[00:04:17.010] – Allan
Dr. Barzilai, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:20.060] – Dr. Barzilai
Nice being with you.

[00:04:21.740] – Allan
Now your book, Age Later: Healthspan, Life Span and the New Science of Longevity is obviously a topic that I think more and more as I age it just kind of one of those things that just sticks out like, you know, I see people living to their 90s to one hundred. And plus, I was watching a show on Netflix the other day called Old Guard, and they were effectively immortal until for some reason they weren't. But you're talking about people in this book that are almost immortal.

[00:04:52.910] – Allan
I mean, they're living 40 percent longer than the average. And that's that's incredible. And if we're going to live that long, obviously, we also want to have the health span to go along with that. So a lot of good stuff. I want to pull out of your book, and I really appreciate the opportunity to review it with you.

[00:05:09.080] – Dr. Barzilai
Sure.

[00:05:10.260] – Allan
OK, so you got interested in aging. You're talking about meeting up with your father. You're walking with your father.

[00:05:18.200] – Dr. Barzilai
Grandfather.

[00:05:19.980] – Allan
Grandfather. And he got really he got really tired walking up a hill and that kind of got you at an early age thinking about aging. And in your study, as you got older, you know, you're actually studying this topic. You identified a term you call super agers. Can you can you define super agers and some of the traits that you found in people that live for a really long time?

[00:05:41.390] – Dr. Barzilai
Well, let me just go back and say that in the field of aging, we call it Gero science. We made really great strides because we kind of ignored the fact that it's really very complicated when you look at the components. But it's less complicated when you look at models that seems to age longer, to age slower, I mean. And to have an increased health span. And there are models like that in nature. And once they were discovered, once you could do it, imitate some of the findings in genetic ways, it became much, much more achievable.

[00:06:27.680] – Dr. Barzilai
And we understand now that aging is flexible and we can target it. And the reason I went to the centenarians at the same time where those genetic component have been discovered and very exciting models, was because I thought, you know, let's go to humans who live 100 years old because they lived, as you say, they lived 40 percent longer than their cohort. You know, now people are living longer anyhow, but we're not living to age of 100 and ask, what are the reasons for their slow aging, and that's why we got them. And in order to be in my study, basically you have to be healthy at age 95. Now, if you're one hundred and twelve and in coma, you still make it because it's the genetics that we were after. OK, and we wanted to find the genetics component of exceptional longevity, but being healthy and living independently at 95 showed that no matter what, they've exceeded their health span by a lot compared to other people. And that that's our definition of the super agers.

[00:07:49.530] – Allan
OK, now you found a few traits that are fairly common amongst the super agers dealing with cholesterol, growth hormone. And I'll be honest with you, the last part of that, you got a little over my head in the science.

[00:08:06.810] – Dr. Barzilai
Yeah.

[00:08:07.350] – Allan
But can you talk about those traits, what they are and what they mean?

[00:08:11.400] – Dr. Barzilai
Yeah. So, for example, when we started looking at the centenarians and doing just kind of routine tests, initially routine tests, one thing that was really remarkable is that they had a high level of the good cholesterol of HDL cholesterol. It actually ran in the family. It's kind of complicated because the good cholesterol goes down when you look at this certain individual longitudinally, OK, you take the same person. The HDL every year, every eight years will go by five fold by five points.

[00:08:46.890] – Dr. Barzilai
So basically 100 years old, their HDL should be like 20. But it wasn't it was normal. When you, when you look at those data cross-sectional, when you look at population, it doesn't change with age. It's forty five for men. Fifty five for women. So how can you explain that in individual it goes down and as it's the same. Well if this is a longevity factor, if this protects you against dying, then the people where it goes low, they die and the people with high level maintain the high level up.

[00:09:22.410] – Dr. Barzilai
And this is kind of what we've discovered in our centenarians. So they did have high level of HDL, which made us ask, well, what is the genetics of that? What are the changes in genes that they have and others do not have that explain this high level of HDL in their families. And we found a couple of them that proved to be not only interesting, but they're, it was kind of realizing the promise because in each case, a drug was created for them. One by Merck and one by another pharmaceutical called Ionis. So it really was a proof of concept that was really interesting and important.

[00:10:12.420] – Allan
OK, and now the second trait you talked about was human growth factor.

[00:10:17.530] – Dr. Barzilai
Right.

[00:10:18.310] – Allan
Particularly the IGF one.

[00:10:20.410] – Dr. Barzilai
So, again, one of the first thing that was discovered in nature, in genetics is that the animal models that the animal dwarfs in many models, they live long. Even the nematode, when you take out the nematode warm, when you take out the growth gene, they live much longer than the little dogs live longer, the ponies live longer. And when you mutate many of those growth genes, you get an extension of health span and lifespan.

[00:10:59.320] – Dr. Barzilai
And I actually thought that that's probably not going to be the case in humans. But, you know, when you write a grant, you come up with hypotheses. You don't care if it's true or not. And my belief had nothing to do here. I was convincing that I should get the money to do it then. And we found out that it is very important. In fact, more than 60 percent of our subjects have mutations or changes in the growth hormone pathway, the growth hormone pathway.

[00:11:31.930] – Dr. Barzilai
There's more than one gene. There's about growth hormone, but there's another gene that's very important. That's called IGF1. And that's what growth hormone does when it binds to the liver, it increased growth IGF1 and then IGF1 has this receptor and growth hormone as receptors, there's a whole pathway. And this pathway is impaired in our centenarians. And so we think that actually look, it's to explain simply the theory here is that at a certain point you have to change your energy from growth to defense.

[00:12:13.900] – Dr. Barzilai
OK, now you're playing defense. You have to stop this growing and you stop you have to start like pointing the energy to do something else, like stop the genetic breakdown, stop the breakdown, basically. And so people who are already tuned like that are aging just just later.

[00:12:39.340] – Allan
OK, so the big anti aging movement has people taking testosterone and in some cases they're also taking growth hormone, but in fact, that might actually be shortening their lives.

[00:12:53.950] – Allan
Right. And I would add estrogen for women in this case. Look, we were rushing and by the way, I was there at this camp initially, when I came to aging, there was no aging, not much of aging. There are several people who had apostasies, but there is no really big signs of aging. And I thought, well, I should be an endocrinologist because one thing is clear, all those hormones are going down, which means let's just replace them. And that's how we'll do aging.

[00:13:35.780] – Dr. Barzilai
And it turns out that it's almost the opposite, because, look, when you have the breakdown of aging and you're seeing lots of things, some of them can cause aging. There's no doubt some of them maybe don't play any role, at least in our lifespan. But some of them may be protective. After all, when you start to have this break down, just like you have an infection, you have inflammatory response. When you have a breakdown of aging, you have a response. By the way, some of this is inflammation too.

[00:14:12.860] – Dr. Barzilai
So it's it's not as simple as to say, oh, it's high, we lower that or it's low and will increase it. It's not like that. And I think the best, and all the examples that you gave are really good. But, you know, the estrogen was such a controversy. I mean, some people say why the Women's Health Initiative even went to estrogen. We knew it's going to be good.

[00:14:42.050]
And now that it's bad, people are saying, well, maybe, you know, maybe no, it's not what it is. Maybe there's other explanation. And they basically focusing on the fact that if you give estrogen between 50 and 60, maybe at that point you get some benefits. But still, the women who are older than 60 didn't do well in estrogen. So it's going to it's going to get to them, OK? And it's kind of the same with testosterone.

[00:15:09.360] – Dr. Barzilai
And I mean, no matter how we looked at testosterone, the risks outweigh the benefits. And growth hormone is a really open area because there is a lot of business in growth hormone and lots of elderly people are getting growth hormone.

[00:15:29.930] – Dr. Barzilai
And in the meanwhile, I'm discovering by totally unbiased way that probably this is not a good idea to give growth hormone OK, because it's the opposite. If you have low growth hormone, you're much more protected. You can live healthier and longer.

[00:15:47.180] – Dr. Barzilai
I would say just one thing to be aware of, this effect of growth hormone is huge in females and not as much in males, both in animals and humans. In other words, growth hormone injections might not be as risky for men as they are for women, but we are not sure of how risky it is. What is the magnitude of this effect? So there's a little openness here, but be careful.

[00:16:22.240] – Allan
Yes, and then when you get into the mitochondria, I think you did lose me a little bit there only because it got pretty, pretty detailed. But can you kind of go into, you know, the mitochondria does a little bit more than just provide energy in the cell. And the things you're finding is that that's part of what's causing the aging or the slower aging.

[00:16:44.080] – Dr. Barzilai
Right, so yet so let me let me describe the evolution of that, OK? Once upon a time, many hundreds of million years ago, there was the initial cell. And the cell had a real problem, the cell had a lack of energy could do only glycolysis. There's not that many calories from glycolysis. And the cell was also exposed to oxygen, which is very toxic. So there was the cell, but next by the mitochondria was walking. And the mitochondria is really a bacteria that can do two things, can harness the oxygen and also make energy out of that.

[00:17:38.180] – Dr. Barzilai
So that's how the cell got the mitochondria. OK, so these mitochondria is a collaboration of bacteria and and the cell to make it better. And it was felt that in this marriage the cell really was calling the shots because a lot of the messages came from the nuclear genome, OK, for the from the nucleus of the cell. Right. And what we kind of discovered is a new biology that really showed that this mitochondria has hundreds of its own messages.

[00:18:20.480] – Dr. Barzilai
And so there's a crosstalk not only between the nucleus and the mitochondria, but those peptides that are being manufactured by the mitochondria are exiting and they're influencing other effects across the body. And they are known as mitochondrial derived peptides. So, yeah, you know, about the mitochondria and the powerhouse and the fact that mitochondria declines with aging and that is associated with lots of diseases. And we really need to make sure our mitochondria is OK.

[00:18:54.890] – Dr. Barzilai
But there's another aspect of the mitochondria, which is the messages they have. And I have a company that I founded with my co-founder, Hossy Cohen, who is the dean of USC School of Gerontology. It's CohBar where we are actually making therapy out of those peptides that are basically offering resiliency against many of the diseases of aging.

[00:19:25.940] – Allan
OK, so so these are traits that we would have. You know, if we're looking at our own aging, there's seven what they call, I guess, Hallmark's. You didn't identify these, but you mentioned them in the book. So kind of like the areas where your field looks, a couple of them that I was really I was obviously familiar with and you've gotten into already is the epigenetics, but also inflammation and a few others. Can you kind of go through those and why looking at all seven of those is important.

[00:19:57.380] – Dr. Barzilai
By the way, I have eight there, but, you know, we had seven initially, the Europeans had nine, then Brexit happened, you know. You know, those those hallmarks we we initially thought to call them the pillars of aging. And then we said, you know what, we still are gathering data. It's going to change. And if you all of a sudden take a pillar, the whole building would collapse. So let's not call them pillar, let's call them Hallmark. But in fact, I'm using much more another term, which is knob's, because what makes a hallmark hallmark is the fact that there's a good research that shows that if you intervene then you change health span and lifespan.

[00:20:47.930] – Dr. Barzilai
OK, that's really the evidence. Another thing interesting, those hallmarks are interconnected in the sense that you can target one of the knobs and it's going to influence the others. So I'll give you an example. One of those hallmarks is called Purtill Stars. What is Protostar? We are manufacturing and with aging, we're manufacturing in increase amounts of proteins that are just wrong. They're not folding right, they're not accumulating. They're doing traffic jams and they're causing lots of problems.

[00:21:33.120] – Dr. Barzilai
Now, there is a way to deal with it. There are several ways to deal with it. But one is called autophagy. Autophagy is the garbage disposal of the cells. OK, there is the ability to garbage disposal that is decrease with aging. But by the way, it's a green energy garbage disposal because it gets those proteins or whatever garbage takes them to little components that are, that can be recirculated for energy again. And autophagy, by the way, is eating yourself, but it's not really eating yourself, it's cleaning yourself and making available better, better body.

[00:22:11.430] – Dr. Barzilai
So when you turn on autophagy, which you can do genetically or by drug, you get the effect on the mitochondria. You get the effect on the metabolism and you get the effect on immunity. OK, and other things. Another thing, two of the hallmarks are decline in immunology, in immune function and also inflammation or as we call it, inflam-aging. Those are the really two things that are relevant now to COVID. And let me make a point out of here, COVID.

[00:22:51.840] – Dr. Barzilai
So I'm telling you how we went from Hope to promise. Right. And we're going to realize the promise. And then COVID landed on us. And it's it must be an opportunity to but COVID landed on us and really showed ages. It showed that if you're 80 years old, you're two hundred times more likely to die if you're 20 years old. OK, it's really the major risk for dying.

[00:23:16.800] – Dr. Barzilai
And by the way, multi morbidity, lots of diseases for me they're just how old. But you are biologically, you know, at age 65, half of the people in Europe have less than two diseases and the other half have more than two diseases. So they're they're not super agers. They're aging really quicker. Aging is the major risk factor for COVID. And this is because of something that happened to those Hallmark's the immunity declines so the virus is more likely to attack you.

[00:23:50.550] – Dr. Barzilai
And second, what the people die from within few days of the infection, they get a very big inflammatory response uncontrol that is destructive, that is destroying the lung, and that is really causing the death. Those are two of the hallmarks of aging that can be targeted. Actually, both of them can be targeted. And we're trying to find a way for the public to know that, know what to do about it. But this is just, I think, important insights on the hallmark. If you want something more specific, you can ask.

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[00:25:58.080] – Allan
That was wonderful because, you know, I think that really when I when I saw that picture, because you had a graphic in the book, you could see that interrelation, you know, and you did an excellent job there with Covid as an example of, you know, you've got two things. You've got the immune response and then you've got the inflammation in the body and how they're interrelated. So now that's really good.

[00:26:19.380] – Allan
You got into one topic that I thought I thought was a little interesting. You know, being in the health space, I have a lot of friends that are in the health space. And I have one friend that was on metformin while he was he was diabetic. He reversed his diabetes and he got off of metformin. But he decided for personal reasons, longevity reasons, to start taking metformin again. Now, he exercised he rides his bike. He does a lot of different things. So he was already exercising, which was a benefit. But then when he started talking about metformin, I was like, OK, well, until I saw it in your book. So can you kind of talk about the benefits we get from something like metformin or exercise?

[00:27:00.810] – Dr. Barzilai
Sure, really interesting topic. And in fact, let me say, I have many interest in metformin, but it's all because of overwhelming interest. We're trying to do a study that will demonstrate to the FDA that aging can be targeted and then variety of age related diseases, not only one, but few can be delayed substantially. OK, that aging is a preventable condition from age related disease perspective. To thread this needle, we had to find a drug that does it, a drug that is available, a drug that doesn't have pharmaceutical about it because we were just scientists and a drug that really will serve as a tool to pave the road.

[00:28:00.780] – Dr. Barzilai
Because because the point is, if the FDA doesn't have indication to target aging, then health care providers don't have to pay for it. If health care providers are not paying for that, the pharmaceuticals are not going to jump in because they need a business plan. I realize that. So we needed to break that. And that's the Gero-science effort and American Federation of Aging Research. And the NIH now are all partners in the study.

[00:28:29.850] – Dr. Barzilai
That's called TAM, targeting aging with metformin in order to show that aging can be targeted. OK, so that's the big picture. OK, of course you have to understand that because of that I'm not selling metformin to anyone. OK, that's not the purpose. But I need to do the study in order to show that. But why why metformin? Well, first of all, if you give metformin to almost all animals. Most recently a fish, one of the fish that is in the lab now investigated. It's called killing fish, killing fish, all other animals. You give them metformin, they live healthier and longer.

[00:29:11.000] – Dr. Barzilai
OK, but in in people, because and by the way, metformin, just from historical perspective, it's a drug that initially in the forties of last century. OK, so 80 years ago was used to prevent flu and malaria. In other words, somebody discovered the fact that it has some strong effects. While doing that, people also demonstrated that people who got metformin and in high glucose level, their glucose level normalized. And in fact, then it all became about diabetes. And it's the first drug of choice to treat Type two diabetes, which is the major form of diabetes.

[00:30:02.160] – Dr. Barzilai
So metformin is out there for more than 60 years. So everything you want to do, you know about metformin, we know about metformin, OK? It's been around there currently almost two hundred million people around the world that are on metformin. So it's generic. There's no pharmaceutical beyond it. It's cheap. It's safe.

[00:30:26.230] – Dr. Barzilai
Perfect tool for us. What is the evidence from humans, Will? If you take non diabetic and give them metformin, you'll prevent diabetes in them. OK, a big clinical study, it's called the DPP. Another big clinical studies were to look at the effects of metformin versus other drugs on prevention of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, metformin prevented cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

[00:30:57.820] – Dr. Barzilai
There's many association studies, hundreds of association studies, all showing that people in metformin have less cancers, all all kinds of cancers. There's both clinical studies and association studies that there is less cognitive impairment and less Alzheimer's in people with metformin. And maybe the most fascinating to me is a huge study that was done in the UK, where in the UK you can go into the pharmacies and get data, you know, not the name of the person, but other medical information on those on those subjects.

[00:31:43.070] – Dr. Barzilai
So they took like 170,000 people and took this 78,000 that are on metformin data control with age match people, you know, in the treated by the same doctors getting subscriptions from from the same pharmacies. And basically they showed that compared to non diabetic people with diabetes and metformin had much less mortality, 17 percent less mortality over five years of follow up. Now, the people with more mortality had no diabetes and the people on metformin had diabetes, they had they were more obese and more sick to start with, and yet they live longer.

