The DAILY HACKS To Melt Fat Away, LOSE WIEGHT & Live Longer | Shawn Stevenson

and so once i changed it that started changing the inputs i was putting into my body i didn't just become physically healthier my my thoughts changed you know my perception of reality and i came across this quote from einstein very early on and i mentioned it towards the end of the book that the most fundamental decision that we make is whether we live in a friendly or hostile universe [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with none other than sean stevenson sean welcome back man great to be here man any time talking with you is awesome dude i feel the same i absolutely love researching you the new book eat smarter is really fun to see you make the transition from sleep which is what you're known for but really the diet and health side is what you've spent more of your time on i'm so i'm super amped to talk to you about this one of the things that i want to really go ham on today because you cover it so interestingly in the book is burning fat changing your life through your diet and the fact that people struggle with it not because of calories but because of a failure to recognize how individual we are walk me through that dilemma talk about how you approach in the book and what the hell people are supposed to do with the fact that nobody is like them which is something you mentioned over and over in the book help us yes perfect man yeah so there's this term that we're really working to impress upon culture called your metabolic fingerprint all right each of us has a unique metabolic fingerprint and this consists of of course there's genetic components there's microbial components there's so much about us that makes us so diverse there's nobody like you in the history of humanity who has the same metabolism and there never be anybody like you in the future and the craziest part tom is that there's even yourself right now your metabolism next week is going to be significantly different it's constantly changing and evolving and adapting and i'm really working to impress us upon culture because this cookie-cutter system of nutrition has not has not really given us good results if we just look at what's happening with our society a big part of that as you mentioned when i went to school i went to a nice private university very expensive they had a great pre-med track and i took a nutritional science class which was an elective i didn't have to take it i thought nutrition had to do with fitness right so i was like okay i'm gonna learn about how to be more fit there was nuance there because you know i didn't really understand the difference with health and fitness and so the very first day of class the very first day of class he said that if you want to control your body composition all you have to do is control calories if you want to control your health we just need to manage calories calories were the tip of the spear it was the thing that we were taught if we can regulate this thing this entity then we can regulate our health now the big problem is kind of manifested in culture is that there's actually these epic caloric controllers all right sort of like epigenetics right there's things that are above genetic control now we know there are things above caloric control that actually control what calories do in our bodies which gets back to our unique metabolic fingerprint in a moment but getting that from my professor by the way sidebar my professor was borderline obese himself and he was an incredibly brilliant man and he was doing the things that he wasn't like secretly going and like beer-bonging like three musketeers or whatever like he was teaching us at the time it was the food pyramid right seven to 11 servings of whole grains each day should be the staple the the base of the diet and in that system of thinking all he did was he created learned helplessness because he kept trying to do the thing he's just like well i just need 14 to 19 servings of whole grains and i'll get it i just need to cut my calories more and it wasn't working and what we know today is that for example i'll give you one of the the epicolor controllers you've said this before tom you've heard many people say this it's not just the calories it's the quality of the calories just like with sleep smarter it's not just the minutes of sleep it's the quality of those minutes and so now we've got a really interesting study this was published in food and nutrition research and i mapped this out really well in each smarter the research went to find out what happened what happens when you eat a meal of whole foods versus a meal of processed foods and so they had some test subjects to consume what they deem to be a whole food sandwich which was multi-grain bread and cheddar cheese all right now that's of course is debatable but now they've got the other group of test subjects consuming a processed food sandwich which was white bread and cheese product and some folks might be like what the hell is cheese product that's what craft is craft singles they can't legally call it craft cheese because there's not enough cheese in the cheese but as i digress so anyways here's the most important part of this story the sandwiches are the exact same amount of calories the whole food version and the processed foods version same amount of fats carbohydrates and proteins on paper same sandwich it should have the same metabolic effect according to the calories and calories out model but here's what happened after compiling the data the folks who ate the processed food sandwich had a 50 reduction in calorie burn after eating that meal versus the people who ate the whole food version all right so i'm going to pause it there why how how did they determine burn right yeah so this is a great example a little sidebar for everybody to understand the pathway of fat leaving your body or we call this caloric expenditure so that's one of the things we're demystifying and he's smarter is like where the hell does fat go where does fat go when you lose it where does this quote burn process happen so number one we've got when we're thinking about like eliminating fat we are not we can't indiscriminately kill a fat cell itself when you're born you have about the same amount of fat cells that you have today um what happens is the fat cells