Category Archives for "health"
August 24, 2020
- in guest/interview , health , keto , weight loss by allan
Is the carnivore diet good for you? – Dr. Paul Saladino
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On episode 448 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we ask the question: “Is the Carnivore Diet good for you?
Dr. Saladino is the leading authority on the Carnivore Diet. He has used this diet to reverse autoimmune issues, chronic inflammation, and mental health issues in hundreds of patients. He is board-certified in psychiatry and completed his residency at the University of Washington. He is also a certified functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for Functional Medicine. He attended medical school at the University of Arizona, focusing on integrative medicine and nutritional biochemistry.
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This episode is also sponsored by Fastic. This is a wonderful app that teaches you how to do intermittent fasting right. If you have an iPhone, you can access the free at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic. Get the Android version at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic.
You may or may not know that I am a fan of the ketogenic diet. I regularly make bone broth to get collagen and minerals from the bone and bone marrow. And I'm definitely not someone to discard the egg yolk. Ketosis is an excellent way to improve your body composition and fight chronic disease.
I've always dismissed the Carnivore Diet as an extreme elimination diet, which it is since it limits you to just animal products. But after reading The Carnivore Code, I decided to give it a try. I went three weeks with this way of eating and it's not so bad. I got off of it for two reasons:
1) I could get enough liver and kidneys and I don't feel like buying supplements was the way to go.
2) I missed vegetables. As the doctor mentioned in the show, if how you're eating is working, then maybe carnivore isn't for you.
With all of the scientific evidence Dr. Saladino presented in the book and during this interview, I'm less concerned about eating meat regularly and a little less enamored with vegetables overall, but I'm glad I tried it for a bit.
Transcript
Allan
Dr. Saladino, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Saladino
Thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.
Allan
I have had someone on about the carnivore of diet before. His name is Craig Emmerich, Maria's husband, you might know him. And it was really fascinating. I've been interested in the diet, but honestly, it seems pretty extreme to me to just eat meat and organs. I've read a lot about it. I've heard a lot about it. But I think your book, The Carnivore Code, is really kind of the first book I've seen that basically power drives any other way you'd want to eat, I mean, for lack of a better word, it's like, boy, you just pulverized all the vegetables I like and you did it with science.
Dr. Saladino
Well, I tried. And the goal of writing the book and we can get into what I do and why I do it, my goal is not to convince everyone to stop eating all plants for the rest of eternity. The idea with the book and I'll tell the listeners a little of my story as well in a moment, but there are really two main thesis in the book. There are two things that I'm hoping to achieve and the first is to exonerate, red meat to undo the bad science that's been done around red meat and ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb.
Dr. Saladino
These kinds of foods are some of the most vilified foods on the planet. And yet I strongly believe and I think that the medical literature strongly supports the fact that they are the most nutritious foods on the planet for humans. So what we have is this completely upside down ideology this completely reversed mainstream idea around fear of red meat. And that doesn't need to be that way. And I talk about in the book why that is and evidence for red meat being essential in the human diet.
Dr. Saladino
And we can get to both of those things. The second point of the book is to explain and to suggest to offer that plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. They're rooted in the ground. They've been co-evolving with animals for four hundred and fifty million years. And so in order for plants and animals to co-exist in an ecosystem, they have had to develop defense chemicals. This is really not conjecture or opinion. This is botanical science. And these defense chemicals can harm humans. And so plants exist on a toxicity spectrum and understanding which plants are the most toxic in the least toxic is crucial for every human to achieve optimal health.
Dr. Saladino
It's really just it's another tool in the toolbox for people. If people are listening to this and they are thriving, they're just crushing it, kicking, butt, don't change a thing. I respect anyone who's crushing it. And I will give anyone an electronic high five for making an intentional choice with their diet. Whatever that choice is, that's the first step, is making an intentional choice of diet, thinking about your food.
Dr. Saladino
But there's a lot of people that are suffering and no one has really gone to these lengths. No one has uncovered these questions. Nobody has turned these stones over and said maybe some of these plants are harming us. Maybe this is the reason that some of us suffer with eczema like I did, or asthma or psoriasis or depression or mood issues or libido issues or weight gain that won't reverse or tons of other autoimmune issues.
Dr. Saladino
And it's just exciting to be able to do to try and do those two things to say, hey, this red meat don't fear this. Very valuable for you, very critical for you, your family, your children, for their health, for your parents health, everyone. Wrongly vilified based on bad science, which is epidemiology. And the second part is you're not thriving, realize that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum.
Allan
Yeah. Now in my book, The Wellness Roadmap, I brought up a concept that I call opportunistic eaters. And what it is, is as humans, you know, if we're hungry, we're going to go for food. I think I got a little backward and so I got opportunistic eating today is pulling up to the McDonald's drive-thru. It's easy. It's quick, low cost for me from an energy perspective, I don't even have to get out of my car and there it is. Not good for me, but it gives me the energy it did what it was supposed to do, I guess. But then when I thought back to our ancestors and the way that they would look at the opportunity, I think I had it backward. And you rightfully said something in your book that that made me turn that around. You call it the Carnivore Code Hypothesis. And that would be where we would effectively favor meat, particularly red meat, over other sources of food for the nutritional value of them.
Allan
Whereas I thought it's easier for me to pick blueberries in the blueberries, not actually attacking me back. Well, we're going to find out later. Maybe that blueberry is but, you know, I feel safer picking blueberries than I would hunting a water buffalo. Now, even if you and I and a few other guys together with spears and went out there and started working, it would be a little safer, but still risk. We take every time we wanted this food. But what you brought up in the book. There's a good reason why we would take that risk.
Dr. Saladino
There's a very good reason why we would take that risk and why we have taken that risk. The beginning part of the book is really about where we've come from in humans and looking at fossilized evidence of human cranial vault size, the growth of the brain. And there's pretty good evidence that one of the key, if not the critical factor in the massive growth of the human brain, was the advent of hunting in our ancestors and the procurement of meat and these unique nutrients that occur in meat.
Dr. Saladino
So if you look at what's in meat and this goes back to the idea of exonerating red meat and understanding how valuable these foods are for humans. There are many nutrients in red meat specifically, but in all animals really that only occur in animal foods.
Dr. Saladino
So often we're told, of these phytonutrients, quote-unquote. And I really think that's a fairy tale, that's not true when we can talk about that as well. But there are unique nutrients. There are unique nutrients that only occur in appreciable biologically available quantities in animal foods.
Dr. Saladino
But we've never heard about these. So you kind of allude to this in your description. And I think most people and our ancestors were really after the calories, but it worked out when they were seeking the most calories in the largest animals and the largest repository of food, they were solving this energetics equation. Per energy invested, the return on a water buffalo is much better than a blueberry. And it just so happens that when you get that water buffalo, you are getting so many more unique nutrients that are so much more bioavailable. Because we know that in order for humans to be optimal, we need micronutrients. These are things like vitamins and minerals, and I'll talk about those in a moment. In order for our ancestors, or you or I to survive until tomorrow, we need calories.
Dr. Saladino
And you can get those calories from a Slurpee or a Big Mac or a Frosty or french fries. You'll survive till tomorrow. But if you want to survive decades from now and have vital health and healthy children and multiple generations and play with your grandkids, you need micronutrients. And that is the real difference. But by seeking out the highest sources and the most efficient sources of calories, our ancestors also sought out the unique micronutrients. So what am I talking about here?
Dr. Saladino
I'm talking about things like creatine, carnitine, choline, carnitine, vitamin K and B12. The list goes on and on. These are nutrients that really only occur in animal foods in any appreciable quantity. And they are necessary. They are absolutely essential for optimal human health.
Dr. Saladino
But you really can't get creatine from plants. We know that it makes builder stronger, but we also know that it makes us smarter. There have been interventional experiments where they'll do trials without giving vegetarians and vegans creatine. And they get smarter. They do better on memory tasks and card sorting tasks and cognitive processing tasks.
Dr. Saladino
And then there's choline, an essential nutrient for the formation of the brain to make new baby brains to make our brain strong. It really doesn't occur in appreciable quantities and plant foods, but it's absolutely abundant and very biologically available in animal foods. Carnitine, carnitine, these are unique amino acid forms that are used in the antioxidant process in the human body. Vitamin K2 is a form of vitamin K that's absolutely essential for proper calcium partitioning in the human body and higher intakes of vitamin K2, which is a series of Menaquinones, have been associated with much better cardiovascular outcomes.
Dr. Saladino
But where's the vitamin K2 In-plant Foods? It doesn't exist. You can't get vitamin K2 from Plant Foods. You can vitamin K1, which is Phylloquinone. But humans are really, really bad at converting Phylloquinone to medical quinone and an intake of Phylloquinone in Plants is not associated with any of these improved outcomes from heart disease or calcification or sclerosis. So the list goes on, right? Vitamin B 12. Most people know about that, but these are all critical nutrients, trust to be optimal and they were critical for our ancestors brains to grow.
