The TOP FOODS You Absolutely Should Not Eat To LIVE LONGER! | Dr. William Li

Tumors cannot grow larger than the head of a ballpoint pen, the tip of a ballpoint pen, until it gets a blood supply. No oxygen, no nutrients, no growth. All right? But when cancer is actually able to get this blood supply, they start taking off. They can grow 16,000 times in 2 weeks. So, it's angiogenesis is a trigger to propel cancer growth. One of the things that's so profound about your approach is you've compared the response to all kinds of diseases to a drug, and then the response to food as if it were a drug. And it really, I literally have the chills right now just saying that. It It is astonishing how you can get a response from eating food, whether it's pomegranates increasing the mucosal layer in your intestines, or many, many other things, which I'm sure you will rattle through some of here shortly. Uh that if you saw a drug that gave that kind of response, it would be a multi-billion-dollar drug, and people would be losing their minds. But the fact that it's food becomes even hard to test for. Walk us through some of the early realizations that you had around that, and I've heard you talk about how as an oncologist it's easy to get, you know, um Oh god, what are the the chemotherapy drugs and test it out in your lab, but if you ask the same thing about what the response would be for broccoli or something, it's like nobody they look at you sort of sideways. Um talk to me about food as a drug. Yeah, so first of all, food as medicine is a an ancient concept. And if you go back to the ancient societies and ancient cultures, like Greek culture or Asian culture, um food isn't just food. It's not just sustenance, you know? Um it's actually part of our lives, and part of our lives is actually what we eat, um influences our bodies. Um here's how I came into this, you know, very honestly, I'm not one of these doctors that basically, you know, quit modern medicine and then pooh-poohed and issued prescription drugs. Like I just told you, I I've actually been involved with developing biotech drugs. So, I I believe that new medications can be really, really important for the right person at the right time and the right situation. However, I started to realize that because I helped to develop many of the systems to develop drugs, that we were not taking it full advantage of all these testing systems, right? Um and and to just to flesh out um how I have explained it, uh I I'm a cancer researcher. So, I I've done a lot of research with in cancer labs. And I can tell you you can um go on the internet, click on some chemo drug or whatever, have it FedEx to you by um by a mail order, have it arrive the next day, put a uh a little um uh a spoonful of the chemo drug into a into an experiment, and within a few days or maybe even a few hours, you would know using this test system whether or not the drug is effective against cancer, whether there's activity, okay? Now, you can pick up the phone, and you can call on a pizza or a salad and have it delivered in 15 minutes. And you ask the same cancer researcher, "How do I study what the onions do? What do What does the anchovies do? What do the you know, what does the lettuce do?" And they would scratch their heads and say, "I have no idea." So, that's what I did. 10 years ago, is to tackle that challenge of of of bringing two worlds collide making two worlds collide. The The world of biotechnology, where we have like you can't believe how sophisticated some of these testing systems are. And that's what's amazing because you can throw in the drugs, too. And you can throw in the foods. And then you can compare them side by side. So, um I uh my area is in the field of angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels. For years, cancer researchers were finding trying to find a ways to cut off the blood supply that feed cancers. So, if the cancer doesn't get a blood supply, it's just this microscopic thing and it can't grow. In fact, tumors cannot grow larger than the head of a ballpoint pen, the tip of a ballpoint pen, until it gets a blood supply. No oxygen, no nutrients, no growth. All right? But, when cancers are actually able to get this blood supply, they start taking off. They can grow 16,000 times in 2 weeks. So, it's angiogenesis is a trigger to propel cancer growth. So, finding drugs that can inhibit angiogenesis or stop blood vessels from growing into tumors was at one point kind of a holy grail. It was, you know, like, how do we get that? Lots of drugs, I've been involved with the whole thing. And now there are actually lots of real FDA-approved drugs. But, we were able to study foods in that same system. Foods Some of the foods, soybeans, grapes, strawberries, lemons. And it was crazy to actually see um because I have the street cred of being able to study it against the biotech drugs, that pound for pound, ounce for ounce, molecule for molecule, um in in in many cases, the food held their own against the drug. Some cases more powerfully. Obviously, some foods are not as powerful. But, that actually opens the gateway for a whole new future. And I think that's something that's really exciting to watch. No joke. Do we know what's going on at the molecular level? Is it a metabolite that our microbiome produces when um breaking down grapes that's stopping the angiogenesis, or is it something else? Yeah, so um so, mother nature in creating foods, um have uh laced these foods with natural chemicals, right? Um these are called bioactives. And they're called bioactives cuz they're biologically active. And in a plant, let's look at a strawberry, for example, okay? The tartness of strawberries, you know, there's strawberries are sweet and tart. The tartness comes from an acid, unsurprisingly, called ellagic acid. Okay? And so, you know when a strawberry is a little tarter because it's got more ellagic acid. So, um ellagic acid is a powerful starver of cancer. So, cuts off the blood actually end up in our bloodstream? Like can Could I eat strawberries and then you could draw my blood and be like, "You had seven strawberries."? Absolutely. That is insane. Okay. Now, but here's the here's the even more insane part. What are these What are these bioactives doing in the plant? They are part of the plant's health defense system. So, these natural chemicals help the plant defend themselves. When we eat them, they have another job description. They do double duty, and they actually help to activate our own body's self-defenses. Now, here's one thing that I think is a practical, um, value. You know, for a long time people are sort of talking about like, "Man, you know, like you should eat more organic and don't eat pesticides and stuff like that." Here's a whole new take on this, okay? And this is kind of smoking hot information. Um pesticides actually kill insects so that the plants, um, look better. Um, the leaves aren't as chewed up, and usually the fruits or vegetables look a little bit better, too. Right? That's just agriculture, makes it look better on the product look better on the shelf. Organic doesn't use that. And so, a lot of times you get have you have that more natural, you know, the bugs are nipping at the leaves and chewing at the stems. Guess what? Mother nature created things like ellagic acid as natural insecticides. And so, basically, when the, um, the plant, the strawberry plant's being chewed on, it makes more ellagic acid to repel the bugs. It's a wound healing response and a defensive response. So, organic foods have more bioactives as a reaction. I just was, uh, uh, involved with a study, uh, I was meeting about yesterday talking about coffee. Organic versus conventionally grown coffee. Conventional grown coffee with pesticides, organic coffee hands down, um, this is a study at the University of uh, Warsaw University, um, hands down, um, a pound for pound of coffee bean, organic coffee has more bioactives than the pesticide-treated coffee because the insects, the natural things in the environment, cause it to create more natural health defenses. Dude, this, yeah, this gets incredible. I can't believe I'm this deep in my journey of health and all that and I never realized that the actual chemical compounds from food, I always thought it was the metabolites from the the digestive process that was making its way into the bloodstream, which I know also happens. Also happens. Yeah, that's uh, that's really intriguing. So, one thing we actually haven't talked a lot about, which is your specialty, is angiogenesis. So, when we eat something that has an anti-angiogenesis benefit, is it like ubiquitous across every blood vessel in the body or is it doing something creating some sort of knock-on effect like the antibody drip that we're getting where it's somehow selectively targeting things that are overproducing something? Great question. Let me kind of um, frame it in uh, uh, first framing about angiogenesis in general. So, when we were in our moms' wombs, okay, and sperm met egg and started to form a little ball of cells that didn't look anything like a person yet, it started to create little organs and start to create shape. The first organs that get created are blood vessels. Our circulation is the first thing that gets created. So, our blood supply, our circulation is very much a part of who we are. And I mentioned that we have 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels. Just to give you a sense of how extraordinarily big that is, if you were to pull out all the blood vessels from from you or me and line them up end to end, that would form a thread that would go around the earth twice. Huge, okay? It is insane. Now, um our every single cell in our body, every organ require relies on just the right amount of blood flow, so they're getting fed with oxygen and nutrients. Um they don't need more than just the right amount, and but if they don't have enough, our body has to be able to grow more, okay? This, having just the right amount, I call it the Goldilocks zone. So, Goldilocks, remember the the story? You know, the bears went in there and it's not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft. All our health defenses, including angiogenesis, is exactly the same way. Not too much and not too little, but just the right amount. So, this just-right zone exists for our blood vessels, our stem cells, our microbiome, our DNA kind of balance, as well as our immune systems. All about homeostasis, a term you used earlier. Just the right amount. Now, that means our body knows how to grow more when it's necessary, and then when there's enough, it stops. And if there's too much, it's kind of like a gardener, you know, that sees your lawn overgrowing, it mows the lawn. Mows it right back down till it gets to the right height, okay? Our body's health defenses, when they're working at their best, is like a perfectly manicured lawn. Not too much, not too little, just the right amount to be able to to to to go around, like playing like rounds of golf on a perfect course. Now, what tumors do is they hijack this process, and so they, like a tumor is sitting on a golf course and just grows extra weeds and grass right just for itself. So, that's the gets targeted. Your body tries to fight that off, but sometimes we need some extra help for it. That extra help can be a smart bomb drug that we designed to target those extra blood vessels, or we can help our body mow the lawn by eating foods that have anti-angiogenic or blood vessel mowing capacity. You'll never be able to get rid of them all. It's just back down to the body's set point. So, what's an example of a drug that can actually do this? There's a monoclonal antibodies that are designed like smart bombs to take out tumor blood vessels. But, foods can actually do it, too. Now, why can drugs and foods target a tumor blood vessel and not take down your aorta or the blood vessels feeding your brain like your carotid artery? It's because when we build a healthy blood vessels, we take our body takes great care to construct them to be very, very strong. It's like building a skyscraper, okay? The architects and the contractors and their craftsmen, they make everything perfect, as perfect as they can. But, when a tumor does it, you know, it doesn't it's not careful contractor. It's like a lousy contractor. Just throws it the the the thing up. And so, the blood vessels that are grown are flimsy, they're fragile, they're unstable. And so, think about, you know, a hurricane like Hurricane Ida sweeps through the area and the strong sturdy structures, our healthy blood vessels, are going to stay up even when the wind is there. All the ones that are not well constructed, the wind blows them right down. And that's why a tumor blood vessel is much more vulnerable to either food or drug. Wow, that that's really incredible. Okay, so you wrote the book Eat to Beat Disease. We've touched on a little bit, but now I think it's worth What What is your sort of general I know that there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all. It's very important for people to understand. But, in terms of general patterns of eating to beat disease, what are those general patterns? Yeah. Well, first of all, um when I wrote Eat to Beat Disease, which became a New York Times bestseller, uh the whole point was not about writing about a diet. It's not keto, it's not South Beach, it's not about weight loss even. It's really about health. And because when I was um doing my