Hello and welcome to today's podcast. I am so glad you're here. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness Podcast. Today we're going to talk about 9 keys to being fit after 40. You know, there's a lot of folks out there that you'll see and they, they seem really, really fit and they're over 40. You know, you have to ask yourself, what are these people doing that's allowing them to accomplish this? I was having a conversation with a guy at the gym, you know, we're both over 40. He's an excellent shape. He does the CrossFit style type workouts. And so I was, I was just asking him about it and what he was doing in his training and where he was getting his training materials from. They're always varied, different workouts.

And, he enjoys doing them and that's cool. And he's really good at it and he enjoys it and it's a different kind of fit than I am. I'm more of this strong, slow, I can carry heavy stuff. I can do all the things I want to do. And so we have a different mindset of what fitness is. And we get to talking about that a little bit because he was thinking he might want to get into competition. Now if you're not familiar with the CrossFit competitions, they're quite intense. Uh, and I was explaining to them, I said, you know, the last time I saw one of the, uh, the big ones, uh, the guys that were over 40, the masters level athletes, they were just in tremendous shape. I mean, the things they were doing was just actually quite insane. And we even got into that, why are they doing all of these insane things, over the age of 40, over the age of 50, that, you know, I would say even 20 years ago, no one would've dreamed someone over that age would be doing things.

And we see this every day and I do like sharing these in the Facebook group. If you're not a member, you should go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. I share all kinds of information, and if I see a 72-year-old woman doing a deadlift that's over her body weight. Yeah, I'm going to probably share that because it's pretty cool. But there's different looks and feels to fitness and I said it in the book, The Wellness Roadmap, and I'll say it again. Fitness is not a look. Fitness is about you being fit to task. So I think that's the first key for you to pick up on as we kind of go through this whole view of fitness is that fitness is not a look. A fit grandmother is someone who's able to be a great grandmother to her children.

She's able to do the things that they want to do. She's able to get out and be with them. She's able to provide for them. She's able to be the person she needs to be, that's her fitness. For someone like my friend Glen who wants to compete in CrossFit games, he is going to push himself a lot harder and that might not be entirely healthy, which is another whole other conversation we could be having. Being fit doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy. And that's why I call it wellness of having all three. So fitness is not necessarily a look, it's a way you feel, the way you're able to do the things you want to do. And to this point, I am there and will I always be there? I don't know. You know, like I said, I want to be the a hundred guy who is 105 who can wipe his own butt.

I want to be independent. I want to be able to take care of and help my family and my wife. I don't want to be dependent on others. And so my fitness regime is based around those things. So one of the big things when I go into fitness is do no harm. So as I'm lifting, I'm trying to make sure that I'm not hurting myself. I'm only making myself stronger or maintaining strength in certain areas. The other work that I do is about just trying to avoid injury and staying fit. So that's one thing. People who are fit are doing, they're not evaluating themselves relative to other people. They're not trying to compete against their 20 year old selves. They're doing what's necessary to be fit to task. The second thing is they have a focus. It's very easy for people to get into a kind of a routine, a habit, or they show up at the gym or they do their morning thing.

They do their run, they do their, maybe there's some lifting, but they just are kind of putting it all together. They walk into a gym or they walk into a workout either doing the same exact thing they do almost every time, or they come into the gym and they really don't have a plan at all. You'll see a lot of this now, it's a lot more common to go into a gym and see that half the people are sitting there looking at their phones. Now, if they're looking at their phones because they're trying to figure out what their next set is, or they've got a timer, then that's cool. But most of the time we know that's not what they're doing. They're texting their friend, they're doing this. Real fitness is going to come from application. It's going to come from being engaged in what you're doing.

Your muscles will improve better if you're focused on the movements that you're doing. So if you are a runner looking and feeling about your form and making sure that it's not breaking down versus just a mindless run, you're going to do better in fitness if you're focused on the form and the feel and the things that are going on in your body then if you're listening to a podcast or doing something else, listening to music. Sometimes that lack of focus is preventing you from reaching a level of fitness that you're interested in reaching. You know, when I go in the gym to work out, I actually like to go in there and when there's no one else there because otherwise my full introvertness comes out. And, you know, I don't talk to anybody during my workout. I don't like to talk to people during my sets.

I don't like to talk to people during my breaks. I don't like to talk at all during that time when I'm lifting. If I'm in there lifting, I'm lifting. So I actually go into my gym when no one else is there and do my own lifting. That allows me to have just complete focus on task. I don't have to do anything else. So that's the second key, focus. The third key is intensity. If you're not pushing yourself and being intense and purposeful and it's a little bit different than focus. Focus is staying engaged in what you're doing. The intensity means that while you're doing work, there's some effort to it. There's some, there's some push to it. You're finding that that line of discomfort, you're going outside of your comfort zone. So people who are really building good fitness are always right at the edge.

So there's an intensity to the work they're doing. Now they don't always stay at that edge and we'll talk a little bit about that. Then the next point. But they do have that edge, you know, they're the ones that are actually going to be very kind of happy about having a PR. Now when we talk about PR, that's a personal record. It doesn't have to be something huge and massive. But cutting 10 seconds off of your one mile walk can be great. That means you maybe, you extended your gate a little bit, you extended your speed, your pace, taking a different route and going up a, a route that has a Hill that makes that walk a little bit more difficult. There's an intensity to that purpose. So finding that opportunity to incorporate intensity into your work is going to make things a lot better when I'm working out with clients.

Now, you know, I'll get them in there and I'll add more weight and I'll be kind of pushing them while they're doing it. You know, a lot of folks they'll get in and it's hard. And they'll want to stop right at that line where it starts getting uncomfortable. And that's actually where some of the best stuff is happening. So having a little bit of intensity in the work you're doing is really, really important. The fourth point is balance. When you go into a work deal that you're going to do a workout, just, just recognizing that your, your body is an organism that can break. And it is an organism that needs to recover and rest and it's an organism that's capable of a lot of different things. But if you go in and do the same work, the same type of work all the time, you're not going to have balance in your fitness.

So if you're just going out and doing running, that's great. If you love cardiovascular training, perfect. If cardiovascular or stamina is something that's very, very important to you as a, what's your fitness should mean, perfect. But you still need to be working on those other things. You need be working on strength. You need to be working on balance. You need to be working on your mobility and flexibility. Those are very important as well. And if you're not putting balance into your fitness regime, you're getting very one sided. And that's, that's an opportunity for injury. And also means you're probably not going to be as fit as you could be because you really weren't focused on the other aspects of training. One really good way to make sure that you're getting balance is for you to kind of look at periodization. And what I mean by that is where you'll take time to say, okay, this is my running season and then I'm not going to run during my off season and give my body a time to recover.

All professional athletes do that. They have their season when they're on and they're working really, really hard. They play their season and then after their season's over, they have a recovery period. They have a time when they're doing something else. They're probably working on repairing injuries or probably working on, you know, mobility and flexibility. They're training other aspects of what they do. Not necessarily that directly in relationship to the athletic event that they're involved in. So making sure that you have balance in your training is also very important. Okay the next one, which I guess is number five is going to be patients. You've gotta be patient in this game for fitness. Our bodies will respond to stimulus. If you stimulate a muscle and you give it adequate nutrition and adequate rest, it will get stronger. But you've got to have the patients to know that that's not necessarily going to happen in a linear fashion and it won't always go up and it won't always be large increments.

You know, one of the, one of the difficulties in running a gym and working with people is that, you know, at first they're using smaller dumbbells and that's, you know, okay, cool. It makes sense. But the difference between say a five and an eight is significant in percentage wise. It doesn't seem like a lot that extra three pounds, but when you look at it from a, what you can do with five pounds versus what you can do with eight, it's a pretty big jump. And even when you get up to weights, like we're dealing with, uh, you know, 10 and 15 and 20, those are still huge, huge jumps in volume of work. And so it's really hard. A lot of times for new trainees or trainings that haven't been around to recognize that those jumps from 15 to 20 are huge and to have the patience to keep working through.

And sometimes you're not necessarily gonna get all the reps you want to get, but just kind of working through that process of saying, I'm going to get there. Maybe you're doing a body weight squat and you'd really like to start adding some resistance. Have the patients to really get the form down on the body weight squat, have the patients to get your strength up and to keep your form. And once you've built that strength, once you've built that mind body connection, that neuromuscular connection and your body's moving the way it's supposed to, all that's going to happen. But you have to have the patience to work through this process and then recognize again, strength gains, speed gains, distance gains, all the gains that you would see in the fitness game are not linear. You're not going to get better in a linear fashion.

There's going to be really great periods of time when things are going really good. There's going to be times when things level out. And that's just the normal state of the human body. We never function in a straight line. You don't lose weight and straight line, you don't get stronger in a straight line. None of that works that way. It's always going to be kind of up and down. You want to look at basic trends and you want to be smart about it. So have the patients. The next item is also very important as part of the three P's that I talk about in the book. The Wellness Roadmap. It's the persistence and consistency. So a lot of people will come in the gym, uh, in January, you know, new year's resolutions and they'll hop on that treadmill and they'll go for 45 minutes.

They're exhausted, they go to work, they come back the next day, they come back the next day, they come back the next day. Well, there are about three weeks in and they really haven't seen a move on the scale. You know, they give themselves an excuse to skip a day and they skip that day. And then by skipping that day, they didn't maybe skip the next day. And so they're, they're not persistent. They're not consistent, so they're not going to see improvement because they really haven't done anything long enough to give their body the stimulus to say, Oh, I'm a runner, or Oh, I need to be ready to do this energy output each day and manage that. All our people will go in and they'll lift weights and they'll get delayed onset muscle soreness. We call that Dom's for short. They'll get DOMS, it hurts. It hurts a lot. And that'll be enough for a lot of people to just quit.

They'll say, Oh, I don't like the pain, that hurt. Or worst case, you get a small injury, little tweak to a hamstring or you know, your shoulder starting to feel a little wonky. And rather than having the persistence and consistency to work around that injury, you know, you still can work your legs if you have a trouble with your shoulder, you can still probably work your back and maybe your arms, maybe your chest, but you don't, you know, you can work around a lot of these things if you're smart about it, but you still have to stick in there and do the work. Even if it's a situation where, okay, yeah, you kinda tweaked your shoulder or you're feeling a little bit sore in the elbow, maybe we avoid the weights for a period of time when we focused on a different modality.

Maybe it's time for you to do some high intensity interval training with a little more sprint work. We can do that on the exercise bike. We can do that on the elliptical. And we do that for a few weeks to kind of build some stamina while we're waiting for the elbow to recover. But that's persistence and that's consistency. That's still showing up for your fitness and you have to do that or you're not going to be fit over 40. Number seven is the third P in that I have in the wellness roadmap and that's progression. We want to make sure that what we're doing is adding value and there's going to be a point when your body gets to a given strength and you can go do a given weight. I see this in circuit training a lot. People will go up to the circuit training machines and they're always on the third peg for this machine, the fourth peg for that machine and the first peg for this one and the seventh peg for this machine.

And they go around and they set their pegs in the same hole every single time they do that machine. That's great that they're getting the exercise. I'm really happy to see them in the gym working, but the majority of the people that are doing this aren't getting any stronger in the initial peg hole that they put themselves in is not going to be the level of fitness that they really want. They're going through the motions. I don't mean any disrespect for this, but we used to call these Barbie workouts and that's where you'd see the young girls come in and they'd pick up the three pound weights and start doing curls. Number one, biceps of smallest muscle you could possibly want to work for any duration, and because they're not going to do much value for you. And number two, the amount of weight then resistance they were using wasn't going to do anything.

And their concern was that they were going to get big and bulky, not gonna happen, not gonna happen for a woman. And definitely probably not even going to happen for a man over the age of 40, unless you really put in some intense work and focus on muscle building. It's not easy for us to gain muscle over the age of 40. So don't be afraid that you're going to get bulky, uh, put some progression in there. Get stronger. This is only going to help you as you get older if you're working on runs, be smart about how you do your long runs in your short runs. So that you're building a slow progression to get yourself ready for the running season. I use the term gentle nudges and I mean that your progressions should be these normal little small increments. As I said earlier, we're talking about smaller dumbbells that can actually be very difficult to do.

So it's a function of recognizing I do some sets at 20, maybe I drop back to my fifteens for my second and third set. That's cool. You're still giving yourself those gentle nudges to allow your body to get stronger. If you're doing your runs, you're looking at adding some volume to a run, but never adding much more than 10%. Uh, that's kind of a rule of thumb. Your long runs should never be more than 10% more than any other time that you were doing. And we kind of use that in bodybuilding, weightlifting resistance training as well. But in a general sense, you want these gentle nudges that are going to allow your body to have the stimulus that it needs to get stronger. A gentle nudge of progression tells your body, Hey, there's more requirement here. We're going to have to work harder next time and your body responds positively to that by getting stronger.

The eighth one is recovery, and this is one that's really hard for a lot of people. More is not better. You know, I have a workout program that I do with some group trainings and we do a full body workout twice a week, and invariably every time I talk to somebody about twice a week, they're like, Oh, well I should do this program on the days I'm not training with you. No, you should not do this program. This is a strength program that requires the stimulus, the nutrition, and then of course, the recovery. The recovery is as important, if not more important than the work. If you could imagine that you did a whole bunch of work, say you were setting a foundation for a home and you spent all this time laying the concrete and you didn't let the concrete set before you started building on top of it, obviously your foundation is not going to be there because you didn't allow it to set.

And so when you're working, you're building muscle, you're cutting muscle down. You need to give it time to recover and to rebuild. So recovery time is very, very important overall across your workouts, making sure that you do the work and you have the recovery time. Two other functions of recovery are as you're doing work, recognizing that there's times when breaks are important. We see this in high intensity interval training where there is a break period that's allowing your body to basically recover a little bit. We see this in resistance training where we'll do a set and then we'll have a little rest period. It could be for a minute, two minutes. It's really just time to let your energy systems reset and be ready to give you maximum output for the next set. So those little bits of recovery.

And then the final one I want to talk about is sleep. Sleep is hugely important to balancing your hormones, making sure you're giving your body what it wants. Most of the good stuff that happens in our body happens when we're asleep. Our brain refreshes, our body refreshes. All these things are really, really good for us. So recovery and sleep, hugely important if you want to remain fit. If you push yourself and you don't allow yourself to recover, you're going to start dealing with cortisol problems. You're gonna start dealing with other things and you're not going to reach your fitness goals. You're just not. Recovery is as important as the work. And then you see, we just had, uh, seven points that were all built around work. And I'm giving you the one recovery, but want to be very clear. Recovery is hugely, hugely important. It's as important as those others. You have to make sure you're doing the work, but you have to make sure that you're getting the recovery your body needs. So listen to your body. Uh, never should it tell you to quit, quit, and never come back. But if it's telling you you need an extra day, if its telling you you need a little bit extra sleep, the sleep, the recovery are important. So listen to your body when that's what you're hearing.

So the final point is to wellness. As I mentioned before, a lot of people will really push fitness goals and they'll push themselves to a point where they're being unhealthy. They'll push themselves to a point where they're being unhappy. If you find yourself in the gym comparing yourself to other people, you're never going to be happy with that result. You just aren't, we, we are all built on our bell curve. There's going to be a percentage of us that are outliers. You know, I see it on Facebook all the time. You know, these guys going out there and bench pressing 450 pounds, they're older than me and you know, if I sat there and said, “Oh, I have to be bench pressing 450 pounds.” I would never make it. I'll never bench press 450 pounds. I know physically it's probably outside the means of what I ever was capable of doing. But even if I took the time to do the training, I'm pretty sure soon as I found someone who is doing 450 like me and I got past 450, there'd be someone else doing 500. And so the comparisons to other people are really going to break down your happiness. And so I want you to start comparing yourself to the person you were yesterday or last year. Those are better comparisons. Maintaining your strength as we get older is a win.

We're dealing with sarcopenia, we're dealing with osteopenia. Uh, we are losing strength every single year unless we're doing something to prevent that. So if you are maintaining or getting stronger in your lifts, that's a huge, huge plus. If you're getting better times on your runs or at least maintaining your runs, that's a win. There's a natural aging curve. And if we're doing things to break down that, that aging curve, that's a fitness win and we should be very happy about that. So don't compare yourself with others. Compare yourself with who you are, who you know you should be. And then as far as the health aspects of it, you should never let your push to fitness break down your push to health. They're both equally important. They're all happiness, health and fitness, all three legs of a stool. And we have to have all of them in equal proportion or just not going to be whole.

We're not going to be well. So don't let fitness overrule those other two. You need to make sure there's balance in your life as well as balance in your work. So as you'd go through the process here, I'm going to recap just a little bit, but you know the keys to being fit after 40, they're not hard. It's just a function of saying you've got to do the work, you've got to get the recovery and you got to make sure it fits within the paradigm of who you are as a person.

So going through them really quickly. Fitness is not a look. Fitness is about being fit to tasks and case in point being 105 and being able to wipe my own butt. That's a good look for me cause I don't want to be the guy who needs help going to the restroom, but I'm not going to look like maybe someone else that you would say was fit. I'm going to be fit for task.

Second is focus. When you do work, focus on the muscles you're working. Focus on the form of what you're doing that's going to help you prevent injuries. That's going to help you get better results. The mind muscle is a huge, huge proponent of making sure that you're building fitness as fast as possible.

Intensity. You need to work hard, you need to make sure you're pushing yourself in a way that when you're doing the work, you're really engaged in that work and you're getting the most out of that work. So focusing on what you're there to do, making sure that you're engaged in it. And then the third one is intensity. You know, this, this is fitness is a push. It's taking you outside of your comfort zone. So there should be some intensity to what you're doing. It's great to do some casual walking here and there. That's great for overall health. It's great for potentially weight loss and other goals that you might have. But slow walking without really putting some intensity to it is not going to improve your fitness. It's going to just basically allow you to age on a standard aging curve.

The third is balance. You know, don't just train one dimensional. Don't just say I'm a strength person, which I could very easily say, I've got to do some balance work. I've got to do some stamina work and I've got to kind of keep those in balance to meet the goals of what I think I should be as, as a fit person. Okay.

The next is patience. Fitness does not just happen and it's not something that you're going to always have. There'll be an injury if you injure yourself, you need to be patient about the recovery. You need to be patient about the time it takes. You need to be doing the, the physical therapy that's necessary and not going out there and immediately trying to get back into the workouts you were doing. Have the patience to listen to your body and do what's right for you.

The next is persistence and consistency. We have to keep showing up. We have to keep working. We can't rest on past. You know, this is not a situation where we, we built up a nest egg that we can now live off for the rest of our lives. Fitness doesn't just stay with us. We have to keep paying in so we have to keep showing up and we have to keep doing the work. Uh, progression. Uh, if we're not progressing, if we're not pushing ourselves toward progression, we're very likely more to regress. That's the aging curve. So making sure you're working towards progression is very important.

The eighth, again, is recovery. And I can't stress this enough if you're working hard, if you're doing the focus, if you're doing the intensity, you're doing all these things you need. Also let your body recover when it's time to recover. So being smart about recovery is really, really important. And then the final is don't let fitness over. Well overdue wellness. Wellness is health, happiness, and fitness. So you want to have all three in your life, so take time for all of them and don't let fitness push you out of those other two.

before you get outta here, I wanted to take just a moment to invite you to our Facebook Group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group we have weekly challenges. I share all kinds of information there. It's sort of like a way to keep conversation that we have on this podcast going, so if you'll go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group you can join the 40+ Fitness Podcast Group and be a part of a like-minded community. We help each other get where we want to be. We celebrate our wins. We have a good time. I hope you'll come join us. 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group.

