The BEST FOODS To Eat That End Inflammation & MELT BODY FAT! | Shawn Stevenson

Sean Stevenson welcome back to the show I am very excited to talk to you and at the end I want everybody to stay tuned because I'm going to give you the best John Stevenson quote which sums up one of the most important principles you will ever encounter in your life but first I want to ask you for people that struggle with weight loss and or chronic inflammation what is something that they can add to their diet that would help or is this simply a game of stripping away oh such a great question you know even if we look at something like obesity It's always important to look at what is the underlying Foundation of this outward appearance or this outward manifestation of a thing right and so this term inflammation has been gaining traction it's been around for a long time and you know the Latin and Greek Roots it's essentially to set Ablaze right to set something on fire and inflammation can get drugged through the mud as this bad thing and we want to stop all inflammation but inflammation is critical for all functions of life without inflammation we wouldn't heal from an infection we wouldn't heal from wounds we wouldn't heal from a workout right it's a critical part of our lives and of our livelihood however when we dip into this place of chronic inflammation right acute inflammation is one thing but it's kind of like a low-grade fever and one of the things that we know today is that when our fat cells are overly full they start to send out sort of this false distress signal pulling in immune factors as if you're infected and so researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine found out how this is connected and essentially one of the biggest issues with inflammation is hypothalamic inflammation in the brain Okay so we've got inflammation in the body from a fat cells distress signal and they found that this inflammation the brain in the brain was creating more body fat and creating higher levels of metabolic dysfunction and that metabolic metabolic dysfunction and higher levels of body fat is creating more inflammation in the brain so what do we do to help to bring a resolution here because what happens is a vicious circle obviously if neural inflammation is creating more body fat and body fats creating more neural inflammation we're getting trapped in this vicious Circle and most people are stuck in that and their favorite Instagram you know account or even their physician isn't telling them we need to address this inflammation specifically in your brain to help to heal your body so researchers at Auburn University found that there's this particular food and I don't have a dog in the fight I didn't I didn't care this much about the fact yeah and and you know I was just blown away that this actually had this action in the body what they found was that oleocanthal rich extra virgin olive oil is able to help to reduce neural inflammation specifically helping to heal the blood-brain barrier which is has a tendency to get broken down by our abnormal diet allowing more of these kind of toxicants into the brain and creating more inflammation do they know the method of action no we know so little still you know we know a ton in nutrition right now but we probably know maybe one percent of all the there is to know right now yep it's still so much more for us to discover and so when folks are reaching out to learn from folks you got to keep in mind that even your favorite expert knows so little and we can tend to put all of our eggs in one basket in a sense with a certain diet framework a belief about diet we might find out later on that olive oil has some opposite effect but this is what we know right now and I always like to point people to leaning into tradition humans have been utilizing olive oil for thousands thousands upon thousands of years and it's very simply made because there's also this movement today which I'm grateful for towards addressing our consumption of ultra processed foods right now the average American the average American's diet is 60 Ultra processed foods right now whoa all right I'm not surprised at all but still hearing you say that is startling it's crazy it's crazy but we have to be clear up on Ultra I know you did me too brother you know Ultra processed so I look at my family morbidly obese have been my entire life but many of them have like managed to get into their 70s and I and I at the risk of completely derailing where we were headed I don't think people of our generation are going to be able to look the same as they looked and live as long as they lived because my mom didn't get into Ultra processed food let's say until she was in her 20s whereas kids now in the womb brother they're into Ultra processed food and I think that that 20 30 year span is going to be devastating to People of Our Generation like even I am so freaked out by the fact that I know my mom was eating terribly when she was pregnant with me she smoked also while she was pregnant that did not help and then uh my whole life like I used to eat fried turkey nuggets and french fries deep fried turkey nuggets and french fries almost every night you can't do that you can't do that listen this is getting into the fields of nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics we have entire fields of science looking at how each and every bite of food that we eat impacts our genetic expression and also how our unique genetic makeup leans towards certain nutrients certain foods that work better for us versus somebody else right now you're speaking to this really important thing which is what if we're doing this earlier because there's so much of the body being made foundational things like your brain being made out of these compounds right and so but also mentioning you know your family is very similar to mine very similar this also speaks to something that we look over which is the resilience of the human body right you just said it we can be in a state where we're probably experiencing four different chronic diseases and caring an insane amount of excess body fat as well and still be able to keep trucking along the body is always trying to sort things out and to fix things if you think about something like type 2 diabetes which here in the United States somewhere in the ballpark of about 130 million Americans have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes right now a huge portion of our population now if you look at this condition so we've got dysfunction happening with our blood sugar essentially we've got these beta cells in our pancreas that are making insulin right and insulin is getting made and released in response to glucose entering our bloodstream from the food that we're eating primarily today we have the ability to shuttle insane amounts of food into our bloodstream at one time that we never evolved with and so insulin is going to be hyperactive and at some point it's kind of like it's kind of like a spam email scenario happening where you keep getting this insulin message over and over and over again until the inbox the cell is just like I'm gonna block you I'm gonna white I'm not gonna white list this message and it's going to down regulate its interaction with insulin right so now we've got all of this glucose running while in the bloodstream which it's not exactly like this but a good analogy is kind of like little shards of glass right you can just tear stuff up this is why we tend to have you know when we're in this state of insulin resistance and diabetes capillary issues losing vision losing Limbs and things that are further away from the core right so where things are starting to get a little bit more constricted start to get torn up all right so with that said even though we're in the state the body is making an adaptation to that abnormal glucose to keep you alive all right what insulin resistance and diabetes is it is the body adapting to less than ideal conditions or circumstances to keep this person alive when exposed to all of this blood sugar that could kill you all right so there's this intelligence and Grace that the body has to keep operating and trucking us along because what people tend to do on the surface is like well you know we're still living longer no right now this generation is the first generation and anybody can look this up that's not going to outlive our predecessors that process is reversed but also with our Innovation you would think our lifespan would continue regardless we're not living longer we're dying longer we're just extending the suffering with this Ultra processed food awareness which I'm grateful for we can get into a little bit of uh teetering back and forth because something like olive oil is a processed food how much can I heat it though I'll answer that one second with with olive oil right we've got a very simple processing we take olives we crush the olives with low temperature right that's how it's traditionally done that is processing but it's it's minor processing versus you taking uh you know a couple of ears of corn and turning it into Lucky Charms right right like there's no connection whatsoever to this thing and it's so riddled with artificial colors and flavors and the like how how can you heat olive oil to answer that question fantastic question traditionally We're Not Really Cooking with it as much by the way salad dressings putting it on bread right these are some of the ways that would be used traditionally if we are cooking with it we've got to be mindful the reason it's in dark glass is that it's heat and light sensitive all right it doesn't change just because you pour it into a pan so just keep that in mind the common moniker is happening to it when it's getting heated up though is it is it termination okay oh and also yeah it can become rancid as well by not being packaged correctly but olive oil is kind of you know if you think about wines it could stay like there was some research that came out not too long ago that they were finding old bottles of olive oil like you know 100 years old or whatever and cracking into it and it was fine I wouldn't say it was fine personally you know but it was edible and they didn't die you know what I'm saying okay so I I've heard a lot about olive oil the benefits all of that I'm excited that you can actually layer that on and still get some added benefit the epithelial lining in the blood-brain barrier which a lot of people may not even realize so they know they have one in their gut only I have only heard people talking about the blood brain barrier as a similar epithelial lining recently so I imagine a lot of people are unaware of that if you're getting the breakdown in the gut you're almost certainly getting the breakdown of the brain so being able to add something like olive oil and get the effects is tremendous but I eat a lot of olive oil but I worry I always heat it up always and I've never been able to get a great answer I'm assuming it's because there's not a ton of research that says okay you can heat it to this point but not above but like for instance I don't use butter in my pan or anything like that I eat eggs most days but I'll put olive oil as the lubricant on the pan but I'm scrambling eggs I mean it's it's hot yeah am I doing myself any favors or would I be better off with something like ghee which is clarified butter for those that don't know like what's the right move there I love that you ask questions like this because this is the level that you're on and also a lot of the audiences as well which is like we want to be our very best right most people though Tom are like they're not thinking about their eggs in olive oil you know what I mean like they're eating Dunkin Donuts and like mini muffins yeah so now we're getting into the minutia which is