themselves get filled with contents right in the form of these energy packets like triglycerides and what we're doing by the way your fat cells can swell up and they can become a hundred times their their size their original size so it's it's crazy what fat cells can do and so what we're what the goal is when we're talking about pulp fat loss is getting the fat cell to number one open to release its contents then it needs to get shuttled to its end station which primarily the mitochondria to actually be burned at this metabolic power plant and it gives off this atp gives off energy but what they discovered was that about 84 of the fat that we lose is via carbon dioxide when we breathe out so as you describe the sandwich so first of all the mildly processed sandwich because even cheese is obviously processed food does not strike me as the ideal barometer for whether this is accurate so it's interesting that they're still pretty staggering results between mildly processed and extremely processed and then what is your prediction if they were to do that with like the sean stevenson prescribed whole food diet would that reduction in burn from where you're at with a true real optimized whole food diet be even more even better yes exactly that's the point that's the point but that's getting back to what are your genes expecting you to eat because the further we get kind of mutated and away from the the origin of a food the more complex it becomes for our for ourselves to really recognize how to use that food which created these what i call these hormonal clogs so this is why there was this reduction in energy expenditure post eating that sandwich basically their hormones their their tissues became much more stingy and hanging on to that caloric energy and fat cells not opening up so that's number one they and this is this is the part of the nuance like we can't identify the study doesn't identify right where is the clog happening but we know it's happening and i would argue that it's happening throughout the entire process right the fat cell being able to have its intelligence to do its job correctly because another thing even if the fat cell releases contents it can get reabsorbed somewhere else so it needs to get to its end destination and then the process of metabolism with the mitochondria the mitochondria have to be healthy and doing their job you know and so so many pieces along this process can become uh can become damaged you know and here's a great thing about us as humans we're very resilient like your body can sort itself if you just look at us like just look at what the body is able to take how unhealthy we can be and still be kicking you know but also just imagine how good things can get as well you know when we give our giving our bodies the right thing so our bodies are always seeking to get back into homeostasis it's always looking for that but it's also very resilient at helping you to survive and one of the things that i really want to bring forward as well in this conversation of fat because again i didn't know we would talk about this but in our culture we're trying to kill fat we're trying to get rid of fat we're we have over 200 million people in our country are overweight or obese right now and right now we have 43 percent of our citizens are clinically obese moving towards 50 half of our population within the next couple of years it's insane and i think you come from a similar circumstance in my family just say i got 30 close family members 28 of them were obese growing up sure and these are this doesn't mean that they're bad people it doesn't mean that they're not trying it doesn't mean that they want to be obese it's just the nature of the environment that we're in and not really knowing how metabolism works and so this idea of indiscriminately killing fat we have to do away with that because our body fat is actually it's pretty amazing it's actually doing what it's designed to do it's what's enabled us as humans to evolve and get to this point because it was this incredibly incredibly intelligent energy storage system during times when things were a little bit leaner and the problem is we we don't have any lean times anymore at all so you were a clinician for 10 years i find your approach to talking about fat right now very revealing and i'm interested to know why you take it so you're being very kind um as a clinician have you learned that you have to have a level of kindness to get people to start doing the right things like why lead with that instead of just saying like because your book ends with a prescription you tell people go do this and look at you cage it a thousand different ways or you know hedge your bets saying that i don't like to prescribe things like everybody's different um why are you leading with kindness when you talk about fat tom man i love you this is why i love talking with you you know it it i it is very intentional you know i don't come from very kind circumstances you know like when i was in college and figuring all this stuff out i lived in ferguson missouri you know and i lived in uh apartment complex sleeping on a mattress on the floor i never met anybody who went to college let alone graduated except maybe professors or something like that but you know just from the environment that i was in man i was inundated with poor health and violence you know and even myself i was kicked out of high school my entire junior year of fighting i got kicked out of that same private university that i mentioned that you know i went to in the first place i got kicked out of that school for fighting who does that who goes to college kicks kicked out for fighting i just grew up in an environment where we're taught to solve our conflicts with violence and so i say that to say part of it is i believe that humans are inherently good and but we are also products of our of our environment of our environment but we're creators of our environment as well when we become aware of it and so once i change it that started changing the inputs i was putting into my body i didn't just become physically healthier my my thoughts changed you know my perception of reality and i came across this quote from einstein very early on and i mentioned it towards the end of the book that the most fundamental decision that we make is whether we live in a friendly or a