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Allan (01:05):
Naomi, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Naomi (01:08):
I am so excited to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you.

Allan (01:11):
Your book High Fiber Keto. Okay. First, you know, fiber and keto in the same book title right next to each other. Actually getting along, uh, a 22 day science-based plan to fix your metabolism, lose weight, and balance your hormones. So when I heard this book was out there, and like I said, keto and fiber in the same title and right up to each other and they're not fighting, they're actually getting along in this book. So I don't want to give all of the plot away, but, uh, you know, I just thought that was a very interesting concept and I was really eager to dig into the book and I'm glad I did because I learned quite a bit.

Naomi (01:45):
I'm so glad to hear that. You know, it's, um, to me, first and foremost, keto is something that I've been passionate about personally for about two and a half years. So I've been in a ketogenic nutritional ketosis state for about two and a half years. I've come out of it a couple of times, but most of that time I've been there. But I was born in Switzerland. I was born on a biodynamic farm and so whole foods and, um, clean, nutritious vegetables, meats, dairy, fruits, all of the things. And I've eaten a lot of grain over my life. Um, all of it started with this premise of whole food. And I, I really appreciate the philosophy of the concept that look, not one size fits all and it also depends a lot of times on our age. So I'm 46 years old. Nutritional ketosis is perfect for my body because I'm like 75% of the U S population, which says that they are carb or experiences Carb intolerance may not recognize that that's really what's happening, but they're carb intolerant.

Naomi (02:59):
Growing up in Europe, my mother's French eating baguettes every single morning, having a carb centric diet. It took me many years to get to the place where my autoimmune system was like, okay, I'm done. I can't take any more of this abundance of glucose. You know, my insulin was all over the map. My blood sugar was all over the map. And look, I was eating healthy foods, but it was the time in my life. And so I'm excited to sort of bring what fundamentally I believe is important for all of us. And that's fiber and what fiber does in our body, like 90% of Americans are deficient in their fiber. And then when you take, you know, there's soluble and there's insoluble fiber, some of the fibers that are out there, the soluble fibers have different types of fibers, like things like inulin that literally create the prebiotics that feed your whole microbiome. So your probiotics in your body love certain foods. And those happen to be a lot of these amazing fibers that connect with the nutritional ketosis.

Allan (04:18):
And I want to jump ahead to that. I want to talk about fiber because I think you're right. It's one of the big arguments when you go in and say, okay, I'm going to do this keto diet. And they're like, Oh well you won't get any fiber in your diet and therefore that's bad. But I know, and they're right, there's a lot of science out there that tells you that fiber is beneficial to your heart, but you got to get it from the right sources. So in the book you had the five fiber facts, could you kind of go through those facts and kind of walk us through, because one, I think it's going to show us how important fiber is in our bodies and then two, it's going to kinda dispel some of the myths of why Keto and fiber are not really against each other and they can actually work together.

Naomi (05:01):
Yeah. You know, I'll just give you a little bit of background and then we'll get into the five facts around fiber. What I would say with the five fiber facts is that when you're getting into nutritional ketosis, when you getting into nutritional ketosis, what usually happens is your body naturally in trying to sort of meet the 65 to 75% of the fat needs that you have, your body naturally just gravitates towards what's almost like a little bit easier and more simple. And so over time, what I was finding for myself in my own body is while I had always consumed a ton of fiber, I wasn't getting enough fiber when I started keto. So the five fiber facts were really like where I fell and started hurting my own health because I wasn't getting fiber. And then recognizing, okay, how do I bring these carbohydrates into my body in a way that's not going to take me out of nutritional ketosis?

Naomi (06:07):
Because by the way, I feel amazing in nutritional ketosis. So I would say the very first thing that anyone needs to think about when it comes to these fiber facts is that if you're eating things like cruciferous vegetables, you and I are both really big fans of them. What are they? Things like a broccoli, things like, you know, the, the most delicious cauliflowers. I mean there's cabbages. Like there's so many different, uh, Brussels sprouts. I had a ton of Brussels sprouts last night. So this family of vegetables do more than just bring in the good fibers. They have so many health benefits. I mean, we could go through the sciences. It's completely mind blowing as we know it. They also activate autophagy in our body. And my first book, Glow 15 is all about the ways that we can naturally activate within our system what we have. And activating a autophagy is our natural detox system.

Naomi (07:12):
We know that the cruciferous vegetables help to naturally detoxify our body. And so in order to have this optimal health, we have to make sure that we're really bringing in the right amount of fiber. So most people need somewhere between 25 and 35 grams of fiber. But because fiber's a carbohydrate, and in my view of nutritional ketosis, I try to keep my carbohydrates to about 50 grams a day. I don't play with net carbs or I don't or you know, the, I just say 50 grams of carbohydrates. So then I'm looking at fiber as part of those carbohydrates. And fiber obviously is utilized in the body in a very different way than other carbohydrates, right? It's not going to spike the insulin, it's not going to create the blood sugar issues. So it's, it's pretty exciting to sort of think about how that can work in the body.

Naomi (08:13):
So fiber helps to balance our blood sugar and we know that this balancing act that fiber does is just one of the sort of benefits of fiber. And what I found when I brought the two together, Keto and fiber was that the ketogenic diet also helps to balance blood sugar. So you take the two and you have like a 10 X effect, so that's a really powerful thing. Again, next one. Satiety. Nutritional ketosis helps us to feel satisfied and for me one of the best benefits was being able to take control of my mind again. We have like 60,000 plus thoughts in an average day. How many of those thoughts do we spend craving some sort of sugar or some sort of food or whatever it may be. When you get into nutritional ketosis and your body's able to really use your own body fat as your fuel instead of using sugar glucose as a fuel, you become satiated, your mind is able to focus on many other things because you're not an on this hamster wheel.

Naomi (09:31):
Well, fiber also really helps us to say sheet, which again helps us to not have those cravings. So it becomes like this virtuous cycle of positivity for our health and our wellbeing. So it helps with satiety and it helps with cravings. And the beauty of fiber rich foods, you know I have artichokes on the front of my book is a fiber dense food is a nutrient dense food. The whole food aspect of fiber rich foods is so powerful. So you get like a pack of all of that, which I love very much. And you know the artichoke is a great source of fiber. It's got about, on average a mid sized artichoke has about 10 grams of fiber. It's also got all of the important electrolytes. So one of the big issues that we have when we are deficient in fiber, which again about 90% of Americans are deficient in fiber, is we also become deficient in magnesium.

Naomi (10:37):
And we know that magnesium is this core mineral that we need for recovery when we exercise. We need it for over 300 reactions in our body. And yet it's not only about it not being in the soil like it used to be, it's also because all of our crops are being sprayed heavily. So even if you're eating organic, you're still not getting the levels of magnesium that your body needs. And then you take it a step further. If you're not eating fiber when you're doing nutritional ketosis, it makes it even more difficult. And magnesium is so critically important for anyone who's doing keto. It doesn't matter what diet you're doing, it's going to be super critical. But the electrolytes that you need to take when you're doing nutritional ketosis are more so than if you're on more of a carb centric diet. So the last thing that I would just say sort of as, as the five areas of focus with fiber is the fiber helps with our digestion. It helps to improve our digestion, it helps to increase the amount of butyrate that we're producing. And butyrate, as we know, is how our ketones are produced. And ketones are the energy source. You know, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino considers them like the fourth macronutrient. Um, there's a lot of research that we're going to see around ketones and what ketones do for our brain, what they do for our different organs. But the beauty of fiber is it works synergistically, truly with nutritional ketosis and within our digestive system it also helps with the production of butyrate.

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Allan (12:18):
So some of the core things that came out of that, then I want to kind of just reiterate here is one, you're getting your fiber from whole foods. This is not something where they say, okay, here's a cereal that has all this high fiber stuff, but we're still talking about real food. The other thing is, you know, for most people you can get in and stay in nutritional ketosis with 50 grams of carbs per day, particularly if a large percentage of those is coming from fiber. So if you're targeting that 25 or 30 or 35 grams of fiber and you're measuring your ketones, what you'll find is that you'll be able to get into ketosis. There's other people that will just, they'll cut out carbs entirely. They'll get down well below 20, maybe down to zero or 10 or something like that.

Allan (13:03):
And they find themselves in ketosis pretty quickly. But then they're not getting their magnesium. They're not getting their sodium, they're not getting their potassium. So they're having to supplement with those things. Whereas if they're eating a nutritionally dense fiber rich diet, that is also ketogenic they're less likely to be deficient in those minerals are going to be getting the nutrition they need. And so it's kind of like you said, it's the best of both worlds because you're going to get to eat your Brussels sprouts too. And I love Brussels sprouts by the way. We just can't find them on this Island. And often enough, every time I see him, I snatch them up. Uh, I had my wife, my wife went to David, which is a town about five hours away from here. And I told her she asked what do you want?

Allan (13:45):
I'm like cauliflower, all the cauliflower you can buy. Cause we can get rice cauliflower. But they charge like for like 16 ounces of it, they charge like seven, eight bucks. And so I was like, buy some cauliflower. So it's, you know, for $3 you buy head, she'll buy me three heads of cauliflower for nine bucks. So I made a bunch of cauliflower rice. Yes. And so you know that's kind of the cool thing about all this is that when you're giving your body what it needs it starts operating better. Your thought clarity, everything else is going better. You had a concept in the book that I just thought was awesome because I tried to tell people, you know, don't, don't feel like you have to kill yourself on a treadmill every day to get weight loss and also realize that, you know, sitting around doing nothing is also probably not the answer as well. You want to get yourself into a good basic protocol of movement and everything else. So you're finding kind of an optimal space for lifestyle. You mean the term you used in the book for that was dream metabolic engine. Take a few minutes to get into that concept because I really liked this concept.

Naomi (14:52):
Yeah. I love this concept. I'm very excited to share it with all of you. So as a woman in her mid forties, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my health. My biology, I have four children. I'm a founder and entrepreneur, you know, and an author so my time is so limited. And I also, you know, I know, but it feels like we all know what it feels like to have a body that's like really working with us and for us. And so I'm always striving to give my body what it needs at this time. And it's not static, right? We talked about different diets for different people. And I am not a dogmatic person. I've never believed like right now for my body, nutritional ketosis is what keeps giving and it's been two and a half years. But it doesn't mean in a couple of years that I'll be in a place where I can transform what it is that I'm eating.

Naomi (15:57):
It's the same thing with exercise and it all comes to, and like mindset is, is another example of it and how we leap and how much regenerative sleep we need. Um, but it all comes back to this idea of our metabolism. So just like, I fell in love with understanding how all we needed to do was activate autophagy in our body auto meaning self phagy meaning to eat as like the Greek definition of autophagy self eating, and that we could activate autophagy through the cruciferous vegetables, through different types of exercise, through a nutritional ketosis, through intermittent fasting, through, you know, tapping into your circadian rhythm, so when you sleep, you're really regenerating. I fell in love with metabolism in that same way and it was after I had interviewed over 80 experts. I did this docu series called the Real Skinny on Fat and the real skinny on fat really looks at, you know, everything around what went wrong.

Naomi (17:07):
Why did we here in the United States go from in the 50s having a 10% obesity rate and having a high fat diet to really getting to a place where there were a couple of events that occurred. Um, Eisenhower had a big heart attack. The president had a heart attack. The conclusion from his medical experts was that saturated fat was an enemy. And, um, you know, in Panama how much coconut is enjoyed and how much saturated good fat is enjoyed there. And so our country in the United States went to a place where everything became low fat, no fat. And now if we look at what has resulted from that, about 60% of our country is overweight or obese. Childhood obesity is a thing. It didn't even exist, you know, 50 years ago. And so for me personally, when I learned all of this information and I tried to think of how can I most easily affect my health, where I can enjoy my life and not have to spend, you know, 20 hours a week just trying to put the pieces together from this book or that book or whatever it might be, I felt that our metabolism was really the answer.

Naomi (18:26):
So our heart has a metabolic rate, you know, our brain, we have a whole body metabolism just like there's whole food. And so getting your metabolism to really work with you in the same way that autophagy can is, is essentially the premise of this book. It's the passion behind this book. And so a metabolic engine that's the stream is based on a couple of different principles. It's based on the idea first and foremost that the number on the scale is not the number that you should be thinking about. Right? The number on the scale is just a number. What you really need to be thinking about is the ratio and the ratio between the amount of lean muscle that your body has and is producing and the amount of body fat. And so for any woman, like when you hear that throw away the scale, we're going to get in the gym or we're going to learn about NEAT, which is non exercise activity thermogenesis, or we're going to, you know, increase our cardiovascular activity, whatever it may be, we're going to focus on strengthening and building our muscles and that's going to improve our metabolism so that we can live our most beautiful and healthy life. It's like a very empowering thought. So that's one of the principles around metabolic health.

Allan (20:03):
Yeah. So kind of from that, what we're basically saying is when you get to a good metabolic state, you're going to be lean, you're going to have plenty of energy. And you know, you're basically going to be able to live a very good energetic cause, you know, obviously, and you've said this in the book, energy is life. When we talk about feeling really good, uh, and those days when, when just like everything's happening for us and it's like our energy levels up and where it all comes back to it. I woke up, I rested well, um, I was refreshed, I got good nutrition and my energy was great and I had a great workout and I'm ready to attack day. So I think that's what we're really getting to here is when that stuff starts for you more and more and more, that's you getting leaner. So yeah, the scale is going to probably go down for most of us that are overweight, but that's not the end number. That's a piece of data in all the other data that you can be looking at because there's also, you know, they'll look at BMI, they'll look at waist to hip ratios and there's, there's some value in each piece of that data. But that's just kind of an outlying symptom of the metabolism being primed for you to have the energy and just really feel good.

Naomi (21:17):
yeah. And, and there's other very simple ways to optimize your metabolism. I mean, if you are not doing nutritional ketosis, okay, but start your day. If you're not someone who's sensitive to carbohydrates, but you make sure that you start your day with fat first, carbs last, that's going to support your metabolism. If you want to do an intermittent fast until noon in the day and you stop eating at 8:00 PM, that's going to support your metabolism as well. And we know, you know, to your point, this sense of energy and how our metabolic health really energizes our entire wellbeing, all of our organs. It's pretty phenomenal. There are so many misconceptions about our metabolism. You know, we always think a fast metabolism is what we need. But it's really an optimized metabolism. There are times in our life when our metabolism will slow down and that's appropriate.

Naomi (22:19):
There are foods that we can eat that can help to optimize it. So in the first chapter of high-fiber keto, it's all about metabolism and really starting to understand it from a fundamental level. And we built this assessment that you can do. I built it with a metabolic world renowned expert, and it's about, I think it's about 50 questions, but at the end of it, it's going to tell you what the true age of your metabolism is today. So I'm 46 I want my metabolism to be younger than my chronological age. And if it happens to be older, that's okay too. You can learn the simple steps that you need to take. Like for example, for a woman in their forties you know, us thinking about balancing our hormones. Well, it's something we need to be thinking about all along. But once you get into your forties your progesterone has gone down.

Naomi (23:20):
You know, your estrogen is starting to go down. Your testosterone could be at a very low level. Like that's really the time period when you know these sex hormones are going down. Most women hit menopause by the time they're 51 so understanding how your metabolism is affected by your thyroid and balancing your hormones and eating right for your body at this point in your life is critical. And maybe, you know , I firmly believe in um, in, in taking bioidentical hormones and it's not just about this idea of, okay, I'm going to have more energy or my skin's going to be better. It's also for example, like let's just take testosterone when we're in our forties and for most women it's really going down significantly. It affects our joints, it affects the way our body feels, it affects our ability to make good decisions and to even make decisions. So balancing the hormones and understanding how metabolism can have such a big part of that through the different exercises is really just so key.

Allan (24:31):
Now, one of the concepts that you've got into the book that I think it was again, another great thing to have in this book. There's so many little things buried in there. So we're talking just about the surface of this. And so this book is something that you can go through and I think read five times and you're going to pull something good out of it each and every time. Cause there was all these little tidbits woven in there. But, um, you made a, I think from an advice perspective, a mistake that a lot of people make is they will step in and they'll say, okay, I'm going to go on this elimination diet. They call keto. I'm going to get rid of all my carbs. Uh, and then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to quit coffee. I'm gonna quit smoking and I'm going to start running five miles a day.

Allan (25:11):
And, um, I'm gonna make sure I call my mom at least once a week. You know, they try to change so many things at one time. Uh, and in particular it's the diet and exercise. And I want to kind of specifically get into, because so many people will go, you know, when, when it was new year's Eve, it's like, okay, tomorrow I'm in the gym and I'm also going on this diet. Uh, and their bodies are really not equipped to deal with that much change. So you introduced a concept in the book, you called me time. Ah, and, and I think I really liked that. It's kind of this gentle understanding that movement is still key, but it's not that you have to go spend, you know, an hour on the elliptical Monday through Friday. Can you talk about me time?

Naomi (25:57):
Absolutely. So me time is all about what stands for sort of like the metabolic edge time. So again, it's giving your chance yourself a chance to optimize and not have to like grind. I'm a firm believer that what makes us happy will also make us healthy. And that's, you know, fundamental and philosophical in my world. And I also firmly believe that every day is a new day and it's a daily renewal. So when we wake up in the morning, it's a fresh day. And what we do today is going to impact the way the day is experienced. So from the nutrition that we take, the movement that we do, the foods that we eat, the mindset that we have, this is a daily renewal and we have to constantly be renewing. Um, and it's also a very positive thought and me time goes right into that. So what I did with high fiber keto is I started with those 80 interviews that I did for the Real Skinny on Fat for the docu series.

Naomi (27:01):
Then I myself got into nutritional ketosis and went through all of the challenges. And about a year and a half after I was in nutritional ketosis is what I said, I want to get this concept of metabolic health out there into the world. Like this whole body metabolism concept. And I know that people will benefit tremendously because metabolic syndrome is such a big issue and most people don't even fully understand what it is and that it's affecting their health or that they may have two of the five, you know, or three of the different five factors around metabolic syndrome. So I was really, really passionate about that. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a clinical study to prove out the concept of keto and fiber. And so I did a clinical study at Jacksonville University and I did it only on women, not because we didn't want it also to work for men.

Naomi (28:04):
But because there's so much of a lack of science on women right now, we need more science on women in order to understand, because we're different obviously than men and our hormones play a big part in the way that we live in the health that we have. And so we studied these 25 women and the professors, the experts, the PhDs that created this study with me, what they said is that when a body is getting into nutritional ketosis, it doesn't matter if it's an athlete, it doesn't matter if it's my great grandmother, it doesn't matter if it's my eight year old son who by the way does keto. Um, and he does it, you know, to prevent seizures and he's done it for quite some time. It doesn't matter who you are, when your body is adjusting from using sugar as your fuel source to becoming a body fat burner, you need to focus entirely on that.

Naomi (29:07):
So the program that we did was 22 days and every single participant benefited. And so I thought, okay, we're going to put together an exercise program, but I was absolutely mistaken and the professors told me we're going to put together a movement program. And this movement program is all about NEAT, which is a new area of science. Meat is an acronym for, as I mentioned before, non exercise activity thermogenesis. And this a way that we can just simply move around. I'm going to give you some examples every day and actually burn up to 500 calories. So right now as we're doing this podcast together, I'm standing up, my body is activated, my glutes are activated, my core is activated and I'm, I'm moving my hands around a lot because that's my nature. Anyone who likes to Twitch or tap their knee, keep up the good work, right?