research to look at different foods that would activate our health defenses, here's the first thing I was surprised by. It's not like one food or two foods or five foods or yeah, it was more than 200 different kinds of foods. And they were fruits, and they were vegetables, and they were spices, and they were legumes, and they were different kinds of seafood including shellfish, and they were different kinds of fish beyond salmon, okay? Um and and there's even some dairy products that can actually have um some benefits as well, including fermented foods um like yogurt and sauerkraut and kimchi. And these foods are so ubiquitous that they are found in the traditional cultures of every single society, but especially Mediterranean diet, which we know is healthier for us as a pattern, and Asian food, which uh we also know is healthier. And so what I started to realize is that eating to beat disease is not just picking a particular disease and trying to figure out what the recipe is that the one-size-fits-all, but it's really um a journey that we have our whole lives from the time we're small until we get old and we get older. Um parents have the opportunity to actually start feeding their children when as soon as they're taking solid food, foods that can actually help them beat disease. In fact, in fact, breastfeeding is actually helping your child um uh beat disease by uh shaping and sculpting their microbiome, right? One of the health defense systems. So I came up with 200 different foods. I lay them all out according to which health defense systems they activate. Some cases they activate all of the health defense systems. I call those grand slammers because man, a single food will knock out you know, knock the five health defenses out of the park. It's a home run uh to eat those things. And I explain all the research that's been done by myself and other people to show how they actually work. So, what's the principle? To eat to beat disease, you can love your food to love your health. Love your food to love your health. That seems so contradictory to what we used to think about healthy food, right? Cuz the old thinking is that well, you got to eat healthy, you got to cut out everything you love, you know? And and and I'm I'm turning that upside down inside out. I'm inverting the whole equation. I'm saying, if you look at those 200 foods that I put down in my book Eat to Beat Disease, take a Sharpie out and circle the ones that you love already. I like this, I like that one. Tomatoes I like. Oh man, I like this one. Okay. That's a great starting point because if you start eating those foods, you're already ahead of the game cuz you already love foods that can actually eat to that can activate your health defenses. Now you can explore, expand your horizons by choosing these other foods that are out there as well. If you sat on TV and watched a food the food network, you can find all these people experimenting with different ingredients. If you go onto YouTube, you can look for an ingredient you don't recognize, bitter melon. The heck is a bitter melon? Well, it's an Asian gourd. Is it bitter? Absolutely, but there are ways of actually cooking it so that's not so bitter and it has medicinal value. Well, how would I do it? Click on YouTube and search on recipe cooking bitter melon and you'll watch somebody teach it to you. So, love your food to love your health. Explore what you like and just know that the foods I put in the book activate your body's health defenses. Right. And some of the things I know you've recommended um historically, mostly plant plant-based. Um you talk about getting some omega-3 from marine sources, uh whether it's from fish or whether it's from uh I I think you talk about seaweed. You'd have to refresh my memory. Um you do personally eat some meat, though I don't know if you eat any red meat or not. I know you recommend that people cut that down. Uh extra virgin olive oil, um things like that. Am I missing any of the the heavy-hitting advice? Well, I mean, so here's here's the basic thing. Um all the research, scientific research that's been done, and the epidemiological, the public health research shows that eating a plant-based, mostly plant-based diet, that that's pretty broad, you know, um uh fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, uh healthy oils, good for you. You should eat most of mostly that. Doesn't mean uh and by the way, uh plant-based could be tricky because a lot of ultra-processed foods also have um plant materials in them. Processed soy, all kinds of other things, all kinds of unhealthy oils made from plants. However, if it's whole plant-based foods, it's the kind of stuff you'd find in a grocery store or a farmer's market, okay? Like, I would say mostly go for those. Mostly go for those, okay? Um uh uh seafood has been shown to improve survival and decrease the risk of death. If you eat two or three servings of of seafood, shelf it could be fish fish or shellfish, um you get a healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Is that per day? Per week. Two to three servings per week. And the amount you would eat, uh which I write a whole chapter about food doses, uh you the amount you would eat is about 3 oz. So, people like, "Well, wait, I'm not a human scale. I have no idea what 3 oz is." What I would say it's a lot less than you think. It is a piece of fish about the size of a deck of playing cards. You can put it in your palm. It's about It's about as thick as a thick of playing cards. Not that big a deal. And, you know, um and and people who love seafood can can get a lot of it that way. Recently, there was an interesting study that showed if you actually increase your level of omega-3s by an extra serving a week or two, like from wherever you are with your starting point, you can increase your longevity, your survival by 4.7 years. So, an extra serving of of of of omega-3 rich seafood, you increase your survival by lifetime survival by 4.7 years. Now, you can get if you're a vegan or vegetarian, you can get omega-3s from plant-based foods. So, chia seeds, flax seeds, some of the nuts you can get those as well. But, what in plant-based foods you get a different kind of substrate to make your omega-3s. So, you got to eat a lot more of it. So, you know, um I I I I like diversity. So, um plant whole plant-based foods, seafoods if you actually eat fish. Um if you don't, explore it if it's not for some ethical reason. Um and then, you know, look uh in dairy by the way, you know, when it comes to food and health, there's no universals. Okay? Some dairy products, you know, like I honestly cheeses are good for the microbiome because many traditionally made cheeses, not in large quantities, they've got saturated fats and a lot of salt. But, some cheeses actually have lactobacillus and other healthy gut bacteria that we can use as a probiotic food. Yogurt, a dairy product, probiotic food. And so, I'm all about the science. Wherever the science takes me is where the evidence takes me. There was a great American novelist named E. L. Doctorow and he had this great quote. He once said, "Writing is a novelist, writing is like driving at night. You can't see beyond your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." And that's what science is like. You just can only see where your headlights are going and you're focusing on the evidence and ignoring all the darkness that's out actually out there. So, what about meat? Okay? Um I can tell you that most of the research has been pretty convincing that if you eat a lot of red meat, okay? Which was really only done for the last 70 years or so, like you know, since the 1950s. Um before that, most societies didn't have were were not prosperous enough to have a ton of meat around, okay? And and now we have an abundance of meat that we've industrialized meat and all the things that are not so good for us, but um all the studies show that eating a lot of red meat and all the studies have shown that eating processed meats, we're talking about our sausages and the pepperonis and all kinds of other hot dogs, all that kind of stuff. Um that's been classified by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen, by the way, processed meats. You know, once in a while, especially if that's something you really enjoy, don't worry about it. Knock yourself out, enjoy it, but do not do it all the time. And if you can cut it down or cut it out, more power to you, better for you. And so, this whole idea about, you know, life is for the living, got to enjoy our how we do things, you know, some things we enjoy aren't that good for us, you know? Some people like to roll down the windows or take the top down and drive really fast on a on a road faster than the speed limit. Just don't do it all the time cuz one of these times you're going to actually get into an accident, right? What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here, and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. And let me tell you right now, discipline, by its very nature, means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you, it pays off. In fact, I will tell you, you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad Discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. Right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. I will see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. And so, I think that idea of moderation, but if you're informed by science and you can actually then listen to your body, if you feel like crap after eating something, don't go for it. Don't eat it the next time, or eat less of it. The science is just so rich at this point in time in history that, you know, anybody that wants to get into food as medicine as a science, not as a trend, but as a real science has a huge future ahead of them. The urgency is that our metabolic health globally is in a terrible place. I mean, a third of American adults has hypertension. A 10% of of kids age 12 to 18 has hypertension. That's crazy. It is. Uh 50% of adult Americans will be obese by the year 2030. Not just overweight, but obese. So, we are you know, our life expectancy is declining. Is it that it's actually declining? Oh, it's declining dramatically. Before COVID, it began. So, people say, "Well, because of COVID, people are dying earlier." Uh and you know, the truth of the matter is that this metabolic derangement bodes for a much worse outcome as it relates to COVID. They're tracking that? Like, there's actually studies on published. Yeah, you measure uric acid at admission, and it predicts to some degree who's going to end up in the ICU, who's going to end up on a vent, and who's going to die. Now that we recognize uric acid and its role in disturbing metabolism, and its role in inflammation, and its role in increasing what is called oxidative stress, the damaging effects of free radicals, it was looked at, and lo and behold, look what they're finding. What is uric acid? Like, what what is it? What triggers the unhealthy elevation? So, uric acid is a very simple chemical, and it is the end product of the metabolism in the human body, uh and the bodies of other animals, of only three things: alcohol, uh something called purines, which are the breakdown products of DNA and RNA, and by far and away, fructose. So, to me, uh we've known that fructose is a demon for a long, long time. And you in 1970, it was published in the journal of The Lancet that fructose is a player. It is a big player. And yet, we were told that because fructose doesn't cause insulin to be secreted and doesn't need insulin to be metabolized, therefore it was a safer sugar. Mhm. And um you know, we recognize how industry uh was able to manipulate that messaging and how everybody fell for it. But if insulin really is like one of these high risk factors and fructose doesn't require insulin, why isn't it bad? That is the well, I'd say million-dollar question. That's the 500 billion-dollar question. That's how much we subsidize the growth of corn to make high fructose corn syrup today with that as a premise that, "Look, it should be safe because it doesn't need insulin to be metabolized." It is a powerful threat as it relates to type 2 diabetes because it stimulates a couple of things. Number one is gluconeogenesis, the creation of glucose in your body de novo in the liver, and uric acid enhances that process. And it causes what is called insulin resistance, meaning that insulin doesn't work as well in your body through a number of mechanisms. So, that's the dirty secret of fructose that the industry didn't want us to know about. Now, it's been called out. So, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver. Why? Uh as it turns out, it can be metabolized in various other tissues in the body, even including the brain. We learned about the liver, but even the kidney can metabolize a fructose. So, uh the the story, you know, everyone everything's been compartmentalized. But now we know that it's a lot a lot bigger story. You know, that glucose can become fructose. High glucose levels, especially when blood will turn into become fructose through the use uh through the body's use of a an enzyme called aldose reduc- reductase. That is enhanced when serum sodium is higher. So, higher levels of salt Mhm. leads the body to know that it is in uh it's getting ready for famine or water restriction. Make more salt. Uh it actually create it we we retain more salt, and we make fructose out of glucose. Fructose is