Dr. Saladino
And the statement I make in the book is that I strongly believe and I think the evidence absolutely corroborates the notion that eating meat made us human. It's essential for humans to eat this. And so the investment is slightly higher danger hunting a water buffalo is going to be repaid in spades, it's going to be repaid over and over. As you get that hunt, you get that kill graciously, thankfully, and you share it with your tribe and you are nourished so deeply also by eating organs, if we can talk about.
Dr. Saladino
But that's really what allowed our ancestors to thrive, that it was so easy to get the nutrition from animals. And you can survive on plant foods, but they've got these toxins and you have to detoxify them. They're good for survival. But our ancestors really would have sought out animals first. And if they had to, they would use these plant foods as a fallback. If you can't get a buffalo, you might gather some blueberries.
Dr. Saladino
Now, fruit is kind of a specific thing that I'll talk about. I think our ancestors would have eaten fruit in season, but blueberries aren't available year-round. And you don't make a baby out of blueberries, you know, but you can't just you can't make a human out of the nutrients in blueberries, but you can make a human out of the nutrients in water buffalo that's got almost that's got basically everything you need.
Dr. Saladino
Blueberries, It's got some calories and a few things that we can use, but not great. Now, the fruit stems, leaves, roots and seeds of plants are much more highly defended with these defense chemicals. And that, I think, would have been absolutely way down on the list for humans. If you cannot get you cannot get an animal, then you're going to eat those things to survive. But our ancestors favored animal foods. They made us who we are. And by really forgetting that wisdom today, we are forsaking our ancestral birthright to much, much deeper levels of human health.
Allan
Yeah, and kind of following along with that as we develop and you start thinking about, OK, why is a human-like a human? Because we do have some teeth that allow us to eat some vegetables, but they're not all of our teeth are animal or plant teeth. So it's obvious that we have a little bit of diversity opportunity there. But there are other things about the human body that makes it clear that we're hunters, we're meant to be carnivores. Can you talk about some of those changes physiologically that have happened as humans have evolved?
Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is quite a fascinating story and it starts in the mouth. And really, as you go, as you said, the teeth argument always gets brought up a lot. But we clearly have teeth for both chewing fibrous material. Probably we held on to those because we needed that during times of scarcity of animals. And we have lots of teeth for biting into meat and eating animals. The digestive system of the digestive tract is one of the more fascinating parts of our physiology that distinguishes us from plant-eating herbivores.
Dr. Saladino
The acidity of our stomach is much more. It's much greater. So we have a lower PH, which means a more acidic stomach than many other species, many other primates, many other herbivorous or even omnivorous species. That's a strong suggestion that as we begin eating meat, we were eating rotting meat. So we were eating carrion just to prevent our guts from being damaged by bacteria that might have been growing on the meat. We don't have to eat rotting meat today, but there's a clear evolutionary blueprint there of our ancestors eating meat that was rotting or eating meat in general and the stomach acid protecting us from it and the stomach acid also breaking down that meat.
Dr. Saladino
The shape and distribution of gut regions is also very different in humans. And this is one of the other things called the expensive tissue hypothesis that probably allowed the human brain to grow so big. And we see this in other animals and other species as well. But energetically there is a ceiling on how an animal can change throughout its evolution and as a species.
Dr. Saladino
And so if you want to grow a bigger brain, which uses a lot of your energy, you're going to have to trim the fat, so to speak, from somewhere else. And it looks like the tradeoff for humans was in the gut. We have a much smaller, large intestine. So there's a stomach, a small intestine and a large intestine. The small intestine is 20 plus feet, goes from the end of your stomach to the ileocecal valve, which is where your colon starts. And your colon is your large bowel and these these parts of the intestine serve different purposes. But humans have a slightly larger small bowel and a much smaller, large bowel than primates.[00:17:48.710] – Dr. Saladino
So what appears to have happened in the very compelling hypothesis is that as we were able to eat more nutrient rich foods, we were able to shrink the size of our colons because we didn't need the colons to do the massive fermentation that primates do. So if you look at a gorilla or an ape, they have both a very protuberance stomach. They have a rib angle, which is much more pointed outward than humans. Our ribs kind of go straight down and an ape goes way out to accommodate this very large colon.
Dr. Saladino
The colon now for humans is really just to reabsorb the last bits of water from our stool as it passes through the small intestine. And the small intestine is where we do most of the absorption of nutrients. So there's this real change and that allowed our brains to grow big because we have smaller energy needs in our gut. We can then redistribute the caloric availability to growing a big brain in a very metabolically expensive brain. There's a fascinating fish in Africa that I talk about in the book called The Peters' Elephant Nose Fish.
Dr. Saladino
People can Google this. It's a really cool looking fish. But you see the same thing here. The expensive tissue hypothesis plays out in this fish as well. It has the biggest brain of any species or fish relative to body size. So it's a pretty smart fish. And in order to do that, it has the smallest gut. So it has this trade-off between gut and brain. Again, not surprisingly, that fish is a carnivore as well. And in the fish world, Carnivore is a little different than in the human or land mammal world. But that fish doesn't eat plants, that fish eats other fish or smaller, smaller animals that it's consuming.
Dr. Saladino
So that allows it to consume higher nutrient density food and have a smaller gut. And so it gets a bigger brain energetically in the trade-off. So there's all sorts of other things that suggest that we're hunters. We've got these shoulders that allow us to pitch, and no other species on the planet can throw a fastball like a human can throw a spear.
Dr. Saladino
Primates can't do this. Nobody else can do this. We have these articulated fingers. We're very agile on our feet. And even the whites of our eyes are fascinating. I should have, the book is it wouldn't have shown this picture very well, but I should have put a picture in the book about this. If you look at a chimp's eyes, I didn't know this until I was researching the book The Sclera. So the part of the eye outside of the iris is brown.
Dr. Saladino
And a human, it's white, and so if people look in the mirror, you'll see that center part of your eye, that's the iris and the white stuff to the side. That's the sclera. And a chimp sclera is brown. So if you look at the chimp eye, versus a human eye, it looks very different. And the hypothesis here, advanced by Bill von Hippel and others, is that humans became cooperative rather than competitive. That if I'm in the tribe with you and I'm looking to the right, you can tell which direction I'm looking because you can see the contrast between the iris and the sclera.
Dr. Saladino
But if you look at a chimp, you can't really see which direction they're looking because it's all the same color. So it was advantageous for them to not signal their intentions, what they were looking at, potential mate, prey, escape route to other chimps. But humans became cooperative.
Dr. Saladino
So we were hunting in groups. We were signaling danger and we were becoming this cooperative species. Well, you don't need a whole lot of cooperation to pick blueberries, but if you're hunting a water buffalo, you probably want to cooperate, right?
Allan
Yeah, let's send Derrick in there.
Dr. Saladino
If you've been in the military, or you've seen these adventure movies, you know, you can communicate with somebody across the room with your eyes without saying anything. Or if someone sees danger, you can see where that person is looking immediately.
Dr. Saladino
So there's all these adaptations that make us look a whole lot like hunters. There's also fossil evidence that we've been hunting. I mean, two million years ago when the human brain began to grow is when we see these fossilized remains of Shuli and tools, these by facial by facial stones, which look kind of like big arrowheads. They were used for spears and for butchering. And we start to see bones that are dated to two million years with cut marks on the bone from the butchering.
Dr. Saladino
And we see hunting injuries to animals and we see mass graves where our ancestors apparently herded animals into blind corridors or drove them off cliffs to harvest them in mass. So right at the time we see the human brain start to grow. We then begin to see evidence for hunting and looking at the fossil record, we can see these changes in the human physiology, suggesting, humans are hunters. First and foremost, we're hunters.
Dr. Saladino
Everybody says we're hunter-gatherers. Well, we're like hunter-gatherer. You know, we're like mostly hunting a little bit of gathering if you can't get an animal. And then the question is, what are the foods our ancestors were really gathering? It wasn't kale, I'll tell you that. You can get into it.
Allan
So since the 70s, you know, you don't eat fat, don't eat fat, don't eat fat, low fat, low fat, everything, and with paleo coming up, I guess mid two thousands and so and it was growing and then that went to Keto. So I was I was into ketosis. I was was feeling better than I've felt in forever. And then this news report comes out, you know, that red meat you're eating is going to cause colon cancer. Your chance of dying just went up dramatically. You know, I'm reading the article and I'm like this can't be true. But, you know, well, there's a study and everybody took off with that study. Can you tell us a little bit about that whole story of how that happened and why it's wrong?
Dr. Saladino
Yeah. So based on what you already laid out, I'm sure the listener can imagine how evolutionarily inconsistent it would be for a food that was at the center of the human diet for the last three to four million years would be bad for us. That doesn't make any sense. OK, but there's, quote, science. So let's talk about why this is so misleading.
Dr. Saladino
So what you are referring to is a 2015 IARC report from the International Association for Research on Cancer, which is a WHO/FAO type of committee on cancer. And they met to review all of the studies that they could find connecting red meat and cancer. So it wasn't an actual experiment. It was a consensus decision by a group of scientists, which can also be valuable. But, and they came out in 2015 and said red meat is a class to a carcinogen, which means that we're pretty sure it's a or maybe it was 2B, 2A or 2B.
