a thousand times its volume it can hold energy essentially we didn't evolve containing that much however but today because we never have a famine we just keep filling and filling and filling these fat cells and what happens is we start to have this unwanted immune response because that the stress of that fat cell getting expanded unnaturally and never getting a chance to offload is essentially sending out a false distress signal to our immune system that this cell is infected essentially you know there's something abnormal happening here and as this is happening this is contributing and we saw this even during you know pandemic related things with a significantly higher incidence of severe outcomes hospitalizations and death when we venture into obesity and a part of that is the dysfunction that happens with our immune system now on top of that with the immune system dysfunction what about cancer because part of the ability of cancer to progress is an abnormal relationship with our immune system and being able to catch Things Early in our immune system to basically take out Rogue cells that you know have he reached the hay flick limit they're not supposed to replicate all the things and take that take them out what we see in the data we see about a doubling doubling of the risk of breast cancer doubling of a risk of prostate cancer five times greater risk of colon cancer seven times greater risk of endomet cancer when we develop obesity it's crazy and so this is not about vanity this is about a state of our biology a state of our physiology a state of human health that is subjecting us to all manner of disease and dysfunction so I like the input of trying to remove the moralizing from this it's what I learned from Max when I first spoke to him last year and he he reminded me that there are lots of different ways that people can get fat uh good example of this Robert pman the guy that did the largest ever twin studies in the world uh every single pair of twins born between 1991 and 1994 in the UK was contacted about being enrolled in his study he's the father of behavioral genetics uh and he was talking to me and he was saying that he has the predisposition to be fat and he said that when he walks past a b y some people aren't that bothered but he smells bread and his gin response just goes through the roof but it could also be that you don't really like exercise that much and it could also be that you don't really uh enjoy eating foods that are a little bit leaner and it could also be you know there's lots of different ways to get the Kaio equation to work against you from an obesity uh perspective and just because I come from I have a background where I would be TI i' be like 63 kilos if I'd never been to the gym that's not the same disposition that everybody has that being said there is an awful lot of agency like ultimately if you don't put it in your mouth it doesn't go into your body right so finding this balance between um empowerment and reminding people of the sovereignty and agency that they have over their health and fitness whilst accepting that the base that people are working from is not the same the difficulty some people are swimming upstream and some people are swimming Downstream right uh and I think again from Max I'd be interested to know if you agree with this that as far as he's concerned the current world that people find themselves in if they want to eat foods that do not cause them to be obese if they want to not eat Beyond satiety they are finding it harder to do now than ever before because of how Ultra processed foods are hyperpalatable they're more calorie dense they're quicker and easier to put into your mouth and get into your stomach they're more readily available you're able to graze throughout the day all of the things again that get this Kao equation the balance to just lean more and more and more and more toward Surplus calories it's never been more difficult to be underweight right or to be of a healthy weight exactly and also even with all those things you just shared we have this new category huge list of obesogens so these are OB obes obesity causing agents that are firmed in particular they're riddled with obesogens in Ultra processed foods so it's it's similar to a carcinogen a cancer-causing agent which according to the who for example glyphosate which has been on a lot of people's conversation list recently glyphosate according to the W is that the lawn killer the weed killer stuff yeah yeah Monsanto and I'm from St Louis Home Base I went to work there after college and so glyphosate according to the who is classified ifed as a class 2A carcinogen that means that it probably causes cancer in humans that's why there's so much unrest about it but this has been known for quite some time and by the way this is in the East Mar family cookbook too because what is this translate to am I really getting exposure well the environmental working group took a bunch of the most common grain products on us store shelves and and analyzed them for glyphosate Content they found 80 to 90% of conventional grain products were contaminated with glyphosate a probable human carcinogen again and again carcinogens obesogens these are going to be things that are often found in significant content in Ultra processed foods yeah so I don't understand the obesogen thing is that just a uh component of food which makes it more likely to be overeen what's these are these are synthetic chemicals that literally alter our metabolic function and and contribute to the process of weight gain give us some examp on their own one of the most ominous sounding obesogens that we're all getting exposed to pretty much every day is bisphenol a all right so this is in food packaging and so this is a plas plasticizing chemical so Plastics are made from fossil fuels and I see plastics every I mean you can't so much of this is made from plastic it's made Our Lives you know it's the the material you know it's like the look the feel of cotton the