hostile universe i love that quote so much man like i get the chills right now because i look i lived in what seemed like a hostile situation and i just started to see beauty everywhere man i started to see potential everywhere i start to see the goodness in people because we're all just trying to get our needs met and seeing in my clinical practice nine times out of ten the people making it to me they had been they weren't treated with kindness and so i started to lead with that and see people open up just when i let them talk and here's a big tip for the coaches out there if you let somebody talk if you just ask them questions they will tell you the cause and cure of what's going on with them they already know but we have to have the patience and the kindness to do those things and also knowing that oftentimes even though they were making the decision to put the food in their mouth yes but i'm coming from a place where i didn't know that there was a difference i just didn't know as soon as i got access i started to make better choices now you didn't know what there was a difference in the foods you were eating like the quality of calories exactly yeah i didn't know that there was a difference between a fish stick and you know wild caught salmon it's just food it's just stuff that we eat and we're just trying to survive you know let alone thinking about thriving and cognitive performance and all this stuff we're just trying to get by you know but once i became aware of how much food mattered that's part one the awareness but part two is also the accessibility i had to take myself outside of my environment tom and actually you know go to you know mile on the other side of town to a wild oats you know like i had to make exceptional decisions to make those things happen but investing back in myself paid off dividends but most folks don't even know that that first part is an option to begin with so we're leading with kindness we're i'm assuming lowering people's defenses we want to avoid the morality of food i know online you always avoid sort of bs you talk a lot about not getting involved in arguments over minutia and staying like hey let's look at the sort of big swaths of what's actually going to make progress okay cool so we're being kind we're i'm assuming we're encouraging people to be kind to themselves this is not a moral failing if you find yourself unhealthy what this is is some fundamental misunderstanding but you just said that people if you let them talk they'll actually tell you what to what the fix is so if they know what the fix is why aren't they doing it this is a great question for me there's two parts part one is the education and this is huge and you're a big proponent of this because you might know that there's an issue with something but you might not be educated on why that is and also what to do about it right and so in the instance of food i mentioned a little bit briefly about my indoctrination in my first nutritional science class which again my professor meant well but he was teaching me something that was fundamentally flawed because it ignores the fact that your body is made of food all right my my colleagues i know the top cardiologists in the world top gastroenterologist top neurologist the list goes on and on they might go to school for 12 years to become a cardiologist and learn about food for two weeks and your heart is made of food this is the problem like you don't even know what the thing is made of that you're treating and then we're treating the dysfunction with the drug right you've got lycinapril you've got statins you're not understanding your heart is made from food the blood running through your arteries is made from food the arteries themselves are made from food so the system itself is fundamentally flawed so again people coming in they might be aware that yeah i need to change what i'm eating i know that but they're so far removed from understanding how powerful it is and what to do about it because of the cookie cutter stuff that again my colleague might get get two weeks of training in which is like eat a low-fat diet plenty of fiber all this really superficial bs and then they're telling their patients you need to lose weight how how like and so often and i talk about this in the book our system of healthcare has been treating the healthcare professionals so poorly it's a badge of honor to absolutely destroy yourself in medical school and then try to pull yourself out of it you know and just so you see the high rates of suicide depression anxiety obesity dying from the very same things that they're treating the system is flawed and it's fundamentally because it's not appreciated the fact that we as i'm seeing tom right now and as he seeing me we're seeing the food that we've eaten it's fruit that's really well said okay so i'm gonna start um putting my finger on some of the things that i think end up causing people problems this is obviously a world i'm extraordinarily familiar with so put somebody on a low enough calorie diet no matter what those calories are comprised of i could give somebody a twinkie with arsenic on it and if it is low enough in calories over time if the arsenic doesn't kill them they're going to lose weight they're going to lose fat on top of a whole host of other problems but like what do you say to that sean stevenson oh this is good and there's actually a professor who did the tweaky diet he did the tweaky experiment you know just like see i told you guys it's just the calories now here's some of the fundamental issues with that because anybody who's just even as remotely versed in nutrition and just fundamentals of health because again our system of medicine just focuses on disease not what creates real health but like what is this impact that it's having on your neurotransmitters this twinkie diet what is it doing to your pancreas what are you making your heart cells out of right what is the long-term ramifications of of a diet protocol like that and so here's the the term that i again impressing upon culture is epic caloric control we mentioned the quality of food briefly but another one of these major controllers is the microbiome and i know that of course you had folks talking about this on the show but i want to take this to another level because this has to do with your body's processing