[00:32:36.000] – Dr. Barzilai
So take everything I told you about metformin and you see that it's a real drug that has real effect on many diseases in a composite of diseases. And that's why we use it as a tool to get permission from the FDA to target aging with it.

[00:32:58.840] – Allan
OK, now we can get we can get a similar effect with exercise, but in the book you kind of talked about using both of them together.

[00:33:06.260] – Dr. Barzilai
So, you know, so one of our challenges is we have all those hallmarks. Let's say we have a drug for all the hallmarks. Can we use all the combination together?Will it be additive? And the answer is it's specific. So we collaborated with a group that done the following study. They took elderly and they exercise them. A half of them were exercise with metformin and half of them without. And they actually that was an NIH grant. And they predicted that metformin will be editive to the effect of exercise. But to their surprise and by the way, there are other groups that showed the same.

[00:33:58.750] – Dr. Barzilai
All the people that exercised did better, but the muscle of the ones that exercised was bigger than the muscle of those that exercised and were on metformin. So it looked like metformin was actually inhibiting the growth of the muscle. OK, we were interested in that because in one of the supplements that you don't read, they also show something fascinating that although the muscle was a smaller, the strength was the same between two groups.

[00:34:37.820] – Dr. Barzilai
OK, so for me it means per gram of muscle. The one on metformin is better. OK, why is that? And what we did with this group we got, they did biopsies before and after treatment of the people. And we looked at the transcript of those biopsies and we showed exactly the mechanism by which muscle growth with exercise and why and how it wasn't growing as much with mitochondria, it was totally fitting. But metformin increased 516 other transcripts that are more of the aging protected transcripts.

[00:35:23.080] – Dr. Barzilai
OK, so they affected autophagy, as I said before, some other things they decrease and or some other things. And so at the end, you can choose if you want to exercise because you want big muscle, don't take metformin. But what the metformin did is it didn't affect the force but affected the aging of the muscles. So at the end it had the similar functional effect but you can choose what you want to do.

[00:35:58.890] – Allan
Yeah. And that kind of falls in line if you think about it. When we first started this conversation and we were we were talking about the growth factor in the hormones and people will often take those hormones because they want to get a little bit more muscular even as they age. And then here we are saying, you know, if you can build the quality strength of muscle without building that extra size, metformin will help you do that. And I guess the final one is…

[00:36:26.270] – Dr. Barzilai
Can I just say something about that. Look, a lot of what growth hormone is doing and for which you say it is quite expensive. Right. So how people, why people are buying it. Because they see something. What they see growth hormone melts fat under the skin. OK, that's why people seeing that something is happening when it melts fat around your muscle, your muscles look bulgier, OK? There's very few studies that shows any effect on strength. OK, maybe there's a little bit, but it's not much at all.

[00:37:08.370] – Allan
Yeah, that's going to come with the testosterone where you're recovering a little faster, therefore you're working out more often and that's typically where, you know, bodybuilders, they use either testosterone or steroid. That's where they see the size come from is they're just able to train harder and longer and more often. And that's what they get.

[00:37:26.820] – Dr. Barzilai
But, you know, what you said is very important. So I want I want to use this opportunity. We're talking about 70 years old. We're not talking about bodybuilders below 40. OK, so what I'm telling you is true for aging, OK? I'm not saying it's untrue for the others, but I'm not saying it's true either. OK, so let's say let's just build a Chinese wall.

[00:37:56.810] – Allan
Yeah. And I think that's where I was going with this is to say, you know, a lot of the things that we would be doing to build muscle and look more aesthetically pleasing are not necessarily going to be good for aging.

[00:38:16.310] – Dr. Barzilai
Exactly.

[00:38:16.950] – Allan
OK, and one that I wanted to get into is I saw this on this show. It's been years ago. And you name them you call them chronies. But they're basically people that significantly under eat. And there's some science behind how under eating can and calorie restriction can allow you to to live longer. We see that. We've seen a lot of that. But you talked about in the book ways that we can use things like intermittent fasting and ketosis to mimic that effect.

[00:38:46.680] – Dr. Barzilai
Right. So I want to say something about this paradigm. When we started caloric restriction, we knew another fact that if you give zero calories they all die in a few days, right, so we know that there are limits. OK. The question is how much how much calories, right?

[00:39:10.520] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:39:10.770] – Dr. Barzilai
And I'm not sure that the chronies took the right amount of calories. I think they took less calories than what they should have. But for me, one of the things that I, that we've done that always has to go back to the science. Yeah, we did those caloric restriction everywhere all the time, and it was always successful. OK, and whenever I test a drug that might affect aging, one of the control groups is the caloric restricted animal. Right. But what we did with the caloric restricted animal is the following. We would come in the morning. They were hungry. We would put all the food in the morning so they would eat all the food in the morning and will fast for twenty three hours more. OK, we really OK, because we said, oh, you know what caloric restriction means, it means that less for breakfast, less for lunch, less for dinner.

[00:40:07.490] – Dr. Barzilai
But that's not what we did to the animal. When we started actually doing the caloric restriction throughout the day, they were thinner, but they didn't live longer, which means something is in these. Fasting is important for the benefits of caloric restriction.

[00:40:26.160] – Allan
Do you think that has something to do with, you know, with cell death and the bodies reusing of materials a bit a bit more efficiently?

[00:40:35.750] – Dr. Barzilai
Well, we are looking we're looking now and it really we're looking at it what happens in this time course of fasting. So we're taking young and old people, men and women, and we're trying to look what happens to the biology of aging. We're going to take their cells and see at which time they become younger. Right. We are going to see in the plasma, when are the ketones starting to go up? When is the insulin going down and all that and and really determine. Because, look, first of all, if all it takes is 12 hours, then more people will be able to do 12 hours.

[00:41:13.820] – Dr. Barzilai
They'll they'll just skip lunch right? The 16, eight hours, which is what I'm doing is just surprisingly easy. All you do is skip breakfast. And you know that in 16 hours you can have whatever you want and you're not limited, although you find out that you eat less, but you're not limited. And I think this is a big advantage. If you gave me a diet for three months, I could fail any day. I could break any day. But I'm not going to break if I have two hours to go. I'm just not going to break. OK, so that's easy. And another thing, you lose weight quite rapidly initially, then it's stabilized, but you lose weight, so good diet.

[00:42:00.230] – Allan
And I think that's kind of the point. You know, when I get into ketosis, which I'm approaching right now, I naturally stop wanting to eat breakfast. I just when I wake up I'm not hungry. That's a very productive period of time for me. So even stopping the eating because it's quiet. You know I get up about four or five o'clock in the morning. And so I have about four hours before any emails are coming in or anything else is going on.

[00:42:25.610] – Allan
And those are the most productive hours of my day. So I don't want to stop and eat. Then I want to wait till the email start coming and then I can eat my breakfast while I'm reading email. But, you know, I think there's a lot to this and I appreciate that you're taking the time to to study how all these different protocols and in some cases now we're going to say medications can target aging because again, we don't want to just get older. We want to we want to have a long health, healthy life, too. So try to get that biological age lower than our chronological age.

[00:43:01.970] – Allan
Doctor, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:43:11.700] – Dr. Barzilai
Well, first of all, I agree with this definition and, you know, with my book, I'm not trying to sell any medication, although I have a lot of comments on many of those and not on medication, on stress, on society on interaction.

[00:43:33.480] – Dr. Barzilai
I mean, boy, the older people are so lonely with this covid-19. They are just so lonely. There's so many things that are part of health span. And it's not only medical, it's emotional, it's everything. What I'm what I'm trying to do is really to say something else. So I'm sorry. I'm not you can ask me specifically, but I'm trying to do something else in my book. I'm trying to say there's a lot of information out there. OK, here, we're going to have information out there.

[00:44:11.250] – Dr. Barzilai
How how do you know what's real, what's marketing, what was proven, what was hope, what is totally fake? OK, it's very difficult. And I'm saying, look. I'm going, I'm basically I'm impressed only when I see a clinical study, a clinical study means we take a population. Half of them are on a drug, half of them are in placebo. They don't know. The doctors don't know. And we have an outcome that we calculated. We know how many people we need and how much time we need. And this is a clinical study. And that's the only way that you can be sure that you're doing the right thing.

[00:44:56.470] – Dr. Barzilai
And unfortunately, there are not that many of them. I brought as an example, vitamin D. Vitamin D is associated with every disaster in the world. OK, but just the same, except women with osteoporosis. Every time you give vitamin D to people in risk, almost nothing happens or very little happens that the effect of vitamin D seems huge and when you give vitamin D, almost nothing happens or very little happens.

[00:45:30.020] – Dr. Barzilai
So there's no compelling reason. By the way, I have low vitamin D level. My doctor wanted me to take the vitamin D and I said show me to me. And he said, well, maybe if you have osteoporosis, said, let's do a scan. I did a scan. I actually have bones that are five sizes thicker than the average. And I'm thinking, you know what, maybe that's why I have low vitamin D level, because we might not know all the direction. Maybe the fact that my bone is like that, it decreases the conversion of vitamin D because it needs protection. So I don't need to be all bone. OK, so so for me, vitamin D is not a is not an issue because the clinical studies have not supported it.

[00:46:24.340] – Dr. Barzilai
There is another part of vitamin D, though, that I would give us an example. If you want to take vitamins, at least vitamin D didn't show to be harmful. So that's also good. So, you know, we can go one by one. And so but then there's another category. There's a category of drugs that have promise, OK, based on lots of data, maybe animals data. But there is no clinical study and maybe there won't be clinical study, you know, there are nutraceuticals. OK, so in that play, in one of the examples, anime and ad supplements and a man. So I don't have anything against taking in a man.

[00:47:13.130] – Dr. Barzilai
I think I don't understand everything. We don't understand everything we need to know about any men, but it probably has strong anti-aging properties. And I don't see really that it's doing harm, although I'm not in absolute way sure of that either. OK, are they good people who have cancer? Maybe it's not good in people with cancer. OK, there are lots of safety issues that we could deal. But the point really that I'm trying to stress is we have to do better than just reading something in the Internet and taking it much better than that. And there's a way to make progress in that.

[00:47:52.510] – Allan
Yes. Well, Doctor, thank you so much. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Age Later, where would you like for me to send them.

[00:48:00.650] – Dr. Barzilai
So Age Later can be bought on Amazon. And if you want to have more information about the book and about health, the American Federation of Aging Research, AFAR.org is where you can find more about the book.

[00:48:21.810] – Allan
You can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.Com/449 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Barzilai, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:48:33.950] – Dr. Barzilai
A pleasure. Good luck to you and and nice mission to have.

[00:48:38.150] – Allan
Thank you.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Clean those dirty genes with Dr. Ben Lynch

Less...

Allan
Dr. Saladino, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Saladino
Thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.

Allan
I have had someone on about the carnivore of diet before. His name is Craig Emmerich, Maria's husband, you might know him. And it was really fascinating. I've been interested in the diet, but honestly, it seems pretty extreme to me to just eat meat and organs. I've read a lot about it. I've heard a lot about it. But I think your book, The Carnivore Code, is really kind of the first book I've seen that basically power drives any other way you'd want to eat, I mean, for lack of a better word, it's like, boy, you just pulverized all the vegetables I like and you did it with science.

Dr. Saladino
Well, I tried. And the goal of writing the book and we can get into what I do and why I do it, my goal is not to convince everyone to stop eating all plants for the rest of eternity. The idea with the book and I'll tell the listeners a little of my story as well in a moment, but there are really two main thesis in the book. There are two things that I'm hoping to achieve and the first is to exonerate, red meat to undo the bad science that's been done around red meat and ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb.

Dr. Saladino
These kinds of foods are some of the most vilified foods on the planet. And yet I strongly believe and I think that the medical literature strongly supports the fact that they are the most nutritious foods on the planet for humans. So what we have is this completely upside down ideology this completely reversed mainstream idea around fear of red meat. And that doesn't need to be that way. And I talk about in the book why that is and evidence for red meat being essential in the human diet.

Dr. Saladino
And we can get to both of those things. The second point of the book is to explain and to suggest to offer that plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. They're rooted in the ground. They've been co-evolving with animals for four hundred and fifty million years. And so in order for plants and animals to co-exist in an ecosystem, they have had to develop defense chemicals. This is really not conjecture or opinion. This is botanical science. And these defense chemicals can harm humans. And so plants exist on a toxicity spectrum and understanding which plants are the most toxic in the least toxic is crucial for every human to achieve optimal health.

Dr. Saladino
It's really just it's another tool in the toolbox for people. If people are listening to this and they are thriving, they're just crushing it, kicking, butt, don't change a thing. I respect anyone who's crushing it. And I will give anyone an electronic high five for making an intentional choice with their diet. Whatever that choice is, that's the first step, is making an intentional choice of diet, thinking about your food.

Dr. Saladino
But there's a lot of people that are suffering and no one has really gone to these lengths. No one has uncovered these questions. Nobody has turned these stones over and said maybe some of these plants are harming us. Maybe this is the reason that some of us suffer with eczema like I did, or asthma or psoriasis or depression or mood issues or libido issues or weight gain that won't reverse or tons of other autoimmune issues.

Dr. Saladino
And it's just exciting to be able to do to try and do those two things to say, hey, this red meat don't fear this. Very valuable for you, very critical for you, your family, your children, for their health, for your parents health, everyone. Wrongly vilified based on bad science, which is epidemiology. And the second part is you're not thriving, realize that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum.

Allan
Yeah. Now in my book, The Wellness Roadmap, I brought up a concept that I call opportunistic eaters. And what it is, is as humans, you know, if we're hungry, we're going to go for food. I think I got a little backward and so I got opportunistic eating today is pulling up to the McDonald's drive-thru. It's easy. It's quick, low cost for me from an energy perspective, I don't even have to get out of my car and there it is. Not good for me, but it gives me the energy it did what it was supposed to do, I guess. But then when I thought back to our ancestors and the way that they would look at the opportunity, I think I had it backward. And you rightfully said something in your book that that made me turn that around. You call it the Carnivore Code Hypothesis. And that would be where we would effectively favor meat, particularly red meat, over other sources of food for the nutritional value of them.

Allan
Whereas I thought it's easier for me to pick blueberries in the blueberries, not actually attacking me back. Well, we're going to find out later. Maybe that blueberry is but, you know, I feel safer picking blueberries than I would hunting a water buffalo. Now, even if you and I and a few other guys together with spears and went out there and started working, it would be a little safer, but still risk. We take every time we wanted this food. But what you brought up in the book. There's a good reason why we would take that risk.

Dr. Saladino
There's a very good reason why we would take that risk and why we have taken that risk. The beginning part of the book is really about where we've come from in humans and looking at fossilized evidence of human cranial vault size, the growth of the brain. And there's pretty good evidence that one of the key, if not the critical factor in the massive growth of the human brain, was the advent of hunting in our ancestors and the procurement of meat and these unique nutrients that occur in meat.

Dr. Saladino
So if you look at what's in meat and this goes back to the idea of exonerating red meat and understanding how valuable these foods are for humans. There are many nutrients in red meat specifically, but in all animals really that only occur in animal foods.

Dr. Saladino
So often we're told, of these phytonutrients, quote-unquote. And I really think that's a fairy tale, that's not true when we can talk about that as well. But there are unique nutrients. There are unique nutrients that only occur in appreciable biologically available quantities in animal foods.

Dr. Saladino
But we've never heard about these. So you kind of allude to this in your description. And I think most people and our ancestors were really after the calories, but it worked out when they were seeking the most calories in the largest animals and the largest repository of food, they were solving this energetics equation. Per energy invested, the return on a water buffalo is much better than a blueberry. And it just so happens that when you get that water buffalo, you are getting so many more unique nutrients that are so much more bioavailable. Because we know that in order for humans to be optimal, we need micronutrients. These are things like vitamins and minerals, and I'll talk about those in a moment. In order for our ancestors, or you or I to survive until tomorrow, we need calories.

Dr. Saladino
And you can get those calories from a Slurpee or a Big Mac or a Frosty or french fries. You'll survive till tomorrow. But if you want to survive decades from now and have vital health and healthy children and multiple generations and play with your grandkids, you need micronutrients. And that is the real difference. But by seeking out the highest sources and the most efficient sources of calories, our ancestors also sought out the unique micronutrients. So what am I talking about here?

Dr. Saladino
I'm talking about things like creatine, carnitine, choline, carnitine, vitamin K and B12. The list goes on and on. These are nutrients that really only occur in animal foods in any appreciable quantity. And they are necessary. They are absolutely essential for optimal human health.

Dr. Saladino
But you really can't get creatine from plants. We know that it makes builder stronger, but we also know that it makes us smarter. There have been interventional experiments where they'll do trials without giving vegetarians and vegans creatine. And they get smarter. They do better on memory tasks and card sorting tasks and cognitive processing tasks.

Dr. Saladino
And then there's choline, an essential nutrient for the formation of the brain to make new baby brains to make our brain strong. It really doesn't occur in appreciable quantities and plant foods, but it's absolutely abundant and very biologically available in animal foods. Carnitine, carnitine, these are unique amino acid forms that are used in the antioxidant process in the human body. Vitamin K2 is a form of vitamin K that's absolutely essential for proper calcium partitioning in the human body and higher intakes of vitamin K2, which is a series of Menaquinones, have been associated with much better cardiovascular outcomes.

Dr. Saladino
But where's the vitamin K2 In-plant Foods? It doesn't exist. You can't get vitamin K2 from Plant Foods. You can vitamin K1, which is Phylloquinone. But humans are really, really bad at converting Phylloquinone to medical quinone and an intake of Phylloquinone in Plants is not associated with any of these improved outcomes from heart disease or calcification or sclerosis. So the list goes on, right? Vitamin B 12. Most people know about that, but these are all critical nutrients, trust to be optimal and they were critical for our ancestors brains to grow.