the signal then that prepares us for not having any food, which is really quite intriguing. So, fructose found in nature, I would assume primarily in fruit. Right. Fructose Fruit sugar. That's where it comes from. So, what is it about the natural appearance of fruit that warrants cuz fruit's what spring, right? Or summer? Fall. It's Fruits fall? Late summer and Uh that's what happens when you live in LA. Late summer and early fall. Okay. So, it's like, "Hey, world." Traditionally for our ancestors. I mean, now you have fruit 360, right? Yeah, like I literally have no idea what's natural. traditionally it it is the late summer and early fall when the wild blueberries would ripen, and our proclivity to finding sweet things, Mhm. a survival mechanism deep in your brain and the brain of every human walking the planet, makes us gravitate towards sweet. We consume fructose, and that triggers a powerful mechanism in our bodies to make fat, to store fat, to lock it up, to make more blood sugar to power our brains, to raise our blood our blood pressure. So, these are powerful survival mechanisms that happened, you know, probably 14 to 17 million years ago when in the middle Miocene period, uh when the world cooled, and for our primate ancestors, that was a survival pressure. And those who had mutations in the genes that have to do with uric acid made more uric acid, which alerted their bodies to make more fat. Now, those are the only only primates that survived, they passed it on to you and me and to every human, such that when we are exposed to fructose, it's telling our bodies, "Get ready for times of food scarcity." Mhm. So, the idea of um higher blood sugar and insulin resistance and all those terrible metabolic things that we're doing our damndest right now to target, those were wonderful adaptations for us for more than 99% of our time on this planet. What's happened is now we still have the old genome, but we've challenged it with a new environment that is rich in fructose, that is more sedentary, we're not doing as much, we're not sleeping as well or restoratively, and and therefore uric acid is increasing and worsening our metabolism and leading to this host of diseases that we talked about. Hope you enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsor Ombre Labs. For $30 off your at-home gut health test, go to tryombre.com/impact. Enjoy the episode. Okay, so, what's your take on fruit itself? Like, is that to be avoided or That's a million-dollar question. So, fruit is a is on the table. Because of the fiber content? Fiber, bioflavonoids, and importantly, vitamin C. So, vitamin C uh dramatically helps with your excretion of uric acid. So, you're net negative in terms of uric acid by eating an apple a day, by eating a couple of apples a day, a handful of grapes. Uh and certain fruits are actually associated with lowering your uric acid, like tart cherries. Hence, the O in the book cover. See the O? I do indeed. It's the falling cherry. Nicely done. So, okay. So, we're intaking all of this excess fructose. Used to be good for us. Now, it's becoming a problem. Uh the end of that metabolic train is uric acid. Uric acid used to be or it has a role, but not in the elevated levels that we're talking about now. Um uric acid is in these elevated levels is causing inflammation. Is there anything else going on or is it simply this cytokine drip? Oh, no. It's There's a lot going on. And let's uh double-click on something I think is really interesting vis-à-vis some news that happened today. One of the things that uric acid does, it it inhibits nitric oxide. Now, not to be too technical, but we need nitric oxide for many reasons, two of which are it allows blood vessels to open up, improving blood supply. Uh when there's not enough nitric oxide, there's not enough blood supply. It also facilitates how insulin works to keep our blood sugar in check. And not having function of nitric oxide compromises blood supply and compromises how insulin works, so our blood sugar will go up. The reason I say that is there are drugs that increase nitric oxide. Uh one of them is Viagra, as an as a matter of fact. There's a time and a place when you a person might need Not you. A person might need more blood supply for erectile dysfunction. Uh and a study was published this morning showing that people who take men who take Viagra uh uh it's associated with a 70% reduction in risk for Alzheimer's. Can you imagine? And this is not the first study. More blood supply to the brain also uh reduction in the formation of what's called tau protein in the brain. But think about it. That might well explain why elevation of uric acid is associated with an 80% increased risk of dementia, a 55% increased risk of Alzheimer's specifically, and a 165% increased risk of vascular dementia. Because it's actually lowering our NO. It is lowering the functionality of nitric oxide. Okay. So, we have the nitric oxide in the system, but it's unable to do its thing because of the elevated presence of uric acid. And important I think a lot of people get the nitric oxide blood supply relationship, but the the the tying nitric oxide into how insulin works is a relatively new idea. So, uh you know, that's been demonstrated in animals and then in humans that uh you know, that's a an important function that's compromised by uric acid. So, yes, we talked about inflammation, cytokine storm, cytokine dribble. This nitric oxide story is actually very important as well. does it interface with insulin? Because we need nitric oxide for two things. How insulin is able to get through the blood vessel into then target the insulin receptor, and then how it's able to bring blood sugar into the cell doing its job to help lower blood sugar. So, the function to pull that off. You need the That's how insulin makes its way through the blood vessel to get to the muscle and or liver cells to do its job in terms of the sequestration of blood sugar, if you will, for the formation of of glycogen. Okay, so that would predict then if the elevated levels of uric acid cause my vasculature to be too constricted, now I basically I'm leaving the glucose in my bloodstream. I'm probably then going to secrete more and more insulin trying desperately to get it out because the mechanisms don't realize that this isn't a lack of insulin problem, this is a vasodilation problem. I'm too constricted. I can't get out. I can't reach the muscle cell. I can't reach the fat cells. Uh that's really interesting. It's really interesting. It's a It's a big problem because that leads to insulin resistance. Insulin doesn't do its job. And, you know, insulin resistance is devastating for the brain. Why? Well, the brain requires glucose, so we can understand from that perspective, but insulin is a powerful trophic hormone for the brain. It nurtures brain cells. If you want to grow brain cells in a in a Petri dish, let's say, you nurture them with insulin, and that's how they grow. So, you know, insulin has far more uh important roles, you know, beyond just its role in regulating blood sugars. So, insulin permits the glucose receptors at the blood-brain barrier uh to allow uh glucose to get into the brain to power brain cells, if you will. So, it's a very big story. So, why might this be? Why would your What would be the upside of having uric acid create insulin resistance and therefore cause blood sugar to go up? Why? Because when you're starving, it'll help power your brain. Because, you know, we're not the fastest, we're not the strongest, but we have a big brain in relation to our bodies. So, that's been our ace in the hole. It's been our high card that we can play during times of you know, either starvation or predation. So, we need our brains to keep us able to get food and to keep us from becoming food. That's not a real concern these days, right? But, in the day, we needed to make sure we didn't get eaten. One of the chapters in the book is called Survival of the Fattest. I assume this is what we're talking about. Yeah, and it's not like our primate ancestors were got fat and were, you know, were lying around being fat. They just had a little bit, a little edge, that superpower, a little extra body fat so that, you know, for that extended period of time when there wasn't food, they would be the ones to survive. They were able to lay down that fat and survive because they had a mutation in this gene, what the uricase genes. So, they couldn't break down uric acid. Their uric acid levels would go up, trigger their fat production, and they would survive. Help me understand that mechanism in light of what we just walked through. So, elevated uric acid, constriction of the blood vessels, the glucose stays in the system. How is it getting me to lay down the fat if the glucose molecule or the insulin molecule's having a hard time getting the glucose molecule into the cell? Other mechanisms. So, we only covered two so far. The next would be oxidative stress. So, elevated uric acid uh profoundly increases what is called oxidative stress. When mitochondria in the cell uh are exposed to higher levels of oxidative stress, they are less functional, and that triggers that's one of those uh stresses in the body that triggers fat production. And that becomes a really interesting story that we didn't cover specifically in the book, but I think it's fascinating nonetheless cuz it's similar. And that is why do we as human beings not make vitamin C? I mean, you know that's a fact. We've you've talked about it before. And I I think we have to talk about that because it's not just well, it sucks to be human. We don't make vitamin C. You got to make sure you're not a limey and I you eat enough limes you don't get scurvy so that your teeth don't fall out and your kids aren't born naked or whatever happens when you have scurvy, right? Well, I think it's interesting because um this oxidative stress triggers fat production, which was a good thing. It's again fat production a good thing. Being coming a little fatter is a good thing. Yes, in the through the lens of our history of being prime age or even hunter-gatherers. And increasing oxidative stress by not having vitamin C would have been looked at uh looked upon as being a good thing through that lens again. And would also cause us to then seek out the fruit. Those who would seek out the fruit would survive. Get enough vitamin C to survive during times of food scarcity. Okay, so now as we take this into a modern context, um we know that it served us for a while, but now we're getting we have so much fructose coming into the diet. Our levels are going up so high. We're constricting the blood vessels. Going back to what you said about um Viagra, like that just that if that ends up holding, I mean, that's like a miracle drug. A 70% decrease in the likelihood of Alzheimer's is crazy. I would take a 5% decrease in Alzheimer's risk. And I think it's fair to say that you know, getting your metabolic health in order is a powerful way to decrease your Alzheimer's risk. We know that to be true. We know if you're a type 2 diabetic, you've quadrupled your risk for that disease, Alzheimer's, for which there is no medical treatment as you and I have this conversation right now. Despite the exciting news of several months ago of a new miracle drug that gets, you know, that that limits beta amyloid. Uh what happened with that was really quite um encouraging. You know, it was resoundingly rejected by the neurology world and rightfully so because it doesn't work. We don't have a drug to prevent that disease and yet we really understand where it's coming from. It's coming from disturbed metabolism. It's been said that Alzheimer's is not generally a genetic disease and I would until recently have agreed with that saying that yeah, about 4% of Alzheimer's have familial type Alzheimer's disease. You know, there are populations around the world, South America for example, where it runs quite strongly in families. I would tell you now that it's probably a 100% genetic. As is type 2 diabetes. I would say it's 100% genetic and you're looking at me saying where you going to go with this? And let me go let me let me play it out. Because as I've mentioned earlier what we're seeing now are these metabolic derangements that underlie these diseases that represent a disconnect between evolution and environment. So we have this genome that's coding for our survival in the context of a different environment. Now that we're challenging that genome with a new set of circumstances, a new context. Looking at it through a different lens if you will. Uh it's expressing genes that are paving the way for our metabolic decline and setting the stage for the very things we don't want to get. And I have to to you that language is something that came to me I think the night before last as I was just lying in bed thinking about this stuff. That it is absolutely a genetic uh disease in that context of the mismatch. And we're living then with physiology and and a body a machine uh that is uh you know mismatched with our current environment. It's outdated machinery. And I I realized before I wrote Drop Acid that I had written about that topic a half century ago. And I wrote a an op-ed in the Miami Herald about what about us living today with the outdated machinery that is more suited to the environment of our ancestors. And uh I I saved it. I was 16 years old when I wrote that article. I saved it. I put it in the book. And um that's the issue is that you know it's the foundation of the paleo movement. Let's try to recapitulate the environment of our of our ancestors both uh just in terms of other activities sleep and exercise physical activity stress but mostly the foods that we eat. If we can emulate what our our genome expects we'll have better health. All right. So it's a good transition to the Love Diet which you describe in the book. So walk us through what does LUV stand for? How do we get that match re-lined up? Again let uh let's say that diet is one of the biggest players and I think perhaps the most important. Um so Love means lower uric values and it's the diet that we constructed that can be um used as a lens through which you could look at your dietary preferences or your dietary dogma if you will whether it's keto vegan paleo all of those diets and others uh can be adapted to be more conducive to lowering your uric acid values. Uh it means as things that we've talked about being very cognizant of purines, of alcohol, specific types of alcohol, and certainly when you recognize that 70% of the manufactured foods in America today, in other words, if it has a barcode and it's in the grocery store, it has added sweetener. 