of calories and research this was published in the journal cell really crazy study they discovered that there's a certain bacteria that they found in mice that blocked their intestines from absorbing as many calories from the food that they ate all right now through the lens of allopathic medicine we just need to bottle up whatever bacteria that is and sell that just block people's intestines that's it you don't block people's intestines from absorbing as many calories you can keep eating what you want not understanding your body does not operate in a vacuum there's no such thing as side effects these are direct effects because everything's interconnected one of the things i saw early on in my clinical practice probably five years into it i've been in this space for 19 years but 10 years in clinical practice probably about five years into it i came across a study because so many people were coming in statins were like they were the hottest thing on the streets all right because that everybody was coming in on a statin and there was a study that came out revealing that folks taking a statin had a 30 increased incidence of having diabetes now all right something was happening with creating abnormal blood sugar you know does this have to do with the beta cells does it have to do with insulin sensitivity you know that was open for debate but we knew that it was happening and so when you when you try to treat that symptom with okay we just need to get everybody that's bacteria is this going to affect my bacteria's ability to produce b12 is it going to affect my bacteria's ability to produce short-chain fatty acids to protect my gut lining and prevent autoimmune conditions we can't think about in those terms so here's where we do think about it all right so they discover this bacteria now we transition this over to humans this was from researchers at the weizmann institute so tom in my practice i could have somebody send out for a stool sample never even see them a day in my life i can get their report back and know with a high degree of certainty whether or not they're obese based on the makeup of their microbes that is insane and so the research questions really fast while you're on that side note what comes first do you just have a bad roll of the dice and uh you came out of your mother's womb and the microbiome that you formed happened to be obesity um promoting or is it your diet the microbes respond to the fact that you're eating cheetos and all that kind of stuff all your cheese like products uh yeah which which comes first it's a both end world it's a bold and world time because we are getting that download specifically from our mother but one of the studies was done in identical twins all right you don't get more similar of a person to study or people to study to see the effects of one thing or the other than identical freaking twins man when they find a twin whose bacteria cascade is associated with obesity insulin resistance and and weight gain and then they find i know one of the other twins who has in a microbiome who's that's associated with leanness right and they track them over years that they're they're in the same household eating the same diet but the twin who has the microbiome with the cascade associated with obesity became insulin resistant more often became obese more often than their lean microbiome twin right and the microbiome shifts based on our choices based on our lifestyle because one of the number one drivers and i broke this down any smarter as well what we discovered was that folks who are eating more of a traditional diet their hunter-gatherer closer to that type of diet they have upwards of four times greater diversity in their microbes than the average person in the western world we're losing our diversity like crazy and a big part of this is we're not feeding the microbes their preferred food source for them to stick around in the first place all right so these are what we call quote prebiotics and anybody can go to google and look in prebiotic foods but that's limited thinking like we've got asparagus jerusalem artichoke art gun uh onions and garlic that's small small potatoes here's the truth every single food has prebiotic capacity every single real food for some strain of bacteria and there might be a food that your ancestors have been eating for centuries that is suddenly stripped away by a diet choice or just by by proxy just by the environment that you're in and suddenly you don't have that bacteria getting fed anymore it has no choice but to become extinct in your system right and so what the researchers discovered was that the number one weight as your bacteria diversity goes down your rate of insulin resistance goes up bacteria diversity goes down your rate of diabetes goes up your rate of obesity goes up your rate of insomnia goes up as your rate of microbes goes down all right we know that they have an inverse relationship the number one way to reverse and improve the diversity of our microbes is just so simple is to just simply increase the diversity of foods that we're eating now why does that work i get why if i had depleted a population and i can bring back what is there but if it's truly gone extinct is there dirt on the food like how am i repopulating if i'm not taking a supplement of some kind with a probiotic in it yeah this is a great question as well so number one uh in my practice i put people on probiotics so frequently and we would get like these credible probiotic formulas some of them take like two years fermentation process like wizards do spells over them all kinds of but we were missing the point because they're not able to colonize it to populate in the gut to do all the cool things that they can potentially do if they're not given their preferred food substrates they're not giving their prebiotic sources and so to answer that question yes we do want to have sources of probiotics coming in preferably through food right and we do go through that but also the most important thing again is not missing the point and this is the this is the point when you eat a food when you would just say we eat a berry when you're eating that berry you're eating a prebiotic and you're eating that berries microbiome as well you're taking that on yourself so it is coming along with probiotic with bacteria it's just the nature of