Dr. Saladino
And the statement I make in the book is that I strongly believe and I think the evidence absolutely corroborates the notion that eating meat made us human. It's essential for humans to eat this. And so the investment is slightly higher danger hunting a water buffalo is going to be repaid in spades, it's going to be repaid over and over. As you get that hunt, you get that kill graciously, thankfully, and you share it with your tribe and you are nourished so deeply also by eating organs, if we can talk about.

Dr. Saladino
But that's really what allowed our ancestors to thrive, that it was so easy to get the nutrition from animals. And you can survive on plant foods, but they've got these toxins and you have to detoxify them. They're good for survival. But our ancestors really would have sought out animals first. And if they had to, they would use these plant foods as a fallback. If you can't get a buffalo, you might gather some blueberries.

Dr. Saladino
Now, fruit is kind of a specific thing that I'll talk about. I think our ancestors would have eaten fruit in season, but blueberries aren't available year-round. And you don't make a baby out of blueberries, you know, but you can't just you can't make a human out of the nutrients in blueberries, but you can make a human out of the nutrients in water buffalo that's got almost that's got basically everything you need.

Dr. Saladino
Blueberries, It's got some calories and a few things that we can use, but not great. Now, the fruit stems, leaves, roots and seeds of plants are much more highly defended with these defense chemicals. And that, I think, would have been absolutely way down on the list for humans. If you cannot get you cannot get an animal, then you're going to eat those things to survive. But our ancestors favored animal foods. They made us who we are. And by really forgetting that wisdom today, we are forsaking our ancestral birthright to much, much deeper levels of human health.

Allan
Yeah, and kind of following along with that as we develop and you start thinking about, OK, why is a human-like a human? Because we do have some teeth that allow us to eat some vegetables, but they're not all of our teeth are animal or plant teeth. So it's obvious that we have a little bit of diversity opportunity there. But there are other things about the human body that makes it clear that we're hunters, we're meant to be carnivores. Can you talk about some of those changes physiologically that have happened as humans have evolved?

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is quite a fascinating story and it starts in the mouth. And really, as you go, as you said, the teeth argument always gets brought up a lot. But we clearly have teeth for both chewing fibrous material. Probably we held on to those because we needed that during times of scarcity of animals. And we have lots of teeth for biting into meat and eating animals. The digestive system of the digestive tract is one of the more fascinating parts of our physiology that distinguishes us from plant-eating herbivores.

Dr. Saladino
The acidity of our stomach is much more. It's much greater. So we have a lower PH, which means a more acidic stomach than many other species, many other primates, many other herbivorous or even omnivorous species. That's a strong suggestion that as we begin eating meat, we were eating rotting meat. So we were eating carrion just to prevent our guts from being damaged by bacteria that might have been growing on the meat. We don't have to eat rotting meat today, but there's a clear evolutionary blueprint there of our ancestors eating meat that was rotting or eating meat in general and the stomach acid protecting us from it and the stomach acid also breaking down that meat.

Dr. Saladino
The shape and distribution of gut regions is also very different in humans. And this is one of the other things called the expensive tissue hypothesis that probably allowed the human brain to grow so big. And we see this in other animals and other species as well. But energetically there is a ceiling on how an animal can change throughout its evolution and as a species.

Dr. Saladino
And so if you want to grow a bigger brain, which uses a lot of your energy, you're going to have to trim the fat, so to speak, from somewhere else. And it looks like the tradeoff for humans was in the gut. We have a much smaller, large intestine. So there's a stomach, a small intestine and a large intestine. The small intestine is 20 plus feet, goes from the end of your stomach to the ileocecal valve, which is where your colon starts. And your colon is your large bowel and these these parts of the intestine serve different purposes. But humans have a slightly larger small bowel and a much smaller, large bowel than primates.[00:17:48.710] – Dr. Saladino
So what appears to have happened in the very compelling hypothesis is that as we were able to eat more nutrient rich foods, we were able to shrink the size of our colons because we didn't need the colons to do the massive fermentation that primates do. So if you look at a gorilla or an ape, they have both a very protuberance stomach. They have a rib angle, which is much more pointed outward than humans. Our ribs kind of go straight down and an ape goes way out to accommodate this very large colon.

Dr. Saladino
The colon now for humans is really just to reabsorb the last bits of water from our stool as it passes through the small intestine. And the small intestine is where we do most of the absorption of nutrients. So there's this real change and that allowed our brains to grow big because we have smaller energy needs in our gut. We can then redistribute the caloric availability to growing a big brain in a very metabolically expensive brain. There's a fascinating fish in Africa that I talk about in the book called The Peters' Elephant Nose Fish.

Dr. Saladino
People can Google this. It's a really cool looking fish. But you see the same thing here. The expensive tissue hypothesis plays out in this fish as well. It has the biggest brain of any species or fish relative to body size. So it's a pretty smart fish. And in order to do that, it has the smallest gut. So it has this trade-off between gut and brain. Again, not surprisingly, that fish is a carnivore as well. And in the fish world, Carnivore is a little different than in the human or land mammal world. But that fish doesn't eat plants, that fish eats other fish or smaller, smaller animals that it's consuming.

Dr. Saladino
So that allows it to consume higher nutrient density food and have a smaller gut. And so it gets a bigger brain energetically in the trade-off. So there's all sorts of other things that suggest that we're hunters. We've got these shoulders that allow us to pitch, and no other species on the planet can throw a fastball like a human can throw a spear.

Dr. Saladino
Primates can't do this. Nobody else can do this. We have these articulated fingers. We're very agile on our feet. And even the whites of our eyes are fascinating. I should have, the book is it wouldn't have shown this picture very well, but I should have put a picture in the book about this. If you look at a chimp's eyes, I didn't know this until I was researching the book The Sclera. So the part of the eye outside of the iris is brown.

Dr. Saladino
And a human, it's white, and so if people look in the mirror, you'll see that center part of your eye, that's the iris and the white stuff to the side. That's the sclera. And a chimp sclera is brown. So if you look at the chimp eye, versus a human eye, it looks very different. And the hypothesis here, advanced by Bill von Hippel and others, is that humans became cooperative rather than competitive. That if I'm in the tribe with you and I'm looking to the right, you can tell which direction I'm looking because you can see the contrast between the iris and the sclera.

Dr. Saladino
But if you look at a chimp, you can't really see which direction they're looking because it's all the same color. So it was advantageous for them to not signal their intentions, what they were looking at, potential mate, prey, escape route to other chimps. But humans became cooperative.

Dr. Saladino
So we were hunting in groups. We were signaling danger and we were becoming this cooperative species. Well, you don't need a whole lot of cooperation to pick blueberries, but if you're hunting a water buffalo, you probably want to cooperate, right?

Allan
Yeah, let's send Derrick in there.

Dr. Saladino
If you've been in the military, or you've seen these adventure movies, you know, you can communicate with somebody across the room with your eyes without saying anything. Or if someone sees danger, you can see where that person is looking immediately.

Dr. Saladino
So there's all these adaptations that make us look a whole lot like hunters. There's also fossil evidence that we've been hunting. I mean, two million years ago when the human brain began to grow is when we see these fossilized remains of Shuli and tools, these by facial by facial stones, which look kind of like big arrowheads. They were used for spears and for butchering. And we start to see bones that are dated to two million years with cut marks on the bone from the butchering.

Dr. Saladino
And we see hunting injuries to animals and we see mass graves where our ancestors apparently herded animals into blind corridors or drove them off cliffs to harvest them in mass. So right at the time we see the human brain start to grow. We then begin to see evidence for hunting and looking at the fossil record, we can see these changes in the human physiology, suggesting, humans are hunters. First and foremost, we're hunters.

Dr. Saladino
Everybody says we're hunter-gatherers. Well, we're like hunter-gatherer. You know, we're like mostly hunting a little bit of gathering if you can't get an animal. And then the question is, what are the foods our ancestors were really gathering? It wasn't kale, I'll tell you that. You can get into it.

Allan
So since the 70s, you know, you don't eat fat, don't eat fat, don't eat fat, low fat, low fat, everything, and with paleo coming up, I guess mid two thousands and so and it was growing and then that went to Keto. So I was I was into ketosis. I was was feeling better than I've felt in forever. And then this news report comes out, you know, that red meat you're eating is going to cause colon cancer. Your chance of dying just went up dramatically. You know, I'm reading the article and I'm like this can't be true. But, you know, well, there's a study and everybody took off with that study. Can you tell us a little bit about that whole story of how that happened and why it's wrong?

Dr. Saladino
Yeah. So based on what you already laid out, I'm sure the listener can imagine how evolutionarily inconsistent it would be for a food that was at the center of the human diet for the last three to four million years would be bad for us. That doesn't make any sense. OK, but there's, quote, science. So let's talk about why this is so misleading.

Dr. Saladino
So what you are referring to is a 2015 IARC report from the International Association for Research on Cancer, which is a WHO/FAO type of committee on cancer. And they met to review all of the studies that they could find connecting red meat and cancer. So it wasn't an actual experiment. It was a consensus decision by a group of scientists, which can also be valuable. But, and they came out in 2015 and said red meat is a class to a carcinogen, which means that we're pretty sure it's a or maybe it was 2B, 2A or 2B.

Dr. Saladino
They give gradings to the recommendations based on the strength of the evidence. And so then they said that processed meat was a 2A carcinogen and red meat was a 2B carcinogen, meaning there was a little bit less evidence that unprocessed red meat was a carcinogen and there was more evidence that processed meat was a carcinogen. So they're making these recommendations.

Dr. Saladino
And you said, OK, well, how do they get these recommendations? They didn't do an experiment. They're reviewing the data. Well, they're super smart scientists, right? We should trust them. Well, in 2018 and this caused a huge hubbub in 2015. In 2018, the actual explanation of how they arrived at those decisions came out.

Dr. Saladino
And when you read that, it paints a very different story. So these, there were many scientists, I think over 20 scientists that sat down and I think it was in France and they had over four hundred studies to review and they excluded all the studies except 14. So that decision is based on 14 studies. They just took everything else. They said that's not valid. It's not that experiment wasn't done well enough. It doesn't it's not an appropriate model.

Dr. Saladino
They excluded all the animal studies. So there were no animal models. Right. And every single one of the studies they looked at was epidemiology. So in that consensus report, they used 14 epidemiology studies. Now, this is worth diving into because it causes so much confusion and consternation. Epidemiology is observational research. There is no experiments done. Most of us from science class imagine that all the studies we hear about on the news are interventional. You combine two chemicals, you get a color change, you take a group of rats, you give them more sugar or more fat, and you see what happens.

Dr. Saladino
You take a group of humans and you give them a drug and you see what happens. This isn't what this IRC report is referring to. There have been studies done in which people have replaced carbohydrates with red meat. And in fact, those studies do not show any harm for red meat. They show decreasing CRP and no changes in other markers of inflammation. But was that an interventional study included in this decision? No. No interventional studies were included in this decision.

Dr. Saladino
They were all epidemiology, which is survey-based research. And so what these researchers did was look at 14 different types of, 14 different studies. And all of these studies were either prospective or retrospective cohort study. So they take a group of people and they give them a survey. And they say, how much red meat did you eat over the last 10 or 15 years? And then they looked to see how healthy these people are and they try and correlate those two. Or they'll take a cohort of people and say how much red meat you eat now and then follow them moving forward for 10 or 15 years and see how many of them develop health problems. And at first glance, that sounds reasonable, right?

Dr. Saladino
Except here's the problem. Epidemiology, observational studies can only tell us about correlation. You can't make a causative inference from that because just because somebody eats more red meat, it doesn't mean that the red meat caused the problems.

Allan
I think you had a really good example. You had a really good example in the book about divorce rate in Maine.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, there's a great website called SpuriousCorrelations.com, where people can see these sort of the hilarity that ensues when you try and connect correlation with causation. Many things correlate. The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita margarine consumption over the last eight or nine years to a very, very high degree. Does that mean that as people ate less margarine, they got divorced less? No, but it makes absolutely no sense. But you can correlate these two things.

Dr. Saladino
You can also correlate things like deaths by getting tangled in the bedsheets with per capita cheese consumption and the number of movies Nicolas Cage has appeared in with, I think something with pool drownings or something. You know. You can correlate all kinds of things that don't have any connection. And in the case of red meat, you've already really alluded to the problem that for the last 70 years the narrative has been fat is bad for you, red meat is bad for you. So who eats red meat over the last 70 years?

Dr. Saladino
People that are rebels people that also probably are less likely to go in the sun, less likely to play tennis on a Tuesday morning, less likely go to their doctor to get a colonoscopy or mammograms, less likely to get pap smears, less likely to do other types of health behaviors. Exercise, meditate. These are just these are the types of things more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol.

Dr. Saladino
These are the type of things that are very hard for epidemiology to control for. But the people who eat red meat consistently do worse in the United States because they are the people who are rebels. In the book, I call them the James Dean types. And the converse is also true. Who has eaten more vegetables over the last 70 years?

Dr. Saladino
Well, it's the people that I gave a high five to at the beginning of this podcast who are making intentional choices with regard to their diet. Now, they're also doing other healthy things. You don't just listen to health advice on diet, you also listen to health advice on exercise and go out in the sun and you do other things that are good for you. You're more likely to be of a higher socioeconomic status because you have the ability to do those things.

Dr. Saladino
So it creates this really confounded story regarding what are these studies actually telling us. But really the narrative doesn't end here. If you look at those 14 studies considered by the IARC, are you ready for this, only 8 of the 14 to start with, 8 of the 14 did not show any association between red meat and cancer. And if people are just kind of like scratching their head right now, OK, so 8 of the 14 studies showed no association between red meat and cancer. Granted, these are epidemiology. But 8 of the 14 association, the majority of the studies, no association between red meat and cancer.

Dr. Saladino
6 of the 14 showed association between red meat and cancer. But of that six, five of them, that's association was not statistically significant. So not only is epidemiology confounded by these biases and does it not allow us to make a causative inference from correlation if we do the math and the correlation is not even statistically significant, we can't even actually say that it's a real correlation.

Dr. Saladino
It could be due to other errors. It's not a big enough difference. So what I'm saying is that 1 of the 14 studies, 1, showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And we can dig into that one study even further and say, what was that one study done? That one study was done in a population of Seventh Day Adventists, which is a religious group that shuns meat. So in that group, the people that eat meat are really going to be rebels because the rebels not only at a social level, the rebels at a religious level, and the whole Zygi, the whole environment of a Seventh Day Adventist community is a group that's mainly vegetarian.

Dr. Saladino
And if you're eating meat in that community, you are definitely an outlier and definitely sort of bucking other health norms. Likely they found that the people who ate more red meat in that study were also much more likely to be obese. This is the problem with epidemiology studies. Was it the obesity that led to more cancer or was it the red meat? Well, the study can't say, which is why you have to do interventional research. And as I said, there are many studies that have been done with red meat that are interventional.

Dr. Saladino
Take a group of people, give them more red meat, see what happens. They don't show any problems, no inflammation. It's very hard to study people at an international level for cancer. You'd have to give people more red meat for years and years. The epidemiologist is done for years. But at a molecular level, we can see that giving people more red meat does not. Lead to increases in inflammatory markers, which is what you would expect if it were going to trigger a cancer, it was going to do something bad if it's going to trigger a cancer.

Dr. Saladino
But this is really what the notion that red meat is bad for humans is based on. Badly done epidemiology in which 8 of 14 studies showed no correlation, 5 of 6 not statistically significant. Only 1 of 14 showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And in that study, it was badly confounded by unhealthy user bias. The last thing I'll say here to really drive this point home is if you look at epidemiology, again it's all flawed, none of it's perfect. But you can look at epidemiology from other countries like Asia, and you don't see the same correlation that you do in the West because the narrative is different there.

Dr. Saladino
There's very large epidemiology studies from Asia looking at over 180,000. Another one is 220,000 individuals followed for 5 to 15 years. And where they find the men who ate more red meat had less cardiovascular disease, the women who ate more red meat had less cancer. But they didn't think about that study at the IRC. and no one can explain that the only way then you could say is what? Red meat is good for Asians but bad for Westerners. That makes absolutely no sense. That's silly. It's possible. But that's not even that's really not a hypothesis anyone is going to entertain.

Dr. Saladino
The more plausible explanation is that the narrative is different. In Asia, We know this red meat is associated with athletes. So who eats more red meat? The same people that eat more vegetables in the US, the people that are more likely to exercise, they have more financial resources. The more people, people that are more likely to do things, go see their doctor, less likely to smoke, less likely to be obese because they have more of an investment in their health.

Dr. Saladino
So this is really how we get misled about red meat and cancer, red meat and heart disease, red meat and longevity. It's all the same story over and over. And I go through all of these in the book and debunk these myths one by one and give tons of references. The book has over 650 references. And I show, hey these things you've been told you've been misled. These are based on observational epidemiology. And when I have it, which is most of the time I share interventional studies with argue, which argue completely against it and say, hey, look, this is much more valid.

Dr. Saladino
Very savvy listeners will know that in 2019, another study came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine that was super controversial. A separate group of researchers looked at the IARCs findings in 2018 and said, that's hogwash. You guys excluded all these studies. You didn't weigh them properly. You didn't use any interventional studies. In the Animals of Internal Medicine. Two studies came out in 2019 saying red meat is not bad for humans. We're going to look at this evidence again. Red meat is not bad for humans, but we get this like propaganda in our heads. And now we're so scared. We're fearful as humans.

Dr. Saladino
Nobody wants to die early. Everybody wants to see their grandkids grow up. We don't know what to do. And I think as humans, it's been part of our consciousness for 70 years. And we suddenly are just it's very hard to get it out of our out of our out of our paradigm, out of our perspective and really look at the data. And we have Ancel Keys and originally very bad epidemiology from the 1970s to think that that's a whole separate story.

Allan
Yes, it is. Now, one of the other things I found kind of fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, was that the advice at one time was to tear your kale and let it sit for about 10 minutes. So the toxicity that would happen would be at the highest level. So we would get this hormesis this effect from the kale, and it makes it that much better for us. I can't tell you how many times I tore the kale and let it sit for 10 minutes before I ate it. Can we talk a little bit about plant toxins and why you know, that kind of hormesis might not be what we actually really need.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is a little bit of a complex point, but I'll try and break it down in the simplest terms for me. Hormesis is a word that basically means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger up to a point until it kills you. Hopefully most of your listeners have seen The Princess Bride where Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and they're having this battle with iocane powder and maybe people haven't. But he says, you know, he give he says he gives them two cups of water to put iocane powder in one of these cups. And it's a poison. It's obviously a fictitious poison. And I'm going to, you get to choose, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and saying, you choose which one.

Dr. Saladino
And he puts it in both, right, and they both drink, and so the Sicilian dies and he goes, Oh, how did you you tricked me. He said, Yeah, I tricked you. I put it in both. I've been slowly developing this this the strength to iocane powder over the years. That's how hormones this is supposed to work. But it doesn't quite work like that. You know, a little bit of poison is supposed to make you a little stronger. But it does and it doesn't. So here's the problem. The concept of hormesis, I believe, conflated between what I call in the book environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.

Dr. Saladino
Environmental hormesis, this is a pretty well-established concept. It's the idea that a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of heat stress, like a sauna, cold plunge, ketosis. These are environmental hermetic, so not molecules, they're experiences. I could have also called it experimental hormesis, but these are things that we encounter in our life that our ancestors always encountered fasting, starvation for a short amount of time, leading to ketosis.

Dr. Saladino
These are things that we've always encountered evolutionarily that cause our body of stress going to the gym and lifting weights, going for a walk, going for a jog. These are hormesis. Exercise is a experiential or environmental hermetic. A little bit of that makes you it gets a little bit of a toxin. You know, that if you lift weights too much, you're going to be sore. If you go out in the sun too much, it's going to you're going to feel it. You go in the sauna, you're like, whoa, that was intense, right?

Dr. Saladino
You feel it. It causes a little stress, but what is your body do in response to that stress? It gets stronger. Anyone who's ever exercised to lose weight or lifting weights and seen their muscles grow, will realize the stress makes you stronger. Now, at a certain point, it's going to break you. If you lift too much weight, you're just going to tear the muscle or break a bone. If you run too much, you're going to stress fracture, etc. But there is a concept that a little bit of a poison makes you stronger when it comes to experience or environment.

Dr. Saladino
Now we have applied this concept to plant molecules incorrectly, I believe. And the reason it's incorrect is we've forgotten that molecules come with side effects. If you look at the research on Sulforaphane for instance, which is the glucose scintillate, which becomes an Isothiocyanate, in kale when you when you rip it up, it has been shown to increase glutathione in the human body. But it's also been shown to do many other negative things that we're never told about. It's just like when any of the listeners go to the pharmacy and you get a prescription for a medication. That medication comes with a package insert, in the package insert tells you, hey, this medicine is metoprolol or lisinopril or a statin. And I hope that, I don't prescribe those medications much at all in my practice anymore. And I hope that most of your listeners are healthy enough to have avoided them.

Dr. Saladino
But we all know this. If you go to a pharmacy and get a medication that comes with side effects, antibiotic, whatever, all the molecules that are foreign to human biology have this. They all have it. sulforaphane has it, curcumin has it, resveratrol has it. All of these plant molecules, we've been told are so good for us also have package inserts, but we're never handed them because they're not considered to be pharmaceuticals. But they are.

Dr. Saladino
They are definitely pharmaceuticals. And many plant molecules are used and developed into drugs. Most of the chemotherapy that we use for cancer is from plants, paclitaxel, etc. There's lots of chemotherapy from plants. Well. In the case of chemotherapy, it's pretty clear the chemotherapy might kill some cancer cells, but it's also going to kill your cells and chemotherapy has very clear bad side effects. But it's the same with other plant molecules.

Dr. Saladino
So if the plant molecules have a bad side effect in the case of sulforaphane that Isothiocyanate in the kale you're eating, that one has a side effect of inhibiting the absorption of iodine at the level of your thyroid and causing damage to cellular membranes and oxidizing your DNA, which can also lead to problems and cancers. And people who have eaten too much kale may also get GI effects, you know, gas bloating or other issues. And so it's pretty clear that sulforaphane or other compounds in these vegetables are also harming our gut.

Dr. Saladino
But we're never told about those things. We're only told these are good for you. Eat more of this. Well, it's pretty clear those are plant toxins. We're told they're antioxidants, but they're not. They're pro-oxidants. And they cause our body to increase its own endogenous antioxidants.

Dr. Saladino
But here's the kicker. You don't need any more antioxidants if you are doing the environmental hormesis, if you are doing experiential hormesis, exercise, cold plumbing, sauna, being in the sun at a healthy level, fasting occasionally. There are many good studies that I show in the book that suggest vegetables don't do anything extra for you from an antioxidant perspective. There are many studies in the book that I share in reference that show inclusion of massive amounts of fruits and vegetables don't improve markers of oxidative stress, inflammation or DNA damage.

Dr. Saladino
And what they do do is cause you all these harm on the back end. They cause all this collateral damage because of the side effects. So when you're ripping that kale, you're thinking I'm getting, quote, antioxidants. Well, no. Sulforaphane is a pro-oxidant and it's very clearly a plant defense molecule. It doesn't participate directly in any human biochemistry. Sulforaphane causes free radical production, Sulforaphane causes oxidative stress. You can get it to bump up your glutathione a little bit, which is this endogenous antioxidant.

Dr. Saladino
But you can also bump your glutathione, this molecular policeman in the human body by doing cold plunge, by doing sauna, by doing exercise. And then you won't have any of the side effects from the so forth thing and you'll probably have a lot less gas and your thyroid will be much healthier in the long run. So this is essentially what I'm saying here. There's a real difference between molecular hormesis and environmental hormesis, and we don't need plant molecules to be optimal.

Dr. Saladino
That's been demonstrated over and over and over. And we must not forget the side effects that these molecules have in human physiology. And that, I fear, is where many people are suffering unnecessarily.

Allan
Yeah, I think one of the points I had early on when the Carnivore diet started getting a little bit more popular is just like ketosis. They come forward with an idea. And everybody thinks of the keto diet now as the bacon diet, people that are going to keep the “bacon! bacon!” And yes, you can have bacon, but not just bacon. Something else, please. A lot of people that are in carnivore are doing something very similar, like 30 days, just eating rib-eye steaks or they'll go 30 days just eating bacon. And yeah, they lose weight. They say they feel great because they do get into ketosis, but they're not getting everything they need either. There's a right way and a wrong way to do Carnivore.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah. And I think it goes back to what we spoke about earlier. Just how did our ancestors do it, both out of respect for the animal and just from an environmental sort of caloric perspective. They ate the animal nose to tail. So I'm a really big advocate for this. This is understanding that you cannot just eat steaks and be on a carnivore diet in a healthy way that's going to cause a folate deficiency.

Dr. Saladino
So I talked about all these micronutrients earlier in the podcast and they are found throughout the animal. A cow is not just animal meat all through the cow. A cow has a liver and a stomach and a spleen and heart and a kidney and intestines. And you know what most of us will think of it is gross. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in developing some adjuncts to help people get more organs in their diet, which I'll talk about in a moment, but it's something that our ancestors have always done. And so anyone that's listening to this, that's from an ethnic background, your family probably ate heart or liver or kidney or spleen.

Dr. Saladino
And, you know, maybe as a kid, you were like, I don't know about that, but it's relished by indigenous people. Liver is sacred. It's not even touched by human hands in a lot of cultures. It's the first thing you eat. If we look at the way animals who are carnivorous eat other animals, they always go for the viscera first, they'll eat the liver. And it sounds morbid, but it's like, hey, look, we're just trying to appreciate the sacrifice that animal has made for us and get all the nutrients we can. I've seen video of ORCA's eating sharks and they just eat the liver. They don't eat the animal meat. They just eat the liver out of the shark. All these animals realize the liver and these other organs are super beneficial for nutrients.

Dr. Saladino
The liver is a very rich place for folate, choline, vitamin K2, Riboflavin. If listeners are unsure of this, I'll ask them the question, where do you get your riboflavin? I think riboflavin is the most commonly deficient nutrient in human populations in 2020 that no one knows about. Vitamin B2, you really can't get it from plants and you can't get it from muscle meat in enough quantity, but you can get it from the heart or liver.

Dr. Saladino
So and I realize this is a very hard thing. This is probably the biggest piece for people that's challenging is how do I eat organ meats. So it's so exciting to be able to I wanted to build a company to help people do this. This company is it launched at the beginning of August and this podcast is coming out later in August. It's called Heart and Soil, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. What we do is we take organs from grass-fed grass, finished animals in New Zealand, and we desiccate them with low temperature, dehydrate them and we encapsulate them into a pill. We're basically making organ meat pills to help people get the organs. If they don't want to eat the liver.

Dr. Saladino
I think the best thing is to eat real liver or not even. It's not that the pills aren't real liver. Just the best thing is to eat fresh liver or fresh heart. But if you can't do that, that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about being able to do this for people in this business at Heart and Soil is to get them desiccated organ pills. But there's a real option for people now because you can take them in a pill that's been low temperature hydrated to get the organs.

Dr. Saladino
But if you're not eating the organs, whether you're eating plants or not, you're missing out on nutrients. It's not just for carnivores. They're for everyone. It's for you and your grandma and your kids. My sister has a two and a half-year-old and an eight-month-old, and both of them get these organ meat pills. She just opens them up and sprinkles them on the food, mixes it with hamburger. Neither of them can swallow a pill, but she can open the pill and sprinkle the powder onto something and put it mixed in with ground beef for Luke, my nephew and Michaela.

Dr. Saladino
And it works great. And they get these nutrients. But that's what kids need and that's what adults need. Even if you're eating plants, you still are not getting enough choline. You're still not getting enough folate. You're still not getting enough riboflavin. What about zinc? What about copper? What about selenium? What about manganese or about boron? What about K2? There's so rich in the organ meats.

Dr. Saladino
The other piece of this equation is methionine and Glycine. And this comes in with collagen. Collagen is thankfully specifically kind of quote, an organ meat that has become much more in vogue recently. People are all about bone broth. They understand the incredible benefits of this for skin, hair and nails health. But a lot of people in the Carnivore world don't even do bone broth. They just eat steak and you need to get the connective tissue.

Dr. Saladino
So one of my favorite things to do every day is to make bone broth. I don't make it every day, but I eat it every day and I make it just by putting bones and tendons in an instant pot and then drinking that it gets collagenous and kind of jelly in the fridge. And then you're getting tendons. Well, the tendons are rich in glycine, it's an amino acid that complements with thymine and which is rich in muscle meat.

Dr. Saladino
And so together these helper biochemistry run in the best way to get too much thiamine without enough glycine. And there's a real problem in human biochemistry. So but again, it all works when you eat like your ancestors. If you eat the animal nose to tail, there are no nutrient deficiencies that will develop in humans. So I will repeat that, because that's a very important statement. Eating animals nose to tail provides humans with all of the nutrients they need to thrive. End of story, full stop, period. That's it. That's why it was so easy for our ancestors if they had to go hunt and gather a blueberry, a little bit of this route, a little bit of that plant to get all their nutrients. It's really hard. I don't know if anyone's done a plant based diet, but I was vegan for seven months. I was Rovi for seven months. About fifteen years ago. I had to work so hard to get all the nutrients I needed.

Dr. Saladino
Where do you get your zinc, pumpkin seeds? Well, I don't really like pumpkin seeds. Like that's the only source of zinc I could find in any appreciable quantity on a plant-based diet. So to get adequacy on a plant-based diet, you have to eat 37 different foods that are never all in season at the same time that never would have grown together at one time. You can't get all the nutrition you need from eating plants, period.

Dr. Saladino
All the nutrients I mentioned earlier and even just to get basic nutrients, you have to eat twenty-five different plants that never occurred together on the face of the earth. Evolutionarily it's really hard. You want to get all the nutrients you need eating animals, eat a steak, add some liver, you're pretty much done. Add some bone broth steak and liver. Now you can add other things for variety, but you'll get everything you need. The first thing people think about is vitamin C, and I address this in the book.

Dr. Saladino
There's plenty of vitamin C in animal foods that are fresh. We know that animal meat has vitamin C, animal organs have more vitamin C than the muscle meat. No one has gotten scurvy eating animal foods when they're fresh. This doesn't happen. There are thousands of people doing this. I don't believe vitamin C, I don't have scurvy, but vitamin C level is just fine. You can get vitamin C in whole foods. That's a whole other rabbit hole.

Dr. Saladino
But even beyond vitamin C, you don't need fiber. I address that myth in the book. You can definitely poop without fiber and multiple poop, even better without fiber. So again, this leads us to so many of these rabbit hole, whichever one you want, but eating from the nose to tail is so critical, and that's why I think the supplements can be helpful at heart and soil or just eating the organ meats that you get from a good farm is critical along with bone broth. And the only other thing I'll say here is that a carnivore diet also doesn't have to be ketotic. I think that low carbohydrate states would have happened. I think humans would have been in ketosis absolutely frequently, but I don't think we were in ketosis all the time.

Dr. Saladino
And so if ketosis is a stumbling block for you know, that in the book I talk about tier one through five carnivore diets and have a stepping stone. And in the Tier 1 diet, I outline which plant foods are the most toxic and which plant foods are the least toxic. And I think the least toxic plant foods are the fruit. They're the part of the plant that the plant wants you to eat. So things like squash or avocado or olives or berries or even apples and oranges, I think these are reasonable for most people.

Dr. Saladino
And you can get carbohydrates in your diet on a, quote, animal-based diet on a Carnivore ish type diet. So don't fear this. If ketosis is scary, if you want to do a ketogenic diet, you absolutely can. I found for myself and most people, cycling in carbohydrates in the form of low toxicity fruit works best. It's probably what our ancestors would have done and things like Honey, so raw, organic honey is a great adjunct that people think about all the sugar.

Dr. Saladino
I have a podcast. It's called Fundamental Health. I've addressed all this on the podcast. We talk about it in the book. You don't want to overeat fructose and fruit, but reasonable amounts look pretty darn safe for humans. You know, if you're eating less than seventy-five grams of fructose a day, which is a lot of fruit, your liver can handle it just fine. You'll be fine. That's even a very large amount. Most people don't get more than twenty or thirty grams of fructose a day.

Dr. Saladino
And so reasonable intakes of fruit and honey, totally safe for humans, not type of naturally occurring sugar is not bad for us. You don't have to fear it in any way, shape or form.

Allan
Dr. Saladino, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dr. Saladino
So I think that you need to understand food. Food is a big lever, right? So that's what we've been talking about this whole time. Understand what foods nourish your body and understand what foods harm your body or are causing problems for your body.

Dr. Saladino
So that's what the book is about. And again, it's not it's not about convincing the world to stop eating plants. It's about helping people understand that animal foods, red meat critically vital for humans, very nutritious, not harmful, wrongly vilified, plant foods exist on a toxicity spectrum, can be harmful for a lot of people. Eat the least toxic ones if you need variety, color, flavor. But understanding which foods help your body thrive will be the first step.

Dr. Saladino
That's critical. And then at the end of the book, I also talk about how to live like our ancestors. And we've hinted at this previously with our discussions of environmental hormesis. It's also sunlight, community, cold plunging, sauna, exercise outside, occasional fasting. These are all normal things. I think if you do those things. And then the third piece for me would be doing something that you care about finding meaning in your own life.

Dr. Saladino
And I'm so grateful to be able to do this work. It's it's been a challenging road for me because so many of these ideas are so controversial. But I really believe that this knowledge needs to be out there. There are a lot of people who are being misled and their lives are suffering because of it. And so doing something that you find meaningful in your life is probably the third critical piece.

Allan
Cool. Well, thank you. And if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Carnivore Code and that supplement company you were talking about, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Saladino
So the book is TheCarnivorecodebook.com. That's the website. You can check it out. It's out now. It's, I imagine I really think it's going to sell really well and hopefully we're going to affect a lot of lives positively. The website for my company, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. So heartandsoilsupplements.com, you can find all those organ pills if you want to include more liver or bone marrow or heart or spleen, any of the organs in your diet. We've got them on there for you. And my website is Carnivoremd.com.

Allan
So you could go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/448 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Saladino, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.

Dr. Saladino
It's my pleasure.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Carnivore cooking with Craig Emmerich

Less...

00:03:07.080] – Allan
John, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:10.780] – John
Thanks, Allan, great to be with you

[00:03:12.700] – Allan
Now I got your book, Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power, and, you know, I've read a lot of books and I've read a lot of books about the brain and about neuroplasticity. This was probably the most practical book on neuroplasticity that I've ever read.

It was not just the theory of this is how the brain should work or should fire, this was set Innercise, exercise for your brain that actually makes this stuff happen. And, you know, you said in the book, don't do all of them at one sitting because it's too much. But I found myself as I was reading, trying to do them.