70% do. And by and large, that comes from high fructose, there's the villain, uh corn syrup that we subsidize to the tune of 500 billion dollars a year. So, um it's time to call that out. Uh uh I wrote a an op-ed, it was an open letter to President Biden uh February 21st of this year with Dr. Casey Means uh saying that, you know, these um uh nutrition recommendations that last for 5 years for the United States that are put out uh by the USDA allow uh indicate that 10% of our daily calories coming from sugar is okay. The I wouldn't say there's no science that would support that, but 99% of the science uh that was provided to the review committee for that dogma or that doctrine said that's way too much. That 6% should come or less from sugar. So, our hope was that we could get some new language that would rewrite you know, that uh that 5-year recommendation, but How many people do you think steer by the recommendation? A lot. Really? Oh my gosh. Like people actually pick up the box and they start reading it. No, no, no. I'm talking about in terms of of government influence that the military and schools and federal uh food programs. They say 10%. They, you know, then they're Therefore, these foods that are manufactured that have all this added sugar fair game. Oof. That's And what does that do? It creates the very illnesses that are bankrupting our health care system. So, that don't make no sense to me. No, it does not. Uh I'm guessing that that hasn't been adopted, that we're still at 10%. Um so, we've got sugar hiding everywhere. What are things that are high in purines that we should be paying attention to? Um like One One thing I definitely want to talk about is red meat. Um but where else are we going to find like if we know that DNA and RNA is in everything, then I I don't even understand, to be honest, how some things are higher or lower. But to do with the cellularity and the concentration. The more cells it has as opposed to other things. dense cellular one and a Dense cellular one be a like a small fish, like a sardine or an anchovy. Is more than lots of cells. Uh well, let's just say with it meat or animal products for one second. We'll get to that in a second. Uh as opposed to chicken or Really? Just the space between the cells is different. between. It's that density. It's the uh the real cellularity of uh organ meat, for example, liver and kidney. Very high in purines. So, they will uh they're directly involved in their metabolism, breakdown of the DNA and RNA then to make uh uric acid. But it doesn't necessarily mean as we segue to fruits and vegetables that all foods neces- who that are high in purines are going to raise uric acid. So, that's a bit of a disconnect that we finally have massaged into being meaningful because for years, well, for years it was foods high in purines, if you have gout, stay away from them because we know purines make uric acid, we know high in uric acid is the cause of gout. Well, what what is gout? So, gout is the extracellular crystallization of uric acid, where uric acid is so high that it finally precipitates out. It's like um making rock candy. Have you ever made rock candy in the day? All right. Well, how you make rock candy is um you have a solution of sugar, and you heat it. And it because it's hot, you can dilute more sugar. And then as it cools, if you have a thread in there, it'll crystallize on the thread, and you pull it out, and you've got rock candy. I mean, you're eating sugar. There's nothing else there, right? Anyway, so things precipitate out when their concentration is really high. it like on people's elbows and stuff. It's crazy. And it crystallizes. Why it picks the great toe, who knows? break through the skin? Can. They can open up and be hugely painful. In fact, you know, we humans are not the only animals at risk for that. Other animals that have high uric acid, like reptiles and birds. T-Rex, Sue the T-Rex had gout in her fossilized skeleton. But wait, in in such a natural environment, how are they ending up getting gout? They're just eating things that are too They're eating other lizards, and they're just too high in in Who can say? I mean, I don't think we know exactly what T-Rex ate, but you know, it looks based upon teeth and short digestive tract that they ate meat. You know, they were these you know, prototypical carnivores, and as such were at higher risk for gout. Segues back to us as humans. So, it doesn't mean that people who eat a lot of meat are necessarily going to get gout, and may not even have a high level of uric acid. But it takes us to a place It really depends on the person, so therefore you want to check your uric acid. But here's How do you check your uric acid? It's a blood test, and Over the counter? Yes. That's the good news. But most people have already had their uric acid checked as part of your annual blood test and you could call your doctor say, "What's my uric acid?" and she or he would say, "Well, it's either normal or not." If it's above seven, it's abnormal. It's out of the normal range and below seven you're in the clear. But understand, Tom, this is only in the context of gout, Mhm. not metabolic health. So, for metabolic health, we want it not in the normal range in the optimal health Which is? range. 5.5 or lower. Okay. That's what the research indicates uh is the cutoff uh in terms of cardiometabolic issues. So, having higher uric acid levels One interesting study published in 2009 looked at 42,000 men, 48,000 women, followed them for eight years. Those who had the highest level of uric acid had a 16% increased risk of all-cause mortality, becoming a dead person for any reason whatsoever. That's what the term means. Cardiovascular mortality, 38%. Why might that be? We talked about nitric oxide. We talked about blood flow. We talked about inflammation of the arteries, for example. Uh stroke risk, death from stroke, 35% increased risk. And here's an interesting part of that study I thought um for people looking at their values. For every point of uric acid elevation over seven, uh all-cause mortality increased 8 to 13%. Oh god. So, at eight, at nine, at 10, you know, you see people with a uric acid level of 11. Ooh. That's a big, big study. The other thing this study showed which I thought was really quite interesting, they concluded that 1/4 of all uh type 2 diabetes was a consequence of elevated uric acid. What? One of the things I discovered way back then was that we evolved in concert with the plants that we're eating or the animals that we're eating. But back then, we were eating leaves. And there's actually now evidence that the thing that makes us human as opposed to a chimpanzee is there's a distinct change in the gut microbiome between when chimps and gorillas evolved off and we evolved out. And you can actually tell a human being by their distinctive gut microbiome instead of a chimpanzee, for instance. Mhm. We share 98% of all of our genetic material with chimps and gorillas. And yet we're profoundly different. And what makes us profoundly different from them is not our genes. It's actually the genes of our microbiome. Unfortunately, uh my wife has had some very real experience with just how important the microbiome is. You're the only person I've ever heard talk about that. I'd love to hear more about that. So, um if we were going to prove your thesis out and what would we be doing to the diet to create that effect in the microbiome that would express so such a radically different species? Lectins are plant proteins that are one of the major defense systems of a plant against being eaten. One of the things that's hard for us to conceptualize is that plants do not want to be eaten. They actually have a life and they were actually here first. Um when insects arrived, plants had a problem because they couldn't run, they couldn't fight, they couldn't hide. But they have a huge advantage and that's their chemist. They can turn sunlight into matter and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. So, what they do is they make proteins that are sometimes called sticky proteins or lectins that stick to certain sugar molecules in us, particularly in our gut lining. Just by the way, if anybody has sinusitis or runny noses when they eat certain foods, you are actually producing sugar molecules in your mucus to trap lectins. And I have so many people who had chronic sinusitis, including myself, when we finally got lectins out of our diet, they completely went away. So, lectins bind to sugar molecules. Lectins cause the wall of our gut to actually separate, and people have heard the term leaky gut. I used to If you'd asked me 15 years ago if I thought leaky gut was a was a problem, I would have said it was pseudoscience. Now, with the advances in understanding how the microbiome works and in understanding how lectins work, I think everyone who has a disease has a leaky gut. Now, I'm pretty dumb. Hippocrates said this 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. So, one of the things we know about research is research is research. Look again. Cuz somebody already knew this, and Hippocrates knew it 2,500 years ago. It's really interesting, and I'm I I've heard that quote so many times, and it's one that I just accept and go, "Oh, wow, what a great insight." What do you think led him to that at Even now, people have a hard time conceptualizing the microbiome cuz it's invisible. So, how did he come to that conclusion? He had this interesting theory. He believed that we all, any creature, has what he called, the translation is green life force energy. That actually wants perfect health for that creature. And that it's a driving force. Unfortunately, he believed, as I do, that there were external forces that were preventing that expression of green life force energy. So, he thought the purpose of a physician was to identify those external forces that were keeping the green life force energy from expressing itself and remove them or teach the patient to remove them. And then the patient would heal him or herself because the green life force energy would take over. Now, that sounds kind of new age and touchy-feely, but he was absolutely right. And one of the things that I guess I and and other people have discovered is that one of those external contributing factors are lectins. And if you remove certain lectins, things you'll start to heal yourself. Let me give you another example. If we're out on the ocean in a boat and the boat springs a leak in the bottom of the boat and water is rushing in, we have two options. The one option is we grab a bucket and we start bailing. The bigger the hole is, like the old commercial, we're going to need a bigger bucket. And I think that most systems for healing the gut are just giving people buckets to bail whatever. It's a lot easier to plug the dumb hole. And then you don't need buckets. And so, if lectins are one of the major ways that we get leaky gut, then if we get lectins out of our diet, that's how we plug the holes. Unfortunately for us, the lining of the gut is only one cell thick. And so, imagine one cell thickness keeping everything you eat or everything living in you, like bacteria, separated from you. And they're all held together, locked arm in arm with tight junctions. So, what Dr. Fasano showed with gluten, which is a lectin, is that gluten makes its trouble by causing leaky gut. So, once those spaces are open, not only do lectins get through, which are foreign proteins, they're splinters, but also pieces of bacteria, called or living bacteria, also get through the wall. Now, on the other side of the wall is your border patrol, your immune system. And 65% of all the white cells in our body are up against this wall. Why are they there? Because that's where the problem is going to happen if it's going to happen. So, when these foreign proteins get across the wall, the immune system basically sounds the alarm, sounds the air raid sirens, we go to threat level five, we scramble the fighter jets, and we actually go to war status. And as I talk about in the book, that war status is manifested in multiple ways, whether it's brain fog, whether it's arthritis, whether it's depression or anxiety, whether it's coronary artery disease, which is how I got interested in it in the first place. And all of