Naomi (30:11):
If your mother said, don't do that, don't, you know, bang your fingers on the table or whatever. All of that is NEAT. All of that is activating your metabolism and it's, and it's helping to burn these calories and it's a form of movement that's really useful. So in the book we show you a very simple plan of adding up to 7,500 steps a day. So you're going to get to that place. You're going to never sit for more than 30 minutes at any point, right? Like I want you just to get up and move around. You're going to engage in, you know, tapping your fingers, shaking your hands, moving around, just this physical movement, wherever, whenever, if it's, you know, we always here park your car away from the grocery store, do more walking. Growing up in Europe, we didn't really use cars in the same way.

Naomi (31:04):
And you know, for you in Panama you have more of a luxury of being on your feet more than we do here in the U S you know, it's, it's more difficult, but there's lots and lots of ways. I mean, even simply using a manual toothbrush like a couple of times a week or just doing physical things and then trying to get outside as much as possible because movement outside is so beneficial to your overall wellbeing. And I consider all that really great. So I don't want you to be exercising when you start this program in the 22 days while you're allowing your body to get into nutritional ketosis. Instead, I want you to be doing this, you know, me time or this metabolic edge time to really activate thermogenesis naturally with movement.

Allan (31:54):
Yeah. So this is not a time to start. If you're going to start a nutrition program, focus on that. You still need movement, your body needs movement. Even if it's just something as simple as like you said, walking around, standing when you were sitting for awhile, tapping hands, uh, doing a little dance while you're brushing your teeth, whatever it is. Um, enjoying that time of movement. Our bodies were designed to move. In fact, our lymphatic system, uh, which is responsible for moving toxins out of our body, which if you're burning body fat, there's toxins being released in your body right now is a really good time for your lymphatic system to be optimized and movement optimizes your lymphatic system. So this is really good. And so it's not the time to start an exercise program, but what's going to happen is once you get into ketosis and your energy level starts optimizing, you're almost naturally going to want to start moving more.

Allan (32:46):
And so it's going to kind of be this self-fulfilling prophecy. As your metabolism gets better, you want to move more. As you move more, your metabolism gets better. And it just, it just builds on itself. So just recognize the exercise will come, the exercise program will come because you'll just have so much energy. At some point you'd be like, I've got to do something with this. Um, so that's going to come. But another thing that I really liked to do, you said it was 22 days for your program, which was, you know, I think it's a really good opportunity for someone to see if something is going to work for them. Too many people quit keto in the first week and say, no, it's unsustainable. If you make it through these 22 days, which you make pretty simple because you tell us exactly what to eat, what to do each day, but you don't just start with day one. Its like, you know, go in and eat all the carbohydrates in my house and run in and start this thing. You kind of have this little prefix prep period to get ready to get started and then the 22 days. Could you kind of just walk us through the program that gives someone an idea of how this all works?

Naomi (33:43):
Yeah. You know, changing our mindset is like the most difficult thing ever, right? I've been doing this for two and a half years. I grew up enjoying whole fats. I never ate low fat or no fat and I still have to work on my mindset because you know, nutritional ketosis is only enjoyed by a very small fraction of the population. And look, there are parts of the world, like when I'm in Alaska, the Inuits have been doing it for a very, very long time. And when I sat down and spoke with a number of the women over there and I said, okay, tell me about your favorite foods. Where do you get your energy from? They were talking about things like blubber, like whale blubber and a lot of the foods that they eat from the ocean, um, and all of the fats. And they never look at coffee as an energy source for them.

Naomi (34:38):
They always look at fat as it, but, but for most of us, education and learning and hearing this counter to what you may be hearing in the media is a challenge in and of itself. So the setup before you get into this is first helping to work with the mindset because otherwise, you know, it's like you'll self sabotage and then you'll be frustrated and you won't get the kind of results that your body wants to give you. Um, so I go into this concept of, you know, making sure that what's in your home, the foods in your fridge and your pantry are the right ones. Getting the mindset going, understanding that the first pitfall that most people experience is from a lack of hydration or, or going from, you know, having all of the hydration that's found in a carbohydrate to the lesser hydration that's found in a fat.

Naomi (35:40):
And so many people get keto flu. And how do you prevent that? So how do you get enough of the, let's say the green gel waters from cucumbers and celery and a lot of the vegetables that can penetrate more deeply into the cells than just a glass of regular water. We talk a lot about hydration in that. In that early part, I speak a lot about obviously the electrolytes and how important they are because that that change is a really big deal early on and then we get into exactly what the participants did in the clinical study and I try very, very hard to make this the most simple step by step guide. We have over 80 delicious recipes. I went back to like comfort foods to make these recipes so that your mind wasn't like, Oh my gosh, I don't want to eat these odd things that I've never heard of.

Naomi (36:37):
No. Like we have peanut butter and jelly fat bombs, we have all this good stuff. So just trying to simplify it so that when you get into the 22 days, you're going to be like the participants, you're going to benefit. Every single one of them had benefits to their health. Like some people, they lost as much as 9.7 pounds of body fat, seven pounds of weight. Um, everybody improved their blood sugar levels. Everybody you know, made changes around their circumference of their waist. Not everybody in the 22 days got into nutritional ketosis. Only 60% of them did. But everybody benefited. So you may be like the other 40%, it may take you a bit more time and I show you exactly how to go there and how to do it naturally and easily.

Allan (37:29):
Yeah. And that's what, this is a very gentle program to get you there. It's not the drastic, drop yourself to know carbs and go through all this heck, if you will for the first seven days with the keto flu and then you come out the other side feeling great. This is more of a gentle, we're going to lower our carbs to a steady state, which for a lot of people, 50 grams is, it's still, it's still a move. And so the preficts kind of gets you in the right mindset, gets you moving, and then you start going and then 22 days you see the effects of what this can do for you. And yes, there are recipes, really eager to try that Gouda cheese sandwiches that you had in there. That's on the repertoire. As soon as I can find some almond flour, I might not have it shipped in. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Naomi (38:24):
You're asking me my top three. I just, first of all, I love what you just said. Um, three strategies I think to stay well and to be happy. Number one is getting into understanding how much sleep and regenerative sleep you need every night. So learning what your sleep cycle is. That's a really important strategy. So once I discovered that my sleep cycle was 90 minutes, I knew that I needed five sleep cycles to feel my best. And so seven and a half hours was better than eight hours. And so that's my number one strategy. Another strategy, and it's, and it's here in the book, is all about hydration, right? I think most of us believe, okay, I have to drink eight glasses of water to be hydrated or whatever. We know that you need to be urinating six times a day in order to be flushing through and really being hydrated and what are the ways that we can get hydrated.

Naomi (39:25):
I spoke a little bit about gel water. I'm really passionate about deep hydration at a cellular level. Because when we don't have that and as we get into our forties and beyond our ceramides, you know, the lipid I layer that sort of protects our body. It's like the mortar between bricks, it starts to break down on our skin and so our skin starts to leak moisture, it starts to leak that hydration. And so I'm a really, really big fan of understanding all things hydration and I think that's a huge piece. And then of course understanding what's right for your body, what type of foods are going to energize you and make you happy and healthy and being able to be flexible enough so that you don't put yourself into a box and then four years later your doctor's like, I cannot believe you've been eating these foods because your blood levels show this. Then you're deficient in that. So it's really about flexibility and constantly customizing your life for you.

Allan (40:35):
Thank you for that. Naomi, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, it's called High Fiber Keto. Learn more about what you're doing. Where would you like for me to send them?

Naomi (40:45):
They can go to highfiberketo.com we have a website, Naomi Whittel. I have a YouTube channel and we've got tons of videos showing, you know the recipes and different activities within the book. All of my social platforms. And then our website is just naomiwhittel.com.

Allan (41:03):
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/424 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Naomi, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Naomi (41:13):
Allan, thank you so much for having me. I love being here with you.

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Keto for vegetarians and vegans with Dr Will Cole

Less...

Allan (01:10):
Dr. Barnard, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Barnard (01:13):
Thank you. Great to be with you today.

Allan (01:14):
You know, it's interesting. You have so many books out and, I guess it's a little bit embarrassing. I've been in this industry, doing this podcast for over four years and I don't know how I've missed you all these years. It's kind of interesting, but this book that we're going to talk about today, Your Body in Balance: The New Science of Food Hormones and Health is actually pretty good. I really enjoyed the read.

Dr. Barnard (01:37):
Pretty good? It's groundbreaking.

Allan (01:42):
Well it is, it is. There's a lot in there. It's a very deep book. And particularly what I like about the layout and I know you kind of said something at the beginning of the book of you can read it this way, but you probably still want to read it cover to cover. So I was a cover to cover guy. I will say, you know, there were sections of it that I thought, okay, this, this is cool and I understand this and I know that and okay, that makes sense. And then, Oh, I didn't know this. So it is a good book because it brought out a lot of things that I didn't know. And it related a lot of, I guess, basic illnesses we go through. Many of them kind of come from the same problem and it's the quality of our food.

Dr. Barnard (02:23):
That's right. And to be really specific, many people have all kinds of symptoms that they had no idea it related to their hormones being out of control and hormones are messengers. So the ovaries make estrogens and the estrogens go to the uterus and they get it ready for pregnancy or the testes make testosterone. And so that goes to your, to a man's brain and makes him want to run for president. Kidding. But, uh, the hormones affect our bodies in many, many ways. And if you are unaware, you may be unaware of it, but a young girl has menstrual cramps or endometriosis or a couple has infertility and he never realized that their hormones were out of balance. And more importantly, they didn't realize that their hormones were knocked out of balance by what they were eating for breakfast. And so the point of your body in balance is to say, here's how the hormones are working.

Dr. Barnard (03:12):
Here's the reason why you're depressed or why your blood sugar is high. Here are the hormones that relate. Here's how to pick foods to get you back into balance. And what you said is right that there are certain themes that come through over and over and over again. Cheese is terrible from the standpoint of your hormone balance. Uh, animal products in general are not good and plant products are better. And so we go through it, tell people to, to really get back into balance and to be able to reclaim your health as a just an amazing thing.

Allan (03:42):
Yeah, and I'm a huge proponent of, of people going out and saying, okay, let's, let's look at the science. Let's look at what's there and then let's listen to our bodies. If we're not healthy, what we've been doing isn't working and there's not really going to be a pill that the doctor can give us that's going to compensate for eating the wrong way for years and years and years.

Dr. Barnard (04:05):
Unfortunately, that's what medications are trying to do, but they don't do a particularly good job. Um, with regard to diabetes, which is now the hormone that's not working is insulin. Insulin is a hormone. It's made in the pancreas that goes to your cells and it acts like a key to try to let sugar get into the cell because sugar or glucose is the name of it. It's job is to give energy to your, to your muscles and, and to the rest of you. And insulin is a key that loves the sugar in the cell. But if it's, if it's not working, you end up with high blood sugar and diabetes. So our research team developed a better diet for diabetes that turned out to be 300% better than the best current diet. We were funded by the U S government to do it, and it works really very well, but it's a completely different view of diabetes.

Dr. Barnard (04:58):
We now understand that the reason that insulin isn't working is because fat has built up inside the cell. And as long as there's a lot of particles of just grease, fat, lipid inside your muscle cells, the insulin can't work well and you end up with diabetes. But the beauty of this is if you get that fat out of your diet, it tends to come out of your cells and diabetes improves. And in some cases diabetes just goes away, which is something that previously people thought was not possible. So our goal here, choose the foods, get the hormones in balance, and let your health recover.

Allan (05:34):
Yeah. And it's following, you're following a similar vein that I've, I've had with many doctors that I've had on the show and we talk about, okay, you've got to eliminate some foods because they're just not doing your body well. And so when I look at the vegan diet, and from my perspective, again, I'm not vegan, but I look at it and say, you do need to, a lot of your diet has to be somewhat plant-based. You shouldn't go completely carnivore. And vegan is an approach. It's, to me, it's an elimination diet and it's an approach to where you can actually learn what your body performs very well with. And so I just, you know, as we go through, when we talk about elimination diets, in either case, I think it's very important for you to understand the nutritional basis behind what you're doing. And so, uh, I'm not going to be the person that throws a stone and says you can't get your protein if you're a vegan. Cause that's a false statement. You can't get proper protein. But there are some things you have to be aware of that you're not going to get initially out of a vegan diet. And you have to work around that.

Dr. Barnard (06:40):
That's right. You won't get ecoli. You won't get salmonella. You're not gonna get any cholesterol. I'm teasing a little bit, but the animal products are really unhealthy for us in so many ways. They provide a lot of things we don't want. I mentioned infectious bacteria and parasites and all that kind of stuff, but they have cholesterol, they have a lot of saturated fat. Dairy products have estrogens in them that came from a cow. You have absolutely no need for any of that stuff. And a plant based diet is dramatically healthier than animal based diet. But what you said is true. You want to plan it. Do you want to make sure that it's the best it can be?

Allan (07:17):
And so for someone that's going to go pure vegan, uh, they're going to have to recognize that B12 is an element of that diet that isn't there? They're going to have to supplement for that.

Dr. Barnard (07:27):
Easy to do.

Dr. Barnard (07:28):
And the same thing with a carnivore, when they go out and decide they want to do carnivore as an elimination style, I would just get completely opposite spectrum of what you're talking about. But they're, they're going to need fiber. They're not necessarily getting the fiber they need properly. So on either side of these, there's just a little bit of thought that I think has to go to any kind of elimination diet.

Dr. Barnard (07:48):
Well, there's, there's much more to it. If a person's on a carnivore diet, they need to consider the fact that they're at high risk for colorectal cancer. They're at high risk for cardiovascular disease. They're probably at higher risk for Alzheimer's but the jury is still a little bit out there. We are not designed physiologically to be eating, uh, animal products and we, and we don't do well when we, when we make them the center of our plate.

Allan (08:13):
Okay. I do want to ask that question because that was something that's in my mind trying to figure this out because you know, it's funny, there's this meme going around the internet right now that says, you know, we used to think that people were idiots because of a lack of access to knowledge. And now with the internet we have access to all knowledge and it really hasn't solved the problem. That's kind of the joke of it. You can have complete access to information and still not know the answers to things. There's so much information out there, so much conflicting information that's often difficult to parse it out. And so we typically like to put paradigms together, you know, like calories in, calories out. It's just an easy little way of thinking about food and energy expenditure. But another one that's out there that's pretty common, and I actually kind of believe a little bit of it's true, is the ancestral eating.

Allan (09:02):
And granted that, I know my ancestors did eat plant matter as a part of their regular diet. But if you live in Northern Europe, you can't, you can't survive as a vegan year-round because the is just not going to be there.

Dr. Barnard (09:17):
You mean today or you mean?

Allan (09:19):
Well, I mean, yeah, I don't mean today. Today, I've got you know, Safeway or what are they? I forget what they call their grocery stores over there. Sansbury's or whatever. So yeah, there's grocery stores everywhere and so you just get your groceries and they're shipped in from Mexico or Chile or Spain or wherever. But in the general sense of our evolution of us coming through, um, there were periods of time when we would not have access to plant matter at all.

Dr. Barnard (09:46):
Okay. So your, your, uh, your, uh, ancestors were in Europe. What was specifically where,

Allan (09:52):
uh, it would have been in, uh, Ireland, up into Norway, all the way over to, uh, what would be I guess Western Russia area? All of them. Yeah. Almost nothing. Almost nothing South of that. If, if 23 and Me, uh, it was actually right about that. Uh, there's almost nothing else. Yeah.

Dr. Barnard (10:12):
Okay. Um, go back in time. Where did they come from? Where did, where did they migrate from to get there?

Allan (10:18):
Uh, most of them migrated up from closer to the equator.

Dr. Barnard (10:21):
Uh, which Continent?

Allan (10:22):
uh, Africa. From what I understand.

Dr. Barnard (10:25):
Okay. Uh, what can you eat in anF in Ecuadorian Africa?

Allan (10:28):
Oh, tons. There's the equitorial region would have been flush with fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Barnard (10:34):
So a natural diet for you would be lots of fruits and vegetables and plant based foods.

Allan (10:41):
I don't know. I mean potentially, yes.

Dr. Barnard (10:44):
And your ancestors had the same bad judgment that my ancestors had, which is to leave that wonderful, uh, equatorial environment and to go to a Northern climate. Mine ended up in North Dakota. Um, and so, uh, our healthy a healthy diet for us, if we look at it, we are in the biological group of great apes, which is chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans and Bonobos. And they are mostly or exclusively a herbivorous and, and that's the diet they were still good, good with. And, and it's amazing what happens when you kind of take a lesson from that and use it. Um, the thing that actually caused me to write this book, Your Body and Balance was that a phone call from a young woman who was eating all the wrong things. She had terrible mess, Joel cramps. And who would think that menstrual cramps would have anything to do with, with what you ate?

Dr. Barnard (11:34):
Um, she called me up and she just said, I can't get out of bed. This happens to be every month for about one day. I've got a business trip tomorrow. What do I do? I said, let me give you some painkillers to get you through today and tomorrow. But then I suggested to her a diet change that I don't think any doctor would ever have suggested for cramps. I said, how about this? No animal products for you at all the next month and keep oils really, really low. And it absolutely cured her, her cramps. She thought, what is, you know, how could this be? So I did a randomized clinical trial of that same prescription in a large group of women who had had cramps. And it, it works. It's very effective. What she didn't know was that your body has a system for eliminating excess estrogens.

Dr. Barnard (12:20):
And it depends on fiber. And if you have lots of fiber in your diet, which comes only from plants, you eliminate the excess estrogens. If you don't eliminate them, they cause the uterus to go through more vial changes every month. And you feel terrible if you eat a lot of fatty foods, meat, dairy products and so forth, you get too much estrogen in your body as well, not from those foods, but your body's response to the fat by making estrogen apparently. And if you eat cheese, cheese has estrogen in it that came from the cow. Nobody explained this to her. Her own doctor never told her this. But my point is that we in nature we would have had a very high fiber, very low fat diet, uh, with no ice cream in it. So we wouldn't be getting estrogens from a cow and it returned to a more healthful diet is, um, is amazing what it will do in balancing the body.

Allan (13:11):
Yeah. And I do agree with you there. Um, wholeheartedly. I think the, uh, the emphasis we have on our, um, food in the Western diet of milk and cheese is really kind of off the reservation there. We're, um, we're a milk and cheese eating nation for one reason or another.

Dr. Barnard (13:30):
Yeah. And it's, and it's bad in every way. I have an now by point of disclaimer. Um, I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Uh, I come from my extended family raised cattle. They're all good, decent people, but I have to say to raise cattle for dairy or for me, this is obviously the cattle don't enjoy it. It ends up being a fatal experience for them. Um, and the environment doesn't enjoy it because they're belching methane all day long and your coronary arteries aren't too cool about it either. Um, so it's, it's a good idea to break away from that even though that's, that's the way most all of us were raised initially, unfortunately.