Dr. Saladino
They give gradings to the recommendations based on the strength of the evidence. And so then they said that processed meat was a 2A carcinogen and red meat was a 2B carcinogen, meaning there was a little bit less evidence that unprocessed red meat was a carcinogen and there was more evidence that processed meat was a carcinogen. So they're making these recommendations.
Dr. Saladino
And you said, OK, well, how do they get these recommendations? They didn't do an experiment. They're reviewing the data. Well, they're super smart scientists, right? We should trust them. Well, in 2018 and this caused a huge hubbub in 2015. In 2018, the actual explanation of how they arrived at those decisions came out.
Dr. Saladino
And when you read that, it paints a very different story. So these, there were many scientists, I think over 20 scientists that sat down and I think it was in France and they had over four hundred studies to review and they excluded all the studies except 14. So that decision is based on 14 studies. They just took everything else. They said that's not valid. It's not that experiment wasn't done well enough. It doesn't it's not an appropriate model.
Dr. Saladino
They excluded all the animal studies. So there were no animal models. Right. And every single one of the studies they looked at was epidemiology. So in that consensus report, they used 14 epidemiology studies. Now, this is worth diving into because it causes so much confusion and consternation. Epidemiology is observational research. There is no experiments done. Most of us from science class imagine that all the studies we hear about on the news are interventional. You combine two chemicals, you get a color change, you take a group of rats, you give them more sugar or more fat, and you see what happens.
Dr. Saladino
You take a group of humans and you give them a drug and you see what happens. This isn't what this IRC report is referring to. There have been studies done in which people have replaced carbohydrates with red meat. And in fact, those studies do not show any harm for red meat. They show decreasing CRP and no changes in other markers of inflammation. But was that an interventional study included in this decision? No. No interventional studies were included in this decision.
Dr. Saladino
They were all epidemiology, which is survey-based research. And so what these researchers did was look at 14 different types of, 14 different studies. And all of these studies were either prospective or retrospective cohort study. So they take a group of people and they give them a survey. And they say, how much red meat did you eat over the last 10 or 15 years? And then they looked to see how healthy these people are and they try and correlate those two. Or they'll take a cohort of people and say how much red meat you eat now and then follow them moving forward for 10 or 15 years and see how many of them develop health problems. And at first glance, that sounds reasonable, right?
Dr. Saladino
Except here's the problem. Epidemiology, observational studies can only tell us about correlation. You can't make a causative inference from that because just because somebody eats more red meat, it doesn't mean that the red meat caused the problems.
Allan
I think you had a really good example. You had a really good example in the book about divorce rate in Maine.
Dr. Saladino
Yeah, there's a great website called SpuriousCorrelations.com, where people can see these sort of the hilarity that ensues when you try and connect correlation with causation. Many things correlate. The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita margarine consumption over the last eight or nine years to a very, very high degree. Does that mean that as people ate less margarine, they got divorced less? No, but it makes absolutely no sense. But you can correlate these two things.
Dr. Saladino
You can also correlate things like deaths by getting tangled in the bedsheets with per capita cheese consumption and the number of movies Nicolas Cage has appeared in with, I think something with pool drownings or something. You know. You can correlate all kinds of things that don't have any connection. And in the case of red meat, you've already really alluded to the problem that for the last 70 years the narrative has been fat is bad for you, red meat is bad for you. So who eats red meat over the last 70 years?
Dr. Saladino
People that are rebels people that also probably are less likely to go in the sun, less likely to play tennis on a Tuesday morning, less likely go to their doctor to get a colonoscopy or mammograms, less likely to get pap smears, less likely to do other types of health behaviors. Exercise, meditate. These are just these are the types of things more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol.
Dr. Saladino
These are the type of things that are very hard for epidemiology to control for. But the people who eat red meat consistently do worse in the United States because they are the people who are rebels. In the book, I call them the James Dean types. And the converse is also true. Who has eaten more vegetables over the last 70 years?
Dr. Saladino
Well, it's the people that I gave a high five to at the beginning of this podcast who are making intentional choices with regard to their diet. Now, they're also doing other healthy things. You don't just listen to health advice on diet, you also listen to health advice on exercise and go out in the sun and you do other things that are good for you. You're more likely to be of a higher socioeconomic status because you have the ability to do those things.
Dr. Saladino
So it creates this really confounded story regarding what are these studies actually telling us. But really the narrative doesn't end here. If you look at those 14 studies considered by the IARC, are you ready for this, only 8 of the 14 to start with, 8 of the 14 did not show any association between red meat and cancer. And if people are just kind of like scratching their head right now, OK, so 8 of the 14 studies showed no association between red meat and cancer. Granted, these are epidemiology. But 8 of the 14 association, the majority of the studies, no association between red meat and cancer.
Dr. Saladino
6 of the 14 showed association between red meat and cancer. But of that six, five of them, that's association was not statistically significant. So not only is epidemiology confounded by these biases and does it not allow us to make a causative inference from correlation if we do the math and the correlation is not even statistically significant, we can't even actually say that it's a real correlation.
Dr. Saladino
It could be due to other errors. It's not a big enough difference. So what I'm saying is that 1 of the 14 studies, 1, showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And we can dig into that one study even further and say, what was that one study done? That one study was done in a population of Seventh Day Adventists, which is a religious group that shuns meat. So in that group, the people that eat meat are really going to be rebels because the rebels not only at a social level, the rebels at a religious level, and the whole Zygi, the whole environment of a Seventh Day Adventist community is a group that's mainly vegetarian.
Dr. Saladino
And if you're eating meat in that community, you are definitely an outlier and definitely sort of bucking other health norms. Likely they found that the people who ate more red meat in that study were also much more likely to be obese. This is the problem with epidemiology studies. Was it the obesity that led to more cancer or was it the red meat? Well, the study can't say, which is why you have to do interventional research. And as I said, there are many studies that have been done with red meat that are interventional.
Dr. Saladino
Take a group of people, give them more red meat, see what happens. They don't show any problems, no inflammation. It's very hard to study people at an international level for cancer. You'd have to give people more red meat for years and years. The epidemiologist is done for years. But at a molecular level, we can see that giving people more red meat does not. Lead to increases in inflammatory markers, which is what you would expect if it were going to trigger a cancer, it was going to do something bad if it's going to trigger a cancer.
Dr. Saladino
But this is really what the notion that red meat is bad for humans is based on. Badly done epidemiology in which 8 of 14 studies showed no correlation, 5 of 6 not statistically significant. Only 1 of 14 showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And in that study, it was badly confounded by unhealthy user bias. The last thing I'll say here to really drive this point home is if you look at epidemiology, again it's all flawed, none of it's perfect. But you can look at epidemiology from other countries like Asia, and you don't see the same correlation that you do in the West because the narrative is different there.
Dr. Saladino
There's very large epidemiology studies from Asia looking at over 180,000. Another one is 220,000 individuals followed for 5 to 15 years. And where they find the men who ate more red meat had less cardiovascular disease, the women who ate more red meat had less cancer. But they didn't think about that study at the IRC. and no one can explain that the only way then you could say is what? Red meat is good for Asians but bad for Westerners. That makes absolutely no sense. That's silly. It's possible. But that's not even that's really not a hypothesis anyone is going to entertain.
Dr. Saladino
The more plausible explanation is that the narrative is different. In Asia, We know this red meat is associated with athletes. So who eats more red meat? The same people that eat more vegetables in the US, the people that are more likely to exercise, they have more financial resources. The more people, people that are more likely to do things, go see their doctor, less likely to smoke, less likely to be obese because they have more of an investment in their health.
Dr. Saladino
So this is really how we get misled about red meat and cancer, red meat and heart disease, red meat and longevity. It's all the same story over and over. And I go through all of these in the book and debunk these myths one by one and give tons of references. The book has over 650 references. And I show, hey these things you've been told you've been misled. These are based on observational epidemiology. And when I have it, which is most of the time I share interventional studies with argue, which argue completely against it and say, hey, look, this is much more valid.
Dr. Saladino
Very savvy listeners will know that in 2019, another study came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine that was super controversial. A separate group of researchers looked at the IARCs findings in 2018 and said, that's hogwash. You guys excluded all these studies. You didn't weigh them properly. You didn't use any interventional studies. In the Animals of Internal Medicine. Two studies came out in 2019 saying red meat is not bad for humans. We're going to look at this evidence again. Red meat is not bad for humans, but we get this like propaganda in our heads. And now we're so scared. We're fearful as humans.
Dr. Saladino
Nobody wants to die early. Everybody wants to see their grandkids grow up. We don't know what to do. And I think as humans, it's been part of our consciousness for 70 years. And we suddenly are just it's very hard to get it out of our out of our out of our paradigm, out of our perspective and really look at the data. And we have Ancel Keys and originally very bad epidemiology from the 1970s to think that that's a whole separate story.
Allan
Yes, it is. Now, one of the other things I found kind of fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, was that the advice at one time was to tear your kale and let it sit for about 10 minutes. So the toxicity that would happen would be at the highest level. So we would get this hormesis this effect from the kale, and it makes it that much better for us. I can't tell you how many times I tore the kale and let it sit for 10 minutes before I ate it. Can we talk a little bit about plant toxins and why you know, that kind of hormesis might not be what we actually really need.
Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is a little bit of a complex point, but I'll try and break it down in the simplest terms for me. Hormesis is a word that basically means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger up to a point until it kills you. Hopefully most of your listeners have seen The Princess Bride where Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and they're having this battle with iocane powder and maybe people haven't. But he says, you know, he give he says he gives them two cups of water to put iocane powder in one of these cups. And it's a poison. It's obviously a fictitious poison. And I'm going to, you get to choose, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and saying, you choose which one.
Dr. Saladino
And he puts it in both, right, and they both drink, and so the Sicilian dies and he goes, Oh, how did you you tricked me. He said, Yeah, I tricked you. I put it in both. I've been slowly developing this this the strength to iocane powder over the years. That's how hormones this is supposed to work. But it doesn't quite work like that. You know, a little bit of poison is supposed to make you a little stronger. But it does and it doesn't. So here's the problem. The concept of hormesis, I believe, conflated between what I call in the book environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.
Dr. Saladino
Environmental hormesis, this is a pretty well-established concept. It's the idea that a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of heat stress, like a sauna, cold plunge, ketosis. These are environmental hermetic, so not molecules, they're experiences. I could have also called it experimental hormesis, but these are things that we encounter in our life that our ancestors always encountered fasting, starvation for a short amount of time, leading to ketosis.
Dr. Saladino
These are things that we've always encountered evolutionarily that cause our body of stress going to the gym and lifting weights, going for a walk, going for a jog. These are hormesis. Exercise is a experiential or environmental hermetic. A little bit of that makes you it gets a little bit of a toxin. You know, that if you lift weights too much, you're going to be sore. If you go out in the sun too much, it's going to you're going to feel it. You go in the sauna, you're like, whoa, that was intense, right?
Dr. Saladino
You feel it. It causes a little stress, but what is your body do in response to that stress? It gets stronger. Anyone who's ever exercised to lose weight or lifting weights and seen their muscles grow, will realize the stress makes you stronger. Now, at a certain point, it's going to break you. If you lift too much weight, you're just going to tear the muscle or break a bone. If you run too much, you're going to stress fracture, etc. But there is a concept that a little bit of a poison makes you stronger when it comes to experience or environment.
Dr. Saladino
Now we have applied this concept to plant molecules incorrectly, I believe. And the reason it's incorrect is we've forgotten that molecules come with side effects. If you look at the research on Sulforaphane for instance, which is the glucose scintillate, which becomes an Isothiocyanate, in kale when you when you rip it up, it has been shown to increase glutathione in the human body. But it's also been shown to do many other negative things that we're never told about. It's just like when any of the listeners go to the pharmacy and you get a prescription for a medication. That medication comes with a package insert, in the package insert tells you, hey, this medicine is metoprolol or lisinopril or a statin. And I hope that, I don't prescribe those medications much at all in my practice anymore. And I hope that most of your listeners are healthy enough to have avoided them.
Dr. Saladino
But we all know this. If you go to a pharmacy and get a medication that comes with side effects, antibiotic, whatever, all the molecules that are foreign to human biology have this. They all have it. sulforaphane has it, curcumin has it, resveratrol has it. All of these plant molecules, we've been told are so good for us also have package inserts, but we're never handed them because they're not considered to be pharmaceuticals. But they are.
Dr. Saladino
They are definitely pharmaceuticals. And many plant molecules are used and developed into drugs. Most of the chemotherapy that we use for cancer is from plants, paclitaxel, etc. There's lots of chemotherapy from plants. Well. In the case of chemotherapy, it's pretty clear the chemotherapy might kill some cancer cells, but it's also going to kill your cells and chemotherapy has very clear bad side effects. But it's the same with other plant molecules.
Dr. Saladino
So if the plant molecules have a bad side effect in the case of sulforaphane that Isothiocyanate in the kale you're eating, that one has a side effect of inhibiting the absorption of iodine at the level of your thyroid and causing damage to cellular membranes and oxidizing your DNA, which can also lead to problems and cancers. And people who have eaten too much kale may also get GI effects, you know, gas bloating or other issues. And so it's pretty clear that sulforaphane or other compounds in these vegetables are also harming our gut.
Dr. Saladino
But we're never told about those things. We're only told these are good for you. Eat more of this. Well, it's pretty clear those are plant toxins. We're told they're antioxidants, but they're not. They're pro-oxidants. And they cause our body to increase its own endogenous antioxidants.
Dr. Saladino
But here's the kicker. You don't need any more antioxidants if you are doing the environmental hormesis, if you are doing experiential hormesis, exercise, cold plumbing, sauna, being in the sun at a healthy level, fasting occasionally. There are many good studies that I show in the book that suggest vegetables don't do anything extra for you from an antioxidant perspective. There are many studies in the book that I share in reference that show inclusion of massive amounts of fruits and vegetables don't improve markers of oxidative stress, inflammation or DNA damage.
Dr. Saladino
And what they do do is cause you all these harm on the back end. They cause all this collateral damage because of the side effects. So when you're ripping that kale, you're thinking I'm getting, quote, antioxidants. Well, no. Sulforaphane is a pro-oxidant and it's very clearly a plant defense molecule. It doesn't participate directly in any human biochemistry. Sulforaphane causes free radical production, Sulforaphane causes oxidative stress. You can get it to bump up your glutathione a little bit, which is this endogenous antioxidant.
Dr. Saladino
But you can also bump your glutathione, this molecular policeman in the human body by doing cold plunge, by doing sauna, by doing exercise. And then you won't have any of the side effects from the so forth thing and you'll probably have a lot less gas and your thyroid will be much healthier in the long run. So this is essentially what I'm saying here. There's a real difference between molecular hormesis and environmental hormesis, and we don't need plant molecules to be optimal.
Dr. Saladino
That's been demonstrated over and over and over. And we must not forget the side effects that these molecules have in human physiology. And that, I fear, is where many people are suffering unnecessarily.
Allan
Yeah, I think one of the points I had early on when the Carnivore diet started getting a little bit more popular is just like ketosis. They come forward with an idea. And everybody thinks of the keto diet now as the bacon diet, people that are going to keep the “bacon! bacon!” And yes, you can have bacon, but not just bacon. Something else, please. A lot of people that are in carnivore are doing something very similar, like 30 days, just eating rib-eye steaks or they'll go 30 days just eating bacon. And yeah, they lose weight. They say they feel great because they do get into ketosis, but they're not getting everything they need either. There's a right way and a wrong way to do Carnivore.
Dr. Saladino
Yeah. And I think it goes back to what we spoke about earlier. Just how did our ancestors do it, both out of respect for the animal and just from an environmental sort of caloric perspective. They ate the animal nose to tail. So I'm a really big advocate for this. This is understanding that you cannot just eat steaks and be on a carnivore diet in a healthy way that's going to cause a folate deficiency.
Dr. Saladino
So I talked about all these micronutrients earlier in the podcast and they are found throughout the animal. A cow is not just animal meat all through the cow. A cow has a liver and a stomach and a spleen and heart and a kidney and intestines. And you know what most of us will think of it is gross. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in developing some adjuncts to help people get more organs in their diet, which I'll talk about in a moment, but it's something that our ancestors have always done. And so anyone that's listening to this, that's from an ethnic background, your family probably ate heart or liver or kidney or spleen.
Dr. Saladino
And, you know, maybe as a kid, you were like, I don't know about that, but it's relished by indigenous people. Liver is sacred. It's not even touched by human hands in a lot of cultures. It's the first thing you eat. If we look at the way animals who are carnivorous eat other animals, they always go for the viscera first, they'll eat the liver. And it sounds morbid, but it's like, hey, look, we're just trying to appreciate the sacrifice that animal has made for us and get all the nutrients we can. I've seen video of ORCA's eating sharks and they just eat the liver. They don't eat the animal meat. They just eat the liver out of the shark. All these animals realize the liver and these other organs are super beneficial for nutrients.
Dr. Saladino
The liver is a very rich place for folate, choline, vitamin K2, Riboflavin. If listeners are unsure of this, I'll ask them the question, where do you get your riboflavin? I think riboflavin is the most commonly deficient nutrient in human populations in 2020 that no one knows about. Vitamin B2, you really can't get it from plants and you can't get it from muscle meat in enough quantity, but you can get it from the heart or liver.
Dr. Saladino
So and I realize this is a very hard thing. This is probably the biggest piece for people that's challenging is how do I eat organ meats. So it's so exciting to be able to I wanted to build a company to help people do this. This company is it launched at the beginning of August and this podcast is coming out later in August. It's called Heart and Soil, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. What we do is we take organs from grass-fed grass, finished animals in New Zealand, and we desiccate them with low temperature, dehydrate them and we encapsulate them into a pill. We're basically making organ meat pills to help people get the organs. If they don't want to eat the liver.