fabric of the look the feel of plastic the death the killer of Our Lives sorry Plastics are awesome in their own right but in regards to their interaction with our food is a serious Pro problem I just had a conversation with a board certified toxicologist who worked in the flavor and fragrance industry and she shared with me that you know even for example when we go to a coffee shop you know you get that to go cup and it's a paper cup why is that hot liquid not like melting the cup or like breaking the cup down it's because the inside has a certain type of plastic oh God and the data now she shared a study with me that you're consuming From Any Given cup of coffee regular serving size of coffee at least 25,000 microplastics 25,000 and there's microplastics and there's nanoplastics and she shared with me that these microplastics again bisphenol a is just one plasticizer chemical there's bisphenol s there's so many but we can get tricked because it's Health washing saying this is BPA free but she said that this the inter they can interact with our cells directly and function sometimes as like xenoestrogen compounds so activating estrogen Pathways this is why we see the correlation with breast cancer we see the correlation with gomasa with breast tissue development with men and so we've got that aspect but she said that primary thing that's happening we're seeing in the data is that is contributing to inflammation and so I'm saying all this to say with our food supply it isn't just the food itself it's also what the [ __ ] is packaged in wow so you're saying that even if I avoid the soy when I go to Starbucks there's still other estrogens floating around in the thing that they give it to me in and even with soy again soy's been utilized for for thousands of years by humans when you look at the data and I used to again because as soon as I heard xenoestrogen with soy I immediately put it on the do not disturb list you know and the reality is the way that it functions in the body is not quite like we kind of create that superficial term of a xenoestrogen and like all these bad things messing up testosterone that being said traditionally people were not guzzling soy milk and eating soy dogs and having a toe furky for you know Thanksgiving I'm going to guess then that the storage of food especially if someone a lot and lot of guys that are listening to this will be gim Bros they'll be doing their food prep perhaps on a Sunday or perhaps each morning they need to be looking very carefully at what it is that they're storing this food in especially hot food taking it from the pan into their tupperware container uh I blitzed all of mine and pivot they they do this so Tupperware do glass based uh storage containers so you can do that but even that has a plastic lid so I'm trying to find a solution now if anyone knows one of a All Glass storage container would probably need to be a liter and a half I think liter and a half to two liters seems about right because you get some spinach and throw that on top and do all you want room uh but yeah dude for a decade I thought that Health was and you know stepping over uh dollars to pick up pennies it's probably better to be eating good food that you've C yourself that you know and being like oh maybe there's some bpas in this Tupperware as opposed to oh well I'll just go and continue to order on Uber Eats each day or whatever it might be um but yeah you even if you're cooking your stuff at home what are you storing that in once it's done it's hot it's going direct from the straight into so what's your solution you must you prep food your en you cookbook is all about this what's your solution you're on the road you want to make sure you're eating well how are you storing your food and taking it with you yeah I mean a simple thing if you don't want to throw all your Plastics Away by the way for your food storage which I haven't we still have some stuff we're cycling it out over time phased out you know and you do want at least let your food cool down because we do know that the heat interaction so a recent like this study was just published and they the the researchers put food into quote micro wave safe plastic container and microwaved it for 3 minutes and they found that in a 3 cm space of that of that container released literally 50,000 plus microplastics and we're talking millions of nanoplastics into the food and that's just from a 3 centimeter space of it so just we're not we're not heating our stuff up in the microwave in a in a 3 cm thing it's it's large it's a lot so this is real it's a thing we don't want to be tooo neurotic but if you can avoid it avoid it don't make hot food don't put your hot food in there or don't heat it up in there if you can what do I do I love stainless steel stainless steel containers for food with a silicon lid is great um do you have any brands that you use you know I did I put some in the bonus resource guy for the cookbook and actually I talk about this in the cookbook like food storage as well glass is great as well these been used traditionally uh glass for a long time for food storage and you know Stan eing vertical diet guy uh his solution for his favorite meal Monster Mash uh is a thermos so he gets a cylindrical thermos and like Scoops his food in uh and you get double benefit from that that you can do it from hot it'll go straight in it will stay hot for you know 10 or 12 hours throughout the day and it's just stainless steel all the way up sound so whome a potential you can also just I guess drink your food potentially although he does say he did talk to me about how he gets some strange looks both going through TSA when they say thermos they presume that there's liquid in there and when they look more closely it's beef and rice and and other stuff and then also that he's got a special long Fork that he uses to get to the bottom of this thing so if he is on a plane and he's just m he's like 2060 280 lb super Jack dude big Baldhead uh and I can't imagine what it's like to sit next to him you're already like this up against the window and this massive guy pulls out a thermos and just starts eating a daddy long legs Fork yeah it starts eating meat from it with this like special flight safe super long Fork yeah uh so that's a I mean people have kind of really got obsessive over the BPA stuff and I'm always cautious even though it's like it's interesting and it's something that could be hiding in plain sight and it's an easy change like you use the storage that you have so if you change the storage that you have it's now no longer a problem for you right so it's a single time decision that pays off Downstream but how big of a problem is this is this a a penny or is this a dollar when we're looking at this from a obesogen perspective I think it's in the middle tier got you okay 50 Cent yeah shout out to Curtis Jackson yeah um but because it's so pervasive it's so pervasive you know in our food system and nobody stopped to ask is this a problem for humans I didn't even think about the fact that the inner coating of disposable coffee cups would have this so I'm going to guess that if someone that's listening is a big coffee person and they enjoy their Starbucks or Costa or whatever it is uh that you would say get yourself a good quality steel stainless steel lined thermos type coffee cup of some kind take that and give it to them they'll do all of the fancy stuff that you want but do not be using the Disposable cups if you can ideally yes if you can again we don't want to be and here's this is a little interesting fun story I haven't shared this but um I was with my wife and we had like a little station and usually you know I bring my for sigmatic and I make uh coffee in the room and they didn't have coffee mugs in the room at the moment and I just it kind of you know was a little bit of a time crunch we had something to do and I was like they only have these like reusable paper you know the paper cups with the plastic lining and I was telling my wife like babe you know they only have this whatever she was like I don't care because she doesn't care but when she listened to my guest the board certified toxicologist shout out to Dr Ivon burkhard my wife just happened to listen to that episode and she she was talking to me every five minutes I was in the other room just trying to do some Mobility work like relax it was a long day and she every five minutes babe did you know oh the plastic the paper cups like you were right and because it it came from somebody else you know so dude I you and Max it doesn't it doesn't surprise me that you guys are friends he was telling me that when uh his mom was still with us that she wouldn't always listen to the advice that he gave her if he told her directly but if he went on Dr Oz and said it she would be accepting of it as long as it was through a more like highly uh credentialed delivery mechanism even though it's still him right it's still the son it's just not the son on FaceTime or sat ups at the dinner table a lot of people deal with this you know um I I talked with Tony Robbins not too long ago and he said that there's a statement it's a you know it's been said for a long time but he said and it just like really jumped out at me that you can't be a prophet in your own land sometimes right and so the proximity with people that know you sometimes especially if they changed your diapers for example it might not land the same way medium is the message exactly as as if Dr o said it and so fortunately I happened upon that Insight when I was working with people running an office working as a nutritionist day in and day out that you know a lot of times when people are wanting to again make a change if it's coming from that person and they're going back to their household right so they want this Behavior they they want this result I'm giving them the science back Behavior change to do it then I'm sending them to a culture that's fighting against them yeah yeah yeah yeah if they were to come in and just just they start spouting off the stuff it would be a challenge and so one of the things that happens so much when people come up to me a lot of times it be like you know my wife or my my husband or my my kids or you know my mother is always talking about you and we've changed so much because Sean says is like a thing in the household because it's that it's that external voice yeah of course backed by science and also it's most of the stuff that we're talking about makes sense it's how many how many guys do you think are going to listen to this today and say to their wife this evening that they should have sex before they go to sleep and then finish it up with because sha says because Shan say PR the shirts because Shan say PR the shirts with the arrow pointing down let's [Laughter] go [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] yeah I um I think you know we've moved it's interesting we spoke about culture right at the very beginning and this again we're trying to play this game of not moralizing of bringing people along for the ride of not you know pointing the finger and accusing people of stuff and yet there is a like making Health normal again seems like such an like an odd pivot it would it would almost have to reverse this uh accounting for and and climatizing for poor health outcomes whether it be uh changing the size of plane seats or whether it be the the all of the different changes that people are looking to do with menus with accoun all of this stuff it's very strange to think about okay what would a set point healthy Society look like like Krishna merthy said that it is no manner of Health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick Society my man yes yes that's what we're experiencing right now it is normal to be unwell we are living at a time this is the first time in human history where if you are healthy you are not normal and this is a fact but our definition of normal of course is very complicated y we want to normalize Health we want to create a culture that makes it easy to be healthy and that's what's possible I spent many years again I've been in this field for 21 years trying to address the larger culture and I've made a remarkable impact coming from somebody who I went to when I went to college I lived in Ferguson Missouri a glorified food desert of the highest order and I grew up I had multiple chronic illnesses myself chronic asthma hospitalized every year I had an arthritic condition Advanced arthritic condition diagnosed when I was 20 years old my spine was breaking down I broke my hip at track practice like that's crazy that shouldn't happen to a child to come from that to write the firstly Wellness related book to become an international bestseller I think we've got maybe 25 foreign separate foreign book deals like it's crazy it's like in libraries in China you know it's crazy it's crazy but that's what's possible I have made a dent in the bigger l in the bigger culture Escape but that is a tremendous task it heavy it is life sucking and energy draining to do that and it's it's very very difficult it is a like I get I'm right now Conjuring up an image of Atlas all right or Copus maybe right yeah yes now with that being said let's address that but let's first and foremost address I just had this great conversation with a man named Greg Harden and I'm man I'm so grateful to have met this man he's he's really the first Mentor in college for Tom Brady Michael Phelps Charles Woodson the list goes on and on he's like a superpower for them meeting him changed the course of their lives Tom Brady was like fourth string when he met Greg what Greg said to me and he said when he said it again it hit different because we've heard this before control the controllables control the controllables Tom was so concerned with trying to change things that he couldn't control what he could control was the way that he was training what he could control was taking advantage of the opportunities that he was giving no matter how small they were the starting quarterback was getting 20 reps back up 10 reps Tom was getting like two he was like make those two the greatest two human Humanity's ever seen he frame reframed it like that he put some power back into his hands for him to control the controllables what what do we do in this context with a larger culture Escape that is unwell focus on your microculture intentionally create a microculture around you that makes Health easy that makes movement easy that makes good sleep easy right now again stepping out our door it's very difficult to control those things but within under our own roof and by the way I'm I want to make this clear we are products of our environment we can't help it we are influenced by the things in our environment all the time but humans are also creators of our environment we can create an environment intentionally that that's what makes us so remarkable we can create an intentional environment that makes this stuff easy with that said the environment starts with us the culture starts with us we are representation of our culture got to shout out Gandhi in this one to be the change like people say that [ __ ] like seriously we want everything else to change outside of us the truth is it's an inside job first and foremost because here's the cool thing when you take yourself like you're from across the pond when you come here though you're representation of your culture you can't help it it's beaming Off Of You the suaveness the accent all the things it's just coming off please come on all right when we show up anywhere we bring our culture with us it's infectious we have this we attribute contagious things to just negative things but Wellness is contagious as well and we've got data affirming that too the Framingham heart study for example and so let's focus on creating a microculture in our household what does that look like I shared for me the core of that which is community family and friends because it's the biggest leverage point it feeds into itself when you can focus on creating healthy relationships especially in close proximity to you which is something we're never we we not Tau about how to have good relationships which is the most impactful thing on our lives we go to school we learn about like I don't times tables or whatever you know like that's cool that's cool but that's not going to impact my life more than how do I learn how to be a good listener how do I become a person of value so that people want me in their relationship right so for me it's focusing on controlling the controllables be the type of person of value who can have great relationships that's part of listening to this right now what you've created is helping us to be better people right so investing in that you're already winning you're already starting the process and building on that process also in your own micro culture with your with your food know thyself if you can't have Cheetos in the crib without having orange fingers definitely don't bring them in and we don't have to villainize Snickers if we want to if we want to dabble in that I got Snicker bites in the cookbook high quality ingredients real food ingredients we've got I mentioned the Cherry frozen yogurt pops if you want a sweet Frozen treat right let's upgrade the ingredients we know our culture we like that stuff we like popsicles you know we like burgers we like chocolate let's just okay that's cool because the processed food industry are the ones that really [ __ ] it up for us all right humans we innately are driven to eat things that taste good to us I know the top guys in all the different diet Frameworks one of my guys is the e to live don't live to eat guy I couldn't be any further from my perspective on that not based on like that just doesn't sound good but because of biology we have this really Immaculate intelligent flavor receptor system that's our the human nose and and the in our pallet the interface there is so cool we can taste things that