Allan (14:05):
Now, do you think that there's significant difference, um, because one of the things you said in the book was, you know, obviously for, for giving them the hormones and they're getting pregnant every cycle that they're eligible to be pregnant because they want to maximize the, you know, the yield, uh, off of their cows. And so that's, that's part of the problem. Do you think there are more sustainable ways that you know you could raise cattle that would not cause as much problem or is it just inherent in any access to any food that's a milk or cheese regardless of whether it's a properly raised animal or not?

Dr. Barnard (14:42):
Well, if you want to get cheese just to state the obvious, cows aren't going to give you any cheese or milk or anything. Well, they don't give it. People take it. The way this has done is you take your left hand and put a big glove on it, up to your shoulder and insert it into the cows rectum. This is what happens on every glass of milk came from this source through the rectal wall. You can feel the uterus and you hold it steady in your left hand grip. You then take your right hand and load up a very long syringes looks like a knitting needle and you jam it through the cervix and you impregnate the animal. The reason that this is done is that if the animal has not been pregnant, she's not gonna make milk.

Dr. Barnard (15:18):
Her pregnancy is about nine months. Uh, at the end of that time, she will give birth. The male calf is slaughtered, uh, for veal. The female calf is taken away because you don't want her to drink the milk because if you did, you would, you wouldn't have anything for you. So you, you're, you're now just taking that milk that is supposed to be for her baby. And so now you're asking me, well, how do I do this humanely? How do you artificially inseminate a cow humanely? How do you take away their calves humanely? How do you kill her humanely when she's not productive anymore? These are fantasies that we have. And for me as a doctor, I'm not an ethicist, I'm a doctor. What I see is all of the things that come as a result of that, which is the estrogens in the milk are affecting your body. The lactose sugar in the milk breaks down to produce galactose, which is toxic to the ovaries. There's no good side to it apart from the fact that culturally we've come to accept it as normal.

Allan (16:14):
Okay. All right. We don't want to know how the sausage is made. I guess is the answer. Yeah.

Dr. Barnard (16:19):
Well you know and I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been on the other side for half my life. I mean I have personally driven cattle to slaughter. As a child, I had a 20 gauge shotgun and I went out with my dad and we killed all the, anything that moved out of Canada into North Dakota. So I understand all that, but there comes a time when you understand what it does to your body, what you're doing to the planet, what you're doing to animals. We used to have the idea that animals were resources. I think that's a mistake. I think we need to think of them as people are not people, but they're beings who are sharing this planet with us. And to the extent that we can leave them alone, I think that's a good thing.

Allan (16:55):
Okay. Um, now you had a very interesting perspective on fish oil and I remember that that part of the book, I was just, it was, I was a fascinating read to kind of go through it. Do you mind taking some time to talk about why fish oil and fish might not be a good idea?

Dr. Barnard (17:11):
Well, I have to say science is still marching forward on this, but you might be referring to the connections with prostate cancer. This was totally unexpected. You know, people have tried to make money by selling fish oil supplements. They don't work particularly well for or at all for protecting the heart. And that was kind of what had been hoped for. But in these studies, it turned out that men consuming the fish oil capsules would have a higher risk of prostate cancer. And at first that was thought to just be a statistical fluke.

Dr. Barnard (17:44):
But it shows up over and over and over again, including researchers who are trying to disprove. So we still don't know the mechanism for it, but we just see this. So the question is, should, should people avoid it? And I think the answer is yes. Now with that said, Let's say a person wants to boost their omega-3 content and um, they, what you can do if you wish is you can, you can get a blood test. Um, there are companies, there's one called Omega quant. As in quantifying your Omega three Omega quant will send you a card. It costs maybe $50, $60 and you put a drop of blood on it, you send it back, they'll tell you if you're low in Omega three or not. And if you're not, you can maybe stop worrying about it. Perhaps if you are, you can decide if you want to take the risk of supplementing with Omega three. If you do, there are, luckily there are vegan Omega threes available. They're there. They're exactly DHA and EPA just like a fish, although they don't smell like a fish, they don't have mercury in them or whatever. And they're okay, but the safety of them is still uncertain, uh, because of the prostate cancer risk.

Allan (18:52):
Okay. Now I hear about this more and more as you know, obviously now I'm in my fifties and so, you know, I've got friends in my fifties and sixties and so the conversation around a bioidentical hormone replacement seems to be kind of a regular recurring conversation amongst my friends and kind of out in the industry. I think it's becoming much, much more mainstream than it ever was. And a lot more people are looking to it to either help them deal with menopause or as, as men just kind of feel a little bit more viral and, and you know, in many cases to try to address other problems like ED, you don't think that's such a good idea though.

Dr. Barnard (19:31):
Yeah, I have to say I'm concerned about, and the reasons and actually it's, it's not that there's anything unusual about the bioidentical hormones. They, uh, or, or I should say that if they're formulated correctly, they might be an exact match for yours. What I'm concerned about is that yours are dangerous. Um, where we see this very clearly as in women, a woman has estrodiol, which is a hormone in her bloodstream that diminishes at menopause and she may have hot flashes or whatever. And she goes to the doctor who says, let me, let me give you a prescription for Premarin. And she goes online and discovers that Premarin comes from a horse and it's a mixture of, of estrogen, some of which aren't, aren't human estrogens at all. And, and she learns that Premarin, the name comes from pregnant mare's urine and that all seems gross.

Dr. Barnard (20:20):
So she goes back to the doctor and says, what do you got? And there are hormones that are actually not horse derived, not animal derived at all. And they are a match for your own hormones. But then you discover that your own hormones, if they're in too high of a quantity, will increase your risk of breast cancer. Uh, so for post-menopausal breast cancer is directly related to the amount of estrogen in a womans blood. And so she's supplementing her natural hormones with extra hormones, her risk of various cancers likely to be higher. So that's where we are. And, um, my concern is, is that even if they are identical to yours they're still problematic.

Allan (20:59):
Okay. And I think one of the other concepts that was in the book that I thought was really important because it's, I think it's missed more times than it should, is if, if a man suffering with ED, that's a big red flag that something bigger is going on in his body.

Dr. Barnard (21:13):
Oh my goodness. Um, this is, I'm glad you asked that. And just about every primary care clinic and in America and everywhere else, um, guys go into the doctor's office and they say, you know, I'm having trouble and the doctor writes amount of prescription for Viagra and I would, he goes, if this is a smart doctor, he will drop his pen, race out the door and grab the patient before he is gone down the elevator and say, I forgot to tell you something and escort the patient back in the office and give him a short speech. Which is the reason that you have erectile dysfunction is that you've got narrowed arteries. Uh, the reason for erectile dysfunction in the vast majority of older men is atherosclerosis. The arteries are narrowed by a lifetime of eating animal products.

Dr. Barnard (22:04):
Fatty foods may be ,smoking, might contribute, diabetes can contribute, and the erectile dysfunction occurs because a man's private parts are a hydraulic system that needs good blood supply to work. And if he doesn't get good blood flow, uh, he's nothing's going to happen. So, um, as his arteries are narrowing from his meaty cheesy, greasy diet, the blood supply to his private parts is shut off. But what the doctor was concerned about is that he has the same atherosclerosis in his heart and the same probably in the arteries to his brain. And he has to explain to him that within the next five years, you are at high risk for a heart attack or stroke men with erectile dysfunction, it is now viewed pretty universally by cardiologists. Erectile dysfunction is the Canary in the coal mine. It's a sign that you've got artery narrowings that ultimately are likely to kill you. So take your viagra if you want to, but start a healthy completely vegan diet and your arteries will open up again and uh, in to a degree in the vast majority of people. And that may mean that your artery or your a heart attack never happens and your stroke never happens. And your erectile dysfunction can go away as well too, which we see all the time.

Allan (23:21):
Yeah, and I think that's really important is, uh, a lot of general practitioners might, might just miss that signal. Uh, pull out the scripts, let you leave for the blue pill and, and think we're all good. But this is, this is a big warning flag for you to keep on the, on the mass to know, okay, there's something bigger going on here and then I've got to make some changes to make sure I'm still around to enjoy those little blue pills. If, if I continue to need them.

Dr. Barnard (23:46):
Well and you may not continue to need them. For a doctor to write a Viagra prescription for a man with an erectile dysfunction, without talking with him about his atherosclerosis and without referring him to a dietician to give him a healthy vegan diet. That's the equivalent of seeing a smoker in your clinic and prescribing some laws and just to help him with his cough. You have to say at some point the smoking is going to kill you. And unfortunately, the doctors still haven't really quite gotten that message. And uh, many of them have cardiologists really understand this, but primary care docs are in some cases they're there, they're not there yet and they really need to be.

Allan (24:23):
Now, one other thing obviously is a personal trainer. This is near and dear to my heart. That continued to come up was the need for exercise that it helps us in so many different ways. Can you, could you give us a little bit of insight into exercise? Why it's helping with so many of these issues, and exactly what's going on in our body that is helping us heal.

Dr. Barnard (24:44):
Yeah. Exercise is, is um, it's a funny thing. Um, and even I think it's been a bit misunderstood. Um, early on in your body and balance. I talk about fertility and there have been say, distance runners, women who are no longer opulate, um, because they're running so much and so people started to think, Oh, don't run so much if you want to be fertile, take it easy, dah, dah, dah. But then other research has shown that the more vigorously women exercise, the higher their fertility. And the way we put it together is that there's nothing wrong with the exercise. Having your muscles move is a good thing where people run into trouble is if they're not keeping up with themselves with their diet and they're losing so much body fat that they are now out of hormone balance in the other direction. That's when the infertility comes in. Um, so exercise is fine. In fact, the more vigorous exercise, a woman who has the higher fertility, as long as she doesn't lose body fat and exercise of course plays a role in, in many, many other things. It's good for brain health. It appears to reverse brain shrinkage. Um, it helps with weight loss a little bit, not, not nearly as much as the diet changes will, but it's part of a healthy diet. I'm part of a healthy lifestyle. I mean.

Allan (26:00):
Yeah. And I think that's cool. The cool thing about it, you know, you referenced Ornish's study, uh, where he had not just eating a vegan diet, but other lifestyle changes like quitting smoking and exercising and the Australian study that you reference also talked about the fact that they, they got them into exercising and that helped with the weight loss. Uh, cause it's just kinda like, just little kick in the butt, right past of what you're doing with your food, uh, that can help you reach that weight loss goal a bit faster. And with the weight loss, a lot of these conditions that you talk about in the book, you know, like diabetes, like infertility and some of those other things, those, those tend to ferret themselves out. If we're forgiving our body what it needs.

Dr. Barnard (26:44):
They really can. No, I do want to say a word for people who are unable to exercise, let's say their joints aren't really shot or they have say retinal problems that are extremely fragile at the moment or they've got massive obesity and they're really having trouble. You could still benefit enormously from the diet changes alone even without a lot of exercise. And the reason we know that is in our research studies, if we're trying to test diets, we ask people not to modify their exercise regimens cause that would be a confounder. Um, so we know that the diet alone works well, but, but adding exercise to it is a really good thing. Plus I have to say, um, if you're out, uh, running a 5K, you can't eat a bowl of ice cream while you're doing it. So it's got lots of other benefits.

Allan (27:30):
Yeah. But they'll figure out a way to drink it. Little goo packets or something. 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. Barnard (27:45):
Well, I'm going to suggest, first of all, you want to follow a healthy diet, which I'm going to say is a low fat, completely plant based diet. It is a good thing to get an a good activity and sleep cycle. So that means do get, give your muscles, have a reason to live, exercise them, but don't forget to stop and sleep at night. So to give yourself the ability to rest so your bed, your best the next day. But the third thing I think is the most important and that's to share what you know with other people because they are at risk for all kinds of problems because they don't have the knowledge that you have. And if you understand how foods and exercise can protect your health, share that information with other people, share it with your loved ones in turn because you are now their role model. They'll keep you on the straight and narrow the next time you have some kind of temptation. So that'll help everybody.

Allan (28:36):
Yeah. And this book has a lot of that information. It's well-researched, it's well supported. Um, so Dr. Bernard thank you so much. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, your Body in Balance, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Barnard (28:50):
Oh well thank you for asking. Our website is PCRM.org that stands for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (pcrm.org) and you'll see me, Neal Barnard to all of our social media and our organization that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is there too.

Allan (29:07):
Okay, well you can go to 40plusfitness podcast.com/423 and I'll be sure to have that link there. So Dr. Bernard, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Barnard (29:17):
Nice talking to you today. Thank you.

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If you've been a listener of the podcast for any time at all, you probably know that I'd moved to Bocas Del Toro, Panama and I now call this home. We've been here just over a year, well in bogus where I live. There's a very social expat community, most of whom are my age or older and it's fairly common for us to meet up with friends for dinner and be joined by new friends. As you can imagine when they find out that I'm a podcast host and a health coach the questions on health and fitness start and the stark reality of the aging curve hits me again and again. The weight gain, the aches and pains, the chronic diseases for most of us getting older sucks but it doesn't have to. If you're ready to make a change, it's time for you to join. 40 plus fitness online group training.

I'm reopening up 10 slots for the 14 day free trial and I mentioned this in a past podcast, but then afterwards realized I had not actually opened up the sign it signup page. I'll call it a senior moment. I forgot to take it out of draft mode. Well I fixed that and now I'm gonna go ahead and extend the free trial until February 29th or until the 10 openings are taken. This trial will show you that online personal training is for you. Basically I'm able to do some things as an online personal trainer that I would never be able to do in the gym. In the gym. You see your trainer for about two to three hours a week, usually maximum.

But in this case with online training, I'm in your phone. I'm an app on your phone. I'm on the weekly group conference calls. I'm in the Facebook group. I'm just a message away. So you have a coach available to you pretty much 24 seven to get you the answers, to push you, to help you, to hold you accountable, to be your partner in helping you get healthy and fit with the app. I can track your workouts, we can track your nutrition, we can set up daily actions that you use to become healthier by building the habits and eliminating bad habits that are holding you back. So if you're ready to check it out again, it's a no obligation, 14 day free trial. Get in, see what we're all about. If it's not for you, then then go. I mean get it, but I believe it is and I want you to check it out. So go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/trial.

Try it out. We spend a lot of time talking about mindset. We spend a lot of time talking about nutrition and we obviously, because I'm a weightlifter, we talk a lot of time about getting in the gym or working out from home to get the best fitness that you can get for yourself. So again, if you're interested in changing your aging curve, you're interested in being younger than you are, the best way to do it is with good nutrition, good exercise. And I'm there to help. So go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/trial and check it out today.

So today I want to talk about viruses because it seems to be a big bad year for that with Coronavirus going around the world really has some people shaken up and two different types of the flu that apparently are going through this year. So I thought this was a good time to have this conversation. Maybe even a little late. I probably had a push doing shows like this more towards November. But it, it has been a particularly bad year. So I wanted to talk about this, but before I get into it, I do want to put out that disclaimer. I am not a doctor. What we're talking about here is not medical advice. It's merely educational and entertaining, hopefully. So you can understand different ways to take care of yourself. Most of the things that I'm talking about here are probably things you actually already know, but it's just a good reminder to have this out there.

As I mentioned, there've been quite a few outbreaks this year and most of them have been viruses that are spread through the contact with the virus and then contact with your mouth or your eyes. Okay. And it's typically with our hands. So we're grabbing something, we're touching something, we're shaking someone's hand. Cause I think that's why the fist bump has become a lot more popular lately. So we're trying to save ourselves there, but just recognize that it typically means that something's coming contact with our hands. And then we've touched our face or our eyes in particular to spread this disease. So the first answer for dealing with or avoiding the dividers is have good hand hygiene. You know, you should be washing your hands regularly with soap and warm soap and water, warm water and soap and, and just basically making sure you get a good, good wash of your hands.

Too often we don't take the time to wash our hands regularly but during this time when you know, these viruses are around, this is the time of year to really, really focus on keeping your hands clean and keeping them out of harm's way. I also am a big believer during this season of hand sanitizer. Again, anything else that's going to keep your hands clean is going to help. I'll tell you a story. I was actually in Hong Kong when the SARS virus came out and it was interesting because one of the guys I was traveling to Hong Kong with, he was from Singapore. He was really, really terrified of the SARS virus. He did not want to go to Hong Kong. But you know, we had to go for this business trip. So we get there and the disease at the time was somewhat consolidated in an area called Calloun.

And you know, we were, we were not near Calhoun when we went for the visit. But then one ladies that was working there was really excited because she had found this great restaurant that she wanted to show us and it happened to be in Calhoun. So we actually took the subway to Calhoun. And in an Asian subway personal space is not a thing. They press up against you crowded really like startings and these in these cars, it's really kinda crazy. I'm a bit of an introvert, so when I've got tons of people around me like that, it's a, it's a little disconcerting, but I put my hands in my pocket so I wasn't touching the surfaces. Rode the subway over, had a nice dinner and rode the subway back. No problem. Again, it's really all about keeping your hands clean and keeping them away from your face.

You know, I see people wearing masks and, and that can be good if you're especially susceptible to disease, which as we get older, our immune system gets a little weaker. As we are young babies, obviously immune systems are what they are. They haven't gotten enough things to really be immune to anything. So there are times when you might want to take extra precautions. Wear gloves wear masks. But for the most part, you could still touch your eyes. It's really in my mind, keep your hands clean. If your hands are clean, you're very, you're less likely to spread this disease to yourself. The second is to manage your immunity. Now most years flu shots are a gas and then the other, they're doing a substance of, they're trying to figure out what the virus is going to look like this particular year.

They're trying to find a way to help us get through this season. So a lot of times these are hit or miss. But obviously, if you know you're going to be around people with impaired immune systems or you're going to be exposed particularly a lot then it's probably a good idea to go ahead and get one. But there are other things that you can do to help support your own immunity. The first one I'm gonna talk about is nutrition. If you're not eating good nutrition, whole food nutrition you're not giving your gut what it needs to keep you healthy. The gut contains most of our immune system, obviously not when we're talking about these types of viruses, but making sure that you're getting good nutritious food is going to support your immune system and make sure that you're in the best shape you can be.

Because a lot of times we're probably exposed to these viruses and we just don't get them because our immune system fights them off. A lot of these others, you know, now can say we won't get a disease won't get one of these viruses. But just recognizing that the stronger your immune system is, the better off you are. And diet is a big, big part of that. Exercise is also a very, very big part of keeping a strong immune system. Now the first thing to recognize is also that stress exercise is a stressor. So if you're putting your body through excessive exercise, you may actually be weakening your immune system. So this is probably not the time to be in the gym for hours working on a treadmill, just killing yourself. But recognizing that if you go through the process of exercising and keeping your body healthy that's going to help your immune system.

And then finally anything you can do to reduce stress. Anything we do that stresses ourselves the adrenals, everything that's going on in our bodies that is suppressing our immune system. Predominantly because right there when you're running from the bear, the stress you're not, your body's not worried about fighting other defenders away. It's worried about the Bayer. So your immune system gets suppressed when you're highly stressed. So anything you can do for stress reduction is going to help you. You help your immune system remains strong. So kind of recapping the immune system part, you know, diet, exercise and stress management and just getting good rest are all going to be very, very important to make sure that you're as healthy as you possibly can, which is a good way of supporting your immunity. All that set all the precautions we can do.

Obviously people are going to come to work with these diseases. In some cases they won't even necessarily know they have them depending on incubation period and the infection period of a particular virus. But if you happen to get sick my advice is to stay at home, manage your illness, get well, and then get on with your life. You know, this is a point where you want to go to the gym but just, just don't. You know, there's all these talks about you can work out and yes, you probably can work out but you're at the gym, you're touching things and you're, you're sneezing or you're coughing and therefore you're spreading this other people coming into the gym, you know, they're, they're likely to get it. And so you just are basically spreading it to everybody else. I know a lot of times workplaces won't less necessarily let you skip work, but trying to stay away from people trying to let this, this period of infection go away will allow you to deal with the virus.

And in fact, dealing with this virus needs to be your number one priority at this point in time, not your PR lift or this other thing you want to try to do with your health and fitness. Getting well from this virus is your priority at that point in time. Also listen to your body. I did have a friend when the H1N virus (I think is what it was called) came out. And he was just 30 years old. He got it and he actually passed away because he stayed home and got sicker and sicker. And by the time he went to the doctor, he was already facing some significant organ failure problems. And so recognizing that if you're not getting better over the course of a few days you need to go seek medical attention. They can, they need to help support your body during that period of time while your body's fighting the virus, but just listen to your body and try to stay away from people and get through this period of time.

Now if someone else in your household ends up with the flu or with one of these viruses you need to change your lifestyle. You know, well, my wife gets ill. I don't sleep in the bed with her when I get ill, I don't sleep in the bed with her. We go to different bedrooms and or I'll sleep in the living room if I need to stay away from people so that I'm not getting them infected. There's a particular period of time when I'm going to be infectious where she can get this virus and I don't want to get that or she has it that I could get this virus. So we change up our lifestyle a little bit for a few days until this period's over. And at that point practice very detailed hygiene issues where I'm washing my hands regularly, I'm using the hand sanitizer.

If I have to carry soup into her, I carry the soup in, I grab her other stuff out. Anytime I'm doing that, as soon as I get through, I'm washing my hands, I'm cleaning my hands with the hand sanitizer and just making sure that I'm, I'm really doubling down on my hygiene practices. So those are kind of some of the core things. Just understanding how these viruses are spread. They can, you know, viruses can live on surfaces for a good long period of time from hours to days depending on the virus. So understanding how these viruses are spread and it's typically going to be through your hands and touching other surfaces where the viruses are at. The harder the surface, the more likely it is to have a contact of a virus. So again, washing your hands, good hygiene practices are going to be kind of your first line of defense.

Managing and having a strong immunity is going to help if you're getting good nutrition getting proper exercise, dealing with stress and getting proper rest you're giving your body the best chance to fight these infections. And then again, recognizing where the disease as, if it's happening to you, trying to avoid spreading it. The more people you spread it to, the more they're likely to spread it to others. And then also if you know someone who has it just kinda managing your lifestyle, managing your hygiene during that period of time so that again, you're not getting it. So I hope this has been helpful. Again, I am not a doctor and I really was just sharing some of this information because I know it's kinda top of mind as we have the coronavirus and the flus out there. As, as we go through and go forward, I'm sure you know, the learn more about these viruses and hopefully, they'll be able to do some things to keep it from spreading. Much further, but it's really gonna come down to what you do for yourself. That's gonna make the most difference in your life. So I do hope you found this helpful.

Before you run off, I wanted to remind you about the 14 day free trial for 40+ Fitness Online Personal Training. It's 14 days, let you kick the tires and see if online personal training can work for you. It's worked for thousands and thousands of other people. I use it with my clients to get great success and I want you to try it to go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/trial and try out 40 plus fitness online personal training.

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Less...

Allan (01:40):
Kyle, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Kyle (01:42):
Hey, how's it going,

Allan (01:43):
It's going well. It's going well. I have been following cryotherapy for quite some time. You know, I love this stuff. I geek out on the health and fitness stuff and things that are going on. And obviously as things go, you know, there's the early the people who are early on, you know, they're going to be the early adopters that are out there looking at these different technologies, different approaches. And so I like to kind of know what's happening because typically that kind of stuff starts hitting mainstream, you know, four or five years later. So I've been reading and hearing about cryotherapy for years along with some other therapies that are coming along. So I'm kinda excited to see these things out there, you know, and particularly where now we've got a lot of evidence that scientific evidence that these things are actually doing some good. So your company is called iCRYO, they offer the cryotherapy services along with others. Could you take just a moment to kind of talk about what cryotherapy is and the different types and you know, how it came about?

Kyle (02:47):
Yeah, most definitely. So we actually, it backdates all the way into the 70s. Uthere was the Japanese scientists that was trying to treat rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, but doing it in a natural way to kind of help accelerate the body's healing power and, and the mechanisms behind the way the body, you know, moves through any modalities as far as healing's concerned. And what he did was he was administering people in subzero temperatures using liquid nitrogen as a cooling application. And as the years progressed, as they performed and perfected the technology, we have machines and chambers to date that are just far superior than really anything else you'd see in the wellness market in reference to convenience of a therapy and as far as what you get out of that therapy from an immediate benefit standpoint. So it's kind of funny, you know, we live in this instant gratification society and when you go and look at a recovery mechanism or something that's of an all natural standpoint, normally it takes some time, right?

Kyle (03:49):
Normally you hear to live a healthy lifestyle, to eat healthy, to you know, whether it's going to work out the gym, you got to spend it hours and hours upon weeks to do these things. When I looked at cryotherapy, it's a three minute session, so it's very fast, and the benefits are immediate. So as soon as you step out of the chamber, you start to feel the effects from that session immediately. So we're capturing the convenience of it being a very short time window for people to have to allocate each day to do this. But even better, it's an immediate benefit. And so wrapped up in a nutshell, cryotherapy, we use liquid nitrogen to cool the chambers down, get those to subzero temperatures. We can set the setting of the machine to a few different levels based on skin sensitivity.

Kyle (04:36):
So the hottest, I always tell people, and I laugh and I say the hottest but the hottest, the machines can go, are roughly around negative 150 degrees Fahrenheit. When I say that people are just blown away, their trying to figure it out.

Allan (04:50):
Those are the experiments where they throw, they throw coffee in the air and it freezes.

Kyle (04:53):
Yeah. So when I say that people kind of give me the deer in the headlights look on, you know, how am I able to stand in a chamber that's negative 150 degrees Fahrenheit and that's at the hottest level. The coldest that we can get some of these chambers down to would be around negative 240 degrees Fahrenheit. So we're talking about extreme cold now. The interesting part about this is nitrogen is a repellent type molecule, so it actually hits the skin and it reflects right off. So we're not actually penetrating the surface of the skin. And getting inside the muscle tissue, which I'll get into the science later around why ice isn't really effective as much as we thought it would.

Kyle (05:32):
But yeah, so we use liquid nitrogen actually repellent hits the skin and reflects off. So we're essentially tricking the mind into going in that fight or flight response for active recovery. So when your body hits that fight or flight mode, it thinks in essence it thinks you're going into to kind of like a dying mode, right? Right. Your body's in shock. You're shocking the central nervous system. So what it does is it rushes all the blood from the extremities to the core. It does this because we have amputees walking the planet today. So we know that we can live without our arms or legs, but the one thing we can't live without is our vital organs.

Kyle (06:09):
So it pushes all the blood to the core basically to save itself is kind of the layman's way to think about it. And then after your two to three minute session of cyrotherapy is done, that blood is enriched during that process and reoxygenated and it goes back out to your extremities and it just provides the body with a sense of euphoric feeling. There's a lot of serotonin, melatonin and endorphins that are released through this process. So you have a kind of that runners high that people could experience. You get that mood enhancement from the serotonin release. And one thing that I do cyrotherapy for is that most people don't realize that it can really provide a benefit is sleep. You take a look at people not allowing their bodies, not allowing melatonin to release properly and they're restless because of that.

Kyle (06:55):
And so what do we do? We go get a prescription for some sleeping medication, right? And then it alters us in different ways that we didn't want the first place. So it, the benefits of cyrotherapy are really, really across the board. Anything from stress, anxiety depressional issues, that's all cognitive rehab, right? That's all mental and I always try to explain to people cryotherapy is not just an athletic recovery tool its there to enhance any part of your life that you're really having trouble with.

Allan (07:28):
So, you know, I was very, very active growing up and all the way through my twenties, and then I sort of took a little hiatus from the whole athletic aspects, but I turned my ankle really, really bad when I was about 20, I guess 26, 27 to the where the doctors, when you go in, they are like, Oh, it's broken. And then it was like, Oh, it would have been better if you broke it. Cause you've done a whole lot of damage. And ice and contrast therapy were a couple of things that we did you said that cryotherapy is different than ice. Can you kind of compare and contrast those so that we can kind of understand why this is, even though you're doing something localized, it's not exactly the same general effect?

Kyle (08:08):
Yeah, definitely. So ice is a, is a penetrating cold. So what I suppose is when you apply it to the skin, it actually penetrates the surface of the skin. The cold gets actually in the muscle tissue. Everybody harnesses inflammation differently. So for a physician to say, you need to do ice for 20 minutes on your knee and I need to do ice for 20 minutes on my knee. Really, that's just kind of a shotgun approach to the rehab portion. He doesn't really know the exact amount of time because everybody recovers in a different time period. Right. So realistically, if you do ice for even a minute longer than you're supposed to, you can start to damage that muscle tissue because you're applying the cold for way too long. And in doing that, you start to damage the recovery process. So you're doing opposite effect of what you were intending to do in the first place.

Kyle (08:59):
Now with with cryotherapy, using liquid nitrogen, as I said before, is it acts as a repellent so it hits the skin and reflects off. Therefore you're getting all the benefits of a cold therapy without any negative side effects of actually damaging the tissue. So it's a much more, and not just enhanced version of cold therapy or cold recovery, but it's a safer mechanism to do what you're trying to do. And, and I think when, when physicians in the medical field adopts it here in the United States it will be part of a protocol for chiropractors, for PTs, for orthos, really anybody that's dealing with some type of a pain or an inflammation type issue. The nice thing about cryotherapy is we don't just offer whole body cryotherapy. We offer a localized treatments as well. And so with the localized unit, it's completely different machine.

Kyle (09:48):
We can actually pour the nitrogen into a hose and centralize it to a specific area, whether it be a wrist and ankle, a low back, a knee. So we can really target areas, not just for pain, but for recovery as far as post-operation. So somebody gets a shoulder replacement or a total knee replacement, and we can spot treat a specific area. Now, realistically you would want to do the whole body cryotherapy over the localized because it provides a systemic reaction. It allows the body to act as one rather than just focusing on a single area. But realistically they're both very effective mechanisms for healing.

Allan (10:29):
So as a healthy person, I mean, so the healing I could see as a healthy person. You know, you talked about some benefits, the sleep, the stress and things like, can we kind of go through some of the basic benefits a little bit deeper? You know I'm like a big fan of anything that's going to reduce inflammation because that's kind of a trigger for most of the diseases we have today. Can you talk about some of those things and just let us know how cryotherapy actually does that?

Kyle (10:54):
Yeah, most definitely. So everybody's going to get a different benefit from cryo. And when somebody asks me if they're a candidate for cryotherapy, the very first thing I jokingly ask is if they're living, breathing human beings. And I say that because every person that walks the planet harnesses some level of inflammation. Now it's kind of a double edged sword because inflammation is necessary, but it's not necessary in a chronic standpoint. So the first step to healing is actually inflammation. So inflammation is required to heal. But what we're trying to do is minimize that inflammation process to where you can heal faster, right? So a lot of people don't understand that the actual first stage of healing in any area of the body is inflammation. So it's a necessary component. We just want to minimize that window on how long that inflammation is actually there.

Kyle (11:43):
Now, for people that deal with chronic inflammation like rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis or fibromyalgia, things that are just chronic, they deal with their entire life. There's no cure, but there has to be a way to treat these things. That's where cryotherapy really comes into the picture. Now, what people really don't understand is cryotherapy is working on an internal level. So it creates a systemic reaction inside the body. And we're essentially moving blood external or internally from one point or another. So you're really taking into account the central nervous system, the way that the mind communicates with the rest of the body I think the interesting part is these chambers that we're dealing with today are told total body chambers, you actually walk into a space where you're covered from head to toe. There's a nerve in the back of the neck called the Vagus nerve.

Kyle (12:36):
It's one of the largest communication tools in the entire body from the brain to the rest of the body and interacting that with subzero temperatures and cold, actually triggers that response. So we're able to take the body from just a normal recovery standpoint and multiplying it immediately through a cryotherapy session. So during a session your mind is talking to the rest of the body and is trying to figure out where it's harnessing the inflammation the most. And it's a very interesting tool that we tell all of our guests during a cryotherapy session. You may feel colder in certain spots opposed to other spots in the body. It's because the cryotherapy is actually recognizing where the inflammation is being harnessed and it's attacking that specific area so it could feel colder in your knees. If you have bad arthritis in your knees, it could feel colder in your lower back if you have metal plates running in your spine, depending on where you're harnessing the pain and the inflammation, that's where it's really gonna feel, guess most aggressive during the session.

Kyle (13:40):
So doing it from a physical standpoint, most people don't look at the mental capabilities that come from the benefits side. We can tolerate things as far as, or we can deal with things as far as headaches and migraines. Those are some things that you deal with on a daily basis that are directly correlated to inflammation. Those are things that cryotherapy can definitely help with. So when I, when I talk about how the number one benefit is inflammation, yes. Most people don't understand inflammation is tied to almost every single issue a living person deals with on a daily basis, physical and a mental standpoint. If you have sleeping issues or even women with uneasy or are not scheduled menstrual cycles, you're dealing with chronic stress, anxiety, depression, a lot of these things are triggered because the body's not naturally releasing endorphins like it should or it's not naturally releasing serotonin like it should.

Kyle (14:36):
And, and I think the one phrase that we started using years ago is cryotherapy unlocks the body's healing power. It unlocks what it's harnessing and not releasing on its own. So it's a very interesting concept to see when the body isn't properly releasing things. Like it should, as long as you can just shock it through a cryotherapy session and essentially trigger that response and allow the brain to communicate with the rest of the body by targeting that vagus nerve. We're able to cut, literally heal the body on its own, which is, which is an amazing technique to be able to do that.

Allan (15:13):
Yeah. You know, the benefits are definitely there. Recently in the press, and I'm probably not a good subject matter to be talking about. But Antonio Brown, who used to play for my loved Pittsburgh went crazy and he ended up at the Raiders. He actually used how cryotherapy as a part of his athletic recovery process, but he burned his feet and he couldn't perform. And so you kinda hear these horror stories, but you hear a story like that and you're like, Oh, there are some risks to cryotherapy that I need to be aware of. Can you kind of talk about some of those risks?

Kyle (15:47):
Yeah. And that's one thing that I saw very early on. I was actually pursuing my doctorate in physical therapy when I came across cryotherapy and so I knew from a, a protocols in a safety procedure standpoint, a training system had to be put in place. And it was extremely interesting when I looked in the cryotherapy and I looked into equipment. And in the process of purchasing, purchasing equipment, there was no training established. There were no guidelines, there wasn't a standard process of care there. There, there was no certification, there was no schooling that was required. Literally Joe and Jane Smith on the side of the street could go purchase a cryo machine today and start a cryotherapy company. And to me, from a physical therapy mindset, understanding that any therapy that's done at any point in time without any education or training can be very detrimental to the person that you're administrating this too.

Kyle (16:45):
And so we took it as an advantage early on for our company to create the very first training platform for cry therapy services. And we still use that platform today to train every single one of our staff and every single one of our locations across the country. I saw this as an issue when it first came out. There are cases all across the nation of user error. And it's not a lack of these people not caring about the business or not caring about the industry. It's just a lack of knowledge, right? It's a lack of understanding that it's a therapy. It's cryotherapy and it has to be treated as such. So that's one thing that I think the industry has a few years to really grab a hold of. Kind of pushing with the rest of my company, the safety side of the industry.

Kyle (17:36):
If, if I could, to be honest, I would probably start a school. I had started an Institute of some kind and train people on the safety behind cryotherapy, the different devices that we use and most liquid nitrogen because that's where these, these burn cases are coming from with the Antonio Brown situation. That's also something that I really wasn't afraid of. Those cases, even though I don't like to hear about them. And I feel really bad for Antonio and all the other people that have suffered these issues, it kind of brings more light awareness and visibility to the industry. And I'm hoping that one day a governing body will either be created or somebody will come in from the government and say, Hey, we really need to pay attention to this. Right. and, and I'm pushing for that because realistically we're prepared for it. We have the safety protocols and the systems and the training manuals that if the government were to ever get involved we would be ready for that.

Allan (18:34):
Well, I'm a fan of not having the government involved in the industry kind of doing the right thing in the first place. What are some of the things, I mean obviously burns, but beyond, you know, burning a part of your body what are some other things that could go wrong with a session like this, if you're not dealing with professional people that understand what they're doing.

Kyle (18:53):
Yeah. I mean, we are dealing with the nitrogen, so there's nitrogen in the air that we breathe today, but there's only a certain percentage of nitrogen, right? So the air that we breathe is a certain percent oxygen, a certain percent nitrogen, but it's not 100%. Dealing with 100% nitrogen there is a time period where if you breathe in too much, you could get a little dizzy. If you breathe in even more, you could actually pass out because you have lack of oxygen to the brain. Now, realistically, if you breathe in nitrogen, are you going to die? No, you're not. You'd have to consume a large portion of nitrogen consecutively to really get to that point. So it's not impossible, but it's definitely a slim to none chance.

Kyle (19:31):
Outside of that, those are really the two biggest issues that you can encounter when dealing with cryotherapy is a burn case, which we've seen that happen way too many times,uwhich is why we're trying to help steer the safety side of the industry and, and, and control that a little bit. But outside of that, you know, really just getting dizzy or maybe passing out in some instance, but it's actually quite interesting. I'm glad you brought this up, but there's new technology on the market from Poland,uwhere the chambers are actually separating the nitrogen from the oxygen and an exhausting out the nitrogen molecules and pushing in the cold air to the chamber. So it's breathable air technology.

Allan (20:11):
Okay. So you think they'll still be able to get down to the same temperatures with an air mixture versus just a pure nitrogen?

Kyle (20:18):
They have. We're actually using that unit right now in our corporate location. We're in the process of swapping all of our existing locations to this newer unit. Number one, because of the safety side of it, right? So understanding that when the guest is inside the chamber, they're breathing in just cold air, right? It's nothing that's gonna allow them to pass out in doing those, since we're not doing a direct nitrogen into the chamber this lowers the risk for burn cases tremendously. I have actually tested this machine out for almost a year before we rolled it out into the rest of our locations and we rolled it out into our franchise model. And I can say right now I've pursued, I've encountered it coldest temperatures this chamber could possibly do and there was zero side effects of even running into a burn issue. So it was, it's almost like we just came out with the iPhone X or the cryo chamber is the way I think about it. It's just a far superior model in the terms of it's extremely safe. And so that's why we decided to make a transition.

Allan (21:24):
Okay. So it's important for someone to do a little bit of research before they pick their therapist or their location. They're going to go just to kind of figure out what type of equipment they're doing, how the people understand the use of that equipment. And you know, obviously the reviews and things like that that are going on with them just to make sure they're getting a good therapist.

Kyle (21:43):
Yup. I think that's one thing that people aren't doing right now that I encourage everybody to do a little bit more is, not just research, not just online research, but call it a place of business where you're thinking about doing these cryotherapy service. Walk in ask your questions. If the person that that's responding to your questions can't answer them thoroughly or they're fumbling or they feel like they don't have a legitimate answers and they're kind of making stuff up on the fly, leave and go somewhere else. Because I think the problem that I have right now is most people are getting a bad taste in their mouth from cryotherapy therapy. Not because of cryotherapy isn't working properly, but because number one, they aren't being run through the process appropriately. Unumber two, they're not mean,uth they're not given the correct explanation in the benefits of the service, so they don't even know what they're doing it for.

Kyle (22:31):
Realistically, they probably just saw LeBron James or Floyd Mayweather or an athlete talk about it. So they wanted to try it out. But just conveying lack of communication in terms of conveying the correct material, walking them through the safety measures as far as how to properly, you know, take a guess. Walking in the door and administer a cryotherapy session. So I really just think there needs to be an enhancement of awareness in terms of when somebody looking into whole body cryotherapy, they just asking the right questions and even if they aren't the right questions, ask any question that comes to mind and make sure that you're getting the right service.

Allan (23:09):
Cool. Now let's say someone has a, they know they've got some inflammation, they've got some joint pain and arthritis and various parts of their body and they want to do the whole body cryotherapy when they walk into the clinic. What does a typical session look like for them? And you know, roughly what is this going to cost them?

Kyle (23:28):
So for the very first time, a few of our centers operate on different pricing structures based on where they're located in the nation, right? We offer the very first session at an intro rate. It's a discounted rate because we know you've never tried this before and it's new to you and you want to experience it, but you don't want to break the bank, right? So some of our location, we have a special of $9.95 for your very first time. Okay. $10. Ureally the barrier to entry is extremely low and we wanted it that way because we want you to try it and we know it's an unknown and we want you to at first before you really start spending money. Usome of our locations and most of the industry will charge anywhere from $20 to $30. So the first session, which in my opinion, that's still extremely low for something that's providing the amount of benefits it is.

Kyle (24:16):
And then after your very first session, it's something where we sit down with a guest and we try to customize that package to them. Not everybody needs to do cryotherapy every single day, but realistically we want to know what you're coming in for so we can help design a plan and a membership specifically to you. We have four different tiers of pricing as far as what our memberships come out too. So based on those four different membership levels, we try to customize that membership directly to that person that's looking in, inquiring about doing cryotherapy throughout the weeks of the month. And so I think it's really crucial to understand what that is person is doing it for and then we help educate them on how many times they should be doing it a week or a month and then get them to understand there's a certain reason why we're recommending this, this membership. Most single sessions after you've done your first session, we charge $50 a single session.

Kyle (25:12):
The industry standard that's still actually pretty low. I know a lot of cryotherapy centers across the nation charge upwards of $60, $70, $80, $90 a session. Me personally, I think they're just gouging the guest. I don't think it's appropriate to charge that much. I do think there is a great value to this service. But what business owners in the cryotherapy space are not reminding themselves about, is it's a therapy? So any therapy that's done consecutively over extended period of time, you're going to see more benefits of, right. If I were to do a massage once a year opposed to once a month, which one do you think I'm gonna get the better benefit from? Probably the once a month. Right? Cause I'm paying attention to my body and I'm helping the issues that I'm dealing with on a regular basis. So I always encourage people to try to fit in cryotherapy as much as they can.

Kyle (26:02):
The very first month they start to try it. Because that's going to do two things. Number one, it's going to get them to understand the real benefits they are going to gain for it because they're obviously doing it on a reoccurring basis. Number two, it's going to get them to recognize how they can actually fit this in their schedule if they're going to continue doing cryotherapy. So it really just points out a lot of good points in the picture of, you know, how often should I be doing cryo and what are the main reasons I should be doing it for?

Allan (26:31):
Okay, now I saw a video on, I think it was on your website where you had a guy kind of coming in and he was walking in for his very first session. And so, you know, there was some, some guidance, there was someone talking him through, okay, you know, do this, do that. Can you kind of talk through that? How, how when I go into the session, you know, how am I dressed, what am I doing? What am I feeling? And then what are the things, like I noticed you told him, keep your head up so you're, you're breathing more oxygen, the nitrogen and that type of thing. Could you kind of talk through that just so they could feel the mechanics of a session?

Kyle (27:05):
Yeah, most definitely. So first time guests, every single time that we encounter our first time guests, it's exactly the same. So yeah, number one, we want to make that instant connection. We have a culture here in iCRYO that I believe is very different from others. We'd like to make relationships with our guests. We like to establish that we're not just here to sell you on something, we're here to get to know you and to actually help you. There are some deep rooted issues that people deal with that they get extreme pain or headaches or some stuff they're not willing to share with just the average person. So you really got to get to know these people. So the first time guests, we make that instant connection. We have a conversation with them for about a minute or two on why they're coming in in the first place, how did they hear about us, what are the issues you're dealing with, and that specialist actually takes them on a tour of the entire building.

Kyle (27:53):
We offer six different services at each one of our centers. Each service provides a different benefit to whatever they're looking to accomplish in their recovery goals. So in doing that, we give about a five to an eight minute tour. We explain all the services that we have one by one in the benefits that they can gain from each service. After the tour is done, we bring them back to the counter. And it's funny, a lot of times they may have come in for a cryo facial or a whole body session or compression therapy session. And after we take them through that tour and we give them some education, they realize, wow, you know, there's, there's maybe two or three or even four services that I want to do now. Right.

Allan (28:31):
It's not just the one service that I came in for, but specifically if they're coming in for whole body cryotherapy, we get them to fill out a waiver and an information sheet so we can better understand some of the issues that they're dealing with. Okay. We set them up with robe, socks, slippers and gloves. On the newer chambers. We actually,udesignate a face mask that covers their mouth and their ears. We do that because you're breathing in extreme cold and we want to be able to block that barrier of cold from the esophagus just for another extra level protection. It's, it's really not required, but we like to take safety to the next level. Uand so in doing that, we provide a face mask, which you can see on some of our newer videos or pictures or website material.

Allan (29:13):
Yeah. This guy was recording a video so he wouldn't have wanted his mouth covered, but yeah. Cool.

Kyle (29:22):
So we designae a dressing room to that guest. We put them in there with their socks, robe, the gloves and slippers. They, they strip down from head to toe. Usually you can wear undergarments. There just can't be any moisture or metal. If there's metal, if obviously you're gonna provide a burn,ulike a necklace or something that's metal, they had to remove those and then any undergarments has to be removed if they're sweaty. So sometimes people will come in directly from a workout or a run or you know, a long day at the plant or a construction worker and they're, they've got sweaty underwear or sweaty under garments. So we asked them to remove those and then we can, we supply them with, with clean and dry undergarments that they can do the session. But yeah, so after they get dressed,uthe cryotherapy specialist brings them over to the chamber explains basically how the operation is going to work. Its a three minute session. So it's extremely fast, which people love.

Kyle (30:17):
We actually created what we call the commandments of cryotherapy. And there are 10 commandments. Uit's basically 10 checks points that we run through with every guest to show them the do's and don'ts of this session. So once again, it's just another thing that we supply in our safety system that shows our guests that we take it to a completely different level when it comes to how safe this process is after their session is complete. Uwe basically just give them some education on what they possibly are feeling and how they're going to feel throughout the day. They go back, they get dressed, so all their dirty laundry in the dirty clothes, and then we take them back at the front to walk them through and guide them down a path of which package or membership is most appropriate for them.

Kyle (31:03):
The one thing that I preach in this company second to none is don't sell somebody. Lets understand what that person needs and design a plan specific to that person. The last thing that I want is somebody spending hundreds and thousands of dollars when realistically they may have needed to purchase, very cost-effective package, right? So I think that's one thing that we do very well opposed to maybe some other crowd therapy concepts in the US we're not there to sell. We're there to educate and then guide them down a path to where they know every dollar that's being spent is being used properly.

Allan (31:42):
Cool. Now I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Kyle (31:53):
Well, I think one is understanding. And educating yourself on mechanisms to get you to well, right? To get you to feel amazing and to get you to love life. Sometimes people just don't know. It's the lack of education. And so not just in, I do this in every wellness service, not just cryotherapy. If you're doing your research online, that's great. Looking at reviews that awesome. But realistically I tell people to go face to face, walk into these wellness centers. Learn more about these services and the benefits directly from the people administering them. Two things are going to happen from that. Number one, you're going to find out if they actually knowledgeable about what you're going to do, right? So you're figuring out is this the place to do it or not? Unumber two, you're gonna educate yourself during the process.

Kyle (32:41):
And I think the lack of knowing is where we have a lot of our issues today. I think obesity is at its highest, not because of any other reason than the lack of education. And to be quite honest with you I'm mentally looking back into my middle school and high school years. We didn't have a real health education class, right? And so it was kind of a joke. It was kind of just like a gimme class and I think if we just paid more attention in our schooling systemsin our education program about educating these kids at a young age, then will go through college. Will go through our young adult years and look at food in the things that we consume in the way that we treat health and wellness a lot differently.

Kyle (33:26):
I was out to dinner. I don't mean to get off track here, but I was out to dinner with a friend of mine the other day and I was asking him why he picks certain meals to eat throughout the day. When we were at dinner, he chose a meal and I said, Hey, why did you pick that meal? And he just told me, cause it sounded good. Well me, when I pick a meal, I'm actually analyzing that meal. The calories, the carbs, the fats, the protein, the sugar content. I'm analyzing each meal before I even order it. And it's because I'm educated on what my body needs at a specific point in time of day. And it's just unheard of, I think that way because people just buy things because it's either an impulse or somebody else bought it. Right.

Allan (34:09):
Yeah. Okay. Well, Kyle, if someone wants to learn more about you or your business iCRYO, where would you like for me to send them?

Kyle (34:18):
Well, I would say go directly to the website. We house all of our information on the website. It's icryo.com and you can also check us out on social media. We're very active on Facebook. We're very active on LinkedIn, on Instagram. I like to connect with people in multiple different ways. I think this day and age, the amount of content you can voice out there should not be limited and the amount of conversation and in the ways that people can reach you out should not be limited either. So yeah, the website definitely the number one.

Allan (34:49):
Cool. Well you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/421, and I'll be sure to have the link there. So, Kyle, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Kyle (34:59):
Yeah. And I appreciate the time today and I look forward to really honestly helping out anybody that listens to this podcast. I think you guys have done a great job creating this platform to educate people and I really hope people tune in and plug into the information and I hope I added some value to their lives.

Allan (35:15):
You did, Kyle. Thank you.

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The inflammation spectrum with Dr. Will Cole

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Allan (03:13):
Aliza, Dr. Chin, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Aliza (03:17):
Hi, thanks for having us.

Dr. Chin (03:19):
Thank you for having us. So excited to be here.

Allan (03:22):
Now, this is episode 420. And I thought it was apropos that I have a conversation about cannabis and CBD. So I was glad to see you had a book out there. It's called Cannabis and CBD for Health and Wellness. It's just perfect. So really excited to have the two of you on here. Enjoyed the book. I always like learning new things and obviously with cannabis and CBD just starting to kind of make a run at being somewhat legalized in some places and obviously illegal in others. You know, there's some things we've got to work through before we could actually even start this conversation, but where it is becoming legal in California, Washington, it's Colorado particular, I think is where they're opening the most. Florida I think is doing now some medical marijuana. So obviously some recognition that this, this does have a place in health and wellness and that cannabis is in fact a medicine.

Aliza (04:16):
Yeah, absolutely. The whole landscape has changed since just three years ago when I got into the industry. And this is Aliza, by the way. You know, I have a cannabis education company to educate women in particular about the health and wellness benefits. And when I first started out, there were fewer States that were legal and the stigma was intense. I was even afraid to tell anybody what I was doing. I was transitioning from the tech industry into cannabis, but I was experiencing a lot of health and wellness issues myself. Aging issues, 40 plus 50 plus. And cannabis seemed like a good natural alternative to some of the medications that they were trying to give me. So I really feel like we've come a long way in three short years, but we have a long way to go.

Dr. Chin (05:15):
Well, especially with the different States having medical programs now, I mean there's you know, 30 over 33 States when I started this integrating medical cannabis. I, I've been practicing this for over 10 years because I had the medical advantage of going or the educational advantage of going to medical school in California shortly after they legalized it. And that's over 20 years ago. So for me, I was in this middle of the Switchbox and I had the best of both worlds, learning, you know, conventional MD school, but also learning how to integrate cannabis with my patients. And now we have dispensaries, I'm in New York now. We have to spend stories that have a pharmacist in it and every dispensary and dispensing it like regular. So it has come a long way.

Allan (05:59):
Yeah. You know, I was coming from a corporate world a few years ago and I remember when they started legalizing in different States and making it recreational cause I was wondering, okay, if it's medical, they probably can't fire you for it. But if it's not medical, if it's just recreational then how does that play out? And I was talking to our general counsel and I said, so if someone goes to Colorado where it's completely legal to use this substance, they use it and then they come back here and obviously, you know, they're completely back down to normal and they're walking around doing their job. And we do a random drug test, can we really fire them? And he says, “Yes, absolutely.”

Allan (06:43):
You know, so can we talk a little bit about, you know, the legalalities of, and some of the stigmas here because you know, the whole point of it, and it's weird cause I'm down here in Panama now and the culture is very different from Arkansas as you might imagine. A lot of my friends use cannibis on a daily basis. And not just for medical, I mean they are clearly recreational. But can we kind of talk a little bit about that? Because it's interesting because it's, again, you know, against the law federally and it's legal in certain States and you know, it's just bizarre to me. It's really hard for me to wrap my mind around where people, where this is and why it's shifting so fast.

Aliza (07:27):
Well, so this is Aliza. I can tell you I'm living in Alaska and people don't know, but Alaska pretty much legalized cannabis in 1975. They absolutely decriminalized it and you were allowed to grow it in your home, carry up to an ounce on your person. It's a very different scene up here in Alaska, but pretty far removed from everything else. If you think about it, it's incredibly complex. So you mentioned federally illegal. Yes. That adds a huge layer of complexity over the fact that each state has their own set of laws, rules and regulations. Each state manages their cannabis retail growing retail, manufacturing, all in different ways. So no matter where you end up going, there's a whole set of rules. So one of the things I do is market cannabis and CBD companies and trying to navigate what's allowed and what's not allowed even from an advertising and marketing standpoint is very challenging.

Aliza (08:35):
But to your last part of the question, why is it happening so quickly? Well, there's a lot of money to be had. And where there's money, there's powering greed. I mean, it really boils down to that. We think about when the internet first became something available to the public, all the big companies came in as soon as they knew that people were there. So if people are consuming and people have access, everyone's going to be looking at this industry for the money. Whereas a lot of us, like June, like myself, I like many of the people we work with are looking at it for the health and wellness benefits. I mean, the money's there. We're not gonna ignore that, but I think that's a driver.

Dr. Chin (09:19):
Yeah. And it's really inconvenient for patients, for even continuity of care. For example, I have a 73-year-old patient who has Parkinson's and she finds cannabis quite helpful for appetite for her muscle spasms. She's able to feed herself at the dinner table, which is a huge, huge feat. And she has, she's a, she has a home in Boca, in Florida. She sees me in New York and then she has another home in Arizona. So she carries three different medical cards and has to see three different physicians you know, in each state. Cause she can't take her medicine that works for the Parkinson's too, when she goes down to Florida for them. You know, when she has New York winters and she goes to Florida. So she has to, it's really, really, really inconvenient for patients.

Allan (10:06):
Yeah. And you know, that's one of the things I was, you know, looking at, cause you did a really good job in the book of kind of going through the different ways that we can use the canvas. So like, you know, not just the smoking or the vaping not just the brownies. But then basically, you know now I guess they got, you said they had capsules and, and, and other means of getting it. But it's still, if you get caught transporting it at the airport, TSA, you're going to get busted.

Aliza (10:35):
Well, yes and no, but don't do it. I think TSA has actually in, in certain States, and especially from legal to legal States, I hate to say it, but they sometimes will turn a blind eye. I would never ever risk it and never, ever recommend that anybody do that or try that. But if you also look at some of the cases, like the grandmother who has the CBD tincture for her arthritis, getting caught, getting arrested, but then everything gets dropped and everything is returned to her because there's this ambiguity. So I think some of what June was talking about with patients, there's a lot of confusion for patients. There's a lot of confusion for anyone who purchases, consumes and may have it on their person. What can I do? What can't I do?

Dr. Chin (11:27):
What I, what I also do, and you made mentioned about employment is you know, if it's medically necessary and patients come to see me to get a medical card sometimes I'll write a letter the patient will ask that I write a letter to their employer, you know, saying, you know, if the drug test comes out positive, it's because you know, they're using the CBD or THC or combination of the cannabis. And I'll just write out my note, you know, patient will use it according to the employer's policies. So, you know, not maybe not during the work hours but after hours or a number, they're not on call, et cetera. And usually I haven't had any issues with any patients actually even with this letter, with a supporting letter.

Allan (12:09):
Okay. Well the other stigma I think is, you know, obviously we're going to have family members that are going to be like, okay, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why are you becoming a pothead? And you know, how do we have that conversation with them?

Aliza (12:25):
Well, you know, it's not even just stigma, it's stereotyping. So if you think about all of the media, even entertainment, the image of the stoner dude, I think it's really important for first and foremost for anyone who is comfortable consuming it, either in a recreational, as you say, sort of a relaxation and enjoyment fashion or in a medical fashion that they talk about it, that they're not afraid to do so. The more we talk about it and normalize it and show it is everybody from every different walk of life is potentially a consumer of cannabis, particularly on the health and wellness side. So if we can just get rid of some of those stereotypes, I think that would be extremely helpful. And as a mom, as a busy mom who doesn't want to be ever, ever altered or high around my kids, there are many different ways to consume cannabis. And now with the advent of CBD products, without getting that high, but getting the benefits, the nourishment internally for your systems to regulate hormones to help you with anxiety. I mean those are the kinds of things that are helpful to moms, but you don't have to buy into that stoner dude persona. You can be very successful, very productive, very active, and very engaged and still be a consumer of cannabis or CBD.

Allan (14:02):
Okay. Let's dive in a little bit and talk about how cannabis actually works within our body. What is actually going on when someone consumes or smokes cannabis.

Dr. Chin (14:14):
To understand how cannabis works with your body and your brain. I just want to go over the existing systems that we all know, what we have in our, on our body. And you know, we know about our circulatory system, our digestive system immune system, our central nervous system. You know, what gets us up and going in the morning. But there's another system that was more recently discovered called the endocannabinoid system. And we don't learn about this in medical school or science class, but the endocannabinoid system is our body's own system that makes cannabinoid like molecules. And that's why our body reacts well to plant based cannabinoids have coming from the cannabis plant because our body has a system that's equipped to react to it. And this system is so important, it actually modulates and regulates all the other systems. It interfaces with all those other systems that you've learned about.

Dr. Chin (15:07):
And that's why it seems like, Oh well, you know, I hear that it works for Crohn's disease and anxiety and migraines and PTSD and then Parkinson's. And it seems like, Oh, this is just a snake oil is magic elixir. But it's because this endocannabinoid system regulates all these different systems in our body. That is why the CBD or cannabis or different parts of the cannabis plant works so well for humans.

Aliza (15:33):
And also if you think about the chemical compounds within cannabis, we write a lot about this in our book, cannabinoids and terpenes being two of the most common chemical compounds in the cannabis plant. Well cannabinoids that June just mentioned that we naturally produce cannabinoids, they're called endocannabinoids when they're in our body, but phyto cannabinoids or plant-based cannabinoids are very prevalent in cannabis. So cannabis happens to have over a hundred cannabinoids that have been identified so far. And that is more than pretty much any other plant out there. So in a sense it's, it's like a super food or a super plant because it's just so rich in these chemical compounds and each one of them has sort of a different set of effects. And the one I like to really talk about and that appeals to me is linalool Oh, I'm sorry. That's actually it's terpene. I was just going to move into terpenes next. Terpenes though are other chemical compounds that are in foods, color, smell and taste of foods are the terpenes and lina lu being one of them is also in lavender. Myrcene is another terpene also in mangoes.

Aliza (16:57):
Back to the cannabinoids is a lot of alphabet soup. So it's, we know THC that is what alters your perception. We know CBD now and Cannabidiol. And that is sort of almost the antagonist and partner of THC in a way. They really interact with each other a lot. They're CBN that makes you really sleepy. But if you have too much of it, it makes you paranoid. So if you just think about it, there's all these chemical compounds in the plant that make it an effective medicine. And as June mentioned, it affects all these different systems and all these different facts. And that's why sometimes everyone thinks it's just too good to be true, but it really is just such a richness of chemicals that react well with our bodies and brains.

Allan (17:55):
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the key benefits as I'm not going to say that cannabis is mainstream yet, but it's, it's, it's, it's definitely getting there is that, you know, you're hearing about how they can, they can do different formulations of the cannabinoids and the terpines to get certain effects. So if you want to relax, so you're dealing with maybe doing some, you've got some chronic stress or anxiety there's a formulation that's going to work best with you to help address that specifically. And so you're not just saying, okay, I'm gonna take all the good and the bad. They're getting pretty good at zeroing down on some of these things, aren't they?

Dr. Chin (18:36):
Yes, we know the profile. So we know the different plant compounds. There's testing for that. We know how much there is. So here in New York, when we recommend medical cannabis, we're talking about milligrams down to the milligrams. And I chart how these cannabis medicines react with their prescription medications. So we keep track of that and we can be quite precise. So it's not take a bite of this cookie or a sliver of this gummy, but we're, you know, we're using oils that are measured, we're using capsules and tablets that are fast dissolving or Enteric Coated that might work in your stomach in a timed release. So there's really there, I think they're using pharmaceutical type technology when making cannabis medicine now. When they're doing topicals or using certain penetration enhancers and grabbing technology from the dermatitis dermatological field. So it's, it's come a long way.

Aliza (19:34):
And also the products that are coming out back to the cannabinoids and terpenes products are coming out that are emphasizing certain cannabinoids or certain terpines or combinations. So you might see something that is heavier in CBN as a sleep aid or something with THCV, which is a variant of THC. And that would potentially be for focus or even for appetite suppression, which is kind of weird because yeah, we think of the munchies if you have THC, but THCV can suppress appetite instead of stimulate it. So you're starting to see products that really narrow down the cannabinoid concentrations and terpene concentrations for also those specific effects.

Allan (20:22):
I think, you know, it was funny because let's say funny cause it was actually a comedy, but you know, the Cheech and Chong movies and the guys, you know, they're joking about you know, glaucoma medicine. You know, I think that was the big joke back in the 70s and eighties of, of what what pot was for. But it's, it's much better than that. It does a lot more for us as a medicine. Can you talk about some of the different things that we can use cannabis for as a medicine to include acute issues, chronic issues, and even some mental and emotional issues?

Dr. Chin (20:54):
The number one I think I see in my patients are chronic pain and chronic pain is a very broad diagnosis. It can come from fibromyalgia. It can come from low back pain, migraine deep and pelvic pain for women. Because it's, CBD is such a potent anti-inflammatory. And I talk about CBD and THC the most because it's the, well most well researched, but CBD is a very potent anti-inflammatory and what patients are finding for chronic pain is that it really gets to the root of the problem. So you're not just masking it by taking care of the pain and just taking a pain reliever, but you're getting rid of that underlying inflammation that's causing the pain in the first place. Parkinson's patients I had mentioned before,it's very good for the muscle tremors and also for the sleep and appetite. I see ALS patients, epilepsy patients, both pediatric and adults. I see quite a bit of epilepsy patients. Insomnia, anxiety, Crohn's disease, collitis. So it's a varied practice. Upatients usually come to see me after they've exhausted all options. Of course I see cancer patients cause it helps with nausea, appetite,and pain and the immune system as well.

Allan (22:10):
And one of the other things you mentioned in the book was it was good for gout.

Dr. Chin (22:16):
Yes. So gout is great because what do you think causes gout? Inflammation.

Allan (22:25):
Yeah! And so this, you know, and I think, you know, if you actually look at most chronic diseases, inflammation is kind of a basis for almost every one of them.

Dr. Chin (22:33):
Exactly. Exactly. So when you have chronic inflammation, that's when it becomes a serious disease. I mean, you look at you know, high blood pressure, diabetes, that all comes from inflammation.

Allan (22:43):
Now you know, a lot of people are going to go at this and they're going to do you know, self-medication, if you will experimenting. And then of course now with it, you know, becoming medically legal in most States or a lot of States they can, we start working with their doctors if their doctors are familiar or willing to get into this. Kind of talk about the contrasting of whether people should be doing the self experimentation or whether they should go to a doctor first when doing some of this stuff.

Aliza (23:11):
Well, I can talk about my personal experience and also because I mentioned elementa before. My company that educates women about using cannabis and CBD for health and wellness. The thing that we recommend most of all is see your doctor. But that's very, very hard if they're not in a legal state. And it's also hard if their doctor is connected to a hospital. This is something I learned from June. If they're connected with the hospital, the hospitals are federally funded so they cannot even talk about it. So you're really looking for either somebody in private practice, but in some of the States you also have natural paths who can talk about it. But from a personal standpoint, I'll totally let June talk about from a doctor standpoint. But from a personal standpoint, what I've learned is what is on the label. If you don't have a doctor available and you're not consulting with the doctor, what's on the label as a recommended dose, you should always start lower.

Aliza (24:07):
And the saying is start low and go slow. You incrementally add a little bit more over time until you get to that feeling that you want that relief that you want, the effect that you want, but that you don't just hit your body right away with the cannabis. I have gone from cannabis to CBD just because I find that a lot of what I experience is either anxiety or inflammation. And so I know that with CBD you can actually take a lot more of CBD than THC. You kind of need to in order to get an effect on the cannabis side, 2.5 milligrams is totally enough for me where if other people are like 15 to 25 milligrams or even more,uon the CBD side, 25 to 30 milligrams is more my sort of dose. So it's a lot of numbers is a lot of calculation. You really have to pay attention, but you can't overdose on either of them. You might get uncomfortable, but you can't actually overdose and die from either cannabis with THC or CBD as an adult, as a healthy adult.

Dr. Chin (25:26):
I think the take home message really here is that cannabis is unique because there's really no precedent. There's no other drug in the world that we're using recreationally and medically. And so patients really have to demand that their health practitioners get educated. You know, really doctors need to tell patients the difference between their opinion versus scientific fact. And with plant-based medicine, there isn't one size fits all thinking. And unfortunately with the medical model and what we're taught in med school, it is one size fits all. It's here's your pill, you know, here's five milligrams of your blood pressure pill. I expect to see you in a month and we'll measure your blood pressure again. But with plant-based medicine, it just doesn't work that way cause everyone will react differently with herbal medicine. And really this whole movement, I, I see it as a plant sort of going back to plant-based medicine, this medical cannabis movement, because it's a wake up call to the healthcare system. Patients are turning away from mainstream medicine and heading to support groups like Elementa or apothecaries that have CBD shops or a cannabis shops because these support systems are giving them what they need. They're listening, they're connecting better with their consumers or their patients and they're providing education and an alternative, a more natural approach to health and healing.

Allan (26:43):
You know, in the kind of the full circle of this. It's interesting because, you know, I guess the, the reason pot's illegal is because it's, it was, it was deemed a gateway drug to do these other things. But with the opiate epidemic, you know, basically, you know, now we're in pain meds and everything that people are taking. This might actually, this is a safer alternative for a lot of those pain issues that people are getting addicted to opiates.

Aliza (27:05):
Well they're calling it an exit ramp drug now. And the reason it's illegal though there's a lot of misnomers about why cannabis was made illegal. And it was not because it's a gateway drug and it was not because people actually proved that it was a gateway drug. It was really based more on historical, you know, greed propaganda control and power. It was not about the medical issues around it because it was being vilified back in the 20s, the 1920s and the 1930s. And so we just forget the history of why it was made illegal. It had nothing to do with danger at all. And so we've just sort of been brought up with these false narratives about it being dangerous and it is not, it is certainly not on the same level as heroin or cocaine even though it's been scheduled that way in the U S and it can help with addiction. And it's a healthier alternative to some of these very terrible drugs. It can really bring you back to balance and health and keep you away from some of these dangerous substances.

Dr. Chin (28:24):
Well also when you look at the history too, it was during the time when they started to create inexpensively manufactured, you know, precisely dosed, easy to swallow pills versus a tincture. You know, it was at 1898 Bayer synthesize aspirin from birchbark. And then we had barbiturates that came, that came in. So we really take pills and capsules for granted. But you know, before that time it was, you know, yes, here's a tincture, here's a drop of this, put this in your tea. So it was really, I think that a perfect storm, you know, in terms of politics, the anti-immigration thoughts, you know, caused by the great depression. And then there was a pharma.

Allan (29:05):
Okay, well Eliza, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well.

Aliza (29:16):
Well, having written this book, Cannabis and CBD for Health and Wellness, but also I, my previous book was the happy healthy nonprofit where we did a lot of research about what does it take to get well. And I know even for myself really important is sleep, getting a good night's sleep and moving your body. We're in such a sedentary world now sitting behind a desk at a computer, hunched over, your body is suffering and so much disease is from not moving around. And then the final thing is just be really mindful what you put into your body, what you put on your body. Because if you think about even when you put things on topically, your skin is your biggest organ is what I've heard said, and it absorbs things. So what do we put on our bodies? What do we take into our bodies? Be really super mindful about those things.

Allan (30:11):
Okay. Dr Chin. Again, 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. Chin (30:22):
I would have to agree with Aliza. Number one thing that I always talk about with my patients more than anything else is nutrition. So not necessarily putting yourself on a restrictive diet, but really taking a look at what you are consuming. You know, how much sugar you're consuming, keeping a food diary. Meditation is a big thing that I also talk to my patients about. And exercise and exercise can be something small, a 10-minute walk to start with and slowly building up, but moving your body that gets the lymphatic tissues moving. So when we think of, you know, like, Oh yeah, of course diet and exercise. But think about how it changes the physiology. My Parkinson's patients, cannabis does not work for my Parkinson's patients unless they do rigorous boxing exercise. So for those that take the cannabis, if they don't do any exercise to cannabis starts to not work. But if for those patients that exercise rigorously, they have to be out of breath, the cannabis works double.

Allan (31:21):
Okay, cool. Thank you for that. So I'm Aliza and Dr. Chin, if someone wanted to learn more about you in the work that you're doing in this book, where would you like for me to send them?

Aliza (31:35):
Well for, for me it's elementa.Com. It's Ella for the French for her, and menta Spanish for mind. Her mind elementa.com.

Dr. Chin (31:50):
Wonderful. And you can find me at drjunechin.Com.

Allan (31:56):
And I'll have those links at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/420. So Aliza, Dr. Chin, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Aliza (32:06):
Thank you.

Dr. Chin (32:07):
Thanks for having us.

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Dr. Axe: 02:14 Yeah, it is. You know, I think for me, one of the things I keep hearing is from patients I've worked with in the past and people today is that they notice the difference when they start working on their collagen You know, whether it be they're taking supplements that support their body's own collagen production or a collagen supplement or just drinking bone broth, which was really the first thing that I started to do that I had my patients do in the past that, you know, I've recommended so many supplements and super foods over the years, but the one that people kept coming back to me saying, wow, I noticed a dramatic difference in my health really, really had to be collagen. Now there are other things as well. I think there are certain herbs and spices and vegetables and probiotics that, and sometimes Omega3. So there are things that people can notice a big difference with. But for me personally, in my own gut health and joint health, I noticed a really big difference in collagen so I'm always excited to talk about collagen you know, I wrote a book on the topic but you know, I'd love to talk about today. Anything related to, you know, how collagen or you know, collagen, but also those other superfoods that support collagen production, how they can help our health.

Allan: 03:20 Absolutely. My wife has been having some issues with her knees and so she's been dealing with the doctors and doing the basic things that I think people our age over 50 anyway, start to do with their knees as you know, you get it scoped and then you, you go back in and they're going to do the little shots. And then she went this last time and the doctor gave her the prescription or not prescription so much. He gave her some collagen sold her collagen and said, you know, you need to be using this now. She felt it helped. She hasn't been on it long term I think going on now two and a half months. But it's, so she's taking it, having a little less, little less problems, but just the other benefits that she's getting from the collagen, she said my hair is growing and feeling so much better. My fingernails are growing, my skin. They're just so much healthier now than they were before I started this protocol.

Dr. Axe: 04:08 Yeah, it's amazing. You know, my, I've noticed the same thing. My wife and I joke around how fast and our fingernails grown, how thick and strong our hair is right now. My wife is pregnant. She's due here in April.

Allan: 04:22 Congratulations!

Dr. Axe: 04:22 Oh Hey, thanks so much. Yeah. And so we were just talking last night, but she was just saying, I mean even through pregnancy, I mean, she just feels really, really good and both of us eat a really good diet. But when she started taking collagen and consuming bone broth and these collagen superfoods, I mean she really noticed a difference in her skin, hair and nails. I mean, it is the number one ingredient if somebody is looking to improve their overall beauty as well. You know, a lot of times people today are using these sort of outside in products. You know, it's maybe it's hyleronic acid for the skin or moisturizers, essential oils and I recommend all those things and think they're fantastic.

Dr. Axe: 05:00 But at the same time, if somebody really wants to see the biggest difference, they possibly, or maximize the difference they see in their beauty, collagen is definitely the number one supplement. You know, this is kind of a shocking statistic. Once you reached the age of 25 years old, your body produces less collagen every year by the time people are in their 50s their own body produces 75% less collagen in their fifties than they did in their twenties and so that's why it's even more important because our own body is producing less. It's so important that we supplement collagen into our diet. And I had, somebody asked me recently on this,and said, Hey, it's collagen a fad. And I said, collagen isn't really a fad. It's one of the oldest superfoods that we were getting in our diet. Think about this. Our ancient ancestors all consume bone broth, which is 90% collagen. It's pure collagen that's what bone broth is and we aren't getting bone broth in our diet and therefore we're essentially missing a macro nutrient.

Dr. Axe: 06:00 And think about this. There actually are no essential carbohydrates. There are essential fatty acids and there are essential amino acids. There's also something called a conditionally essential amino acids. Now the amino acid you're going to find in collagen are considered more conditionally essential. They're not always considered. But this being said though, they are essential. We need them to be healthy. And the big thing to think about with this, if you're missing in your diet, a macronutrient, okay? Like for instance, protein. If somebody doesn't have enough protein in their diet, they can get thermogenesis Their muscles can waste. It causes major nerve trend issues. I had a patient one time, Allan came in who actually, this is interesting, he was my first patient ever when I was in student clinic and his doctor put him on a no fat diet for his cholesterol, which first we know today, anybody who keeps up with the medical research, that's crazy. But he was taking, consuming no fat and his hair was thinning and his nerves were degenerating. He was losing his memory, lose it.

Dr. Axe: 07:07 I mean he in a matter of three months, his entire body started wasting away from not eating fat. Now think about this. Collagen is a macro nutrient. It is a protein. We are completely missing this protein in our diet. So again, it's one thing, Hey, if you're a little bit deficient and a mineral, like it will affect your body. But if your, which is a micronutrient, but if you're completely deficient in a macro nutrient, your health is really going to suffer. And I think today a lot of people are suffering from conditions like leaky gut syndrome, chronic joint pain, thinning hair, chronic inflammation. They're struggling with these issues because they're not getting collagen in their diet. And when somebody starts consuming more bone broth, taking a multi collagen protein, supplement, consuming herbs and superfoods that support your body's own collagen, they really start to notice a big difference in their body when that happens.

Allan: 08:01 Now let's take a step back cause you're saying macro. And I think people know that basically we know the three macros are protein, carbs, and fat, but as we kind of go through that, we know it's a much more complex formula that there's an essential, amino acids, there's essential fatty acids. That's that we need. Like I said, there is no essential carbs, although we do generally have to make sure we're getting enough energy to support body functions. So we do eat a proportion of those. The way we break them down, whether we go keto or otherwise, we make some decisions on how we're going to allocate those, those macros rather than we're making decision to make the decision or we're just not making decisions. We're eating what we want. We're still making the decision of what we put in our body. But how is collagen, how is it that you're seeing your collagen is maybe a fourth macronutrient if we will, but what is collagen and why is it so important?

Dr. Axe: 08:51 Well, collagen is so important because it makes up one third of all of the protein in your body. Okay, so one third of it. Now I want to say this as well. If you think about if one third, so, so like our muscles, those are made up of more muscle building proteins like branch chain amino acids and mathiolene. Okay. That's what makes up our muscles. What makes up our ligaments, tendons, fascia, connective tissue, our skin, our hair, our nails, our bones, our discs, our gut lining, our arterial walls. If a pregnant mother has a placenta, their body's creating that's made up of collagen so all of those areas I just mentioned are made up of more than 90% collagen for the most part. And here's another interesting fact. Listen to this. There is more collagen in your bones then calcium and all other minerals combined, and so we don't think about these things, but collagen is so critical for us to be healthy.

Dr. Axe: 09:56 It's like, well, why do we think calcium is the most important thing for bones? Because the dairy companies found it was the top mineral in your bones. But there's also magnesium, there's phosphorus, there's all these other things. But because of marketing, that's why we feel like it's so important. But really today, if we were looking at your bones and what's most important, it's actually collagen. So all that being said, collagen is so important for so many areas of your body. Think about this for your arteries to be, you want them to be elastic and not hard. When you hear something like calcification of your arteries, that's hardening of your arteries. You don't want that. You want to have soft, supple arteries, which are made of collagen when they're healthy. So all of these areas are just, it's so important. And collagen also will spare muscle.

Dr. Axe: 10:45 It supports your metabolism. So for fat burning and weight loss, it's important. But just in general, like it's important for, it's kind of like the glue that holds your body together. So if you want to be healthy, especially your joints and ligaments and tendons to be healthy as you age. Like I had a grandfather who was 96 years old and just passed away last year. But up until he was 96 he had joint pain. None of his muscles hurt though, but his joints hurt. And that's because he really, for the good part of his life, up until the last couple of years when I had him start taking it, he really never took collagen. And so again, I think for us it's the biggest thing we're missing in our diet. And I think if people start using it or consuming a diet and listen, it's not just taking a collagen supplements more than that, it's consuming vitamin C, which is necessary for collagen production, not just any vitamin C, an absorbable vitamin C that comes from super fruits like Camou-Camou, ascelroa cherry, amla berry or certain foods, broccoli, citrus fruits, also like red bell peppers, you know, so there are certain foods and then we get into, there are other foods that support collagen production that helped boost cells in the body.