eating real food same thing with an avocado you're eating that avocados microbiome if you eat some kale you're eating that kale's microbiome if you eat some walnuts you're eating that walnuts microbiome so we have this limited thinking that i need probiotic you know some kind of special probiotic food i need some special probiotic supplement no we're really missing the point here food already has the thing but for many of us especially where we are we can like leverage because i know some people have got some wonderful benefits adding in some fermented foods absolutely but we don't want to miss out on this prebiotic because prebiotics are needed for the probiotics to make postbiotics all right so this is when they're making vitamins minerals short-chain fatty acids in you for you it's this beautiful symbiotic relationship so i hope that's what it does i want to draw a straight line from the question about hey you can eat a twinkie and if your calories are low enough you are going to lose fat and the punch line of what you just said so here's what i'm taking away from that you actually can for sure i promise you you can lose weight eating anything if you keep your calories low enough now some foods because of the signaling effect of calories and not all calories are the same you may have to restrict tighter and tighter and tighter on certain foods than you would on others and so yes you can lose weight eating a twinkie diet but as you mentioned not only do we have those kind of effects but your blood vessels and all of that other stuff are made up of the very things that you eat and in processing they're like at a cellular structural level and a signaling level you're changing the material that you're taking in and it's like i get why people are obsessed with like getting shredded and being in good shape but when you begin to understand that that is ah thing that happens and that there's actually a whole host of things that happen then people begin to think about it the right way now what i found amazing about your book is you call out directly hey boys and girls don't worry about whether you're paleo vegan uh carnivore what none of that matters listen to your body yeah now is what i want to know is what the hell do you mean by that we're right now there's a lot of infighting over minutia as you mentioned that i said earlier um and these wonderful diet frameworks these are my friends you know the top person in each of those and they the reason that they write these books and that they have these positions is that they see results for their patients they see results for the people that they're working with they're not trying to be negligent they're not trying to ignore the data they're helping people but what's also overlooked is that there's a large percentage of people that each of their diet frameworks is not helping and that's the truth and a big part of that is many of these diet frameworks even though they can be wonderful they can also imprison you and they can leave things out make things off limits that you might need that somebody else doesn't need right but also it might be protecting you for something you know so there's there's balance there but we have to have a little bit more agency over our thoughts agency over our choices and this gets into the discomfort of becoming more educated about who we are you know unfortunately there's no easy way around this you know if you're really going to thrive and to be the best version of yourself we have to learn how we work but the thing the thing that i want people to understand and just kind of going back i gotta really wrap this point up because you really like made that hard line point about this with the twinkie diet those researchers at the weizmann institute who understand about what's you know the bacteria in mice they took bacteria samples fecal samples which fecal transplantation is like one of the hottest things on the street as well it's super weird but it is but they take they took these fecal samples from folks who had a bacteria cascade associated with obesity and implanted it into lean mice they took another set of fecal samples from human subjects who had a bacterial cascade associated with leanness and implanted that into lean mice those mice stay lean the mice who received the implants from the folks with the bacteria cascade associated with obesity those mice became insulin resistant they gained weight and gained body fat not because of calories not because they changed what they were eating because of the bacteria these principles supersede any of the ideas that we carry about just managing calories if you just get into a caloric deficit because the mice are already eating the same thing yet they're gaining weight and i've seen again many other people listening especially if they're in healthcare people coming in they're already at a day diet you know and maybe they're six feet tall and their weight loss has been stuck and then we once we can have a certain level of like stepping away and not thinking we have all the answers and listen to the person do some investigation we might find out there's an underlying autoimmune condition a thyroid issue we might find out that inflammation is the causative factor because as you mentioned we talk about that as well there's so many things that control what calories do not to say that being in a caloric deficit can't just make weight fly off of somebody absolutely but even within that there are things controlling that person's metabolism that's going to outpicture different results from somebody who might be at the exact same height and weight starting off as them where i want to keep pushing on though is this notion of self-awareness and how you listen to your body so i'll give you an example when i first started working out i had been working out for probably for about eight months before i realized that you could fire your lats like you could actually send a signal to that part of your back and it would pull your arms down and you have this understanding of whoa when i fire that muscle i feel it i can actually feel that muscle contracting and i now have a level of control with food it's the same but it's like steering a boat when you steer a boat you do something nothing happens and then six seconds later the boat moves so it is very hard to drive a boat