Dr. Saladino
I think the best thing is to eat real liver or not even. It's not that the pills aren't real liver. Just the best thing is to eat fresh liver or fresh heart. But if you can't do that, that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about being able to do this for people in this business at Heart and Soil is to get them desiccated organ pills. But there's a real option for people now because you can take them in a pill that's been low temperature hydrated to get the organs.
Dr. Saladino
But if you're not eating the organs, whether you're eating plants or not, you're missing out on nutrients. It's not just for carnivores. They're for everyone. It's for you and your grandma and your kids. My sister has a two and a half-year-old and an eight-month-old, and both of them get these organ meat pills. She just opens them up and sprinkles them on the food, mixes it with hamburger. Neither of them can swallow a pill, but she can open the pill and sprinkle the powder onto something and put it mixed in with ground beef for Luke, my nephew and Michaela.
Dr. Saladino
And it works great. And they get these nutrients. But that's what kids need and that's what adults need. Even if you're eating plants, you still are not getting enough choline. You're still not getting enough folate. You're still not getting enough riboflavin. What about zinc? What about copper? What about selenium? What about manganese or about boron? What about K2? There's so rich in the organ meats.
Dr. Saladino
The other piece of this equation is methionine and Glycine. And this comes in with collagen. Collagen is thankfully specifically kind of quote, an organ meat that has become much more in vogue recently. People are all about bone broth. They understand the incredible benefits of this for skin, hair and nails health. But a lot of people in the Carnivore world don't even do bone broth. They just eat steak and you need to get the connective tissue.
Dr. Saladino
So one of my favorite things to do every day is to make bone broth. I don't make it every day, but I eat it every day and I make it just by putting bones and tendons in an instant pot and then drinking that it gets collagenous and kind of jelly in the fridge. And then you're getting tendons. Well, the tendons are rich in glycine, it's an amino acid that complements with thymine and which is rich in muscle meat.
Dr. Saladino
And so together these helper biochemistry run in the best way to get too much thiamine without enough glycine. And there's a real problem in human biochemistry. So but again, it all works when you eat like your ancestors. If you eat the animal nose to tail, there are no nutrient deficiencies that will develop in humans. So I will repeat that, because that's a very important statement. Eating animals nose to tail provides humans with all of the nutrients they need to thrive. End of story, full stop, period. That's it. That's why it was so easy for our ancestors if they had to go hunt and gather a blueberry, a little bit of this route, a little bit of that plant to get all their nutrients. It's really hard. I don't know if anyone's done a plant based diet, but I was vegan for seven months. I was Rovi for seven months. About fifteen years ago. I had to work so hard to get all the nutrients I needed.
Dr. Saladino
Where do you get your zinc, pumpkin seeds? Well, I don't really like pumpkin seeds. Like that's the only source of zinc I could find in any appreciable quantity on a plant-based diet. So to get adequacy on a plant-based diet, you have to eat 37 different foods that are never all in season at the same time that never would have grown together at one time. You can't get all the nutrition you need from eating plants, period.
Dr. Saladino
All the nutrients I mentioned earlier and even just to get basic nutrients, you have to eat twenty-five different plants that never occurred together on the face of the earth. Evolutionarily it's really hard. You want to get all the nutrients you need eating animals, eat a steak, add some liver, you're pretty much done. Add some bone broth steak and liver. Now you can add other things for variety, but you'll get everything you need. The first thing people think about is vitamin C, and I address this in the book.
Dr. Saladino
There's plenty of vitamin C in animal foods that are fresh. We know that animal meat has vitamin C, animal organs have more vitamin C than the muscle meat. No one has gotten scurvy eating animal foods when they're fresh. This doesn't happen. There are thousands of people doing this. I don't believe vitamin C, I don't have scurvy, but vitamin C level is just fine. You can get vitamin C in whole foods. That's a whole other rabbit hole.
Dr. Saladino
But even beyond vitamin C, you don't need fiber. I address that myth in the book. You can definitely poop without fiber and multiple poop, even better without fiber. So again, this leads us to so many of these rabbit hole, whichever one you want, but eating from the nose to tail is so critical, and that's why I think the supplements can be helpful at heart and soil or just eating the organ meats that you get from a good farm is critical along with bone broth. And the only other thing I'll say here is that a carnivore diet also doesn't have to be ketotic. I think that low carbohydrate states would have happened. I think humans would have been in ketosis absolutely frequently, but I don't think we were in ketosis all the time.
Dr. Saladino
And so if ketosis is a stumbling block for you know, that in the book I talk about tier one through five carnivore diets and have a stepping stone. And in the Tier 1 diet, I outline which plant foods are the most toxic and which plant foods are the least toxic. And I think the least toxic plant foods are the fruit. They're the part of the plant that the plant wants you to eat. So things like squash or avocado or olives or berries or even apples and oranges, I think these are reasonable for most people.
Dr. Saladino
And you can get carbohydrates in your diet on a, quote, animal-based diet on a Carnivore ish type diet. So don't fear this. If ketosis is scary, if you want to do a ketogenic diet, you absolutely can. I found for myself and most people, cycling in carbohydrates in the form of low toxicity fruit works best. It's probably what our ancestors would have done and things like Honey, so raw, organic honey is a great adjunct that people think about all the sugar.
Dr. Saladino
I have a podcast. It's called Fundamental Health. I've addressed all this on the podcast. We talk about it in the book. You don't want to overeat fructose and fruit, but reasonable amounts look pretty darn safe for humans. You know, if you're eating less than seventy-five grams of fructose a day, which is a lot of fruit, your liver can handle it just fine. You'll be fine. That's even a very large amount. Most people don't get more than twenty or thirty grams of fructose a day.
Dr. Saladino
And so reasonable intakes of fruit and honey, totally safe for humans, not type of naturally occurring sugar is not bad for us. You don't have to fear it in any way, shape or form.
Allan
Dr. Saladino, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
Dr. Saladino
So I think that you need to understand food. Food is a big lever, right? So that's what we've been talking about this whole time. Understand what foods nourish your body and understand what foods harm your body or are causing problems for your body.
Dr. Saladino
So that's what the book is about. And again, it's not it's not about convincing the world to stop eating plants. It's about helping people understand that animal foods, red meat critically vital for humans, very nutritious, not harmful, wrongly vilified, plant foods exist on a toxicity spectrum, can be harmful for a lot of people. Eat the least toxic ones if you need variety, color, flavor. But understanding which foods help your body thrive will be the first step.
Dr. Saladino
That's critical. And then at the end of the book, I also talk about how to live like our ancestors. And we've hinted at this previously with our discussions of environmental hormesis. It's also sunlight, community, cold plunging, sauna, exercise outside, occasional fasting. These are all normal things. I think if you do those things. And then the third piece for me would be doing something that you care about finding meaning in your own life.
Dr. Saladino
And I'm so grateful to be able to do this work. It's it's been a challenging road for me because so many of these ideas are so controversial. But I really believe that this knowledge needs to be out there. There are a lot of people who are being misled and their lives are suffering because of it. And so doing something that you find meaningful in your life is probably the third critical piece.
Allan
Cool. Well, thank you. And if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Carnivore Code and that supplement company you were talking about, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Saladino
So the book is TheCarnivorecodebook.com. That's the website. You can check it out. It's out now. It's, I imagine I really think it's going to sell really well and hopefully we're going to affect a lot of lives positively. The website for my company, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. So heartandsoilsupplements.com, you can find all those organ pills if you want to include more liver or bone marrow or heart or spleen, any of the organs in your diet. We've got them on there for you. And my website is Carnivoremd.com.
Allan
So you could go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/448 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Saladino, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.
Dr. Saladino
It's my pleasure.
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Thank you!
Another episode you may enjoy
Less...
July 27, 2020
- in guest/interview , health , mindset by allan
How to survive and thrive when bad things happen – Dr. Jim Taylor
With all that's going on in the world, we need to have strategies and tactics to deal with the stress and anxiety. Dr. Jim Taylor gives us those tools in his new book, How to Survive and Thrive When Bad Things Happen.