Yeah, it was exhausting when you got to the beach one, it's funny because I um, that was just a meditation I started doing for myself to fall asleep if I woke up and I was feeling anxiety and I would just imagine myself walking down a beach. And so it was just it was interesting. You started going through that. And I was watching it and reading and it was like, oh, goodness, I had to go take a nap.

I was like, so relaxing and so awesome. So, again, I really enjoyed the book. And then I went on to even go do the Brain-a-Thon, which again, was awesome. So thank you for that. I appreciate sharing that. I really appreciate you being here today.

[00:04:41.960] – John
Thank you. The book Innercise was all around when I came to the realization that I have and everybody who is with us today has a trillion dollar brain, but we weren't given the user's manual for it. And, you know, everybody knows that I could exercise to build up my cardiovascular system and to build up my lung capacity and to strengthen my muscles if I want to exercise. But what about our brain, the greatest neuro muscle and bio-computer in the whole universe?

[00:05:18.320] – John
What are some techniques that we can use to get our brain to work better and to get us to focus more, to create empowering habits, to let go of stress or anxiety or uncertainty or fears that hold us back? What about that? And for many, many years, I've been practicing the mental and emotional techniques that I laid out in Innercise and actually give people the audio, enjoyed it and have a great dialogue about it.

[00:05:49.160] – Allan
Perfect. So in the book and I think this is where it clicked for me to understand this, is that I work with a lot of clients and they're trying to lose weight and they're trying to get fit and trying to get healthy. And for some of them, it just seems so hard.

[00:06:08.340] – Allan
And, you know, they struggle and they struggle and I'm like, you know, I know you want this. I know you're committed to this, but it's not happening for you and we've got to break that down. And you use this term cohesion and dissident's kind of talk about one of those kind of things that holds us back that we're not even necessarily aware is happening. Can you talk about that?

[00:06:30.130] – John
Sure. So, listen, we all develop our habits, right? We have habits the way we think on a regular basis. We have a habitual way of feeling. We have behaviors that lead to our results. So when we understand our brain just a little bit better and we understand that every one of us is already one hundred percent disciplined to our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings and our behaviors. And so changing is hard if you don't have the right process. So whenever we're looking to change our eating patterns, when ever we're looking to change how much activity we get in the day, whenever we want to change, how much sleep we get when ever we're looking to change our own self image of ourselves, which is something we've had for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, that requires understanding.

[00:07:32.140] – John
How do I make change easier not easy, but easier. And this is where most people have an issue. It's not in the intention or the goal that's the problem. It's what happens after that that's the problem. And so when we understand that our brains all work identically, every human beings brain works identically and our brain works on a couple of principles. So let me give you a couple of these principles.

[00:08:04.570] – John
Number one is any time that our brain experiences a change, a change in our behavior, a change in our diet, a change in our exercise, our brain goes, hey, what's going on? You're using energy and our brain wants to conserve energy. So anything that is going to use up more energy the way I think or behave, our brain is going to go what's going on here? And it's going to resist. So that resistance is our brain wanting to move back into its comfort zone. Right. Just like a thermostat is meant to keep temperature in a room at a certain temperature that's set in the thermostat. Our brain wants to have you keep the same settings. You're awake, you're eating your exercise energy expenditure. That's one.

[00:08:55.320]
Number two, whenever our brain feels that there might be real or potential pain or discomfort, it says, hold on a second here. I don't want to feel any pain or discomfort. Well, guess what? Changing our diet is considered uncomfortable to our brain, starting to exercise, even though it feels good to do it, it also means we might have muscle soreness. It also means that we might have aches and pains, etc.

[00:09:23.170] – John
So our brain is trying to resist anything that's going to cause us pain or discomfort or having less than what we had before. So understanding that these are natural mechanisms of our brain, we can start saying, OK, are there some techniques that I can use to make this easier versus easy? And the answer is yeah, there's a lot of techniques that we can use to re-commit to reframe things. So first thing that I share with people who want to lose weight, first and foremost, stop thinking of what you need to do is losing weight.

[00:10:05.680] – John
As soon as our brain thinks of losing anything, it resists it. Why? We're always taught to find what we lose, find what you forget. So what if we instead said, OK, what do I really, really want? Is that weight that I want to lose or is it fat that I want to release? Right. So if we think about body weight as extra calories, extra energy, what we want to do is we want to release that energy and use it.

[00:10:34.390] – John
But that's really not what we're looking to do. You know, the reason we want to, I'm going to use a term that I don't like to use is lose weight, is not for the losing the weight. It's for how we're going to feel about ourselves. It's for the love where we're seeking. It's for the self belief about ourself that we want is for the lifestyle that we want its for the energy that we want. And so what if we instead of focused on losing weight, we focused on what's the lifestyle that I want?

[00:11:09.830] – John
What are the benefits of that lifestyle, instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. The very fact that, you know, the word diet, the first three letters are die? OK, dieting is hard, but figuring out a meal plan, a way to eat that sustains me that I could that I could keep doing past one week or three weeks or six weeks, that's a totally different focus.

Instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:11:52.970] – John
Now, most people try to lose weight and they say, OK, I'm going to lose 10 pounds with 20 pounds or thirty pounds or fifty pounds or whatever the amount is, and they alter their behavior until the point of reaching their goal, and then they revert back to all of the old behaviors that got them to gain all the weight. So instead of having their brain focusing on the behaviors and the way to be for losing weight, why not say, nope, let me make a lifestyle change that will empower me or make me feel better for the rest of my life instead of for a week or two or three.

[00:12:30.530] – Allan
And so what you're basically doing is you're kind of getting cohesion between what the body wants, which is to be what the subconscious brain wants it wants to be able, wants to have adequate energy. It doesn't want the knees to hurt when you're walking up and down the stairs and losing weight as it will, we would think about that logically. The words we use is doing that. But you're using the term release, which is a very different thing than the losing.

[00:12:56.300] – John
And the other thing that we need to understand is water is weight. Muscle is weight, we don't want to lose weight, you could lose two, three, four, five, six pounds of water and weight in a week. But you're going to get it all back. You can have one dish of pasta or rice and it retains two and a half times its own weight and water and gain it all back. So what we want to do is we want to activate fat release so that we use our fat stores as energy. And that's really what we want to do.

[00:13:33.130] – John
We want to create an environment within us so that the food that we're eating gives us energy and what it is that we're doing for basic survival needs but then through hopefully a little bit of exercise, we are using fat as fuel for the energy requirements that we need. And we create initially a slight imbalance between how much we're consuming and how much we're using.

[00:13:58.340] – John
And in doing it slowly instead of fast and really focusing on fat release and sustainable weight release or weight loss, if that's what we want to call it. Now, we're looking at a totally different game and we're not looking at going on a diet which is is really detrimental to a lot of people's heads and hearts because they suffer these, or they gain these high wins and then they suffer these lows by gaining all the weight, which happens for ninety seven percent of people.

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[00:16:03.350] – Allan
Now, when you're talking about exercises, I mean Innercise excuse me, know, one of the things that you brought up there was there's lots and lots of different ways to Innercise, much like with exercise. So I could I could decide to go ahead and do an aerobics class where I can go lift weights or I can go for a run or I could go skiing or I could go hiking.

[00:16:22.220] – Allan
There's so many different ways that I could exercise to affect different things balance, mobility, strength, endurance. It's much the same way with innercise. But there's about seven key areas that you identified in the book that we can innercise to benefit ourselves. Can you talk about those?

[00:16:38.670] – John
Sure. So let's just take the, you know, the self-image side of our brain. Everybody knows that they have a self-image of themselves. And so if I was to ask you to draw yourself out or to write down what you feel you look like, would that either visual or written description match the way you want to look? And for most people who are maybe overweight, there's a mismatch. What if I said that if you, for example, went to some magazines where they had people with your type of physique that you want to have, those realistic. What if you cut out a picture of a physique that you wanted and you took your own face and you put it on top of that picture.

[00:17:35.730] – John
And what if every day you looked at that picture and you started to see yourself moving towards that over a period of time, whether it's one month, three months, six months or one year? You said this is the body that I'm going to have. This is the body that's giving me energy. This is the body and physique that's going to make me feel the way I want to, look the way I want to. What if you start to just visualize that every day?

[00:18:01.650] – John
What if you started to emotionalize what would it feel like to actually be in that body? What would happen is you would start to develop a new self-image that would override your old self image. It's almost like recoding software on a computer. Your self image is nothing more than cells in your brain of recognition of what you have seen in the mirror ten thousand times and what you have thought about a hundred thousand times.

[00:18:34.000] – John
And so when we start to use, for example, visualization, visualization is a simulation. When we start to simulate in our mind's eye on a new body, the new energy, how we will feel, the complements we might get, the things we might start seeing to ourselves about ourselves, we start to rewrite our own hidden self image and overlay a new self image around that.

[00:18:59.830] – John
And when we start using innercises, whether it's verbal analyses or emotional innercises or mental innercises to activate cells in our brain and then reinforce those cells and patterns in our brain, we know that whatever we do consciously, repetitively over time becomes an unconscious pattern. And so we can use a variety of different innercises to rescript, reshape imprint what it is that we want instead of what is.

[00:19:36.410] – Allan
Yeah, so, you know, the way I kind of look at it and you said something really important that I want to go back to is realistic, you know, don't don't sit there. I can't pull out, you know, you know, say Arnold Schwarzenegger and put my face on his body and say, you know, when he was at his prime and say, that's what I'm going to look like in a year or two, that's not realistic. But if I do find, you know, a body body style, I think that's going to fit me, and I begin to think of myself in those terms that's going to affect my subconscious, which is going to then affect my behavior. And make me start doing the things that are necessary to have that body type.

[00:20:13.650] – John
Absolutely. There's a visual that I like to share with everybody just to show them how this can work. I'm going to ask everybody who's listening right now a question. And the question is this. Can you slowly jog a marathon right now?

[00:20:32.300] – John
And I work out almost every day, and I cannot right now. Like I'm not in shape to jog a marathon 26.2 miles. Now, here's the second question for everybody who's listening, as if we agreed today that a year from now or 18 months from now or even two years from now, we're going to jog slowly and healthy and a healthy way, a marathon, 26.2 miles. And today all we did is we got from a seated position and stood up and then sat back down.

[00:21:07.640] – John
That's all we did today, maybe five times during the day. And then tomorrow we did it five times and the next day we did it five times. And we figured out what would be a really good eating plan for energy. What would be a good little movement plan for flexibility and some balance. Could we maybe in a week, if we were sedentary for the last five years, could we maybe walk in our apartment from the sofa to the kitchen? And the answer is probably yes.

[00:21:35.640] – John
And then once we did that five or 10 times, could we walk outside maybe a tenth of a mile slowly. And then could we walk two tenths of a mile, then can we walk five tenths of a mile, then can we walk one mile, if we did it in a healthy way? The answer for almost every single person is if I started off that slow, yes, I could do it.

[00:21:57.850] – John
Well, let's take it out to three months. Could we get faster, stronger, better in three months and build a foundation? Yes. Well, what about three months later? What if we hired a professional to help us get in better shape? And then we started to slowly once we release the weight, once we felt more comfortable, we started having more energy. Maybe at a certain point we needed to do a slight, very easy job. Could we do it? The answer is, of course we could.

[00:22:29.880] – John
Well, then guess what? If we could do that, could we build up the muscle and the endurance as we got stronger, as we release the weight? Could we possibly in a year or a year and a half or two years slowly jog a marathon? And the answer is yes, and how do we know that we know that because millions and millions and millions of people start off just that way.

[00:22:54.350] – John
So even though we may not see the end outcome right now and even though we don't have the knowledge or the skills or even the resources to do it, could we gain the mental and the emotional and the physical fortitude to be able to do it if we committed to it? And the answer is yes. We have all the knowledge, the skills of how to do it right now.

[00:23:19.460] – Allan
Yeah, you've just described how I trained for a Tough Mudder. I was in no shape to even consider doing a Tough Mudder. I could do a 5K obstacle course, I couldn't do a 13 mile one. And so I was I was watching the videos of the people that were completing it and they were doing it. And I was like, OK, that guy has a grip strength. That's how he's able to do what he's doing, that person stronger.

[00:23:41.990] – Allan
That person isn't carrying as much body fat. And so the visuals I had in my head was a person is doing that. That's not me today but that will be the day that I do that race and I committed by signing up for it. I wrote my check, you know, give my credit card number. I got the ticket for my daughter and I. And so the commitment was there.

[00:24:02.110] – Allan
And what that meant was each day was, OK, I've got to get my grip strength a little stronger. If it's just hanging from a pole, you know, a pull up bar, that's how I'm going to start getting my grip stronger. And then I was doing pull ups and then I was doing, so it's just a progressive thing over time. And it's those little bitty things like if you put a penny in a jar every day and then and then after two weeks, double it and put two pennies and after two weeks double it and put four pennies. After a while, you realize you basically have your retirement taken care of. It's that kind of building that you get out of all of this.

[00:24:35.320] – John
Yeah, and whenever you're looking to, you know, to change from one habit to another, from a destructive to constructive, from disempowering to empowering, there's something that I teach all my students and that is reduce it to the ridiculous. So reduce whatever it is that you need to do or want to do to the ridiculously small. Right, and so one minute a day, two minutes a day, three minutes a day, five minutes a day for 100 straight days builds the habit.

[00:25:09.270] – John
Once we have the habit, we can build the intensity and the duration. And so instead of trying to do everything in the first week or two weeks, why not focus on I'm going to develop empowering, constructive habits that I'm going to stick to instead of something that's not sustainable. And so when we're thinking about our brain. Let's understand how it works and our brain resists big changes, our brain resists anything that takes a lot of time and energy.

[00:25:44.790] – John
And so when we want to develop a habit of this is what I would like and I'd like to sustain it, let's reduce it to the ridiculously small so that I can develop the habit that I can add layers afterwards.

[00:26:03.750] – Allan
Now, one of the things you went into the book, and I think it's it's really important, is that if you don't set a goal the right way, your likelihood of accomplishing that goal goes way, way down. But you talked about a function of something called brain friendly goals. Could you go into that briefly?

[00:26:20.910] – John
Sure. So it actually piggybacks on. What I just said is there's different parts of our brain. If you think of your brain almost like an orchestra or a band, you know, there's different musicians who play different instruments. Well, there's different parts of our brain that does different things and when we can get our brains, different parts to work together in synchronicity and harmony, it works a lot better. So, for example, there's a part of our brain I called the Einstein part of the brain.

[00:26:52.320] – John
That's really good for imagination. What I would like, what it would feel like and be like and how can I achieve it. All right. There's another part of our brain which I call is the Frankenstein part of the brain that is analyzable. What can go wrong here? What if you start and you don't continue? What if you get hurt? What if you embarrass yourself? Or what if you're ashamed or ridiculed or judged because you give it your best and you fail?

[00:27:18.810] – John
So our brain, in order to make brain friendly goals, works like this. What do you want to achieve? Write that down. Why is it really important for you to achieve it? Write that down. How can you get started? OK. Write that down. When are you going to do it? Put it on your calendar. What are the tools or resources or people that you need in order to help you get that all together? That's a brain friendly goal because now I have the what, the why, the how, the who, and the when, and our brain goes, OK, are you committed to doing this or are you interested?

[00:28:02.400] – John
And this is the question of all questions I have, because when somebody says, here's what I want, I always ask them, well, are you committed to that or are you interested? And many people say to me, what's the difference? I tell them, what if your answer is going to cover stories or reasons or excuses, why you can't or why you won't if you're interested, you know, when it's time to do it, you're going to come up with a story, reason or excuse.

[00:28:26.370] – John
But if you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the “I don't feel like it.”

If you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the "I don't feel like it." @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:28:39.540] – Allan
I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be? What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:28:47.220] – John
Well, number one is, what does it mean for you to be well? Right? How are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are you doing? Whose life or whose whose life is impacted other than just yours? And so whenever we think about wellness and well-being, define it for yourself. Define it for yourself. For me. Tell me, how do you define success? For me success is harmony between health, wealth, relationships, career, business, fun experiences, charity, spirituality. For me, it's that harmony. That's success. It doesn't make sense for me to have so much health, but not wealth, so much wealth, but not health. So for me, it's that harmony. So that could feel like my life is in flow.

[00:29:43.520] – Allan
OK, thank you, John. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power and all the wonderful things you're doing over there with your company, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:29:56.420] – John
Thank you. I think they can hop onto Amazon to take a look at my book Innercise or my other book Having It All, which is also New York Times Bestseller (also available on Audible). They can if they want to go deeper into the brain around making more money and to financial success. They can go to brainathon123.com. I'm on Instagram. I'm on my Facebook fan page. I'm on Twitter. And then obviously our websites JohnAssaraf.com or myneurogym.com, which is my company.

[00:30:31.220] – Allan
Yeah, I did the Brain-a-Thon this weekend. I made it about three quarters through and I just a lot it was wonderful. And then I just joined your Exceptional Life Program, so I decided I'm seeing a lot of you lately, but yeah some really cool stuff. Thank you so much for being a part of Forty Plus Fitness.

[00:30:51.660] – John
Thank you my friend. Thank you so much for doing this.

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Less...

[00:02:19.240] – Allan
Tony, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:02:21.860] – Tony
Allan, my pleasure to be here, man.

[00:02:24.590] – Allan
No, actually, it's my pleasure. You've been a big part of my life early on anyway. I had gotten out of out of college, and in college I was a gym rat. I was the guy who was always in the gym every day from 2-3:00. The guy that owned the gym knew I was going to be there.

[00:02:42.210] – Allan
So I actually started spelling him for his lunches each day is like, Allan, just make sure nobody kills anybody while I'm gone. And he would he would go get some lunch. And the only bad day we had was when he got food poisoning for eating bad fish and he didn't come back. I didn't know what to do. But after I got out, I had this supposed to have this great job. You go to college, get a great job.

[00:03:01.120] – Allan
But my income was actually less. And so I was like, OK, I can't afford a gym membership, but I need to stay in shape. I like where I am. I like what I'm doing and I want to stay in shape. And so I happened upon an infomercial for P90X and there you are, smiling and active and energetic and a little bit a little bit intimidating, but in a cool way. In a cool way.

[00:03:29.370] – Tony
I like the way you put that. I like that.

[00:03:31.830] – Allan
Well, you know, you have a certain persona and you bring that out and you talk in one of the videos that I watched about, you know, how when you first started, someone said, just be Tony. And you did. And it clicked. And I think that's the thing about you is that you were just this genuine cool guy that everybody wants to hang out.

[00:03:53.350] – Allan
I want to come work out in your backyard with you because your gym in your backyard are just so cool. Now, I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily be able to keep up with you. And you're nine years older than me. But damn, it looks like you have a fun, fun time. We do.

[00:04:08.220] – Tony
We do. The whole property is a gym, pretty much. You could work out in the bathroom. Dang it. There's so many other places to do it. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's been an amazing ride for me. It's hard to believe I'm 62. I don't know what the heck that's supposed to feel like. It feels kind of better than twenty two or thirty or forty two, you know what I mean. And that's just because I, because I've learned a lot along the way.

[00:04:30.930] – Tony
I mean and I'm always making adjustments along the way. and P90X was sort of one one phase, one stage of my learning process. Prior to that. I was a gym rat too. I was just going to the gym and I was doing cardio and weights and that was it. Sometimes I would do both the same day and sometimes I would alter them. But I had a very sort of limited, myopic view of what fitness was. And I just I was very fortunate.

[00:04:53.190] – Tony
I had a lot of kismet in my life. And I ran into some really interesting people and I put myself in situations where I was uncomfortable and I wasn't very good. I mean, right now I'm in the middle of a handstand challenge with my sister, her and her daughter, my niece and some friends, and only because I can't do them. So, I mean, if I can't do something, then it's interesting, then I will I'll spend months trying to get good at handstands, you know what I mean.

[00:05:15.960] – Tony
So just being curious, man, that's all I've ever been. I know there wasn't really a question there, but know that your comments kind of leave me in my path at this point.

[00:05:25.860] – Allan
So absolutely. And I think we all can actually talk in our lifetimes about how we we have these stages. And so you had your beachbody stage and now you've got these kind of these new cool things happen, your power life supplement brand and your Tony Talks podcast. It's a video podcast that comes out. I saw it on YouTube. At least the first one was out a couple of weeks ago. And, man, it's like I said, you just you just doing so much good for so many people that I'm I'm proud to have you on the show.

[00:05:56.280] – Tony
Oh, wow. Well, thank you, man. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

[00:05:59.970] – Allan
So what are the things that that you shared in one of the interviews I saw, and, you know, there's a lot of them, but I've kind of pulled together because you you have this really cool keys to success concept in your head and applies to fitness. It applies to your business side. It applies to probably everything you do in your life, including your relationship with your wife, Shawna, can you talk about your keys to success and particularly as it relates to fitness?

[00:06:29.280] – Tony
Well, gosh, you know, I mean, I have these paragon events here at my home. We've had four so far. And we invite people from around the world. We had a couple come in from Kuwait City. You know what I mean, most folks are coming in from Canada and other places in the US. And the seminar that I'm doing right now is is really way outside of the box of things that we're in In my book, The Big Picture: 11 Laws That Will Change Your Life. You know variety, consistency, intensity, accountability, different kinds of things.

[00:06:55.350] – Tony
But if you really kind of pull back from sixty five thousand feet and you look down, you know, what is the foundation of who you are? And so this is just my story. But whenever I disseminate my story to different people in interviews or or live events or whatever it is or a paragon, I've been here at my home. You know, I always tell people I was a C- student with a speech impediment who was the most lazy procrastinator you ever met your life.

[00:07:19.380] – Tony
You know what I mean, I just I didn't really see that I had much of a future, you know what I mean? And then I started getting into some in some personal development. And that really changed my life, you know. And then when I moved out to California in 1980, you know, I had worked out in the gym here and there, I took a weightlifting class in college. It kind of helped build my confidence. And miraculously my GPA went up that semester because I was working out.

[00:07:42.360] – Tony
So I didn't understand the exercise, the science behind exercise. In fact you at least norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin and brain derived neurotrophic factor inside the temporal lobe area in the brain, it's teeny it's called the dentate gyrus. So whenever you exercise and breathe heavily, the molecules and the proteins inside of your brain come together. It's like Miracle-Gro for your brain. So everything improves. Sex, drive, memory, cognition, ambition. I mean, it's an amazing process.

[00:08:09.660] – Tony
And a lot of people cheat their way there through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But, you know what I mean I mean, there's always payback. You know, short term solutions, temporary solutions can lead to long term problems. You know what I mean, type two diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks, you know what I mean, Parkinson's disease, all these different things. You know what I mean. So so I kept the rock and roll and the sex, but I got rid of the drugs in the alcohol and the poor eating habits and the lack of movement.

[00:08:39.620] – Tony
So, you know what I mean, there are there are three things that are really under your control. And a lot of things aren't traffic, whether other people, work, you know what I mean? The stress is one of these kind of amorphous energies that are sort of hard to put your fingers on. So if you do these three things and this is I'm giving you the long term answer here, because we have time.

[00:09:03.920] – Tony
Its fitness, food and mindfulness. I used to say it was fitness and food, but the mindfulness thing is really become an important thing for me. And I got really sick back in twenty seventeen. I ended up with Ramsey Hunt syndrome, which was basically shingles in your ear, which means shingles in your brain, which means shingles in your brain or frying nerves in your brain, which really affects everything.

[00:09:25.460] – Tony
Smell, taste, balance, creating tons of inflammation, tons of fatigue, constantly vomiting, being noxious all the time. Right. So the mindfulness practice kind of came into play there for me, it was really, really important. I mean, I you know, I meditated once in a while and I would play with my dogs and I would take a nap. I mean, whatever forms of mindfulness you want to call those types of things.

[00:09:46.400] – Tony
But for me, it was full-blown meditation. That's the only thing. All the tinctures and doctors and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put me back together again, you know what I mean?

[00:09:55.020] – Tony
So all I had was my breath. I can't work out. I can't drive, I can't eat. I got to take some deep breaths because most of us all use the top part of our lungs, especially now with covid, you know what I mean. Like that that virus lives at the bottom. So I may not do a cardio and plyo three times a week just to flush that out, make them strong in case I get this thing I'm ready to rock, you know.

[00:10:16.430] – Tony
So when I was a struggling kid, a young kid who was really not doing very well, not very happy financially, in big trouble, in debt, no relationship, really. You know whenever I would exercise, I was just more productive. I mean, I read John Rateys book years later, Spark the effects of physical activity on the brain.

[00:10:36.200] – Tony
And and I was oh, this is why when I'm really consistent with my fitness, when I work out five, six, seven days a week because five is the minimum, like, you know what I mean, you go to work five days a week, you go to sleep every night, you eat every day. We do a lot of these things so that we can survive on planet Earth. But I wanted to thrive. I didn't like where I was.

[00:10:57.690] – Tony
So when I exercised often, I was releasing all these chemicals in my head and I was just a better man. I was about a human being. I was more productive. I was happier. I was getting stuff done. I was checking boxes, you know what I mean. And then later the food thing came into play, you know what I mean. I was just I love double cheese, chimichangas and bacon cheeseburgers with Dr. Pepper. I mean, come on, it's yummy.

[00:11:17.780] – Tony
But it didn't serve me, man, you know what I mean. So and I was Keto and paleo and vegan and blah blah. But now I'm all those things, you know what I mean, I don't I don't limit myself from anything. I just eat really healthy versions of all these different types of food philosophies, which is really what my book is going to be about, probably come out in 2021, you know what I mean and and taking all the pressure off.

[00:11:37.890] – Tony
Because so often when we're trying to figure out the food element, there's always some form of restriction. Right. You can do this, but you can't do that. And if you do that, it's going to lead you down that bad path again. Where you are going to be right back where you were. And so I just thought, you know, and this is this is kind of an anomaly, really.

[00:11:56.730] – Tony
I mean, I eat keto and vegan and paleo and vegetarian and Mediterranean, Vietnamese and Chinese and French. You know what I mean, like, wow, the world is my oyster. I just eat versions that my great, great great grandparents probably ate. And it wasn't Dr. Pepper or Red Bull and Doritos in a Twinkie.

[00:12:17.120] – Tony
I mean, like, you have to get you have to eliminate certain types of foods and you have to figure out how to make all these other foods taste good enough that you want to eat them all the time. Hello. Like, what's so hard about that? Like, people are still scratching their head, trying to figure it out. So I exercise five to seven days a week. I really healthy. I have cheap snacks because snacks are calorically smaller.

[00:12:37.490] – Tony
I mean, like there's these little chocolate chip cookies that are kind of gluten free. They're chocolate chip and screw it, I'm going to eat them. But once in a while it satisfies and it quills my my cravings. And then I'm rockin. And then I meditate in the car. I meditate when I first thing I get up in the morning, I meditate before I go to bed and I'm talking five minutes.

[00:12:55.520] – Tony
I'm talking sometimes two minutes. I'm not sitting there in Lotus in a dark room with a candle meditating for 90 minutes. I don't have the time or patience for that, but I have to like if I know if I'm in distress (taking a breathe) All I need is about ten of those men, and I'm going to go and yoga and Pilates and other types of mindful fitness. There you go, man. You got the whole cabana.

[00:13:28.570] – Allan
That's a lot to wrap. But no, really, there's a lot in there. And one of the things I wanted to I wanted to really dive in with you on is, you know, in your training, because even even when I was doing P90X wasn't the same workout. Every week, every day there were different workouts or different things. And they were all the right thing to do at the right time. And I was looking as you went through, you have a ninja course in your backyard, you have a hatchet throwing. And if you miss, you do push ups.

[00:13:59.740] – Tony
Doesn't everybody Allan?

[00:14:01.510] – Allan
And you have a balance what they call the balance line. The taut line. And so it's like you you know, you train for life, you train a lot of different variety. Why do you why do you put so much variety into your training?

[00:14:20.800] – Tony
Well, you know, I mean, if you look at the original P90X, I had about a year of research for that program and prior to that we did something called power 90. And power 90 was kind of fitness one to one as far as far as I was concerned at that stage of my my career. I mean, I've been training Tom Petty and Billy Idol and Annie Lennox from Eurythmics and Sean Connery.

[00:14:45.320] – Tony
Every time I do Sean Connery, I'm going to do that. But I was training The Boss, Bruce Springsteen and different kinds of people. And so, you know, you've got these really. These icons in fitness and acting, Allison Janney and Bryce Dallas Howard and I mean, the list was pretty long for a long, long time.

[00:15:03.500] – Tony
And so, you know, there's a lot that was a lot of pressure for me to make sure that they got good results in a relatively short period of time. And so it was up to me to kind of dive into different types of area to prevent boredom, injuries and plateaus or lack of results over time. And so, you know, when my first client was Tom Petty and Tom was not an athletic guy at all. I mean, the first day I met him, he was smoking a cigarette and put that down.

[00:15:31.130] – Tony
Hey, Tony, I'm not really a fitness guy. You know, I'm I'm a rocker. So I just I got to increase my stamina. Nobody likes a fat rocker. I mean, so it's like, OK, I got four months, man. I got him on the bench pass. I had him hitting the heavy bag. We were on the stationary bike and we started from scratch. And so I knew even back then that I had to give Tom as many different things to kind of keep him entertained.

[00:15:57.470] – Tony
And I noticed where his weaknesses were. And almost all of his stuff was weaknesses early on. And but it was that variety, right? It was that variety. It was the heavy bag. It was it was the it was the core work. It was the cardio work. It was the resistance work. It was all that kind of stuff. And so I was laying the foundation of what eventually would be power 90 and then would be P90X which was, you know, the coup de gras of fitness at that time. And so we had long debates about how much variety there should be. Do you really need? Martial arts? Do you really need yoga? Do you really need classes? Do you really need more specific stuff? Like you're working on balance, too, you know?

[00:16:32.570] – Tony
I mean, is it necessary? Let's just get these people looking good. And for me, it wasn't about looking good. It was about health and wellness. It was always about how I mean, when I was younger and when most people are young, you know, I mean, they want to they want a six pack and they want big arms and they want all these different things. I understand that. But that's not a very good objective. I mean, if your purpose is locked into the quality of your life, which affects the quality of other people's lives, that's a bigger picture kind of look at me.

[00:17:00.260] – Tony
If it's just so you could walk down the beach so girls could talk about your six pack. Well, you better form a personality while you're at it because you're six pack is only going to to take you so far. Like what's your sense of humor? Like, what kind of job do you have? What kind of person are you in the world? Because your arms and your six pack and your booty, that's an ephemeral thing. That's not it to me. It's not important.

[00:17:19.520] – Allan
Well, it gets you into the party but to stay you're going to have to do a lot more.

[00:17:24.880] – Tony
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so still to this day, I mean, why don't I have a ninja course, and a slack line. Because I'm always learning. I'm always growing. I like working on my my weaknesses. And that's what P90X was. I mean if you look at the way I train now, I spend as much or more time on speed, balance and flexibility as I do cardio and resistance. Right. Because the world still is about cardio and resistance, like, oh, fine, that's better than sit on the couch and smoking pot, you know, I'm saying but you might want to try to delve into some other area.

[00:17:55.590] – Tony
That's why I go to a track man at 62 and I and I do hundreds and two hundreds and four hundreds. Right. Because I'm teaching my body to move quickly. That's why there's martial arts in all my stuff. Right. Because old folks, old fit folks, people who exercise to go to the gym often. Right. They reached sideways to grab the shampoo on the shelf and they're jacked up for a month because the range of motion sucks.

[00:18:18.650] – Tony
Or, you know, you've got to hustle down the down the terminal to catch the catch your airplane and you blowout the hamstring because you haven't run fast since softball in ninth grade. I mean, so these are these are other really important elements. And and so that's that's why I train that way that I mean, it keeps me young. I mean I'm sixty two things that I can think of.

[00:18:39.040] – Tony
I mean, I have a routine in the backyard. We go up a pegboard about 12 feet off the ground from top to bottom. Then we grab this being that basically supports my patio up to the top of 17 feet off the ground where if you fall, you're going to break your leg and then we ring a bell up there, which means you have to hold on to the beam with one hand, ring a bell, come down the rope, go back up the rope, ring the bell, go down the beam across the pegboard and then do maximum pull ups in my 20s, 30s, 40s. Couldn't do that. No, no way. I would have been scared to death to climb up this beam.

[00:19:10.750] – Tony
And it's about always challenging yourself. Does it mean that I mean, I heli ski. I mean, I've been heli skiing a couple of dozen times, you know what I mean, like pull up land on the top of a mountain with guides in front of me and behind me, just skiing with snow going over my shoulders. I could I would have been scared to death to do that as a kid, you know what I mean? So, I mean, life is short. It's such a short, ridiculous ride. The fact that I just turned 62, I'm going to turn 72 and I'm going to be 82.

[00:19:38.840] – Tony
And so this is the part of my life where I can enjoy it. Like I finally have enough bread in the bank that I can go and do things. Like when I was young I was poor. I mean like I had like really work I had to couch surf friends places when I a ski hill, you know what I mean. And you know, and I was getting by eating Cheerios and yogurt three meals you know, those were those are fun days and days of exploration. But you know, it's too bad a lot of people finally get to a point in their life because most people are retiring about now, by sixty five and they're not physically fit and strong enough and flexible enough to to go and do things.

[00:20:18.190]
So, you know, so they fish or they or they play shuffleboard, sorry man.

[00:20:23.710] – Allan
Or they crochet.

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[00:22:10.360] – Allan
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This episode of 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Let's Get Checked. Use code Allan20 and get 20% Off! [00:22:36.140] – Allan
So, yeah, I mean, I get it. It's easy to get locked into things you're good at. I'm I'm pretty decent when it comes to strength and for endurance, if I'm slow, I can go. When it comes to just doing sprints and I hate them like that. Hundred yards or two hundred yards or four hundred yards. That would be the worst day of my life. But I see value in it and understand that it needs to be the worst day of my life because that's the weak spot and that's where I'm actually changing.

[00:23:04.790] – Tony
There's so many lessons there, though. I think if you warm up properly, you got a good coach. You know me. Understand that you're not going to be. You know, Usain Bolt or anything, or just go out there and you're just learning the technique and driving the knees and leaning forward and doing all the thing and breathing properly, this, you know, I mean, it's know I'm not saying everybody needs to do all the crazy stuff that I'm doing, but you need to do something.

[00:23:30.040] – Tony
You need to if you really want to be. Because to me, it's about joy and happiness. It's joy and happiness. Right. And when you know, you're releasing all these chemicals and you're taking care of yourself and you're leaning up and you feel you're just you just lighter on your feet, you know what I mean? You just feel like, oh, wow. And I get thousands and I'm talking thousands of stories from people who say who I was as a human being, above and beyond the physical and who I am now, mentally and emotionally and spiritually is day and night purely because I ate right. And I moved my butt and I got quiet once in a while. I mean, how powerful is that?

[00:24:04.560] – Tony
And you control those things like you you can pick what time to do it. I mean, I get at work and I got kids. Fine. I got ten minute workouts, man. You know what? If you can make as many excuses as you want, but the fact of the matter is, you just don't care. You're not prioritizing. And so you can continue to survive, yea surviving, taking care of me, paying my bills, going to work, watching the game, having some beers and then maybe you'll live to seventy five, maybe, maybe you want or you want to thrive and you just you just learn what you need to do to do it and and then it's a whole different ballgame.

[00:24:36.310] – Allan
Yeah. Now you went through shingles and that's kind of one of the topics my mother suffered from shingles about two and a half years ago or so. And so I started doing some research on it, thinking, OK, is this something I you know, I need to go ahead and get the vaccine or do something with. And I opted not to do the vaccine at the time. But now reading it, hearing your story with Ramsey Hunt, I guess there is the new light shined on it by me.

[00:25:04.510] – Allan
So I'd like to understand your experience and your recovery as you went through that, because you went into it extremely healthy and then lost twenty five pounds. And, you know, but it's still recovery for you was a chore. It was a task. And so what did you do to recover? What are your what are your thoughts on someone that just hasn't had it yet. I'm nine years younger than you are at this point. What would what would your advice be on just getting fit, getting happy, getting healthy, eating right foods? What would what should we do as a protocol to make sure that we're we're staying healthy and not falling prey to things like this?

[00:25:42.400] – Tony
Well, yeah, it's a great question. Man it just kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, if you've had chicken pox, it's in there. It's sitting there waiting for you to get too stressed out in the wrong moment, the wrong time to rear its ugly head and make your life a living hell. Now, it really depends on where you get a lot of people get it across their shoulder or on their neck or their mid back or top of their butt.

[00:26:04.120] – Tony
There's all kinds of crazy places that'll get it. It just it lives at the end of these nerves. And at that time, I was going through some contractual stuff with Beachbody and it wasn't going very well. And it's one of the reasons why I'm not with the organization anymore. I still have a great relationship with them. And I mean, we're just they were moving in one direction. I was moving in another and it was freaking me out. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you when you're with the same company for 20 years. Yeah. You just assume that, you know, hey, I got twenty more in me, you know what I mean? So, you know, whatever.

[00:26:31.620] – Allan
The same guys that bought the P90X are going to buy your P100X.

[00:26:36.610] – Tony
Yeah yeah yeah. I mean everyone's like, where's P90X4. I can't make that one sadly because I'm not with them anymore. So that was, that was really weighing on me. That was sort of the main thing, it was really weighing on me because you know, you're riding this amazing wave for so long and then and then you go, OK, well then I would assume that you guys, based on my track record, would continue to want to do X, Y and Z, and they didn't want to do X, Y and Z.

[00:27:01.840] – Tony
And I was like, wow, really? OK, well, and then, you know, then, you know, that that was coming to a close. And at that same time there was that shooting in Vegas. And I had friends that were there and a good friend of mine was just sitting there listening to the concert. And the gentleman right next to her, she was just sitting and they were just talking and he catches a bullet right here in front of her and dies, you know? I mean, I had other friends that were there as well.

[00:27:29.530] – Tony
I don't know, man. That really was heavy duty for me. I just I just I thought, where do we live? Like, what is going on in this country? And then and then Tom Petty died the next day, and I've been training Tom for 30 years and he was a friend. I mean, he was just a client initially. But I went on tour with Tom and it was I knew his ex-wife. I knew his new wife. I knew his mother in law. I knew his kids, you know what I mean, you know, and my history with him was was just phenomenal.

[00:27:59.290] – Tony
I mean, he was just an amazing, talented, super cool. And he was gone and for all the wrong reasons, you know, I'm like, golly. And then I always I kind of blame myself a little bit for that because his manager called me the summer before and said, you've got to work with Tom. He really needs it badly, but I wasn't getting all the intel. I didn't realize that he was struggling with some things that I wasn't aware he was struggling with. And if I had known that, you know, maybe I could have had, you know, because he he trusted me more than almost anybody.

[00:28:28.800] – Tony
His wife he trust his management he trust. But he really was like, OK, what am I going to do? What are we got to eat? And I wasn't getting all the intel. So when contract stuff, the shooting, Tom, and then all of a sudden I had a workout crew here, had about 50 people here, and everybody was acting like everything was normal. I mean, like two days before 50 plus people were killed in Vegas.

[00:28:50.910] – Tony
And we just chat and they're kind of goofing off. And I invite them to come to my house for free to train, and I snapped. I mean, I went ballistic. I went because if I even reenact that, I'll probably get Ramsey right now. And I was just really upset that everybody was just dogging it. And then life is too important and you have to be strong and durable in life, because if you're not, you could be a victim as well, or you could die before your time.

[00:29:13.840] – Tony
And then within a week, I had this rockin headache on the right side of my head. I told Sean, I go when I feel a little bit off, my equilibrium is weird, and then it got so bad that I started throwing up and then I thought, well, maybe maybe I had a stroke or a mini stroke or something. So I went to a couple of doctors and they didn't know and then so the rash was all in my right ear. It didn't appear yet, but it was happening. I mean, yeah. And if I had known and I take any antiviral medication, I could have beat it. Aan, it was tough.

[00:29:47.250] – Tony
It was really tough. And it lasted for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months. And it took about a year before I was able to recover. And I remember the first time I attempted to work out, I got on the treadmill, walked on the treadmill for five minutes. I forced myself. I was in such pain and I got off the treadmill and I threw up and I laid down for almost two hours. And it was that very slow.

[00:30:09.000] – Tony
Took months and months, man. And so then I hooked up with these folks, created power life because they knew my story. I was posting about it and stuff. And, you know, I lost twenty five pounds and as weak as a chicken. I remember trying to do push ups for the first time.

[00:30:22.680] – Tony
I knocked out, like I can usually do like seventy push ups if I had to, if there was a contest and there was money on it and I can do like 30 pull ups pretty pretty much and I could do like eight pull ups and I was dying and I could do maybe 15 push ups. It was huge for me, no cardiovascular strength but but you know, it was it was getting back in the game. And I had the foundation right.

[00:30:43.530] – Tony
I had that original foundation. I knew what to do. I knew what to eat once I could. But I needed supplements, man. I needed a decent supplements that I wasn't getting, you know? I mean, the cool thing about what we're doing at Power Life is we're making these really unique formulas. I mean, there's whey proteins and there's plant based proteins, but we're putting in chromium and vitamin D and and HMV and, you know, probiotics, prebiotics and sun fiber and all these really, really interesting combinations of different things based on tons and tons of research.

[00:31:11.100] – Tony
And really, they were making it for me, you know, I mean, like, hey, you guys and people our age, we we're all going to suffer from Sarcopenia at some point. I mean, some people sooner than later. But Sarcopenia is age related muscle loss. And I had I had accelerated Age-Related muscle loss as a result of my illness. And so, you know, I mean, that's a sixty two year old arm, that thing's doing OK.

[00:31:32.250] – Tony
And, you know, the six pack is back and my quads are strong and and it feels good. I mean it took a year to come back man and it wasn't easy, but thank God I ran into the right people the right time to make these supplements for me, you know, I mean to help because I wasn't getting it from, you know, what I was taking. I just wasn't getting enough. And I could it was just a struggle. And I was still dealing with with pain and fatigue. You know, I talk about this in my latest seminar.

[00:32:01.460] – Tony
If there's two things that really slow people down, it's those two. It's pain and fatigue. And if you've got if you're exhausted and you've got joint pain, back pain or neck pain and knee pain or ankle pain or whatever, hip pain, then you just there's no enthusiasm to kind of attack life. But if you can find the right, the right kind of foods, that brings inflammation down, getting regular blood work done. I get blood work done every every six months.

[00:32:25.020] – Tony
Yeah, but every six months, twice a year. And I look at my panel and I mean they take 12 vials on my arm. It's like it's like a vampire comes in here. Right. And but I learned about it all. You know what I mean. I mean this. What's my hormone stuff. What's my thyroid stuff. What's my testosterone estrogen. Vitamin D, vitamin C, like all these different things. Chromium like what are all these where are my high or my low.

[00:32:45.730] – Tony
And we make those adjustments every time. And then once I started taking my own stuff, you know, my last blood work was she's like, oh my God, your testosterones to the roof, you supplement your testosterone. I go, No, no, I just I don't have the joint pain.

[00:33:02.190] – Tony
So when I lift or I do stuff, I'm not fighting pain. It prevents me from doing the amount of repetitions, the amount of weight that I want to do. I can just really go, you know what I mean? Like my right shoulder. I have bursitis, arthritis, tendinitis in two bonesetter's and a three percent torn labrum in his arm. But I can do handstands.

[00:33:19.110] – Tony
And I was doing I was doing military before when my shoulder ached, I had to stop here. Right. But it was awesome to come all the way down without that searing pain in my shoulder and full range of motion. That was just awesome, you know. I mean, I'm not Hercules, but I'm, I'm pushing 50's, one hundred pounds and I felt good man.

[00:33:40.320] – Tony
So it's just for me it's just. Always researching, always, you know, staying curious, knowing when to take downtime, when I have to and this is thirty, thirty seven years of playing with this stuff, man.

[00:33:53.870] – Tony
So, yeah, that was a brutal period. And and I would recommend anybody, because the old vaccine for shingles was kind of the hair of the dog that bites you, right? I mean, so it can actually give you shingles. I mean, it's terrible. But the new one is is a completely different formula. I think it's the GlaxoSmithKline new vaccine. And so when I got this thing, I can't tell you how many thousand people ran out and got the vaccine after they heard my story.

[00:34:20.680] – Allan
Yeah, I can imagine. Well, Tony, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?

[00:34:31.100] – Tony
Well, without repeating myself, it's finding an exercise program that you can stick with. And then when that program is over, you find another one and another one and another one. And if you want to do the first one five times in a row, fine. But then you want to I mean, that's why I made Power Ninety, P90X, P90X2, X3, 22 minute hard core. I've given people enough variety so they don't get bored, they don't get hurt, they don't plateau. Right. So the foundation of who I am and I would recommend that to anybody is figure out a way to be consistent with your fitness.

[00:35:06.070] – Tony
Intensity is important. You want to you want to always up the ante over the course of time because that helps with improvement. You don't want to lift the same ten pound weights and the same exercise for 10 years. It's a waste of time, you know what I mean, so, so intense consistency is everything. Fitness is the first thing. But on top of that is being consistent with your fitness. Right.

[00:35:26.840] – Tony
And then accountability is everything. A lot of people can't. I'm talking just the fitness category right now. I'm not talking about all the other aspects of your life, but when it comes to fitness, you've got to be accountable. You've got to be accountable somehow. And some people who live in Minnesota in the middle of winter, who go down into the basement and do yoga for an hour and a half or plyo and fifty seven degrees down there, and then they get up in the dark and go make breakfast for their kids before school superheros like they should get medals every time they go down there and do that.

[00:35:53.910] – Tony
Me, I need other people. So they're either in my house, they're online, they're somewhere. Right. I mean the all the days that I work out, I've got somebody here. And even during the quarantine, we're doing it on Zoom call just like this. All right. It's your turn to do pull ups.

[00:36:08.990] – Tony
How many are you going to do? Fifteen. All right. You mean the number is really sixteen? OK, well, all right. And there's all this back and forth and on Zoom. It's easy. I mean, there's always solutions when there's a problem, right?

[00:36:17.610] – Tony
So and then you need a plan. I mean, without a plan, like what do you figure out what you're going to do, what time you're going to do it and write it down in advance, like predict the future. Get a calendar. Right. So here's an example. Here's my wall calendar. I started a wall calander. I got two calendars on my computer, but I don't do this any more.

[00:36:37.670] – Allan
Yeah, they still they still sell those.

[00:36:39.410] – Tony
They still sell these man. And you can go to they're called a stationery store and you write down playo yoga, chest and back cardio, but you write them all down and you hang. I don't have a red one here. I did wait here it is just like this. I get to go. I'm so lucky right now.

[00:36:56.600] – Tony
You hang this. That's a red Sharpie, you tie a red Sharpie on your calendar, so I got them all written down here and you should have about twenty five workouts written on your calendar. And every time you do that, you take your red magic marker and you make Xs at the bottom of the calendar on the last day you write how many you did you count Xs and you write and if it says 15 you lost or you're tied because 15 workouts in the course of one month means you took 15 days off.

[00:37:25.730] – Tony
Try doing that with food. Try doing that with work. Try doing that with sleep. Forget it. Not a shot. You're a dead man. All right. So but if you have 22 Xs more days than not, then you have succeeded, then you're going to see results. Then you're going to feel better. Then you're going to get stronger. Then you're going to be more flexible. Then you're going to be happier. All right.

[00:37:44.630] – Tony
Because the more you do, the better you get. The less you do, the more you're going to struggle, period. All right. So purpose why why are you doing this thing? I'm giving you 4. But you've got to decide why and if it's to be sexy. Well, you better be a swimsuit model or a bodybuilder or whatever. But if you're if your goal is to improve the quality of your life physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually for some people, and to start to really make an impact in other people's lives because you've gotten your act together, that's powerful.

[00:38:15.560] – Tony
I workout today. I'm going to plyo today at 5:30pm. Do I want to? No, but I know who I'm going to be after I'm done. I mean, I mean, you know, my legs. People look at my legs. I mean, they're super striated. Here you go. I'm going to show you right now Allan. Look at these pythons. Man, can you see that thing? Hold on.

[00:38:32.230] – Allan
Awesome.

[00:38:33.380] – Tony
Right. That's all. There it is.

[00:38:36.680] – Allan
That does not look like that does not look like a 62 year old leg.

[00:38:40.390] – Tony
And all I do is jump. Jump up and down, jump up and down and do squats and lunges, you know what I mean? And so my purpose is that I know I'm going to feel afterward and I just repeat day after day after day, purpose, plan, accountability, consistency. That's the foundation of really being the person that you want. And then from there, the world is your oyster man, I'm telling you..

[00:39:01.490] – Allan
Very cool. Very cool. Well, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about Power Life, the supplement line and then again, Tony talks and all the other cool things you're doing, where would you like for me to send them.

[00:39:16.060] – Tony
Go to TonyHortonlife.com. It's all right there. We're in the process of actually upgrading the website. There's a lot of really cool new things that we're doing above and beyond. Tony Talks and Power Life. And I've got a brand new fitness equipment line called TH Fitness. You know, a lot of the factories now all across the world are trying to catch up because they were closed. So we're sort of the last in line. But we hope that within about three months we're going to have jump ropes and mats, med balls and stability ball, different things on the website.

[00:39:43.310] – Tony
So TonyHortonlife.com, you learn about everything you need to know about your T. Horton right here. So check it out.

[00:39:49.470] – Allan
Awesome. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/446 and I'll be sure to have a link there for you if you're driving or can't write that down right now. But Episode four four six. So Tony, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:40:02.490] – Tony
Allan. My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me on today. Appreciate it.

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40+ Fitness Podcast

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[00:02:49.220] – Allan
Alana, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:02:51.930] – Alana
Thank you for having me.

[00:02:53.970] – Allan
So, you know, I did a little survey asking listeners, what do you want on the show? What do you want me spend more time doing? And I put in a weight loss and, you know, fitness and some other topics in there. And there are a few people wrote a couple of things. And overwhelmingly though, I was pleasantly surprised that they wanted to talk about strength training. They wanted to talk about training a lot more.

[00:03:18.480] – Allan
And as a personal trainer, most of the time when we see someone walk in the door and the first thing in their head is that they want to lose weight. So it's kind of surprising. But it's also why I reached out. I want to make sure I had had you on the show. Your book is called, Strength Training Over 40: A 6-Week Program to Build Muscle and Agility. And as I went through it, I was like, you know, this is this is very well done because it's simple.

[00:03:42.570] – Allan
You've got complete body workouts whether you want to do at home or in the gym. You explain every exercise very, very well. And I work with some blind clients and so when I'm working with a blind client you have to be very specific about how a movement looks and feels. And you really captured that in the book with your description. So great job.

[00:04:05.070] – Alana
Well, great. Thank you so much for that. And you know, it's when I see clients, one of the first things that I, when we first sit down, I talk to them about the fact that we're not going to get bogged down with numbers. I don't want to even know what they weigh. I'm not going to pull out the measuring tape. We focus on getting strong. And that's kind of my mantra. And I say, you know, if we focus on getting strong, everything else kind of falls into place and it does. And so they're thrilled to hear that.

[00:04:37.710] – Allan
Yeah. You know, one of the core reasons I think people over the age of 40 feel like there's this uphill battle when they start trying to maintain their muscle mass or get stronger is it just seems a lot harder than it was when they were in their 20s. And it is harder. I won't belittle that at all. A big reason, though, is our hormones. But the good news is that resistance training has a lot of benefits for us, including helping us improve our hormones. Could you talk about that a little bit?

[00:05:09.150] – Alana
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, hormones are really complicated and can't be discussed in isolation. They all work together. But basically hormones are chemical messengers in the body that regulate things like metabolism and growth and our mood and our physical response to stress. And interestingly, the body perceives strength training at first as a stressor which can elevate cortisol levels which we don't want to have elevated for long periods of time because they can wreak havoc on the body. It cortisol, the hormone that's responsible for that fight or flight response, and also the accumulation of retention of body fat, belly fat primarily.

[00:05:59.340] – Alana
So one might ask why strength train of it stimulates cortisol. And in my research, I've learned that strength training also stimulates human growth hormone, which helps the body to adapt to strength training and human growth hormone helps to reduce cortisol levels as well as helps us with insulin sensitivity. And so we know the other side of insulin sensitivity is insulin resistance, which we don't want because that can lead to Type two diabetes. So we know there's a close relationship between cortisol and insulin that's positively affected by the elevation of human growth hormone, which is stimulated by lifting weights and not just going through the motions of lifting weights either, we want to really challenge ourselves with those weights.

[00:06:59.700] – Alana
And so basically, we're training the body to deal with stress in a healthy way by putting that added demand on our muscle. And also, there is strong evidence that strength training not only increases human growth hormone in both men and women, but it also increases testosterone in men, which helps to build muscle and bone mass. And and and it increases estrogen in women, which helps stave off heart disease and osteoporosis. So that's just a very small snapshot into the hormonal response to strength training.

[00:07:40.740] – Allan
Yeah, you know when we're getting to this age, I'm in my mid 50s now and our hormones are not our friends and at least they don't feel like they're our friends, but they actually are our friends if we take the time to understand that balancing the resistance work is going to signal and it's the hormones that are going to do that signaling for you. So the release of growth hormone, this temporary increase in cortisol, which is catabolic, is then going to stimulate that muscle to change and insulin is going to play its part by replacing some of the glycogen that's come out of the muscle.

[00:08:18.390] – Allan
So whole training aspects of it gets those things working a lot better together, which is really where the key is. And then with regards to insulin and estrogen, if we don't have those right you don't feel energetic. You don't feel strong. You don't feel all the good things we felt when we were younger. So in many ways, your sex hormones are your stay young hormones and the better you do at balancing those out, keeping those where they need to be, the longer you're going to feel young.

[00:08:48.090] – Alana
Absolutely. And I think when insulin and cortisol are out of whack, it can create estrogen dominance, which I think for women in menopause is really the guilty party. And so many of the complaints that women have with menopause. And regarding menopause as well, I get a little bit fatigued by hearing women blaming everything that's going on with them on menopause and when the fact is that it's and I believe an accumulation of sort of not so wise choices.

[00:09:38.980] – Allan
And thats a really nice way to say it.

[00:09:42.790] – Alana
And then we hit sort of because we do we start to lose muscle mass at about the age of 35, called Sarcopenia. It's a fact. And but we don't really notice it until we hit about 50 and we've lost so much muscle by that point that our metabolism has slowed down because our muscle mass is directly tied to our metabolism. We lose enough muscle, our metabolism becomes sluggish. And so I find that many women, and men as well, hitting middle age, they've just lost so much muscle that their metabolism has slowed way down. So yet another another reason to get on strength training and the earlier the better. But it's never too late.

[00:10:35.860] – Allan
You know, a lot of times I'll have someone and they'll tell me, look, I know I need to work out. I know I need to, but then they don't. And in the book, you talked about the difference between inspiration and motivation. Could you take just a minute to go over this? Because I think it's I think people have it backwards sometimes when they're thinking, I need somebody, you know, to motivate me. Get me going. And so they kind of want a trainer or they want to work out body or something, someone to walk with them even when they're going to do their walks or something. But I think we're looking at that wrong. If we get those two words mixed up.

[00:11:15.580] – Alana
I think so. I did a little video the other day on this very topic and it was really well received. And one of the things that I discuss with my clients, again, when I first sit down with them is about finding their why, what's going to get through them through the door. And it's going to be different for all of us. And I see inspiration as looking outward, such as Instagram and magazines or Facebook groups or whatever. Inspiration and motivation truly comes from finding your why.

[00:11:57.490] – Alana
What is important to you? For me, I had a baby a week away from my forty fifth birthday, so my why is wanting to be really active for him and when he he's 17 now, so when he has children I want to be active for them. And so again and I say to people whatever it is that gets you through that door. That's your why and you have to deeply internalize it, but not every day that motivation is going to be there.

[00:12:30.950] – Alana
And when that motivation sort of goes on vacation, that's when we need to tap into discipline. But motivation itself will help carry us through for the most part. Yeah. So in some people, I'll ask them what to think about their why. And to them it's just wanting to look good in a bathing suit on the on the beach. I said, that's great. If that's your motivation right now, that means you don't have a lot of aches and pains in your body and you're wanting to look good if your reasons are purely aesthetic, whatever it takes to get you through the door and keep yourself strong.

[00:13:09.320] – Allan
You know, I think as we get to this age that we're at that point where we really need to start thinking about what our lives are going to be like for the next 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 years or so. And and if we're losing muscle, we're not doing this and we don't do this. We can't get ourselves motivated and can't get ourselves doing this work. We're going to lose more muscle. Eventually you're not going to be able to open up jars and you're going to lose your independence eventually.

[00:13:36.050] – Allan
You're not going be able to get up from the seated position. You're going to lose your independence. And so one of the core ways I like to look at it is I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105.

[00:13:45.470] – Alana
Yes, absolutely.

[00:13:46.850] – Allan
You know, that gets me up in the morning. You know that that gets me thinking. If I don't do this, then I'm you know, I'm setting myself up for that. When I first got into this, it was it was also my daughter. My daughter was starting to get into CrossFit and she was starting to do this obstacle course races and just that kind of fun stuff. And I was thinking, and I want to go see her do this, but I don't want to just sit there and watch her do it.

[00:14:14.750] – Allan
I want to be on the obstacle course with her. I want to be doing across the work out with her. But at the time, I was in no physical shape to make that happen. I needed to be a lot stronger to carry my body through a Tough Mudder or any kind of thing like that. So that's that was my motivation, is wanting to finish those races and spend that time that way with my daughter doing the things she loved. So many times we have our kids around us doing the things we want to do. I wanted her to be doing the things she loves and I wanted to be a part of it. So, you know, finding those ways to have that internal motivation to show up every day to do the work that's necessary to be that person that can open your own jars, that can wipe your butt at 105 or finish a Tough Mudder at 47 years old.

[00:14:57.980] – Alana
Yeah, absolutely. And I give a little example in my book. About one day I came home with groceries and it was dark in the middle of the winter and my boys had inadvertently locked me out of the gate and I didn't have my phone with me to call them and I didn't want to start shouting and bothering the neighbors. And so I thought, well, I'll just climb up over this fence and it's a really high fence. And then I was on top of the shed and then I had to lower myself down.

[00:15:27.950] – Alana
And that's, as you know, where the real strength comes in. And I got to the top and I thought, OK, it's like, you know, the down portion of a pull up. And I could do it. And I felt like a young girl scrambling up that fence and over the shed and down and opened the gate and grabbed my groceries and I was in the house and I remember thinking I couldn't do this if if I hadn't kept myself strong.

[00:15:56.900] – Alana
Not that it's a huge deal. I could have eventually gotten through the gate. But just the fact that I was able to do that, I was so proud of myself. And, yeah, losing muscle you know, for as far as aging goes is the the fastest way to lose our independence. And I'm like you. I want I want to be able to take care of myself for a really long time. I want to be able to do the things that I love to do for a really long time and not have to just look at pictures from other people that walk to the top of the hill and and looked down. I want to be able to do that myself. So those are also my whys, you know, to stay independent. I don't think any of us relishes the fact of, you know, going to a home and sort of deteriorating there.

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This episode of 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Let's Get Checked. Use code Allan20 and get 20% Off! [00:19:07.830] – Allan
My grandfather lived into his 90s, and that's where he spent the ending of his life, because he couldn't get himself up and down, he couldn't do the things he needed to be able to do. He lost big parts of his life. I remember sitting there at the golf course with him when he was 80 and he said he was going to quit playing golf because he just couldn't do it anymore. His balance wasn't there, his strength just wasn't there. And I just felt that you lived your whole life playing golf. You love the sport, you live on a golf course and now you're not going to play golf.

[00:19:37.210] – Alana
Right. And that that brings up a good point, too, because the one thing that people say to me is, well, I walk a lot, so my legs will be strong forever, but it just doesn't work that way. Eventually it'll slide backwards if we're not doing purposeful strength training to strengthen those muscles. And so that's, to train for our sport, whether it be golf or anything, hiking, you know, train the sport of life and we have to do it.

[00:20:13.540] – Alana
And just quickly, I was a competitive figure skater growing up and I had these skinny little legs. But soon I wasn't able to compete with the girls that had the genetically strong legs. And in those days back then, we didn't train for our sport. And I remember thinking, oh, if there was only a way, if there was only a way to be strong. And I had to eventually in my late teens give up skating. But I discovered the gym soon after that.

[00:20:43.870] – Alana
And I was just so happy because there is a way there is a way to keep ourselves strong. And and I've done that ever since. And I can honestly say at age 62, I'm in better shape, I just I keep getting better and stronger and people that boggles people's mind. They don't understand it. And also they say it must be such hard work. You must have to be doing this constantly and no, I might spend three hours a week in strength training because I've done it for so long. I'm now just maintaining so it's never I like to say it's never too late to start because as the saying goes, muscle knows no age. But the sooner you start, the longer you will have to reap those benefits of a strong body.

[00:21:47.530] – Allan
One of the things I was really glad to see in the book was that you spent a good bit of time talking about stretching and showing some stretches that we would do. And you included both the dynamic and the static stretching. Could you take some time to talk about both and then when one is appropriate, when the other isn't?

[00:22:07.810] – Alana
Yeah, sure, dynamic stretching is not stretching as we know it, per say, they're sort of more dynamic movements such as leg swings and arm rotations and high knees and marching in place, jumping jacks even, mountain climbers. And so if we're at home and we don't have access or jumping rope is good, but that's also cardio. If we don't have access to cardio equipment, doing these dynamic movements is a great way to not only warm up our joints, but get our heart rate up as well.

[00:22:47.150] – Alana
So those are to be done prior to strength training and then static stretching, which is the kind of stretching that most of us are familiar with are the longer holds the well where the hamstring stretches and the quad stretches and those sorts of stretches. But one thing, most of us don't hold those stretches for long enough. You know, people will hold them for three or four seconds. That's it. And go to the other side. But we really should be holding those stretches for 15 to 30 seconds.

[00:23:25.700] – Alana
But, and those should be done after strength training, it shouldn't be painful either. And I'm I'm believer in that we really shouldn't be stretching beyond our natural range of motion. And I think it's really, really important to maintain our our natural range of motion. But I think the studies are showing if we have very flexible joints without strength, that creates unstable joints and unstable joints are joints that are prone to injury. So that's been interesting to me because I grew up in through the 80s, 70s and 80s where it was all about stretching, and we really pushed ourselves way beyond our natural range of motion.

[00:24:13.100] – Alana
And we don't do that so much anymore. So just maintaining our natural range of motion, I like to say I'm as flexible as I need to be, meaning my joints, every joint in my body can do what it was meant to do.

[00:24:26.630] – Allan
Now, sometimes you're talking to a potential client or talking to someone and they hear the word gym. And immediately there's the palms get sweaty and they're thinking about going into a building that they're not going to recognize 90 percent of the stuff in there. And there's people in there. In many cases, they're in the corner over there with the heavy weights, grunting and carrying on, maybe even yelling at each other just to seem to get motivated or sitting around on the phone, sitting on the equipment that you want.

[00:24:55.510] – Allan
And so there's you know, there's this this environment that for a lot of people, they're just not quite comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits, why we might want to go to the gym, but also if we really can't or don't want to go to the gym, there's ways we can do this at home so we can go through that.

[00:25:14.700] – Alana
For sure. The gym is is a motivating place or because you see other people doing what what you're doing, they're interested in the same thing, which is keeping their body strong. One thing that I will do sometimes if I have a say, a sixty five year old lady who has never been in the gym before, I'll take her over to the buffest guy in the gym and introduce her. And then she sees that these guys are just so sweet and and they say, yeah, if you need any help, just, you know, I'm here.

[00:25:52.160] – Alana
And so I think that has has always helped. But being around your your tribe, you know, the people who are interested in doing the same things that that you're doing is very helpful. And I sometimes will start older clients out on the machines, which are great. We can't have those machines at home, most of us. And it's a great way to start some people who have never done strength training before. And so there's that aspect, the machines and the being around other people who are interested in the same things you are no matter the age.

[00:26:37.070] – Alana
And I think people will really be surprised at how helpful the fit buff guy, you know, is when asked a question. People are always surprised by that. And and they they say to me, I'm so intimidated. You know, they're not looking at you and they're certainly not judging you. The only thing that they're thinking is good for you, good for you, for walking through that door. So that helps too.

[00:27:05.140] – Allan
Well, the core of is this, the more members the gym has than the gyms making money, it's going to stay there. So we want our gym to stay and we want our gym memberships to be reasonably priced. If it's just us in the gym, suddenly it's not that reasonable priced because we want all that equipment in there. And so they're happy to see a new person walk in the gym. That's a net positive for the whole environment.

[00:27:30.870] – Allan
And I had a client. His name's Trent. And he told me he said he he doesn't really know the names of anybody, but he goes to the gym at the same time every day and the same people. So not at each other, they'll see each other. He doesn't know their names, doesn't really talk to him, know him that well from that perspective. But he said any day that he's thinking he might not want to go to the gym. He's imagining those guys in there working out, and it's like even if they're not really holding him accountable, accountable, he's holding himself accountable because he knows they're in there and he's not.

[00:28:05.890] – Alana
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great point. And I have a very competitive nature, as many people do. And if, you know, you're sitting at home on the couch there, those other people that you see every day are in the gym, you know, getting ahead of where you are. So you know that that's a good point as well. The gym is a very I don't know. I have been to so many gyms during the course of my life, and I have never, ever, as a small little female, ever had a negative experience in the gym. So I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage for some people to take that first step through the door. But it gets easier and easier. And so I tell them that the first time we sit down together.

[00:28:50.080] – Allan
And I know some people say, well, let me lose a little bit more weight, let me get a little bit more comfortable with this, and then I'll consider going to the gym. And so there are ways that we can get this done at home as long as, again, we got that we got that whole motivation, inspiration thing working for us. Many of us can have a home gym and get the same results.Can you talk a little bit? If I'm going to set up a home gym, particularly do your six week program, what are some of the equipment that I would want to have?

[00:29:18.730] – Alana
Yeah, well, I think we've proven this during this covid time for sure that we can work out at home. And so I suggest resistant bands of various strengths and you can get the bands with handles or that are continuous loop. Any kind of many bands are also great. Maybe two or three sets of dumbbells to have at home are great. And if you could get a bench, that's great, but you can use your coffee table or even the floor for some exercises if you don't have a bench, a stability ball is awesome to have. You can do all kinds of exercises with a stability ball. Those are some people call them swiss balls or exercise balls and a mat and maybe a pull up bar, which I have.

[00:30:16.720] – Alana
And and if you can't do pull ups, you know, you can attach a resistant band to it and put your foot in there. And it's like an assisted pull up and maybe a medicine ball and certainly don't have to do all of that. You can get away with just the resistant bands at first and then just kind of add to it as you go. But you can get a really good workout in with those pieces of equipment.

[00:30:45.670] – Allan
And you can often find these used their resale shops in some towns and then can going on something like Craigslist almost always are. Some of the markets, like on Facebook, you'll find used fitness equipment at a cheap, cheap price so you can get these things without breaking the bank if you take your time and shop wisely.

[00:31:07.600] – Alana
Oh, absolutely. Although I will say right now people are hard to find because people have snapped a lot of this up right now, but you just keep looking and and you'll find it. In the mean time we shouldn't forget about bodyweight exercises as well. There's a lot we can do with just our body weight, although that's not going to carry us through forever because we do need to continuously you know, we want that progressive resistance. But body weight is a great way to start out.

[00:31:43.510] – Alana
Also, I should add, TRX straps, you can buy and hook to the top of your door and those come in really, really handy.

[00:31:54.850] – Allan
Alana, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:32:03.940] – Alana
OK, well, these might not be your typical responses, but first of all, I would say our state of mind is really important. So be mindful of the words that we say to ourselves, like, for example, I'm sick and tired, or I hate or I'm having a seniors moment or I'm old, or I'm X age therefore I'm supposed to be in pain and lacking energy or be carrying extra fat and growing old sucks. You know, so I never say those words to myself.

[00:32:36.970] – Alana
I'm really, really conscious of of how I speak to myself. And so be kind and gentle to yourself and treat yourself how you want others to treat you and also to stay. This is part of of this of the first one is staying connected with others and don't isolate during this this time that we're in right now, be kind to others and be of service, you know, it's all about that state of mind. And second, keeping our brain stimulated by learning new things and getting outside of our comfort zone, which might be going to the gym or taking up something new.

[00:33:18.770] – Alana
And outside of our comfort zone is where the best things happen. And stay informed. But don't get bogged down by the negative news today and find solace in knowing that we're all in this together. And third, exercise your body because you love yourself not as punishment for something that you ate. And strength train and maintain your your natural range of motion, as we talked about, challenge your heart in some way, you know, at least three times a week.

[00:33:54.170] – Alana
And, you know, just just stay strong and agile so that you can do the things you love for a long, long time. So that's kind of a long answer. But those things, I don't think we can stay well without addressing the state of mind and our brain as well as our physical bodies.

[00:34:16.610] – Allan
I completely agree. So Alana if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Strength Training Over 40, what would you like for me to send them?

[00:34:27.470] – Alana
Well, Strength Training Over 40 is available now on Amazon.com and I'm in Canada, so it's available here in Canada on Amazon.CA and through my website as well, which is AlanaCollinsfitnesscoach.com. And I have a pretty large following on Instagram. There's my two handles are Aging Fearless and Aging Strong. And so you can check me out there.

[00:34:58.610] – Allan
All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com forward/445 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Alana, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:35:08.610] – Alana
Thank you so much for having me. It was it was really fun.

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