because you have to account for that leg food is insanely complicated if you eat one thing and you're in a good mood you'll be fine you eat the same thing in a bad mood and it upsets your stomach it's so complicated i mean that's just one of a bazillion different ways but people don't learn to connect i ate this thing and i feel this way i'll give you example from my own life about six months ago sean i'm i'm always sharp and i was just like just in the middle of the day all the time and i was like way out of it and then finally i connected that feeling with the word people used for brain fog i had never understood what people meant by brain fog and so all of a sudden i was like is this brain fog and i was like oh my god this is brain fog i don't think i'm tired this is if it's brain fog it is almost certainly something i'm eating i end up tracking it down it was pecans i have no idea why i can eat pecans but when i eat them every day all of a sudden because i'd gotten into this routine where one of my meals was made with a lot of pecans it was amazing and over time and that was the worst part it probably took four months of me eating those that meal almost every day to get to that point but then once i was there until i removed them from my diet i couldn't shake it no matter how much i slept caffeine nothing i just felt that brain fog stopped eating them was gone in like 48 hours that's so crazy and this is the thing is it can be something so small and subtle like that and what you're bringing up and how do we kind of get this inner guidance system back online first of all it's an acknowledgement that it exists because in our system we are so focused on objective measures which i'm very analytical so i'm super into that stuff but being able to track the data the things that everybody else can measure isn't even remotely close to how powerful your subjective experience is tell me something that matters more than how you feel i'll wait you know this is the thing this is the most important barometer of everything in our life and yet we get we pay so little attention to it so basic metrics that we can pay attention to when we eat a meal just seeing how does that make me feel how does the digestive process feel but so i think so often as well we start to have these alarms that go off when we eat certain things and we just keep hitting the snooze button on it like ah you know this fatigue is normal this stomach discomfort we get these different responses your body's giving you feedback that something's wrong something's not right here and yet we accept it as normal and so that inner intelligence we start to create a lot of static on the line all right so that's part of it is being able to clear off the static on the line and i want to add another layer here just with a little bit more science on what that static on the line can look like there's this wonderful ex i talk about the science of flavor in each smarter and there's this wonderful occurrence of something called post ingestive feedback right post ingestive feedback and essentially through our evolution whenever we would eat a food your body your your brain your your tissues are essentially like taking notes like okay you know we'll just say just found some wild berries you ate i got some copper from this i got some selenium i got some of some amino acids i got a little bit of uh omega-3s from the seeds your your body is taking notes that when you eat that food is connecting a flavor sensation to those nutrients and so now when you start to become deficient in those nutrients your body can submit a craving a craving signal to go and eat that food to get those nutrients back to where we need them to be now here's the problem processed food manufacturers have really muddied up the waters of this post-digestive feedback because now we can make things taste like different things all the time and it doesn't have to be exact but it's just enough to create enough biological interference that we don't even have that intelligence anymore right so a big takeaway from today and just overall for everybody is that chronic nutrient deficiency leads to chronic overeating chronic nutrient deficiency leads to chronic hunger when we're having these deficiencies part of the big reason why we're having uh haphazard hunger and cravings our bodies are driving us it's not just the fact that we're addicted right that's that can be dismissive but they're just addicted to sugar well they're probably deficient in damn near every single nutrient that they need to actually thrive all right and your body is going to keep compelling you to eat more to get those things in that's how we evolved and so having that process you know again to become kind of skewed and twisted up it just it makes another layer of complexity of trying to figure out this inner intelligence so to to help with this and i provided some very specifics in the book but again i'm very much on we've got to experiment for yourself but one of the things that was found to help to reduce the impact of hyper palatable foods on our brain funny enough is chlorophyll all right chlorophyll yeah chlorophyll is found to help to reduce the urge to eat hyper palatable foods and also to reduce neural inflammation okay do you take it as a supplement so just in foods you know chlorophyll anything green is going to be a good source of chlorophyll so of course green leafy vegetables but then we've got these super dense sources of chlorophyll like chlorella you know they even got its name chlorella from the high chlorophyll content spirulina but then you also get these other benefits there like with spirulina is one of the foods clinically proven to reduce neural inflammation and why am i bringing this up where's the interference and being able to know how we feel and what we need tom i want everybody to get this because you're not going to hear you're going to hear this in a few years but right now you're here here first with tom bilyeu one of the biggest epidemics we're facing today is neural inflammation all right inflammation of the brain and one of the studies that i talked about in the book this was published in the annals of the new york academy of sciences they they reported that specifically hypothalamic inflammation and your hypothalamus is like this is like your body's internal thermostat