Transcript
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Dr. Taylor, welcome to 40+ Fitness. [00:02:29.670] – Dr. Taylor
Thanks. Thanks very much for inviting me on. I think it'll be a lot of fun. [00:02:33.120] – Allan
Yes, well, the topic we're talking about wouldn't necessarily be considered fun, but I think it's a really important topic for us to get in right now, particularly when you consider what stress does to our health. The name of the book you have is called How to Survive and Thrive When Bad Things Happen, Nine Steps to Cultivating an Opportunity Mindset in a Crisis. And, you know, going through the book, you really did lay out a lot of tools and really a kind of, in my mind, a good framework for us to think about problems. [00:03:04.920] – Allan
And, you know, we can talk about him in terms of crisis, which is what this is about. But I think a lot of times just are, some of our day to day issues, things that we just struggle with. In many cases, if we're if we are cultivating this opportunity mindset you talk about in the book, I think we're just gonna be in a better place all together. [00:03:24.560] – Dr. Taylor
For sure, and one thing I emphasize in the book is that there are crises both small and large, and no doubt that we are experiencing some very large ones at this moment in the U.S. and around the world. But every day we experience as adults and young people, different levels of crises and small ones as well that impact us. And the more we can practice a good approach to the little crises, the better prepared we will be for handling the big crises. [00:03:54.130] – Allan
Yes. It was. It was funny, I my dog woke me up. She she had to go and had my coffee and was like, look, you know, the rule. Let me have my coffee, cup of coffee, and then I'll be, I'll take you out. Well, she couldn't wait. She's like, no, we're going. So I poured myself a cup and I'm walking out of the door. And as I walk out the apartment, I hear clang. And I know that the gates now closed and I didn't bring my keys and everybody's asleep. You know, my wife's asleep and everyone in the building's asleep. [00:04:24.160] – Allan
So I sat outside for two hours waiting for someone to come out or for my wife to realize I was gone. But, you know, in the instant it happened, you know, your brain just kind of wants to fire up, you know, all the anger stuff, all the things that are actually going to make you not solve the problem. They just seem to want to bubble up intensely at that first moment. [00:04:50.250] – Dr. Taylor
Right. Well, it's quite interesting because what I call the crisis mentality is really our primitive reaction to perceived threats. But what we're seeing now in modern times versus on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago when we first evolved into human beings, Homo sapiens, is that what worked then doesn't work now. And so, as an example, our greatest instinct is to survive. And I'm guessing that getting locked out of your building wasn't really a threat to your survival, but you reacted in much the same way. Your fight or flight reaction got triggered and you felt some very strong emotions and maybe you felt this need immediate need to figure it out and resolve the crisis, which was the perceived threat. But it sounds like you were able to work through that. [00:05:44.310] – Allan
Well, I just decided I was I was relegated to where I was relegated. And I may as well just sit there comfortably and hang out with my dog. Worse things could happen. You know, there's a lot going on in the United States with COVID, with, you know, the kind of racial inequity conversation and the political aspects of what's going on in The United States. There's like three crises, all kind of combined and overlapping and interlaying.It's just really tough time. What are some of your thoughts on what you're seeing as far as your responses and you know just where we basically are with that? [00:06:28.580] – Dr. Taylor
Sure. Well, there's no doubt that we are experiencing a perfect storm of crises and it's so many levels. And in my book, I talk about many different types of crises that are applied here. We've got personal crises, health crises, safety crises, financial economic crises, governmental crises, societal, environmental, all these things, all these different types of crises are rolled up into these three really substantial crises that are affecting our lives. [00:06:57.980] – Dr. Taylor
And what that simply does is turn up the volume on our reactions to the crisis. And so I'm starting to see in my practice as well as just in my life. Higher levels of stress, more emotionality, more anger, frustration, sadness, despair. So certainly, especially these days, what I consider to be some poor decision making when it comes to how best to deal with some of these crises, particularly with COVID. And at the same time, I want to be fair that we're also seeing some really wonderful things that people coming together, people supporting each other, and a lot of inspiration. A lot of pride. And so as with any kind of crisis, this perfect storm of crises is bringing out the best in us, the best in humanity, and also some of the worst of humanity. [00:07:48.420] – Allan
Yeah, and I think that kind of blends in to kind of the core tenet of what your book is about is that, you know, we we don't necessarily want to just go into all of these crises and in every crises and just think in terms of how do I survive. Typically, these crises also open up opportunities for us if we have the right mindset. Can you talk about the survival rival conversation? And then you know how that how that blends into our mentality? [00:08:18.560] – Dr. Taylor
Absolutely. So S.A., as I mentioned earlier, survival is our most important instinct because if we can't survive, then we're not gonna pass on our genes and property species and keep human beings going, continue to move forward and survive in the world. And this has been wired into us since we climbed out of the primordial muck millions and millions of years ago. And and it is such a powerful drive. So when whenever we perceive a situation as a threat to our survival, it triggers this cascade of reactions. [00:08:48.650] – Dr. Taylor
And let me Allan, let me give you a very brief neuroanatomy lesson here, that this part of the brain in what's called a primitive brain is the part is called the amygdala. And it's where all information throve in all information flows through. And what it does, it it's responsible for creating emotional reactions and behavioral reactions to a perceived threat to our survival. And so, as I mentioned earlier, our instincts are survival, which when our survival is threatened, it causes this reaction of fight or flight. [00:09:21.890] – Dr. Taylor
We can either attack a thing to survive or we can run away from it. And whats interesting is on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago, threats, crises were were very immediate and very tangible. So it might be a saber tooth tiger, or a rival tribe with a really big club. And the fact is, is that we didn't have time to deliberate to think about what's the best plan of action here, because if we did, we were already dead or beaten. [00:09:48.470] – Dr. Taylor
And so we created this instant change in us psychologically, emotionally, physiologically and then behaviorally. And so that served us very well for a very long time and ensured our survival. But there's this other part of us that's almost instinctive as well, and it's being able to thrive and the word thrival. By the way, I didn't think it was a real word at first, but it actually is. I looked it up. [00:10:12.730] – Allan
My spell doesn't like it for sure. [00:10:15.340] – Dr. Taylor
Oh, really? OK. Very good. And so there is also this part of us that wants to thrive. And it's what's really created advancement through all of human history. It makes us want to get up in the morning and do marathons or triathlons or learn to play the piano or to develop the Internet or whatever it might be. So there's the other part of us, but it's not quite as primitive or primal or as immediate because you cannot thrive, you'll still survive. [00:10:45.120] – Dr. Taylor
But as evolved beings, we have this side of us that drives us to do more than just to survive. And so that primitive mindset, the amygdala creates what I call a crisis mentality. And the other side of that was what I call an opportunity mindset. And again, little more neuroanatomy class here. That is a part of the brain. Well, first of all, we have this thing on top of our of our heads, the separate us from animals. And it's called the cerebral cortex. [00:11:13.860] – Dr. Taylor
It basically involves our ability to think. And a part of that cerebral cortex is the front of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And you're probably familiar with the phrase executive functioning. It's a big thing with kids in development these days and basically executive functioning. And the prefrontal cortex is associated with making decisions, identifying options and choices, weighing risk rewards, looking at future versus immediate benefit. [00:11:39.580] – Dr. Taylor
And this is the side this involved with the thrival part of us. And what's really important, understand these days is that crises then back in the day in primitive times are very different than crises now. So, again, the crises in primitive times were very immediate, clear and tangible, and they required immediate action. But, Allan, modern crises are very different, particularly if you think about COVID, racial inequities, political strife. They're often unforeseeable. They're often not predictable. They're not easily understandable because clearly there's a lot we don't know about COVID. Also, they're often distant and indirect. [00:12:14.130] – Dr. Taylor
So a lot of us haven't been much affected by by COVID. And yet we're required to do a lot of things that are necessary to prevent it from spreading. Also with COVID, as we're learning with the spread of COVID around the country, the crisis is delayed and it's lingering. And the reality is that the health and the economic crisis caused by COVID is going to last for a very long time. [00:12:38.770] – Dr. Taylor
And then another really challenging part of it, Allan, is that there's not a lot we can do to get rid of COVID. We can't fight COVID and we can't exactly flee COVID. Yes, we can lock ourselves in our houses, but it's still there. So the challenge here is that what worked so well for our survival back in primitive times when faced the crisis no longer works now because we can't fight and we can't flee. And so that then requires a more evolved reaction.And that's where the opportunity mindset comes in that engages the prefrontal cortex and our executive functioning.