these things come right back to what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that if you want to cure the disease, head to the gut. And And I see this, for instance, I had so so allergies as a young adult and in college that I had to get all allergy shots and you know all your allergic to things. Well, my allergies were just because my immune system was just on hyper overload. I don't have any allergies anymore. I didn't outgrow my allergies. Through the last 17 years, I've told my immune system to chill out. There's nothing to be interested in here cuz there's nothing coming across the border. That's super interesting. Uh probably about 3 months ago I started getting really itchy and then just like in like my chest would itch like crazy. My back would itch like crazy. I'm like, what is going on? Cuz I'm really religious on my diet. I don't cheat on my diet, but a couple times a year like I'm really hardcore about it. And then it started with like a little spot on my neck and then it was like I had to wear like long sleeve everything. I was just one big rash. It was It was insane and I've never had anything like that in my life. And so I was like this I know this is something I'm eating just like in my gut. I can feel that that's true, but I haven't changed my diet. So I was like, what could this be? And before I give you the punchline of what I think it is, Tom Bilyeu here announcing my new Español 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 dub them into Spanish language. Tell your friends and family start watching Tom Bilyeu en Español. Muchas gracias. Be legendary. What when you hear stuff like that, where do you go? Well, you're the best way to think about your skin is your the lining of your gut is actually your skin turned inside out. That's fascinating. And so you have from your mouth all the way down to your anus a tube that's got the surface area of a tennis court. And everything that you swallow is actually outside of you as it's moving through. The inside skin has to do the same functions as the outside skin, and that is kind of keep things away from us, but it's got a fatal flaw. It not only has to keep things out, but it has to let things in, like the proteins and the fats and the sugars that we eat. So, that's where the mischief can happen. But when I see someone with an external skin problem, it's always a reflection of what's actually happening in the gut. What is that process? What does it look like? How can people that are watching this now, if they're struggling from something, how do they begin that process of repair? So, you know, I think the first thing you do is get major lectin-containing foods out of your diet. You won't like me for a couple of weeks, uh but most people, even within a couple of weeks, begin to notice a difference. Now, what are those? They're foods that we actually, evolutionary, were not designed to eat. Beans are so lethal raw that there's very good published studies in humans that they can cause massive bloody diarrhea, and there's some pretty good studies in monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and red velvet monkeys that they can actually cause heart disease and even kidney damage from the lectin content. What's fascinating from a human evolution standpoint is that humans, up until the dawn of agriculture, were actually very tall creatures. Uh most humans were about 6 ft tall, and our brain size was about 15% bigger than it is today. And when if you look chronologically by 8,000 years, uh 2,000 years into grain and bean eating, we actually shrunk about a foot and our brain size has never recovered from 10,000 years ago. So, these are anti-nutrients. Grains and beans. That's number one. Number two, 2,000 years ago, northern European cows suffered a genetic mutation, a spontaneous mutation where they stopped making the normal protein in milk, casein A2, and began making casein A1. Now, casein A1 has a lectin-like protein that is converted into a compound called beta-casomorphin, which can cause a direct immunologic attack on the beta cell of the pancreas, the insulin-producing cell of the pancreas. And there's some pretty good evidence, and it's accumulating every every year, that one of the causes of type 1 diabetes or juvenile diabetes is casein A1 milk. And it actually correlates very well in countries that have casein A1 cows, they have much higher incidence of type 1 diabetes than countries that have casein A2 cows. Cheeses, for instance, are safe from France, Italy, and Switzerland. Sheep, goats, and water buffalo are all casein A2. And what is it about that that's so problematic? It actually makes a it's a lectin-like compound that stimulates an immune response. So, just as I would get from the beans or whatever I'm getting uh Exactly. You'll get the same thing. Okay. So, it's a it's a very new addition to our diet. Now, the newest addition to our diet is some of our most precious foods are American, North American, or South American foods. For instance, in the nightshade family, uh potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, and goji berries. So, the the nightshades, the peel and the and the seeds have the lectins. And Native American Indians, in the Southwest, always peel and deseed their peppers. They char their peppers, they deseed them, and then they either grind it into chili or eat them that way. But, they always do that. The Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes before they make sauce. And is this like a cultural intuition kind of thing, where they What I What I like to do is I go around the world studying cultures and figuring out, why did they do this? How did they detoxify lectins? For instance, rice was invented 8,000 years ago. 4 billion people use rice as their staple. Yet, 4 billion people take the hull off of rice and eat it white. And surely there can't be 4 billion dumb people who don't know any better that white rice is bad for them and brown rice is good for them. In fact, they've been taking the hull off of rice for 8,000 years. Same way, believe it or not, up until William William and Harvey Kellogg in the early 1900s, did the idea that whole grains were good for us. And if you look back 50 years, then when the whole grain goodness really caught on, you'll notice that a lot of our current health issues, including this epidemic of autoimmune disease, didn't occur. This epidemic of dementia didn't occur. And so, whole grains are one of those wonderful myths that got perpetrated by a few individuals. The other individual that perpetrated this, English surgeon by the name of Dr. Burkitt. And Dr. Burkitt uh did some missionary work in Africa in the middle of the of the last century. And he is a colon surgeon, a guy who would operate on colon cancers. And he went down there to do some work and nobody had colon cancer. And he actually went around and watched and looked at the bowel movements of these Africans who were eating huge amounts of tubers, things like yams for instance or celeriac root or jicama. And their bowel movements were huge. And he goes, "Wow, you know, look at all they're eating all this fibrous stuff. And it must be that the fiber in their diet is keeping them from having colon cancer." So, he came back to England and he espoused the the fiber theory of preventing cancer. Now, the problem is in England they didn't have a lot of these sorts of tuberous foods, but they had tons of what's called insoluble fiber in the form of wheat and rye and barley and even oats. So, he didn't know the difference between insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. And so, he said, "We should all be eating fiber." And so, that's actually where that whole idea that the hull was actually good for you. Now, the ironic thing is he actually died of colon cancer. That is very ironic. Very ironic. There's a saying among surgeons that we always die from the disease we treat, so. Well, then, so that There's so many interesting points in there. Talk to me about how animal meats end up cuz you don't eat hardly any. Um how how does lectin find its way into animal meat? We raise animals with antibiotics, and this was discovered by by accident years ago when they were thinking that antibiotics might be needed for crowded conditions of you know, stockyard animals. But the researcher found out that by giving antibiotics to these animals, they grew faster and got fatter much quicker than the animals who didn't get the antibiotics. So, it was approved by the Department of Agriculture and the FDA to give antibiotics to animals for the purpose of growth. Those What we didn't know is that those residual antibiotics are incorporated into the meat, the beef, the chicken, the pork, you name it. And so, we actually every time we ingest factory-raised meats or even farm-raised fish, ingest microdoses of antibiotics. Microdoses of antibiotics are incredibly effective at killing off your microbiome. So, in the last 40 years, we've had this, you know, incredible, you know, the the worst storm that could possibly happen for our microbiome and for our leaky gut. So, then are lectins There are lectin-like substances in the meat, but is there actually lectin itself? Great question. There was just a paper published from Ohio State a few weeks ago that shows that lectins in soybeans can be found in the meat of animals that you feed them to. Now, I used to think that this was kind of fanciful in the alternative medicine world, you know, you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And as I started seeing more and more autoimmune patients, uh we had case reports of uh particularly there's a woman psychologist in LA that I talk about in the book who had horrible lupus, was on two drugs, and we got her off of all her drugs by following this program. And her her lupus cleared. She had rashes. And um she she came back to see me, and she said, "You know, everything's great, but I've got this eczema, this little rash on my upper eyelids." And so we're going through the list. I said, "Well, something's getting into you." And we get to pasture-raised chicken. And I said, "Now you're you're eating pasture-raised chicken." She said, "Oh, yeah. I eat organic free-range chicken all the time. It's my go-to food." I said, "Free-range chicken?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, you know, organic free-range." I said, "Well, the federal government in 2007 passed a law that says you can keep 100,000 chickens in a warehouse, feed them organic corn and soybeans, and not let them out of the warehouse except open a door for 5 minutes every 24 hours, and the chicken has the potential to go outside." And that is the current government definition of organic free-range chicken. Wow. So, she was eating the lectins of soybeans and corn in the chicken that she was eating. I trained in London, England for children's heart surgery, and my kids were 4 and 6 years old. And they missed Kentucky Fried Chicken terribly. And a Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in London. And now in those days, there was so much fish available in England that the chickens were fed ground-up fishmeal. Wow. And the the chicken breasts were actually translucent, like fish. And uh so, you know, we go to Kentucky Fried Chicken, they both grab a drumstick, and they bite into the drumstick, and my 4-year-old goes, "Ew! Ew! You tricked us. This is fish. Ew, this isn't chicken." Wow. And I'm going, "Oh, no, no, no, no. Look, you know, drumstick, you know, Colonel Sanders, that's chicken." "No, it's fish." Well, she was right. It wasn't a chicken. It was a chicken with feathers that was actually a fish. So, we have to realize that our chickens are no longer chickens. They're an ear of corn with feathers. Americans are 70% carbon atoms from corn. Wow. A substance that we were never exposed to until 500 years ago. Europeans are 5% corn. In fact, France in 1900 banned corn as unfit for human consumption. Wow. So, Yeah, what I want people to do is is eat and party like it's 9,999 years ago before we started all this mess. Mhm. And when we do that with people and teach them how to do it, it's amazing what happens to them. Well, let's talk about that because if I had um only heard some headlines about you, I would have thought, "Oh, red meat, I'll get after it." Because I eat a ton of red meat and think I'm doing healthy things. So, you don't need a lot of meat. Why not? So, we found that there was a a molecule, sugar molecule, on the wall of pig blood vessels that's totally different from the sugar molecule that's in ours. But, it differs by only one actually atom. And it's new it's called new5GC uh in pigs, cows, and lambs. And we carry what's called new5AC. And I have nothing against red meat. But, if you look statistically, the red meat-eaters do have significantly more coronary heart disease and significantly more cancer. Now, why cancer? Well, it turns out that cancer tumors in humans use new 5GC to shield themselves from detection by the immune system. The problem is we don't manufacture new 5GC, nor can a cancer cell. Which means they acquired it from external sources, namely beef, lamb, and pork. Now, fish doesn't carry it. They have the same molecule that we do. And chicken have the same molecule that we do. So, I urge people, uh if they're going to eat animal protein, and I I do, to use wild shellfish or wild fish as their main source of animal protein. Do I eat meat? Yeah. I mean, do I eat beef? I do. But, I get grass-fed and