we're literally regulating what your metabolic rate is your brain doesn't give a how many if you're trying to calorie count your hypothalamus can tell your gut to reduce the absorption of calories that you just ate your hypothalamus can tell your gut to increase the absorption of calories from food you just ate all right these things are epic allure controllers superseding that normal function so what they discovered was that hypothalamic inflammation is one of the biggest driving forces of obesity because it's throwing off our metabolic rate all right and here's the other side obesity is one of the biggest causes of hypothalamic inflammation and it's just creating this terrible loop where people can't get out of it and again i know my friends you might have these diet frameworks but if we're not explicitly helping people to reduce the inflammation in their brain we might just be spinning our wheels here but many of these wonderful diet frameworks though that are really worth their salt they're accidentally doing it anyways they're helping to reduce neural inflammation one of the foods that was again clinically proven to reduce inflammation neural inflammation funny enough and i i'm this is not an advocation for this food it's just the data exists i was shocked at auburn university found that oleokanthal rich extra virgin olive oil is incredibly effective at reducing brain inflammation and it's been found to repair the blood-brain barrier right your internal security system basically keeping things out of your brain that create more inflammation that gets damaged over time especially from you know excess sugar and the list goes on and on but wow i didn't know olive oil can do that that's really remarkable and what they found was this two to three tablespoons a day and how do you go about that there's nuance there too you know um olive oil if you've ever seen it in the stores nine times out of ten is in dark glass this is because it's photo sensitive light can damage olive oil all right and so you don't want it to be in clear plastic that's already nasty it's already messed up all right number one and also is this should bring up well should i be cooking with it you can and it might be healthier well definitely healthier than these highly processed seed oils you know canola oil and veg quote vegetable oil but very low heat but ideally and folks traditionally we're going to use it as a finisher so your meal is finished plated and you drizzle some olive oil on use it to make dressings people put it on sourdough bread talk to me about that so massive individual variability nobody is ever going to be like you again nobody's had digestion like you nobody ever will have digestion like you so you are doing an n of one experiment whether you want to or not how do people figure out what to eat so this gets down to a principles and not not written rules not def definitive points because again everybody is unique so there's going to be principles in every diet framework that are going to make them successful and then there's going to be things that can make any diet framework go terribly wrong right so what we want to do is eat in a way that number one and i just mentioned this earlier to help to reduce inflammation so that these internal guidance systems can be get back online this inflammation is it's a really it sounds kind of hooky tom i don't know about you but it just inflammation inflammation but it is a real problem because inflammation number one is not a bad guy that's number one we need inflammation it's a functional part of our immune system or part of our healing a part of just cellular processing period we don't want no inflammation is a part of growth however chronic inflammation inflammation where it's not supposed to be like this heightened neural inflammation can really really mess us up so the biggest driving force is for most of us today with inflammation specifically gut inflammation is the consumption of pesticides herbicides rodenticides and you know i get i did share one of the studies in the book finding conclusively a meta-analysis that pesticides do in fact not only create inflammation in the gut but create abnormal uh gene expression from your microbes right your micro most of our if we go gene for gene most of the genes we carry in our bodies are not ours all right we're 99 genes of other you know our bacteria cascade that we're carrying around with us and so these things damage our gene micro the microbial expression of our jades all right so this is not a small thing and we've come to accept it as normal and right now we have literally thousands of pesticides have been approved by the epa so-called environmental protection agencies supposed to be protecting us many of them have been recalled many of them are actually caught up in red tape right now like chlorpyrifos for example that's been found study after study to lead to neurodegenerative diseases specifically for development of babies and creating brain damage and creating skyrocketing rates of miscarriages you would think it would be it would have been gone it's happened so many times it's disgusting because with these companies it isn't innocent until proven guilty it's innocent until it cuts into their bottom line enough the lawsuits because it's just you know it's just business as usual they already have a certain amount of set aside for all the damage it's going to cause so it when we're talking about avoiding pesticides this isn't a it's not a trendy thing that i'm talking about here these chemicals are not designed for human consumption but the premises is generally regarded as safe because we're a bigger organism we're bigger than the little pests that they're trying to kill but things bioaccumulate in our tissues and number one and number two we're made of little things smaller than those damn pests we're made of these things and they're damaging our microbes they're damaging ourselves so do we avoid that by eating organic organic there's nuance there with organic but it's going to be generally a good step to make and we can do that ourselves and as we continue to demand it there's going to be continue to change what's available in the market for sure so and also a way around that because again not having a lot of money i would start to go to farmer's markets there was a farmer's market