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[00:15:28.370] – AllanYou know, as COVID came about. I was. I'm here in Panama, and I bought a gym last June and I've been working for nine months, almost nine months to get the gym up to my standard. You know, I'm buying new equipment, getting painted, organizing all these different things. And I just made my last purchase of what I felt was necessary to kind of have the gym ready, make it gym ready anyway. And then COVID. And in Panama, they're taking this a lot more serious than they are in most parts of the United States because they just don't have the medical facilities to deal with a massive outbreak. They just don't. It could it could handle it if outbreak the way that it would just naturally do it. [00:16:12.890] – Allan
So they're shut down here was much more dramatic and draconian than anything in the United States. So not not belittling that, as any kind of law. This is definitely not fun. But, you know, immediately it was it was this frustration that just overtook me. And, you know, I'll admit my reactions for the first two months of this outbreak were they were negative. You know, I went down that as you put the book, the negative emotional chain.Can you talk to us about that reaction? The frustration that we feel, particularly on these drawn out crises and then what we can actually do about it? [00:16:51.260] – Dr. Taylor
Sure, sure. Well, before we do that, I'd like to sort of complete my thoughts a little bit on the opportunity mindset and how that's different from this sort of urgency and the intensity of the crisis mentality. Is that OK? [00:17:01.810] – Allan
Sure, sure. Sure. Absolutely. [00:17:03.210] – Dr. Taylor
Yeah. So an opportunity mindset is obviously much more positive orientation. It's a can do orientation, it's like we're in this crisis. It sucks. But how do we deal with it in a positive way? So that's the first thing versus like, oh my gosh, it's the worst thing in the world. Is it so bad? Which is the crisis mentality. Second of all, with engaging executive functioning in the prefrontal cortex, it's creating a staying calm, not freaking out and being very purposeful and deliberate in how we're going to respond. [00:17:31.930] – Dr. Taylor
So instead, I make a distinction between reacting, which is sort of this immediate, visceral reaction and a response, which is for me, very, very deliberate, very thoughtful, very purposeful. And in some key components to the opportunity mindset is, first of all, our values. And so basically what happens in a crisis is our world is rocked. The ground on which we stand is no longer stable. And that's especially true in the case of a hurricane, an earthquake and so on. [00:18:02.700] – Dr. Taylor
So really going back to what do we value and what's important to us that helps that can help disconnect away from them and the amygdala and get the information flowing to the prefrontal cortex. Also, our attitudes are really important. Am I going to be a victim here or am I going to take ownership? And so that's really important as well. So basically an opportunity mindset is about having a clear understanding of what we're dealing with in a crisis and then having a method in the madness, because what a crisis creates is madness. [00:18:33.220] – Dr. Taylor
And if you can have a method through it, then you're going to deal with it much more effectively. And lastly is being decisive. And there's a lot of uncertainty, Allan, with respect to a crisis, as you well know, when's it going to start? When's it going to end? When can we move on to phase two or phase three? When can we reopen? And it's important to be decisive, as decisive as you can, and taking the actions that you believe will help you get through the crisis. So any follow up before I move on to the frustration and the negative mode? [00:19:01.670] – Allan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I you know, the way I kind of put this or thought about this was I locked myself out. You know, what are the ways that I'm going to be able to get back in because I can't I can't go through the gate by myself. It's locked. And there's no other way into my apartment. There's no other key. So I just have to wait for one of three things I kind of already mapped out. OK, either I'm going to hear my wife come out on the patio that overlooks where I'm sitting. So I'm listening for the sliding glass doors to open or someone's going to come out of the building, or three if a friend drives by or rides by on their bike. I can have them Facebook message my wife and let her know that I'm locked out. So I had three solutions that I'm basically working towards. And then also just in my head thinking, you know, petting a dog is stress relieving and, you know, we're going to have some hangout time whether she likes it or not, that's what we're going to do. [00:19:55.740] – Allan
And I knew, OK, there's some things I've got an appointment, you know, I might be late for or might not make. And I'll just have to apologize because it's outside my control at this point. So for me, it was it was kind of a little bit of acceptance. But then I did have some at least some positive actions that I could take during that period of time while I was I was waiting for the crisis to end. And thankfully, my neighbor Bay, he came out and let me in. He was going to charge me dollar for it. But he did let me in. [00:20:26.510] – Allan
And so it was over, you know, but had I gone through that whole, like I said, the frustration, the negative emotional shame that I found myself doing with COVID, you know, it wouldn't have been as productive and I wouldn't have I wouldn't be talking about it fondly. I guess that's the best way to say it. [00:20:44.460] – Dr. Taylor
Right. And I just want to point out a couple of key things that you did very well. Firstly, you accepted that which you couldn't control. That is, you are locked out. That is reality. And to rage against the machine of reality is a very fruitless and frustrating experience. Second of all, you controlled what you could control. You were looking for a friend to ride by on a bike. You pet your dog, you relax. You drank your coffee and you did what you could. [00:21:10.380] – Dr. Taylor
And so so those are some really positive steps. And what was key about that is that frustration is a strange emotion, because when I asked people if frustration is a good or a bad emotion, they say it's a horrible emotion. It feels bad, but it's actually a really important emotion evolutionarily, because when you're frustrated, if you think about we all know what frustrated means, what it feels like, it's like, oh, my gosh, I'm stuck. [00:21:35.460] – Dr. Taylor
But few people really understand what frustration, what causes it. So basically with frustration, what causes frustration is when you're heading down a path toward a goal and then a giant gate falls in your path or a boulder or whatever you want to say. So your path is blocked. So that causes frustration. So frustration starts out as a good emotion, Allan, because when you're frustrated, what's your initial motivation? To clear the path toward your goal? The problem is, is that initially when you're frustrated, you typically just do more of the same harder. [00:22:10.540] – Dr. Taylor
And that violates the law of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And so if it's not that easy to remove that gate or that boulder, then you're going to get more frustrated. And that leads to the second part of my negative emotional chain, which is anger. Now, again, I ask the question of people, is anger a good or a bad emotion? Well, people say it's a terrible emotion, it feels horrible. But it's actually evolutionarily a good emotional initially, because when you're angry again, it motivates you to clear the path toward your goal. [00:22:45.570] – Dr. Taylor
The problem, Alan, is that when you're angry, One, is you can't think clearly, and two, you can't focus effectively. So typically what happens when you're angry is this is sort of frenetic attempt to clear the path. And again, that doesn't work very well. The real challenge is the third chip piece or link in the chain, the negative emotional chain, and that's despair. [00:23:11.900] – Dr. Taylor
And this is not a trick question. This is this is a bad emotion. Because as soon as you despair, you give up. And as soon as you give up, you lose any chance of resolving the crisis. Then you become a total victim. And so the goal is to stop at frustration, easy to get to anger. It's hard to come back from anger. And it's really hard to come back from despair. [00:23:37.750] – Dr. Taylor
But if you can master the frustration and this is something I do a great deal in with my client, tell us, what do you do when you're faced with a frustrating situation? And so a couple of key steps. First is take a break. As long as you stay in the situation that's causing you the frustration, you're going to stay frustrated. Let's use your example of of being locked out of your apartment building. If you stand there, you probably continue to be frustrated. [00:24:05.590] – Dr. Taylor
So the best thing to do is take a walk around the block with your dog, get some physical distance, which creates emotional distance, which will reduce the frustration. But that's not enough, because if you then go back, the gate is still gonna be locked. And so the next thing to do is to identify what the cause is, what's the problem? And again, it's pretty clear you're locked out. And this, of course, is very simple. If we do, can we can talk about COVID and apply it there as well with a more complex situation. But then once you identify the problem, I'm locked out, then you can come up with a solution. Well, I can wait it out. I can. I can wait for a friend to come by on a bike. I could yell up to my wife. There are a lot of different options. And if you can find a solution that will work right away, well then the frustration is going to disappear. Because you're going to have a solution to the problem. And so if you go through some of these deliberate steps, the most basic is to take a break. Look what the situation is. Identify the problem, find a solution. Then you can return to the situation. And then if all else fails, because there are some days when like with COVID, the promise not can be solved today. [00:25:27.450] – Dr. Taylor
In that case, it's best to redirect your attention on something else. So with COVID. Maybe go back to work. You get some exercise. You hang out with your family. You check the news, whatever it might be. But the important thing is when you start to feel that frustration instead of letting your amygdala take over. Which is totally fruitless and frustrating experience is to re-engage the prefrontal cortex and think through this process. [00:25:57.100] – Allan
It's much like a personal trainer. You ask people about pain and everybody is like, well, pain is bad. And I kind of correct them a little bit. I say, no, I say pain is not a bad thing. It's actually a very good thing because it's a signal. It's telling you something if you're if you're willing to listen. And frustration kind of works that way in a sense. The way I look at it know, the next time I went out the door, I made sure I had my keys. [00:26:24.070] – Allan
So it's it's pretty settled right now. I'm going to have my keys on me when I leave my house again. So it was an educational opportunity I guess is the best way for me to look at it. It's silly, I locked myself out and all I needed was the keys that I had left sitting on the counter. And so going forward, when I leave the house, there's a little extra reminder there, kind of seeded emotion. Take your keys with you, dummy, so it doesn't happen again. So I did kind of find you know, I did densify the cause, keys on the counter instead of in my pocket. And now going forward, I have a solution. [00:27:03.320] – Dr. Taylor
Right. And I think your example of pain is a great one, because when people think of pain, they think about survival. And back on the Serengeti, 250,000 years ago, pain usually meant that you were about to die. So it is sort of very important survival purpose. However, moving forward into the thriving. The reason why people exercise, run marathons is it was easy. Everybody would do it, but probably nobody would do it, because that's not the challenge. It's not thriving. The reason why people push themselves physically is because of the satisfaction, the fulfillment that comes from challenging ourselves and overcoming our limitations. [00:27:41.910] – Dr. Taylor
And so so pain, yes. Can certainly be bad. But it also can be a really wonderful sign, of I'm working hard. I'm pushing myself, I'm getting better. And so, again, it all is about attitude and how you look at it. And that's the lens through which you experience a crisis, pain, frustration, what it would have you. [00:28:03.010] – Allan