grass-finished beef. And I use it as as a treat, not as a mainstay of my diet. When you were working with Dr. Phil, you guys tried to take over a town? Yes. And that the the results were somewhat surprising. is all the stuff that I never get to talk about. So, we're going to pull back the curtain now. And you know, some of these things that you try to do on TV that are just an epic fail. The whole idea was back during the weight loss challenge days. And they decided to take over a town. So, they send me in. And what they've done is they've gone in ahead of time. And they have taken over the high school. Now, they got the mayor on board. The mayor thought this was a great idea. But, he didn't kind of check in with the whole town on what do you think about this, right? And so, they go into the high school. What they did was they just removed all of the fast food. And they removed the kids' favorites like French fries, cookies. They pulled it all out. So, they took the French fries and they did a swap. Now, I love swaps, but if I was going to swap a French fry, my first choice wouldn't be a carrot stick. No one's fooled there, right? So, they did all of this and then I get into town and they go, "Okay, here's what we're going to have you do. We're going to have you go to the high school and you're going to sit down with the kids. These are a bunch of teenagers. And we're going to have you talk to them about nutrition. And what they're going to do, right? They wanted me to sit down and explain why we'd replace the French fries with the carrot sticks and why we replaced the the desserts with the fruit and how great this was going to be for them. And you can imagine what this was like. I was like this little lamb just thrown to slaughter with all of these very angry teenagers. And what are they saying? We don't understand why. We don't care. You don't care. We don't care, right? I mean, they didn't care. They didn't care that eating French fries was bad for them cuz it when you're a teen, you can't you're not selling health to a teenager. So, you've got to meet them where they are, right? So, for a teenager, what are they going to do? Maybe they want to be like one of the rock stars or one of the big athletic stars, but they really don't care if they're not thinking about the heart attack they're going to not have when they're 60. Right? They want the French fries. And this is something I've thought a lot about like one with what we were trying to do with Quest was I didn't feel like I could convince people to um make a lot of change in behavior. Our whole thing was how do you leverage behavior? But if you have kids and your kids are facing that kind of I won't even call it peer pressure, but you walk into the school, there's a lot of fast food, the fast food companies of course are making sure that that's available in the schools in some cases. Right. Like how do you appeal to them if they want to be, you know, the rock star of the school? They're not thinking about the avoiding the heart attack. So, send in the athlete or the pop star that they want to be like. Like, what they shouldn't have done is sent me in. They should have sent in someone like that and been aspirational and let them co-create what they need to do to have a life like that and get their buy-in and their why. I used to be a spokesperson for Subway and I remember I got one of one of the doctors who I worked with was like, "I can't believe you're going to be a spokesperson for Subway. You know, it's it's fast food." I go, "Americans eat fast food." So, if I can work with them to make that fast food healthier and start to shift some behaviors that they're already going to do, but we can help them do them better, great. They're going to go and get energy bars. If we can get them to get a better choice than so many of them that are just adult candy bars, great because you just got to have one foot after the next, right? I mean, I I was doing something on a home shopping channel and I go I couldn't say the names, but I had Almond Joy and Mounds and they had the same amount of sugar as as a Cliff Bar and I think it might have been the Luna Bar. It was like, "Are you kidding me?" That was literally our marketing message was it's the first protein bar that's not a candy bar in disguise, which is crazy. And you talk a lot about sneaky sugars and the way that people A, don't understand necessarily uh what they're eating and B, that a lot of this stuff is just getting into our diet in ways that we wouldn't expect. So, what are some of the areas that people should really be watching out for um that they might not expect has sugar in it? Yes. So, I love this quote from Dr. Mark Hyman who said uh our number one recreational drug of choice is sugar. And it's true. And so, why are we sneaking sugar in all these foods? Because then we'll want more of them. And so, that's why the manufacturers are doing it in places that you wouldn't expect. Used to be turn of the century, we ate 5 lb of sugar per person per year. It's now, gosh, what is 150 lb of sugar per person per year. We're eating like basically our weight in sugar and the obesity rates have gone from 0.5% to over Now, we're more obese than overweight. So, over 30%. It's because of these things sneaking in and the biggest crime is them sneaking in and with the marketing messages to make it look like it's healthy. So, take apple juice concentrate. We're all concerned about high fructose corn syrup, but apple juice concentrate has more fructose than high fructose corn syrup, but yet you can put it onto a label and say no sugar added, right? Doesn't this make you insane? And put it on like a kid's food or one of those silly fruit snacks or one of the yogurts say no sugar added. And then everybody thinks it's okay. The sauces, those silly salad dressings. I mean, when we went fat-free back then it was everything. We got to get the fat out of everything. And all of a sudden, you were eating all this sugar, but it was okay. Because fat makes you fat. Yeah. I remember literally so I was at at roughly this time I was writing and I used to keep this big tub of red vine licorice. And I remember uh saying to my friend cuz she was like "You know, I I think if you eat too much sugar, it turns to fat." And I was like, "That doesn't even make sense." That literally didn't make sense to me. I was like, "How's that possible? How does sugar become fat?" I don't even understand. So, yeah, I was totally bought into that. I was too. I used to eat six meals a day. I used to go from client to client to client and I would go I had my frozen yogurt store and then I would go to Il Fornaio and get a skinny latte and a um cuz I had a fat-free milk, right? And I'd get like a baguette and I would just eat all day long. Carbs. Yeah. Cuz I was starving. So, talk to me about the drug-like effect of this stuff. Like, why why is it so hard for people to let go of this? Because I think that the reason that it's in the supply the way that it is is because we love it and we want it. And it's essentially people are serving up what we're asking for. But why are we asking for also giving it to them, and then we want it. You know, it's it's it's like which came first? Mhm. Right? And so, if you look at So, they did the cool study on rats where they looked at the reward center of the brain. And when rats were first given an um I think like it was some kind of morphine. And when they gave the rats morphine, it lit up this pleasure center, the reward center in their brain. Then they gave them Oreo cookies. It lights up the same pleasure center in the brain. And then they gave them the choice, and they chose the Oreo cookies. Mhm. But if you think about it, you've got gluten, dairy, and sugar together, that trifecta of an opiate-like effect on the brain. So, you start out and you have a little bit of it, and there's a couple different ways we become addicted to sugar. One is genetics. I mean, we have some people I am genetically not I don't have a a sweet taste a sweet tooth. I'm so thrilled about that. Now, my adopted mother does. So, she plied me with sugar all growing up, but at age 12, I just quit. I don't like it. Wow. I do not have a sweet tooth, but you can get one because exposure equals preference. So, you can train it, but then you also get that hit, you know, to the pleasure center of the brain, and also it boosts serotonin. And if you're stressed out, if you're stressed out, you are actually going to deplete serotonin, and then you're going to want more sugar to boost it on up, and then you also change your gut microbiome. So, when you change your gut microbiome, you become more glucose intolerant. So, now you're going to need more sugar for fuel. So, your body can't access stored fat for fuel. So, you start to get this whole like compound effect of like what's really going on? Well, these all these factors start to create the problems. So, how do we begin to back out of that? I know you've talked a lot about um or worked with people, I should say, with getting sugar out of their diet, how to deal with that. You talked about some of the replacement stuff that there are smarter replacements than carrot sticks for french fries. But what is some of that stuff for somebody watching now that's really tried uh they want to, they've got the intent, but they just don't know what to do. How do we everybody, I mean, no one sits down and goes, "You know, I think I'm going to eat really crappy. That's what I'm going to do. That'll be perfect." You know, I think we all want to eat healthier, but then we try to do too big of a change and we fail and then we go, "See, it's my genes. I'm getting older." So, give me an example of too big of a change. Well, french fries to carrot sticks. I'm not going to eat any sugar, I'm going to quit it all cold turkey. The reason I tackled sugar, and I never intended to, the first thing I started with, cuz I'm kind of obsessed with you being your own personal health detective and being able to connect the dots between how you feel and what you're eating. I think we've divorced ourselves from that with so many of these different programs. There is no diet that's right for everybody. It's really about looking at your, you know, where you are, your outcomes you want, your lifestyle you have, your genetics, your epigenetics, and going, "All right, what outcome do I want right now?" And I think diets help you learn what works for you and what doesn't work for you. So, I write The Virgin Diet about testing these seven foods to see which works for you and which doesn't. And one of them was sugar. And the only reason I put sugar in there, cuz it wasn't in there at first. Woah. Yes, this is what's really funny. I was doing that online with thousands of people. And because I was teaching doctors how to use food sensitivity testing in their office, and the same food showed up. It was always gluten and dairy and soy and corn and eggs and peanuts. So, I was like, "Why are elimination diets with so complicated? Let's just focus on these ones." But what I found is when I didn't add sugar, people were just moving over to sugar. And I couldn't think about that because I'm not a sugar person, but I saw it over and over again. And fructose actually can make your gut more permeable. And artificial sweeteners can disrupt your gut microbiome. So, I write The Virgin Diet, I slip sugar in there as one of the seven, and this is like the uproar. I can quit those six, I can't can't get rid of the sugar. So, all those real die-hard sugar addicts were the people I wrote the sugar impact diet for and what I did first was I did a little pilot test cuz I thought if I can if I can do this with them, then I can do it with anybody, right? These are the ones that have failed. These are the ones that are self-proclaimed, I'm a sugar addict, I can't handle it. And so the first thing I did was I went to Amazon cuz I'm like, why have there been so many books written about sugar and yet we still have the problem? What's really going on? And my sense was because we were not taking people through the transition from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. We were just trying to like go here, cold turkey. And unless you go stick them in Betty Ford, this thing is not going to work. That's interesting that you liken it that hard to addiction. Do you really mean that there is that kind of intense physiological withdrawal? Oh, yes. Well, because think about it. If you're used to eating sugar and most people don't even realize where it's sneaking in. Again, they don't think about that green drink that they drank that actually is more sugar than a soda, right? Cuz it's a green drink. Yay for me or the fruit smoothie or whatever. They don't think about all the places. The the mochas, the bars. Like you look at a salad where they had the candied walnuts and then the dried fruit and then the raspberry vinaigrette. Or they went and had Chinese food, right? They just load themselves with sugar. So all of a sudden you've got a body that's used to having incoming sugar throughout the day and using that for energy and you yank it. And if you're insulin resistant, it's not like your body goes, "Okay, you know, I'm just going to use that fat for a fuel source. I'll go dig it out of the belly. That'll be perfect." No, it goes, "Where is it?" And you start to feel crappy. And so what happens when you start to feel crappy and low, you know, low blood sugar, you're not going to go wait it out. You're going to go get a cookie. So I knew that we had to take people through a transition from being a sugar burner to help them becoming a fat burner and what I did was I rated foods high, medium and low sugar impact, not based on sugar alone, but really looking at fructose separately and then also looking at how fast carbohydrates turn into sugar because, you know, just because something isn't straight sugar, it doesn't mean your body's not turning into sugar quickly like white bread, right? So, that's what I did and I tapered from, say, you know, someone eating white pasta to rice pasta to spaghetti squash. That would be an example of a taper, but over time. And then the other thing is I love adding before I take away. That's interesting. When you think about it, in most diets, what do they tell you to do? Okay, take this out, take this out, take this out. And the minute someone says you can't have that, I'm like obsessed thinking about it. But if you start with telling them, "Listen, I want to make sure you're getting clean protein each meal, some good healthy fats, foods with a lot of fiber." That trifecta for good blood sugar balance, cuz that's really the key to everything. You crowd out a lot of the crap. Mhm. So, that's kind of step one. That's really interesting. Now, thinking back to one thing that you said that really surprised you and it certainly surprised me when you told me is with all the people that you've worked with, when you asked, like, why is it that why do you think you struggle with losing weight? The answer that people gave you I found really, really interesting. What was it that they told you? How do you know this stuff? Man. Oh my goodness. dive deep into the world. Wow. Wow. I'm wondering what else you know. Yeah, this was a shocker cuz I literally thought with everything that I do, when I asked my community, "What if you're not where you want to be with your weight, why not?" I figured they'd go, "It's sugar, you know, or I can't give up my bread or my cheese." And that was not it. When we asked people, it was because they didn't feel worthy. They didn't feel good enough. So, we've got to always go back and start with people as to like, why do you want to do this? Why are you important enough? Why is this matter? Before you start to try to change things for them and with them. And how do you then deal with it? Like, how do you help people through that? Cuz you're there's a reason you've endured. There's a reason that you've been around and such a potent force in this industry for so long, and I think it's because you sit at this intersection of really understanding the the realities of the biological responses and neurochemistry and everything of what we eat, but you also understand mindset. Um so, one, I'd love to know how you help those people, and then I'd love to hear um the just absolutely astonishing story of how you really develop this um mother warrior mentality that you have. So, I think maybe it's just cuz also I just haven't quit. You know, right? Cuz that's a big part of it is just continuing to show up. Um I'm obsessed with how to help people get results. I mean, it was it was actually very early on when I was a personal trainer. Back then, people were hiring me because they wanted to lose weight. And I was like, well, you know, you can't exercise out exercise a bad diet. Like, so exercise is important for maintaining your weight and for shifting kind of your body's um hormonal responses. We didn't even know about hormones and exercise back then. But I I knew intuitively that if you had more muscle, that it wasn't about doing bunches of cardio. That if you had more muscle, it would shift things. I didn't understand it also helps with insulin sensitivity. But I I knew that diet was key, but what I started to see above that, that was crazy, was and I remember I had this one woman who I helped her and she was getting so lean and fit and healthy, and her husband didn't dig it. That's interesting. He was threatened. Oh, I saw this happen now multiple times. And so, she went right back to where she was. And then I started to watch people as they started to lose weight and get healthy. If they didn't really believe that's was their self-image, they started to shift back. So, you still you have to work on who do you want to be? You know, who are you? What What's your vision for yourself? Then you start to take the steps as to how to get there. And you have to be so clear on that. In fact, we had this woman who ate ice cream bars all the time. But she like literally every hour. She had gastric bypass, but she would eat ice cream bars every hour because she'd fill up her pouch otherwise. So, she'd wake up all night long and eat ice cream bars every hour. Wow. Okay, crazy. Why? You're just letting yourself up. to ice cream bars. But here's what I did. She remembered herself as this lean, healthy, fit woman. She remembered when she used to be there. And I was like, let's get that picture. We actually took a picture of her back when she was that way and put it I put it on an ice cream stick and I put it in the freezer in front of the ice cream bars. You know, I was like, when you open that, think about, you know, cuz they can't exist together. You got to pick the one, right? You've got to remember who you are. And then operate from that. So, I think we've got to go back to getting really clear on the why with whatever we want to accomplish in life and then make sure that we're taking steps in that direction. If you start to go this way, grab out that picture again to remind yourself of who you are and where you're going. I've never heard anybody talk about it as clearly as you with um bivalve foods and getting into some of the the things that we can do that are seafood based and then also you're sort of putting it in historical context of we probably didn't come up on the grasslands. And I'd love to hear more about that and sort of how that led you to realizing that there's potential big benefits to seafood. Okay. Thank you. That's a great question, Tom. I think quickly it's just the notion of nutrient density, meaning what nutrients are you getting for the calories you're eating? If If calories make us, you know, fat uh as a doctor, I was confronting that a lot, or obese. All right, we want fewer of those. Well, we we still need all the nutrients for our brain. Then, all this data started coming out about the omega-3 fats when I was a resident. We're all like talking about fish oil, and I was kind of into integrative stuff, and I didn't eat fish. And anytime I see something, kind of like with you, I was like and it and I said, "Where did all these fish oil omega-3s come from?" Like, they obviously come from fish. I was like, "All right, well, if I'm I'm going to be like a brain-healthy guy and eat this way." And I'm a low-fat vegetarian. I needed to add in this disgusting food, fish, seafood. So, I slowly added this in living in New York, cuz you realize well, you're on a coast, and I had all these friends who were chefs. And I And I really started finding ways that I like seafood. And the reason is that nutrient density, when we think about brain health, comes down to B vitamins, magnesium, iron. We did a research study, a really small study that I did with Dr. Laura Le Chance, who's also a psychiatrist, where we just said, "If we look at all the literature, what are the 12 nutrients that are most important for brain health, and specifically depression?" That's the most debilitating disease, like does something stand out? And there are 12 nutrients that had really as we went through like levels of evidence, significant data of both epidemiological studies, but also clinical trials. We took those 12 nutrients, and then I think this is the most important thing people miss. We turned them into food. We asked, "What foods have the most of these nutrients?" And you mentioned bivalves. So, usually with these scales, like the ANDI, the aggregate nutrient density index, it's all plants, cuz plants always have fewer calories. And I didn't like that, cuz 98% of people eat meat or seafood, and and I was curious. So, we listed all the plants, and they're what you'd expect, lots of leafy greens and rainbows. But, in the animals, three of the top five are bivalves, mussels, clams, and oysters. And when we say we're talking about that scale, these are things that contain the 12 um key nutrients. They They contain the most. They're the foods with the most of these 12 nutrients. So, I know that number one on the plants is watercress, which is really uh you know kind of leads for leafy greens, but so are all lettuces, kale, collards. Kale is like number 12 or 15. Red peppers, pomelo. And so that's the way I get to these foods is through nutrient density. That then leads us to food categories. And so the bivalves and seafood are food category cuz they're the most concentrated and only source of long-chain omega-3 fats. The omega-3 fats, we make them in our liver a little bit when we eat plant omega-3 fats, but there's reasonable data, especially when you think thing like the pregnancy data, like women who eat more fish, their babies tend to have like higher verbal IQs, and less behavioral tested? Yeah, nine verbal IQ points if you feed pregnant women if you give them salmon. There have been some really I'd love to do a hardcore data deep dive with you cuz I'm really curious what you think about the studies, but there's a variety of data that if you feed kids, pregnant moms, and individuals more seafood, you see lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder. Actually, one of the first studies in nutritional psychiatry looked around the world at intakes of seafood and found that cultures that eat more seafood have lower rates of bipolar illness. Do you know what the mechanism is going on there? Is it just the brain is starved for quality fat or No, I would well, I would say that let's think about the functions of those fats. EPA, structural fat, but also like the double-07 fat because it functions to create all these things called resolvins and neuroprotectins, which that just sounds good. I want more of that. Like resolving that inflammation and neuroprotectin, like that's literally what they do. DHA, again, structural fat, about 7 to 8% of dry weight of the human brain is DHA. It's the longest fat you eat. And then EPA is more functional. EPA is kind of it is like aspirin. take a lot of EPA, you increase your bleeding time. As we said in my first book, The Happiness Diet, Happiness Diet makes your blood kind of silky smooth. So, less clotting, less inflammatory response, and EPA, eicosapentaenoic acid, gives rise to eicosanoids. Eicosanoids are they're like the um I don't know, the specialist agents in our immune system, right? Where they they're like snipers. They they basically regulate the immune response, and it's more specific than other inflammatory factors, the um they come from the omega uh six fats, which are more like SWAT team or more like the Marines. We're like, "We're going to save you, but there's going to be a big mess." And uh and so, that's where we we always say wild salmon, right? Or fish oil pill. But I I part of making this list of foods and other things on there are wild meats, organ meats, is to kind of create a conversation. It's not like you got to eat all these foods. And and then to do the shift into what are called food categories. Whether you eat watercress or kale or arugula or collards, eat leafy greens. So, I don't know how familiar you are with um Dr. Alan Goldhamer. Um he's probably the most extreme dietitian I've spoken to, and he talks about getting people all the way down to a diet that includes he prefers pure vegan, um and no oil, no salt, no sugar. And he's the first person I've heard sort of be anti um olive oil. What's your take on especially olive oil and salt? What's my take on extreme veganism? I I think that In terms of olive oil and salt, I'll tell you this. Salt, like cholesterol, like saturated fat, is a real red herring. For people who are eating salt from the salt shaker and eating natural foods, the only thing you need to worry about is getting enough salt. For people who are eating processed foods, where 95% of sodium consumption in America comes from. Right? That's where it comes from. It's things like tortilla shells. It's things um you know, it's in everything. It's in soda. So, these So, that's where I come down on salt. And the reason it's an issue is we have so much obesity, we have so much high blood pressure, and diabetes that and people are eating processed foods. In terms of olive oil, I just really think the folks who are pushing the extreme low-fat diet probably that thing you're talking about how kind I am, I struggle with that sometimes because I think there are a lot clinicians, who don't see patients. I'm not saying this doctor is one of them, and who don't understand the implications of their very harsh, inaccurate, and not evidence-based advice. And it's where I really have always been in a milieu that if you're going to say a food helps somebody with a serious illness like depression, or heart disease, like you need to have some evidence behind you other than just our clinical experience. And so, I think it's hard to prove that consumption of fats is bad for human health. I haven't seen that in the data. I've seen no data that also olive oil separates out in any way. I've certainly seen data that trans fats, again man-made fats, are