in ferguson and meet the farmers ask them hey are you guys spraying on your lettuce you know and they're like absolutely not you know and just talking to them learning you know there's many and it's much less cost right i can get three times the amount of lettuce that i was buying at whole foods or whatever there for the same amount of money so um so yes avoiding the things that are damaging this internal intelligence that are damaging our our metabolism right so that's just one but then adding things in as well that help to reduce inflammation so what does that look like one of the most important tom and i'm gonna say this again and again because it says this has to do with metabolism but also it has to do with our sleep quality it also has to do with our cognitive performance and i know this is important for you as well and this is the need to make sure we're getting in plenty of dha and epa all right this is so freaking important i don't even want this to if anybody does anything from this episode i want to make sure that you're getting in enough omega-3 fatty acids in the form of dha and epa so number one dha and epa have express lanes if you want to think about the blood-brain barrier being like a toll booth they have express passes to get into the brain like your brain sucks them up like in droves because they're needed for structure of your brain cells omega-3s function as structural fats in your brain creating plasticity creating stability and signal transduction so your brain cells can actually talk to each other without omega-3s goes wrong real fast to the degree one of the craziest studies in the book they found that the folks who had the lowest intake of dha and epa had the highest rate of brain shrinkage all right your your brain literally shrinks rapidly if you're not getting these fats in and so what it was was just under 1.2 teaspoons a day anything under that increase the rate of brain shrinkage what are the best three foods or supplements to get your dha and epa okay perfect food first fruit first the journal neurology found that folks who consume just one seafood meal per week do in fact perform better cognitive skills tests i think that's a direct one-to-one response to those omega-3s but if you if you're not taking uh if you're taking a vegan vegetarian protocol i've got news for good news for you too but food first and then of course there's grass-fed beef in that same spectrum has omega-3s a high ratio of omega-3s uh eggs the best food source though tom is not the fish the fatty fish but the fatty fish eggs so salmon roe and caviar can have three times more dha in epa than the fish itself and then we've got from there most of the studies done on dha and epa is done via fish oil all right so i did share some studies in the book that are just really shocking when it comes to fish oil but then from there the next rung down is krill oil right krill that's the microscopic shrimp super dense and astaxanthin which makes your body absorb omega-3s even better it's incredible that might be for somebody who's doing a vegetarian protocol wherever that lies on your ethics krill oil might be a savior for your brain if anything everybody today even if you're taking a vegan protocol please get yourself an algae oil all right high quality algae oil it has the dha and epa there but we don't have clinical studies now to see its effectiveness but we do know that it's there and i just don't want you to wait around for that data dha is so important for your brain just to be clear this is the plant source is ala right that's what you find in chia seeds and flax seeds and hemp seeds i would have patients get flax seed oil for years i was missing the point it's not the same as dha and epa but it's so important for your brain that your body can convert some ala into dha but you can lose depending on your metabolism your unique metabolic fingerprint you can lose 90 in the conversion process and so you'll have to eat five bags of chia seeds a day to get what your brain needs you know it's just not doable and plus you probably want to leave the bathroom at some point so that's that's that part and i also want to share this really quickly with uh omega-3s and omega-6s this was a study and this was published in the journal nutrients and it found that a large increase in the ratio of omega-6s in the diet compared to omega-3s directly increases our risk of obesity but here's the most important part listen to this this another study and this was highlighted and then i broke this down i'm getting giddy right now another study highlighted in smarter found that an imbalance in omega-6s to omega-3s leads to dysfunction of your hunger-related hormones and increased fat storage even with calories being the same people with a higher intake of omega-6s gained more weight and more body fat and had more dysfunction to their hunger-related hormones all right epic caloric controller omega-3s help to reduce inflammation omega-6s are not bad but we need more omega-3s right now because we've become such a mega-six dominate society man it is a big topic my friend that you cover extraordinarily well you have a gift you know you're always very humble about it but you have a gift of taking these incredibly complicated topics and making them accessible to people your book is fun to read by the way lots of fun jokes and references and a thread that makes it easy to follow where can people pick it up where can they engage with you more thank you so much tom that really does mean a lot and that was the mission behind it uh so people can pick it up anywhere books are sold bam barnes noble uh amazon all that good stuff and also eat smarterbook.com we did a little video mini course so there's 10 videos to highlight 10 foods that have some of the most clinical evidence on kind of helping us optimize our fat loss related hormones so that's where people can find the book and i appreciate you so much tom people where they're listening to this amazing podcast one of my favorite podcasts on earth one of the few that i listen to you can find my show as well it's called the model health show and we do some cool stuff there too no question awesome guys check him out everywhere you can i promise you will be richly rewarded and speaking of being rewarded if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential