Let's Say Hello

[00:02:15.380] – Allan
Ras, how are you doing?

[00:02:16.490] – Rachel
Good Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:18.350] – Allan
I'm doing well. You know as we mentioned on the last episode, we are recording this early, so I'm still sitting in the same spot I was last week. We're still in Boquete. They were still going to David. Nothing has changed on that front. And I'm just this much closer to getting back to my coffee. So not a lot to change. You know, the same amount of snow in Michigan, same amount of non snow in Panama.

[00:02:42.710] – Rachel
Nice.

[00:02:43.340] – Allan
But it's good to have this topic. You know, full admission. This was a this was a selfish topic. It was a very selfish topic with Dr. Buchanan, because when I saw the name of it, you know, I was like, OK, I'm going to read this book anyway.

[00:02:59.090] – Allan
And I you know, to let them send it to me for free, I'll have them on the podcast. But I do think based on what's going on in the world, that this is a really, really important topic because so many people are getting pulled into this mold. You know, why did we have more votes cast for the winner and for the loser in this election than any other election in history?

[00:03:23.660] – Allan
And the answer is they created a tribalism. A regression, if you will, and we all went in. And because we were fed fear, fed fear, fed fear, which is the fuel for tribalism, we fell for it and we ran in with sticks and knives and anything else we could grab. And we got but we got the vote on, you know, the arguments are their friends and family are breaking up and it's all happening because of our environment.

[00:03:55.930] – Allan
And so I was really glad to have the conversation. And while I'll admit, Dr. Buchanan got a little political on more the political side, I wanted to keep staring them over to the health side, if you don't notice that steering. But, you know, his book is both. It's those topics now are interweaving. They're not being separated. And so I think this is a really critical topic for us to be talking about.

[00:04:19.660] – Rachel
Perfect. Then let's get into it then.

Interview

[00:04:45.850] – Allan
Dr. Buchanan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:48.610] – Dr. Buchanan
Thanks for having me.

[00:04:50.260] – Allan
You know, your book, Our Moral Faith, that was a core couple of reasons that I wanted to get into this book. And I'm just going to admit this full out. This was selfish, the reading of this book having you on the show. I did it for purely selfish reasons because of things I'm seeing going on, behaviors that at times I find myself drawn into that I just know are not good for me from a stress perspective, and they're not good for me as being the kind of person I actually want to be. My outward moral image, if you will, as you put it in the book, I think.

[00:05:28.660] – Allan
And then I think the other the other part of this is and you pointed to someone, an individual, and he said he used the word what was that word was, oh, irritant. So I kind of want to be the trigger that gets people thinking, Okay, is this where I am? Is this what I'm doing? And is this what I really should be doing if I really care about my health, if I really care about my wellness?

[00:05:55.300] – Dr. Buchanan
Yeah, I think that's a good entry to the book is called, Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism, MIT Press. And yeah, I think I wrote the book for the same reasons that you found the book interesting. I was aware that we had a phenomenon that could be called tribalism in our society, and I became increasingly disturbed, quite irritated by the worry. And I recognized it as having terrible effects on individual health because of the stress that it creates.

[00:06:29.050] – Dr. Buchanan
And also on relationships. I mean, friendships are breaking up. Marriages are breaking up because people are so divided and divided in a really hateful way, I think, on a large number of issues. So I think it really does have to do with individual health and with the relationships that also with the effects of tribalism on society. I think tribalism is incompatible with democracy.

[00:06:54.820] – Allan
Yeah, I've done a lot of books, a lot of authors had on them on talking about longevity. And one of the core tenets of longevity besides moving eating better and all that is our relationships with people, that having a purpose, having a society around us, the kind of people where we feel part of something. And so I think a lot of people would think, oh, well, that's tribalism. But tribalism, the way you kind of define in the book, we talk about tribalism and cooperation.

[00:07:24.700] – Allan
It's not just the family unit. It's not just that closeness. There's a there's a there's a deeper part of it. And then there's also a bit of a darker side to it. Can you can you kind of talk about tribalism, cooperation and why that was really important to us, but how that also is very limiting, if that's all we have.

[00:07:44.350] – Dr. Buchanan
My book takes a kind of evolutionary approach to tribalism, and it argues that a tendency toward tribalism, toward dividing the world into us versus them, and attributing all the virtues to us and a lot of vices to them, that this is something that's rooted in our evolved psychology. Evolutionary theorists tend to believe that our moral psychology developed somewhere around four hundred thousand years ago at a time when we lived in a very harsh environment. Humans were in small groups, hunter gatherer groups. They were widely scattered. They were on the margins of subsistence, and there were no institutions or peaceful cooperation among these.

[00:08:25.790] – Dr. Buchanan
What that meant. Was that you encountered somebody from another group on the savannah, probably your best strategy was preemptive aggression, one to react hostility toward them because they could be a huge threat to you. And it was under the circumstances that we developed a capacity for the tribalistic mentality. But the good news is, our moral mind, our moral psychology is also very flexible, it's very plastic and under the right environmental conditions, we have the capacity to react or a more inclusive, non-tribalistic way.

[00:09:02.910] – Dr. Buchanan
Now, even though troublesome has these ancient evolutionary roots, it's not fixed. Tribalism itself has evolved. It used to be the tribalism just literally applied to people who were from another society. Now we have tribalism that's intra-societal. That is, we identify groups within our own society that we react to with the kind of hostility that our ancestors used to react toward literally different societies. And so that's the situation we're in now.

[00:09:37.500] – Dr. Buchanan
What I mean by tribalism isn't just a matter of dividing the world into groups. Everybody does that. I think that's probably inevitable for human beings. It's more than that. It's dividing the world into us versus them, and it's attributing everything good in our social world to us and everything bad to them. It also involves a kind of what I call a supreme emergency framing. That is, you tend to think that every issue is a momentous issue where everything is an existential threat.

[00:10:14.670] – Dr. Buchanan
For example, Sean Hannity has a new book and it's called Live Free or Die: America on the Brink. That sounds like we're under an existential threat. We conservatives under existential threat from those horrible liberals. Once you get yourself into the supreme emergency framing, then you'll be willing to infringe moral rules you otherwise wouldn't. It's a case of, well, now we can make exceptions to our moral rules because we're in this dire extreme emergency. So that's one feature of another feature is that tribalistic discourse really drives out truth-seeking and genuine argumentation. In favor of what I call sorting and signaling, sorting the world into us versus them and in a way that's sort denigrating to them and signaling our loyalty to our group, signaling our group identity.

[00:11:14.970] – Dr. Buchanan
If you look at totalistic discourse, it looks totally illogical. It looks like people are making all sorts of invalid infrances and they're accepting as authoritative sources of information that they shouldn't. And so you might conclude that their reasoning badly, but I don't think their reasoning at all. They're engaged in sorting and signaling. It just looks like this. And part of what goes on is that when you're the tribalistic mode, you clump together, all of the people that are opposing all the liberals are alike, all conservatives are alike.

[00:11:46.020] – Dr. Buchanan
And you also tend to get together issues. You're going to buy one bundle or another. There's no possibility of mixing and matching. Once you get into that mode, and you also this is another tribalism, you tend to think of the other the opposing group as all being the same, and they're all either irremediably stupid and misinformed or they're all irredeemably insincere. Now, once you regard the other in that way, you don't regard them as an equal that you can reason with.

[00:12:21.390] – Dr. Buchanan
Instead, they're just beyond the pale. And that means that you don't listen to what they say and you don't try to engage with them productively. In other words, tribalism rules out compromise and bargaining because it rules out basic respect or the other. But bargaining and compromise are essential to democracy. Democracy doesn't work well. So that's one reason why tribalism is a threat to democracy. But I think it's also a threat to something even more basic. And that is what I call the first great expansion.

[00:12:52.980] – Dr. Buchanan
I talk a lot about the progress of the book, and I think in the last three hundred years or so, in some societies, there have been two huge milestones of moral progress, what I call the first and second expansions of moral regard. The first great expansion is the recognition that all human beings have a basic equal moral status in modern terms, that we all have human rights just by virtue of being human. That's a kind of recognition of equality.

[00:13:22.800] – Dr. Buchanan
It's quite new in human history. For the most part, people in one group have regarded themselves as having equal status, but they regarded others as being of inferior status or maybe not having any moral standing at all. So that's the first rate expansion.

[00:13:38.680]
Second rate expansion is almost complete. It's the beginning of a recognition that at least some non-human animals count morally in their own right, that we're not just free to use them for whatever purposes we want. That they're suffering, there will counts. Now, these two great expansions of the circle of moral regard are pretty recent and they're still not completely carried out the way we live. But there has been huge progress. I think that one of the worst things about tribalism is not just that it undermines democracy, but that it undermines the first great expansion

[00:14:11.330] – Dr. Buchanan
I mean, think about it. Part of what it is to regard somebody as a genuine human being is to regard that as reasonable, as capable of being reasonable. But if you are in tribalistic mode. That's not how you view the other. You view the other as either irredeemably misinformed or stupid or as completely insincere and corrupt.

[00:14:38.160] – Dr. Buchanan
Let me give you example, the first way to categorize it, you ever heard the term Libatard in conservative circles? And the idea is that liberals, all liberals, are mentally retarded or developmentally disabled as you say now. Well, that means there are equal in terms of being somebody we could reason with, about how we all live, what our society should be like.

[00:15:05.990] – Dr. Buchanan
Let me give you one example of the other way of looking at the opposing group, and that is that's being insincere so that you shouldn't pay attention to what they say because they don't really mean it often. Rush Limbaugh says that. Democrats, liberals don't really care about immigrants. That their open borders idea is really rooted in their conviction that if you let a lot of people in the country go vote Democratic. Now, what's going on there? Well, what he's saying is that you shouldn't pay attention to the reasons that Democrats or liberals give for loosening border restrictions, because that's not what it's really about. Instead, it's a shift to condemning the character of the person who advocates. That's very convenient because then you don't have to engage with their arguments. You don't have to engage with their estimates of the facts of one policy or another. You just set them aside as people who are to be held in contempt. They're not worth trying to reason with because they're totally insincere.

[00:16:13.680] – Dr. Buchanan
Tribalism happens on the left as well as the right. And here's here's one example among many. Sometimes nowadays, student activists will prevent a speaker from speaking on campus. The strategy is to brand the speaker as racist or sexist. And then the idea is they don't have the right to speak at all. So they're shouted down. There's disruption of their attempt to say, what are you going to say? And this is, again, a matter of sorting, sorting out whether racist or sexist, and then we shouldn't pay attention to it. They don't have any rights to speak. And it's also a matter of signaling that we're against racism or we're against sexism when we do this. I think it would be far better if people were allowed to speak and then you engage with them and criticize them and explain why you think they're racist or exactly what you mean by racism. That's pretty squishy term.

[00:17:15.070] – Dr. Buchanan
So those are the kind of strategies that go on in tribalistic discourse. And you can see that is just a total breakdown of communication. There is communication within our group. We're sorting and signal and reaffirming our group identity, but there's not genuine communication with the opposing group and there's no cooperation with the opposing group, I mean, tribalism makes for great cooperation within our group. Great solidarity, right? And a kind of groupthink but they end at independent thinking, and that does facilitate the kind of cooperation with our group. But that cooperation comes at the expense of a complete inability to cooperate with the opposing group.

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[00:19:11.200] – Allan
I wanted to get into this because I was thinking about, you know, what the impact that this is having on my stress levels, watching my friends go at each other and pile on. And, you know, it's going down one trail of thought with someone and they're saying some things. And then, of course, the comments that follow. And you're like you're you know, you're talking about another human being. You know, you're not. I mean, granted, you're somewhat anonymous on this platform. So you can have this conversation without being in someone's face and having to say it while you're looking them in the eyes and recognizing, Okay, they're human like me. And I'm saying this to someone human. But now we're in these constructs of social media. Where it almost feels like here's this this wall that's protecting me, that will allow you to say anything you want to say.

[00:20:06.810] – Allan
With our ability, which is actually kind of fascinating when you think about it, that we can continue to adapt and change. We have a plasticity of our brain, of our bodies. And now we're getting into this book of our moral beliefs and attitudes and how we treat the world, how we treat animals, how we treat people. We have this ability to change. But we're not turned on to that yet. So like I said, I want to be the irritant that gets people thinking about why am I in this tribe while my piling on? Why am I happy that that someone in Texas is getting covid? Why would I ever be happy about that? But I see that on Facebook all the time.

[00:20:52.080] – Allan
And it's spilled over into ideologies that are really dangerous. So, you know, should you be wearing a mask? Should you avoid large groups? Should you get a vaccine? Should you? And so there's all these stories and you're trying to think through what actually is happening? What's the actual best course of action for me? And unfortunately, when you get tied into this tribalism, you lose that ability to have your own opinion because the social cost is just too high. To say I agree with you on the mask issue, but I disagree with you on the vaccine issue, whichever side of that you're on, and almost no one can do that and have that conversation, because as soon as you start to say, I don't agree with you here, they immediately now just have a checklist of everything else that you're supposed to believe and who you voted for the last 20 years. And you know how you live your life and how terrible you are. You become to them, even if that's not really who you are and you almost lose the capacity, you can lose the capacity if you let it, of being able to step back objectively and look at these, particularly health issues. Now, politically, you can believe what you want to believe and you can go down the route you want to.

[00:22:17.070] – Allan
But as soon as you start dehumanizing people and as soon as you start letting your objective reasoning go away. I just, the danger here is just phenomenal. Just off the charts. I don't know how to explain it.

[00:22:34.010] – Dr. Buchanan
Yeah, it is. And you really hit the nail on the head when you said, if you say you might disagree on this thing, that people automatically put you in a box and distribute all sorts of other things to you. That's the clumping of that. And that's what makes it so inhibiting of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. I mean, if if I'm with a group of people who are generally of the liberal persuasion and I suggest that I think that maybe the Second Amendment is not such a bad idea so long as it's interpreted as allowing significant regulation of firearm ownership, automatically put in the sort of NRA nut category. And the liberal people that I'm talking to will automatically assume that I'm also against legalized abortion. That I'm also in favor of all sorts of things that I'm not really in favor of. But knowing that you'll be lumped together in that way, that you'll be sorted. Is very, very inhibiting.

[00:23:38.430] – Dr. Buchanan
Now, I like the fact that you're emphasizing the notion that sort of autonomy or thinking for yourself. I think there's a larger collective version of that. And that's why the title of the book is Our Moral Fate. What I argue in the book is that which kind of morality is predominant in the society, but what kind of moral agents we are depends a lot on the environment. It's not an environmental determinism. There are two two factors here. One is the moral mind or our evolved capacities for having morality. The other is the environment.

[00:24:15.830] – Dr. Buchanan
And the point is that there's an interaction between these two factors so that the moral mind, if it's in a very harsh kind of environment, will tend to express itself in tribalistic way. Or if people think that the environment is much more hostile than it really is because they've been propagandized or imbibed in an ideology, then the moral mind is going to react with an exclusive negative tribalistic. On the other hand, if the moral mind is operating in an environment that's more favorable to inclusion, that is where the costs of treating other human beings that are not in your group as our equals. When those costs are lower then we're free to act in a more inclusive way.

[00:25:06.090] – Dr. Buchanan
And so here's the real kicker about this thing. Human beings are different from all other animals on the planet that we know. We are really extensive niche constructors. We construct our environment. We do this continually. We don't just construct it once and one way. We're constantly changing the way we construct environments.

[00:25:28.140] – Dr. Buchanan
And that's very liberating. If it's true that what kind of morality we have, what kind of moral agent we're going to be depends upon what sort of environment we're in. If we learn about how the bottom line responds to different environments, that in principle we can take charge of our moral fate. I think this would be the highest form of autonomy and maybe the highest form of creativity that human beings ever had. In the past, we've created environments, but we've done it for all sorts of reasons and without any understanding of how it affects us morally.

[00:26:03.450] – Dr. Buchanan
But if we could at all a science of institutional moral design, that's kind of a mouthful. But I think you get the idea that for the first time in human history, we could really take charge of ourselves. And it's essential to be human that we have morality, that we're moral agents. And so we could learn to shape that aspect of us. That would be fantastic. That would be nothing that ever occurred in human history.

[00:26:30.120] – Dr. Buchanan
Now, we can do some of that on an individual basis. For example, you could just not participate on Facebook or Twitter. And that's what I did for pretty much. And you can try to guard yourself against getting into these Internet echo chambers where everybody believes the same thing and they just hyper each other in the more extreme views. There are some things that individuals can do on their own without institutional change.

[00:26:57.600] – Dr. Buchanan
But I think in the long run, if we really want to beat tribalism and if we want to realize the best potential of our moral nature, it's going to take some society-wide institutional changes.

[00:27:11.850] – Allan
Yeah. When you talk about the niches and everything, I think many of us have, for a lack of a better word, relegated the creation of our environmental niches to Facebook and Twitter. And the reality of it is that Zuckerberg and Dorsey get more zeros in their bank account through tribalism than they would if we all actually were being inclusive and actually having the right conversations and getting to the true truths versus what is collectively the ideology of our tribe.

[00:27:47.640] – Allan
You had something really important because you were talking about what we needed to have to kind of build that niche, just trying to build an environment that's there. And one of the things you talked about was freedom of expression. And so I'm going to read the phrase that you used in the book, what you said in the book, because I think after I get through doing this, what I would ask you to listen to is or think about is how this relates to Facebook and what it does, because I think Facebook is really smart. I think they know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing and they're doing, in my opinion, they're doing this. And this is to have the freedom of expression you need – this requires, among other things, that control over communication technologies be dispersed so that no one person or group can monopolize them and thereby constrain freedom of information and expression and curtail the exercise of critical moral reasoning.

[00:28:38.190] – Allan
Now, governments do that all the time. In history. they've always done that. They've always wanted to control the narrative. But for the first time in history, we now have public companies that are creating these environments that we adapt and adjust to. And they create this divide, they basically pull us from being inclusive and wanting to get to true truths, to picking a side and fighting it out.

[00:29:05.620] – Dr. Buchanan
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that Facebook's strategy assumes that it has an interest in the fact and stoking tribalism because tribalism makes for more frequent use of Facebook. So I think that's why I think this is what you said. This is not new in history. But governments have always tried to control the environment in which we form our beliefs. But whether it's going to deliver a function of government policy or it's just something that emerges from people pursuing their own interests and in the process of doing that, creating new niches.

[00:29:45.330] – Dr. Buchanan
The point is that we've been controlled by other people like this, mainly the more powerful, richer people who play the larger role in shaping our social environment. And when they do that, they don't do it with an eye to maximize our moral potential. They do it for all sorts of other reasons that are completely unrelated. And so, in a way, we've been suffering a kind of domination that we hadn't realized. And now the form the domination takes Facebook and Twitter. So, again, the question is, can we learn enough about the relationship between the moral mind and social environments that we can take charge of our own moral fate rather than letting our moral fate be determined by others who don't care about what happens to us morally, but are just pursuing their own interests in constructing a certain kind of nich will be to their advantage.

[00:30:41.580] – Allan
And if we don't, you know, then we risk going down a line of where there is no reason and therefore we're harming ourselves. And like I said, just the stress of it. The seeing, the constant battling, and you think, Okay, it's going to be over when this happens and then no. It's not and it's going to be over when the no it's not. It's it's going to keep going. You mentioned Hannity's book, and I couldn't help thinking back.

[00:31:09.600] – Allan
Well, Pat Richards was that we got Pat Robertson, I think was the guy back in the 80s was right. And it could have been the same title. It's the same concept. We were we were doomed in the 80s. And yet here we are 40 years later, still kicking. And so I think we don't have to be so fatalistic in thinking that this is doom and gloom because it's not. There is a way forward. We are adaptive.

[00:31:39.840] – Allan
We can we can we can make ourselves better. And we just have to open up ourselves to understand that the inclusivity for other human beings and seeing them as human and inclusively to seeing that animals deserve fair treatment and proper treatment. And, obviously, we're not going to stop meat eating any time soon, but we can be kinder and better about how we do these things. And that's where I think that morality comes in.

[00:32:09.450] – Allan
It's affecting the quality of our food. It's affecting our stress level. It's affecting our willingness to do the objective things that are best for us just because, again, we're following an ideology that's limiting and we've got to get past that limit if we're truly going to reach out and take care of our country, of our world, of our environment and, of course, individually, ourselves. And if we don't do that, then we're paying a big price. To think we're right.

[00:32:43.640] – Dr. Buchanan
Thinking you're right, this is really important. One of the features of the tribalistic morality that I haven't is this kind of certainty, certainty really a kind of arrogance that is, that our side knows exactly what's right and we have nothing to learn from the other side. That's a characteristic feature and it's incredibly hubristic on any serious political issue. I don't think most sane people should regard themselves as having the last word and being completely right and not in any need of modifying their views in the light of what somebody else might think. But that's it. I mean, people in the tribalistic mode, they act as if all the major political issues in the democracy have already been settled, that we know exactly what's going on across the board on all the important stuff.

[00:33:37.970] – Dr. Buchanan
And that's just that's the kind of stubborn, arrogant attitude that really prevents any engagement with people who hold different views from yours.

[00:33:49.190] – Allan
I've really appreciated this conversation. And I loved the the the thought process that you walked us through the detective story and enjoyed the jab you had on palaeo guys and what they actually probably ate back in the day.

[00:34:04.800] – Dr. Buchanan
It was a good portion of human flesh, in many cases. I'm not a fan of taking the paleo diet very seriously. Allan, can I mention one last thing before we conclude just people where they can get the book again? The title is Our Moral Fate: Evolution and Escape from Tribalism by Allen Buchanan. It's published by Animality Press. If you go to Amazon and just type in my name or the title, you'll get information about the book, a brief summary. You'll get how you could order to settle it. Or you can go to the MIT Press site and Google either my name or the title. And you'll also come up with information. I tried to write this book in a way that was accessible for a broad audience. I think I succeeded. That was quite a challenge for me because I made a career of writing these stodgy scholarly articles and books and I was groomed to do that in my academic career. But this has been a kind of fun and challenging to try to write for a broader audience. And I think I succeeded. I think it's I've been told a number of people that it is accessible, that it's not something that requires a scientific background or philosophical background. And that's important because these are issues for everybody. I really wanted to reach everybody in writing this book.

[00:35:22.700] – Allan
Dr Buchanan, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:35:32.680] – Dr. Buchanan
Well, I think one thing is to try to prevent yourself from getting immersed in this tribalistic culture. I think it's really bad for you. I think there's steps that you can take. You can avoid certain websites or certain media outlets and maybe you can cut down your Facebook time or you can learn just not to respond. You can train yourself not to respond to everything you see on Facebook.

[00:35:58.210] – Dr. Buchanan
And I think, again, the main point is to try to school yourself, to regard the people you disagree with as your equals and as people that potentially you can reason if you can do that, that will be a huge step in the right direction. Another way to avoid ill health effects of tribalism is just to turn off the media or at least to turn off any media that look like they have political content.

[00:36:29.580] – Dr. Buchanan
I know a lot of people have done that to me. I do it to some extent. I mean, there are times where if I continue to look at what's going on politically, I know I'll just make myself sick and to no avail. So there's a kind of self-restraint that's involved in keeping your health and keeping your relationships intact. I mean, look, I have to confess, I'm more of a sort of moderate to liberal persuasion. My wife is extremely conservative and we had to work very hard not to let tribalism infect us and destroy our relationship.

[00:37:05.260] – Allan
Absolutely. Well, as you said earlier, I do believe you've made the book accessible and it is available on Amazon. I'll make sure to have a link in the show notes for this. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/467, and I'll be sure to have a link there.

[00:37:20.320] – Dr. Buchanan
Dr. Buchanan, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:37:23.710] – Dr. Buchanan
Well, thank you for your excellent comments and questions.

Post Show/Recap

[00:37:30.940] – Allan
Welcome back.

[00:37:32.320] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, wow!

[00:37:33.940] – Allan
What tribe are you and what tribe or you in?

[00:37:37.420] – Rachel
Allan, I walk the fence. I'm telling you, I am the most middle of the road person you could ever meet.

[00:37:44.320] – Allan
Yeah, well, politically, I'm a Libertarian and a lot of people say, oh, you noncaring… because, I'm not in their tribe and I don't really care when they start going down that line. I actually do care very much and I do a lot to help people. But I like being able to do it on a voluntary basis. I like having access to information that I can make decisions on.

[00:38:06.370] – Rachel
Yes.

[00:38:06.730] – Allan
An interesting tidbit I'd like to share with you today is that we had Dr. Cowan and Sally Fallon Morell on the show a couple of weeks ago and that gets published out on YouTube. So there's an audio version of this podcast. It's just the picture of the logo and then it just runs on YouTube. They didn't like the topic and they didn't agree with what the message was, which, again, I don't know that you and I really fully agreed with or, you know, say, Okay, we're going to say yay or nay, we're on this. We're like, okay, it's information adults take over. Well, YouTube decided no. So YouTube pulled the video and issued a warning. So I haven't been put in jail, but I've had one of my babies taken away. And so, yeah, you won't find that on YouTube.

[00:38:57.700] – Allan
You won't find Dr. Cowan and Sally's book on Amazon. Amazon is not carrying it.

[00:39:04.120] – Rachel
Really?

[00:39:04.840] – Allan
They carry his other books. They carry her other books, but they are not carrying this book. So recognize that, yes, tribalism is about environment, as we talked in the podcast. The places we go, Google, YouTube, because YouTube is owned by Google, so I have to believe YouTube is blocking stuff, Google is blocking stuff, Facebook is blocking stuff, Twitter is blocking stuff and deleting stuff.

[00:39:35.840] – Allan
It's revisionist information that you're using for your health and fitness. And if you don't think that's a problem, all you have to do is look back and look at what the sugar industry did years and years ago to demonize fat and get scientists. They paid scientists to say sugar is fine.

[00:39:56.060] – Rachel
Hmm. That's crazy.

[00:39:57.830] – Allan
And if they can do that and then the government acts on it by creating a food pyramid that benefits the food companies. And social media is going to follow that line because we have social media back then. We just had the government in the news agencies and now the news agencies and the social media are picking tribes. So your access to health information, because like one of my favorite people to to read and I don't always agree with him is Dr Mercola. He's fascinating. And he knows a lot. He knows a lot. He pretty much can't be on the social media stuff because they block him. So he has his own newsletter. You have to now subscribe to a newsletter, the old school way. You know, give me your email address and he sends you the articles because Google won't show his content. You can start searching for Dr. Mercola. He won't show up the way he did before he used to be number one search when you click on to look up something that you want to know something about. And if Dr. Mercola had written about it, he used to show up really high on the search. Not anymore, I'm guessing, because I have that article out there. If you typed it up to look for Dr. Cowan and Sally, you probably won't find my article either. Google's probably not going to show that page and they'll probably eventually penalize the whole site because I have that content on there. So it's scary.

[00:41:25.760] – Allan
It is. It's really concerning because the the beautiful part about science is that it's always changing. There's always something to be studied. There's always something to be restudy, to reanalysed. There's always new conclusions to be drawn. And it just changes so much that it's it's hard to imagine that just old studies or old news or something that's just new and different are being cut out of the most popular ways that we get information these days. And that's online.

[00:41:59.150] – Allan
Yeah, well, one at one time, everybody thought the scientists thought that everything revolved around the earth and for anyone to come and say no, I think I think it's the other way around. I think we're revolving around other things. And so it's not as just, you know, it's not everything we're all revolving around us. Something's going on and we're probably revolving around other things. And for someone to do that, they were heretic. They were they were dangerous. You know, an idea is dangerous.

[00:42:33.190] – Allan
And I would say it can be when it's part of a tribalism driving a behavior of anger and distrust and fear. And so, yeah, if you're if you're afraid of this thing and your tribe tells you to be more afraid and you're more afraid, and that's why there's this comedian called JP Sears and I think he's hilarious, it's satire. He will sit there and pick and pick a pick, a pick all this stuff of, you know, how you're supposed to be afraid. The media says you're supposed to be afraid. So you have to be afraid because the media says you have to be afraid. And but that's that seems to be a pretty strong message out there that keeps coming every day. And it gets clicks. It creates a whole series of memes and headlines. And you follow those headlines in those memes.

[00:43:24.370] – Allan
And many times if you actually read the article and then they have a link to a source and then you go to the source and you're kind of like, that's actually what they said. But you wrote a really great headline because I was yeah, you got me, you know.

[00:43:40.720] – Allan
And so I just think that we have to take that step back. If you find yourself being pulled in to the tribe ideology, realize, 1) a political candidate should not be giving you medical advice

[00:43:56.320] – Rachel
Right.

[00:43:56.320] – Allan
Let's just put that out there. If you're following the medical advice of a political candidate, elected or not. Probably not a good idea. Do your own homework.

[00:44:06.000] – Allan
If you believe that everything they tell you is true, if it's in the media, it's true. You need to take a step back and do a little bit of work because there'll be a headline about an allegation or a headline about an investigation or a headline that says one thing. And they've picked one piece of information. And therefore, they can use that information to scare you.

[00:44:35.430] – Allan
So I'll just I'll put it out there, with the vaccination. They tested tens of thousands of people and four of the people who got the vaccine got Bell's Palsy. It's a face paralyzing palsy and it's typically temporary, but it's kind of concerning if that is a causal effect, which it's hard to say, which is four. There it is. But interestingly enough, none of the placebo group got it. So it's another data point. It's a little data point in a little bit of data. And I know a lot of people say that's a lot of data and a little number relative to that many people because it is a small percentage.

[00:45:15.540] – Allan
But, you know, if you had a point, two percent chance of getting a horrific disease, that, yes, you're OK from covid, but you get this other disease, is that the choice you wanted to make? And I don't you know, again, for me personally, I respect what they've done and why they did the things they did and all of that and the fact that the vaccine is going to be free for the people that want to take it.

[00:45:41.190] – Allan
But the instant that they say must, which employers are going to do for the government and which you don't have a choice if you want to get your stimulus check, if they actually tie it to a stimulus check. I want you to really think hard about what they're doing and why they're doing that. Why are they enticing so many people to do something that they wouldn't otherwise want to do?

[00:46:03.180] – Allan
And that's herd mentality. That's tribalism. That's fear and reward. And so they're they're basically playing on our human nature, creating an environment. And I just want you. And that's why when I do these podcasts, you know, I've had vegans on, I've keto people on, I've had carnivore on. I had even had a raw paleo and I even tried some of it. I had raw eggs and I didn't die. Oh my God. And they weren't even done. They weren't even the processed clean eggs that you have in the United States. These were just the chicken laid the egg. There's still a little bit of poop on the egg and the carton. So, yeah, let's eat.

[00:46:48.330] – Allan
But I think you have to have the subjectivity. Or you really aren't making adult decisions about your own health.

[00:46:56.260] – Rachel
Well, you just said it right there, making it your own adult decisions about your own adult health. Yeah, I mean, you do need to think things through. And like you said, discussing between the myriad of diets between vegan and carnivore. You have to make these decisions based on your own experience. And I've been vegetarian and I survived it, but it wasn't the most healthiest choice for me. I've been keto now for a little over two going on three years, and it has worked for me. So, I mean, everybody else has to make their own decisions based on their own experiments, trials, accidents, whatever it takes. You know, we're adults. We can make our own decisions.

[00:47:37.630] – Allan
Yeah. Part of the reason and it's maybe it's the libertarianism in me that I don't like some of the stuff, the mandates and the requirements and this and that and the other is that it puts us on a very slippery slope. And what I mean by that is we have a crisis, particularly in the United States, but it's growing. Everywhere else is adopting the standard American diet is obesity, and it leads to so many other health concerns. And the question would be, if you walked up to a grocery store and walked up to a restaurant and you wanted to get some food and they said, OK, I need you to download this app. And it's going to tell us how many steps you took today. And if you haven't taken 8000 steps today, we can't serve you. I know that maybe that sounds crazy.

[00:48:27.190] – Rachel
Totally crazy.

[00:48:28.440] – Allan
But, it's a mandate for the health of the country if we're going to pay more for health care every year because more and more people are getting sick this next generation, they're telling us that their life expectancy would potentially be shorter than our own and not because they're riding without, they're actually wearing helmets when they ride their bicycle. So they're safer. They have more safety equipment in the cars. You know, it's not the mom, one arm restraint right in the front seat of the car. We take much better care of our children these days. So for the protection to be that their life expectancy is shorter than ours should, ding, ding, ding.

[00:49:16.690] – Allan
And we can't expect the government to do this for us. Because every time they take it on as a topic it gets picked up by someone like a First Lady. It's managed for talked about for eight years as an undertone. And it helps and affects nobody. And so it's not just to talk about thing. You've got to embrace your own health. And that's why I'm bothered by the tribalism and now the censorship, I'm not going to call it censorship because it's not really censorship. YouTube doesn't want on their platform. Fine, it's not on YouTube's platform.

[00:49:51.370] – Allan
But I think you should have access to information to draw objective choices. You know, I'm with you, Rachel. I don't think necessarily that 5G is a cause because they're getting it in countries that don't have 5G yet. So if you don't have 5G there, how did someone get it? And the resonation principle of my brother gave me chickenpox, which resonated, and I never got along anything. So if his body told my body something, I wouldn't listen to it.

[00:50:21.910] – Allan
So, no, I don't necessarily agree with them, but that doesn't mean that they don't have the right to have their opinion, and that some of the science they put in there is true that they haven't isolated this virus. The test, you know, the positive negatives, false lots of false positives. Maybe some false negatives. I don't know. That's a little harder to know because it's asymptomatic cases. You test positive, you assume you have it. You wait the ten days and you move on with your life.

[00:50:51.460] – Allan
So I just think we need objective information. If you see a headline and it either you really agree with it or you really disagree with it, because that's what they want. They want you to be polarized by it. You get polarized by a headline. If you care about that issue, if you really care about that issue enough that you're angry now or scared to a little bit of reading.

[00:51:13.000] – Rachel
More reading. Yes.

[00:51:14.890] – Allan
You know, not just that article, but look up articles on the other side of that argument and really sit down and say, what do we know? Okay, I know we've given this vaccine to twenty, thirty thousand people. Yes, there were four cases of Bell's Palsy. There were two deaths. And we know that. Now two deaths out of twenty-two thousand is lower than the death rate for covid, particularly for people who are at risk for other comorbidities. So maybe, maybe a good choice for a really healthy young person. You know, is it a bit is it a good choice to make those? And we need the data, we need the information, and if you just look at a headline, you know, headline says Bell's Palsy cases, then suddenly now you have your reason to be an anti-vaxer. Then the headline on the other side is going to make sure to caveat that with zero point zero two percent, which is no higher than the standard rate of Ball's Palsy in the general population.

[00:52:14.520] – Allan
And, you know, when they gave this other vaccine, there was a I think they had heart attacks and they said, well, that was no higher than the standard for heart attacks. And yes, it happened to be that his was the placebo group that had the heart attacks and the non-placebo group didn't. So does this actually cure heart attacks? And the answer that was also no. So realize the small bits of data make a choice, but make it an informed choice. Not just my tribe says this therefore.