Dr. Axe: 11:54 And those are really unique types of adaptogenic herbs. And the other thing you want to do, not to keep going in this, but you want to protect your body's own collagen production and there are certain herbs that help you do that. Matcha green tea, tumeric powder is amazing for this resveratrol found in the skin of blueberries and grapes, but again, collagen is just really important for us because over 30% of all of the protein in our body is made up of collagen. And if you don't get it, think about this. Imagine trying to build muscle like a bodybuilder or trying to put on muscle without eating protein. It's hard to do like they're not really not going to see results versus it's the same thing if you're trying to heal your joints, if you're trying to have a healthy gut and digestive system, if you're trying to have beautiful skin and you're trying to do it without collagen, it's going to be very difficult.

Allan: 12:43 And so the, the basis of this is, you know, if we're, if we're just eating standard protein sources of muscle meat, maybe some eggs and things like that, we are getting a lot of the amino acids, we're just not getting the right mix of amino acids to optimize our, the collagen production opportunities in our body because we're just not giving it the natural resource to do what it's supposed to do. Well, if we're not getting the right amino acids, because the collagen is basically just built out of select amino acids like glycine and others. And so with those amino acids, if we're making sure we're getting those in our diet, we're giving our body the natural resources that it needs to build the body that we have.

Dr. Axe: 13:23 100%.

Allan: 13:25 And then if we're getting those other nutrient and we're getting those other nutrients, like you said, vitamin C and some of the other things that are basically kind of the, the things that make it all happen so that our body optimizes that production.

Dr. Axe: 13:36 Exactly.

Allan: 13:37 Okay. Now the interesting thing was I thought of collagen as just a thing. And you know, I as a one singular thing, you can talk about the different types of proteins. We know if we get plant proteins or we get protein from meat or protein from eggs or a protein from say whey or case in that they're, they're different mixes of amino acids or different structures of them. And so they're, they're all a little different in a, you know, well we'd all we call because we're getting all the essential amino acids, you know, we, we call it the perfect protein, but there are multiple types of collagen that I was not actually familiar with. So could you take a little bit of time to talk about the different types and in particular the ones that you call kind of the five or I guess is six key ones.

Dr. Axe: 14:20 Yeah, so I would say when we're talking collagen, I think five in particular, type one, two, three, five and 10 those are the most important types of collagen we should be getting into our diet. Now I'm going to bring this up to say there was a principle in ancient Chinese medicine and that is if you eat the organ of an animal, it supports your organs. Or if you eat a food that looks like an organ or a system in your body, it actually supports that system. Let me give you an example. A Walnut looks like a hemisphere of your brain. Beets are red and actually look like blood and we know by the way, walnuts are full of Omega threes and colene and all these amazing nutrients that really support brain health. We know beets actually boost nitric oxide in your body, which is super nourishing to your blood.

Dr. Axe: 15:04 We know that certain things like carrots, you cut in half, it looks like an eye and we know according to thousands of clinical studies, carrots and beta carotene and vitamin a support eye health, reishi mushrooms like identity to your kidneys and your adrenal glands so they support your adrenal health. All. That being said, there is a principle that when you eat a certain area of a body or or so like if you eat a chicken breast, it supports muscle meat because that's the area, that's what it is of a chicken. It's pure muscle. It's going to support our muscles. So with different types of collagen type one and three collagen make up, primarily your skin, hair, nails, bones, discs, and then some of your gut lining. Type two collagen makes up your ligaments, your tendons, your connective tissue, and all of your facia. Type five and 10 collagen really helps support areas like your cardiovascular system and your veins and arteries.

Dr. Axe: 16:02 And so this is also why when people are buying collagen as a supplement, it should always say multi first. That's going to be the highest quality. They should be buying a multi collagen protein, because if you're only getting one type of collagen, you're not necessarily as strongly possibly supporting all the areas of your body you should. So I really think that, again, when you're doing collagen, like chicken broth contains mostly type two collagen beef and fish collagen contain mostly type one and three and eggs contain a little bit of collagen or the egg shell membrane, the inner part of the egg egg shell that contains type five and type 10 collagen. And so all that being said, I think ideally we're getting multiple types of collagen because they are subtly going to support other areas. And I will say this type one and three collagen different types of collagen can definitely still be used to create other types or areas of collagen in the body. And it's a misnomer for people to think when I consume collagen and literally just goes to that area and becomes collagen in my body. What happens when you take a collagen supplement, your body breaks down that collagen into individual amino acids like proline, hydroxy, proline, glycine, and then it works with things like vitamin C and hyleronic acid and glucosamine and chondroitin, and it works with those things to create new collagen within your own body. That's kinda how that works.

Allan: 17:27 Okay. Yeah, that was actually kind of surprising to me because in the past, you know, I would pride myself on being the guy who cooks the Turkey for Thanksgiving at my mom's. And so every year I'll buy a grass fed pastured. I mean, you know, grass pastured Turkey, organic Turkey for for dinner and now I'll cook the Turkey and I'll take all the bones and I'd make a bone broth. And then when that wasn't available to me, and I'll, and I'll admit I wasn't getting my servings a day, but I would have bone broth every once in a while. And then when that would run out, I then go to the market and I, you know, the farmer's market and I buy chicken feet, you know, I'd make again make some bone broth. I didn't realize though that I, I was actually only touching on a small portion of the, of the collagen benefits that I could've gotten and that I should have also probably been buying some beef bones as well to make some beef broth, a bone broth as well. I didn't realize that I was still missing out on opportunity, just not having that full understanding and appreciation of the different types of collagen.

Dr. Axe: 18:23 Yeah. You know, it really is crazy how, I'll just say this, you know, I like I, I've taken so many supplements and I've eaten very, very healthy for a long time, but I could still notice a difference when I started this collagen diet. You know, when I started doing all the research and reading up on these ancient like ancient diets. And if you look at Japan today, they have one of the most simple diets in Okinawa. Japan, the top foods they consume on a regular basis are fish broth, rice and fish. They consume a lot of green tea as another one. But, but those are three other top top foods. It's fish and fish broth, it's rice and it's green tea. And I want to mention to, you know what's so amazing about fish broth? It's loaded with collagen and fish, is full of Omega, you know, has these healthy fats like the amegas.

Dr. Axe: 19:13 And then you've got matcha, which is one of the most protective herbs on the planet. And they just consume a lot of herbs, also consumed seaweed, which also is good for collagen production. So sometimes people wonder, I don't know if you've heard people talk about this. I have a friend of mine who is, he is Asian. And he talks about how all his relatives, like even when they're, you know, his grandfather is a 70 and he's like, he looks like he's 40 like very, very young. And I said, you know, a lot of times people will say, sometimes Asians look younger than other nationalities. And he said, well, I think the biggest reason is their diet. He said in the Asian diet today, especially in Japan, he said, you know, the amount of bone broth, the amount of matcha green tea, seaweed, these collagen boosting supplements they consume every day is a very, very high. So I know it might be other things as well, but I just thought that was interesting. In Asia, the amount of, that's what I, as I did all my research, they probably consume the diet that is friendliest to collagen production in college and protection than any diet they're on the planet. And so anyways, I I think that if somebody is looking to see a big turnaround in their health following a full on collagen diet is really going to help.

Allan: 20:24 Yeah. And I, and I think the other thing to go back to what you said is that the Okinawans are probably eating so much more like their ancestors than the American is today relative to our ancestors.

Dr. Axe: 20:37 Exactly. It's an ancestral diet. It's one of the closest, if not the closest that I can think, give, you know, when you look at the blue zone diets, if you've ever read any of the articles or books there, it's interesting because really that's what I would say sets them apart as cultures is they're eating as close as close to their ancestors and listen, not all their diets are the same. You know, their diets are different. The one common denominator is they're all eating real food and they're all active, they're moving, they also practice a lot of spiritual or sort of faith. Like it might be a different faith, but they're also practicing things that are faith based, community based. It's really amazing when you look at what supports lifespan. But those are, you know, those are all factors.

Allan: 21:16 Now in a book an, we've talked about this a little bit here, there are other nutrients that we would want to consume just to make sure we're setting our body, priming our body to have what it needs to be successful in building the collagen and using the collagen that we're taking or eating. Can you talk about some of those, I mean, you've talked about macha tea and some others can. Can you talk about those and how they're helping this process.

Dr. Axe: 21:38 Yeah, so for starters, let me hit on three categories. We have foods that protect collagen. We have foods that boost collagen, and we have foods that just generally help your body create new and healthy tissues. So first, the foods that protect collagen, these are going to be high foods that reduce oxidation. And so it's going to be antioxidant rich foods. I'm talking berries to start blueberries, raspberries. Blackberries will be very high on the list. One of my super favorite super fruits. Goji berries will be high on that list, asaii Berry Maki Berry, but doing berries are going to be fantastic for protecting your body against collagen degradation. I talked about matcha green tea and other forms of green tea, matcha, very high in antioxidants. It also contains a compound called an EGCG, which has the anticancer properties but matcha really high up on that list. I'm also going to throw in that list foods that tend to be like dark blue, dark purple, dark green, so even like spinach and chard, green leafy vegetables, they're going to help protect your body, but I wouldn't say those antioxidant rich foods, especially herbal teas and berries are going to be the ones that you can just do on a regular basis. So for breakfast, maybe you do a collagen smoothie with one cup of berries, one scoop of a multi collagen protein, a little bit of almond milk or coconut milk.

Dr. Axe: 22:59 That's a perfect anti-aging smoothie to have in the morning where you're going to get some of those super foods and then maybe a glass of green tea in the morning as well. That's going to help. Now, some of the foods that are going to help your body in protecting collagen are going to be those foods that reduce inflammation as well. So tumeric is going to be very high on that list. Tumeric contains a compound called curcumin, which reduces inflammation. Interestingly as well. It also can support collagen production because it has a compound called tumor own which support your body and creating more STEM cells. Now along with that, some of my other aunt favorite anti-inflammatories that can help will be, Rosemary also contains Rosemaric acid, which is great. Ginger root, another fantastic one, another one that's great. CBD oil. CBD oil also has anti-inflammatory properties and then any food that's going to have Omega3s, wild caught salmon, other fish like mackerel and tuna, grass fed beef, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, but those omegas along with those anti-inflammatory herbals, those are going to really help with reducing inflammation and preventing collagen degradation and breakdown.

Dr. Axe: 24:10 And last but not least is this this category of super herbs and foods that support your body and creating STEM cells and that tends to be the ones that really are known also as adrenal tonics and that lower stress hormones. Reishi mushroom is amazing. Ashwagandha, which was an Ayurvedic herb that's used today especially to treat hypothyroidism really is incredible. I'll also throw out there herbs like astragalus Rhodiola Rosea, but at the top of the list I would put Rishi mushroom and ashwagandha. Those two in particular help lower lower stress hormones. They support STEM cell production and two of the best out there are reishi and ashwagandha for STEM cell production

Allan: 24:53 Now, so we get these nutrients and we kinda sorta, we're changing this, we're getting this as a part like so we have our our smoothie in the morning or we're, we're now going to incorporate some of these other foods in our daily repertoire, our daily menu and you have meal plans. I think that's one of the cool things about your book is that it, it doesn't just say here's the information, go fourth and do it. You actually have meal plans and some ways that we can do this, but what are some basic ways that we can just ensure that we're getting enough collagen each day?

Dr. Axe: 25:22 Yeah, so I would say for starters, to make sure you're getting enough collagen every single day, one take a collagen supplement or a bone broth protein supplement, you want to supplement with it. So for myself, Hey, maybe if I'm having a big bowl of chicken broth that day, you know, maybe you don't need to know. I still do. And in fact, I recently talked to Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's a, who's a friend of mine and he's a him and myself run two of the largest natural health websites in the world. And I asked him, I said, dr Joe, how much collagen do you consume a day? And he said, I consume 60 grams. That's the equivalent of three to six servings every single day. And so that being said, I consume at least two. So I consume about 30 to 40 grams a day myself. So I'm getting collagen every day.

Dr. Axe: 26:08 And I want you to think about this. If one third of the protein in your body is made up of collagen, if you're like, I'll share for myself, actually I consume about 40 grams a day and so with that, like I consume about 120 grams of protein a day myself. One third of all my protein intake is collagen and that's what it should be. Just like people have heard this balance of Omega three and Omega six fats, you know like you're supposed to have about between a one to one and one to four ratio of Omega three to Omega six fats to have healthy levels. This same goes for collagen, building proteins to muscle building proteins. You need a balance. So that being said, every person on the planet should be consuming. If you're not consuming bone broth, a large serving every single day, you should be getting collagen protein.

Dr. Axe: 26:56 And what I do is I do one scoop of a bone broth protein. The reason I do bone broth protein in addition to a collagen protein is bone broth protein contains it's bone broth in powder form and it also has hyleronic acid, glucosamine chondroitin. These are compounds that support collagen production in our own bodies and so I think they're critical for that reason. So I do one scoop of bone broth protein, one scoop of a multi collagen protein, and that's what I use to get my collagen every day. Now, in addition to that, like this a, yesterday I made a big bowl of what I call immunity soup and what I put in there was two big jars, probably about 30, 30 grams or so, probably equivalent to like six cups of bone broth. I put in some chicken thighs. I did a big bag of kale, I did cauliflower, I did Shataki mushrooms and I did a miso. So I did this chick pea miso I put in there and sometimes I'll do also, I'll put in some garlic, a little bit of sea salt and some, sometimes some white beans and I did this big bowl of immunity soup.

Dr. Axe: 27:59 Anyways, all that being said, it tastes amazing, but I'm also getting chicken broth in that meal as well. So I think everybody, the best place to get collagen, number one is going to be just as a supplement because a lot of us are just not getting it daily. Number two is do it as a chicken broth or a bone broth, like a real homemade chicken vegetable soup. And I would do a combination of a multi collagen protein in your smoothies and your coffee and your tea. It's, it's very close to like, it's pretty much a tasteless powder. And in addition to that, getting just chicken broth and beef broth, but those are the, those are the best places to, to be getting collagen.

Allan: 28:37 Well this is, this is definitely the time of year to be eating immunity soup because flus or anything else is going around. I just met with a business colleague and he was he was coughing at the table and I'm like, Oh man, I gotta, I gotta go do something here. So I don't take it with me, but yeah, so definitely this is good. And that recipe is in the book, by the way, so you can check that out. So we take the soups. We do that now. I'll tell you, you actually convinced me. I actually went out and bought a couple of things. I have collagen powder to take back with me to Panama and I will definitely be looking for opportunities to make more broth, bone broth. We have some limited resources with some of the things that are available to us on the Island, but I'm, I'm going to step it up a good bit. Absolutely. 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. Axe: 29:27 Oh wow. Well I think people want to take care of their body, their mind and their spirit. So I'm going to start off here. One of the things, ways I start every day for myself is doing what I call my spiritual triathlon. And so I wake up in the morning and I spend time just getting grateful saying I'm grateful for. And I know everybody pres a different religious background, but for me like I just praise God. That's how I start my morning and say what I'm grateful for. Number two, I read a book to help me grow. And so this year I'm reading a lot on leadership. I'm reading a lot on spiritual growth. And so I read either my Bible or like a John Maxwell book or Simon Sineck, some book on leadership. And then I'll spend some time, the next little bit and all visualize and I'll meditate or pray.

Dr. Axe: 30:08 Okay? So that's what I do. I do my spiritual triathlon and it's, it's gratefulness, it's reading. And then it's spending some time in prayer and meditation. And I'll tell you when I do that Allan, I just, it really changes my day. Like I'll read something about love, then I'll think, how can I love others better? And love is sacrificing yourself. It's serving others. It's giving something. But how can I serve and be kind. And so that's how I start my day every day. And the second thing they can do, and I want to challenge everybody to do this, is a lot of times people try and change everything at once. Here's what I would say. If you want to be successful in your health and you, so this is something everybody can do. Just change breakfast. Think about this. If you just change breakfast, you're changing one third of your diet.

Dr. Axe: 30:52 That is a huge step and if you can do that all year, you're going to see a transformation in your health and I recommend that everybody do what I do for breakfast and that's do a collagen boosting smoothie, three simple ingredients, one cup of berries, one scoop of multi collagen protein and one cup of coconut milk or almond milk. That's what I do, Allan every morning for breakfast and I feel incredible. I've had people follow that recipe and they've said no other meal that they've ever changed to have they noticed that big of a difference in their health. Three easy ingredients. Now, Hey, if you want to spice it up and add some other things all add in some cinnamon sometimes or pumpkin pie spice. I'll add in a handful of spinach to get some greens or a green superfood powder. Sometimes I'll add in other things, but that being said, three simple ingredients, berries, collagen, almond milk.

Dr. Axe: 31:44 That's it. And so if people can make that change, that's going to be huge. So eat a good, clean, healthy breakfast. And number two, I would say change your mindset to Food is medicine. This is the message I have preached for years almost since the beginning of my career, is that if you think about when you're eating, not what's going to satisfy your immediate desire, but what is going to be as a medicine to your body. And listen, this can be different for different people. In fact, Ellen, I don't believe that there's one diet for everybody. I do believe though that most people generally speaking, are collagen deficient. We're missing collagen in our diet. And I think if people can follow the diet plan that I have in my new book, the collagen diet where I outline [inaudible], how to eat collagen, pancakes, collagen chocolate chip cookies, collagen brownies, you know, but I, these recipes are made with things like almond flour, coconut flour, simple homemade ingredients.

Dr. Axe: 32:42 They're going to help people heal. I think that would go a long way as well. So I would say again, if people want to change work on your spiritual and mental health through doing that spiritual triathlon number two, just change breakfast to that college and boosting smoothie. And number three, change your mind to focusing on food being your form of medicine. And what I found too, Alan is that you know what, like I'm not taking any foods from you. I think if you have the mindset of like in my book I teach people, it's not that you can't have cookies, it's you just need to use a different type of flour. It's not that you can't use oil, I'm just going to recommend avocado oil, coconut oil,G and olive oil or grass fed butter. Like those are what I'm going to recommend. And so I teach people how to make easy swaps to collagen, boosting foods, to healing foods that help them live longer, happier lives. And so I would say those would be the three takeaways that I would take action on.

Allan: 33:34 Thank you. So dr Axe, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about this book, The Collagen Diet or the other books that you have, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Axe: 33:44 You know, Hey, I encourage everybody to check out my Instagram page. It is a doctor Josh Axe on Instagram. Also my website, dr axe.com you can just go to [inaudible] dot com and you can also just search my name on Google, start searching Dr Axe Collagen Diet. You can go to amazon.com as well. I just wrote a new book, check out the new book there. But yeah, I would just search my name on Amazon, search my name on, on Google and I think you'll find a lot of exciting things on both of those resources along with Instagram and Facebook.

Allan: 34:15 And I'll have a link to that on our website, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/419. Dr. Axe, thank you so much for being a part of 40 plus fitness.

Dr. Axe: 34:27 Hey Allen, thanks for having me.

All right. We are a whole month into the year 2020 kind of crazy how fast this first month of January just flew by, but now it's February and I'm happy to announce that I'm opening up three slots for one-on-one clients at 40+ Fitness. So you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/apply and that'll send a message to me to let me know that you're interested and we can have a conversation about rather one-on-one trainings for you with one-on-one training. You get everything that you would get from a personal trainer except counting the reps and that makes it very cost effective. I have an app, so you'll have workouts that'll give be given to you through your app. You'll have constant contact with me with the messaging and email through the app. So again, go to 40 plusfitnesspodcast.com/apply to learn more about working with me at 40+ Fitness.

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