bad. I I think saturated fats are a big family of fats that do a lot of things. Like, they have antibiotic properties. How does that affect our microbiome? Like, same thing as those phytonutrients. Like, I'm not sure it's just all the fiber and all that stuff. We're also taking in all these really interesting antibacterial and antiviral compounds when we eat plants. And those certainly shape our microbiome. That's actually Now, we all say blueberries and blackberries work by like um you know, anthocyanins are so good for the brain. Nature published the study that anthocyanins prune the gut and lead to changes in the gut that lead to change in kind of serotonin dynamic dynamics that lead to the changes in the brain. That it's not like the anthocyanins are up here, it's that they're working down in the gut. And so, I was going to ask, do you do microbiome testing when you have somebody coming to you? Yeah, I do this really really advanced medical procedure um where I ask them what they eat. And when you tell me what you eat and a little bit about your medical history, it's not 100% but it's certainly accurate in the sense that it doesn't change it it we only look at tests if it's going to change our recommendation. And um so I don't test microbiome, what I want to hear is diversity of plants and what fermented foods do we eat. And if if I don't hear anything about that, I'm going to try and add those in gently and then it I think sometimes like a month probiotic supplement is an interesting idea. As I say in the book and I say throughout all of my work, work you can't have good brain health without good gut health. But I think that again, this is the kind of thing that gets a little I would say manipulated, right? Where people as opposed to turning to food and things that they can do, there's this idea we need an expensive test and lots and lots of probiotics and I don't know, it kind of it goes back to that connection thing. Like the microbiome of the soil leads to the microbiome of the the plant, right? Like sauerkraut. I remember the first time I made sauerkraut. It reminded me of this lesson in medical school when they were telling me that bacteria was everywhere, all over every surface of everything and I looked down and like every medical student looked down and looked at her hands and and the you know, the professor Mark Bronser smiled and he's like, that's right. You're covered in a layer of bacteria too. It's everywhere. And like how you make sauerkraut, you just chop up a cabbage and all the bacteria that are naturally on there fermented and you know, it's sort of a well, it's this interesting really interesting cycle between us and the bugs. All right, so I want to get into that cycle now. So, you're somebody who was living in New York, thriving practice. Um did does one of your parents have um signs of cognitive decline? Did I understand that correctly? Yeah, I mean that's yeah, both of my parents I mean, both of my parents are in their 80s and and definitely there's some there's been some cognitive decline on on uh uh on both ends. Uh So, you move in to their farm in Indiana and now from what I hear, you're not going back to New York after years of living on the farm you're now going to Wyoming? So, I'm running this romantic notion in my head if you take the kids out of the big city, they're on the farm, they're more connected, they know the neighbors, they're out playing in the dirt, they're everybody's feeling better, you're feeling more connected to nature. Yes, you're covered in scratches and scars, but man, like being there, working with your hands, being around the animals, making your own like, you know, goat's milk kefir and all that and you just like, we can't ever go back. And now we're going to, you know, find something maybe that's a little closer to uh small city, but we still want to keep this lifestyle. Is that actually what happened cuz you I think you have to talk about your horse. I think what you described is why I moved out of the city is accurate in what I experienced. Um I was living in New York with my uh wonderful wife and two wonderful kids and living in this kind of box-to-box great urban existence. I rode my one-speed bicycle at a sprint through Central Park on my way to work in a beautiful Upper West Side building where I have a great office and we have a great network of friends and and all the stuff that New York offers and something was just not feeling right. I I don't know how to describe it. I started going back to the farm more on the summers. I started really, as you try and do that and you're not there every day, it's hard to farm and garden. It's just an everyday thing. It's It's a It's a meditative process in a real way that I don't know how to describe it. It's just you really It's like you have to check in every day and there aren't many things like that anymore than like email. A- And and I think there is also something about the natural rhythm that with the kids and my own kind of stress level. Again, not that there's anything wrong with raising kids in a city. It just, you know, the part that really pushed it for me, Thomas, I got tired of shushing my children. Cuz children are supposed to make noise. And I love the noise they make. I love all the songs. I love the screams. And the idea that I as a parent was "Shh, guys. Like, some random neighbor downstairs is upset that I have children." I just couldn't handle that anymore. It felt oppressive. And so, I did find all of that in the country. And and and you asked about my horse. And and my my horse my daughter started as we moved to the country started riding. I I'd owned horses since I was a kid. I've always loved horses. And and um And then as she started riding, um it was nice. I went to some horse shows. And and then when the pandemic hit and it was pretty emotional and I'm seeing lots of patients. I my wife started riding and really and she hadn't ridden much and was I would say nervous and scared. And it really did something for her. And just emotionally. And then I started riding. And I'd ridden as a kid, but I'd never been like with a like a real trainer to really teach you how to ride a horse. Within a few months, I'm like jumping a horse over two two and a half feet like jumps. And you go from this like being scared to having some I wouldn't say mastery, but just being challenged. And then it's like a lot of things I do like surfing and snowboarding. It It really has this feeling kind of a flying where you hit this really altered state where you and this animal are kind of in this space. And where you're thinking I really love that like you're thinking about how much your little toe is cramping and hurts. Or that the canter is like a little bit like wonky and you don't know why. You know, I don't think we can discover that without time out outside of the city we both love. So, it was a place I put myself to go between these two contrasting worlds. As I I guess I wondered the question you're wondering. What if it's great for me? What if in and my family, what if it what if what does it feel like, what do I learn there? Yeah, it's interesting, man. Um I've really enjoyed getting to know your work and your thoughts, and now certainly getting to ask you things directly. There's I I see you as a vanguard of what I think we may have to do to unwind uh where people are mentally right now, and I'll lay it out as I see you, and you tell me if I'm sort of on the path here. Um obviously, I love cities, and cities have brought us both a lot of things. I love modern living. It's brought us a lot of things. I even love social media. It's brought me a lot of things, including um tremendous business success. But, I also see that there's a downside to that, and that social media can be outright dangerous, that city living has so obscured uh a historical or traditional way of life, where we have literally developed genetically to be in that kind of environment, and we're now once removed. And you look at skyrocketing depression. You look at skyrocketing anxiety. You look at um you know, a lot of the sort of pathologized things that that there is a beautiful side to, but there's also the potential for it to spill into the pathological. And seeing people who are successfully unwinding that sounds a lot like what you do. Whole food. First and foremost. Um making sure that you're eating diversity, managing for the microbiome, steering what you eat by how you feel psychologically, which is something that I think until this movement of nutritional psychiatry came along was such a disconnect, and people had no sense of how the two things come together. And so, when we before we started rolling, and you joked and said that your psychiatrist was a little jealous of your horse and you were joking of course but saying like you know I get more out of my horse and I thought there's probably truth in that joke of just you're you're doing something that makes you to use your words feel more connected to use my word more grounded. Tell me really I think it means that we want to continue the conversation. I'm really curious about I feel like we have a similar set of questions because I think there is there is going to be a revolution I think in how we're living. Think in terms of really people who are wanting to optimize their health, not wanting to squeeze in a two-week vacation someplace nice in the sun but to live a life where there's more nature and more exercise and more groundedness and connected ness. And I think the pandemic's really accentuated that. I think food is one of those pieces of it that we have a lot of control over. It's why I like it as a factor in mental health. I think it's where it's different than our other treatments, right? Whether a Prozac works for you or Zoloft or lithium, like we're both crossing our fingers when I prescribe those that they that they work. And they do for a lot of people and they don't for some people. Same thing with psychotherapy. Uh and you don't really control that too much, a little bit. But whether food can work for you, whether there's nourishment or whether there are certain nutrients that your brain needs that really most Americans aren't getting. And I think that's one of the things that connects. We're talking about a rural city, you know, kind of urban divide. One thing that's interesting is both of those places have horrible mental health crises. It's not like country living is like free of depression and anxiety. Um and another thing that connects that is as much as there is a wellness movement, the general American diet in both of those places is just really atrocious and damaging to brain health. And so Um but I like that we're ending with unanswered questions. That's always the sign of a good conversation. thing is I think there are a lot of remaining questions, but what I see in you and what I hope people will take away from this interview is that there is like there is you can't just give people a pill, right? For the sort of ultimate solution here, but you have very prescriptive things that people can do. You know, we've walked through what they can do with the with the food. We've walked through some of the things that they can do with lifestyle. And until you have tried all those, my hope is that people don't lose hope. I mean, I think that's also the most important point or and it's just that people don't lose hope. I I I I've treated people with every type of mental illness. And it's actually what gives me hope. It's what gives me strength and resilience. I've just seen people who have it uh so hard with what happens in their minds and to see them just do amazing things, start companies, have families, transcend it, get sober, whatever it is for that person. It's just it makes me very hopeful. Everybody listening should have hope no matter where you are, whether food helps you or not, whether you want to eat some of these foods or not, that that there is a path forward and and there's always a path forward. I think Tommy your story really demonstrates that. Of just the I think often times we think about wellness in a as a moment in time and we forget about our own personal development and evolution. Development is one of those words we use in adolescence and I think we've just forgotten that so much complex development happens in adulthood. Uh and and to really honor that and encourage that in ourselves and in each other and I and I hope I hope my book really pushes people towards that with food. You know, not that there's exactly the right perfect brain healthy diet, but for you there is. There're those foods that work for you. There're the foods that hopefully include some of these power players in my book like red beans and olive oil and bivalves and fatty fish that we talked about and lots of dark chocolate. We didn't talk about dark chocolate. It's one of my big favorites. Um So, and I think that does make a difference. It's like that little step that helps motivate us and keep us going and inspire us. I think the fact that regardless of the type of dementia a person develops, they they give you these these biochemical band-aids. The fact that it seemed so non-specific to me um made me just intuitively think, you know, I had this I had a a theory that there there had to be a better way. And having a a lifelong passion for nutrition and health just in, you know, general in the sense of general fitness. My hunch was that diet and lifestyle may have had something to to do with this.