[00:52:43.860] – Rachel
Well, exactly. And I just want to take it one step further and go visit your doctor, make a schedule of video consultation with your doctor, because they're the ones that have all of your past blood results. They have your past illnesses and surgeries. And you can discuss carefully with your doctor all of your concerns whether or not you're going to have an allergic reaction, even though you've never had an allergic reaction to a vaccine before. I mean, it's worth just discussing with your doctor and having somebody who's actually seen all of your medical history help you make an informed decision and not base your decision over one headline or another. Like really take a closer look to what this means for you as an individual.

[00:53:28.390] – Allan
Yeah. And then the other side of this and one of the core reasons that I wanted to to get into this topic with Dr. Buchanan is this is if you find yourself getting angry at someone over their opinion, you really got to rethink your priorities. If you're letting this hurt relationships, it's one thing to push the unfriend on Facebook for someone that you went to high school with 30 years ago, 40 years ago, that's one thing.

[00:53:58.440] – Allan
But to sit there and say, I'm not going to talk to my mother, brother or sister spouse again because they are an anti-vaxxer or they're, you know, they're a masker or whatever you want to whatever your side of this conversation is because you're in that tribe, you really need to rethink that because, you know, I've had enough people on talking about longevity and we know it's the social bonds and relationships that keep us tied to this earth to have a good, long, healthy life.

[00:54:30.840] – Allan
And so this is this goes a lot deeper than just saying, oh, I have to be right. I have to agree with my tribe. I don't I can't afford the social cost of not agreeing with my tribe now that I'm in this tribe. But the social costs of being in that tribe are lost relationships, a lot of anger and stress in your life and a lot of fear. And some of that fear may be warranted, but in many cases it's not.

[00:54:55.800] – Allan
And because that's fear is what's driving you in that tribe. It's what's keeping you tied to that tribe is the fear, either the fear that they're going to take something away from you or the fear that that other tribe is going to kill you because they're evil. And that's what tribalism is all about. That's why I thought this was a really good episode to have. I hope YouTube doesn't block it, too, because their secret is out. But I just, you know, just recognize what social media, what the news media is doing to you.

[00:55:31.350] – Rachel
You mentioned fear. But I also want to bring up the anger part of it, too, because, you know, for all this time, we could get along no matter where people sat and the on the aisle, right or left in the middle or whatever. But it's gotten it's escalated to a point where it's making people angry and they're saying such inflammatory things. And it's not just about cherry picking the facts to prove your point.

[00:55:59.100] – Rachel
It's the name calling, it's the degrading. And it's the I'm right. And you're not it's just not the there's no good side and bad side. And it's been really hard to you know, like I've said before, I just live and let live. You know, people need to make their own decisions based on what's important to them in their lives, whether it's about politics or eating or vaccinations or whatever. But you just because you made your choice doesn't mean everybody else has to have that exact same choice.

[00:56:35.010] – Rachel
You have to respect other people's opinions and their abilities to do the exact same thing, make the choices that are best for them. And that name call or shame or that's the part I think that's driving people apart is the ugly part of it all.

[00:56:48.900] – Allan
Yeah. And as Dr. Buchanan put it in his book. It's a heady read, this is not you know, this is not light reading that you're just going to do on a Summer day sitting on the beach. You know, this is something that you're going to be some concepts and you really have to wrap your mind around what he's saying, what he's trying to prove out. And he does it from an evolutionary perspective. So it's tied into a lot of evolutionary sociology, archaeology, science stuff, but it's not so deep. It is written for the everyday person. But there's a lot of big, long words in there, some that you might even have to look up. I did.

[00:57:24.910] – Allan
But, you know, the objective of tribalism is to dehumanize the other tribe, because we need you to act against the other tribe to further bring you into this tribe, so it's a dehumanization. And so when I read on Facebook, “That's good they're getting covid because they did this.” Or they all pose in a picture with that guy so they all deserve to die. And I'm like, no, nobody deserves to die. No, if that's human. And then the other side of it is if they come on my property, I'm going to just shoot them. And I'm like, no, no,

[00:58:08.130] – Rachel
That's fear, fear and anger.

[00:58:11.370] – Allan
Just recognized that that's what the tribe is doing. It's it's helping you and your brain dehumanize another human being. That's not that's not the direction we were headed as human beings. We were headed towards more inclusion. We were headed towards where we recognize the basic human rights of every single person. And we have begun this this exploration into the rights of animals. He was them calling them non-human animals. And in the book, it's just kind of funny, like nonhuman animals. I guess some animals are human.

[00:58:49.230] – Rachel
I don't know.

[00:58:50.970] – Allan
In the book, we didn't discuss it in the interview, but he said he had been seeing some documentaries and some information on octopus and how smart they were and how creative they were and how playful they were. And I actually saw a documentary on Netflix myself where the guy was going out every day and visiting this octopus and he built a relationship with an octopus, much like you would, you know, like a dog, like, you know, another animal.

[00:59:19.110] – Allan
And he said up until that point, you know, the thought process for him was it's not like me. It's not like a dog, you know, I wouldn't kill and eat a dog, and that was where, he had lines of, OK, I'll eat animals, but I'm not going to eat vertebrates because I know they feel pain and I don't like the way they're farming them. Okay, so since I know that the factory farms work this way and I know that's because I'm not going to eat this, I'm not going to eat that.

[00:59:46.440] – Allan
I know they feel pain and I'm so I'm not gonna eat that. But he would eat octopus and then he saw this documentary, started understanding the nature of the octopus and how intelligent it was, creative and all that. So he just he can't tolerate eating octopus. So realize that you have this flexibility if you open up your brain and let information in. And then when you learn something, dive in a little deeper and really get a good foundation for why you feel the way you feel and it?

[01:00:18.980] – Allan
And guess what? Regardless of what that is, octopus is delicious, by the way. It doesn't make you a good or bad person. It doesn't make you less moral or more moral to have that position. It's just your moral position. And if you're sticking to your foundation of who you are by the nature of being you, you're being moral.

[01:00:43.290] – Allan
Yeah, yeah. Live and let live. Yeah. And respect other people.

[01:00:48.390] – Allan
And so, yeah, that's why I tell people go to a farmer's market, talk to the farmer and find out how they're treating the animals that you're eating. And if you're not happy with the way then don't buy that. And you know, so realize the factory farms are, they treat these animals so poorly. But if that's what you're eating, that's what you're eating. So just recognize where you are, how you're acting and make sure it's consistent.

[01:01:11.820] – Allan
You need that moral consistency. And then when you realize new information and that doesn't go along with what you thought, do the research get the understanding and then you have the plasticity to adapt your morality based on your new understanding. But if you stick with a tribe, if you're in that regressed state of being in a tribe, you're not going to be open to that. And that's a shame.

[01:01:37.650] – Rachel
Yes, absolutely. That sounds about perfect. It's a good place to teach people that they can make their own decisions.

[01:01:46.410] – Allan
You can make your own decisions. Yeah, good. Good. All right, Rachel, this has been a good talk. I really appreciate it.

[01:01:51.240] – Rachel
Very good.

[01:01:52.110] – Allan
I'll talk to you next week.

[01:01:53.640] – Rachel
That's great. Take care.

[01:01:55.170] – Allan
Be safe.

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Self-discipline and failure with William Ferraiolo

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:48.040] – Allan
Raz, how are you doing?

[00:02:50.050] – Rachel
Great. Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:52.570] – Allan
I'm doing well. You know, we're prerecording these intro and outro thing conversations now because we want to take a break at the end of the year. And so actually, while I'm recording this, I'm in a town in Panama called Boquete. It's in the mountains. So it's moderate temperatures. A lot of expats that want to come down here and live. They like this region because it's really cool and comfortable and it doesn't get too hot.

[00:03:21.430] – Allan
And you're about an hour or two away from beaches. If you want to go see some Pacific beaches. So a lot of people like living here. And so we've been talking to a lot of expats and they call themselves expats. We're immigrants. But I won't let that definitional term really bother me too much. So we've been spending some time here.

[00:03:41.590] – Allan
We went to a coffee farm yesterday and went through the whole process of how they make coffee from start to finish to picking beans to all the way to grinding them when you're done toasting them. It's pretty cool.

[00:03:56.650] – Rachel
So are you a coffee drinker?

[00:03:58.270] – Allan
Oh, I am.

[00:03:59.230] – Rachel
Yeah. Nice. How does it taste?

[00:04:01.000] – Allan
As soon as we get off this call, I'm going to go back to the dining table because we're recording this around breakfast time. Tammy is having breakfast right now. I'm going to get some more coffee because it's so wonderful around here.

[00:04:11.060] – Rachel
Oh, that sounds so wonderful. I'm a big coffee drinker, too. I love trying different types of coffees. And that would be really neat to see it all in action like you just did.

[00:04:20.350] – Allan
Yeah, I bought a bag a pound of this what they call double roasted, which is basically where when you roasted I guess it's similar like make popcorn I guess is the analogy she uses. It pops the beans as you're roasting the beans pop. And so what you want to do to get to a medium roast is literally just get to the point where all the beans are popped once. And that's the kind of I like the medium roast. And so what you can do is you go to a point right before they crack and then you let them cool off and then you go and roast them again. So that's a double roast to get to that medium. And so I'm interested to get back and grind some of that up and try that tomorrow or next week. But so, yeah, I bought that. She said after you have this, you won't like any other coffee again.

[00:05:07.660] – Rachel
So that's so awesome.

[00:05:10.280] – Allan
She's like, you'll be calling me asking you to ship this stuff to you.

[00:05:13.990] – Rachel
Wonderful. That sounds wonderful.

[00:05:16.750] – Allan
Yeah. So it's good. Tammy's recovering from her surgery, so everything's good on this side and we'll spend about another four or five days here. In fact, as we're recording this, Tammy goes back to see her doctor for her follow up and have her stitches removed. So she's on the mend. And then we're going to get back to Bocas and I guess try to open up a bed and breakfast and a gym.

[00:05:37.330] – Rachel
That's exciting. For sure. Sounds like great plans for the next year.

[00:05:42.550] – Allan
How are you doing?

[00:05:43.780] – Rachel
Good. Getting ready for winter up here. We haven't seen any substantial snow quite yet, but I know it's coming. So just getting out my yak tracks and my studs for my shoes and all my winter gear, it's going to be fun.

[00:05:59.730] – Allan
Fun.

[00:06:02.720] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:06:03.340] – Allan
I'll, I'll be walking the beaches in Bocas about the time you're running with your studs through ice and snow.

[00:06:10.240] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:06:10.900] – Allan
OK, I guess each person has to have their own and love that they have.

[00:06:14.920] – Rachel
Got to love it.

[00:06:16.300] – Allan
Oh bless your little heart.

[00:06:19.570] – Rachel
Thanks. I need it.

[00:06:21.970] – Allan
OK, well it's interesting because the podcast now has been going on for over five years and I've never covered one aspect of dieting that's called the OMAD Diet, which is basically a form of intermittent fasting. I would call it intermittent fasting 2.0. It's a little bit more extreme than than just standard intermittent fasting with one meal per day. And so let's go ahead and start this conversation with Alyssa.

Interview

Text

[00:07:20.920] – Allan
Alyssa, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:23.170] – Alyssa
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:07:25.360] – Allan
So, you know, it's weird. I've had this podcast for five years, over five years now, and I've talked about every kind of topic I thought I could talk about. And then I realized, oh, here's a book on OMAD, and I've never covered a book on OMAD. Wow! It's called The OMAD Diet: Intermittent Fasting with One Meal a Day to Burn Fat and Lose Weight.

[00:07:48.860] – Allan
And just general admission: I do intermittent fasting all the time. I do. I'm in keto most of the time and intermittent fasting just becomes natural. There have been a few times where I found that I did only eat one meal. It was never a planned, I'm going to go do an OMAD thing. It was a I got stuck. You know, one situation. My truck got stuck in my front yard of my property. I was at a property doing some work, and then my truck got stuck. And when the tow truck came, the tow truck broke. So it's three more hours for the tow truck to fix and get me finally get me out.

[00:08:26.150] – Allan
And so I ate. You know, I had eaten the night before. I skipped breakfast and went out, worked for a few hours. And then here I was now driving home at six o'clock. And I'm like, oh, it's been 23 hours since I even ate. I might ought to eat something. So I wasn't you know, I wasn't hungry.

[00:08:43.940] – Allan
I wasn't starving myself. And then I did have a pretty good meal. So can you take just a minute to talk about what OMAD is? Because I think a lot of people get confused and think it's just a way to really restrict calories or trick your body or can you talk about it?

[00:09:02.090] – Alyssa
Certainly. So, first of all, I'm honored that the first person you had on to talk about OMAD. And I think that a lot of people have had similar experiences to you in that the kind of you have to eat three meals a day has been so ingrained. And even with some diet programs that have been popular over the last 20 years, it's more like you have to eat six times a day or you have to eat every two hours or something like this.

[00:09:32.840] – Alyssa
And people don't realize that eating one meal a day an option and can be a kind of sustainable and nutritious approach when in fact it can be. So kind of the basic idea behind OMAD, which stands for one meal, is just as it sounds in that it's really you're only sitting down to eat once a day. But for that reason, it kind of gets rid of all of those different possible restrictions on eating. If you're kind of like calorie counting or things like that, there are people who approach, OMAD as because I'm only eating once, I can eat whatever I want, which is an approach you can take and because you are still fasting for twenty-three hours, you will still get some benefits from that approach.

[00:10:35.510] – Alyssa
But the approach that I tried to take in the book was to kind of figure out how I could create really balanced, well-rounded meals for the one meal a day that we're going to make the fast sustainable. So you wouldn't be starving and also kind of give you a wide array of macro and micronutrients that will support your health overall.

[00:11:03.920] – Allan
Yeah, that was one of the critical things that was in there that I thought was really important is you're not just talking keto, which is why I ended up in that situation where, I basically went OMAD without expecting to. And it didn't bother me because I was already really comfortable with ketosis. But you have vegan recipes and you have vegetarian recipes and you have things that are keto-friendly. You have really a good mix in there. So it's not just keto, is this keto is that, there's this OMAD is this or OMAD is that. Quite literally, whatever your approache and nutritional needs are, you're still meeting those with OMAD.

[00:11:43.590] – Alyssa
Yeah, it's incredibly adaptable in a lot of ways. One way is that you can adapt it if you are following keto or if you are on a plant-based or a gluten-free diet, you can do any number of those things. But it's also really adaptable to your lifestyle. So going back to that, like folks who felt like they needed to eat multiple times a day, that can be incredibly stressful on a person with a busy kind of full life, like trying to fit that in.

[00:12:15.570] – Alyssa
And then if they don't get their second of six meals and they think, oh, well, now today is a wash, like, I'll have to start again tomorrow. Whereas with OMAD you really you only have to find that time to sit down and eat a healthy meal once a day. And that was one of the things that actually surprised me a little as I was working on the book and speaking to people who have done OMAD. Was that the fact that it was really easy and kind of didn't put any added stress on their lifestyle was one of the things that they loved most about it?

[00:12:53.880] – Allan
Yeah, there are a lot of benefits. I mean, for me, it's the food freedom of not having to have food everywhere because I tried I tried some other eating styles after keto. I was trying some eating styles and I was like, OK, so I've got to have a snack of nuts now and have a snack of fruit now. OK, now here's my meal. And now here's this other snack and here's the other snack and then a meal and then another snack. And I had food in my truck, had foodin my office. I had at food all around me so that I would always have this available food. And it was just it was difficult. You know, if I'd got stuck in the mud and I was eating six meals a day, well, I would have just missed five of them.

[00:13:41.370] – Allan
What are some of the other benefits besides the time savings and the and then kind of having that freedom? What are some of the other benefits we could see with OMAD?

[00:13:50.430] – Alyssa
Sure, you already you mentioned ketosis a little bit. That is kind of one of the primary methods through which if you're doing OMAD to lose weight, that is definitely going to help. So that is the process where when you're eating on a regular basis and getting carbohydrates into your body, your body is first going to use up all of those carbohydrates for energy before it starts using anything else. But when you are on an extended fast, your body will work its way through all of that glucose, all of those carbohydrates, and switch to burning fat. And then the longer you go after that switch occurs, just the more fat you're going to burn. So that's one of the big ones.

[00:14:38.700] – Alyssa
Another big way that it can help with weight loss is through its effect on hormones. So the first hormone that it has a big effect on is insulin. So, going back to eating regularly throughout the day, when you're doing that, your pancreas is constantly producing insulin so that the insulin can then go in and take the sugar out of your bloodstream and bring it to your cells to be used as energy.

[00:15:07.170] – Alyssa
But if you're constantly putting in carbohydrates, insulin is constantly being produced. And a lot of people get to the point where the pancreas just gets tired of producing insulin and it can't produce anymore. And so that production starts to slow down. And that slow down is what leads to problems like Type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which are big contributors to weight gain, especially in America, with the number of people that are type 2 diabetics few days.

[00:15:42.030] – Alyssa
But when you're only eating one today, insulin does not need to constantly being be produced. So your pancreas shoots out insulin when you eat and then when you're not eating, the pancreas is like, oh, I can take a break. It gets to rest and relax and recharge. And then the next time you eat, it's ready to produce the insulin that you need.

[00:16:07.560] – Alyssa
And then the other hormone that is impacted is HGH, which has a big impact on exercise as well, which I mentioned later. HGH, human growth hormone, it plays a big role in maintaining lean muscle mass and a steady metabolism. But for a lot of people, the levels of HGH that the body produces is pretty erratic. And it's also one of the hormones that decline significantly with age. But there have been studies that show that extended fasts with things like OMAD really rapidly increase HGH levels, and so that's kind of maintaining muscle mass, especially as you get older, plays such a key role in not only maintaining a healthy metabolism and a healthy weight, but also like keeping your body strong, your joints strong, protecting against all sorts of all sorts of different things.

[00:17:07.870] – Alyssa
And then and then, yeah, there are tons of additional studies that have been done on how it can be beneficial for heart health, for brain health, how it helps people who are going through cancer treatment. There's very new research now into how it affects this process called autophagy, which is like allowing old and debilitated cells in your body to be replaced by newer, younger, healthier cells. And the idea is that the more young, healthy cells you have in your body compared to these old ones that aren't working as well, the better everything is going to run. And the more recent research into fasting is showing that it allows your body to do this cell turn over more quickly. And that is proving to have lots of different benefits as well.

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[00:19:21.130] – Allan
Now, a lot of people when you say, OK, well, what I want you to do is I want you to have your dinner or have your breakfast and then I want you to wait twenty four hours to eat again. I think a lot of people look at that and say, well, oh my God, my blood sugar is going to drop down to zero and I'm going to be jonesing. How how would you recommend that someone go through and basically get to OMAD? Because I think it's a process. I don't really think it's just OK, today I'm eating and I'm not going to eat again for some. Some people can. Don't get me wrong. There's people who can. But for a lot of people, it's a little scary to kind of go off that cliff and say, I'm going to do this. What are some recommendations you have on on a good general approach to that?

[00:20:04.810] – Alyssa
Well, first off, you mentioned like, oh, my blood sugar is going to get too low. Like, there are a couple, like couple kind of groups of people for whom OMAD isn't the best idea. Like, if you do have low blood sugar and that's a health concern of yours, then it like it might not be best. But for the majority of healthy people, if you get the OK from your doctor, it's definitely it's not going to hurt you to give it a shot.

[00:20:33.880] – Alyssa
I think as far as a good approach, you can definitely kind of work towards it. So maybe if you're eating three meals a day, switch to just two and see how you feel then then the other big thing is that, as you just mentioned, it really doesn't matter what time of day you eat your one meal. So when you're just getting started, mix it up and you can have your one meal around breakfast. And like, I actually I have a whole chapter in my book of breakfast style meals. If you are someone who likes to eat in the day, maybe try that for two days and then switch to a midday meal. Try that for a little bit of time. And so you can really play with it to determine what what is best for you, what kind of what timing keeps keeps your energy up the best.

[00:21:35.110] – Alyssa
And then the other another key part is that you are only eating once a day. But that doesn't mean you can't put anything else in your body during the other twenty three hours. So drinking fluids throughout the day can have a huge impact on how full you feel. So that's water, that's black coffee and tea. That's like chicken broth or beef broth, like bone bone broth, those kinds of things. A lot of the time in general, if you feel like you need a snack or something, if you feel hungry a lot of the time, you might just be thirsty.

[00:22:14.050] – Alyssa
And so kind of keeping I know you were talking about earlier, kind of always having a snack of nuts or something on you, I think, with, oh, you always want to have a bottle of water or a mug of something to keep you going. And again, to the last thing which I touched on briefly earlier is to kind of really think about creating meals that are really well-balanced and have a variety of nutrients.

[00:22:48.370] – Alyssa
So a lot of the in creating the recipes for my book, I put a lot of focus on protein and fiber because these are the ones that are going to give you energy, keep you full throughout the day. Also a lot of vegetables because those are going to increase portion sizes. Vegetables take longer to chew. Like the longer it takes you to eat, the more full and satisfied you're going to feel. I also talked a little bit about mindful eating. I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with mindfulness or like mindfulness meditation.

[00:23:28.060] – Alyssa
And so this is kind of applying that idea to cooking and eating. So really being in the present, like smelling the smells, kind of feeling the textures of your food and really being there with your meal and not watching TV or eating while you're driving, because hopefully, like it's only one meal, you haven't had to carve out a bunch of different times in your day. So hopefully you're able to commit that like 20 to 30 minutes just to enjoying your meal. And that can make a huge difference as well. And kind of how satisfied you then feel going into your fast?

[00:24:12.930] – Allan
I think it's really important to emphasize we brought this up at the beginning just to talk to your doctor. And if you're on any kind of blood sugar lowering meds like metformin or you're taking insulin or anything like that, recognize that when you change the way you eat, you change the formula of how your body is going to work. And so if you're on those and using those, your dosages are probably going to have to change to adapt to what you're doing now. As you get into this, this is not something to just jump in to have the conversation with your doctor, be prepared to change your meds as needed so that you can manage through that. But this is particularly for diabetes and obesity.

[00:24:53.400] – Allan
This is a hugely popular and good approach to eating well and keeping your blood sugar and insulin levels stable. So, you know, this is something you really want to look into. One thing I think a lot of people would be surprised with is like, oh, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm just going to be losing weight. I just I don't need to exercise. But I'll tell you, as a personal trainer. Yeah, you do need to exercise?

[00:25:20.880] – Allan
So there's little concern. And I you know, I had a I hired a personal trainer. I want to get stronger for a Spartan. So I hired a personal trainer, Coach Dave and I meet him every morning. And I told him, I said, you know, I don't care how early we meet. I don't you know, he says, I want you to have time to eat, wake up and eat. And like, no, I don't need to worry about eating before I can do things like, yeah, you need those carbs, you need that, you know, that protein and carbs. So you have the energy to make it through a workout.

[00:25:48.390] – Allan
And I'm like, no, Dave, I'll be fine through the workout. But it was only because I knew my body well enough. I'd been training long enough to know that I can exercise without food in my system. Can you talk a little bit about exercising when you're on OMAD? Considerations and things to do.

[00:26:06.660] – Alyssa
Yeah. So just like you can play around with the timing of your one meal, I definitely recommend playing around with the timing of your workout in relation to your meal, because like you said, some people do feel comfortable and energized and strong exercising on an empty stomach. And there have been studies that do show like some benefits to that, but other people that might make them feel nauseous or weak or things like that. And so you can definitely see if you want to do your workout before your meal, after your meal

[00:26:47.250] – Alyssa
Something else I discuss in the book as the only thing you can kind of quote unquote eat during your fast are fat bombs, which I'm sure you're familiar with as it comes comes out of the keto world. So these are like little treats that you make using healthy fats like coconut oil or coconut butter, and then add a little bit of flavoring like maybe like a drop or two of liquid stevia and some cocoa powder. And then you mix it up and you freeze them and you have really indulgent little snacks, the fat that can be kind of an instant hit of energy if you do feel like you need just that little something before or after a workout.

[00:27:34.860] – Alyssa
But, yeah, it's very personal. And there are certainly benefits to exercising during while you're fasting, while you're on OMAD, as I mentioned earlier, insulin and HGH, those are really the benefits you get from fasting as they affect those hormones. And the benefits that you get from exercising are really complementary to one another. So, like, if fasting is kind of keeping your insulin production low and steady, exercise has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, which means that the body doesn't need as much insulin to begin with to kind of move the glucose out of your bloodstream. So the way that both fasting and exercise impact insulin is incredibly good for your good for your overall health.

[00:28:35.460] – Alyssa
And then obviously with HGH as well, if your HGH levels are high there, that's kind of allowing you to build that lead muscle mass that you're trying to build through exercise, and then just as the time of day that you exercise is very personal. So is the form of exercise you choose. I think one of the most important things about exercise is that you have to be doing something that you enjoy because if you don't like doing it, then you're not going to stick with it and then you're going to feel bad about not sticking with it.

[00:29:16.830] – Alyssa
And then it's just going to be this cycle of. Not maintaining your healthy habits, and so I think that any form of movement, whether that's walking, running, biking, dancing, strength training, interval training, really anything, anything that you enjoy and that you feel good afterwards is a good strategy to take while you're also doing all that.

[00:29:49.670] – Allan
Alyssa, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be, what are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well.

[00:30:00.140] – Alyssa
My first one is one that I just started talking about, which is find activities that are good for you that also make you happy. So the biggest way to find, maintain healthy habits are to find habits that you actually enjoy doing and that you get up every morning wanting to do, excited to do, because you're much more likely to do those things on a regular basis. You're much more likely to keep them in your in your life for longer.

[00:30:41.440] – Alyssa
I'm not a huge fan of, like, doing something that just because you think it's good for you, but you don't feel great afterwards or you kind of are the second you finish your dreading the next time you have to do it. Because like you said, happiness is such an enormous part of fitness and wellness that I really don't think these things are worth doing unless you enjoy them. And there are so many ways you can impact your health in a positive way that you're bound to find at least one that that makes you happy while you do it.

[00:31:24.580] – Alyssa
My second strategy is to be kind to yourself. So life is busy. It's unpredictable. You could have this set plan of like you're going to do X workout, you're going to make X dinner, but then your car breaks down and you have to wait for triple A for three hours and then you end up pizza and really like these are things that are not going to derail all of your efforts. They're not things that mean you have to erase any progress you've made so far and kind of go back to start. And so just giving yourself that leeway to deal with those kinds of twists and turns when when they arrive and really just do what you can, when you can and be proud of what you've accomplished is really, really important.

[00:32:27.640] – Alyssa
And then my last strategy is to just be outside as much as possible. I know personally, I just I always feel better about life when I'm when I'm outside and whether that can be something of like walking your dog every day, going on hikes on the weekends or even just kind of sitting outside for a couple of minutes in the morning while you drink your coffee. I feel like the kind of being connected to nature, even if you live in a city or something like that, just kind of feeling the fresh air or the sun or like seeing grass or trees just has such a kind of calming, stress reducing effect that really can just take you out of your head, even if it's just for a couple of minutes and give you that moment of feeling refreshed and renewed and also empowered to tackle anything that might come your way.

[00:33:40.070] – Allan
Thank you. Alyssa. If someone wanted to learn more about you and the things that you're doing, including your book, The OMAD Diet, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:33:50.160] – Alyssa
Sure. When this goes live, the the diet will be available for purchase wherever books are sold. It's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, a lot of different places. So if you search for it there, you should be able to find it. You can also find it. And a lot of the other work I do on my website, which is alyssasybertz.com. And there you'll find information and links to the book, as well as to a lot of the other writing and stuff that I do.

[00:34:37.100] – Allan
All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/466. And I'll be sure to have the links there. Alyssa, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:34:47.840] – Alyssa
Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Post Show/Recap

[00:34:57.130] – Allan
Welcome back, Ras.

[00:34:58.570] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, wow, that was a really, really interesting interview about a whole new way of eating. It's really an interesting concept to just choose one meal per day. There's a lot of things I like about it, but I also have a few questions.

[00:35:12.940] – Allan
Yeah, it's you know, I've done it before on accident only because, you know, like, my truck got stuck in the mud. I think I've told this story on here. My truck gets stuck in the mud. I was gone working on a yard area I owned on some property, worked for the morning pretty hard. And then as I was trying to pull out, my truck got stuck. So I had to call AAA to pull me out of my own property and their truck broke. And so three hours later, waiting for a part, getting that fixed.

[00:35:42.350] – Allan
I went fishing because that's why I own the land in the first place. So I'm over there fishing and taking my you know, I'm I'm fine. I'm not worried about it, but I'm driving back and realizing it's been 24 hours since I had any food whatsoever.

[00:35:53.500] – Rachel
Wow.

[00:35:53.950] – Allan
Because when I do my fasting, which I do intermittent fasting almost consistently when I'm in full ketosis because I'm just not hungry that often. And my goal in ketosis, particularly at the very beginning of it, is to reduce some body fat. So I will skip a breakfast. I still eat breakfast foods when I break my fast, maybe lunch time or later. I'm not going to get stuck in the whole thing of eggs and bacon and have to be in the morning. I'll eat them whenever I want to. But so I've I've been to a point where I had one meal a day. But I think a lot of people that get into intermittent fasting and OMAD just they struggle initially because it is not something you just do. You don't just sit there and say, I had dinner last night, I'm going to wait until dinner to eat.

[00:36:40.450] – Allan
If you're not conditioned, I'm ready for it. You're going to see blood sugar spikes and plummets. And it's not it's not going be a fun experience. And I think the other thing that a lot of people do wrong with OMAD or with any kind of intermittent fasting is they just don't eat enough food.

[00:36:57.430] – Rachel
Mm hmm.

[00:36:58.900] – Allan
You know, food is its energy, but it's also nutrition. And so it's not just it's not just about calories. When you get into OMAD, you know, you've got to make sure you're getting your nutrition in that one meal. So if you're going to try the OMAD diet, you're probably going to have to supplement with some vitamins and minerals because you're probably going to find it hard to get all of that nutrition in one meal unless you really, really focus on it.

[00:37:27.460] – Allan
Now, Alyssa in in her book, has laid out some pretty good plans and some one approach to it. So if you're interested in it, I think you do want to do a little bit of research first.

[00:37:39.580] – Rachel
Yeah, that was my biggest question was how do you pack all of the nutrients you need to have into one meal? Like how how can you get a full day's worth of nutrients and into one simple meal?

[00:37:52.990] – Allan
It's it's really about nutritional density. OK, so you're not going to have white bread? That's going to be something you eat. White potatoes, you might you might occasionally have that, but you're going to be really looking for the vegetables that are really high in the vitamins and minerals that you're going to want.

[00:38:16.300] – Allan
You may, you know, do salt and you may have some potassium with your so you're looking at what are the foods I can have that are going to give me my potassium? What are the foods that are going to give me my zinc and then iodine and the whole bit. And that's what I was saying, is there's a there's a nutritional density limit there. So you're you're eating a lot of food. That one meal is a lot of food, but you want to look for the most nutritionally dense foods you can have so that you know that you're getting a balanced diet because it's still in the end you need that nutrition. Your body needs that nutrition. Short run.

[00:38:50.530] – Allan
You know, you can you can go with fewer calories, but that's not that's not sustainable. And if you're just doing this as a diet, meaning a fixed period of time, and then you're going to go back to eating normal, you're going to yo yo like crazy.

[00:39:05.000] – Rachel
Yeah, it sounds really challenging to not to mention that we have so many habits, you know, the morning coffee and an afternoon snack and a dessert after dinner or something or an evening snack. It's like there's so many habits that are built around our meals that it would be really a big foreign concept just to stick with one meal and not have anything else throughout the day.

[00:39:27.940] – Allan
Yeah, well, my thoughts would be, OK, start with a step away approach, you know, so like with intermittent fasting, if I were coaching someone on intermittent fasting, I'd say, OK, look, you had your dinner at seven o'clock, so from seven or seven thirty you were eating OK.

[00:39:44.140] – Allan
And then you wake up in the morning and maybe normally you would have your breakfast at seven o'clock. And so you're saying, OK, that's about a 12 hour gap. So that's a fast. We have break-fast, so we break our fast. Well, if you can push your breakfast to 8:00. OK, it's one extra hour and you might feel a little hungry. Mm hmm. That's actually good.

[00:40:06.610] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:40:07.840] – Allan
It's it's not a bad thing to feel a little hungry. You're actually not going to starve. And being a little hungry is good because you feel that you actually now are listening to the leptin ghrelin conversation in your body, which is how we know we've eaten enough food. So you push it off an hour and you see how you feel and then you get used to that eight o'clock breakfast time and then when you're ready, you push it off to nine o'clock and it gets easier as you practice this. But the other side of it is, no, you can't you can't be eating a lot of high glycemic index foods for those meals, because if you eat high glycemic breakfast, yeah, at eight o'clock by 10, 30, 11 o'clock, you're going to be starving again as your blood sugar plummets and you're going to want that morning snack or second breakfast, as they call it.

[00:41:01.630] – Allan
So you want to avoid that in the best way to avoid that is eating nutritionally dense foods with their protein and some fat. And I would say particularly in the morning, moderate or low carbohydrate. Most of my breakfast, I have no carbohydrates, because you don't you actually don't need the carbohydrates at all, your body will turn to protein and fat into energy if it needs to. If it can, it'll also use body fat. So if you tend to be towards low carb, it's going to make intermittent fasting much easier. In fact, it might just accidentally happen. You wake up, it's like I'm not hungry.

[00:41:38.710] – Rachel
Right.

[00:41:39.080] – Allan
I'm gonna go ahead and go. And you find at 1:00 or 2:00 o'clock, you're like, well, I probably should eat and I usually do. And that's one of the things when I'm doing my intermittent fasting, as I sometimes even force myself to have a meal at two o'clock in the afternoon, because I know having just one meal at six o'clock is going to make it very difficult for me to get enough nutrition in. So I'll say, OK, I'm going to have, you know, a good salad. And so it's going to have a good mix of vegetables in it and a protein source.

[00:42:05.500] – Allan
So maybe I'm going to make a tuna fish salad. You know, I put that on an actual garden salad and I might sprinkle some bacon on there for just, you know, fairy dust and, you know, and maybe even cut up a little bit of an avocado and say, I'll have the rest of that for dinner. So that's a good, solid meal. Give me a good base of nutrition. Sure. It's it's generally light, so it's not going to be overfilling. And I have at about two o'clock and then I can have a reasonable good dinner with some, you know, a good protein source and some vegetables to round out my dinner.

[00:42:42.040] – Allan
And if I feel like I'm not getting the nutrition I need because, you know, maybe I'm saying, OK, I am eating some vegetables that have vitamin C, but I'm not eating a lot of fruit. So maybe I say I need to go ahead while I'm doing this. I need to take a vitamin C supplement. And so I might supplement with vitamin C, I might supplement with vitamin D. It's really just going to depend on how I feel I'm getting the nutrients I need based on how I'm eating.

[00:43:07.990] – Rachel
Yeah. Two meals a day. A day seems a lot more manageable than maybe one meal a day.

[00:43:15.520] – Allan
In general I would agree. But there's, there are there is a lot to be said. You know, the science, the science isn't really there to say yay or nay. At least that's what I heard going through all these, all these readings and talkings and all that is that when our body doesn't have to focus on dealing with food, you can do a lot of other things. That energy gets used somewhere else. It was a kind of a we were going through the coffee plantation I talked about.

[00:43:42.730] – Allan
He was saying, OK, if a plant gets too many berries on it, it can't keep up with all the berries. So some of the berries just die off because the plants a plant knows I only have a certain amount of energy, I can only ripen so many fruits and then while it's got fruit, it can't grow. So no more leaves. It needs the leaves for energy. So it's this trade off balance of what with the energy I have, what can I do?

[00:44:12.610] – Allan
And in our bodies are the same way. If we're not if we're using our energy or not giving our body enough energy, it turns off functions that we would like to be doing. So share in thinking about what you eat, how often you eat. You know, those types of decisions that we're making. We're making those energy decisions for our body because we're setting that mold in place.

[00:44:36.610] – Allan
And so, you know, it's that how much rain or how much sun a plant gets, how rich the soil is. We're creating our own soil. We're creating our own rain and our own sun. So if we're not drinking enough water, if we're not feeding ourselves right to give us the energy, and if we're not grounding ourselves and doing the good things for our lifestyle, we're not creating an environment that allows our body to flourish.

[00:45:03.310] – Rachel
It's interesting, you mentioned and similarly, I think it gives our brain a little bit of time away because how much time do we spend all day thinking about our next meal or what we need to do? And every day I get the question from the family, what's for dinner? Even though I'm the one that cooks it, it's Mike. But, you know, we spend a lot of time planning grocery shopping. What are we going to do for us? What are we going to cook if if that's the attractive thing about one meal a day is that I only have to answer that question once. Then plan it out once, then I've got all those extra free time. I can do other things with my brain.

[00:45:39.250] – Allan
And I think, as you go into that, you can go even a step further. And if you did some batch cooking, can you imagine the leverage you have. If you go through on a Saturday, Sunday and you cook four or five big meals.

[00:45:54.370] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:45:54.910] – Allan
And you have those ready through the week, your whole workweek could basically be taken care of and you wouldn't even have to think about food. You just know, OK, on Monday we're having steak. On Tuesday, we're having roast, you know, maybe a roast Saturday or Sunday we're having this this vegan lasagna. And, you know, when you get through your week, you're like by the time you get to Friday, it's like, wow, you know, I didn't have to actually do any cooking and I can hit the farmer's market tomorrow and do it all again.

[00:46:24.010] – Rachel
I love that. That is a great idea. We need to do more of that.

[00:46:28.480] – Allan
Support your local farmers, you know.

[00:46:30.050] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:46:30.500] – Allan
So that's why I bought the the coffee from from this place. And if you find yourself in Boquete, please message me and let me know and I'll I'll hook you up with these guys. They've got a little they brought a container down with their stuff, you know, we did it, we high, we hired someone and it's their container. But they actually bought a container up in the States and brought it down and then they turned the container into an apartment.

[00:46:55.900] – Rachel
Oh, wow.

[00:46:56.540] – Allan
Yeah. So they rent out this container on a on a coffee farm. Oh, my God. You want good coffee every morning when you wake up, this is the place to stay. But anyway…

[00:47:07.990] – Rachel
That sounds great.

[00:47:08.920] – Allan
And you can have coffee. Coffee is not really breaking a fast or a couple calories maybe in a coffee. But for the most part, the black coffee is not a violation of OMAD. You're not going to go to OMAD jail for having your coffee.

[00:47:22.390] – Rachel
Good. It's a good thing.

[00:47:24.910] – Allan
Yeah. All right, Rachel, this is a really good conversation.

[00:47:28.300] – Rachel
It was.

[00:47:28.300] – Allan
I'll talk to you next week.

[00:47:29.680] – Rachel
Thanks. Take care.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:00:50.270] – Allan
Raz, how are you doing?

[00:00:54.250] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:00:56.020] – Allan
I'm doing well. We made it back down to Panama in one piece. Travel issues all the way along, running away from/dodging Covid, as I talked about earlier, because it just seemed like the caseloads that were really picking up. And we're seeing that now with the reporting on the news and all. But, you know, we're back here, case loads on the island and across most of Panama are reasonable. But, it just it's going to be here till it's not.

[00:01:22.900] – Rachel
Right.

[00:01:23.330] – Allan
We've got to take one day. And I know they're doing, you know, shutdowns again. And as we're going through this. And so I know it's really hard on folks right now. But, keep your chin up. Keep focused on New Year's coming. You can get through this where you've gotten this far. You can get through this. I just, you know, put your sights on what's important to you, your family, your health. And if it's your fitness, find ways to do it at home.

[00:01:47.750] – Rachel
Mm hmm. That's right. We didn't come this far to come this far. So we can just keep it up and we'll get through the holidays and into next year. It'll be great.

[00:01:56.650] – Allan
So how are things up in Michigan?

[00:01:58.630] – Rachel
Cold, like, if I could, we haven't seen a ton of snow quite yet, but I know some places around us are getting it. So I'm I'm looking forward to the snow because if it's going to be cold, it might as well be pretty. And running in the snow is pretty entertaining for me as well. So I'm looking forward to that.

[00:02:18.810] – Allan
Just watch for the ice. Particularly early in the season and late in the season where you get that melt and then refreeze and then snow on top. Just mind your footing.

[00:02:29.980] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:02:31.900] – Allan
Our guests today are actually pretty cool. I've met both of them at Ketofest and talked to both of them at Ketofest. And I've had both of them on the podcast before, Dr. Eric Westman and Amy Berger. So why don't we go give them a chat?

Interview

[00:03:28.840] – Allan
Amy, Dr. Westman, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:32.080] – Dr. Westman
Thank you.

[00:03:32.920] – Amy
Thanks. Thanks for having us.

[00:03:34.180] – Allan
Well, Amy and I have to say welcome back because I have had you on before, so it's really good to see you two again and to be talking to you. You know, we've met at Ketofest and spent a little bit of time talking, so I'm very familiar with your work. And I was really excited to see the new book, End Your Carb Confusion: A Simple Guide to Customize Your Carb Intake for Optimal Health.

[00:03:55.000] – Allan
And it's kind of a it's a keto book obviously, when we talk low carb, most people are going to get into ketosis at some level. But this is this is something I think that makes it simple. So many carbs. They want simple rules. But you actually took the process and said, hey, we're not going to give you a cookbook, we're not going to do it. We're just going to say, look, here's how you understand what carbs are doing to you.

[00:04:18.580] – Allan
And here's a layout of a plan. And I think having that plan walks them through. It's like these are the foods you can eat. These are the foods you stay away from and you give the reasons why. I just think that is so very well put together. Book to end carb confusion.

[00:04:34.300] – Dr. Westman
Thank you. You know, we have been working in the low carb space and yes, I'm known as the keto Guy. As a researcher, I helped to validate the low carb diets over the last twenty years. And but I also realized there are a lot of other ways to go about things. And I'm in a clinic treating people grounded. And I think that's helped me understand that there are a lot of ways, there are a lot of carbs that some people can eat.

[00:05:03.010] – Dr. Westman
But in fact, I have a brother who can eat all of these carbs and he's never gained weight. So using kito diet in the clinic and the book, I would say it's keto and more. And we never say you have to do keto and we help you find out whether you do need it or not. And I have tried to bring in really the science not just from my own research, but the science on low glycemic diets, the science on just the lower carb types of diets that have come out well over the last twenty years.

[00:05:36.580] – Dr. Westman
But yes, I am an author on the new Atkins for a new You and keto clarity. And but this is my first solo venture. I'm trying to bring in all of the information I've learned from other researchers as well. I look to Christopher Gardner at Stanford, David Ludwig at Harvard, and the common theme is sugar is the bad guy, not fat.

[00:06:03.490] – Dr. Westman
And so knowing that I'm in a clinic still and busy, I teamed up with Amy Berger, who is a professional writer, I'm not. I'm a researcher and a scientific writer. And so Amy had a way of articulating the same ideas in a very readable format. So you're not going to be reading a lot of my words. They're also Amy's and she's been in this space for just about as long as me, not in the research world. But so I'm really trying to bring the knowledge that I've gained into a readable form.

[00:06:38.560] – Dr. Westman
And this, I hope, is for the general public to read. It's not, you know, low carb. Or I'm going to lock you up in a low carb prison. It's understanding how can my brother eat one hundred and fifty carbs a day and still be healthy? You know, it's understanding that.

[00:06:57.460] – Allan
Yeah. And Amy and Dr. Westman. Yes. That's the one thing I would say about this book is it didn't bury me in the science because a lot of books do. It was very clear. And I think, you know, for someone who's looking at this space and has just gotten scared or confused and again, don't they don't understand why can my significant other eat that way and not gain a pound? But I look at a donut and, you know, so it's very well done. I really appreciate it.

[00:07:29.440] – Allan
Let's take that conversation about sugar a little bit further, because for decades, just stay away from fat, stay away from fat, stay away from fat. And the food companies were really nice about making the food taste good by just replacing the fat with sugar. And that's been horrific on our help. Can you explain what exactly is going on in our body when we're ingesting too much sugar?

[00:07:53.590] – Dr. Westman
Sure. You know, we really rediscovered or gone back to one hundred years ago when this was all well understood. It's like we came through a period of time where it all got messed up, the focus on fat and the food. And so the understanding, of course, is deeper now. But it's been known for a long time that if you eat or drink sugar, you raise the blood sugar or glucose more specifically, and then that causes an insulin response in the body.

[00:08:24.070] – Dr. Westman
And it's glucose insulin response, we now understand, is the root cause for the atherosclerosis or the heart disease, the stroke, the kidney disease and diabetes. Of course, diabetes is defined as an elevated blood sugar. So patients again, I teach this in a clinic in North Carolina where I have to have a lot of different people understand what we're talking about. And they understand that if you drink sugar, like sweet tea, it raises the blood sugar. And why we've forgotten that is a whole other story.

[00:08:59.590] – Dr. Westman
But we start the book by talking about how things aren't perfect now. The focus on fat does not solve our problems. And the real reason is what sugar does in the body, sugar and insulin, glucose and insulin.

[00:09:15.050] – Allan
You know Amy, as I was into the book and we got into we got into the discussion of glycation, I think that's that was some of the, I guess, a wake up word for me. You know, when your blood gets sticky, bad things are going to happen.

[00:09:27.640] – Amy
Yeah, that's it's kind of an oversimplification, although kind of like you said, I mean, the subtitle of our book is A Simple Guide to Customising. You know, Eric and I both are frankly stunned at how complicated a very simple way of eating has been made out to be the last few years. So we we purposely wrote this book to appeal to a very broad audience, you know, maybe to be appealing to the people on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit that eat, sleep and breathe keto and low carb all the time.

[00:10:03.430] – Amy
But also, this is the book to give to your mother or your cousin, the one that has obesity or has diabetes. But they're never going to do a keto diet. They're never going to learn about Amthor and Autophagy and all this stuff. They just want to feel a little better. And anyway, with the with the glycation, you know, we we try to explain everything without the scientific jargon and the gobbledygook. It's all written in plain English.

[00:10:29.290] – Amy
And we explain why glycation is basically for people that don't realize that diabetes is really a vascular disease. It's a blood vessel disease. Cardiovascular disease is the number one actual cause of death in people with Type two diabetes. And this is why people with diabetes have so many problems with the eyes and the kidneys, because these organs or these tissues have tiny tiny, very, very fragile blood vessels, and when your blood is, for lack of a better word, very sticky with sugar and viscose, think of it like instead of water flowing through your veins.

[00:11:04.350] – Amy
Now you've got molasses trying to flow through your veins. Your heart's trying to pump this sticky sugar. And not only is a blood sticky, the blood vessels are mocked up and gonked up with sugar. The whole system is just more fragile. And this this is the root of many of the problems that people with diabetes have. But something that we really harp on in the book that is like a huge mission for me to help educate people about is that even when your blood sugar is normal so you don't have diabetes or prediabetes, your blood sugar can be totally normal.

[00:11:40.050] – Amy
But you might have a lot of these problems because you have really high insulin. The reason your blood sugar is normal is because that insulin is keeping it in check. So whether or not your blood sugar is normal, you still might be living with this long list of issues that come from these metabolic problems driven by by consuming too much carbohydrate.

[00:12:01.590] – Allan
Now, there's a phrase you used in the book, and I've used it and I've heard it before. Some of us can tolerate more carbohydrates than others. And you use the term carbohydrate threshold. Can you talk through that and why that's important for us to understand for ourselves so we can actually have a plan. Because I think so many people go in and say, well, you know, initially this was always advertised as the bacon diet because everybody was all excited they were going to get to eat bacon again.

[00:12:28.920] – Allan
And then, you know, then it was the butter in your coffee diet and then it was the MCT oil and now it's exogenous ketones and it's, you know, but simplifying it. We've got to take it back down and understand this is going to be somewhat of an experiment of N = 1 where you're the subject and it's what you can eat, what you can tolerate. That's going to be the most important thing. So can you talk about that concept of carbohydrate threshold and how it affects how we would approach the adapt your life way of eating?

[00:12:58.170] – Dr. Westman
This is a scientific genetic predisposition that we're talking about and we can put people in the right direction. So we have a questionnaire you complete to see if you're going to be someone who has more carbohydrate intolerance or a lower carb threshold to achieve good health or you have a higher carb threshold. And so we have a checklist of items to look at, but it's not perfect. There is some trial and error there. And we've explained that. And this is what I do in my clinic.

[00:13:30.610] – Dr. Westman
I'll start people out at if they're trying to lose weight at a very low carb level and then help people to introduce carbs, if they want to find their threshold. And we are shying away from the high tech use of ketones and blood measurements and breath. And you know, the watches, the digital watches that are non-invasive and you get ketones then, I think it would be reasonable but we don't ask anyone to do high tech measurements.

[00:14:02.250] – Dr. Westman
It's predicting what direction you should be in and then monitoring how you do. And so it's a genetic predisposition. I mean, it's as if what helped us survive in famines when there was no food around is now a liability so that those who are good storers of the extra energy are the ones who have the lower threshold of carbs. So you're going to hold on to it more. Of course, the more active you are, the more carbs you can have.

[00:14:31.800] – Dr. Westman
That's the the family member I have who is very active, can eat more carbs and is very healthy. But the threshold is really important in terms of the metabolic health and we help people find that out. And when I kind of step back, this is one of the first books to embrace a wide range of carbohydrates in the diet, acknowledging and recommending a wide range. But it's a lot lower than has been recommended if you're doing high carb types of diets in the past. But the carb threshold is really important and we are not using high tech ways for you to figure that out.

[00:15:11.200] – Amy
If I could just chime in quickly. I think we do have a range, but even our highest recommendation compared to a standard type Western diet is lower. But I think the reason, Dr. Westman, is an obesity medicine specialist and I think we talk a lot about weight, but in that checklist we have where people can help and determine what level they should be starting at. Weight is only a tiny piece of this. There is so many issues that you can be dealing with, even if you're at a quote unquote normal weight.

[00:15:42.390] – Amy
I hate that phrase, but a normal weight if you're not carrying excess body fat. But we do start depending on your medical situation, we start most people out at the very lowest level. Because when your carb intake is that low, like Dr. Wiseman was saying you don't have to measure your ketones, you don't have to measure your blood glucose. You're going to be in ketosis. You're going to be fat burning at that level. Everybody will. And then who can also be fat burning and be healthy at a higher level is variable.

[00:16:15.650] – Amy
But the reason we tend to start most people out at the lowest level is because it's the easiest way to do it. There's not a lot of guess work. You will be either ketogenic or burning fat at that point without weighing and measuring your food and calculating the macro. I mean, I love food. I love to eat. I refuse to turn my meals. I'm never going to open a spreadsheet when I sit down to the dinner table. Other people love to do that. And if you want to, great. But the plan that we've designed is designed so that you don't have to do any of that.

[00:16:48.410] – Allan
Yeah, it's it's funny because some of the science that would come out in the past, they would say we're gonna have a low carb group and a high carb group and then, you know, a lot of people in keto space would argue and say, oh, well, that's that's not keto, that's not low carb. And I'm thinking, well, if they were eating two hundred and fifty grams of sugar per day before, one hundred grams of sugar actually feels pretty darn low.

[00:17:13.820] – Amy
It's all relative. Yeah.

[00:17:15.360] – Allan
Yeah. So and then one of the funny things would come out of a lot of those studies would be, well it's unsustainable. You know, so they're thinking, OK, no one can go down to twenty five grams and stay there for the rest of their lives. But there's people who've been doing it for decades. So yes, you can. Can you talk about the three levels of the adapt your life eating style so people can have a general idea of what each of those entails?

[00:17:40.110] – Dr. Westman
Yeah, maybe I'll talk about the levels that you give, the detail on the different foods. I mean, that's that's another great thing about having a nutrition expert as a co-author on the book we make a good team. So again, it's kind of a rough these are cut points of numbers that are not written in stone. I can't imagine that there's an equation like Einstein that says this number represents this for everyone. But there's a phenomenon that we repeatedly see, and that is the lower the carbs, the more percentage of people will be in ketosis or have the metabolic effects of the ketosis.

[00:18:25.790] – Dr. Westman
And so we have kind of, the other main point is we use total carbs, not net carbs, because it's more precise. It's it's more scientific. The net carb is a whole other kind of distraction. So we start at about a 20 total carb per day sort of approach. And actually, it is very sustainable, as you say, if you learn how to do it right. And then we found that in other studies have used carbs up to about 50 per day.

[00:18:53.520] – Dr. Westman
And again, this is kind of a general rule of thumb. And then we have stories of people who are using these different levels in the books, in the book. And then for those who are very active, they're younger they might be cyclists doing competitive cycling. They are able to be healthy at a much higher carb level. And we again, the numbers not important is just a higher level, but with sugar being the bad guy now, not fat and the food, we have estimated that from clinical experience and studies, some people can have up to one hundred, one hundred and fifty grams of carbs per day and be healthy.

[00:19:34.580] – Dr. Westman
I mean this and so this kind of explains the person that you see, how can they eat all that and why you don't see what they're doing in terms of other lifestyle things and the metabolic flexibility or the carbohydrate tolerance is the big factor now. It's not fat anymore. In fact, I would just want to comment. We don't really make any comment on fat being bad. And so you can eat bacon on this kind of diet, too, even if you're not.

[00:20:03.260] – Dr. Westman
OK, so all we've got to sanitize the the idea that fat is is bad, then you're not going to read that. So we're resetting what someone should understand about food without even paying much attention to the old stuff that got us off track.

[00:20:22.430] – Amy
I think something that's unique about our book, though, is that we also don't demonize carbohydrate. I mean, look look around the world, there are quite literally billions of people that eat rice they eat beans, they eat food, they eat potatoes, and they're healthy. They're lean, they live well into old age. And so for us to say that cantaloupe is poison or black beans are killing you is kind of ridiculous.

[00:20:46.880] – Amy
And so but it depends on your health situation. You know, certain foods that might be perfectly suitable for one person are not suitable for the other person who has PCOS or diabetes or hypertension or whatever. But I think that's that's unique in that we acknowledge that you can actually eat carbohydrate, you know, and we also other than just recommending, OK, depending on where you're starting from, here's the carbohydrate level we recommend.

[00:21:17.300] – Amy
I think, something that's also different and that hopefully people are hungry for, no pun intended, is that we explain how to gradually increase your carbohydrate intake if you choose to. Like we were saying, you can live at twenty or thirty grams of carbs for your whole life if you want to. But let's say you you do a strict ketogenic diet. You lose two hundred pounds, you reverse your type two diabetes, you reverse that, everything's great.

[00:21:45.500] – Amy
Now what do you need to stay super strict keto forever or can you have that occasional sweet potato, can you have the occasional piece of fruit? And the answer is for most people probably, yes. And we we walk you through how to reintroduce that stuff slowly and systematically so that you don't regain the weight and you don't trigger a recurrence of all those health issues. But we're very clear that you don't have to increase the carbs. But if you want to, here's how to do it in a way that is most likely to work for you long term.

[00:22:18.980] – Allan
Well, I practice a thing I call seasonal ketosis where I do get strict keto for a period of time, usually starting in February after my birthday. And I'll go pretty much until August in more of a strict keto way of eating. I call that my famine season and then rolls around football season and, you know, Thanksgiving, Christmas and my birthday, like I said, and then I go into my feasting season. So, you know, if I had to give it a classification, I would say I'm in level one for much of the year.

[00:22:49.250] – Allan
And then when I'm ready to let loose, I'm in level three, but I'm still generally low carb at level three. But, you know, that's that's why I liked what you were offering there, because it does kind of give us that that flexibility to say if I'm meeting my goals, my health is good, I can I can let a little bit more carbs in and I can check and see how that's working for you, because you can always step back down to that level one if you need to. So, again, I really appreciated the way you put that forward.

[00:23:21.840] – Allan
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[00:23:51.480] – Allan
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[00:24:31.030] – Allan
Now, whenever anything gets cool, there's a profit to be made, companies are going to step in. So when fat became a problem, they start advertising low fat. When sugar became a problem, they started advertising low sugar. And when keto came along, paleo did it now, keto, they're suddenly going to be coming out with these keto friendly products and they're everywhere and they they have the right macros. So it's like, OK, this should be good. What one of the problems that we really have when you start looking at these commercialized keto products?

[00:25:03.850] – Dr. Westman
Amy, you want to take this one on first?

[00:25:06.490] – Amy
Well, yeah. So it's like you were saying earlier or I don't know if this is maybe before we started recording. Those things are great as a transition step. If you're not prepared to give up your cookies and your cake and your pie and your ice cream, better to have the keto version made with almond flour and arithmetical and coconut flour. And for some people, that'll work perfectly long term. For other people, because it's keto, it tends to be very high in fat, like it's made with coconut butter and oils and cream cheese.

[00:25:38.350] – Amy
But it also a lot of these products contain a lot of sugar, alcohol and a lot of added fiber, not intrinsic fiber, but fiber that they add for bulk or texture. And so these products are allowed to be labeled as either keto or very low in net carbs. And the problem is that some people's bodies react to sugar alcohols, these sort of non sugar sweeteners almost as if they're sugar, not not quite as extreme as regular sugar, but they're still having a blood glucose and insulin response.

[00:26:09.100] – Amy
And so not only are you having that response, but you're combining it with an item that's very, very high on fat. So these sort of, quote unquote, ice creams and keto cakes and stuff are one of the biggest reasons we see for fat loss not happening the way people want it to or for just things not progressing the way someone would want to. And I'm not opposed to these things, but you have to go by a result. If these things are a regular part of your diet and you're not happy with the results you're getting, that's one of the areas you would look to to maybe cut those things out.

[00:26:44.690] – Amy
It's kind of like let me put it this way, when you were saying, like in the 80s when everything was low fat and it was loaded with sugar. Oh, I can eat the whole box because it's low in fat. People are doing that now with the heat. Oh, it's low carb. So I can eat the whole pint of ice cream. It's low carb. I can eat the whole box of cookies. Low carb does not mean low calorie.

[00:27:04.340] – Amy
And I know we hate the C word in our community, but just because something's low in calories, you still have to deal with that food, just because it's low in carbs, that food, energy, those calories still have to be put somewhere.

[00:27:18.080] – Allan
Yeah, and I appreciate you mentioning sugar alcohols because I've never been a huge fan of those. I think when you are you're trying to go low carb and you want to make it something that's generally sustainable. We don't allow our bodies to reset our palate. You know, we're used to eating all the sugar. And so we like things sweet. You know, ketchup has a lot of sugar in it. People don't recognize that because you barely taste that sweetness, because we've been, you know, I guess for like, we were programmed. You know, they put more sugar in and we eat more and they put more sugar and we eat more.

[00:27:49.130] – Allan
Sugar alcohols, in my opinion, don't really give us that opportunity to really begin to taste the sweetness in Standard Foods. But that being said, I was I was standing in line with you, Dr. Westman, at keto Fest, and you said we need to do something, something we don't have to be perfect, but we just need to do something. And it's like, again, I take that back and say, you know, if you need a bridge, you know, these commercialized products or the sugar alcohols might be OK.

[00:28:17.150] – Allan
But you need to put that in context of where you where your instate is, where you want to go. So thank you for that, because that was that was pretty profound standing at a dinner line with you, Dr. Westman.

[00:28:27.470] – Dr. Westman
Well, you know, progress, not perfection, is kind of a general theme when you're helping someone that has a long journey and not only the sugar alcohols, I need them for the true carb addict to keep them away from sugar, sugar addiction being the most common carb that people are addicted to. But the other thing that I see in these products is they'll add the oils or to make the macros right. But then you well, at least when I drink them, I get stomach trouble.

[00:29:04.490] – Dr. Westman
So I don't think these have been well tested. And certainly they haven't been in the clinical trials of keto so we're trying to go back to the real food idea. Don't add in these other products. And certainly if you're drinking something that gives you a stomach issue, that's not keto, that's the product.

[00:29:25.790] – Allan
Yeah, well its a big thing. I tell people you know, one of the big tips for weight loss is don't drink your calories. So if you're adding fat to your coffee, you might like it that way. But in a general sense, you're adding calories to, you're drinking them. So it's not filling you up as much as you would think it would.

[00:29:43.730] – Dr. Westman
There are all these new things new that have not been tested. You know, the idea of putting oils in the coffee and in medium chain triglyceride, it will raise your ketone level momentarily. But if you have then five of those over the course of the day, you're going to be stopping your endogenous fat burning. So, and you want ketones to come from your body fat if you're trying to lose weight. And so we explain that in the book that the way you look at these things is different, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:30:20.990] – Dr. Westman
And I see a lot of people who really don't need the keto metabolism, but they're doing it because it's fashionable and then, you know, six months later, well, what do I do now? Well, they didn't need it in the first place or maybe one month later. And so that's how we can help you figure out with this book what carb threshold still is going to be healthy for you. So, you know, let's say you drank the keto Kool-Aid, but you really don't need it.

[00:30:48.530] – Dr. Westman
We're going to help you figure that out. And on the other hand, if you're scared about keto, that's OK, we may actually end up convincing you or reassuring you that you can eat carbs, you can have fruit, you can have some bread and still be healthy. So we're trying to demystify it and also take the fear away of it. This the end of carb confusion and it might be able to end your carb fear or keto fear as well as a title.

[00:31:18.050] – Allan
And one of the things you had in level one that I understood is, you know, we're going to have to if we're going to be less than 20 grams of carbs, that's pretty much going to negate fruit from that level. But what was interesting was you also negated nuts and cheese. And I was like, oh, well, you know, fat head pizza, you've got it. You know, it's just a cheese bomb. So, you know, everybody in keto eats cheese, right?

[00:31:43.160] – Allan
That's the big thing we take away is the bacon and the cheese, but you also say we probably should be cutting back on the nuts or eliminating the nuts and the cheese while we're in this phase one. Can you talk about that?

[00:31:55.120] – Dr. Westman
Yeah, those are probably the most common reasons that the kind of casual keto you read on the Internet, learn it from a friend, why it doesn't work for people. So if you do have a carb issue a carbohydrate intolerance, insulin resistance is the same same term prediabetes, then calories will matter and trigger foods can make you eat more of them so you overcome the calorie and carb limits. So implicit in our approach and remember, this is an approach that's been used over a hundred and fifty years.

[00:32:33.390] – Dr. Westman
So it's really not all that new. But a common mistake is over consuming nuts, the cheese, the cream in the coffee or tea. So we do have and explain to why those things need to be limited. Fortunately, it's not hard to limit them once your appetite is gone. So it's not as an extreme. Oh, I can't give that up because as long as we as long as we've gotten started and your appetite is down, it's easier to make those adjustments.

[00:33:02.040] – Dr. Westman
But those are common mistakes that we see. I'm doing keto, but it's not working, thats too many nuts, too much cheese and cream.

[00:33:11.300] – Amy
And to be clear, those foods are suitable for a ketogenic diet. It's just if your goal is fat loss, those foods are just they call a hand to mouth or hand to mouth disease. You sit down with a bag of almonds and you're supposed to have an ounce. And before you know it, the bag is gone. And and the thing is also with nuts, I personally find they don't even fill me up. I can have half a bag of nuts and still feel like I barely ate anything.

[00:33:38.010] – Amy
So nuts are actually not permitted at al on the lowest level of our diet. Cheese is permitted, but the total quantity is limited. And again, it's not you know, those foods are high in fat but low in carbs, but they're just so easy to massively overdo. And that's really why they're limited. And they are reintro, nuts and seeds are reintroduced on level two. So, you know, if you're someone that is very, very sick or very, very overweight, starting out, make it your goal to get to the point where you can progress to level two and maybe reintroduce those things.

[00:34:14.220] – Amy
But yeah, that's yeah, that's I mean, that's really the rationale. Just because something is low in carbs doesn't mean it's going to be the best thing for you to eat.

[00:34:25.350] – Dr. Westman
My clinical experience is quite a privilege and I've been involved in research and taking care of patients. And and it's also humbling because I'll have people come back and they look me in the eye and say it's not working. So I have to figure out why and help people. Usually it's we get a lot of information at first. And there's one little thing that didn't seem that big and all that. But still, you have to understand what we're explaining and presenting is something that really works.

[00:34:57.930] – Dr. Westman
And it's been hammered through years of clinical experience and people looking in the eye saying, hey, you know, fix me. So this isn't just some off the shelf kind of rearrangement of foods, which I see, again, is another theme where you could be on the bookshelf and there are 15 different books and you don't know which one to start with. We're talking about one that has been vetted through clinical and personal experience for for a long time.

[00:35:30.750] – Dr. Westman
So you can have that confidence. In fact, we were discussing in writing the book. Do we include scientific references even? And finally it came down to we don't have to. We don't we don't have one scientific reference in this because it's all proven. It's all you have to have a study that shows the sun's coming up tomorrow, you know, I mean, so, again, we want to make it simple, not distractor with the glit.

[00:35:58.620] – Dr. Westman
In fact, books that have hundreds of references. I think sometimes they're protesting too much. But, you know, look at all the science, but no this is practical. It really works. And it comes from our experience with real people.

[00:36:12.540] – Amy
And frankly, nothing, at least in my opinion, nothing that we say in the book is all that controversial. Nothing really needs to be backed up. Oh, well, here's a study that shows this crazy thing we're saying. Nothing, we're not even demonizing some of the things that others in the larger low carbon and keto space really worry about, like artificial sweeteners, not not the sugar alcohols, but things like sucralose and aspartame and saccharin, like Splenda, Sweet'N Low, that stuff.

[00:36:42.930] – Amy
Because that really doesn't have the same metabolic effect as the sugar alcohols, it's almost negligible. Those things we don't fearmonger about the what they call the seed oils. If you're on a budget and you can't spend eight dollars for a bottle of avocado oil, salad dressing, it's OK for you to get the ranch dressing with the soybean oil. You can go to the discount store and get the the ground beef for three dollars a pound. It doesn't have to be grass fed.

[00:37:08.080] – Amy
All that great stuff. The food quality local farms is fabulous if you can afford it. But this plan, Dr. Weissman's patients are the entire spectrum of financial resources, of educational level of socioeconomic status. This approach has to work for every single one of them, every race, every ethnicity, whoever walks through that clinic door, this needs to work. And so we're kind of like, we take all comers, whether you're a millionaire and you have a personal chef or you're going to go to the fast food drive thru and get the boneless burger, guess what? This is going to work as long as you stay within your carb limit.

[00:37:51.060] – Allan
Yeah. And so the way I looked at this, I was like, this is like if you're if you're keto curious or low carb curious. This is a this is a good book to introduce you to it because it's not super deep in science. I mean, it's backed up. I promise you. I've seen the studies that back up everything that Dr. Westman and Amy are saying in this book. So it's there. And then if you're someone who's done keto and then plateaued, I think this is going to give you a lot of answers for why what you're doing right now might not be working for you.

[00:38:22.860] – Allan
And it's a lot of the things we talked about today. It's not understanding your carb threshold. It's getting into the the recipes, you know my feed and Facebook is every other every other post in my Facebook right now from keto is some kind of sweet how to make a pie, how to make a tart, how to make a cookie, how to make a cake, how to make you know. And so, yeah, if you're if you're filling up with that kind of stuff, there's probably reasons why you're getting too many calories.

[00:38:48.750] – Allan
And like you said, Amy, while a lot of people in the community don't want to count calories, you don't have to. But if you're eating calorie dense food, you're eating probably eating more calories than your body really needs. And if you're not losing weight, you're definitely eating more calories than your body probably needs. And we don't like to hear that in the Keto community. But guess what? Both camps are a little bit right. And if you put them together, you have a really good plan.

[00:39:16.590] – Allan
And in your book, End Your Carb Confusion, I think you do an excellent job with the experience you have putting that in there. So thank you so much again for letting me profile this book. I do have one final question for each of you. So I'll start with you, Amy. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:39:39.210] – Amy
Three strategies and tactics. It depends on how we define happiness, health and all that, I and you know, you sent this question ahead of time and I didn't give it that much thought. I because I guess I thought it was more defining them than how to do it.

[00:39:55.440] – Amy
I mean, whatever you need to do to be able to participate in life the way you want to, whether it's having the mobility to go do the physical pursuits you want to do, or whether it's feeling well enough mentally and emotionally to interact with people the way you want to and enjoy the hobbies you want. I don't think six pack abs are not required for any of that. So don't let health and pursuit of some kind of optimal physique come at the expense of your mental and emotional health, because I see that all the time in our community.

[00:40:31.650] – Amy
And it's what's the point of looking great if you're miserable all the time on the inside? So I would say eat and socialize and move in such a way that you are able to do all the things you want to do physically and and intellectually.

[00:40:49.660] – Allan
Thank you, Dr. Westman, and I'll ask you the same question, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:41:01.550] – Dr. Westman
I love that and, you know, I've often wondered what the doctor's role is, and doctor means teacher back in the root word, and I've often thought that the health side of things that the doctor really is just an adviser, and I'm trying to get people to live as long and as happy and as healthy a life as they can help to optimize that very consistent with your definition. And going beyond our book. It's mind body, spiritual wellness. And so we talk about nutrition.

[00:41:40.940] – Dr. Westman
Getting nutrition right helps you in that direction. In so many ways. It just by changing the foods, I see people rediscovering all these other aspects of their lives that were thrown off just because of the food. So we start with nutrition and then I think being physically active and happy and then emotionally, spiritually community helps with that a lot, too. So it's more complicated than we can dive into in this book, but those are the principles that we use when we approach this book.

[00:42:15.290] – Allan
Thank you.

[00:42:15.980] – Amy
Yeah, that's if I just just real quick, if I can kind of piggy back, because I almost forgot, in the book, we do mention that. You know, once you start to feel better physically because, you know, a lot of people have brain fog and low mood and this shift in diet has this cascading effect that once you actually start feeling better and you have more energy and you're thinking a sharper, it's easier to re-engage with those other aspects of your life with the physicality and the spirituality and all that other stuff that maybe you literally weren't able to do because you were so limited by your physical health.

[00:42:53.880] – Allan
Great. So, Amy, Dr. Westman, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, End Your Carb Confusion or what you guys are doing, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:43:03.170] – Dr. Westman
End Your Carb Confusion is available at any any bookstore, Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any bookseller coming out very soon or this week. And then the deep dive. I've actually started a adapt to your life academy, where if you really want to get into detail beyond the book and this is a custom made simple course that we have available now. It's called AdaptYourLifeAcadem.com. And then Drwestmanonline.com is a resource to help figure out where to go based on the things that I understand are most helpful on the Internet. End Your Carb Confusion is available now.

[00:43:50.570] – Allan
Amy?

[00:43:51.590] – Amy
Yeah, right now my website is, we had a little glitch, so it's www.tuitnutrition.com. But you actually have to put the w w w dot if you just put tuitnutrition.com at the moment it won't come up. And I'm also on YouTube. My YouTube channel is the same tuitnutrition and that's my handle on Twitter.

[00:44:13.520] – Amy
And Dr. Westman is also on Twitter. And adapt your life, look for that on YouTube as well. They have I mean, hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews, not just with Dr. Westman, but Ken Berry and all kinds of experts and doctors and nutritionists and trainers that have been interviewed by the company. So lots of stuff there, too.

[00:44:34.100] – Allan
Great. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/464 and I'll be sure to have links, all the links mentioned here today. Dr. Westman, Amy, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:44:45.650] – Amy
Thank you.

[00:44:48.700] – Dr. Westman
Your welcome.

Post Show/Recap

[00:44:51.940] – Allan
Raz, welcome back.

[00:44:53.410] – Rachel
Wow, that was a great interview, Allan. A lot of good stuff in there today.

[00:44:57.880] – Allan
Yeah. You know, whenever I get to talking to someone about Keto, you know, sometimes it can get really technical. And I think a lot of people get scared away by something that sounds so, so strict, something so difficult. And a lot of times you're thinking about, well, how do I keep my carbs below 25 grams when I love bread and I love biscuits and I love potatoes and I love, you know, vegetables and fruit and ice cream and cakes and all the other stuff.

[00:45:24.280] – Allan
I mean, you know, we're buried in carbs. You walk into a grocery store and quite literally, the entire middle of the grocery store is just a big stack of shelves of carbs in boxes, bags, cartons. It's insane. So, you know, what they've come up with, with their adapt approach. And, you know, it just makes it a little easier to understand what's in the food you're eating. Everybody wants an easy button.

[00:45:52.720] – Allan
And, you know, it would be great if we could just, like, make it easy and just say it's it's this or it's that. A lot of times I run my challenges and we find that place, you know, or I have I have the lose a size challenge thing that we go through. It's eight weeks. Or I mean its in 28 days. And then I have my other weight loss program. It's eight weeks and we kind of just stage through there to find where people are comfortable.

[00:46:19.520] – Allan
We push a little bit more and we push a little bit more. You know, it's it's sometimes easier to start with the hard part and then kind of ease back and find your place. But we all have our threshold. And I think that was a really important concept.

[00:46:32.440] – Rachel
Yeah, that was really important because actually I've been playing around with my carb levels lately as well and trying to switch up my diet a little bit because I've been at a plateau. So I know it's time for a change. But it was really interesting to see how people just naturally have different levels of carbs that they can manage without feeling the bad side effects or that or messing around with the blood sugar levels. So that's a really interesting but hard to get to a point.

[00:47:01.720] – Allan
Yeah. You know, self experimentation is one of those where you try something. You've got to give it time and see if it works, you know. So it's you know, it's one of those things where you're going to be investing time a lot of time. So in some cases a lot of time because you're going to say, OK, for four weeks, I'm going to eat this way and then I'm going to do some measurements. And when I look at what happened and see if it's working, if it's working, I stick with it.If not, maybe I ratchet it down a little bit more. Maybe I do something different. You can't add too many things in there or you don't know exactly what it is that's doing the good stuff or the bad.

[00:47:36.520] – Allan
So finding that Mark, you know, and if you want to get technical with it, you know, you can do the glucose meters and the ketone meters. I'm a big fan of my keto mojo when I'm, you know, really trying to get down into ketosis, particularly in the early stages of it. So I'll do the keto mojo and I'm checking my blood sugar, I'm checking my ketones, and then I'm just finding that spot. I've been doing this now for eight years.

[00:48:00.970] – Rachel
Wow.

[00:48:01.480] – Allan
I kind of know, you know, OK, if I eat this way, this is what's going to happen to my body. And almost invariably it does. Now, that said, as I've gotten older. I've noticed that my carb tolerance has gone down, so, you know, if I try to eat more carbs just to find my line, my line has been slowly edging downward over time. And as a result, when I go into my feasting mode, I actually put on more weight faster than I did the first few years that I did this.

[00:48:30.730] – Allan
So I have to still kind of I can't go completely crazy out there eating all the carbs, but I do have to pay a little bit of attention to what I'm doing or I can go a little overboard on it. But I think it's just knowing yourself, given that self-awareness is really, really important in the tools, any tool you want to use, they try to make it really simple.

[00:48:50.350] – Allan
Try this than that and what you can and can't eat. But simple is good for most of us. It'll work just fine. But if you're somebody who needs a little bit more hard data, there are ways to do that.

[00:49:02.050] – Rachel
Yeah, I've got one of those meters myself and I'll be getting that out pretty soon once I settle in and a couple of swaps that I want to make. You know, I've been eating similar foods. I eat a lot of eggs, brussel sprouts, a lot of beef, a lot of chicken. I feel like I'm in a rut with my food. So it's time to switch it up. And and once I do that, then I'll get out the meter and see how it how it feels or how it works.

[00:49:25.930] – Allan
It's the worst tragedy in the world was the sacrifice of Brussels sprouts. We can't get them down here. And so we had two bags of them that we were going to bring down, I guess, technically smuggling, because you're not supposed to bring vegetables and fruits into the country. But we had them in our bags and bags were coming up overweight because the max weight the couple would carry is 50 pounds. We just could not get our weight right. We just couldn't get it to work. So we were like, OK, this has to go.

[00:49:57.070] – Allan
And well, we let go of a lot of stuff before we let go of the Brussels sprouts. But that was kind of the last thing is, oh, I've got to leave the Brussels sprouts. It was either that or the beef jerky and deer jerky. And I'm like, no, the deer jerky is going. I'm sorry brussel sprouts.

[00:50:13.300] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:50:13.600] – Allan
Yeah. So I had to make that sacrifice, but I hated leaving those in the hotel room when we checked out.

[00:50:19.210] – Rachel
Such a bummer.

[00:50:22.600] – Allan
And I didn't even get to eat that many Brussels sprouts when I was up in the States, which was another sad thing is that most restaurants aren't serving it. So unless you cook it for yourself, it's really again. I don't want to make I don't want to depress myself. I've got.

[00:50:36.580] – Rachel
Well, that's right. That's right. You just got to make a list of all the things that you can eat and enjoy eating and then you won't miss so many other things.

[00:50:45.850] – Allan
Yeah. And then I think the other thing that I just want to kind of emphasize from this conversation we had was, you know, when I was standing in the food line, at keto Fest with Dr. Westman, it was you know, it just kind of one of those moments when he said, you know, we just need to do something.

[00:51:03.160] – Rachel
Right.

[00:51:03.850] – Allan
The word keto, if that scares you, then it's not keto, its just low carb. I'm just lowering my carbs a little bit to see if that helps me on my weight loss journey, helps me feel and look healthier. You say you're lowering your carbs. And if that means that the way you're doing that is eating Atkin bars and, you know, canned tuna, then that's the way you're doing it. If it means that you're just looking for lower carb options ketchup and, you know, maybe even some of the fake pastas and making, you know, fake biscuits and things like that, that's fine. If that's what helps you get that start, you just have to take that first step.

[00:51:42.100] – Allan
We're after progress, not perfection.

[00:51:44.560] – Rachel
Right, right. You know, I like to tell people just just move that needle, just just move it slightly and make some simple swaps, you know? And, you know, if you do measure your carbs and you eat whatever one hundred grams of carbs a day or something slide that down to ninety, slide it down to eighty five, I mean, you don't have to make these huge cuts. Why make a huge cut that will make you want to binge later or that you can't live with that makes you unhappy just as long as you move that needle just slightly. I think it would make a big difference.

[00:52:15.520] – Allan
Yeah. Sometimes it's as simple as saying instead of eating the banana and putting that in my morning smoothie, I'm not going to put the banana in there. I'm just gonna put the berries, you know, the protein powder and then put some ice and blend it all up. And that's going to be my breakfast. And I'm just not going to put the banana in there and try it, you know, so that cut 100 grams of calories, a hundred calories out of your meal at most, which is mostly sugar.

[00:52:43.330] – Allan
You know, you're cutting that out. And so it's it can be simple stuff like that. And I'm in no way saying don't eat bananas, that they're unhealthy. But just like Amy said, you know, we're not villainizing any food. We're just saying being aware how your body reacts to it is really what this math is all about. That's how you solve this weight loss problem, is understanding food for your body. It's unique to you. People all over the world are eating rice and beans, as Amy said, but, you know, we we need to find what food fits us best for, what our particular goals are now.

[00:53:22.120] – Allan
And that can change over time. You know, someone right now that's not very active probably doesn't need a lot of carbs. But if you're doing the exercise, then your body can handle that. Insulin is just a really cool thing. We demonize that a lot of times in the keto space, but we need insulin to protect our brain, to get the blood sugar out of our our body, you know, get it out of the blood and store it.

[00:53:47.290] – Allan
Now, if we're burning it, which means, let's say you went outside this morning before breakfast and you ran for two or three miles. You're going to have used up leg, muscle glycogen predominantly in your leg muscles, which are larger muscles. So they hold a good bit of glycogen and the liver and you're going to keep, and that's going to keep your blood sugar, insulin and glucagon they're going to keep your blood sugar level through that whole process at that point.

[00:54:12.730] – Allan
At that point, yes. You can go ahead and have a little bit more carbs with your breakfast because you've given it somewhere to go besides body fat. A lot of people try to do it on the other side with calories. And you say, well, oh, I ran three miles, I burned 400 calories. That means I can have a Snickers bar.

[00:54:31.450] – Rachel
Right! Oh, no, no. Yeah, I go for the food is fuel at that point. And as a runner right now, I'm running pretty consistently four to six miles every day or for five to six days a week. And then on the weekends I'll do a longer run, maybe 10 or 13 miles. And you can tell that on those days, like my nutritional needs on a 4 mile day, is far different from my nutritional needs on a 10 or 13 mile day.

[00:54:58.990] – Rachel
And that's something else to keep in mind, too. So when you do plan out whether or not you have that banana in your smoothie, just think about what your exercise has been for that day or the next day.

[00:55:09.880] – Allan
Yeah. And the plan they kind of put in here, their adapt plan, they call it. It basically is a lot easier than counting calories. I can tell you, if you're just counting carbs, that's all you're doing is one number, it's very easy to count your carbs. It's very easy to look that stuff up on the Internet if it's not on the label, which, you know, you shouldn't be eating a lot of things with labels. The actual real food doesn't have labels or they don't have to market it.

[00:55:32.320] – Allan
You know, chicken doesn't need a marketing. You see the chicken, you know what the chicken tastes like, you buy the chicken and that's the way it's supposed to be. Which is kind of a little funny side story. Our dog loves chicken and rice mixed in with kibble with the dog food. We've started doing that down here. But she doesn't know what a chicken looks like. So when she sees these chickens are running around the road because they're all over the place down here, I'm thinking myself, she doesn't know that that's what she's having for dinner.

[00:56:02.440] – Allan
And if she did, what would it change her behavior? Because she just ignores them. And I'm like, thats your favorite food.

[00:56:07.450] – Allan
If she only knew

[00:56:08.680] – Allan
That's your favorite food in the whole world and you don't even know it. We've never fed you cat, but for some reason you instinctively want to chase the cat. But there's a funny little funny little side story there. But so, yeah, you know, you don't have to think of it as keto. They say it's somewhat of a keto book. I called it somewhat of a keto book, but I don't want you to think that. I think it's just really finding that place, though. How many carbs can I tolerate based on my activity and my biology and my genetics and going from there to find an optimal way for you to eat?

[00:56:44.260] – Rachel
Yeah, that sounds like a really great book.

[00:56:47.650] – Allan
All right, Rachel, anything else we need to go over before we get off the call here?

[00:56:54.460] – Rachel
Now, that was a really good interview. I'd like to take a look at that book as well.

[00:56:58.720] – Allan
Yeah. And this would be a good book to buy now as we as we get into, because we're coming really close to, you know, the Christmas season, Hanukkah, end of the year with New Year's and all of that. And it tends to be a time when we overindulge, particularly in the sweets. So kind of having a good idea of, you know, these levels of carbs and starting to pay some attention to it. This is a good time to do it.

[00:57:23.530] – Allan
So you're not putting on pounds that you been thinking about January, trying to take off.

[00:57:29.320] – Rachel
Good points.

[00:57:30.020] – Allan
Don't put them on there in the first place. Then you don't have to lose them again.

[00:57:33.340] – Rachel
That's right. That's great.

[00:57:36.010] – Allan
Have a great week, Rachel. I'll talk to you next week.

[00:57:37.330] – Rachel
Thanks. You too. Take care.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Margaret Bakalian
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

An antidote for alzheimer's with Amy Berger

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Let's Say Hello

[00:00:49.670] – Allan
Raz, how are you doing?

[00:00:52.070] – Rachel
Great, Allan, how are you today?

[00:00:54.320] – Allan
I'm doing well. I'm cold. Yeah, and by the time we issue this one, I'll be on my way back to Panama. And I can just say that, for me, I would say 40 is the new 70. And what I mean by that is it's 70 degrees out. I feel like it's 40 degrees. So it's been nice that we got really lucky on our trip. And it's not been really cold anywhere we've gone. But when the temperature drops below 70, I'm like, no, just no.

[00:01:31.010] – Rachel
Yeah, yeah. We've been feeling some cold weather up here. I've been laying layering up a little bit more on my runs. So, yeah, it's changed season for us getting cold.

[00:01:41.720] – Allan
Yeah. Our guests today are kind of interesting. It's a really interesting concept where we're going to be talking about 5G. We're going to be talking about the coronavirus. And I just want to put this out before we really get into the context of all of this, as I am not a doctor and I'm not going to give you any medical advice whatsoever in this show. Dr. Cowen is a doctor. He was a medical doctor, but he's let his license lapse because he couldn't get anybody that wanted to buy his practice. So he just let it lapse. And he's retired effectively. He's approaching health from a different perspective. So just recognize that the people talking on this show, none of us are actual doctors. So we're not meaning any of this to be medical advice. If you have questions about this, we encourage you to do the research.

We encourage you to go out and talk to your medical professionals and then make the decisions that are that are right for you because we are talking about something that is is actually kind of it's interesting when you think about it in concept, but it's a little bit controversial. But I wanted to bring this concept up for you because I think it's just really important to have the full picture as you're making decisions. And, there's a lot of discourse on this and some of it's informed and a lot of it is not. So with that, we'll go ahead and get into our interview.

Interview

[00:03:37.150] – Allan
Tom, Sally, for both of you, welcome back to the 40+ Fitness Podcast you both have been on one time before. And so I'm really happy. We did your Cosmic Heart book a few years back.

[00:03:52.180] – Tom Cowan
Thank you.

[00:03:53.020]
The interesting thing about that book, that book in particular, Tom, is I can actually remember where I was when I had that aha moment in that book where I was like, this is can be transformative. And so I just want to say that that was one of the books that sticks out in my memory. And I've had almost 300 people on the podcast.

[00:04:17.260] – Allan
And so but that's one of the books and one of the moments I remember walking to get the keys to my house because I'd gotten locked out and my niece was working at a restaurant about a mile from our house. So I was walking to get keys because I'd locked myself out of the house. Seems to be a recurring theme in my life, but she happened to have keys to the house. I was walking back there and I was listening to yours, the audio book, and it was just a really enjoyable read.

[00:04:40.950] – Allan
And it kind of turned my thinking on a lot of things. And this book is doing the same thing. It's kind of turning some things I had or I thought I knew on their ear. And so this really got me to thinking I might not know as much as I thought I knew, which is kind of another recurring theme in my life where I know the more I know.

[00:05:06.760] – Tom Cowan
I've done it myself.

[00:05:11.260] – Allan
So thank you both for the opportunity to talk about this book, because we're going through a time that at least for anyone alive, we've never experienced before, we've never experienced anything like this where people around the world are getting sick and they're getting shut in. And it's creating all kinds of problems for us.

[00:05:33.490] – Sally Fallon Morell
And it's all predicated on the notion that this illness is contagious.

[00:05:42.550] – Allan
Right. And so your book is called The Contagion Myth. And, like I said, when I got into it, I was like, OK, in my whole life, we were taught bacteria and, you know, viruses. And then a few years ago, I think it kind of turned on its on its ear and said, no, don't wash your hands and use those antiseptic things. You know, this stuff. I don't use that because you need some of that bacteria, you need some of that virus that makes us healthy.

[00:06:14.920] – Allan
And so, you know, much like eggs, what do you eat, eggs or not eat eggs? Do you do saturated fat and ideas back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And you're proposing a theory that's very different from the germ theory that I I grew up knowing. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what's wrong with germ theory and with this whole coronavirus to covid-19 thing? Why why are we getting that wrong?

[00:06:45.270] – Tom Cowan
Yeah, so basically the idea of the germ theory is that originally the people who proposed it said we were sterile organisms, which means that from, as I like to say, from the skin on in, there was no bacteria or they didn't know about viruses at all. And if there was a bacteria in you, it's because it was a pathogen, meaning it came from the outside and then, quote, infected you and made you sick. The first thing I would point out about that is that would make human beings different from essentially every other thing in nature.

[00:07:27.150] – Tom Cowan
For instance, if you have a compost pile and you put dead squirrels in it, which maybe don't belong in a compost pile, you'll get fungus and bacteria to eat the squirrel. And as far as I know, nobody says that the compost pile has an infection. Another example we use is if you come upon a dead dog and there's maggots on it, nobody thinks the maggots killed the dog. Another example is if you cut down trees in the forest and then the trees die and are sitting in the forest floor, if you said bacteria and fungus are bad, so I'm going to get rid of them. And so you antifungal an antibiotic, the whole forest, you would never decompose the trees, you would never recycle that and you'd end up with a dead forest. So the fact of the matter is, whether people believe it or not, is the role of bacteria in nature is to recycle that which is diseased and dying or maybe dead. And that's just the observational fact. And there's no particular reason why that should be different in us. And one can't say because there's bacteria pressing in your throat that that means they're causing the disease any more than you can say because there's firemen at a fire that they caused the fire.

[00:08:53.580] – Tom Cowan
So there isn't a scientific method of determining whether something is the cause, something meaning a bacteria or a virus. And if you could permit me, I think I have an analogy that will make it make sense for people, if that's OK.

[00:09:12.660] – Allan
Sure.

[00:09:13.440] – Tom Cowan
Imagine I had the hypothesis, which is reasonable, that the calf pay careful attention to the words I'm using here. The caffeine found in coffee beans raises people's blood pressure, right? That's my hypothesis. That's what I got out of epidemiology. In other words, a lot of people got sick in a certain place. Then the sickness seemed to spread or the nursing home, or my Uncle Harry went to a party and then he got sick. These are all epidemiological observations which we then have to prove with real science whether such and such is the cause of that problem. Right? That's how science works. So the epidemiology is is the caffeine in coffee causes high blood pressure.

[00:10:04.770] – Tom Cowan
So if I said, Allan, I'm going to grind up the coffee beans, put them in a capsule and have 10 people eat it and it raises their blood pressure, would you agree that the caffeine in the coffee made their blood pressure go up?

[00:10:18.900] – Allan
It would be it would appear so. I mean, that was the one thing. But I don't know if we controlled for everything, but in a general sense, I would say yes.

[00:10:26.940] – Tom Cowan
Let me change your mind a little bit unless you somehow think the only thing in a coffee bean is caffeine. Then you have no idea which of a hundred different substances in the coffee bean actually made, you have high blood pressure. So my conclusion was now we know that coffee beans cause high blood pressure, but we don't know it's the caffeine. So let's go a little further than we put the coffee through a drip filter like people who make coffee. And you you throw away the grounds.

[00:11:00.450] – Tom Cowan
Right? And you have liquid coffee and you know that the caffeine is water soluble. So then you have somebody drink that and their blood pressure goes up. Do you now know that the caffeine caused high blood pressure,

[00:11:14.970] – Allan
OK, to not be tricked again? I would say no. There's also some other things in that coffee brand has been liquefied. So not going to catch me twice.

[00:11:25.380] – Tom Cowan
Now, the next step, I do some laboratory procedure to extract the caffeine. Right? And then I prove to you that the only thing you could do this with chromatographs and different laboratory techniques. I prove to you, Allan, that the only thing I have now is pure caffeine. Then I give it to people and it makes their blood pressure go up. Have I now proven that it's the caffeine in the in the coffee beans?

[00:11:55.610] – Allan
I'm real close to saying yes.

[00:11:57.560] – Tom Cowan
And I would agree with you. You got it. That's how we understand causation. That's how we understand isolation. Now, here's a statement at this point. And according and I'm saying this based on what the CDC is telling us in a July 2020 bulletin they put out. I'm also let me read you something from European surveillance. This was a group of virologists who are tasked with making a test for the coronavirus.

[00:12:31.700] – Tom Cowan
They say, quote, the ongoing outbreak of the recently emerged novel coronavirus poses a challenge to public health laboratories as virus isolates are unavailable. Later, they said, we aim to develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratories without having the virus material available. The CDC says, quote, There is no isolates of the Sars-Cov-2 virus available. Therefore, they never got the caffeine. That's what they're saying. We asked that the lead authors of the six papers that are most referenced for having isolated and characterized this virus, some of them, the title of the paper is Isolation and Characterization of the Virus.

[00:13:29.630] – Tom Cowan
And we asked them, did you isolate the virus? And they said no. We have no pictures, we have no isolates of the virus available. Now, I can tell when I look at the picture because pure virus looks like pure virus. And if there's one virus and a whole lot of cellular debris, then that's not purified or isolated. And the whole point is, unless you isolate, you can't demonstrate that that's the thing that causes disease, any more than giving coffee beans proves that it's the caffeine.

[00:14:10.540] – Tom Cowan
And since they've never isolated, they have no proof that it causes disease. In fact, when they inoculate that into animals, none of them got sick. That's just the facts, even if it wasn't isolated.

[00:14:24.220] – Tom Cowan
Now, the other thing you can't do is you can't devise a test that says I can find a unique piece of this virus unless you've isolated it first. It's like me saying, I found a piece of metal under your chair and I know it's from a flying saucer and you would say, how do you know that? And you would hope that. I would say because I saw a flying saucer. I analyzed the flying saucer. I know what it's made of. And I know that piece of metal could have only come from a flying saucer. If I say to you, Allan. I've actually never seen a flying saucer. And I don't really know if that piece could have come from your chair or an airplane or a helicopter or something you would think. Tom, there's something wrong here. You can't make a test for finding a piece of something which you've never analyzed.

[00:15:28.860] – Tom Cowan
And I'm not like making this up. This is what the CDC is telling us. So literally at this point, nobody has proven even the existence of this virus, let alone whether it's pathogenic. Now, to finish your question, this is the same story that's been going on for one hundred and fifty years. And whenever they do isolate a virus or bacteria, which has been done and can be done, lo and behold, they find that it doesn't cause disease. So they isolated the caffeine. They gave it to the people and they find out it doesn't make your blood pressure go up. It must have been in the grounds or something else.

[00:16:17.820] – Tom Cowan
Now, as far as I can see, because we now have I'm working with sort of 14 groups of doctors and two of them are from MIT and two from Harvard and PhDs. And none of us can find a reference that says these isolated bacteria or virus cause disease. And that's where we are in 2020.

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[00:17:59.630] – Allan
OK, it's a spin on anything I've ever studied or learned in the past.

[00:18:05.980] – Sally Fallon Morell
Allan, I might add no one has done contagion studies either. Now, when we had the Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people, the US Public Health Service did contagion studies. They took people who were sick and had a group of people who are well, and they had the sick people cough and breathe on the well people. They injected their bodily fluids and their blood into the well people. They tried every possible way to make these well people sick from the people with the flu.

[00:18:42.860] – Sally Fallon Morell
And it was one hundred percent failure. They could not make a single well person sick by exposing them to the sick people. So the Spanish flu was not contagious in spite of what they say. And of course, they were mystified. They had no explanation for this. Now, we do have an explanation, but they need to do that today before we lock down the whole world and make people wear masks and stop school and stop gatherings and stop people from going to church or singing in choirs.

[00:19:12.980] – Sally Fallon Morell
We need to do at the very least, even if you haven't isolated this virus, you need to do contagion studies. And we haven't done them.

[00:19:22.260] – Allan
One of the things that you guys talked about in the book as far as the contagion studies, with the Spanish flu, they had people cough on other people, like you said, is like you stand over that, I don't know, would they even consider doing that in this day and age? I mean, is that ethical?

[00:19:42.340] – Tom Cowan
So here's the interesting thing. One way to answer that question is there's three models you can use to test in infectivity or contagion. One is humans. Two is animals. Three is tissue culture. In other words, you can take tissue from a kidney or an egg or a rabbit or embryo or something and put the virus or something you think has the virus on it. So here's that sort of Gordian knot that we're in. A) you can't do human studies because that's unethical. B) there are no animal models for a viral infection for say, polio and HIV and for coronavirus. In other words, for some mysterious reason, none of the animals get sick. It's only humans. So that doesn't work.

[00:20:43.010] – Sally Fallon Morell
And before coronavirus, Tom and I have found two studies where they tried to make the animals sick. One was mice and one was hamsters. And they did not achieve that. Go ahead, Tom.

[00:20:57.190] – Tom Cowan
And the third one is these tissue cultures, which means they take on purified snot essentially and inoculate that on a tissue and then they starve and poison the tissue. In other words, they take away the nutrients, and they add, they do it with kidney tissue and they add kidney toxic drugs. And then the tissue breaks down and then they say that proves it's contagious. But I am now in possession of a study recently published where they actually tried this on three different human cell lines and none of them got a psychopathic effect, which means none of them were affected by purified stuff from somebody with Sars-Cov-2.

[00:21:44.770] – Tom Cowan
So those are the three ways. So the first way we can't do because it's not ethical, the second way doesn't work because for some unexplained reason, animals are not models, which is an interesting word for this infection. And the third doesn't work for unexplained reasons. And so there you go. So what's the evidence? The evidence is that frankly, at this point, I don't know what it's I can't follow it because I don't see it.

[00:22:19.810] – Allan
Well, you know, and you talked about this a little bit in the book, as a kid, my brother came home and he said, “Hey, I've got chickenpox.” And he hugged me, as he was saying. And now my brother and I, we fought like cats and dogs growing up. So there was zero reason for him to be hugging me other than he wanted to give me his chickenpox, which he did. I mean, in my opinion, based on that, I mean, he hugged me and two or three days later, I'm breaking out with chickenpox. Everybody in our house got chicken pox that hadn't had it before. So all of us kids got it. That feels like contagion.

[00:22:58.780] – Tom Cowan
So let me dissect that a little bit. Remember that epidemiology, in other words, I got sick and then you got sick or everybody in Wuhan got sick or the nursing home got sick or any epidemiological observation you can make? Every scientist, every virologist, every medical doctor who knows the field would say that is not proof of viral causation. Period. So. now we have an observation, which I would agree we should investigate to see if there is a virus involved there.

[00:23:38.870] – Tom Cowan
I agree. And the reason we should is because chicken pox virus, unlike HIV or unlike the Sars-Cov-2 virus, you can actually find and purify and isolate. And you can find it in your brother, you can you can find it in you, and that's not proof. That's just an interesting further observation. So the proof then is we isolate the virus, expose people who haven't got it. Just to the virus. And what happens is they don't get sick.

[00:24:18.200] – Tom Cowan
Now, you could say, well, why did you get sick? First of all, it is an interesting mystery, right? But all I can say to start with is, Allan, if you can show me a study saying the isolated chicken pox virus has made any animal or person sick, I will change my tune because all 14 of us have looked and we can't find it. So here are some possible theories.

[00:24:47.690] – Tom Cowan
So why do we have viruses in the first place? Well, it turns out very detoxification strategy. In other words, if you're poison in a certain way, and that could be DDT, glyphosate, electromagnetic fields, emotional poisoning, starvation or any nutrient deficiency, your tissues react by the DNA or the RNA and chickenpox case. Its DNA breaks down into the body, packages that up in these little particles.

[00:25:21.830] – Tom Cowan
And because DNA essentially is an antenna with a resonance, it then resonates and sends a signal to other organisms in its environment. Hey, we've been exposed to a new toxin. Here's a way to adapt to that new situation. It's like, what trees do you poison a tree or beetles infect a tree and they send out chemicals through their roots to tell the other trees to make a defensive response. That's what we do. In other words, viruses are simply the mechanism of adaptation because the other model that we're told about, which is you have a mutation and that's spread through the population by survival, is way too slow.

[00:26:11.520] – Tom Cowan
Imagine as the mutation that helps them get rid of DDT. How long do you think it would take before their progeny filled up Boston. Like ten thousand years, in which case there's no more DDT. So that's not how it works. We also know that if you put DNA into a beaker of water and then you put a different beaker of water with with free nucleic acids, which is what a virus is, and you shine a light on the first one, you come back the next day and the second beaker will make an identical copy of the same DNA.

[00:26:54.060] – Tom Cowan
In other words, how does that work by some sort of resonance, like tuning forks, like why know if you put 20, 20-year-old girls in a cabin and they all menstruate at the same time? Is that a virus? Is that contagious or is actually life is more complicated and based on energy that has a resonance that we all feel. We feel when we go into a room with happy people, we feel better. If we go into a room where there's sickness and despair, we feel worse.

[00:27:29.470] – Tom Cowan
Is that a virus? So there's a lot of things that are passed between people. And I can't emphasize enough that when we do the science and isolate the virus and give it to your brother, it doesn't make him sick. It's not the virus. There's something spread. It's not the virus.

[00:27:50.880] – Sally Fallon Morell
However, your brother could have communicated to you, we are coming to the end of our childhood. We are entering a new phase of life. This is a good time to do some housecleaning, get rid of some stuff through our skin. And your body said, “Hey, yeah, that's a good idea. I'll do it too. Right now. This is a good place to do it.” That's the resonance concept.

[00:28:18.630] – Tom Cowan
And the reason why Sally is absolutely correct about this is because when we do real science and find out what the prognosis is of children who have been through chickenpox versus not in every case we find out that children who've been through chickenpox have less cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and a whole lot of other things. So this is a communication strategy to help us adapt to our world. And we have made a misconception and called it a pathogen

[00:28:55.140] – Sally Fallon Morell
And to adapt to do certain types of cleansing activities at certain times.

[00:29:01.210] – Tom Cowan
Yes.

[00:29:01.670] – Sally Fallon Morell
You know, all boys go through puberty at a certain time. All girls do too, all children do. And that's just nature has a timetable for changes in the body, and I think these typical childhood illnesses are part of that timetable, they're getting you ready for your next stage in life.

[00:29:25.760]
Measles is even more interesting because they have never found a measles virus. If you find the measles virus, there's a 100,000 euro prize for you. So what is it that seems to be contagious? We agree that a contagion is the explanation that comes to mind first, but in actuality, life is much more complex and much more wonderful, really. And yes, measles parties work, you know that the message gets around among the children. “Hey, this is a good time.” It's just like in a tribe. I think these transitions happen more at the same time with people who are really living together all the time.

[00:30:16.210] – Allan
Now, you know, we're recording this a little bit before it goes live, and I haven't flown back to the United States yet, but one of the requirements from Panama is that I have a PCR test, a negative PCR test, to be exact, within 48 hours of my flight. And the airline will not let us on the plane if we don't come up with that piece of paper certifying that we've tested negative. But there's a lot of problems with the PCR tests.

[00:30:45.580] – Sally Fallon Morell
Yeah, they're very dangerous. For one thing, very invasive. They're being carried out by people who don't have any training. And you have to ask why? Why can't they just do a swab from your mouth or your nose? Why do they have to go all the way back? Through the sinus passage to the membrane that separates your sinus cavity from the brain. And then, OK, so let's just say they get a positive, what does that positive mean? It does not mean they found the virus. It may mean they found a piece of DNA that they think is part of the virus. It also may mean that the way they've carried out the test is always going to get a positive. Those tests can be set. The number of amplifications you do can be set to always get positives or always get negatives. In fact, there was a big problem in Florida. People were sending in these swabs and they were coming back 100 percent positive because of the way they had calibrated the test.

[00:31:47.230] – Allan
And that's one of the things I'm really concerned about is, you know, you hear about this professional football player gets the test, so he thinks he's not going to be playing on Sunday and Monday. He gets the test. He tests positive. They give him another test on Wednesday and it's negative. They give him another test on Friday and it's negative. So he can play on Sunday. But he didn't get to practice all week because because he.

[00:32:08.530] – Sally Fallon Morell
Well, and they could have sent it to a different lab, you know, that they know gets more negatives. It's just like I know I have a dairy farm and we know which lab gives us better results on our milk, lower counts or whatever. And but I'm concerned about how invasive and painful these tests are. Now, you can also do a blood test, which is for antibodies. That test is equally useless really doesn't tell you anything. But I would see if you could do the blood test instead of this.

[00:32:41.440] – Allan
They don't give us an option as the country wrote the law and it was within 48 hours, which is really difficult because a lot of labs don't turn around that fast. And so we're hopeful we'll find a lab that will allow us to get it. And we think we do. We've got an appointment on a Sunday, strangely enough, to get this done. And so if it happens, great. You know, but we had all kinds of travel problems getting here. So I'm sure if it goes well and smooth, I'd just be shocked. But I'm just I'm concerned about that false positive.

[00:33:14.680] – Sally Fallon Morell
Yeah. Go ahead, Tom.

[00:33:17.200] – Tom Cowan
Well, first of all, I would say there is no such thing as a false positive because a false positive means you've standardized it against the isolation of the virus. And since that's never been done, there is no false positives. False positive means would mean that the test is has a certain meaning and there is no meaning. Now, I would strongly encourage people not to believe what I just said, but I would actually read the package insert because the package insert on the FDA test says this test is not to be used to diagnose the virus or prove causation. The test on the Roach test, the package insert says this PCR test cannot be used to diagnose a viral illness. And the inventor of the test said you can never use this test to diagnose a viral illness or demonstrate causation

[00:34:16.990] – Tom Cowan
So given that which is just the facts of the package insert and what they're required to say, there is no meaning to the test. that's why one set, one says 80 percent that false positive. Another says six or 13. None of those numbers have any meaning at all because it's never been standardized against the isolation of a virus. So we don't know what we're testing for. And just a final thing. They say that the PCR test is unique to a piece of the virus, but the World Health Organization has now disclosed that that piece they're testing for in their test is actually found on human chromosome number eight. Which means it's testing to see whether you're a human being, or a papaya, or a popa, or a goat, or a sheep, because many of those have also tested positive.

[00:35:17.620] – Tom Cowan
Now, you can say, if it's testing for a piece of human chromosome number eight, why doesn't everybody test positive? And the answer is because you can put the number of cycles at 30 and then about four to five percent or so of the people will be positive. You can put it up to eight to 40 cycles and then 80 percent of the people will be positive. And that's not because there's any difference. It's just because you've looked harder. And so this becomes a very powerful tool in the hands of people who want to say, oh, there's more cases. So that test has 40 cycles. Oh, we gave you a vaccine and now we've got rid of it. And so now the test has 30 cycles and all that's changed is the number of cycles and got a different result. Because they're testing for a piece of protein or DNA on human chromosome number eight.

[00:36:22.840] – Sally Fallon Morell
It's so tragic, the incompetence of our public health. Profession. And this outbreak, it just boggles the mind because they have used an invalid type of test for this, the numbers are meaningless. And Tom and I are not arguing that this is just a bad case of the flu that's been poorly treated or counted as Covid or whatever. We are not arguing that we think this is a serious disease, life-threatening disease. We believe it's caused by electromagnetic radiation, mainly with the roll out of 5G. And we need to be looking very carefully at every person who gets sick. We need to determine whether they're sick by their symptoms and not the tests.

[00:37:14.370] – Sally Fallon Morell
There's a whole bunch of questions we need to be asking. Where were they, what their exposure was? Are they already electrically sensitive? Do they have any metal in their body? We need to be doing real, true epidemiology and we're not. And so we just have no idea how many people are sick or is it going up or down or or anything. Where are these illnesses? Where are the true illnesses? Where are they just positive tests? And it's really criminal, the incompetence of the public health officials, and yet they have shut down the whole world.

[00:37:57.020] – Allan
On the 5G because, you know, we know if we put something in a microwave, it's going to be affected by the electromagnetic waves. And we know if we get out in the sun too long, we'll get a sunburn. And it's possible that that skin being burned could then mutate and cause a skin cancer. So we know radiation or electromagnetic waves can cause problems, cellular problems, DNA problems.

[00:38:26.210] – Sally Fallon Morell
Lung problems particularly.

[00:38:31.100] – Tom Cowan
Allan, by the way, I don't know that you actually know that the DNA can be mutated.

[00:38:35.660] – Allan
OK. Yes. I don't have any evidence other than…

[00:38:41.210] – Tom Cowan
All you know is some people who get burned, show up with cancer later in their life. That's all you can say.

[00:38:48.710] – Allan
Yes. OK, fair enough.

[00:38:51.220] – Sally Fallon Morell
You've got to be very careful with Tom.

[00:38:57.940] – Sally Fallon Morell
The truth is, we just don't know. We don't have any clues as to why certain people are getting sick and why others are not getting sick. And I live out in the country. I have a very boring life. I don't go very many places and I don't know anyone, seriously I don't have any friends or relatives who have gotten sick. And then I have people tell me, oh, you're being, you know, not very sympathetic, I know four people who've died of this. These are just observations, kind of meaningless observations.

[00:39:36.130] – Sally Fallon Morell
And by the way, we're not minimizing this. In fact, we and I believe it's going to get worse and worse until we start looking beyond this non-existent virus and into what are the likely causes.

[00:39:52.420] – Allan
One of the things you brought up in the book that I had actually never heard of before is this concept of exosomes or what these exosomes are, that they resemble almost exactly what a virus structure would be like. Can you describe what exosomes are and how they're like viruses or what what they what they represent?

[00:40:16.190] – Tom Cowan
An exosome is exactly what I described before, so the whole question is the theory of how viruses make you sick is they come from the outside. They inject their DNA or RNA into your cells. That it replicates. And then it's somehow some day later, it buds out. And now you have a thousand where you used to have one. And then it goes out of the cells and goes to another person in the whole thing goes again.

[00:40:49.230] – Tom Cowan
But the problem is we don't actually know whether these are coming from the outside. Or as I said before, you poisoned a tissue and it responds by packaging up some genetic material and some proteins. And it essentially spews those out of the tissue and then it communicates with the rest of the body and even potentially other people, even potentially other organisms, as there has been a new poison in town. And here's what you need to make a defensive reaction.

[00:41:25.530] – Tom Cowan
Those things coming from the inside of our tissues are called exosomes. They're not similar to viruses. They're not like viruses. They are exactly the composition of viruses. They have been isolated and purified and they have been shown not to cause disease, but to be communication strategies.

[00:41:48.900] – Tom Cowan
So essentially what's happened here is we have a misconception. The misconception is these things, they're called viruses have come from the outside to infect us when the reality is they're exosomes coming from the inside as detoxification and communication strategies. And when you analyse them, you find they have the same receptors, they have the same ACE protein inhibitors, they have the spike protein. They have all these things which we're alleging to be part of this virus. But they're all breakdown products from our own cells.

[00:42:32.310] – Sally Fallon Morell
It's been a wonderful 20 years as far as paradigm shifts are concerned, because no one is talking about bacteria being bad anymore. Now, we know that we have a biome we can't live without bacteria. They are 80 percent of what they call our immune system. We are covered inside and out with helpful, friendly bacteria, which we call the biome. So this is a huge shift, just in the last 20 years. We need the same shift when it comes to viruses. We just assumed when scientists found these things, they just assumed that they were bad, just like they assumed that bacteria were bad, the wrong assumption. And now we need to have this paradigm shift when it comes to viruses. We have a virome and that virome greatly increases when we're sick or starved or poisoned. And the purpose of the virome is to protect us and help us. It's going to take a while. Just like the bacteria shift took a while.

[00:43:43.920]
I had to laugh the cover of Discover magazine. I read Discover because to me it's always the epitome of conventional science. It's nothing radical or iconoclastic there. And the cover was about the wonderful bacteria in our guts. And they make us feel good chemicals and they do all these things. You would not have seen that twenty years ago or even five years ago in Discover magazine. So I hope I live long enough to see Discover magazine have a on the front page. The Wonderful Virome or something like that. It will take a while.

[00:44:25.830] – Allan
Now, obviously you can't help but follow the press on this because it's 24/7 these days. And so there's there's just so much out there. But a few things that I did run across that are I think are really important is that if you look at the cases of who's getting really, really sick, it's people who were already sick. It's people who were obese, and it's people with low vitamin D So they're depleted in vitamin D or deficient in vitamin D. Seem to be three qualities of the people that end up in the worst shape for dealing with whatever the illness is. And so you go through and this is where I like the practical aspects of this, the things that we can do to protect ourselves. So it's possible we might still get sick, but what are the things we can do to perhaps prevent getting sick or if we do get sick to weather the storm a little bit better?

[00:45:26.260] – Sally Fallon Morell
Well, I think first you have to realize that we are electrical beings, we have a kind of electrical circuitry in our bodies, and most of that circuitry is not the nerve cells, it's the water in our bodies. The water is structured against our cell membranes, against the tissue membranes and it becomes what's called an exclusion zone. And the water is has a charge to it and that functions as a wire in our bodies. So even our cells have all these little networks of structured water and it's like a network of wires in our body.

[00:46:05.210] – Sally Fallon Morell
So you want those wires to be a good and strong and well insulated. So they're not so much affected by electromagnetic radiation from the outside. And the number one thing to do is eat lots of saturated fats. I know that raises eyebrows, but the saturated fats are what your cell membranes need to create this hydrophilic surface, to be strong and not tear or be permeable or anything like that.

[00:46:36.470] – Sally Fallon Morell
Most definitely. And most of these people who are suffering from obesity and, you know, preexisting conditions, I doubt they're eating a lot of saturated fat. They are eating junk food, which is polyunsaturated fat or trans fats. They're not eating the natural fats like butter, tallow, lard and so forth, that our bodies need to have this good, strong, well-insulated circuit. So that's number one.

[00:47:04.640] – Sally Fallon Morell
We talk about getting plenty of B vitamins, plenty of vitamin C in the diet, plenty of vitamin D, but the D needs to be balanced with vitamin A and vitamin K, so all of that is in the food chapter.

[00:47:18.950] – Sally Fallon Morell
At the same time, we need to clean up our environment, especially our houses, especially where we sleep. So that means not having your cell phone in your room, turning off the Wi-Fi at night, if you can actually turn off the electricity in the wires in your bedroom at night. That's helpful. One really easy thing to do is not have an electric clock right by your head when you're sleeping. So there's a list of things that we give for food, for your environment, for your water.

[00:47:51.000] – Sally Fallon Morell
Tom has some very interesting thoughts about drinking well-oxygenated water. You know, when these people get sick, they need and they're put in the hospital with all kinds of electric equipment all around them, around their heads. They might be put on ventilators, are given the worst kind of food, the worst kind of water. If someone gets sick with this disease, they need to get out of the city, get out of that environment, go to places as electrically neutral as possible and have good water, well-oxygenated water, good food, you know, all of these things that we're recommending. Unfortunately, that's not happening.

[00:48:37.290] – Allan
Tom, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:48:49.040] – Tom Cowan
Eat good food, including lard. That's the most important food right now for the all the fat soluble vitamins. The pig has to be from pasture, though, like a real pig, a fake pig, eat good food, be out in the sun, connect with the earth and get rid of all wireless devices.

[00:49:11.780] – Allan
Sally, I had to find wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:49:20.390] – Sally Fallon Morell
Well, in addition to what Tom has said, and I completely agree with him on all of these, by the way, lard from pastured pigs is our best source of vitamin D. There's is a thousand IUs of vitamin D and a tablespoon of that kind of lard. That's the right kind of fats also. But in addition to what Tom is saying, I would say raw dairy products, especially raw liquid milk, fluid milk, because it's such a wonderful source of glutathione, which is a huge help in detoxification.

[00:49:51.560] – Sally Fallon Morell
Clean up your bedroom, get a good night's sleep, spend time outside, do things that you like to do. I know sometimes we have to do a lot of things that we have to do, but as much as possible, you should be doing things that you like.

[00:50:08.670] – Tom Cowan
And there's one more thing that's actually, I think, more important than any of those other things. Sally may not agree, but if right now, if I was to say what the most toxic element in our environment is, it would be fear.

[00:50:25.690] – Sally Fallon Morell
No, I agree, I agree.

[00:50:27.340] – Tom Cowan
And the reason people are afraid is because they are worried about dying. And the reason they're worried about dying is because they think the most important part of them will die. And I'm here to tell everybody that that is a horrible delusion. And for those who need to look into that, I would suggest you spending a lot of effort trying to find out what is a human being, what is a living thing, and do we really die, at least the part of us that we're most interested in? Because if we don't and there's nothing to be afraid of.

[00:51:14.380] – Allan
Well, thank you, Tom, Sally, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Contagion Myth, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:51:25.450] – Sally Fallon Morell
Well, they can start with my blog, NourishingTraditions.com. Among other sources, including Tom's my art at my blog called Is Coronavirus Contagious. That's one of the main things that started us on this journey that we've taken. So I'm constantly updating. I updated that blog with others and Tom and I are just about to do another one. So that would be one place. And then the Weston A Price Foundation, westonaprice.org is also providing a lot of information in our journal and on our website.

[00:52:09.830] – Tom Cowan
For me, it would be drtomcowan.com.

[00:52:14.770] – Allan
Great, thank you both for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:52:19.330] – Tom Cowan
Thank you.

[00:52:20.230] – Sally Fallon Morell
Thank you.

[00:52:21.970] – Tom Cowan
Take care, Allan.

Post Show/Recap

[00:52:29.530] – Allan
Welcome back, Rachel.

[00:52:30.970] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, how are you?

[00:52:32.290] – Allan
All right, well, so what did you think about that conversation?

[00:52:36.340] – Rachel
Oh, wow, there's a lot to talk about there, but I'd like to talk about the good stuff first. And why don't we start with how science changes, that science doesn't always stay the same all the time?

[00:52:49.240] – Allan
Yeah, it does. And you could you could go back and say at one point, people thought witches were what made people sick. And sometimes they thought the world was flat. And they approach things from that perspective. And the scientists often that would come out with something different, something novel were persecuted.

[00:53:11.290] – Allan
And it still happens today. You know, there's a doctor in South Africa whose last name is Noakes, Dr. Noakes. And he was he was coming out and saying that, you know, this whole fat-phobia thing is a problem, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with people eating saturated fat, absolutely nothing wrong with people eating high fat. And the medical profession in South Africa was all over him. They wanted to revoke his license for the things he was saying on Twitter, saying he's basically giving bad medical advice against what the basic protocols, the standard of care was. And he fought them for years and legal. And finally, you know, again, presenting enough science-backed information to a judge was found not guilty effectively and was allowed to keep his medical license. But he fought for years.

[00:54:03.040] – Allan
And, you know, so sometimes science is just we change our paradigm. I mean, we can go back to just the conversation we had with Dr. Fung. You know, the paradigms of what cancer is have changed. And that's science. You know, they think they know what they know. And then they find something new and we dive a little deeper and we learn something. So, you know, I'm not going to say that Dr. Cowan is right and I'm not going to say that is wrong.

[00:54:29.230] – Allan
I'm just going to say that there's enough going on there that you just you know, you can look at it and you can start to draw inferences. But we're just going to need more work because with 5G, no one's done long term studies. It's new. It's a new thing. We're faced with new technologies all the time. You know, if was a horse-drawn carriage, you could probably get out of the way if it's a car traveling 65 miles per hour. Splat.

[00:54:59.740] – Rachel
Yeah, big difference.

[00:55:01.000] – Allan
You know, so technology has its benefits, but oftentimes there are downsides to the technology. And it's just something for us to wrap our heads around. As we go about our lives, as there's always going to be these new ideas. And there's nothing wrong with the idea. No one's saying he's absolutely right. Even Dr. Cowen says he might not be absolutely right, but he just doesn't buy into the germ theory. And he was just saying, let's talk about 5G and what it means. Let's talk about how there might be another answer to why these things are happening.

[00:55:38.290] – Rachel
Absolutely. Yeah, it's definitely worth researching some more, studying some more. You never know how the tides will change. And in fact, I do remember studying EMFs when I was back in college. This guy was probably 35ish years ago. And that's long time for science and something as interesting as EMFs. But when we studied it and I was an environmental science major, so this is part of my programming. It should continue to be studied and it might even take another 35 years before we figure out or be able to put our finger on something having to do with EMFs.

[00:56:17.350] – Rachel
But it's just one of those long list of things that we could maybe consider for our own personal health and wellbeing. But it's just, like I said, just one of those very many things we need to consider.

[00:56:30.040] – Allan
Yeah. You know, I remember at points in time they've said, you know, OK, don't get out in the sun is completely dangerous. You're going to get skin cancer. That's going to kill you if you get out in the sun. And now we're turning around and saying, well, how you're not getting the vitamin D you need. And that's causing some issues. You're not keeping your circadian rhythm balanced because you're not getting enough blue light, enough sunlight. And so it's just kind of one of those things to say that there are things out there that hurt us that, you know, we don't see, we don't know.

[00:57:03.730] – Allan
And we learn a little bit and then people change and the science changes. And the only thing that really stands in the way of true progress is when large companies or large industries are able to get in there and find a kind of meddle with the stuff. Because, you know, in a sense, the here's a symptom, here's a pill works out very well for the pharmaceutical industry or here's an illness. Here's an illness, here's a vaccine is the same general math. But it's even more compelling because you're not to wait for them to get sick, you just have to have an illness strong enough that people care to take a vaccine. So I'm not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of the imagination, but even the things they're doing there with these new vaccines and things that are coming out now is those are novel. Those are new. And we've never used an RNA vaccine on people before.

[00:58:01.230] – Allan
And they're testing it and they're finding it generally safe. There are some side effects and, you know, there's going to be limited quantity. But, you know, I want to see I want to see more. I want to see, you know, if, you know, 100 million people have taken this vaccine and are generally tolerating it, then maybe it's Okay. And if it's working, you know, the preliminary data that came out was fantastic.

[00:58:25.560] – Allan
But, you know, in the end, we don't know. It's a novel technology that we're mass producing and doing. And that's kind of you know, that's kind of I am Legend, Will Smith movie kind of material. Not to be so dystopian, but you have to make these decisions on your own based on what you believe and in your heart and the research that you've done.

[00:58:52.890] – Rachel
Mm hmm. Well, there's a reason why vaccines usually take five or more years to develop. It's because of all the study that goes into it and the the number of people that they can test it on. Being that coronavirus has this entire world in a pandemic right now. There's a lot of pressure and we can't continue to live sheltered in our homes with restaurants and things closed all the time. Like our economy is having problems, schools are having problems. I mean, the coronavirus is caused a huge problem that just has a huge ripple effect.

[00:59:25.590] – Rachel
And people are dying. Literally, I don't know what the current count is, but we have over a million people across the world that have had coronavirus. And I forget where we are, 200 thousand, I think, in the United States have died from it. So, I mean, I can understand the rush with the vaccine. And I am optimistic that there is a lot of smart people doing the best science that they can in a short period of time. But there's a reason why science takes time.

[00:59:54.960] – Allan
Yeah, and so we'll see. But I would just say I'm glad that they're seeing some progress there.

[01:00:00.640] – Rachel
Yes.

[01:00:01.230] – Allan
I'm actually happier on the treatment side of things that the treatments are there, because in the end, I think that's actually how you beat this is that, you know, there would be certain people that just won't have an opportunity to get the vaccine before they're infected. So having a good treatment protocol, having good testing protocols or better testing protocols is going to be where we're going to we're going to win this.

[01:00:24.990] – Allan
And you're right, my gym is still closed. When they came out with the protocols for how I can open the gym, it's not something that's feasible. You know, my gym is too small for me to have that many people in the gym, to have my equipment spaced out two meters when the entire length of my gym is probably, I don't know, 12 meters.

[01:00:58.050] – Rachel
Tiny.

[01:00:58.680] – Allan
Yeah. I can't I can't spread out now. And so we have to just limit the number of people in the gym. And then they said, my employees have to be tested every two weeks. And that's just not practical for for me to pay for my employees to be tested every two weeks just for this. So the gym will probably remain closed for a while. And I hate that.

[01:01:19.980] – Allan
Because that is a part of health and fitness. That's part of wellness. And that's being completely ignored because it's seen as a higher risk. But it is a segment of the economy that's going to continue to hurt until they really get a grapple on this thing. So I am hopeful that what they're doing is going to work. And it's worth again at the same time, not necessarily nay saying everyone who believes something different than yourself, just to realize that there might be some validity to it.

[01:01:50.970] – Allan
And hopefully people can wrap their heads around it that are smarter than me and do some work in that area to actually determine if it is or if it isn't. And not to get the PETA people mad, but it's like put some put some rats or mice in 5G and let them go and live their lives and then put some rats in the same basic environment without the 5G. So there's no other confounders. They're eating the same amount, they're eating the same food, they're doing the same thing, the same environment all the way across. And just see, is there a difference in the lives of these mice and that would just give you one more data point to share is or isn't, but, you know, and hopefully someone's doing that. but we're rolling out new technology and doing different things. It's a crapshoot at this point.

[01:02:42.060] – Rachel
Sometimes it is. Yes. Yes, it is.

[01:02:45.210] – Allan
But that's what it takes for us to get out of the crap. And, you know, I guess we take that shot.

[01:02:50.130] – Rachel
Mm hmm. And then let's also go back to the preventative measures. You know, we should all be living a healthier lifestyle as best we can and living a healthy lifestyle, being active, eating good foods and being outside and getting fresh air. I mean, all of these things can be hugely beneficial to our bodies, whether we're talking about cancer prevention, coronavirus prevention, any other disease that's out there, you know, we can take good care of our bodies. Maybe we can put it off for a while.

[01:03:19.950] – Allan
Yeah, and that's the deal is lifestyle is going to decide, you know, who's capable of making it through this and who's not. In most cases, that's what they're finding, is it's lifestyle issues that are the confounder that's causing people to really suffer with this thing. So start working on it. If you're obese, lose some weight. If you're a smoker, quit for the love of God. And if you're not eating well, you know, take that time. If you're not getting out, moving enough, get some sunshine. You know, even though now we're getting into the winter months and it's harder to get vitamin D, maybe you need to supplement. But, you know, making sure that you're getting the nutrition your body needs to be healthy. That's the challenge.

[01:04:00.830] – Allan
So if we're into this for wellness, that's a huge part of it being well means getting past these things the right way. It's great. We're going to have vaccines, treatments and all of that. Prevention is number one. We had Dr. Rob and Dr. Lou on not long ago, and it's been pretty clear. Stay out of hospital if you can, because this is more dangerous than some of the other places you might end up being.

[01:04:29.430] – Allan
And so just just realize that you're you have one thing you can control in this world right now and all the crazy stuff that's going on, you can control you. And you can control what you eat. You can control your movement. You can control how often you wash your hands, who you expose yourself to, all of those things. And so where you have control, this is this is the time to show that restraint, to show that control.

[01:04:54.810] – Rachel
Absolutely. Yeah. There's enough signs right now that shows that masks are working, social distancing, that six feet or more of separation is working.

[01:05:03.510] – Allan
OK, we're going to call that physical distancing.

[01:05:06.210] – Rachel
Right, right. Right. Yes. The physical distancing. Yeah, that's definitely worth working for. Sure. Good ventilation being outside has shown this summer. I mean, we did bring down the curve this summer with all of our outdoor activities. So there's a few things that we know works. And until we can get it under control, at least we can work on some of those preventative measures just to stay safe.

[01:05:33.840] – Allan
Absolutely. All right, Rachel. Well, I'll talk to you again next week.

[01:05:38.430] – Rachel
Awesome. Talk to you soon.

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Another episode you may enjoy

The heart is more than just a pump with Dr. Thomas Cowan

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:53.780] – Allan
Raz, how you doing?

[00:00:55.670] – Rachel
Good, Allan, how are you today?

[00:00:57.560] – Allan
I'm doing all right. We are we are doing the traveling around the country and we're just dodging left and right to try to avoid this covid thing. People around us are starting to get tested positive. And so far our testing has been negative. And I have a thermometer that I now carry around with me and we check our temperatures. And so, you know, trying to do the right responsible thing, wearing masks in public and doing those things.

[00:01:23.000] – Allan
You can have your position about all of that. But the reality of it is, do you really want to take your chances and get it?

[00:01:29.690] – Rachel
Right.

[00:01:30.500] – Allan
You know, if I got it, I would say, OK, I got it. And I'd hunker down somewhere for two weeks and then I'd say, OK, I'm probably going to be fine from here on out. But I know a lot of people don't have that. And if you're around someone who's ill, you really have to think about what your behavior is potentially doing to them.

[00:01:47.270] – Allan
My daughter staying with her mother this week because it's closer to her workplace and her mother got tested positive. So, you know, not that either I'm done anything wrong. It's just I got exposed in some way or another and now they have to deal with that. And now I have to somewhat deal with that and go get tested again just because of the exposure. So, be aware that that stuff's out there and it's going to get probably a lot worse before it gets better.

[00:02:17.510] – Allan
And even though there's vaccine coming out and the testing and things that'll have to go on with that, that's a ways off for all of us. It can seem kind of pretty exciting when they make an announcement like that, like, hey, we've got this thing. They don't have this thing that they have this this potential other thing that they have to start building and manufacturing and apparently keeping below a certain temperature, below freezing, which most freezers don't do today.

[00:02:44.000] – Allan
So there's a lot of logistics. A lot of things will have to go on before we can actually say we're out of the woods on this. So just be safe. And that's what I'm trying to do as we travel through the United States is, make sure that I'm staying safe, get myself tested when I can. And if I get exposed, then go get tested again. You know, that's going to be our life going forward for a little while.

[00:03:05.570] – Rachel
Yeah, I suspect that's the case for a lot of people. You know, Mike deals with this for work. Covid is an important part of his health and safety responsibilities for his work. So but we do see time and time again how mask wearing and hand washing has been, really helpful with keeping the count down. And I know the whole world is actually going through a whole new wave of it. And this one is going to be really hard, especially in places like where we live in Michigan, where it's going to be cold and we're going to spend a lot of time inside.

[00:03:35.810] – Rachel
But, again, if you just take a few of those extra steps and wear your mask and wash your hands, it really can do a lot to protect you. And like we've also talked about, Allan, being healthy, you know, just taking the extra step and taking care of your physical health will also be a huge part of the process of keeping you healthy in the long run.

[00:03:57.320] – Allan
Absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and jump into the interview then.

Interview

[00:04:31.490] – Allan
Dr. Rob, Dr. Lou, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:35.600] – Dr. Rob
Thanks for having us.

[00:04:37.510] – Allan
So the book is called HardWired: How Our Instincts to Be Healthy are Making Us Sick. And, one of the things I have to say about this book is it's very unusual that I will read a book and learn more than one or two things because it had so many guests on in health and fitness. And honestly, most books are just repeating something I've read somewhere else.

[00:05:00.610] – Allan
And occasionally someone will pop in with some new ideas, some new thing I've never heard. But I got to the first chapter and I'm like, oh wow, I didn't know that was that bad. And it's the next chapter. And like, hmm, that's very interesting I've never heard about those people before. And then the next one. Oh, so that's what was going on with me. It was just like every chapter I'm like just kind of a new thing in my head. And so really, really great book.

[00:05:26.240] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, thanks very much, part of that was was by design, we when Dr. Lou and I sat down and realized that we're both asking the same question, why do we do the things that we do but from different standpoints, Dr. Lou, being an E.R. physician. So he sees that in the medical world and me seeing that mostly in the social science world, when we started to look at the intersection of those two, we started to discover all of these amazing facts, as you say, and stories that can be told about how these things play upon each other and affect us in our everyday life.

[00:06:01.250] – Dr. Rob
So I'm glad you found that we were actually, as we as our journey was over many years writing this book, our journey was the same. We were shocked at how much our social world is now directing our health, our biological health as well. And that was that's one of the true takeaways of the book.

[00:06:21.640] – Dr. Lou
You know what, the aha moment for Rob and I when we were doing a previous interview was that humans, as well, designed as they are, are running on outdated software.

[00:06:34.180] – Dr. Lou
So the software we're running on served us well for the previous million years. But the fast-paced environment of today's world leaves our brain confused as to what to do. And Rob explains quite nicely that we have too much choice, too much choice in food, too much choice in social media, too much choice in everything. And with that choice comes the consequences of bad decisions that are driven by something that's hardwired into us. I mean, dopamine drives humans.

[00:07:07.240] – Dr. Lou
You get rewarded for water, you get rewarded for food. Finding water, finding food and having sex and having sex is the greatest dopamine release in your brain. And that's because humans want to be around for a long time. But if you have access to too much food, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, we have to sort of ask ourselves, why is this obesity epidemic all over the world? It's not just in North America.

[00:07:34.390] – Dr. Lou
It's all over the world. And we really believe that we're not wired properly. And so what we need to do is patch our software to make sure we can live in these modern times.

[00:07:45.540] – Allan
Yeah, you know, one of the first things you got into in the book was, quite frankly, was terrifying. I worked in the oil and gas business and so we were safety, safety, safety. And, you know, we any anything that went wrong, like you just you took a step wrong, you know, walking up the steps. You were supposed to write up a paper of a near-miss. And, you know, so safety was just drilled into us. In fact, it was actually a part of our bonus. If we had safety events above a certain threshold, we didn't get that portion of our bonus, which made sometimes me question a lot of the reporting.

[00:08:21.750] – Allan
And as an auditor, that's, you know, part of what I was like, OK, how are we doing this? Right. What what astounded me was that the same problems I would see we were seeing in the oil field. With health and safety are happening in our hospitals, and I think the stat that kind of blew me away was 440000 deaths per year due to a mistake.

[00:08:48.620] – Dr. Lou
There was a study that came out of Hopkins that basically said hospital related injuries were the third leading cause. And it's not as if as a health care provider, I go to work wanting to hurt someone. But it's like you said, oil and gas are so far ahead and taking safety seriously that the health care industry, unfortunately, still doesn't believe this is a major problem.

[00:09:11.970] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, it's interesting, we put in some really interesting numbers around preventable error in hospitals and one of the kind of the little math stats that we put in there that was really fascinating for Dr. Lou and I, as well is if you look at comparing hospitals and modern hospital to, say, the Iraq surge in 2007. So we remember the Iraq surge was one hundred and sixty thousand troops that went to Iraq and they experienced a death rate of nine hundred and four servicemen and women. In that same year, 35.1 million people visited modern US hospital. And if you use that number of roughly four hundred thousand preventable errors and deaths, then really it was more dangerous to visit a modern U.S. hospital in that same year than it was to serve in Iraq during the deadliest year in Iraq.

[00:10:04.020] – Dr. Rob
That is just astounding. And now one in four people that visit a modern hospital are at risk of experiencing a preventable error in hospitals.

[00:10:15.180] – Allan
Now, part of the solution of this is obvious. Don't go to the hospital, but you need to go to the hospital. If you have an acute issue, if you're having a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, you absolutely need to quickly get to a hospital. What else can we do to help prevent us from being a part of that statistic?

[00:10:36.520] – Dr. Rob
Well, I mean, one of the things that we look at is why are these happening? What's the nature of these errors that are happening? And it's really not a lack of understanding of medicine anymore. Of course, there's always room for improvement there. The technological advances is really not that we don't have these available. Sure, there are some cognitive biases that play into diagnostic error, what have you. But really, these are non-technical errors, non-technical errors and what we've learned a lot.

[00:11:07.090] – Dr. Rob
And we use we use the comparison in the book as well as aviation safety. Aviation, the same thing, same thing. They looked at these aircraft that are so sophisticated now that really the types of errors that we're seeing are of a non-technical nature. And that's the area that's the main domain that we need to improve upon. But as the book suggests, our hard wired parts of ourselves mean that we're very social creatures. And that means that we have to dance and play around in groups, even in very serious settings like the hospital as well.

[00:11:40.510] – Dr. Rob
And some of that group dynamic and that interplay, that psychology of being part of the group. Some of the hierarchies that are built into the hospital system mean that it's sometimes difficult for us to communicate effectively. So there's leadership issues, there's communication issues. And Dr. Lou sees that a lot more than than I do, obviously, on a day to day basis in the in the hospital environment.

[00:12:05.170] – Dr. Lou
Allan, in emergency department, there's three documented biases that emergency physicians have that lead to error, and that leads us into a similar situation in industry condition known as procedural, intentional noncompliance so that people do bad things knowing they're doing bad things.

[00:12:27.460] – Dr. Lou
And so you have to try and figure out, well, why would somebody take a shortcut when they know they shouldn't be taking a shortcut? Well, if it's the end of an eight hour shift, then they're exhausted and they just want to get out of there. They'll come up with a diagnosis and confirm in their mind that that's the right diagnosis. When if that patient had been seen at the beginning of the shift, maybe that wouldn't have happened.

[00:12:52.000] – Dr. Lou
There was really good study done out of the UK where they had staff wear red badges and green badges and their red badges were people that were fatigued and the green badges were people that were fresh. And the patients had a choice of who they wanted to take care of them. And they always chose the person that had the more sleep and that was relaxed. So when you said, what can people do? First thing is make sure your health care provider washes their hand right in front of you before they touch you.

[00:13:20.050] – Dr. Lou
And if they refuse to, then don't allow them to touch you. Raise a stink. And the other thing is ask them how long they've been up and if they've been up, you know, for a 36 hour shift and they're proud of it, ask for another health care provider. Two simple things. And bring an advocate for yourself as well. You know, you need someone that's going to help you advocate through the system. And unfortunately, if seniors go into health care facilities, which they're more prone to, most of the time they're still, a little maybe too respectful of the health care profession. And don't question what's going on.

[00:13:54.310] – Dr. Lou
Well, we know that Institute of Medicine study done in the States showed that 35 percent of all health care dollars spent in the US are totally wasted, totally wasted. So there's more than enough money in the system to develop a better system. But like you said earlier, and the ideal thing I always say is we should try and get rid of the patient so you don't have to use health care in the first place.

[00:14:16.870] – Allan
Yeah. So avoid the hospital when it's appropriate by staying healthy by a lot of things we're going to talk about here is if you keep yourself healthy, you're in the hospital less. And if you're in the hospital less then you don't have to worry about it as much. But then when you are advocate for yourself, ask those questions.

[00:14:32.810] – Allan
I got what I like. So I was just shocked that there was there was not a check balance or something to say that they had to wash their hands between seeing patients. I just, I don't know. You assume some of these things are just going to happen, because if anyone knows what they're doing, it's the guy that's walking in there with the white coat. But we need to ask more questions. We need to we need to be on the medical team with the doctor.

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[00:16:22.880] – Allan
I don't think anyone right now doesn't know that willpower is a finite resource, and if we get fatigued, sometimes willpower just gets weaker. That's why it's easier to eat ice cream after dinner than it is. You would not necessarily eat it for breakfast because you know better.

[00:16:40.220] – Allan
But you talk about actually taking some of these tactical indulgences. And as I was talking to a client today and he said he just he just loves candy corn and he's lost 150 pounds and he's like, but I love candy corn. So this time of year when it rolls around, I'm going to buy myself a small bag of candy corn. And he says that keeps him on track for a whole quarter. And he says then he knows around Thanksgiving, Christmas, he'll give himself another little treat.

[00:17:07.640] – Allan
Can you just talk about why tactical indulgences are a great way to bolster our willpower or at least help us through those times?

[00:17:15.770] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, for sure. Well, if we start with the idea that, we do have this hard wiring. So if we're stuck with this hardwiring for now, that means we have this reward system in our brain that's constantly turned on. It's constantly wanting reward all the time. So we can either try to fight it or we can try to we can try to work with it somehow. And if you're trying to fight it, you end up, this idea of building resilience all the time doesn't necessarily work.

[00:17:41.360] – Dr. Rob
It becomes more and more difficult. So the idea of these tactical indulgences means that you are allowing yourself to feed the reward center of your brain, but in more perhaps and more positive, ideally in more positive ways as well, taking a little breaks. So willpower is almost like the gas in your car. You can run out of it, you can burn through it and run out of it. You have to keep adding it. You have to keep replenishing it as well.

[00:18:06.620] – Dr. Rob
So there was a great experiment that illustrates this, and it was the cookie and radish experiment. And what they did was they had people have either some cookies or some radishes in a control group, and then they had to do some math problems afterwards, some really challenging math problems. And they found that the ones that had the cookies did a lot better and they were able to last a lot longer with the math test. And that's because they were able to free up some of that willpower by this some small indulgence that allowed them to not have to sort of double up on their willpower. Like, eat these radishes while other people are having cookies and then go into this tough math experiment.

[00:18:44.450] – Dr. Rob
And that was kind of a doubling up of willpower. So we have to be able to allow ourselves and this flexibility to have these small indulgences. And we've we see that even in athletes. And that we we talk about that in the book. And this is very fitting for the theme today as well. So in elite athletics, obviously, athletes are extremely disciplined. They are among the most disciplined people on the planet to be able to get through these excruciating workouts.

[00:19:15.470] – Dr. Rob
But between those workouts, they allow themselves downtime and they maybe have a race and then they watch a corny movie. They eat some indulgent food. They allow their their brains and their bodies to be able to have this tactical break before they have to start again. And that allows them to refresh the system, to add that willpower back into the gas tank. So it's a very, very powerful tool. And it's one that that a lot of people don't necessarily understand how to use. And if we are truly hardwired, we have to work with that reward system. We can't work against it.

[00:19:51.770] – Allan
It's interesting you said that because with the covid pandemic, everything that's going on, a lot of football games in the pros are getting shifted around. And so, it's interesting that we're interviewing this guy and said, you were supposed to have a game and then you didn't have a game. And now it's been 16 days since you having a game. What did you do? And he said, I sat with my wife and watched a movie and had some wine, like that was something he would never have done during the season. But because he had that break, he just used that opportunity to basically have an indulgence.

[00:20:25.130] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's really, really important. And we so we see that in top performers all the time. I've talked to people who are executives as well. Maybe some of your listeners relate to this where they are. They have to be on all the time. They have to be on their game. And then they go and travel, you know, on an aircraft somewhere, maybe overseas. And that that break to be able to sit down, put on the headphones, watch a crazy movie just to relax.

[00:20:52.340] – Dr. Rob
And they say that it almost resets them. It's that refreshing way of resetting your brain and then you can go back to your A-game again afterward. So these are these are feeding our reward system. It's the same dopamine pathways that we're feeding, but we're trying to feed them in more positive and conscientious ways.

[00:21:13.230] – Dr. Lou
Allan, sort of related to that is people don't appreciate the importance of volunteering. So volunteering your time releases something within you and people that volunteer are, it's estimated, 40% happier than people that don't volunteer. So your listeners, if they're not currently volunteering right now, they should try it and see if it makes a difference in their lives. I mean, happiness is 50% genetic. You either have it or you don't. 10% of it comes from having more money. But we know that 40% of it comes from volunteering and strong social support network. So people should not underestimate the power of volunteering.

[00:21:59.060] – Allan
Yeah, and that rolls right into the Rosetto Effect. This was fascinating. I guess. Rosetto was a town in Italy and especially long-lived folks, and they moved to like it was Pennsylvania. Right. And they set up another town called Rosetto. And it was all these people were immigrants coming over and staying in that one town. And they didn't have heart disease. And it was fascinating. And they started studying them. And then two generations later, all that's gone. And you calling that the Rosetta Effect, could you talk a little bit about that?

[00:22:34.160] – Dr. Rob
Sure. I mean, Dr. Lou may want to talk about the clinical side of that, but what I think what to start off, it's very interesting case because, yes, the population, despite their lifestyles, first of all, they worked. They were hard working. They lived and worked in mines that worked in mines they didn't have especially great diets. They drank gallons of wine. They so the typical behaviors that you might associate with having a fantastic cardiovascular system weren't necessarily there.

[00:23:10.010] – Dr. Rob
But yet they were noticing that they were lacking a lot of coronary artery disease or coronary diseases. So they wanted to look into the effect of that. And the traditional medical analysis of them wasn't necessarily yielding an answer. So they had to look at other areas. And one of the most fascinating and seemed like the determinant factor was the sense of community that they had. So Dr. Lou mentioned volunteering, and it's that social support, that network that seems to be absolutely critical to our health.

[00:23:43.280] – Dr. Rob
And we know that intuitively. If you feel that, you know, your family or your friends have your back, you sense that, that if you were to fall on hard times or whatever you need to pick up the phone and call them that they would be there to help you in a second. That intuitively feels good. It's a stress lowering mechanism in your life. And so that was one of the most fundamental findings of that.

[00:24:11.030] – Dr. Rob
And it's a great case for the book as well, because it does illustrate that nexus or that point between our biological medical selves and our in our social world and how our social world is so very important.

[00:24:26.420] – Dr. Lou
Tying into Rob's comments, that's why the UK has a Minister of Loneliness, that's why the United Arab Emirates as a Minister of Happiness, because the literature is now starting to show us that loneliness is worse for your heart health than smoking. That's pretty powerful when you stop and you say that somebody's loneliness is worse for your health than smoking. And so, volunteering is part of a strong social support network as part of it. And this all ties in with the increase in suicide rates that we're seeing as well. That ties in with a lot of social media factors that hopefully we'll talk about. But, you should be saying to yourself, come on, guys, you're trying to tell me that loneliness and volunteering are these are such basic things that don't cost anything. You're absolutely right. They don't cost anything. But the impact they have on you is phenomenal.

[00:25:22.370] – Allan
I think I read in your book it said that loneliness actually changes the shape of your heart. The left ventricle.

[00:25:31.830] – Dr. Rob
Yeah. We do talk in the book about the changes in our body. There's one that is a an effect almost like the broken heart effect and that is a that's a clinical presentation. And Dr. Lou may know a bit more about it, but it's a clinical presentation which is like having a heart attack. And that can happen in times of a very high acute stress. We see it they call it a broken heart effect because you see it oftentimes with the death of a spouse, you're going through that that that horrible grief that is so very stressful for you.

[00:26:11.240] – Dr. Rob
And that can actually play out in the actual way that you're that your heart is working. And the the the the widow and widower effect is very real, where the risk of dying after the death of a of a long time spouse is very high within the first year or two, much higher than the general population as well.

[00:26:36.120] – Allan
Now, I told you I had worked in the oil and gas field, and as you might imagine, when that when the market's good, everything's great, and when the market's bad, everything's really bad. And so I went through about three years of just continuous layoffs until finally my name was on the paper with along with everybody else. It turned out to be a blessing because I said I was I'm not definitely not going back to that kind of lifestyle.

[00:27:05.670] – Allan
You brought up something called allostatic load, which is basically, I guess, an accumulation of stress. And I have to believe that was my problem because I got to a point where everything hurt. Everything just bothered me.

[00:27:20.610] – Allan
I really felt like I had no resilience to stress and I really feel like that's what it was. Yeah. Can you talk about allostatic load and what causes it and what we can do about it?

[00:27:33.250] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, yeah, so we talk about allostatic load and allostasis, we're talking about the cumulative stresses that impact us on a day to day basis and chronically as well as you say, it's that it's the idea of that wear and tear that happens on the body over time with all of those stressors that can be psychological, it can be social, and it can be physical as well. Doing night shifts and all this kind of stuff all adds to this sort of wear and tear. So we want to be able to manage that, of course. And if we go to we obviously we start to venture too far into the stress side of that of a so-called bell curve. If we if the middle is the optimum, then then we're constantly living with stress. It's a chronic stress condition and that will obviously bring us down over time.

[00:28:20.500] – Dr. Rob
And the same thing, if we're under stress as well, that that can be a challenge, a different type of challenge. But we want to kind of stay in the middle and really we talk about having almost like a flow state. You're staying right in the middle. You're on your game. You're optimum. But your body and your brain are essentially evolved to be able to manage this type of stress.

[00:28:42.950] – Dr. Rob
And what we're seeing and we talk about in the book, Hardwired, is that we are in a super saturated ecosystem, essentially, that is creating so much stress that we're having a very difficult time staying in that happy place right in the middle, that optimum. And so now we're walking around with all of this weight of the world, stress on our shoulders, and it's having a real health effect in terms of our actual physical health as well.

[00:29:09.700] – Dr. Rob
And Dr. Lou probably sees that that all the time in terms of stress in the clinical environment.

[00:29:15.560] – Dr. Lou
Yeah, let me let me just add onto that and back up a little bit, so if that stress is present in a pregnant female, that stress actually has an impact on the fetus, so much so that it can change the genetic structure of that if that fetus it's called epigenesis and so that in combination with adverse childhood events. So that's child abuse, child neglect, child malnutrition will stick with an individual and manifests itself later in life with increased cancer rates, increased diabetes rates, increased asthma rates, increased obesity rates.

[00:29:52.550] – Dr. Lou
Just about every chronic disease can be linked back to adverse childhood events. And the stress, especially in a pregnant female, is directly transferred to the fetus. So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, the most important members of our society are obviously pregnant females and kids. You know, in the first 18 months of life, what happens to a child in the first 18 months of life regarding adverse childhood events is going to be with them for the rest of their lives.

[00:30:22.280] – Dr. Lou
Some of your listeners may wonder, why am I still behind the eight ball? Well, you know, if you were to go and do a little bit of a forensic analysis of your upbringing, a lot of the reasons why you are who you are today, can go right back to when you were in your mom's uterus.A

[00:30:43.100] – Allan
lot of people and I fit this list at one point I've tried to move away from it. I don't carry my phone with me unless I have to. So right now, I'm recording this in a spare bedroom and my phone is in the living room. And my wife, she couldn't stand that. If her phone was in the living room, she's in the living room. And because she uses the video games and the social media almost, she feels like a stress release for me. It's the exact opposite. I feel stress every time I get on social media.

[00:31:17.330] – Allan
But you brought up the term called Nomeophobia. First time I'm hearing that word. Can you explain nomophobia and then kind of why? You know, obviously we didn't have social media when we were designed. And it's a new thing, a really new thing. I know some folks out there might not realize it, but we were all born. If you're over 40, social media didn't exist when we were born. Kids are being born into it now, where there are on social media playing these video games before they really even look like they should be able to hold a phone.

[00:31:50.030] – Allan
Can you talk about this? Because this is this is actually, I think, becoming this is going to be big. This is this might be, in my opinion, going forward, one of the biggest health risks that we have in front of us.

[00:32:00.560] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, nomophobia is is it kind of fun word, but it's basically a fear of being without your phone. It's that panic. Where's my phone? And you're padding your pockets and you're looking for your phone and you know, so but is that fear of being with or without it? It's not it's not necessarily a fear of losing it, it's a fear of not checking it all the time. So so it's funny, the spouse thing, there's about 20% of the population would rather not see their spouse for a week, then go without their phone for a week. That's a sad statistic.

[00:32:33.000] – Allan
It is.

[00:32:34.100] – Dr. Rob
Yeah. And about 90% of the people out there will check their phone and look at their phone before bed. And there's all sorts of, you know, things that happen in your brain with a light that comes off the phone that, the blue light that affects you with melatonin. But really, it has to do with the social side. And it's that ability to not disconnect yourself from what's happening on the phone, the content on the phone as well.

[00:32:56.390] – Dr. Rob
So we especially see this in young people. So about 90% of them sleep with their phone like right beside them in bed. And about one in five people will, especially younger people, will wake up in the night to check their social media because it's so arousing for them to do that. So there's a couple of things. One is that, as are our brains, get a very positive reward from looking at our phone.

[00:33:21.770] – Dr. Rob
So we get this, as Dr. Lou had mentioned, this dopamine reward center in our brain. It lights up when we look at our phone. Every time you pull your phone in your pocket, you look at you're getting hit of dopamine. There's other things that they've come out with some of the research too. So oxytocin, which is the cuddle hormone, the love hormone that you would have between a mother and a baby, between a couple that have been together in a long, loving relationship, that that oxytocin, the feel good hormone is also released as well.

[00:33:51.950] – Dr. Rob
But we also know that very heavy social media users also have higher rates of depression. So you have this sort of positive thing that's happening. But in the long run, in the big picture, it's quite a negative one. And a lot of that, again, has to do with the hardwired part of our brain. That has to do with us being in groups and wanting that social reward. So, we're social creatures, we want that social reward to happen. And so all of these likes and everything else that we get on social media stimulate our our brain. And we can't get away from it. We can't get away from it.

[00:34:28.810] – Dr. Rob
But at the same time, a lot of times social comparison in itself doesn't make us feel great. We compare ourselves to others. And it's sort of that, you know, comparing yourself to the Joneses sort of thing, the neighbors. And when you compare yourself, you can't help but look at the things that are in social media that you might not have, that you wish you had. And a lot of times it makes us feel a little bit negative about ourselves.

[00:34:56.140] – Dr. Rob
Dr. Lou talks about that all the time, about how that, you know, that that the ability to appreciate yourself and that self-love is still very important.

[00:35:05.480] – Dr. Lou
It's a matter of then coming and doing a reality check so you can create whatever persona you want online. It's very simple to do right. So what you do is you create this image of yourself and your family and your life. But reality is that's not what it's like. And the reason you do that, as Rob said, is you want to belong to part of a group. Right. That's how we've survived as a species for so long. And so when you get the like, you get the dopamine hit. When you get, you know, people retweeting you, you get the dopamine hit.

[00:35:34.520] – Dr. Lou
But, you know, it also brings out the worst in us. All you have to do is take a look at Twitter and sometimes what happens with Twitter. And it's like people check their filters at the door. And if it's on your mind and you should have slept on it and you don't and you tweeted and you can't pull it back. And so that just perpetuates a cascade of things. And for our young adolescents, belonging is so important. That's why they constantly feel that they need to be present, because if somebody makes a comment and they don't respond, then everyone else seems to gang up on them.

[00:36:09.560] – Dr. Lou
And I don't think it's a coincidence that suicide rates amongst our adolescents have shot up by 35% in the last little while. I see kids in our emergency department on a regular basis that are self-mutilating and attempting suicide that I've never seen before. I teach at the university and whenever they pool or university students, suicide is on their on their mind. Mental illness is on their mind.

[00:36:35.750] – Dr. Lou
We're raising a generation that's not going to live as long as we did. That's the first time in history that we're losing traction. And part of it is the opioid crisis. And so you start taking all these things together. And I think the book is a wake up call to everybody, to our politicians, to our policy makers, to our teachers, to our doctors, to our podcasters, to our influencers. We've got to sort of put things on hold for a second and say, hey, wait, it's not as if we don't have enough money and we're not spending enough money, but we're just not doing it so that everyone benefits from it.

[00:37:13.610] – Allan
At one point in time when I got Facebook, I was like, I'm only going to have people on Facebook that I really know. And I would go through a process about once a year if I had more than 150. And I think that actually it was ironic that that's also the number you said we have connections in our lives, about 150 real connections. And so if the number got over 150. Being a numbers guy, being an auditor, an accountant, I love even numbers like a 50 or two hundred or whatever. So I was at that 150 number and I pare back down and pare back down and it would get harder as I went along and then, OK, maybe I can let it go up to 200.

[00:37:53.210] – Allan
I might have three hundred and fifty Facebook friends right now. And I bought an application that that takes all the political posts and hides them. It takes all of the fluff stuff and just hides it. And any word I want to put in there. So if I just decided for a day I didn't want to see anything about covid, I could hide it and I wouldn't even see it. It puts my timeline in order. So it's not Facebook playing that algorithm to dance in my head. It's in the order it was posted. And I can go back to the last post I saw and know that I've seen my whole feed and there's no reason for me to be on Facebook anymore because I've seen everything that's there.

[00:38:31.610] – Allan
Then I put the phone down. I don't let Facebook send me any other videos or other things they think I want to see because they're playing into this whole dopamine, get you on there, keep you on there, and then just keep feeding you the content. It's a formula and they've got it down really, really good.

[00:38:48.140] – Dr. Rob
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that happens, too, is we especially with the 24/7 news cycle and obviously the political, you know, conflict on both sides of the fence there. And we get caught in this sort of fight or flight response all the time. We're always whenever we pull our phone out, we're looking at the news. It's activating that part of the brain that is really stuck in almost that very prehistoric evolutionary fight or flight stage.

[00:39:16.130] – Dr. Rob
And there's all sorts of chemistry in our body that then gets affected by fight or flight. The cortisol levels and everything else is, you know, we're bathed in this and that is very detrimental to our health and our fitness and everything else in our routine. And then in the young people, too, if they're stuck in fight or flight, either because of screen time or because they're getting caught up in some of the political drama and they're confused and afraid about the world, then everything starts to become a threat and they lose that ability to sit back and use that sort of executive function of the brain and say, hey, I can filter this and I can make sense of it in a more rational way.

[00:39:59.150] – Dr. Rob
They get stuck in that fight or flight. And what you end up happening is they start to become. Hyper-reactive to the world around them, and if you're hyper-reactive, then once again, you get on social media and you see the back and forth of the arguments going on in social media. And you start to become very reactive to that and you start to take a side and you start to get involved in that.

[00:40:22.180] – Dr. Rob
So it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. This this fight or flight is very difficult to get out of. And so, as Dr. Lou said, the generation that is now coming up, the young adolescents, the kids, the adolescents and the emerging adults, the ones that are the college and university age. Those are the ones we're seeing the effects of this now that we're talking about in the book.

[00:40:50.140] – Allan
Yeah, but I would say it's even happening for people over 40. I'm seeing it more and more and just the people I interact with, something will blow up and that's not who this person is. I was sitting with them at a restaurant and we were having dinner. That's not something they would say. But something here is driving them to an extreme behavior. And again, it's the stress of the whole thing. They want to be right. I guess they want to be right. But it just that blow up and it's really kind of bizarre to see that kind of behavior in someone who wasn't on social media 15 years ago.

[00:41:27.880] – Dr. Lou
Yeah. So one of the things that I would suggest for your listeners is that they become familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence so that they have a really good understanding of their emotional intelligence. And there's plenty of good books out there that you can buy and do this assessment and get a printout of what your emotional intelligence is like. And then the next most important tool that they need to have in practice and get good at is the art of having a crucial conversation.

[00:41:57.700] – Dr. Lou
Most people don't know how to have a crucial conversation. And unless you can get a really good check on your emotional intelligence so that you know, when you're about to enter a crucial conversation, otherwise you'll end up with road rage. Like road rage is a perfect example of emotional intelligence gone wild and inability to have a crucial conversation. Because once you get into that situation, it's like Rob said, humans will do three things. You'll either freeze and try and camouflage and blend into your surroundings. You'll turn and run or the hair on your back is going to go up and you're in a full fight mode.

[00:42:39.490] – Dr. Lou
And I see this every shift in emergency, somebody gets their face punched out because they looked at somebody the wrong way or said the wrong thing. And it's pretty frightening. Good advice I can give your listeners as you're driving and somebody cuts you off, lay off the horn, ignore them. You don't know what's going on in that individual's life. You don't know what happened to that woman that day.

[00:43:02.260] – Dr. Lou
You don't know what happened and you don't know what they're on. You know, with this opioid and meth epidemic that's out there, somebody will kill you just for the sake of killing you. So I don't want to frighten people, but just have a really good check on your emotional intelligence. And if you do get into a conversation where you sense it's not going to be a good one, just say, hey, listen, we're about to have a crucial conversation and let's follow these certain rules.

[00:43:31.180] – Allan
Absolutely. I appreciate that,

[00:43:33.550] – Allan
Dr. Lou. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:43:43.120] – Dr. Lou
Well, it all depends. So most of your listeners probably are at the advantage that they have a roof over their head, they have some sort of income, and they have the ability to want to get better. I would say the first advantage would be let's make sure everyone has a roof over their head. Let's make sure everyone gets as educated as they can so that they can find a good job, keep a good job, find a good mate and create a nice, strong family that's healthy for you.

[00:44:12.190] – Dr. Lou
The other thing is we have to understand that we're in far more control than what we think we are. And I think the last one and Rob can remindthem, I think the last one is to just understand that we're running on outdated software. And that's why life is so difficult for all of us. And, the sooner we understand that we have to work even harder at it and develop our own strategies and our own sort of patches to make sure that software is operating in the twenty-first century and not to be afraid of saying I'm lonely, things aren't working, I'm not happy, I need help.

[00:44:47.920] – Dr. Lou
That's the first sign of getting better is saying that you want to get help and stop comparing yourself to others because you'll always find someone that's worse and you'll always find someone that's better.

[00:44:58.330] – Allan
Thank you,

[00:44:59.530] – Allan
Dr. Rob, I'll ask you the same question I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:45:10.020] – Dr. Rob
All right, I'll just build off of what Dr. Lou was saying there. I think that we talk about in the book is and I think the book's purpose, really, as Dr. Lou was saying, is a great word, is a wake up call. Really, it starts with with understanding. So it's understanding ourselves and our bodies. And that's always what we want to do in fitness and health, is that how do how does my body work? How do I get better at everything?

[00:45:31.500] – Dr. Rob
So really, this book is about understanding. It's like a health enlightenment, really. So we talk about the whys. So Dr. Lou's always said, you know, why, why? Why can't I get healthy, why can't I lose weight or why can't I stick to this diet that I'm supposed to be? And, you know, as a doctor, he gets those questions all the time. And really this book is to try to help you understand the whys.

[00:45:52.830] – Dr. Rob
And you've mentioned it right off the bat, that this you know, there's some really interesting facts and figures and understanding yourself. I think that's the first thing is understanding ourselves. And we do that in health and we do that in fitness right off the bat, that the next thing I think is really understanding what parts of us are hardwired in. What what what does that software, Dr. Lou was saying that we're running on, that we need to respect, that we need to understand. And knowing that, for example, the reward system in our brain, how that reward system works. Can we, as we talked about, feed that in more positive ways that frees up some of that capacity that we have to be able to live a healthier life and not get dragged down. And I think the final thing we've touched upon it is real social connection. That is the potentially the the biggest thing that can change your life today almost immediately is having real human connection.

[00:46:52.770] – Dr. Rob
I know it's tough and covid, but that means, you know, having a kind of connection with immediate family, those who you see every day, spending more time with them, walking in nature with them, having more quality time with them, and not just typing on phones in terms of how you communicate with others, but having real face to face conversations with them as much as you can. That social connection bit, and Dr. Lou mentioned it to the loneliness aspect, is probably one of the biggest takeaways from the book.

[00:47:22.140] – Dr. Rob
It not only gives you good health, it gives you happiness as well. So one of the longest studies in the world out of Harvard University, which they started in the 1930s when they looked at, in this case, it was men over the course of their lives, those from fairly privileged backgrounds and know from and those from less privileged backgrounds. They found that at the end of their life course, they essentially said, it wasn't the money that made the big difference. It wasn't the great job that that that was that made the big difference in my life in terms of happiness, even though they thought that was going to make them happy. It was the social connections and the strong social networks that really, really mattered. And those that had the strongest social networks had the greatest health biometrics when they tested them.

[00:48:07.230] – Dr. Lou
One thing that listeners should understand is that you're given two ears and one mouth. So you should always be listening twice as much as you're speaking. And that's a very hard thing for most of us to do. But if you want to connect socially with others, you have to become a really good listener, like a really good listener. And the best way to do that is to repeat what you heard back to the individual so that they understand you're really listening. And the other advice is St. Francis of Assisi said use words, but only if necessary. So in other words, don't yap too much.

[00:48:42.360] – Allan
There you go.

[00:48:42.900] – Allan
Thank you for that, Dr. Rob. Dr. Lou, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, Hardwired or anything else that you guys are doing, what would you like for me to send them?

[00:48:54.660] – Dr. Rob
We each have websites. So, my website is DrRobertBarrett.com And Dr. Lou's is drlou.ca.

[00:49:13.140] – Allan
Excellent. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/462 and I'll be sure to have links there. So Dr. Lou, Dr. Rob, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:49:24.690] – Dr. Lou
My pleasure.

[00:49:25.200] – Dr. Rob
Great.

Post Show/Recap

[00:49:32.080] – Allan
Well, welcome back, Raz.

[00:49:34.180] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. Wow! That was a lot of information in that interview

[00:49:39.760] – Allan
We jumped around and the book is really good because it has a lot more than I was ever able to cover in any kind of podcast. But there were those few highlights where I was like, I need to get into this. I think I mentioned during the interview it's just like every chapter running into something I'd never read before. Stats, I didn't know.

[00:50:02.230] – Allan
Don't go to the hospital, find ways to avoid being hospitalized. Work on yourself because being hospitalized increases your risk of death. Significantly. Which I was just, again, shocked and appalled a little bit. But, it is what it is just, now we know advocate for yourself and try not to go to the hospital if you can avoid it.

[00:50:26.650] – Allan
And I don't mean to not do something that you need to get done to prolong your life or to improve your life. But just realize that you're taking a risk and you have to be proactive as a participant in your health care.

[00:50:40.630] – Rachel
Mm hmm. Yeah Going under the knife is not an easy decision. But, we've always heard my mom's a nurse, so we have a lot of health professionals in my family. And that's always the last thing. That's what the doctor tells you. Going under the knife is always the last thing. And so if there's anything we can do to prolong that or change our lifestyle or nutrition or whatever, that might help keep you out of the hospital.

[00:51:04.330] – Allan
Absolutely. And then I think one of the other cool things that I got into there and, I do this because I do seasonal ketosis, but they called it, what was it?

[00:51:15.070] – Rachel
Tactical indulgences.

[00:51:16.000] – Allan
Tactical indulgencies. Yeah. It makes sense. And I have a lot of clients that talk about that. And, you know, with seasonal ketosis, I have a period of time when I'm allowed to go do the things I like to do. I have some beer, enjoying myself, watching, you know, football, that kind of thing. But I do make sure they're good beers, you know?

[00:51:36.670] – Rachel
Make it worthwhile.

[00:51:37.630] – Allan
It's worthwhile. Right. I'm not just going to sit there and throw down with a national light beer brand, pick your pick poison. But I'm going to go have a nice IPA. I'm going to find a local brew and I'm traveling, that kind of thing. But it is a tactical indulgence. It's a period of time. I know when I'm doing it and I know when I go back that I'm back to who I was and who I am.

[00:52:01.420] – Allan
That's the thing. So, you know, a lot of that is about knowing yourself. And that's why I don't just do it for one meal or one day. I make it a period of time, that's a set period of time because I'm an all or nothing kind of person. I'm not going to have the capacity to sit there and say I'm going to have two beers and then be done. I'm going to have beers till you know, we're done doing what we're doing, so it's a football game. I'm just going to sit there and enjoy myself not driving afterwards so boom, have some fun. I think I think that's a really cool concept to think about in as far as your self-awareness is how do I react to certain things and do I need that reward?

[00:52:42.940] – Allan
I have some clients and they've told me it's like every once in a while they want to do that thing. And I think that's cool, especially when you compare that with the Rosetto Effect, which is spending time with each other. And it's one of the examples I use quite often is, if your significant other invited you to Hawaii, you're going to have a Mai Tai. You're going to eat the pineapple, even if you're keto. You're going to enjoy those things and you should, because that's a part of putting joy into your life. And that's a big, big part of long of longevity. And that's how when I say I'm defining wellness, I include that. I probably should have used the word joy instead of happiness. But to me, they're somewhat synonymous. If you have enough happiness, I think it's called joy.

[00:53:31.110] – Allan
I think that's the key, surrounding yourself with people that you care about, having a purpose and spending time with people because, we're social animals. You need that social, and I've said this before. I hate that they use the term social distancing because that's not what we need to be doing. We need social adherence. We need to be close to each other socially. Now, we might need to physically distance, which is the case if I'm testing positive, I'm not going to subject someone to covid just to be close to them, but I am going to physically distance.

[00:54:09.600] – Rachel
Mm hmm.

[00:54:14.730] – Allan
It's really, really important when you're looking at wellness

[00:54:17.250] – Rachel
For sure, they mentioned the Rosetto Effect and having the social support group and how that is so critical for somebody's happiness. And that's really hard right now with covid. And a lot of places throughout the year have had to quarantine. We had to shelter in place in Michigan where a lot of states did. It's hard. And even now, getting outside with normal groups is really difficult and limited. It's hard.

[00:54:46.200] – Allan
It is hard. It is hard. We talked about social media on the show. Social media is not necessarily the answer to being socially connected. I think it can be as simple as picking up the phone. You know, Zoom is an excellent tool. We're using it for this interview or this discussion. So I can see Rachel right now. We're right here. And even though I guess we're probably driving distances, we're recording this about a little over two hours away. You know, we can have this kind of conversation and we could have this conversation even if I were still in Panama. So I think that's what makes this technology pretty powerful, is you can still visually connect with someone. You still be engaged with someone, and you don't have to necessarily physically be in the same room with them. So we do have that. But, you know, when you can call your mom, visit your mom, you know, go see your dad, spend some time with them, have a beer with them if it's a tactical indulgence.

[00:55:47.772] – Rachel
Yep. Yeah, we've done a lot of that this summer, actually, since the weather's been so nice, we've been able to organize activities outside. So we'll sit out on the back patio at my parents or my in-laws house and just spend time and it's it's safer outside. You can social distance easily. And the weather's been great for that, although it's going to be much harder to do the same thing this winter when it's going to be as cold as it gets up here in Michigan. Not quite the same.

[00:56:17.310] – Allan
I don't understand why you moved that far north.

[00:56:20.730] – Rachel
I miss Florida sometimes. Let me tell you it mostly in the winter. But Zoom is the next best thing. And that's how we're going to have our Thanksgiving. It's how we're going to have Christmas. And our birthdays have been consumed this year and it's the next best thing.

[00:56:36.750] – Allan
Yeah. Well hopefully again they've got the vaccine together and they're working on that and you know, provided it doesn't turn into the movie Legend, you know, super zombies running around everywhere because they've got the innoculation. Hopefully all that will start to work out and buy, you know, particularly by this time next year covid will be somewhat of a memory. But still one. So, you know, I'm not one to push for an end of 2020. And a lot of people like, oh, this is the worst year ever. I think they had it worse and some of their like 1818 and 1918. And if you kind of look back at history, this, we were actually in pretty good shape when you break it all down.

[00:57:23.010] – Allan
But, I'm not one to let days go. I'm going to make every day count and enjoy every day. I'm not going to say let's get to 2021 and any time sooner than we need to get there, you know, enjoy your day and find joy in every little thing. If you don't have a gratitude practice, get one on. Sit down for just five minutes each day, if you want to journal it, that's awesome, too. But find those things that bring you joy and then spend more time doing that, even if it's a little five minute increments.

[00:57:54.120] – Allan
Spend more time doing the things and socializing with people and being with people that bring you that that that thing, and that's going to be so much so much more benefit for your longevity than me even telling you what to eat or me telling you how to exercise. It's really about putting it all together in a balanced lifestyle that makes sense for you.

[00:58:18.030] – Rachel
Yeah, yeah. Happiness is such an important part. And whatever it takes to bring you that joy every day, it's important to really search for that, to go after that and not just let it happen. Happiness just doesn't happen. Sometimes you need to go for that. And for me, I like to exercise. I love my run clubs. I've got a really positive relationship with social media, mostly because I follow runners who are always inspiring and motivating. But it's important to take some time out of your day to do that one or two things that really helps you find overall happiness and joy.

[00:58:53.850] – Allan
Absolutely. All right. Well, Rachel, anything else we need to go over before we sign off?

[00:59:00.450] – Rachel
No, this is a great interview. I think I might need to read that book.

[00:59:04.050] – Allan
It is a good book. Like I said, every chapter was something special in that book. I learned a lot from the book and having done almost 300 interviews for me to learn something new, not just once or twice, but practically every single chapter, this really is something that I think is well worth the time and effort to read. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. All right.

Patreons

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Another episode you may enjoy

Undoctored with Dr. William Davis

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:16.500] – Allan
Ras, how are you doing?

[00:02:17.910] – Rachel
Good, how are you today, Allan?

[00:02:19.440] – Allan
I'm doing well. We're about to head back to Bocas. So this is our last days. Weeks. I think tomorrow. Yeah, it's because I have them tomorrow. We're getting on an airplane and flying to Bocas and, you know, the whole snafu they had with booking a flight.

[00:02:36.390] – Allan
So we won't get back till the 25th, even though, you know, originally supposed to get there just in one shot during the day. But they rebooked flights and caused issues. So we'll spend the night in Panama City, which is not a problem problem. It's just one more day away from my dog, Angel.

[00:02:50.940] – Rachel
Right.

[00:02:51.240] – Allan
Looking forward to get home to her. She says she'll be excited to see us and, you know, get things going there. So that's that's right. Now, I'm still in travel mode for a couple more days and. Well, we'll be there. How are things up there? Michigan.

[00:03:06.850] – Rachel
Oh, good. Good. Getting chilly, of course. But things are good up here. Mike and I have been spending some time in the gym and our new weight set. And I actually, for the first time ever, I had him help me do my one rep max and a bench press and the squat. And I don't remember I don't have what I squatted or pressed handy, but I've never done that before. So that was a really interesting experiment for me.

[00:03:34.140] – Allan
Yeah, they have formulas where you can do like a three rep max or a ten rep max and then you you basically use the formula to convert to a one rep Max, but for one reason or another. And I don't know exactly why my stamina works this way, but that formula never works for me. You know, I can do I can do a ten rep, Max. And then when I actually get under the heavy weight, I do more.

[00:03:57.180] – Allan
I do a good bit more than that. Might even my trainer, Dave, when I was using him up in Louisiana, he was like he says, I don't know what's going on. He said this formula works for almost all of my clients, but not not for you know, there are ways to do it. I do the formula. And basically so along the way, you feel like you're getting stronger. Just look up one of those formulas and said I'd be more comfortable under three rep max? You know, and rather than the one rep Max has.

[00:04:24.640] – Allan
And then the other side of it is it's sort of sometimes easier to to do that more often than the one rep max, because if you don't know exactly where you stand, then there's a lot of lifts and then there's fatigue. And, yeah, you know, that's what most of the time when you're doing this, you know, like for a meet there's three you get three lifts.

[00:04:44.490] – Allan
So if you were going to go into a meet for those those those lifts, they'll say, OK, go in, kind of figure out what you kind of have an idea. Like if you did a three rep max, he's like, OK, I'm like three rep max? I know I'm at x pounds, let's say one hundred. And then you say, OK, so I should be able to based on the formula and then I'm just pulling this out the top of my head.

[00:05:03.180] – Allan
But it's going to say something like, you should be able to one rep max 125. So since you don't know that you do your first lift, you say, OK, I'm going to do 110 as my first lift. So I get something on the board and then you're going to say, OK, it should be 125. So I'm going to do 120. And then your third lift, you can either decide that you're going to go in at the 125 or say, you know, I'm going to push and try 130.

[00:05:29.460] – Allan
So that's why it was important for me to know that the formula didn't work, because if I were to go in and say, I want to do my one rep, Max, a trainer is going to want to start me really low, too low, and then I would never actually get to my one rep Max within the three lifts.

[00:05:44.450] – Rachel
RIght,

[00:05:44.830] – Allan
You want to do it in three lives because you start to really fatigue after that and you coverage's long enough.

[00:05:50.220] – Allan
But it's still you're not going to know your full true one rep max, until you're really pushing that top limit. And most people, when they're doing it right, they're typically failing on their third lift just because they put themselves in a position where they just can't can't do it.

[00:06:06.390] – Rachel
That's that's what we were doing because we were trying to fail on the second or third.

[00:06:11.160] – Allan
OK, OK, good, good.

[00:06:13.170] – Rachel
Starting point though.

[00:06:14.570] – Allan
Awesome. OK, so let's get into our conversation with Rosie Mercado.

Interview

[00:06:48.420] – Allan
Rosie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:06:51.000] – Rosie
I love it. 40+ Fitness. I never thought that I'd be talking about being 40 plus and just feel so empowered.

[00:06:58.260] – Allan
You know, it is interesting that we think about how we wear when we are 20 years. I was actually talking to my wife about, you know, who I was in my 20s in a kind of some of the crazy things I would do back then. And she said, you're no different now. And I guess guys don't really grow up and don't want to grow up.

[00:07:18.550] – Rosie
You said it, not me.

[00:07:20.760] – Allan
I did. I did.

[00:07:23.730] – Allan
And but the interesting thing is that there are still general similarities. You know, since you can't really stereotype and say this is how men are and this is how women are

[00:07:33.450] – Rosie
No, I think it's a variety of experiences that you go through.

[00:07:38.370] – Rosie
I mean, some people mature more than others just because they've had lots of wisdom thrown in their life. And other people just have had you know, they've had, not so much difficulties. I mean, I think each of each person dealls with different issues in their life, depending on their self-esteem, their thoughts, their surroundings, their upbringing. I mean, there's just so many things that really create that environment. So I don't know right now that you said that you were talking about your talking to your wife, about when you were younger and how you view everything.

[00:08:07.710] – Rosie
It's so funny because I was talking to my husband and I said, I don't feel like I'm 40. And everybody I mean, you ask a woman and obviously this is not all women, just some women. It's like you don't ask my age, like if that's such a bad thing.

[00:08:21.900] – Rosie
And it's like, no, I'm 40 years old. I'm embracing it. I feel better now now than I did when I was in my 20s. And because my life is so completely different. And I think it was the self-discovery and the self-love that has made such a huge impact in my vitality and my energy and also in the way that I feel and look, I mean, it's just it's completely different. There's just so much more wisdom.

[00:08:42.450] – Rosie
I wish I could tell myself when I was younger so many things like if I only knew that. Oh, my God.

[00:08:47.250] – Allan
Which is cool because I think that's exactly what you're doing with your book, The Girl with Self-esteem Issues. As I was reading through the book, I thought any woman in her in her teens, 20s, 30s would benefit from that book. But as I got really into your story, which I think it was just it was beautiful that you were just raw and honest and real.

[00:09:08.310] – Allan
And this is where I was and this is what I did. And you share that. And I was like, this is something that a woman in her 40s needs to hear. This is something a woman in her 50s and maybe 60s and 70s needs to hear. And a lot of men need to hear it, too, because women, women do a lot of them will talk about their self-esteem issues. Men tend to bury that stuff and in many cases try to come out a lot more macho than they really are.

[00:09:32.970] – Rosie
We don't cry. It's not we're not supposed to cry. It's not supposed to hurt. I'm going to deal with it. And yes, unfortunately, when we internalize them, we kind of bury that, like we just put it in the back eventually to manifest in some somehow it'll show up in your life, whether it's through having, you know, just all these flings and sex, become a shopaholic. And this is for men and women, you know, bouncing from one relationship to the next, not having relationships, pushing everybody away over eating, drinking.

[00:10:00.120] – Rosie
I mean, it just manifests when you are suppressing old memories, pain, and you don't want to deal with it or you don't want to validate that it exists. It shows up and your life, trust me, it will show up. Because I learned that lesson pretty early on.

[00:10:13.950] – Allan
Yeah. Now, you went through some of the the damaging effects of low self-esteem. And there's there's lots of them. And you explore a lot those in your book. When we start seeing those things happening, what do we do about it? Because, you know, you're really that's going to be big. It's a big project. It's not something that you just do. Can you kind of talk through some of the damage and we can recognize that damage and how we recognize that damage and then just some things we can do to turn that around.

[00:10:40.960] – Rosie
Yeah, you know, I think, first of all, when writing this. First of all, I have to say thank you for reading the book. I appreciate that so much. That for me is thank you. But when it comes to self-esteem, I feel that self-esteem really starts changing and developing as we're growing up. I mean, for me, my self-esteem, I really understood that, I didn't feel accepted or I felt rejected or when I got the negative comments of being called fat ass or hippo at a young age at the age of eight or nine.

[00:11:08.080] – Rosie
I mean, just imagine eight or nine. And the conversation wasn't created at home. I had wonderful parents, but I was too ashamed. I was too embarrassed to come and tell my parents, hey, I'm being made fun of at school. So I feel that it starts at a really young age and different triggers, whether it's at home, whether it's at school, whether it's with friends, whether it's some form of bullying with family, there's just different ways that it starts.

[00:11:31.690] – Rosie
But I really feel that it starts at a young age and sometimes we don't know that that's going on. We don't know because we're innocent. We don't know how to deal with that. We just know that we're being called names or being made fun of because of our looks or the way we speak or ethnic background or just for being, for being you someone. They trigger someone somehow because I feel that bullying really starts like you have to be introduced to bullying.

[00:11:54.880] – Rosie
You're watching it somewhere, you're listening to somewhere, and then you act out on it. And for me, it would start at a young age and then it developed into going into high school or even more so that I already had those issues growing up in middle school, that I took it to high school. I felt fat, I felt isolated, I felt rejected. And because that's the way that I felt, anyone looked at me in a different way.

[00:12:20.200] – Rosie
My mind, they're already criticizing me. They're looking at my hips. They're looking at my body. They're looking that I'm Mexican. And it didn't make it any easier when the mean girls in school started calling me names and nit picking at me, like especially around body issues. And that really played a role because their story became my story. I accepted that as my truth.

[00:12:41.230] – Rosie
And now that I'm forty, I look back then and I'm like, girl, you should own those curves. You should just love yourself because I felt huge. I felt so fat in comparison to the other girls. And I remember one time when I talk about this in the book, being in the bathroom because it affected me so much that I would go grab my lunch. I didn't want anybody watching me eat because I thought I felt fat and people watching me eat would make fun of me that I go there she is going to eat the whole cafeteria. I'd go into the bathroom stall, close the door, stay there for my lunch hour.

[00:13:13.180] – Rosie
And I remember seeing these cheerleaders that I thought were not only beautiful, they had the most beautiful body, they had no cellulite. And I remember going in there saying, oh, my God, I hate this. And, you know, my mom's going to tell she my mom pinches my fat. She says that, you know, that have jello thighs. And I remember listening to that. And I was like, it really triggered in me something. She thinks that she has gelo thighs. I think she's just beautiful. I wish I didn't have cellulite and not having that conversation at such a such a young age, really, I internalized everything.

[00:13:48.040] – Rosie
And I think one of the things that we have to I think as parents and coming in to family, I think one thing that's really important is starting the conversation, being OK with saying, Hey, I went through this when I was younger. Start the conversation to, number one, get your kids comfortable saying, oh, my God, my parents went through that. I thought I was the only one creating the conversation to create that trust and that just openness of saying, look, I went through this and it felt like crap.

[00:14:14.600] – Rosie
It made me feel isolated, make me feel rejected. Why? Because you're opening that door of authenticity, of letting your family and your friends know that, hey, like I've dealt with this and it made me feel this way. You're validating your own emotions and therefore you become an invitation to start a conversation. And for someone else to say, oh, I'm not the only one going through this. And I think that for me would have been it would have been life changing if I would have had that conversation to be able to talk to someone about it, because then I would have felt like I'm not the only one that feels isolated.

[00:14:48.940] – Rosie
I'm not the only one that has body image issues. I'm not the only one that feels fat and rejected. And I think my decision making would have been different and I would have just had someone to speak to. Just having someone to speak to creates a different environment. I think the next thing, when paying attention to self-esteem issues is understanding our own uniqueness and being OK. It really comes to understanding self discovery and self-love. And I had loving parents and they were amazing and everything in the environment, they loved and accepted me, but really being OK and just being constantly told that having an environment where I could look in the mirror and say, hey, I'm unique, I'm different, and that's OK Just having that environment and all starts the conversation. So I really feel that at a younger age, conversation is key. That is the starting point because you just don't know what people are going through.

[00:15:46.300] – Allan
And I think that's actually the key. Any time, any time you're trying to solve this in your head, you have a you have a fixed box that you're…

[00:15:56.870] – Rosie
A negative voice, don't we all we it I mean I'm 40 and I still hear that negative voice pop into my head. The difference and people think, oh my God, she's crazy. She talks about the voices in her head. No, we all have this negative voice that makes you second guess it's how much power are you giving to it and how much are you directing it?

[00:16:15.730] – Rosie
The difference now is when that sucker pops up, I'm like, you need to just be quiet, calm it down. I take a deep breath and I speak my truth. I'm capable of doing this. I'm worthy of doing this. I'm not going to self-sabotage. And I'm going to change the story that that voice in my head is telling me, because these are triggers that are not built overnight. These are this is a voice that has developed since I was younger.

[00:16:38.380] – Rosie
And being able to redirect it has been working, you know, working on it and then just loving myself through it, like accepting that that voice is there, not rejecting it, just accepting. I hear you. But that's not my truth.

[00:16:51.700] – Allan
Yeah, and I think that's really the key. If you if you don't get to a point where you love yourself, you really start making bad decisions and you make bad decisions because this is the voice that is telling you that go with it, have fun, enjoy yourself.

[00:17:07.120] – Allan
You deserve this and then you. But you're not actually doing it from the perspective of saying, well, if I loved myself, I would take my time.

[00:17:15.850] – Rosie
Or that voice that pops in your head that says, oh, my God, if I don't accept this guy, nobody's ever going to love me. This is my last chance that those moments also or when you see a red flag, you're like, hey, you know what? Maybe I'm just gonna let it go. Why? Because this feels good right now and you don't think about the future outcome. You just thinking in the moment that voice I mean, that voice can really play a number if you allow it to. And I think learning to love yourself is such a journey. People don't understand how long of a journey self-discovery can be.

[00:17:49.870] – Rosie
It never ends. It's always growing. It's always developing. But I think you have to be really present to understand that and understand what it takes to really love yourself.

[00:17:59.920] – Allan
Yeah. Because, you know, like you kind of got into in the book is you would you would make a decision. And then when you got to the point where where you started recognizing, OK, I need self-love, I've got to have a relationship with myself first. At that point, you were able to almost mentor yourself. You did have mentors. You talked about a lot of them. Some of them you would you wouldn't imagine a security guard at your high school being a mentor. But for a moment in time, he was, you know, and then you're I guess you're sort of your agent as you got started in your modeling career, became a mentor. And your father was always there and those types of things, your mother. And so you had a lot of good influences in your life, but you had to actually start loving yourself before you would let those voices in your head long enough to do some good.

[00:18:49.180] – Rosie
And people often like I think and that you bring such a great point. People often think that when someone creates makes a bad decision, goes through failure automatically. Oh, my God, they must have had crappy parenting and crappy upbringing or, you know, they just they probably went through something really rough that made them go down that road. And that's not the case. It all comes down to your personal choices and decisions that you make based off of what?

[00:19:15.820] – Rosie
Your self-esteem. I had great parents growing up. The problem was not my parents. My parents empowered me. They loved me. They were old school. Yes. They had such great values. My father was such a role model and he was this tough sergeant. But he was, you know, full of love. And his interest was always, you know, and me becoming better. The problem is sometimes when we're not ready for that, we don't receive that in the best way and we start rebelling.

[00:19:42.940] – Rosie
And I did that with my father. I put my parents. Oh, my goodness. I say to my book, I asked for their forgiveness because I acknowledge as a parent now that I am with my kids, I acknowledge the hell that I put my parents through and they love with me through my darkest moments.

[00:19:58.120] – Rosie
They didn't criticize me. They always had words of honesty that I sometimes wasn't ready to hear. But they always were there to uplift me. And I I had the most amazing parents. What I didn't have was my own self-love. I didn't understand what self-love was. I constantly made other people's stories, my truth. I constantly criticized my hips, my cellulite, my body, my face. And I just felt like I didn't fit in. And the more that became my truth, the deeper that my decisions were based off of fear and rejection.

[00:20:33.780] – Rosie
And that led me into these relationships and self-discovery, for me, it happens to different, you know, in different points of your life, but it really didn't happen to me until I was twenty-eight after my third marriage, my third divorce and, you know, three marriages, three divorces down, hit rock bottom and get sick. It was really a highlight of wow, like I really like God really brought me down to my knees and I really had to focus on where is this all coming from?

[00:21:00.930] – Rosie
And then start asking different questions. Because those questions that I was asking, why me, why me, why me was not serving a purpose in my life.

[00:21:08.280] – Allan
Yes. And then you start to turn it around. And like a lot of us, we've surrounded ourselves with people that are reinforcing the voice we already have. You know, it's you know, we talked with you. It was Jim Rohn that says you're the five people you spend the most time with, Will, and you've got a voice in your head that doesn't like you. It's more than likely four of the other people around you, five of the other people around you are also really don't have your necessarily your long distance, long term best interests. Yeah. And so, you know, in the book, you did have some saboteurs that you had to balance and work through.

[00:21:47.160] – Rosie
They were great teachers. I'll tell you that. They were great teachers of what not to do and not how to react. And they were great teachers in the sense and I love that word saboteurs. It just you know, I think it's the first time that I've heard that word. So thank you for sharing. You just I just learned something is something new.

[00:22:03.900] – Rosie
It's it is so true, because when you are reading this deep, dark hole of no self-respect, no self-love and you don't know what's going on, and you're constantly being told that you will never amount to anything, that nobody's ever going to love you. You go through your divorce. It's like you're lucky I paid attention to you. You know, you're fat, you're old, like you don't give up. You have. Who's going to ever love you after this divorce again?

[00:22:28.920] – Rosie
Who's going to ever love you after this are your body just grosses me out. We already have issues with self-love and you don't know who you are. And you hear those stories. You believe them. You're like, yep, it's confirming what's in my head. Add that voice that's telling me those same stories that, you know, it's just an exterior confirmation that what I'm saying is true. And what happens, you start believing that. And when you believe that, you start acting on that and what happens, you start tolerating disrespect in relationships.

[00:22:56.160] – Rosie
You start, you know, tolerating abuse, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse. You tolerate anything that comes your way. You stay quiet, you don't speak up. Your voice doesn't matter. There's no respect towards your body. And not only that, who does that impact? It impacts you. It impacts those who are watching you. It impacted my parents. Why? Because they didn't know what was going on, but they knew something was going on.

[00:23:18.810] – Rosie
I kept the physical and emotional abuse so quiet that I would have bruises on my arm and my excuse. I have anemia. I'm I'm anemic. I didn't want anybody to find out what was going on. Who else did that impact my kids growing up? Why? Because they think that I'm teaching them through the lack of self-love and tolerating something that less than than I deserve that that is a normal relationship. They grow up with that sense. So to do the self work and turn that around, turn the story around, is teaching my kids that not only did I accept something less than I deserve, this is what happens when you don't love yourself.

[00:23:54.810] – Rosie
But when you turn that around and get back up, you show them the strength and getting back up and discovering yourself and changing your story, changing your values and saying no longer am I going accept this because I love myself, because I'm worthy of more. Because in life, Tony Robbins says it and it's in my book in life you get what you tolerate.

[00:24:12.060] – Allan
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's the hard thing is when you get to a point where you're you start making better decisions because you've now had that conversation with yourself. Look, I love myself, and I'm not just going to roll with it. I'm not just going to sit there. And when you when I'm inside telling myself something that I'm not capable of doing, something that, you know, I need to quit, I'm not going to go with that.

[00:24:36.930] – Allan
I'm not going to double down on overeating or not exercising or alcohol or whatever the problem, whatever it is that you're the voice in your head is saying, oh, well, you're not going to you're not going to change anyway. You're not going to get to that size or you're not going to accomplish that weight. And so at this point, you know, but you get past that and now you've got this group of saboteurs that are also trying to do the thing.

[00:25:00.090] – Allan
And I think that's the point where once you start breaking through and saying, OK, that voice is wrong, that voice is wrong, I see it, I see it and what I'm able to accomplish and so setting like short term goals and and understanding what you need to move forward, because, you know, as you were going through your career, you were kind of recognizing that you weren't as healthy as you needed to be and you weren't moving in the direction of your career as well as you needed to do. And so you took in my mind. Pretty drastic step because bariatric surgery is no joke, and especially when you had it done, it was better.

[00:25:38.450] – Allan
But, you know, there's still a lot of complications that could come from a surgery like that. But you did go through bariatric surgery, and I've never actually really talked about it on the podcast. Could you take a little bit of time to just talk about your journey? Because I think this is some for some people, you know, we've gotten down the road a certain way, and we just need to do some things that are a little bit more drastic to get that kick start to get that big win. So from that point forward, the voices don't sound as loud because we know we've done the right step.

[00:26:10.610] – Rosie
Well, you know, before I did bariatric surgery, I lost 100 pounds. So before the bariatric surgery and I've you know, I went through Yo-Yo dieting. I go on one diet, lose weight, gain weight. It was always, you know, it was always up and down.

[00:26:21.770] – Rosie
And it just got to a point where I really wanted to dominate. I really wanted to create change. I wanted it so bad and I didn't understand why I wasn't successful. And one of the things that I learned through bariatric surgery, that's and it was such a big aha moment. I never had felt for the sensation of eating something and feeling full of saying, all right, I'm full like that, because when you're full, there's an automatic reaction to your body.

[00:26:48.830] – Rosie
There's like they there's a sensation that when you've eaten and you get to that point, it's your body saying, OK, you're done and sometimes you keep eating, keep eating. What happens? You stretch your stomach so big that that sensation is no longer there or you're not connected with your body where you could acknowledge that. So I went through ups and downs. When it came to yo-yo dieting, I tried it all, everything you could ever imagine. I tried it all.

[00:27:10.580] – Rosie
I had the strength to start to keep going and then somehow eliminate story would show up and then I'd drop a little bit of weight. And I'm like, yes, now I can eat the cake. Well, no. I mean, there's nothing wrong with eating the cake. The problem is discipline, perseverance, really understanding what you're transforming. And the problem was a word diet. The word diet really impacted me. And I learned this through bariatric surgery and people discredited me when I became so honest and authentic and saying, look, I lost one hundred pounds before. People are OK to credit that, oh, you did all the hard work doing bariatric surgery.

[00:27:43.970] – Rosie
That's even harder. People don't understand that. So if you are one of those people that say you cheated your way out, look, going underneath the knife at four hundred and twenty pounds is no joke. I'm literally one way or another whether I at four hundred twenty pounds eventually that's going to catch up to me because I'm obese. It will catch up to me and I will pay a price for that. And if I go underneath the knife I could pay the price for that.

[00:28:07.730] – Rosie
I don't know, I'm just, I'm trying something new. And when I did that I got so much hate and criticism saying that I got like I took the easy way out. You just did surgery. And that's the easy way out. No, because you're not guaranteed that you're going to lose. There's people who have gotten bariatric surgery that only last twenty to thirty pounds. Why? Because that inner voice is so strong that they keep eating the foods that they're not supposed to do.

[00:28:32.090] – Rosie
It is just a tool. So they take 80 percent of your stomach out. And basically you start with liquids, they go into puree foods, and then you go into small amounts of food that you're eating throughout the day.

[00:28:45.950] – Rosie
When I go to bariatric surgery, the first time I drink water, it was a first time and I can't even remember that. I felt the sensation of full. I was like. What is that like, I literally you're going to be like, I can't anymore, and I was like, I can't anymore what's going on. Like I've never felt that sensation in Dr. Bernie Hannah running. And he told me he's like, that is a sensation being full.

[00:29:08.520] – Rosie
That for me was mind blowing. The next step is going through the process of pureed foods and then discovering. Looking at the amount of food I was eating and why I was eating, I was eating because I was sad, I was eating because I was happy, I was eating because it was the only way that I could connect with my family. I was eating because it's the only way that I could connect with another human being. It was always through food instead of just having that general connection without the food, like I didn't need the food to connect with all these people.

[00:29:35.370] – Rosie
So that was another lesson that I learned. But the process, the psychological and physical process of losing weight through bariatric surgery, it is transformative because you pay attention to how much food you eating. You have the sensation of being full. Now you have you're learning about your body and how to create energy and how to drink water. And really, OK, I'm educating myself. If I have the sugar right now, that's going to make me break out in sweat. I get nauseous. I do not like the feeling that my body reacts to that. So now you're like, I'm not going to have that, not because I can't, because I don't like the feeling associated. So it transformed the whole psychology. And then once you sit down with your family, you're eating such a small portion and you're done.

[00:30:18.900] – Rosie
You're kind of left like, what's next? You learn to reconnect with other human beings.

[00:30:24.510] – Rosie
So for me, bariatric surgery not only saved my life, if I could have done it when I was younger, I would have. It played a domino effect in my family because my entire family got bariatric surgery. Everybody got bariatric surgery. If my daughter chooses to one day get bariatric surgery, I completely support her. It is just a tool because once you get into it a couple of years later, you could gain the weight back. You could stretch out your stomach.

[00:30:49.320] – Rosie
So it is not a diet, it becomes a lifestyle. And that is the switch in the mind. That is the psychological when it's the story behind it.

[00:30:59.280] – Allan
Yeah, and that's one of the things I really like to get into with my clients, with anyone I'm talking to, is that we have a ton of tools and strategies around. There's not one path to getting there and there. You know, people can say something is a shortcut. But so what this is you know, this is you're not in competition with anybody but yourself. You're just trying to be the best person that you can be. And if you're doing it for the right reasons, because you love yourself and you know the tool that's going to help me get to the next level, that's going to keep me moving forward and not falling backwards, then it's a tool and it's

[00:31:33.950] – Rosie
It's tool. It's a wonderful tool. And I think you've hit it right on my head. What may work for you may not work for me. And that's OK. Failure, just an indicator of what's not working. And that's the beauty of it. If this doesn't work, try try again. Try something different. And what worked for someone else? I may try it. You know what? I just I'm not getting the results that I want. Let me try something different. So the equation is very different for every single human being.

[00:32:01.320] – Rosie
The most important is to start the equation and end the equation in your own way until you find your own happiness and your own success. And that terminology, that definition changes for everybody, because what makes you happy might make me miserable. And I think we have as human beings, we have to learn to respect and have compassion and understanding instead of being so quick to criticize everybody. Because I learned a lot about compassion and criticism throughout my process and throughout my journey and still until today.

[00:32:30.290] – Allan
Rosie, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?

[00:32:39.680] – Rosie
Be honest with yourself. That is so important. Be honest with yourself, with what you're feeling. If you don't like what you're feeling, you the only thing you could control in your life is your mind, body and soul. Everything else you can't control is just out of your hands. So I surrender to that. So understanding and validating my own emotions. It's so important not seeking exterior validation. If I feel angry, I acknowledge that I feel angry.What am I going to do to shift but feel happy? Wonderful. Let's celebrate.

[00:33:06.140] – Rosie
The next one affirming who I am, not making other people's story about myself, my truth, affirming that I am faithfully guided, that I have everything that I need, that I am divinely created, that I am a powerful woman, that I love myself. Affirming who I am in the morning and night is very important. Why? Because things will happen throughout life that could shift us if we allow it to.

[00:33:27.920] – Rosie
And last but not least, the importance of understanding your values. What are your values? How do you make your decisions based off your values, understanding what your top three values are, and making decisions based off of your top three values? Because when you don't when you do that, you won't go wrong, I promise you that. So that for me is really taking care of myself. It's taking care of my mental health and creating happiness for myself.

[00:33:51.530] – Allan
Cool. Rosie, if someone wanted to learn more about you, the things you're doing and your book, The Girl with Self-Esteem Issues, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:34:01.160] – Rosie
You could visit me at RosieMercado.com. Follow me on social media Rosie Mercado and of course the book, The Girl with Self-Esteem Issues is available wherever you buy books. I also have my podcast. You can listen to whatever you listen to podcast, the girl with self-esteem issues. I'm just so excited to be able to talk to you and thank you again for reading my book. That really for me it's amazing when I connect with people who actually take the time to invest and read and really get to know about the story.

[00:34:25.310] – Allan
Well, you're investing in us by being on the show, so it's the least I can do. Thank you. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/461 and I'll be sure to have the links there.

[00:34:36.500] – Allan
Rosie, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness. Thank you.

[00:34:40.110] – Rosie
And I love the name. I want to commend you on that. I'm forty and fabulous. I love it and breathe it in and make it your truth.

Post Show/Recap

[00:34:51.320] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:34:53.160] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a great conversation you had with Rosie. She seems like a really energetic person.

[00:34:58.590] – Allan
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's I knew from the book because it's it's a memoir. And she shared so much about herself. I knew I knew it was going to be a great conversation and that she was going to bring a lot of energy to it and of course, to tackle the topic of self-esteem. And one of the interesting things is there's a lot of people think that it's mostly women that are dealing with self-esteem issues.

[00:35:20.160] – Allan
But I'll tell you, men do, too. And if you don't tackle that problem, if you don't have the self-love, it just becomes increasingly difficult for you to accomplish great things.

[00:35:34.530] – Rachel
Mm hmm. Yeah. She mentioned about how she went through a couple of marriages and a couple divorces, Yo-Yo. Dieted, I mean, and it's she even mentioned it could show up in other ways, like people that have shopping, addictions or whatnot. So it's it's fascinating how bad self-esteem could lead you to some pretty bad places.

[00:35:55.310] – Allan
Yeah. And I think one of the core tenets is that I think people don't give themselves credit for the winds. You know, they'll lose five pounds. That's a win. Not know what they'll do is they'll look back and say, well, the last time I lost five pounds, I gained 10 back. And that's a problem, you know. Yes, you did. But you've just proven that you can lose five pounds. That's a huge win.

[00:36:19.380] – Allan
Five pounds of fat is a lot. And then taking the next step and saying, OK, I just need to repeat the same things. I need to keep going forward based on that win. And so many people just don't have the confidence in themselves to do that.

[00:36:34.680] – Rachel
Yeah. And I always like to celebrate the baby steps really, rarely do we have huge overnight success. I mean, in the topic of weight loss, it took a long time to put on. It's going to take a long time to take it off. I know, because I've been there, too. But we do need to celebrate the incremental steps. And when we learn something new, we can make additional changes to get closer towards that success. So it's a process for sure.

[00:37:01.410] – Allan
It is. And so if you take the time to tackle that and you approach this all with self-love, you'll start treating yourself like somebody you love. And that's really important that that care that self-care from a position of self-love is really how you win the long game in this.

[00:37:19.120] – Rachel
Mm hmm. For sure.

[00:37:21.180] – Allan
And then, you know, we tackled the topic of bariatric surgery. And I would say in the past, I would have probably been a lot more critical on this, because at the time, you know, I had the experiences I had were people getting the surgery and then not changing anything else except volume made the same foods. They just now they eat less of them. And then they went right back to what they were doing and eventually were eating the same sized meals, the same stuff that they were eating before.

[00:37:48.810] – Allan
And yes, because they for a period of time ate much less, they lose some weight, but then they start putting it back on.

[00:37:56.310] – Rachel
Yeah, that's the interesting thing about bariatric surgery. It's it's amazing how the stomach can still stretch even after it was shut off a little bit. So it's interesting.

[00:38:07.050] – Allan
Yeah. And the scary thing to me is and we're going to talk about this next week, actually, is the volume of errors and problems that happen in hospitals. It's a leading cause of death in our country, in the United States. I mean, you know, you don't go to the doctors all the time. You don't go to the hospital necessarily with a life threatening thing and then just die. But it happens. It happens a lot more than I thought reading their book.

[00:38:31.380] – Allan
And so here you are taking that risk, making that investment, because, you know, it's not cheap. And even if your insurance is helping you with it, it is not it it's not a cheap deal and it's not easy to recover from. And then you're going through basically blending your food to be able to eat at the beginning of it. So it's a process. And if you'll take that process and use it well, the way Rosie did in her family, then I would say, by all means, it's a tool.

[00:39:03.360] – Allan
Just recognize you're taking a significant risk by going through an elective procedure like this and you dot your Is and cross the T's and you make sure that things are getting done right. It's you have confidence in your doctor, in the doctors team and then follow through, you know, change other things in your life that are going to help you get to where you want to go, you know, move a little more, eat the right foods to get the nutrients because your stomach is smaller.

[00:39:30.240] – Rachel
Mm hmm.

[00:39:30.930] – Allan
OK, and being full, it doesn't mean you're getting the nutrients you need.

[00:39:36.250] – Rachel
Mm hmm. Yeah. She had the right attitude, I think about for all of those reasons you just said. But she knew that bariatric surgery is a good tool and it sounds like her family members looked at it in that same way, and they made the changes, made those big changes that they needed to after they had the surgery. It sounds like they were very successful afterwards.

[00:39:57.920] – Allan
Yeah. And for her, it was it was a little bit about self-esteem. But I think in a big part, you know, she had some driving forces behind why she wanted to do this. You know, we talk about that. What's your why? Yeah, it was a career that she loved and she was basically being told that, you know, she didn't change her size. She was going to size herself out of plus modeling. She was not the ideal plus model.

[00:40:23.270] – Allan
She didn't fit the demo. So to be the way she wanted to be. And because she was driven to have the success for her children, she did this thing and it worked for her. But she didn't just do it and then eat the way she was eating before. She changed what she was eating. She started exercising more. And even before what she had done exercises, she worked hard, but, you know, she didn't have the drive and determination that really takes her. Plus, she didn't have the self-love that sustains her. And now she does. And that's why she's successful.

[00:40:58.520] – Rachel
Yeah, it's a powerful way to have and something to hold on to it as you go through all these hard situations. She said afterwards when her stomach was about, I think she said they removed 80 percent. She had a really small stomach afterwards and she discussed how she felt full afterwards. And then how she when she did eat sugar with that super small stomach, she was feeling nauseous after she was eating it. So was some pretty big light bulb moments of that something you haven't ever felt before.

[00:41:32.630] – Allan
Yeah. And there are ways, you know, there are strategies for feeling full without, you know, eating a ton of food. If you're eating whole food, you know, and, you know, just starting off with a salad with a lot of roughage, green drinking a glass of water 30 minutes before a meal. you know, that's going to put some volume in your stomach. And then when you put the food in there, you're going to feel fuller.

[00:41:57.650] – Allan
And so, you know, there are ways to feel full. And if you're eating whole food, you're getting the nutrients and get and getting the nutrients that your body needs. Signaling will work. Slowing down when you eat is another way to avoid overfilling. You know, it's just. Oh, yeah, it's live. We're approaching Thanksgiving, the classic day of overeating. So, slow down. Yes. You want three pieces of pie, but no, don't.

[00:42:25.490] – Allan
I eat one third of three pieces of pie each. And then you've got your piece of pie and you taste it all three. Use some strategies to help you get through these times when you have a tendency to overeat by and taking the time and enjoying the taste of the food and giving your body the time to signal, hey, we're there, it's time to stop. You know, we've got enough.

[00:42:48.370] – Allan
Yeah, you avoid the food coma, avoid the seasonal five to five to ten pounds gain after you lost that five to ten before and now you're putting it back on. That's the cycle. That's the cycle of why that happened. You win, you're a winner, you have the confidence you lost the way and successfully make it through these holidays. You're going to get there.

[00:43:11.630] – Rachel
Yeah, well, personally, I hate the feeling of being full. And like I've said before, Thanksgiving is my favorite eating day of the whole year. But I also like leftovers. So I know that I can make a plate of my favorite foods, enjoy it, enjoy the company of my family and put it away and that feel full and bloated for the rest of the evening. And I can look forward to leftovers the next day. So there are a lot of really good tips out there that you can avoid all that.

[00:43:38.990] – Allan
Yeah. And if you're if you're looking for a reason to move a little bit more and I told you about this last week in a post on Facebook group a couple of times, I am participating in the sloth race, Sloth Racing Team Race, and it's a virtual five or 10K. You get to decide which one you want to do. You sign up online on the link if you want to go. There is 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/race and that'll take you to their sign up page.

[00:44:05.690] – Allan
You go ahead and you sign up for it. You don't have to tell them if you're doing a five or ten, but you know, you can choose which one you want to do when you get it. They send you the medal, they send you a T-shirt, and then you go do the race. And what I'd love for you to do if you do this race at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/race And you're on the 40+ Fitness Sloth Racing Team.

[00:44:24.440] – Allan
Go ahead and post a picture of our group. So go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. And I'd love to see the pictures since I'm traveling back now I'll be doing it within about the next two weeks. You got until the end of November to do the race, so there's still time to sign up, about a week to sign up and then you get your stuff and you do your race. Really looking forward to seeing those pictures on Facebook.

[00:44:44.870] – Rachel
That sounds awesome, Mike. And I can't wait for the 10k.

[00:44:47.810] – Allan
Cool. All right, Rachel, anything else we should go over before we call it a week?

[00:44:52.540] – Rachel
Nope, sounds great.

[00:44:53.950] – Allan
OK, I will see you next week.

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Another episode you may enjoy

A funeral for my fat | Sharee Samuels

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:51.670] – Allan
Ras, how are you doing?

[00:02:52.630] – Ras
Good. How are you today Allan?

[00:02:54.310] – Allan
I'm doing really well. I'm doing well. I'm excited about conversation that we're going to interview, we're going to have today with Dr. Fung and his books called Cancer Code. And, you know, it's it's a big, big problem. So I'm pretty excited about the conversation. You know, as we're getting into this as this goes live, I'm going to be in North Carolina visiting my mom, the last leg, sort of last leg of our trip through the states.

[00:03:18.790] – Allan
So kind of exciting, you know, a couple weeks ago. Then we got loaded all of our stuff in a truck. So it's now in a cargo container headed down to Panama. So when I get down there I'll have a lot of stuff to sort through and a rack to build and all that. And I saw the picture that you posted on the group of your rack. So now I'm Jonesing and get that thing going down there because it's a much better rack than the one I have.

[00:03:43.030] – Ras
Nice, that will be awesome.

[00:03:46.300] – Allan
So how are things going up there?

[00:03:48.310] – Ras
Good, good. Mike and I are doing our puppy training, so Puppy is learning good tricks from Stella and vice versa. Actually, Stella is learning how to be a good dog to a puppy. So they're becoming fast friends and they've been really entertaining for us lately, which is timely this time of year. So, yeah, everything's good here.

[00:04:10.570] – Allan
Yeah, a lot of times when you get a puppy, an older dog kind of livens up a little bit, a little bit more playful than they would have been otherwise.

[00:04:16.660] – Ras
Absolutely. I was actually really surprised at how well she's taken to having a little sibling. She's teasing her with toys and and they're just really entertaining each other, which has been a real treat to watch grow.

[00:04:29.290] – Allan
All right. So let's get into the episode with Dr. Fung.

Interview

[00:05:02.530] – Allan
Dr. Fung, welcome to 40+ Plus Fitness.

[00:05:05.210] – Dr. Fung
Thanks for having me here. Great to be back.

[00:05:07.330] – Allan
You're the kind of guest that I just love having on the show because you do your homework, and after you've done your homework and you have your your case, which you say in one of your books. I've had you, I've covered you for The Obesity Code (Episode 77), The Complete Guide to Fasting (Episode 175), and then had Megan on for The Diabetes Code (Episode 321). But you do your homework and then once you have your statement, it's like, man, you just you're just like a wolf.

[00:05:32.830] – Allan
You're on it, man. And I just love your approach to these things because people are always talking about this. And a lot of people don't know about this. The book we're going to talk about today is called The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery. And it's a part of your wellness code trail, I guess, at this point, and like I said, I was going through the book and I'm like, this is this is completely fascinating and scary because this is not what my paradigm of cancer was.

[00:06:04.730] – Allan
My paradigm was that it's growing and we've got to get it out of there any way we can. But we don't understand cancer nearly as much as I thought we did. But we're getting there.

[00:06:16.830] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, yeah, and I think that these things are very important to understand, because a lot of times specialists like doctors and oncologists and researchers, they get caught in the sort of weeds of the minutia, which is not to say that they're not important, like you should use this drug versus this drug. Those questions are clearly important, but the frame is often missing in terms of, how are we looking at this problem as a whole? And it gets into the same sorts of things as the Obesity Code and the Diabetes Code, which is that obesity medicine sort of you get you get locked into this frame of calories calories calories.

[00:07:03.210] – Dr. Fung
Then you start talking about, oh, this food versus food, but your frame is still defined by calories as opposed to sort of hormonal responses and so on. And that's the reason it's important. Same thing with Type two diabetes. You get locked into this frame where it's all about blood glucose and you forget that the disease is not about blood glucose. Right. That was the result of the disease. It's not the cause of the disease. It's not the disease.

[00:07:29.280] – Dr. Fung
So it's the same thing in cancer where people often get sort of really focused on these very small questions and sort of leave the big questions of what cancer actually is that sort of frame unanswered. And it's important because the way you frame a question has huge implications as to everything that sort of goes on afterwards. So not that these questions are not important, but they have to you have to understand both. And this is talking about the frames or the paradigms of cancer and how you approach the disease.

[00:08:07.560] – Dr. Fung
And it's one of these things that's been changing over time, because the real question we're trying to answer here and this is, the book is sort of an exploration of how far we've come, which is not to say that there's not going to be changes in the future. Right. It may change in 20 years. That's that's clearly a possibility. But where we are now and how much it's changed in the last sort of 10 years, this idea of cancer, because the question we're trying to ask is what is cancer?

[00:08:37.410] – Dr. Fung
What is the actual disease that we are trying to treat? Because if you don't know that, then you're sort of guessing a little bit at treatments. So for the last 50 years, the main paradigm of cancer is a disease that grows. And then you say, well, why is this growing, why is this tumor growing? And the answer to that, if you ask a lot of people like, oh, it's a disease where you have these random genetic mutations which cause excessive growth.

[00:09:10.530] – Dr. Fung
So say you take a disease like lung cancer, you say, OK, well, we know that tobacco smoking is a cause of lung cancer and tobacco smoke is a mutagen. That is, it damages genes and causes mutations, and that in a chance mutation in a growth causing gene will accelerate growth. And that's been our sort of understanding of cancer for this entire time. But there's a huge problem with that paradigm of cancer, which is that the data simply didn't fit that sort of paradigm.

[00:09:50.680] – Dr. Fung
So where we were sort of 20 years ago, was that OK, so now we know that there's a mutation in a gene. So you take breast cancer, say, oh, let's look at the BRCA gene or colon cancer, let's look at this gene. So now that we identified this paradigm, we say there's a couple of mutations, two, three, four mutations. So the initial paradigm was, OK, we have one mutation, one cancer. Block that mutation, get rid of that cancer.

[00:10:19.180] – Dr. Fung
And it worked well for some stuff. Right. So CML was a great case where we did that and it worked extremely well. Then clearly, most cancers were not one gene. So then they said, well, it's two or three or four genes. So therefore, if your paradigm is that you have two or three or four genes which are mutated due to random genetic mutation, then let's find those two or three or four genes and we'll block them with drugs and then we'll do fine, we'll cure cancer.

[00:10:49.280] – Dr. Fung
And that's where we were sort of 20 to 30 years ago, where we had this huge optimism that we're going to develop great new genetic treatments of drugs, that we're going to cure cancer and wipe it off the map. And it's all predicated on this frame, this paradigm that this is what we're dealing with. So we started to look for these genes. So we had the Human Genome Project, which, you know, finished up around 2000.

[00:11:16.840] – Dr. Fung
So we sequenced the genes of an entire human genome. And that was a monumental accomplishment. And at the time, we thought, well, well, now we're going to find all these cancer causing genes and figure it out. But we didn't. So then they did something further, which is called the Cancer Genome Atlas, which was that the ability to sequence human genomes, had the technology improved so much by that time that you could you could sequence many, many, many genes. Like you could go sequence your gene for like 50 bucks sort of thing at 23 and Me or whatever it is. Right.

[00:11:53.890] – Dr. Fung
So the technology went from multiple labs in 2000 with multi-million dollar budgets to like you could go to a company, get your genome sequenced today. So by that time the human genome, by the time the Human Genome Project wound up, we did this further thing where we sequenced sort of thousands and thousands of genomes of cancer patients.

[00:12:16.870] – Dr. Fung
So we took the cancer and we sequenced the genome. So then it's like, OK, well, we take like a fifty or one hundred breast cancers, sequence and find that one or two or three genes that's causing it and boom, we're going to get some drugs to block them. So that was sort of the paradigm from 2000 to, say, 2010.

[00:12:36.760] – Dr. Fung
By the time the Human, the Cancer Genome Atlas finished, that paradigm was sort of shattered. It was like blown out of the water because we were not finding two or three or four mutations in a cancer genome, we were finding hundreds and millions of gene mutations. So that is if you take a cancer such as colorectal cancer example. One person with person A with colorectal cancer might have not two or three or four genes that are mutated, might have 80 that are mutated.

[00:13:17.580] – Dr. Fung
And so that's the number that is far out. Like you can't develop 80 drugs and give them all to that patient. It's just so far out of what we can do with cancer therapeutics. The problem was also that if you had the very next patient that you saw with the exact same identical appearing colorectal cancer, say it's in the same place at stage three, same metastasis, everything exactly the same clinically, they would have 80 mutations or a hundred mutations and they would be completely different than person A.

[00:13:53.690] – Dr. Fung
So you needed 80 or a 100 drugs for person A, and 80 to 100 drugs that were completely different for a person. Well, that's just not doable. So at last count that I saw in 2018, there was close to I think six million mutations identified in cancers. So it's just this genetic paradigm of cancer just sort of got blown out of the water. Because how can two gene genomes with, say, 80 to a 100 different mutations like different at many, many, many places, how can they appear exactly the same?

[00:14:37.220] – Dr. Fung
Like what is it that we're dealing with? We're obviously not dealing with anything random because remember, this is the whole premise of this so-called somatic mutation theory, which was that paradigm that we were using. Is that it's just this chance mutation in a growth causing gene. So you randomly mutate this growth gene that grows. And that's why growth. Right. That's, but that wasn't the case. You have all different mutations in all different genes, yet they were appearing identical.

[00:15:08.150] – Dr. Fung
So there's nothing random about this. That is, if you think about it, it makes sense, because if you take a colon cancer from a, you know, a 40 year old black woman today compared to a colon cancer from a Japanese man in the 1920s those two situations are very different. But those colorectal cancer is exactly the same. yet they evolve differently from that Japanese man and that black woman. Like they've evolved completely independently, yet they've appeared the same. Which is an interesting sort of conundrum, because if you think that cancer, is this sort of random genetic mutation, how does everything end up looking the same?

[00:15:57.410] – Dr. Fung
That's a real that's a real problem. So by 2010, this sort of random genetic mutation idea of cancer genetics was sort of blown out of the sky. And it had a lot of implications because what we saw, of course, was that from 2000, when there's this huge optimism with all these new drugs. But the amount of new drugs that have really seriously impacted cancer that is significantly improved the lives of cancer patients is sort of dwindling rapidly.

[00:16:34.880] – Dr. Fung
So, yes, there are new drugs. But if you look at the actual studies of these drugs and some of them are fantastically expensive, you're talking one hundred thousand dollars a year, two hundred thousand dollars a year for some of these drugs. The thing is that if you look at how effective they are, they're sort of like, well, they're either completely ineffective at adding months of life to somebody's expected prognosis to sort of barely improving life.

[00:17:08.030] – Dr. Fung
So. I think one study showed that on average, if you take all of these recent drugs, they improve the prognosis, like the life expectancy by an average of two point one month or something like that. It was it was really, really, really bad. And I think that that's something that we have to sort of look at, because if if these drugs are so poor, then there must be sort of this better way of looking at this disease so that we can identify new drugs because we're sort of twenty, twenty five years into this genetic paradigm. And if you go to the American Cancer Society website, for example, you'll still read what is cancer?

[00:17:48.300] – Dr. Fung
Cancer is a genetic disease of mutations. And it's like, well, that paradigm didn't actually help anybody. It's actually been a giant dead end. Not to say it's a waste of time because obviously this is a learning process. But now in the sort of last 8 or 10 years, there's been this new sort of idea of how cancer, what cancer is, how it came to be that is leading to sort of more improved treatments.

[00:18:17.490] – Dr. Fung
And that's the sort of story that I sort of sort of write about, is that what are, what is this new thinking about cancer so that we can improve people's lives, prevent cancer or identify more promising areas of research, that kind of thing. And that's the sort of evolutionary paradigm of cancer, that cancer is a disease that evolves, not a disease of random genetic mutations.

[00:18:46.110] – Allan
In one of the things that you got into in the book is in helping us understand what cancer is, you identified eight hallmarks of cancer and then you further refine that down to four main characteristics. Do you mind going through that real quick? Because that for me was a real good frame to kind of understand when we're talking about cancer.

[00:19:07.890] – Allan
And then as you took that forward, it's like, what else is like this? And you kind of took it, like you said, in that evolution, which I kind of read as a De-evolution back to basic or atavism. But it's one of those things where it's now it's a new organism. I mean, it's almost its own thing. Can you kind of talk through that?

[00:19:29.130] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, exactly. So this is what we're, so it's an interesting sort of way. We came to this because cancer, we know is, evolve, is sort of originates from our own cells. When you have lung cancer, it came from your own lung cells that when you have liver cancer, it came from your own liver cells. It's not some extrinsic thing that like an infection or a virus or something. It's something that came from your own body, but now somehow became perverted.

[00:19:58.350] – Dr. Fung
So there's lots of different types of cancers and there's, you know, lung cancer, and liver cancer, and breast cancer and so on. And they're all different in a lot of ways. So that's the way that we've always treated them. So you look at things like breast cancer and you have a different staging system compared to liver cancer, colorectal cancer, different things are important for different cancers. So one of the things that happened in about year 2000, which was a big change, was this sort of codification, not of how cancers are different, but how cancers are the same.

[00:20:35.820] – Dr. Fung
And it's an interesting story because the researchers, and it's actually one of the most highly cited research papers in oncology. So this is the sort of one paper that everybody reads and it's called The Hallmarks of Cancer. And it was published in 2001. And when you read about the story, it's like the researchers themselves didn't actually think much at the time about the paper. They said, well, they're very smart researchers. And what they did was they said, hey, like we all talk about the differences between cancers and then way talk about the similarities between cancer so we should write a paper.

[00:21:13.680] – Dr. Fung
So they wrote a paper about it and it became the most important piece of research in a long time, because when you look at the sort of lumpers litter problem. So in biology, you can either lump things together or you can split them apart. And this has important implications because you can lump things together like, OK, an apple and an orange or two pieces of fruit. So they're fruit. You can split them apart and say apples and oranges are different because they're different.

[00:21:46.110] – Dr. Fung
Like this, it's round, it's orange and so on. So you can lump them together, you can split apart. So cancer had always been a splitter. So you say breast cancer, stage one versus colorectal cancer stage four, they are different. And what you do when you split things apart is that you actually highlight their differences and you sort of investigate further how they're different. When you lump them together and say their fruit, then you can say, well, fruit share these two characteristics.

[00:22:15.360] – Dr. Fung
So it's the same thing in cancer. So what they're doing, instead of being splitters, they were sort of lumpers and said, let's look at all cancers and say how, what is it about cancer that is similar between breast and colorectal and leukemia and all these different types of cancer? So they came up with eight sort of characteristics, which is a great starting point, because in order to understand cancer, not just breast cancer, not just leukemia, but cancer, you have to know what it is.

[00:22:44.280] – Dr. Fung
And nobody had sort of defined that. So the best sort of scientific definition of what cancer is could be defined by these eight hallmarks. Which is very is a little bit technical. But I break it down into something a little bit more sort of simple to understand, which is that one, these cancers, so cancer as opposed to normal cells, and this is sort of irrespective of what type of cancer they grow. So cells don't normally grow, tissues do not normally grow.

[00:23:10.990] – Dr. Fung
Your liver doesn't continue to grow and grow and grow until it's sort of the size of a small boulder. Because it's going to impact everything else. And that's what sort of partially was so deadly about cancer. So they grow. Second thing is that they move around. So, again, this is not something that happens in normal cells. So when you consider a sort of lung cell versus a lung cancer cell, lung cell never moves around. It's always anchored to the lung, whereas the lung cancer cell moves around the body.

[00:23:45.930] – Dr. Fung
It can go anywhere. And that's why it's so that's why it kills you, because it metastasize to the liver, to wherever. So it grows and moves around. Third is that it's immortal. So the mortality, again, is not something we see in normal cells. So this is called the hay flick limit. And this has been talked about a lot in the longevity sphere. But the hay flick limit is basically if you take a human cell, so you take your lung cell and you try to grow it, it will split into two daughter cells.

[00:24:20.160] – Dr. Fung
That's that's how cells divide. But you can't do that sort of indefinitely. So when you get to a certain number of replications, that cell will no longer replicate. And we know how this works. So when cells divide, the genetic material sort of splits in two and and that's what you get. But at the end of each chromosome, which is where all this genetic material is as telomeres and the telomere is this sort of cap on the end of the the chromosome.

[00:24:52.680] – Dr. Fung
And every time you replicate it sort of shaves off one. So in other words, every time, you do the cell divides, the telomere cap gets a little smaller and smaller, smaller and smaller. When it goes away, you can no longer divide. And so that was sort of Nobel Prize winning material 20 or 30 years ago. So but it's another way that cancer cells are different than normal cells. And the fourth way that they differ is that they use a different way of generating energy, which is very anomalous.

[00:25:25.620] – Dr. Fung
And it's very interesting because it's anomalous and that's the war of effect. That is, the cancer cells and normal cells generate energy, cellular energy differently. So when we, normal cells generate energy, we use glucose in a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Which means that we take oxygen, we take glucose, we burn them together and we get energy. So we measure cellular energy as ATP and get 36 ATP per glucose in this oxidative phosphorylation, so you get lots of energy.

[00:26:00.820] – Dr. Fung
When you, but cancer cells don't do that. And it's very anomalous because cancer cells which are growing and moving and stuff, you think that they need a lot of energy. So you think that they use oxidative phosphorylation but they don't. They actually use glycolysis. Where you take the glucose and you metabolize it through a different pathway called glycolysis and you get two ATP and lactic acid. So this is, all cells can do this. So when you sprint, for example, and you run and you can't get enough oxygen to your muscles, they generate anaerobic energy, which is glycolysis, which is gets you all the lactic acid, which gives you the muscle burn and all this sort of stuff.

[00:26:43.360] – Dr. Fung
But the point is that you get a lot less energy than you generate more quickly, so that's the trade off. In cancer cells almost always use this sort of less efficient way of generating energy. At the same time that we know cancer cells need a lot of energy, so it's like that is very, very anomalous. And those are the ways that cancers all stay the same in any theory of cancer as to what is cancer.

[00:27:08.950] – Dr. Fung
So we take a paradigm like, cancer is this random collection of genetic mutations that happens to kill you? Well, it doesn't explain anything of why cancers grow like it does and that you have the growth gene, but why they're immortal, like how does it affect the telomeres? Why do they move around? Because to move around, you have adhesion molecules for example. You have blood cells which are trying to kill you, like the body has defences against the lung cell moving around the body.

[00:27:41.050] – Dr. Fung
If it's lung cell detaches and tries to move around the body, it'll get slaughtered. So these sort of genetic mutation, random genetic mutations doesn't explain why. Why is it going to grow? Why is it immortal? Why is it moving around? Why is it using warping effect? Because each of these each of these hallmarks and those aren't, those are just sort of characteristics. Those are not the actual hallmarks. But each of these characteristics requires many, many, many genetic mutations to make it happen.

[00:28:10.210] – Dr. Fung
So why is every cancer independently, so every cancer in history for the last five thousand years of humanity where cancer has existed, each cancer has independently sort of reinvented the wheel. Because like the cancer of the person Queen Atosa in the year 20 AD or whatever, has reinvented the wheel to develop all these characteristics just as the person in 2020 has. How is that? Right?

[00:28:44.440] – Dr. Fung
That's that's a very interesting question that needs to be answered. And the answer is that this is sort of an evolutionary process. And as you say, it's not a forward evolutionary process. It's actually a backwards evolutionary process. And that's how we get to there by understanding what it is that cancer is doing.

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[00:30:19.930] – Allan
One of the things that came out of this is when I was thinking about the treatment, so, you know, you hear a friend is going in for chemo or you hear they're going in for surgery. And, you know, the principle is how do we reduce the tumor size? How do we get rid of the tumor? How do we make sure we got it all? And that's because we know that cancer has the opportunity to metastasize and spread, which is how it tends to kill most of us because we'll get a cancer that's not necessarily deadly.

[00:30:45.400] – Allan
And then it's going to spread to the bone or to the heart, I mean to the brain or to the liver. And then then it is something that could absolutely kill us. Why is there still a big focus on tumor size when that's not really what's going to preserve us? That's not really going to get rid of cancer? Just seems that that's still the paradigm of most of what I hear in treatments as we need to get the tumor size down. If we get the tumor size down, we're winning.

[00:31:11.980] – Dr. Fung
And I think it comes back to the sort of old paradigms, which is to people who are thinking, well, this is a disease of random genetic mutations, which causes it to grow. So the less growth you have, the better you're doing sort of thing as opposed to saying where are we in this sort of evolutionary process of cancer development? That is to say that cancer is, so we focus on this sort of growth and it's easy to measure. So therefore it's easy to put a number on it.

[00:31:43.930] – Dr. Fung
And a regulatory agency such as the FDA can sort of say, OK, well, that's where we go. It's sort of what led us to this sort of inpass of how we got so many marginally useful drugs at this point? Like fantastically expensive, but marginally useful because of this sort of focus on size. Like the focus on size is extremely misguided because we know that it's not the size of the tumor that kills you. So about 90 percent of the deadliness of cancer is the fact that it moves around.

[00:32:24.940] – Dr. Fung
So that's metastasis. When when cancer metastasizes, your prognosis becomes very, very poor. So you have benign cancers like comas, for example. They grow very large or cysts, grow very large. It doesn't matter so much because as long as it doesn't move around, you can always just cut it out if you have to. Most of times you don't even have to. So the whole point is that, you know, you get to this stage because years ago so we know that the size of the tumor is probably a very, very, very minor part of what causes cancer to kill you.

[00:33:08.530] – Dr. Fung
At the same time, the larger the cancer is, the more likely it is to be a more advanced tumor, which means it's more likely to spread. So you get this sort of confusion between the size, which is sort of a marker for how advanced it is compared to the size, which is important in and of itself. Right. I mean, it's a very important thing, just like saying that gray hair, for example, is a marker of mortality.

[00:33:35.500] – Dr. Fung
Right? If you have more gray hair, you're more likely to die. That's true because it's a marker for age. If you're older, you're more likely to die. If you're older, you're more likely to have gray hair. But there's this confusion between sort of gray hair is going to kill you because the gray is a bad color sort of thing versus gray is just a marker for age. It's the same thing as size is. It's the size that's going to kill you.

[00:33:59.980] – Dr. Fung
Or is it because the larger it is, the more likely it is to be advanced? Right. And it's really the light. It's really that if it's bigger, it's more likely to be more advanced. And therefore you've probably had longer and therefore it's more likely to spread. So it's a very important, because if you say that gray hair is a marker for mortality, we know that the gray hair actually causes mortality. You make that sort of leap, that horrible leap of association and causation which we do all the time.

[00:34:31.660] – Dr. Fung
So when you make that horrible leap into causation and say gray hair will kill you, then you say, well, I just need to dye my hair and I will reduce my mortality by 50 percent. Well, obviously that's not true, but we've done the same thing. So a big cancer means that it's more likely advance, which would more likely kill you. So we say, well, let's make it a smaller cancer, and that is the equivalent of dying your hair.

[00:34:54.340] – Dr. Fung
It doesn't do anything, though, and we know that it doesn't do anything because, for example, in surgery. When we have a cancer that has metastasized, there's no point cutting it out or cutting it, you know half of it, because it doesn't do anything yet. Yet when we measure this sort of partial response in cancer trials or drug trials, they say, well, we reduce the size from sort of by 50 percent. That's considered positive. And you can get your drug approved on the basis of these sort of measures, which is like reducing the size or something called progression free survival, for example.

[00:35:39.200] – Dr. Fung
And there's all these sort of logical fallacies as to why these sort of markers don't work. But what happened in the sort of in the 2000s is that the Federal Drug Administration, which approves these drugs, created this sort of expedited way of accelerating drug development. So the reason we never use these sort of markers of approving drugs is because they weren't effective. But in the sort of 2000s the FDA said, well, we need more drugs, so we're going to make it easier for you to get your drug approved so you can use these half measures like gray hair and so on, so you can use these half measures like tumor size to get your drug approved as long as you go back and study to see if it actually improves things overall, that is overall survival.

[00:36:38.300] – Dr. Fung
That's the only thing that matters, overall survival. So the problem was that a lot of drugs got approved based on these surrogate measures. And they when they look back at first, a lot of drugs never went back in to see if they're actually effective. A lot of them, when they look back, found that they weren't effective. So then they actually got pulled down from the market. And other drug companies say, well, we just won't look then, because once we are approved we're just selling stuff.

[00:37:10.650] – Dr. Fung
But you're selling stuff that has never really been shown to be useful. And that's how you get into this situation. We have so many very expensive drugs that have very marginal benefits, if any benefits at all. And it's the use of these sort of surrogate outcomes. And it's the equivalent of saying we measured gray hairs and you colored all your gray hairs black and therefore you did really good for reducing mortality is the same thing. So that's the reason in surgery you never cut half the tumor because it's not useful.

[00:37:43.970] – Dr. Fung
You might as well not cut any of it in. If you could give a drug that reduces it by 50 percent, it probably doesn't do anything. And that's that's the sort of thing that we get into in the book, because there's all these fallacies. People say, well, if you're reducing cancer deaths as opposed to overall deaths, well, how can it not be good? So let's take an example, you have one hundred patients, for example, and they get cancer at age 60, they all die at age sixty five, for example.

[00:38:16.380] – Dr. Fung
So a group of one hundred patients, they get at sixty, sixty five. Now you have one hundred percent of them die of cancer. If you treat them with this drug they, like twenty five percent of them will die of chemotherapy related causes, heart attacks and infections and so on. Now everybody still dies at sixty five. So same overall effect, but now twenty five percent have died, of heart attacks and infections and whatever. Seventy five percent have died of cancer.

[00:38:52.160] – Dr. Fung
So now you have seventy five percent cancer deaths versus one hundred percent cancer death. And so you say now my drug is useful because I've reduced my cancer deaths by twenty five percent. You haven't reduced your overall mortality. In fact, you did harm by causing all these other deaths when the data will actually make it look like you could actually argue that you're actually improving things. So that's that's a big problem. Same thing with lead time bias, for example.

[00:39:21.590] – Dr. Fung
So if you and this gets into the question of screening, for example, where if people talk about screening and they say, well, how is screening bad? Because there's actually a move backing away from a lot of screening and the same thing, you have this lead time bias, which is that if you take a group of people that have cancer at 60, they died at age 70. So with screening, you discover them immediately. They survive 10 years with their cancer.

[00:39:48.530] – Dr. Fung
Say you didn't screen them and they got to that age 60. You didn't find it till age sixty nine. They only survived a year with cancer. Sixty nine to 70. So you say, OK, well, I improve my survival with cancer. From 1 year to 10 years, but it's completely artifactual. Because, in fact, the both groups got to that 60 died at 70. So you see there's all these sort of statistical things when you start to make measures that are like cancer deaths and, you know, survival with cancer and progression free survival and all these sort of terms that get used in the development of disease that actually don't make any difference.

[00:40:29.970] – Dr. Fung
So that's sort of where we got all these where we got into trouble with a lot of these things, such as the screening, which we thought more screening is better. Turns out more is not always better. There's been a lot of screening that's been a complete dud and has been sort of walked back a little bit. And that's how we got to this situation with with cancer therapeutics, where we've got a lot of marginally improved marginal improvement drugs by looking at these measures like size that just were not important in and in and of themselves.

[00:41:06.470] – Allan
Now, insulin is a is a growth hormone, it's a it's a hormone we need for a lot of different purposes in our body. It pulls in sugar into our muscles and our liver when we need it. Stores body fat when we need it. But insulin is also a very big problem for us, and it's intricately tied into cancer growth. And that has when you take that one step further, it's like, what control do I have actually over my insulin? And that's what I put in my mouth. So can you kind of talk us through that?

[00:41:35.900] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, this is the fascinating part. So again, when as we're moving from a paradigm of genetic mutations to something a little bit more nuance like the evolutionary thing. So as cancer is an evolutionary process, almost the development of this sort of new species, then you have to say, well, if it's going to be a new species, and I say that because the human body actually recognizes cancer cells as foreign cells. So it's not our cells. Right.

[00:42:07.040] – Dr. Fung
So the human body has this unique immune system. And if you are not part of the human body, it will attack and destroy you. So bacteria that come in, the immune system will recognize it and kill the bacteria because it recognizes it as non-human. Same thing as a cancer. It will actually, if you put a cancer cell, a cancer cell develops, the human immune system will just innately, without any training, just destroy that. So it is a foreign invader almost, but it came from our cells.

[00:42:38.150] – Dr. Fung
So if you see that as a genetic mutation problem, then you say things like, well, what you eat doesn't make any difference because, or your lifestyle doesn't make any difference because what you eat is not mutagenic. That is, if you like to eat sugar, it doesn't cause a lot of cellular damage. If you eat a lot of refined carbohydrates, it doesn't make your genes mutate. So therefore it shouldn't make any difference. But it turns out it makes a huge difference.

[00:43:12.470] – Dr. Fung
And we started to recognize this sort of with with in the 2000s. So this is why I say a lot of what we think about cancer has changed in the last 20 years without people quite recognizing it. We found out that there's this huge link to obesity. So a lot of cancers are actually obesity related. The WHO recognizes that leads 13 types of cancer is obesity related. So this was not something that we actually knew about in the past. So we actually, I went to medical school in the 1990s and we never talked about obesity as a cause of cancer.

[00:43:52.670] – Dr. Fung
Turns out when you look at the population attributable risk, that is, you know, in a whole population of people, what percentage of risk can be attributed to, say, smoking? It's about 35 percent. Then you say what can be attributed to diet, it's about 30 percent. So it's actually just below tobacco smoke as an attributable risk for cancer. So it's like, wow. And it far, far, far outweighs everything else you think causes cancer, which is things like radiation and pollutants and chemicals, manmade chemicals and plastics and all that.

[00:44:32.840] – Dr. Fung
Those all can cause cancer. But your population attributable risk, in a big population. It's going to be one percent, two percent, whereas diet is like 30 percent. Tobacco smoke is like 35 percent so far outweighs everything else. And then you have to go back and say, well, what is it about this diet that is making people get cancer? And that's where you start to get into these hormones that change with your diet. Things like insulin and other things.

[00:45:03.830] – Dr. Fung
So mTOR, for example, goes up when you eat a lot of protein and that turns out to be very involved in the cancer making process. And 20 years ago, people would laughed at you if you said stuff like that. But now we know that it's true. And the link is that all of these sort of diseases, sort of these hormones that are implicated in nutrition, that is you eat certain hormones, go up like insulin. Well, these sort of nutrient sensors.

[00:45:36.890] – Dr. Fung
So these are specific ways that our body knows that nutrition is coming in. So towards one, AMPK insulin, the others. So insulin goes up when you eat. So we know nutrition is coming in. Turns out that they're also growth factors, that is. And the reason their growth factors is because your body wants to grow when nutrition is available, when nutrition is not available. So if you're in the middle of famine and you're not eating anything, insulin is going to go down very low and your body doesn't want to make more cells.

[00:46:10.910] – Dr. Fung
They don't want the cells that are there to grow. They want the cells that are there to shrink or die. So that's the whole point that that these hormonal mediators of nutrition are actually the growth factors. So it's important because if you have a disease where you have excessive insulin, so Hyperinsulinemia, which we talked about in the Obesity Code, the Diabetes Code, if you have foods that are causing you to have way too much insulin. You're going to have very high signaling for growth, that is, you're telling your body not only to store fat, but you're telling all the cells of your body, hey, you should grow because lots of food is available.

[00:46:55.340] – Dr. Fung
Please grow. Please grow. And the things that are going to grow better than anything else are those cancers. So things such as breast cancer cells are very insulin sensitive. So they're very responsive to insulin. Same with colorectal. So we see this also in obesity, which is also a disease of hyperinsulinemia, where you have a huge risk increase with obesity as well as Type two diabetes. So both diseases of Hyperinsulinemia and both diseases are associated with sort of increased risk of cancer.

[00:47:28.910] – Dr. Fung
So that's the sort of link because these are independent organisms almost. These cancer cells, but they do respond still to growth signals and nutrition, so you increase nutrition such as you eat a lot of sugary food, you eat a lot of high, highly refined carbohydrates, which really spikes your insulin up. You get into the state of obesity where you have insulin high all the time, or type two diabetes, well, you're signaling increased growth, which is going to translate into an ideal sort of growing environment for cancer cells because cancer is like a seed.

[00:48:14.170] – Dr. Fung
Just because you have the seed doesn't mean that it will grow. That is, you take a seed of a plant of whatever plant or flower or something. It's not going to grow if you just put it in a little bag, but you put it in soil and give it water and it grows. Same thing with cancer. So the seed is there because it's actually in all of us, but it doesn't grow until you have the fertile soil which is provided by these nutrient sensors that is giving it the nutrition, you're making nutrition available at the same time, you're signaling it to grow as much as it can and you're in a disease of too much insulin is a disease of too much growth, which is bad for cancer.

[00:49:00.950] – Allan
OK, so knowing what we know now, we want to reduce our risk or minimize our risk. What are some recommendations that you would make now?

[00:49:10.300] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, and that's a great question because I don't think there's a lot of good recommendations that we can make right now. However, the only thing you can say is that if you are overweight or obese, then you should try to lose weight because there seems to be a clear reduction in cancer because you have all these cancers that are related. If you're not obese, then you're going to reduce your risk. Whether or not low carbohydrate diets, for example, versus a plant based versus paleo versus whatever diet, there's not the amount of data that you can say, well, you should follow this diet.

[00:49:51.730] – Dr. Fung
I'd love to be able to say that, but the science just doesn't allow us to. All you can say is that maintaining normal weight is going to be very likely to reduce your risk of cancer. So that seems fairly uncontroversial. But how you lose that weight is you can't sort of at this point say this diet is better than this diet. So whatever diet works for you to lose weight, that's probably the most important thing. A few other things, such as fasting, will it work?

[00:50:26.530] – Dr. Fung
Again, theoretically, fasting is going to be very, very effective for prevention of cancer. But that's all you can say. Theoretically, we don't know that that's true. So fasting, of course, reduces all of your nutrient sensors. So insulin is going to go down and talks are going to go down AMPK is going to go up. So it's going to affect all of them because it's not just insulin, right? There's other nutrient sensors in the body.

[00:50:54.070] – Dr. Fung
So you're going to affect all of them simultaneously versus a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet where you're really only lowering insulin. So the point is that if you're able to lose weight, that's probably a good thing. Fasting is probably a very important part. And that's the argument I make, is that fasting is an important part of weight loss. So therefore, fasting is likely going to reduce your risk, future risk of cancer by allowing you to maintain a normal weight.

[00:51:21.820] – Dr. Fung
The second thing, of course, is type two diabetes. Type two diabetes also happens in people who are normal weight. So it's not just the weight of the Hyperinsulinemia. So, again, fasting is going to help reduce your insulin because when you don't need insulin goes down. So therefore you're reducing the sort of nutrient censor's which is going to likely translate into a reduced risk of cancer. But that's all you can really say. You can say that theoretically this should work, but whether it actually works, you couldn't say with any confidence, there's a few other things in terms of chemo-prevention.

[00:51:55.690] – Dr. Fung
So this was a term coined by the NH to talk about substances which will reduce cancer. And this is always interesting to people to say, well, if I eat this, I'm going to protect myself against cancer. And there's very little that actually is proven there. There's some data on metformin. Some metformin is used again in the longevity circles. It increases AMPK, which is actually one of the nutrient sensors. So it actually signals low food availability. So if you are on metformin for type two diabetes, it seems that there's a lower risk of cancer than other types of diabetes treatments. So if you're on if you're a Type two diabetic, maybe you should consider metformin. There's a little bit of data on that in terms of chemo-prevention. The other one that is interesting to me, but there's not a lot of data is also is green tea, because, again, a lot of these compounds have been studied mostly by the Japanese.

[00:52:58.370] – Dr. Fung
You drink a lot of green tea that it might reduce the risk of cancer. So some of the some of the data coming out of Japan are very interesting. But of course, it's not a randomized control trial. You can't say for sure that this is or isn't going to reduce cancer. But on the other hand, when you look at a chemo-prevention, you have to say, well, what are the risks of drinking green tea? And you have to say, well, almost nothing.

[00:53:25.780] – Dr. Fung
I mean, people drink five, six, seven cups of green tea a day. They don't seem to have any harmful effects and it's pretty cheap. It's just go to the grocery store, buy a big box of green tea. And so it's pretty, seems pretty safe. Seems like there's a fairly inexpensive and potentially you could lower your risk. So, again, as a chemotherapeutic, as a chemo preventative agent, it's probably one of the more interesting things.

[00:53:56.250] – Dr. Fung
But again, mostly I would. I would. That's all the science can say about that. So maintaining normal weight and getting back to the Obesity Code and the Diabetes Code, you know, I think that a rational strategy involves sort of reducing carbohydrates, intermittent fasting, sort of reducing snacks and reducing processed foods.

[00:54:16.510] – Allan
Dr. Fung, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:54:25.730] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, I think I think that those are the main things which I cover in these sort of these books, which is it all kind of comes back to the same sort of things, which is, you know, cutting out processed foods largely like it's not just the process carbohydrates, but they are the biggest culprit. But most processed foods are not going to be very good for you. So reducing processed foods, reducing the frequency of eating, because and this was different of course, in the 1900s versus the 2020s, we're all sort of more towards the obesity side than in the past. So therefore we should try and bring it back in order to be healthy.

[00:55:13.010] – Dr. Fung
And then more specifically with regards to cancer. I mean, I think that the main thing is really just sort of maintaining this balance of understanding of what it is so that we can, and it's not just diet. Of course, there's lots of other determinants, but also things such as avoiding unhealthy habits like smoking. And there's always these things. In terms of stress you should you know, it's probably not good, the chronic stress, because it's this chronic sort of damage that happens when your cortisol is always high. So sort of maintaining this balance of diet and also the lifestyle, which is going to keep you free of cancer.

[00:56:07.000] – Allan
Great. So, Dr. Fung, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, The Cancer Code or your other books, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:56:16.310] – Dr. Fung
Yeah, so you can go to my website, which is thefastingmethod.com. You can follow me on Twitter or Instagram. That's at Dr. Jason Fung. That's Dr Jason Fung. Those are great ways to get in touch. And of course you can get my books, The Cancer Code, The Obesity Code, and The Diabetes Code.

[00:56:34.880] – Allan
Well, Dr. Fung, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:56:38.100] – Dr. Fung
Thank you so much.

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