you're still so far superior so far better off by having those eggs scrambled up in some olive oil than you would the like now what's the good better best practice even with the eggs we've got to be mindful of damaging the yolk right through high heat there's some omega three fatty acids there they're very heat sensitive and so low to moderate heating with the olive oil fantastic and also even eggs if you talk to a chef right somebody who's really versed in making eggs and omelettes they're cooking their eggs like longer right but I know myself probably too I'm just trying to whip those bad boys up and you know get get busy right but the ideal practice is to be mindful that these compounds don't want to get damaged by heat but we're still so far better off doing that than eating some Frosted Mini Wheats right yeah frosted many of these are so good though Sean that's why I brought it up it jumped right up on my spirit time no man that's interesting okay so that's a good angle on inflammation um what about fat loss is uh are there implications with olive oil are there other things we can add we'll get to subtracting in a minute but if there are other things that we can add is there something on the fat loss side that like in my book is smarter it was a randomized trial they put olive oil up against soybean oil supplementation and also there's a study that went MCT oil versus long chain fatty acid oil coming from things like vegetable soybean oil people had greater levels of weight loss and fat loss and also improvements in their satiety hormones by including monosaturated fats like from olive oil and also medium chain fatty acids like from coconut and things like that but also we of course MCT oil is popping right now now if you had to guess so knowing what you know is that because they reduce their intake of the soybean oil or is it like if they kept eating the soy bean oil and added olive oil would they get the effect or is it that they've replaced the soybean oil with olive oil so they gave either group soybean supplement soybean oil supplement or the olive oil or you know another trial MCT oil right they're taking in oil exactly okay so they're not replacing anything right they're dieting just adding that piece in improved fat loss that's what I thought again so the mechanism of action or do you have a guess yeah this goes back to you know I mentioned this a little bit earlier about like what you're making your brain out of but the same thing happens with the mitochondrion what kind of efficiency we are feeding our mitochondria right and are we gumming up the system so a good example and we actually talked about this the last time we talked this was published in the journal food and nutrition research and they were looking at the metabolic impact of a meal of Whole Foods versus processed foods and so they had the test subjects to consume one of two sandwiches right so in one part of the study they're eating a sandwich that is quote processed foods which is um it was white bread and cheese product right and so we mentioned this last time that's craft singles yeah you know it can't they can't legally call it Kraft cheese it's cracked singles because there's not enough cheese in the cheese and and then that's the processed food Sandwich versus a meal of Whole Food which was multi-grain bread or whole grain bread in cheddar cheese I again we get into the debate that's why I started talking about this earlier what's processed and not this is minimally processed cheddar cheese is like four things craft singles is like 15 things all right very different products and also how long have humans had each of these and so the the two sandwich or the same amount of calories same amount of proteins fats and carbohydrates on paper they should have the same metabolic impact but after consuming the two different sandwiches when the people had the processed food sandwich they had 50 reduction in calorie expenditure calorie burn after eating that sandwich versus when they had the whole food meal sandwich and what happens is it's kind of creating this metabolic clog it's gumming up the system and again your body's intelligence is just like oh I don't know exactly what to do with this let's tuck this away here let's it's trying to protect us some kind of way and it's slowing down that expenditure of this less than ideal substance just trying to figure it out it's kind of creating this confusion now with that said this boils down to what are you making your tissues out of and this is one of the most important takeaways for anybody when you're eating food you're not just eating food you're choosing what you're making your cells out of every cell in your body from your heart to your brain is made from food we have this we have this cognitive bias in our reality we think we're just here right you were literally made as I'm looking at you I'm seeing the food that you've eaten that crazy yes it is mind-blowing okay so all of my cells are turning over I am literally what I eat but do you pay attention to the there are some very smart people that are like a calorie is a calorie bra and so it this is one of those things you're very eloquent on this point I try not to be arrogant about this I try to look for as you say what am I wrong about so I do not value myself for being right I promise you like none of this is coming from a place of like I know something you don't know but I have a a like allergic reaction to people who are like a calorie is a calorie and there's no difference but they're really smart people who say that and I don't it it may just be that I'm so ignorant I can't see past like but it seems obvious to me that if I'm eating uh polyunsaturated fatty acid or polyunsaturated fats that gets stored as polyunsaturated fatty acids that that is going to be materially different than another kind of fat even if they're stored within the same fat cell um but I don't know the ways in which they are different so can you are you familiar enough with their stance to steal man that argument and then can you tell me where what they're missing because if you can I absolutely love that because when I came into this I went to a conventional University and my nutritional science class one of those big Auditorium classes the first day of class the teacher said that if you want to manage your weight you just need to manage calories if I if I make you hungry enough if I deny you of calories enough you will lose basically all of your tissues but you will get skinny so we know that's true but where does that begin to break down yes so today again it has its place in science and what we tend to do of course is we get bought into an ideal we might see results with ourselves and even with people that we're working with but what tends to happen is we'll ignore the people who aren't getting the result with our thing it happens with the very best researchers scientists Physicians we mean well but we tend to think that our way is the way right like the Mandalorian and there's so many other versions of that and so today what we've uncovered is that there are epic caloric controllers there are multiple controllers that control what calories do in your body versus the next person all right so one of them I just mentioned is the quality of the food itself is going to react differently in your body so you might be doing a point system or managing your calories but you're eating processed food and creating a barrier in your body's ability to expend the calories that it possibly could if you were eating real food we can't we can't let that go we can't just be like that doesn't exist but we get that tunnel vision when we're just like calories in calories out that's it end of story and I'm so glad you set this up by saying these are very very smart people but here's the thing if we take a very smart person and we teach them the wrong thing they become world-class at teaching the wrong thing all right and this happens a lot in medicine today all right but of course there are great Innovations there are great things that happen but we have to look at the results is it working for the majority of people and the data clearly shows that most people who are doing a standard calorie restriction they do lose some weight then something happens something happens which that something is their metabolic rate adapts their body's expenditure because when you cut calories it isn't just magic fat loss time it's going to change the way that your thyroid is working it's going to change the way that your adrenals are working it's going to change the ways your brain is working everything is going to get affected in your body that's hardwired for survival doesn't give a [ __ ] about you trying to lose weight it's going to adapt right but then it's just like you just need to diet harder you need to cut more calories have you tried a caloric deficit right I've seen this so much to the degree that people end up coming into my office when I was doing clinical work they're on 900 calories a day and the scale is not budging and they're broken right they feel broken and just in tears like I'm trying so hard why won't this work for me and oftentimes I have the story work before they did this thing before and it worked but this is us trying to say you know what this human body that has evolved over millions of years we can just operate it like a calculator it isn't this Ultra complex highly sophisticated you've had on Michio Kaku I believe right Michio Kaku said the human brain is the most complicated organ in the known universe the most complicated object in the known universe and we're just like I could trick you silly brain right I could trick you with a little caloric manipulation your hypothalamus is a master gland in your brain and it's an integration point for your endocrine system and your nervous system okay your nervous system is kind of responding to the environment and providing feedback internal and external right and we know about the neurotransmitters that are associated with the nervous system so we've got stuff that makes us feel good stuff that makes us feel terrible stuff that makes us feel pain all the like the endocrine system is your hormones these are essentially chemical Messengers that are sending messages these little metabolic DMS from cell to cell to keep every cell in your body on the same page you want the community with good communication communication breaks down when people say my hormones are out of whack they don't really know what that means but the cellular communication is run amok and so the things that you want to happen are not happening all that's getting married in this powerful Master gland not to mention it's responsible for controlling your body temperature your hunger your thirst so many other things and when you suddenly go into this caloric restriction your hypothalamus its job is to help your body to adjust to said restriction all right so that part of the equation is known it has to be honored and the way that people adjust or their body adapts is going to change from person to person we can't just berate people like you just need to cut your calories that's not right thank you guys so much we hit 3 million subscribers on YouTube I cannot be more grateful to all of you that help make this happen and now we have a social ecosystem of roughly 10 million people I cannot believe it guys thank you so much for being the most incredible community on the internet few years ago Lisa and I set out to tell entertaining stories of empowerment in a global Community was born thank you to the viewers the listeners and students over at impact Theory University incredible interview guests that have really helped the show become worth watching thank you guys so much to everybody here at impact Theory thank you 3 million times for being so legendary all right guys peace and the rate at which it happens to different people that's another glaring thing like is everybody going to be you know is this going to be like an assembly line thing no everybody's going to be different because we're all different and so a great another one of these epic caloric controllers I took a moment to talk about the hypothalamus for example this is one of the great things it's about education and empowerment right because even folks who are you know really they've anchored into calories and calories out they still want to help people and that's wonderful we're not saying this is wrong it's this and you have to understand and respect the complexity of the human body and pay attention to your audience who's saying I did what you're saying and it didn't work for me right because we tend to not we tend to tend to want to block that out with that said researchers at Yale it's pretty smart people all right researchers at Yale found that everybody well not everybody a lot of people today have heard of the vagus nerve right connecting the brain and the gut this gut brain connection and the gut itself is often called the second brain or the enteric nervous system there's a tremendous amount of neurotransmit there's so much action happening in the gut it's intelligent Force itself so with the researchers at Yale University found was that the human brain is basically keeping tabs on it's kind of like a governing entity with the gut and based on your brain and your gut's assessment of your caloric needs and your nutrient needs your brain can tell your gut to decrease or increase the assimilation of calories from your food that's that's crazy but it makes sense because your body has this intelligence now the question is if I'm riddled with if I've already got all of this caloric energy stored on my body why would my body still allow me to assimilate so much of this caloric energy and this gets into the breakdown of that gut the breakdown of that intelligence between the brain and the gut this gets into food scientists being able to manipulate these systems and things to go Haywire right but with that said if we are eating real Whole Foods and eating foods that really resonate well with our body it's very difficult in the first place to overeat those foods like this is getting into more of the practicality not just using looking at the human body as a glorified calculator but that it has its intelligence because I know you've done this try to do this as well I know a lot of guys do we might try to put on a little size right and we're eating a caloric uh abundance we're eating more than enough but it's just so difficult to put on that extra size that extra weight you got the dirty bulk makes it easier it doesn't say I can put on fat nice and easy okay yeah muscle is a whole different thing the dirty bulk is easier but if you're doing that with real food you know sweet potatoes and high protein foods fish and things like that miserable it is yes not only is it difficult eating so much it can be miserable and I was fascinated by this topic so I looked into it a little bit more and I believe the researchers are based in Kansas City but what they found was essentially that our tongue even the human tongue is ridiculously intelligent but I was wondering why do we suddenly not have a taste for something right we're eating a food and then it's just like uh right something that's good that first bite a few bites in you're just like it's not not as attractive but it slowly goes away we're our taste buds literally change the proteins that we're producing as well change as we're eating in your mouth in our mouth absolutely and over time the overall palette because you know you've heard this as well and probably experiences are are cravings and our desire for certain foods changes like we could just lose our desire to do what we were doing which I was getting fast food in 300 plus days a year if I had a buck I'm pulling up in that in that drive through right the drive through diet you know I made it for years but now it's just like I have no attraction whatsoever to that food and if I eat it it tastes so fake so fake there's this intelligence that's been nurtured but if I kept eating that stuff guess what's going to happen it's going to switch over and I'm gonna crave these artificial things especially these chemicals you know um artificial colors flavors you want to talk a little bit about artificial flavors so this was a huge breakthrough in food science when researchers did the thing that kind of like what we're talking about today everything breaks down into chemistry right so a certain flavor is just a compilation of certain chemicals it's a chemical complex and so using a gas chromatograph they could identify the flavors the chemicals that make the flavor of strawberry per se and now we can take that strawberry flavor and add it to other [ __ ] right so now we got strawberry flavored ice cream no strawberries necessary strawberry flavored soda and candy all the things and it might not taste exactly like a strawberry but it's just enough to muddy up the metabolic Waters and confuse your system right and so because you're saying that my body will react to those cues in some way that even though it isn't a strawberry it's tripping enough of those signals that my body anticipates a strawberry this is where some of the magic happens right here because we evolved attaching certain nutrients and caloric density to certain flavors again this data is not just coming from us it's coming from our ancestors and so when we're getting a certain flavor note without that even sweet if we get a Sweet Sensation but it's not coming along with the expected nutrients and or caloric density we think we could just trick our body but now a recent study just came out you might have seen it getting passed around looking at changes that happen with the microbiome and association with artificial sweeteners not to say again that they can't be used to great success for some people but you can't think that the body and the brain is stupid like I'm going to give you this sweet taste with none of the side effects and one of the studies that I put in each smarter as well found that the consumption of you know like sucralose for example increase the production of insulin all right it's not supposed to but insulin's going up what happens when insulin goes up insulin is that lock and key to open your fat cells up to store more [ __ ] right we think we can trick the system but our bodies are far smarter than us and I started the show saying that like there's so much that we don't know and we're trying to figure stuff out we don't want to act like we've got it all figured out when it comes to like artificial sweeteners for example they have their place it's cool we can come up with this stuff but we have to keep an open mind that it might not be exactly what we think it is I'm going to reframe it a little bit tell me if this lands I get the impulse to say that the body is smart but it might be more useful for people to understand that the body's kind of dumb and it's lagging behind because what it is is you had a blind watchmaker over millions of years of evolution and the people that started secreting insulin or whatever when they put it in their mouth they survive longer than the people that waited until it hit the gut and actually got digested and by then it's too late and your you know your sugars are elevated for too long and so you end up dying younger than other people and because of that now as you're you know in a modern context you have all this fake food your body doesn't realize that oh there's a difference between this thing which is giving me these signals which is why it tastes so good and we're like oh my God this is amazing because Evolution told me yeah eat strawberries eat these sweet things because they're only here in this narrow window as it's leading up to Winter you need to put on a little fat and so one I trigger a response that's more likely to make you fat from things that taste like a fruit and but the reality is that the body doesn't see the difference between this engineered thing which shouldn't trigger all of those responses but still does and this is why people should wait until the end because I have something tied to this that you've said I think it's brilliant and it's really going to unlock something for people but I am going to make people wait till the end for it um but that to me once I understood okay I get it my body thinks because of evolution my body thinks these mean x y z but they don't mean that anymore and so now I'm getting myself into maybe a a better bit of trouble but still a bit of trouble than if I were just shoveling the full sugar version of these things in my mouth yeah I love that it's such a it's a great balancing actor look at let's look at the other end of the Spectrum which is the body's just dumb and just responding to these inputs and the reality is probably going to be somewhere in the middle here as with most things but you know just taking that on like this is how our system can be manipulated clearly we have brilliant scientists who were able to you know again use a gas chromatograph and break down that flavor complex but also create things where we have this Vanishing caloric energy yeah right where we eat I was just talking to my youngest son about this because he was asking about teeth like um if something came up about wisdom teeth right and I just got into this conversation about it that you know a lot of American adults like our wisdom teeth don't come in right and they're all usually impacted or they're crooked or whatever and it didn't used to be that way like our all of our teeth would just come in normally right but a part of that my wife brought it up was she's from Kenya right and so like they grew up eating sugar cane for example like chewing on stuff having hard stuff chew on but it was more so her mom's generation with her generation to get more and more processed food coming in right and also very low tier carbohydrate-based Foods versus the hunter-gatherer like they have the Messiah there as well who would still have this husband Tree and they're doing like the the milk and that kind of thing then they've got another tribe who is out with the fish and that kind of thing better Dental Health both areas right and so we're getting this conversation about not chewing hard stuff and he he had this thing come up like what about like chips and stuff like that that's hard that's but it's like one crunch like one good crunch then it turns into sauce yeah it turns into mush and it's this Vanishing caloric density where the brain you got this big FL intense flavor and you've got this chewing action that takes place but then it disappears so our bodies get tricked in a sense going back to it can be a little bit slow it can be Lloyd Christmas right it could be a Lloyd Christmas version of itself that's dumb and dumber for anybody who's not seen the movie um but that aspect of the body being tricked into thinking it's consuming less calories than it actually is because hey it disappears it's not a big input coming into my gut right so we have brilliant scientists who figure this stuff out at the end of the day though the human body is going to take its do and it's going to figure out or stop trying to figure stuff out when it keeps being faced with all this abnormality you know all of these things that it's never been exposed to that's what we're seeing now as a society we're the sickest Society in the really the documented history of humanity we have the highest rate of chronic diseases ever known to man and we're supposed to be so much better than this we are so smart we're so technologically advanced why are we so sick you know this should be one of the things that we think about every day like this doesn't make sense and to have this generation be the first generation to not outlive our predecessors that our lifespan is reversing that should put off all kinds of red flags for us to say hey if we're going to be results oriented something's not working something in this equation is not working could it be that we're trying to trick our bodies into doing the things we wanted to do versus US understanding the things we evolve with and bringing in more of that can I give you my my favorite quote from Thomas Soul please do the last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what worked for what sounds good as somebody who was in the food industry I can tell you we were breaking ourselves in half trying to like do right by the people eating it but science changes and so who knows like 10 years from now we may realize things we were doing didn't make any sense but we really were trying like sincerely even just the the right metabolic answer over profitability and we made decisions that cost us hundreds of millions of dollars so I put my money where my mouth is on that but inevitably time will look back and say uh you should have done it like this you should have done it like that I recognize that but we make things that don't necessarily work because hey we want to drive the cost of food down hey we want to make sure that the farmers that are making the things that make food taste better and people like it more and you know therefore they will eat them we want to make sure that we subsidize that and so it's like these string of things but I remember back at Quest that this was still in the height of fat is going to kill you days yeah and we were like no you guys have this all wrong like fat is going to be this huge thing this was that I had never heard of ketogenics when we first started Quest and we started learning about it I'm like oh my God like this is amazing could have cancer implications like all this stuff but this is all happening as the government is like we're going to tax food with fat and like they were going crazy on anti-fat and we're like whoa like crazy you may mean well I'm perfectly willing to accept you actually believe what you're saying but you are moving Us in the wrong direction and so when I look at age or the length of life expectancy now going backwards and I think but they don't intend to have that effect but damn we replaced a lot of things that worked for things that we wish would work but don't actually so at what point do we have to hold ourselves accountable Pharma food like at some point somebody's got to say this [ __ ] isn't working yeah it takes a lot of Courage to you know we all have our biases it's important to come into the conversation with that and be willing to continuously question your biases that might mean that you're going to be wrong and here's one of the other things especially about food science you're going to find stuff that validates two totally different perceptions but what I like to do is like what is the majority of data say and also my biases towards what have humans been doing the longest but even still I have to be open to the fact that maybe a Twinkie might activate some kind of yeah like again we can become telepathic or something I'm hoping to go on record to say Twinkies do not do that yes you're 100 right and even that I'm joking because you're right yeah you have got to open yourself up to that yeah and it's beautiful because what happens is this really interesting thing takes place where you start being right a lot more when you're willing to be wrong and proactively looking for ways that you're wrong right now we're living at the Golden Age of my way is the way and this is coming from the top down in society and the bottom up and so I I love this piece because you know just again what we've experienced the last couple of years the most obvious thing was not addressed and I said this at the very beginning and I was looking at the data coming out of Italy and seeing that upwards of around 89 of the folks hospitalized had one or more pre-existing chronic diseases and I was like oh [ __ ] like this is our Super Bowl moment this is our time we've got to focus on getting our citizens healthier the instant argument comes up of we can't get people healthier overnight right and so let's not talk about it was that sort of the underlying the the problem is when fear takes over as well you know that's another part of the ingredient the recipe that can make us ignore essential basic things but here's the thing I wanted to communicate if you look at the vast amount of peer-reviewed data that we have we can absolutely derange our metabolism in a day or we can improve it in a day right so just for example one night of sleep deprivation guess what's going to happen to your immune system guess what's going to happen to your insulin sensitivity guess what's going to happen to your leptin and all the things there's going to become dysfunction opening increasing the risk of you getting sick period and so Appalachian State University researchers found that simply going for a 20-minute walk instantly boosts immune parameters most notably neutrophils natural killer cells just going for a walk one rock but this is a it's a short-term boost but what if you have that practice integrated right not to say that this is the end-all be-all or some kind of like Shield against a viral infection but here's the thing that we we did what we typically do we have a problem we try to find a drug for it right so I had my eye on the data coming out of Italy and I was just being a voice of reason and logic like let's stay balanced in this so we don't we don't Venture into the ridiculous but two a year later I get a study from the CDC I know people at the CDC and I'll tell you most of them the vast majority pretty much everybody that I know with these entities they really do want to help people there can be of course decision makers and people in the process that have some what we tend to do again if there's a nefarious outcome but money's tied to it or the reputation all the things they make tough decisions right so I keep trying to validate and hold a space for people to be good people so I'm coming into it with that now here's what what I got this was published in July of 2021. huge meta-analysis looking at the data from over 800 United States hospitals and over 540 000 covid-19 patients and we'll put the study for people you can put that in the show notes if you like as well because seeing is believing so compiling this huge database of people what they found was that the number one risk factor for death was obesity and the thing is we can have this justification where people won't do it look at how we were galvanized to do things I just went to the gym today and I see all the stickers on the floor stay six feet apart stay safe oh guess what people were doing they were doing the things if it was coming from a place of authority with a little bit of Science and encouragement that fear could have been used as a tool for real empowerment right do you think there was a perfect storm because I think so part of it feels like a hundred percent so many people like confronted with their own mortality still will not change their diet there's a book called change or die which highlights how few people will actually make the necessary changes when even the change they have to make is deadly simple they still won't do it so there's that but it also coincided right as we were getting to the point where you can't call somebody fat or obese that's shaming them in some way and so now it's like people are called onto the carpet for saying that you're overweight you've got this whole movement of healthy at any size and it's coming right as we're like we have to do something right now and we know that people won't change and you put all that together and years in and it's still like considered almost like you're being mean it all came to a head at the same time right you know having that conversation so blaming so you're blaming fat people for the problem right no we're just talking about reality we're talking about science and doing the work where I'm sitting across the table from a patient and they're coming in they're dealing with something to be able to look them in the eye I've seen this so many times I haven't met one person who didn't want to be healthy all right this is a dip this is a difference of course there's this like people won't do the thing we use that in in medicine so much that people won't listen you just have to get better at your job because there's a way and so it's finding out what is that person's motivations you know what it what are their what are the what is the leverage point that you can find because within that human is the potential for so much but of course what happens is we get into a place of complacency we have a perception that that's way harder than me sitting here having my Doritos which I used to go to 7-Eleven open the Doritos pump chili and cheese into the bag Shake It Up all right so that's so much easier than me going for a walk every day why on Earth would I put myself in that discomfort but I'm creating this physiological discomfort and disease in my body all the while that is going to force me to make decisions right so it's just like you get to choose your heart you get to choose your difficult most people are never even presented with that idea right they're never even presented with that idea and we're so disempowered in our culture and also we have all of we have a societal revolution of convenience and complacency and disempowerment and lack of movement we have a society that has made everything so accessible if we wanted to we we didn't we wouldn't have to get up right now to get food sat in front of us whereas our ancestors there was just so labor intensive just to get a meal blessing but also potential curse all right we have to keep this in context so this story that people won't do the thing with motivations people did [ __ ] that they never thought they would do the last two years we can really look out and see that at the end of the day you know if we can provide more empowerment science-based empowerment and create a culture right now we've created a culture of sickness and so to be healthy you're weird as [ __ ] to be the healthy person what state are we in where it's weird to be healthy right and a lot of people have seen the the study that came out about a year ago maybe it was two years ago but this big meta-analysis and they were looking at the metabolic health of the United States citizens and they found that 88 of the United States citizens are metabolically unhealthy how many 88 good to see you to put in the show notes for everybody as well and again if you look at it's no longer the exception versus the rule the rule is the rule is poor health and disease all right so let's go back actually to that study I mentioned from the CDC the CDC was getting tagged in everything related to covet but I was actually reading the studies looking at the references not window dressing looking at it even an abstract sometimes can be misleading 540 000 over 540 000 covid-19 patients over 800 U.S Hospitals number one risk factor for death was obesity the question is why is that Pro and state that pro-inflammatory state of inflammation we're pre-inflamed what is covid-19 in inflammatory condition so you get us you already got a bonfire going in your body now we come in and we throw some extra fuel on the fire what do you think is going to happen bonfire just for people that are really getting into the nitty-gritty is the immune system is already Yes hyperacting kicking off the cytokines we now know the idea of a cytokine storm so you have the immune system attacking the body itself it's kind of like uh if you have a fly in your house if you hit it with a fly swatter all is well if you bring in a shotgun you start doing damage if you're bringing 150 shotguns and you just start obliterating everything you're gonna have massive collateral damage and so you're getting this the attack of the the virus with all these shotguns and now you're just tearing the body apart as you try to end the virus exactly and we can see this with you know other metrics we can measure homocysteine C-reactive protein we could see that inflammation is a problem in the body and this is a consistent thing we see when we're venturing into being overweight and obese the here's the second leading risk factor for death number one was obesity number two was fear and anxiety Related Disorders yeah I had never heard that until I started researching for this episode I was like what how can I get it but that's that should be that should have been everywhere how in the world could the second leading risk factor for death from covid published by the CDC be anxiety and fear-related disorders what is what the hell is going on here what's the connection at that time when the study came out I had already been sharing so much data on psychoneuroimmunology on the psychosomatic effects of covid all published data like we know this happens we have entire field of psychoneuro Immunology understanding how our mind and our thoughts affect our immune system right so if we're in a state where we're riddled with fear like we've been the last two years bombarded fear without context not to say that there isn't something for us to be concerned about and protect ourselves but to get to the place where we're debilitated and we're frightened just at the sight of another human being guess what's going to happen you're going to be pumping out all of these catabolic stress-related hormones and it's just going to be hammering away at your immune system especially over time we didn't just have a week of it two weeks a few months years what do you think's gonna happen it's not good so that was the second leading risk factor for death the third was diabetes and it's related complications again going back I can't believe that anxiety and fear outpace diabetes yeah crazy that's fascinating to me I would have for so long it seemed like everybody was lumping those two together obesity and diabetes so it's very interesting to me that they seem to have a slightly different mechanism of action so that I I would have thought the diabetes would be even more life-threatening than just Garden variety obesity why do you think they're flipped yeah that's such a good question and by the way I want to throw this little bit of data out here too so this is published by the CDC as well healthcare workers obviously had a great level of exposure so they're a great data set and plus controlled environment we can get better feedback 89 of healthcare workers who were hospitalized with covid-19 had at least one pre-existing chronic disease and over 75 right around 75 percent of them obese okay so this isn't again sort of it might be a correlation we know this is is the issue and so with obesity and diabetes these two they do tend to come hand in hand you know they're like they're paired up all right they're they've met on Tinder they're you know what I mean whatever but there are different metabolic situations happening all right because somebody can be not a they can have type 2 diabetes and not be obese and also people who are obese don't necessarily have to have diabetes this gets back to this very important foundational understanding that we're all different and our body's metabolism we have a unique metabolic fingerprint and how our body adapts to things is can be dramatically different from one person to another but what we do is we tend to put these umbrella diagnoses on people right so they get the diabetes label if they have you know the fasting blood sugar is too high or hemoglobin A1c it's too high whatever the case might be you're diabetic that's it no two people have the same diabetes ever because they're a unique human entity and everything is different in that body there are of course similarities where we can classify people and provide a treatment but oftentimes it's that standard of care and this is why we suck at fixing it because we're not taking the person into consideration another thing with battling this issue is we're fighting against ourselves you know we're fighting this internal battle and there's a lack of respect like our fat cells this is my biased uh our fat sales are smart too of course again they could be dumb but they're really intelligent at helping to Keep Us Alive through our Evolution they were developed they developed in such a way that they can keep us alive during times of famine well now we're living in a famine That Never Comes not even remotely close as a matter of fact it's anti-famine right and our fat cells have the capacity to expand their volume by a thousand times a thousand times crazy it's insane so now the problem is as that's happening it's sending out that distress signal that something is wrong here like I have too much stored in this system there's some kind of infection something is breaking down but here's the beauty when we start to move away from the behavior patterns that's causing the problem the body knows how to fix itself it knows how to sort the stuff out right this is where we can get in the conversation about a caloric restriction or the like but the caloric restriction naturally happens when we're eating nutrient-dense Foods because it starts to cover all of these bases these metabolic bases because even the process of fat loss itself which is it's lost on so many people there are key nutrients that are involved in the process even the mitochondria itself our mitochondria is the end destination we have lipolysis where the fat cell lets go of its contents but that [ __ ] can get reabsorbed all right so lipolysis is a step now it needs to get shuttled to the mitochondria to actually be used as fuel right we've got uh cellular respiration and beta oxidation so now that that's getting utilized here's the here's the crazy part the mitochondria really are all of ourselves there I can't think of anything that isn't dependent upon the sodium potassium pump these key electrolytes that enable our all of our cells to do all the [ __ ] they do right magnesium is also another critical electrolyte in our in our mitochondria being able to we have in this kind of uh mitochondrial Genesis creating new mitochondria we need magnesium to help it to do that job and last point this is so cool when I was in my University classes I was taught that the energy currency of the body ATP everybody knows ATP ATP no that's not the bioactive form the bioactive form is when ATP is binded with magnesium that's when it's actually bioactive able to do [ __ ] I don't know this is why electrolytes these key nutrients are so important so if we get dogmatic and we just like cut your calories are you deficient in these key electrolytes shit's not going to work as good what if we start stacking conditions in people's favor using our primitive understanding of nutrition with trying to treat the body like a calculator but also adding on the advanced stuff which is epic caloric controllers so we can really start to get people healthy Tom bilyu here announcing my new espanol episodes on YouTube and podcast we are committed to spreading the impact Theory message of empowerment at scale to as many people in our growing Global Community as possible so we've taken some of our best It episodes with some amazing guests and dubbed them into Spanish language tell your friends and family start watching Tom bilyu and espanol muchas gracias be legendary foreign gets really complicated there was there was something you said earlier that I want to go back to around the idea of how much your mind your psychology influences things but I also want to be clear so when I say that the body is dumb that's probably a more useful way to think about it but I also believe that if you want to believe in God look inside the cell like every time I look at how cells function which is way over my head but even the parts that I can grasp are so terrifyingly complicated that you're like wow it is hard to believe that we just like came to that so it's it's pretty intense but now applying that to the mind it's really incredible how powerful the mind is and when I was researching you you were talking about a study where they gave people the same Shake it's the same Shake but they told people different stories about those shakes walk us through that because this was startling to me in terms of somebody trying to uh figure out this complex game of weight loss perfect yeah so this was a study coming out of Stanford at the time and the lead research was Ilia crumb and she wanted to find out if our thoughts might affect our metabolism and so they Blended up a big batch of Milkshakes for study participants to come by and on some of the milkshakes even though they were all calorically the same amount they slapped the label on some of the Milkshakes that said 140 calorie sensible milkshake right quote sensible right and even though they were 380 calories and some of the other ones they slept on a label that said 620 calorie indulgent milkshake right and so they allow test participants to consume them they were running a hormone panel to see what was going on with their biochemistry and so here's what happened when folks were consuming the indulgent shake that they thought was a high calorie indulgent milkshake their ghrelin levels which ghrelin is this kind of glorified hunger hormone that drives us to seek food seek nutrition seed caloric density seek key nutrients it creates a situation where we are driven towards food when they had the indulgent Shake their ghrelin levels dropped as if they had three times more calories than they actually did wow all right so essentially because they believed they were consuming a lot of calories something that was super indulgent their gorillin levels responded ghrelin also plays a big role in metabolism overall and Metabolism of fat their ghrelin levels and their desire to eat dropped as if they had three times more calories than they actually did on the other side the sensible milkshake and even again keep in mind all the milkshakes are the same amount of calories 380 calories when people had the sensible milkshake their gorillin levels barely budged at all crazy non-significant okay so these folks what's going to tend to happen is you're going to be hungry sooner after even though you had more calories than you thought you had ghrelin didn't change okay and this speaks to again every thought that we have creates correlating chemistry in our bodies instantaneously it's happening 24 7 always will never stop that's the part of medicine in the last couple of generations there's been the separation between mind and body and is the most ignorant thing because you cannot possibly separate the two and so understanding and again pointing people back to their choice and your ability to choose the thoughts that you want to think for example we can tell ourselves we can basically Joe dispenza you are the placebo so after I read the study I immediately thought of him and I really got it we can tell ourselves that this meal is incredibly nourishing and indulgent even though it might be a low calorie meal right so when people are doing the calorie restriction thing and they might not be happy with the fact that they're eating this you know low calorie salad but telling themselves and this gets into the debate like are we lying are we like faking it till we make it doesn't matter you're changing your biochemistry and your body works even if you're telling it to yourself like if I know that it's a 380 calorie Shake can I tell myself it's 160 calories or you know that it's the indulgent so that I stop being hungry great question because we know the greatest effects come when it's coming from an authority figure right not surprising so another study that aliacrum and her team did was a skin prick test and basically they gave people you know they prick their skin and created this reaction histamines kind of skin rash would come up and then they brought in researchers to tell them that they're going to apply an ointment and either and it's going to be in an Agonist or an antagonist it's going to either make the skin rash better or it's going to go away okay and so as study participants we're given the the cream that was a non-treatment there was no treatment fact or are active ingredients in this cream that can do anything all right but the test subjects who rub the cream Believing by their physician by the research or by the scientists that this would help their their rash go away and start to go away within 10 minutes it's bananas the study participants who had the the antagonist cream where it's going to get worse the skin rash got worse within 10 minutes now here's the thing the degree of change how quickly it changed and how effective it was was based on the study participants belief about how intelligent their practitioner was how qualified they were their aptitude their faith in them impacted whether or not the rash changed house and how fast it changed right so keep this in mind what what usually happens is we Outsource our thinking for our bodies to other people and I know this deeply because this was how I got into this field in the first place I had no intentions on working in health and wellness I it just wasn't in my perception but when I went into that position experiencing some leg pain and he had me get an MRI of my spine first of all I didn't even know why I was getting MRI of my spine when my leg hurt got so disconnected from how this entity works and I go in to see him and he puts the MRI up and he's looking at it with me and he tells me I have these two ruptured discs and severe degeneration L4 L5 S1 and I'm just like I'm like I'm a kid I'm 20 years old I'm like okay what do we do let's go what do we do to fix it and he looks at me like whoa you know it kind of even pumps his hand like this like pump your brakes kid and he says son you have the spine of an 80 year old Jesus this is unfortunately something that's incurable but we're going to help you we're going to get you some medication we're going to help you to manage this it was a key word he said we're gonna help you manage this um untreatable uncurable uncurable condition it's only downhill from here but he's going to help me manage it and when I shared this with you before I I didn't really because I've been thinking about this the last couple years I had some extra time Tom I was like I asked him a question that I believed prior that I had no grounds to ask him which is is this do or is there anything I can do should I change the way that I'm eating I asked him that question had no grounds for it so I thought should I change the way I'm eating should I change the way I'm exercising and of course he said this has these are the exact words this has nothing to do with what you're eating but then he wrote me a prescription to eat some pills yeah right but after thinking about it again and again and again that nutritional science class that I had was before this happened this was almost two years before I was like 17 18 in my first uh nutritional science class which was a prerequisite on the pre-med track I didn't have to take it but I thought nutrition was about Fitness and my teacher was overweight all right and so when I saw him I'm like he can't really teach me how to be fit just so like I never said it and never really said the words to myself but just I realized that I had this little disconnection of trust right and so I had this in my memory bank that nutrition matters but when when I asked that question for him to give me that immediate feedback that nutrition food doesn't matter in a disease state my doctor was not just overweight he was obese and I remember him leaning over on me right and just like he was clearly not well and he's probably doing the things that he believed to be effective he's not just you know not trying to not be healthy right but in that moment what happened to me was the nocebo effect right giving someone a negative injunction from an authority figure that things are going to get worse just like that skin prick test but globally like for myself I went from a nuisance of a pain to Chronic debilitating pain within a couple of weeks because I believed I am unhelpable my life is over right and so I carried that with me day after day for two years seeking out multiple which I always recommend people if you get a bad Bill of news please seek out another opinion getting a diagnosis it's only the same like lit bar for bar the same diagnosis around 20 of the time for physician to physician all right now I'm talking about clear difference but just in general you know 20 30 40 time there's going to be some play plays within that diagnosis that are going to be different seek that out but here's the thing I learned over time if you're going to seek out another perspective don't just seek out the same type of thinking Einstein he had this wonderful statement that's attributed to him that we can't solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created the problem right and so I applied that even in the the help that I would implore people to seek out like ask somebody with a different way of thinking about this thing right but I didn't I didn't know that piece of data at the time so I went to the same kind of conventional thing and each time I'm heartbroken leaving there and I'm leaving there with another drug celebrex was popping at the time so I was on Celebrex and I got I got Celebrex from the second guy eventually get sleeping medication eventually you know the list goes on and on I found my little own over-the-counter plus prescription cocktail to knock me out at night because I'm in so much pain you see this is where it gets interesting because you've got the age-old recommendation like thousands of years old let food be thy medicine uh Hippocrates I think it was that said that all disease starts in the gut and so we've known this stuff for a long time and this goes back to that idea of replacing what works for what sounds good so drugs are powerful man like when you get a drug that really works like if you've ever had a bad headache and you take Tylenol or Advil it is awesome it is awesome and I've thought you know a dozen times more I'm sure that I've taken it and thought I'm so glad I live in an age where I can actually get medicine that has this kind of impact because it's really powerful so I get how people end up getting confused but man have you got to really look at the data and so rarely are people actually looking at was this effective did this actually work yeah yeah this gets us into this really important part of the conversation which is I had a conversation with Dr John Abramson and he's a professor at Harvard and he's been huge and it was not his intention to be involved in so much Drug Company litigation pharmaceutical company litigation and he was just brought in as an expert witness one time and then just kind of got pulled into that universe and so he's under so many different ndas and things like that he can't talk about a lot of details but some of the outcomes that we've seen even in the vioxx Scandal that took place if I I could have been put on bioxides at that time I was put on Celebrex vioxx killed affirmed in the data over 40 000 Americans affirmed in the data over forty thousand we're talking about the low end killed them from this drug that again according to the guy who was involved in the damn case all right Merck knew about the dangers they saw in the data in their in their clinical trials they still put the drug out because hey these non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are hot right now we got to put ours out right and so again like there's these little brushes with fate that I have and specifically he even shares some of the stories in his book that you know young people were dying right so like uh one of the stories that he shared was a athlete you know she hit her head and she was like having headaches they gave her vioxx she ended up freaking having a stroke and dying you know it's so crazy but we got to keep this in mind merc's doing better than ever they killed 40 000 Americans we could argue intentionally they knew the dangers and they put the drug out and not to mention all the stuff they did to try to hide it that's why they were hit with such a huge lawsuit the fines all the stuff but these fines to them are like it's nothing to them like they actually have counts just kind of like for the lawsuits like it's already set aside they have the most powerful legal teams in the world so with that said knowing so many people who work at pharmaceutical companies mostly good people people they're just trying to they're trying to serve they're trying to help people they really believe in the mission but they're not in the lab they're not looking at the data they're not paying attention to the fact that our physicians are not when we go to physician we think that there's their medical school training for this particular drug they're prescribing the vast majority of time they're educated on that drug by sales rep sales rep is educating your doctor on a drug and they have the chance if they want to to look at the peer-reviewed data because that's how a drug gets Pub you know approved by the FDA as part of the process they have this peer review process but here's another thing that John showed me that blew my mind I couldn't believe it most of the drug trials that are published in our most prestigious journals the review board most of them never actually see the real clinical trial data they get a summary from the [ __ ] drug company who's actually looking at the trial data the FDA isn't doing that they don't do that and a little not so fun fact that I've really been trying to press into culture because again we need to check these systems so that when drugs are necessary we have safety the FDA over 75 percent of their scientific review budget is funded by drug companies our FDA is supposed to be regulating and checking keeping in check drug companies are funded by those same drug companies because they pay for fees these user fees the Advent of user fees is a recent thing that took place all under the guise of getting drugs we need more drugs we need drugs to people faster the FDA is like we need money so drug companies like we'll give you the money to get the get more employees more computers whatever you need make the process faster user fees now but here's the thing Tom it's not just 75 percent of their scientific review budget the fda's overall budget 50 of it is coming from drug companies we have like it doesn't take Michio Kaku hey a brilliant level thinker to see like there's a huge conflict of interest here this is dangerous but for me there's still a still surface I dug more publishing the journal science one of our most prestigious journals they look at the process of scientific review for a drug to see are not just the entity of the FDA itself but are individuals at the FDA itself being compromised by drug companies and so what they found was that yeah I know I've spent too much time with you online I know the punchline this is rough what they discovered was that when a new drug is brought up for the review process The Physician advisors who are on the board for approving this approval process end up getting paid by a drug company who's involved in that clinical trial almost 40 percent of the time they receive a payment from that same drug company or a competitor okay now how is this legal it's a post-hoc payment so they're not paying them and then getting the thing it might be six months later right it might be nine months later they're getting either cash they're getting a grant they're getting they're getting money and this is literally there are cases where Millions hundreds of thousands thousands of dollars how is this even possible and what's supposed to be the gold standard for drug regulation in the world it's so riddled with layers of corruption that even the good people who are trying to get good products helpful products to people is being compromised at every level last part here I gotta share in 2020 two-thirds because again how is this all happening why is in Congress or a senate why aren't our leaders going after these drug companies in this process and addressing this corruption in 2020 two-thirds of United States Congress members received a check from a drug company whoa now that one I didn't know so it's the question is how can we get this sick how can we be this disconnected why are we so mentally unwell the number one cause of death right now here in the United States Tom for people between the age of 18 and 45 our Prime our Prime of Life years the number one cause of death right now is fentanyl really yes number one cause of death not just overdose specifically Fentanyl why isn't this you you know your [ __ ] why doesn't everybody know this so I've I've started hearing about fentanyl in the last I don't know maybe a year 18 months I'm probably way behind the curve on that uh what is fentanyl and opioid yeah it's in that family of opioids okay but it's a it's a synthetic opioid and is it used in the medical system that's where it started it's where it got to start and they're great documentaries on this absolutely and this question is why would when we hear overdose we tend to have this perception of the person that overdosed man I've got so many people just floods because of putting this data out of like their their Uncle they're like people are going in because they have pain and end up getting hooked on these opioids they have no intention on being a quote a drug abuser so many people and also fentanyl is so deadly like literally just a few sprinkles of it can kill you but it's being like laced in so many other products today right so cocaine from a drug like illicit drug perspective yes so it's being laced in a lot of things but also because it makes the high better like what's the if it's that dangerous you can put less of the other stuff and just a little bit of Fentanyl and everything else cheap oh it's super cheap it's the hottest thing going right now getting to the degrees the number one leading it's a leading cause of death that sound it doesn't even sound right I know it doesn't sound right so I spent the I spent a lot of time almost too much time like looking into these figures and trying to see like breaking down how this something like this is possible this goes back to perfect people are dying per year from fentanyl do you know or even just opioids in general in 2015-ish we had about 50 000 drug overdose deaths just overall by 2020 is a hundred thousand it doubled overdose deaths doubled in that time span more and more and more fentanyl again this was the trigger was Purdue Pharma Purdue Pharma knowingly they they package things up so that this wasn't this was a non-addictive opioid wait fentanyl is not addictive no or that was how they packaged it up okay absolutely but it ended up being just as addictive as anything else yeah and deadly and so uh HBO Max there's a great documentary and also there's a series on Hulu starring Michael Keaton of all people dopes kind of like yeah dope sick I haven't seen it is it good it's pretty good yeah it is pretty good but that's like a fictional implica uh implementation of real events versus crime of the century documentary on HBO Max or of course like because we have such a visual culture I like to point people through those things their entire books on this subject matter as well obviously the data's out there is scary my more terrifying question is why are we turning to drugs so much so all the like rat studies and stuff and I don't know this literature well so I'm very much uh reciting headlines here but the headline feels so right I would be surprised if it isn't accurate that it is very difficult to get a rat addicted to drugs in its open field like where it can literally just live its life but if you put it in a cage then they'll get addicted lickety-split so my question is what is going on like if we gave if we drop drugs into the Savannah 150 000 years ago would they get addicted or would they be so um occupied I won't even say so thrilled but so occupied with their life of hunting Gathering loving marriage death you know dealing with attacks like all that stuff that they just wouldn't think about it or would they boom it's just that kind of thing and they would all get addicted as well I love your thinking man you know um there's always been mind-altering substances that humans have tinkered with right and there's a big movement towards you know plant medicine and all these different things for certain experiences but historically what it would be involved with is something that might be a rite of passage or might be involved in like it's a it's a experience that is a tribal aspect to it it's always been done with this layer of respect to the thing I don't have a feeling that they were and I don't know I am super ignorant on drugs but like looking at what they've done to weed where they've made it hyper potent like it massively increase the THC levels we've done the same thing to fruit so I have to imagine you know that the drugs while obviously still psychedelic may not have packed quite the punch of course way different scenario you know again RSS is happening upon this stuff might you know take a little dabble and just swear that stuff off right it just might be overwhelming too much to send all the things right but we even though our even though our genes haven't changed much in this time our environment has and our level of intelligence in a sense and I'm saying that to say I'm trying to set up the answer which is today is very different because we're seeking it out we're seeking out a solution to our pain we're seeing causing our pain share this many times we have epidemic levels of physical pain and mental pain mental health issues all-time high you name it ADHD depression anxiety schizophrenia everything is up everything and nobody's stopping to ask like what is causing all of this dysfunction right part of it is obviously our exposures our environments are very abnormal our food is very abnormal and there's a direct inrose obviously with what we're putting into our bodies having in essence we can have degrees of these kind of mind-altering experiences right because believe it or not that bowl of Lucky Charms is a mind-altering experience no doubt right and so but we have is classification of oh these are safe to do in our society alcohol is huge huge right it's one thing you're out at the stadium getting [ __ ] up versus you being at home by yourself and doing it right and also it's socially acceptable if the police really want to get DWIs and just sit outside of stadiums but they don't do that right it's not fair game but that's a that is the most socially acceptable psychoactive substance that kills more people than other drugs until fentanyl came along right but that's even still alcohol is way up there it's not in that same kind of classification right violence right weight gain all the things non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is it's it's just way it's the top top 10 too liver disease whoa right so it's either 11 or 10 right now right our livers are getting [ __ ] up right what are the inputs here alcohol is one of the big ones and also obviously sugar too okay so this sets up the point oftentimes we have this perception of what somebody who uses drugs is right we negate the fact that over 70 percent of United States citizens are on prescription drugs okay right now our society we are very Adept at taking a pill to make us feel something that's a really terrifying number okay it's normalized and so whether it's self-medicated or your doctor is your dealer we have a culture that is seeking to suppress our pain physical and mental instead of removing the root cause or dressing what's causing the manifestation I was just talking with Wendy Suzuki Dr Wendy Suzuki she's a neuroscientist out of NYU I've done some guest lectures for her Neuroscience students as well and she has a wonderful book it's called good anxiety and she's addressing our epidemic of anxiety epidemics because anxiety isn't just one thing every person is different but directing people towards something that's more sustainable and effective which is addressing what is causing the anxiety and not just where drugs are appropriate in in instances absolutely it's great to have these things but when it's relied upon what tends to happen is we're suppressing something our body's giving us and our mind this important critical biological feedback that something is off here but we don't want to feel the feeling I want to feel that so we push it down we suppress it take mind altering substances whether it's a drug whether it's food whatever the case might be and we're not connected to our humanness so going back to our ancestors happening upon this stuff they were more connected to their humanness today we have these voids within our psyche and within our spirit and in our bodies were so disassociated from how [ __ ] makes us feel and we're so externally focused social media and it's a golden age of Television it's a lot of [ __ ] a lot of great [ __ ] competing right to not be able to have control most people don't um they're they're binge watching daily all right it's great to have a nice binge watch I like stranger things is great but I put it in its pocket and if I'm going to be a healthy sovereign individual today I need to focus more on creation than on consumption right cultivating my humanness the biggest change that happened to me Tom over those two years of pain I was in so much pain I was afraid to get up so I sat and laid on the floor as much as I could in this one bedroom apartment in Ferguson Missouri while sleeping on the floor everything changed unexpectedly when I decided number one of course I decided to do something when I've been Outsourcing my health and my potential to everybody else what happened the the last physician that I saw you know again are seeking out my friend would be like oh this person's the best so three other opinions and the final one I was sitting at home I had my pill bottle sitting on the side of my bed about to take these drugs and try to knock me out and I just really visualized for whatever reason I don't know why this happened but I visualized the doctor being at home with his family and you know kicking back by the fireplace maybe smoking a pipe or some [ __ ] you know like a very cartoonish kind of romantic idea and but the feeling tone was he's happy he's not thinking about me I left with the baggage he's living his life and I out I Outsource my potential to somebody who's not even thinking about me not to say that he didn't mean well no no but the [ __ ] that that's a keen Insight very keen yeah and so so he's not thinking about me I'm thinking about me but what makes you in that moment are you deciding something is possible or I'm just gonna try I'm not gonna Outsource and I'm gonna start over yeah in that moment the trigger was a change in my question my habitual question because at the time I was like why won't he help me why won't somebody help me why me why me why won't somebody help me and the question changed to what can I do what can I do to feel better and I never thought about that once those two years were you fed up and you got to that point did you read something somebody say something that that moment right there is the most profound change anyone will ever make so I really want to know what made you make that change being able to work with so many people over the years this recipe is different for everybody but for me it was this recipe of ingredients one of them was my grandmother and she had been in my mind harassing me to check on me those last two years because it's like my grandma like I'm fine like leave me alone she's just like are you good are you just checking in on me you know what I felt to be way too much she knew I wasn't okay but I'd always been the one that was okay was it knowing that she loved you like because I really want to know the recipe to it won't work for everybody but there will be more people like you so somebody loves me the doctor's not thinking about me what else yeah it wasn't just love it was belief in me she believed that I would be successful she taught me from a young age that I was going to do something great with my life I was going to be a great man she would say my life conditions didn't match up to my blueprint of what my life was supposed to be and I did I Tom the reason that I was at this place was because I've been fighting so much of my life up to that age of 20. like I'm again I'm in Ferguson on sleeping on the floor you know my mattress is on the floor and I'm barely hanging on the cause I was the first person in my family to go to college let alone graduate and I grew up in a state where I got kicked out of my entire junior year I graduated three years of high school I got kicked out for fighting right when I went to college you think I get my [ __ ] together I got kicked out of college fighting right I grew up in an environment where we solved problems through violence and I didn't really feel like I was a violent person I didn't want to start anything but if you started I'm going to finish it or I'm going to do something right and so that way of living we lived my most my most formative years when I really feel like I went from being like a kid to really taking ownership kind of of my myself and my life we live right next door to a crack house and my father my stepfather I just thought because we saw the devastation happen with my uncles dying from crack cocaine continuously like getting [ __ ] up and end up in prison all the things I thought we established that this wouldn't be you you would never do this and he's in this house next door and I was 12 13 years old I heard my mother outside yelling at him and I just kind of peeked my head down the stairs like and I heard what she said that he was in in there in the crack house and I want he started to walk up the stairs I want to kick him down the stairs so [ __ ] bad I could I could have hurt him I loved him so much so what I did instead I ran over to the it was a four family flat and it was a glass door to to get to their real door and I pressed the door and I broke the glass of this crack house or they have guns you know what I'm saying I was just screaming I hate you I hate you why'd you do this to my family ah fortunately a friend of the family grabbed me they hid me like I was hitting this you know in a closet somewhere and like I can still hear all the commotion outside and they were looking for me and they were able to de-escalate the situation but again I was responding like this and again you could see it maybe rightfully so right but I grew up in this very volatile circumstance I was the one that was supposed to make it and here I was I gave my power away the one who always took his power gave my power away when he gave me permission to that first position when he said I'm unhelpable it gave me it gave me a permission slip to stop fighting and I took it Shameless chills so but that didn't sit well obviously when my spirit eventually it took two years and I'd gotten you know I was overweight and in a lot of pain but I my grandmother harassing me you know checking in on me and the coupled with that vision of you know this person says he can't help me why am I listening to him what can I do to get healthier my life is supposed to be great what can I do to get well and I changed the question and as you know like the human brain really questions are the answer you know there's this process in the brain it's called instinctive elaboration so when you pose the human mind a question like this is why shows get us right the open Loops like it's seeking out to find answers and I ask what can I do to feel better and also I'm a very practical person which I turned that [ __ ] off for those two years I was like what what are some actual tactical things that I could do to like get better like I need to lose weight first thing I did was Slim Fast don't recommend it's not very effective but it's because of like okay what what do I have access to but the low-hanging fruit for me I'd always been an athlete and so I just started going to the gym every doctor said don't do anything which the worst thing you could do is do nothing I could still [ __ ] walk Tom I could walk I was in pain but I could move and they were telling me don't move that's our advice to you that's how we're going to help you but then again they don't talk to me again they send me out the door with the back brace and some drugs and say don't do anything and now not only is my spine atrophying my entire physiology is and so just being able to start to move my body to upgrade the food I was bringing in because again the real solution at the end of the day was what was I making my tissues out of my discs that looked like two pieces of fried bologna on that MRI initially the light should be shining through them it was made of absolute [ __ ] like absolute garbage I ate fast food every day unless again like I didn't have a dollar then I ate fast food at the house well Ultra processed foods which was my favorite meal Velveeta Shells and cheese I just eat a box of that [ __ ] you know and ramen noodles you know like again I'm just eating processed food every day so I'm making my tissues out of really low quality [ __ ] my body's doing the best it can do to keep me alive what if I get my body the best stuff the sulfur-bearing amino acids the vitamin D like you need Vitamin D just for assimilation of nutrients for your bones we talked a little bit before the show I broke my hip at track practice just running why my bones so brittle no all I know is calcium from the commercials you know but there are so many other things that I uncovered and here's the last part of the story the solutions were there the whole time I just wasn't attuned to them the books the resources the people they were there I was just so busy in my world of I'm unhelpable and things can't get better that I just ignored the solutions possible solutions access to solutions that were there all along that's so powerful there's a quote I forget the exact idea but never explain an outcome to nefarious intent what can be explained by incompetence and so I don't think people mean to [ __ ] us up I don't think the drug companies mean to [ __ ] us up I'm grateful for a lot of the drugs I don't think the food industry means to [ __ ] us up I'm grateful for hyper palatable food cheap and convenience I don't think social media means to [ __ ] us up I'm grateful for the people that I've been able to connect with you and I wouldn't be sitting here together if it wasn't for social media so all of these things have had huge benefits in my life but like you I sat on the edge of the bed one day and I looked at my life not moving in the direction that I wanted and I decided to take complete responsibility for the outcome of my life now once you do that you have to start looking at the data what's actually working what allows me to predict the outcome of my actions better and so that puts you on this very useful trajectory but if you never have that click over moment then you get prescribed the drugs you take the drugs you go to McDonald's because it has the dollar menu or at least it did when I was younger uh and you know all of these things sort of snowball you into a really dark place and I I am concerned right now because of the way things are going and I feel like that I mean you gave some crazy Stats today 80 this 88 that 78 is like it's just really really startling and so I'm about to tell people the coolest piece of information I've ever gotten from you which will be the punch line to all this but before I do tell people where they can follow you and learn more perfect man it's always an honor to talk with you always the same for you man people could find me my show is called the model Health show and you know we do master classes on specific subjects and I strive same as you to bring on the very best people in respective fields and grateful to say it's been the number one Health show many many times over and again this is coming from a guy from Ferguson Missouri sleeping on a mattress on the floor and for me to do this it really is a testament to what's possible and just grateful to do the work that I'm doing um people can of course you know hit me up on Instagram I'm at Sean model on Instagram I do a lot over there and my most recent books eat smarter uh USA Today National bestseller and sleep smarter International bestseller is creeping its way into half a million copies sold of a Sleep Book which is incredibly rare you know it really helped to change the culture so you know those are the places people connect with me it's amazing and I highly recommend it okay so back to what we were talking about the quote that I wrote down when I was researching you is food is information but so are thoughts thoughts are information and once people realize what what you are eating is having an impact on how you think believe it or not so I went on a horrendous journey of anxiety dealing with that and I realized that 70 of my anxiety the part that made it overwhelming and made my life near and tenable was from um diet drinks and once I remove the I could not believe that changed my life in in no small way and the thought that the the biggest part of it it's not the total cause of my anxiety but the biggest part of my anxiety was something I was drinking just it seemed impossible and so getting people to recognize that that food is information it's communicating to you at a cellular level it's making you think in different ways we didn't get to it today but you've talked about how in prisons they did a study if you increase their nutrition make their nutrition Superior it decreases the violence pretty substantially it's insane so getting people to understand what you're eating Believe It or Not matters how you sleep matters your exercise matters and what you allow yourself to think matters and so I hope that they don't need to go through a two-year struggle like you did or the multi-year struggle that I went through with anxiety and instead they can learn easily what you and I have learned with great difficulty and recognize what they think matters as well and that they have to get that right because it's all information Sean thank you so much for being here speaking of good information if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace our main Discovery is that there is a switch that animals use to go from being a normal way to overweight that switch you can activate it by certain types of foods