are just mindblowing with that like Gary Vee and the [ __ ] wines like I T it's a hint of like a a Hot Wheels car and like dirt like they all of these subtle flavor notes that we can identify and that helped us to survive because we can taste whether or not that food was good for us and there's this phenomenon called post-ingestive feedback have you heard of this before no postingestive feedback is essentially whenever we through our Evolution and today if we were eat a food our cells our biology would take notes essentially on what it just got from that food and flavor is the language it's like the label it's a flavor label so for example the cherries that I talked about earlier we eat the food okay we get some bioavailable melatonin we get these antioxidants we get these particular amino acids we get this vitamin C your your biology is taking notes that flavor is attached to those nutrients so when I become deficient in those nutrients I'll develop a craving for that flavor that's how we're hardwired food scientists have [ __ ] that whole thing up one of the inventions of gas chromatograph can I isolate flavors based on the chemistry like this cherry flavor here's the chemistry to make it now we can take that flavor and add it to ice cream we can add it to soda we can add it to Candy we can add it to all this [ __ ] that is not cherries and so it muddies up these metabolic Waters I learned today about Mountain Dew flavored hot dogs yo Frankenstein is here walking around amongst us y the form of a wiener all right it's real it's real like this is where we are today where our our biology doesn't even understand or Recognize Real Food anymore so we got to take back control because the LIE is that that [ __ ] tastes better than real food that's not that's not even close our most memorable meals are often times the ones that are prepared by somebody that loves us and they're made from Real Food they're quote made from scratch real food meals we don't often have very like super memorable moments with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos speak to yourself okay shout out to J Leno who was in the first commercial for that that [ __ ] was good all right and with that being said you know this what we're talking about here is my guy Mark Shater you know in the Dorito effect and looking at again being able to take the flavor of a taco and putting it on a chip but now you're not getting the potential veggies the grass-fed meat the whatever else might have been in the real ation with the guy in the food truck that made it there you go we're missing all we just go right straight to hand in the bag you're jacking that bag off yeah all right again speak for yourself all right so here's the bottom line we want to take back control of our pallet and to do that food isn't just food it's information when you're bringing in more of these real foods in in ways that are ABS delicious should be a no-brainer but in ways that are fun that create incredible like food food memories and experiences like taking the salmon and having a delicious salmon burger right now we're getting in all that vital data from those Foods it's changing what's happening with our genes we normalize that in our environment because instead of whatever the [ __ ] else we were going to have as far as a burger was concerned now we've got this I made a batch of them got them in the freezer for whenever I want like we start to create an environment again that makes it easy to make healthy choices so know thyself if you can have some Cheetos at the crib and not go ham on them when you're stressed that's that's cool for most people don't bring that [ __ ] in anymore but treat yourself treat yourself good make sure if you know your if you like if you're a sweetie pie like my wife she's she's a sweetie she loves sweets knowing that we we make sure that we keep a stash of the good stuff for her if she ever has that inclination that she wants some you know some chocolate or whatever we got a higher quality chocolate bar in there we've got a you know a higher quality uh you know the Snicker bites we've got this superfood chocolate bark you know we got all these different things that she can have to address that desire so focus on the microculture hell yeah Sean Stevenson ladies and gentlemen Sean I really appreciate you man why should people go you got brand new book out you got loads of other stuff going on where should they go yeah so the book just came out I'm so grateful this week and as of this recording and it's available nationwide at bookstores and of course at Amazon Barnes & Noble online all that good stuff I actually just saw today that because the book was number one cookbook in the US on Amazon oh yeah they dropped the price so it's 50% off right now on Amazon for people if they pop over to Amazon thank you Mr BOS yeah shout out to and so it's the eatsmarter family cookbook as I mentioned there's over 250 scientific references in this cookbook and most importantly though we identified about 40 of the most science back foods for improving metabolic Health Sleep Quality the list goes on and on and how to make delicious foods with them delicious meals with them so yeah pick up the eat marter family cookbook invest in your in your family in your health great gift to give as well and people can find me where they're watching or listening to this uh my show is called the model Health show and I'm grateful to say it's been the number one Health podcast in the country many many times and we do master classes there on every subject matter you can imagine myself and I bring on the very best people in their respective Fields as well and it's just a special place and it's it's all free you know just click play and you're going to get something special damn right Sean I appreciate you thank you man thank you for having me thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Shawn then you will love my three-hour brand new conversation with Dr Andrew huberman go on give it a press