Yeah, you know, Sometimes it's very difficult for us to kind of take that step, particularly when we're talking about something as big as, say, COVID or the political issues or whatever. When we're dealing with something that's for the most part outside our control, it's a little bit harder to do that. And there's certain people that are more wired to be able to do that and less, you know, back and forth. We can we can train ourselves. [00:28:31.760] – Allan
And I think that's one of the cool things is going through the book. You spoke about three mindset forks in the road. And really, as I went through that part of the book, I was like, you know, if we kind of say bread ourselves, but worked on ourselves to try to, you know, utilize these three things, we're gonna face challenges so much better. Could you take a little bit of time to go through those? [00:28:58.880] – Dr. Taylor
Yes. So I talk about mindsets in terms of basically how you think about a situation and how you think about it relates to how you approach it, how you act on it. And so one of my fork in the road is optimism versus pessimism. And so there's no doubt that this perfect storm of crises we're experiencing, they're all really uncomfortable. They're not pleasant at all. But we still have to deal with them. [00:29:24.200] – Dr. Taylor
And so with COVID, you know, in a way, by getting all negative and going to the dark side, if you're a Star Wars fan, is it adds insult to injury. So the injury is of course is the threat of COVID or getting COVID and economic stress thats on us. But if we go to the dark side and we're negative and we're defeated and we're catastrophizing, that just adds to more the pain and the stress and the doubt and the worry. So we can approach it with what I call realistic optimism, because it wouldn't be reasonable to say, oh, this is a great experience, this is so fun. [00:29:58.640] – Dr. Taylor
But realistic optimism for me is OK. We're in this situation. What can what can I get out of this? How can this benefit me and my family? And in using the opportunity, for example, to whether it's exercising more or spending more time with the family and connecting with them more or helping others or whatever, it might be approaching the situation with something of an optimistic, positive mindset. And again, it's not being unrealistic its not deluding ourselves to thinking that, oh, this is the greatest thing in the world, which it's clearly not. [00:30:28.670] – Dr. Taylor
But we need to look at in a more positive way, and it's a bit of a cliche, have a positive attitude about things. But it's a cliche because it really helps. So that's one that's one mindset fork in the road. The second is disrupted versus stable. The fact is, these crises have disrupted our lives. They've thrown a wrench into all our routines and our habits and things that make us feel good and make us comfortable. [00:30:53.660] – Dr. Taylor
And so we want to look for. We need to actively create stability in our thinking, and in our interactions. So even within COVID, how can we create routines that create a degree of stability and consistency? These, again, human beings like stability and like consistency. Because going back to another 250,000 years ago in the Serengeti, if we didn't see consistency, if we didn't have stability, the chances are we were going to die. And so, you know, we can't create stability in the world writ large, but we can in our lives by, you know, keep the house clean, eating well, staying committed to work, staying committed to other activities that we're involved in. [00:31:35.680] – Dr. Taylor
That's another really important for the road, seeking out stability, creating stability and consistency in our lives. The third is a fork in the road is comfort versus risk. Again, our wiring tells us that in a crisis, we want to circle the wagons. We want to retreat. We want to be as comfortable as possible. And there's certainly some value in that. At the same time, though, it's really important that during times of crisis that we push ourselves out of our comfort zone and take some reasonable risks and do some and I don't mean unreasonable risks like like coughing in somebody's face or going outside and socializing within a foot of a person. [00:32:12.640] – Dr. Taylor
I mean, doing things that will continue to challenge us. And this is a thrival side of us. Doing things to continue to push ourselves to grow and to prosper. And so I think some basic things we can do is, for example. I wrote a blog post recently about five life hacks we can we can engage in to attempt to make our lives better and to use this as an opportunity to grow from this crisis, because it's one thing to grow in normal situations, but if we can grow as people in tough situations, then it's a lot easier to keep that going when life returns to normal. [00:32:53.570] – Dr. Taylor
So one of those hacks is just how you going to use your time? You know without commuting? There's another couple. Maybe for many people it is an extra hour or two of time in the day. Being very deliberate and thoughtful about how you're going to use your time. I think family is another life hack. How can you grow closer to your family? How can you build your relationships in these close quarters? [00:33:13.330] – Dr. Taylor
The third and this is sort of a personal thing as well as professional is declutter. Because it's something I saw in our neighborhood in Northern California, where in the first month or so after COVID in shelter in place came into play. We there were tons of junk out on the sidewalks because just clearing out the stuff in your house you are never going to use again is really positive. But it's also a metaphor for just clearing out the junk in your mind, because during crises, our minds get cluttered. [00:33:41.750] – Dr. Taylor
I've mentioned that several time number four for my life back is exercise. They're very as you well know, as a personal trainer, there are very few things that is therapeutic is getting out and getting exercise and moving our bodies and releasing endorphins. And it's just so positive for our mental health, our levels of stress and so on. The fifth life hack for me, and this is a this would make things a little more challenging. [00:34:06.870] – Dr. Taylor
This is the tribal side is look for old habits that you don't like and you want to change. And might it might be poor reading. It might be lack of exercise. It might be spending too much time at work and might be spending too much time in from a screen, whatever it is. Identify a habit that you don't like and make an effort to change it. These in a way, that's a gift that COVID has given us because we now have the time and the space and a disruption in the routine of our lives which can maintain habits, forces us to break out of those limitations, to find things that we can do to become better people. [00:34:47.290] – Allan
For me, it was was Facebook. I got myself off of Facebook because it was not helping at all. So I took a I started about a little over a week or so ago. I decide, OK, I take a break. I've taken some short breaks before, but this has been the longest break I've had from Facebook personally in a while. And some of the positive benefits of that is and I can count probably on half of my hand. [00:35:12.460] – Allan
How many times I've had zero inbox in my life. I've gotten to zero inbox. So, yeah, a couple of your hacks there just fell in place for me here as I've been dealing with kind of the slow down is the best way I can put it, because until COVID picks back up, my life is just gonna move a lot slower. [00:35:37.500] – Allan
Dr. Taylor, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well? [00:35:46.750] – Dr. Taylor
Yes. Great questions. So I have three. One is exercise, and this has obviously been an overriding theme. But I'm an athlete and I so believe in the power of exercise to make us physically healthier as well as mentally healthier and happier. So exercise number one. Two find something you have a tremendous passion for. No doubt if you care deeply about something, you're gonna be engaged. You're gonna be focused. You're just to be more alive. [00:36:12.970] – Dr. Taylor
So it doesn't matter what it is. It can be work. It can be something sports related. It can be cultural. It can be religious. It doesn't matter. It can be political. Whatever it is. Find something your passion about and dive into it. Because one thing that's very clear from the research is that people who are passionate about things are the happiest people because they care deeply about something and it engages them. [00:36:35.570] – Dr. Taylor
And the third is connect. And this is a real problem I've had during COVID in the language use. I'm a word guy from writing, speaking, consulting, words for me, they're my stock and trade. And so when I heard about social distancing, I thought, who came up with that phrase? Because we don't want social distancing. We want physical distancing. Six feet is not a social issue. It's a physical issue. And during this time of isolation, we need to connect more than ever. [00:37:04.630] – Dr. Taylor
We need social interactions. Now, safely, of course. But it's so important that another one of the most robust findings related to both happiness and stress is that the happiest people, the people who are the less least stressed, are those who have the strongest social relationships and connections. And so one way very powerfully to mitigate a lot of these challenges that we're feeling related to the crises is to connect with others. And if we can maintain those connections and deepen them while we are going through this crisis, we're going to respond to it in a much more positive and much more healthy way. [00:37:42.640] – Dr. Taylor
And we're much more likely to thrive rather than just survive. And it might just be that we'll just survive rather than just totally falling apart. So exercise, dive into a passion or something and make a real effort to connect. Those are my recipes. Those are my ingredients for for health, fitness and happiness. [00:38:02.930] – Allan
Those are great. So, Dr. Taylor, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, How to Survive and Thrive When Bad Things Happen, where would you like me to send them? [00:38:13.410] – Dr. Taylor
Sure, well, two place for the book, everybody, of course, goes to Amazon. Do a search for that or for my name? Dr. Jim Taylor. And it'll come up and also my Web site. DrJimTayor.com I've got so many things. I've got a blog. I've got podcasts around crises and many other issues. You can learn far more than you probably ever want to know about me and my work on my Web site. DrJimTaylor.com. [00:38:37.830] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/444, and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Taylor, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness. [00:38:47.450] – Dr. Taylor
Great pleasure, Allan, and be well.
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Another episode you may enjoy
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July 20, 2020
- in aging , guest/interview , health by allan
Thriving into your 90s with David Frost
David Frost is on a mission to make the Boomer generation Kaboomers so they can thrive and strive into their 90s.
Transcript
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David, welcome to 40+ Fitness. [00:02:35.240] – David
Well, thanks so much, Allan. And golly, here we are the first Friday of a crazy summer. [00:02:40.780] – Allan
So, golly, that that definitely puts you in the boomer category using that word. So book is called KABoomer: Thriving and Striving into your 90s. And I really like that concept because I think I would say, you know, when we were growing up, you know, 30 was old, 40 was old and, you know, we were all just going to die at 65. So I don't even know why social security exists because we'll just die the day after we are eligible. But living into your 90s is really not really the goal. But it's it's just so possible and so believable now because more and more people, we see them living good lives, doing the right things and living well in and past the 90s. [00:03:26.560] – David
True. And some of that technology, some of it's lifestyle. And we're blessed to be in the age where average statistical life expectancy is growing. But then, of course, some of us like you and I think that living better is the other side of the coin, where not only do we want more circles around the sun, but we'd like it to be good circles. [00:03:48.990] – Allan
Yeah. One of the things I like to say is I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105. [00:03:57.470] – David
Amen! And if you do, some of that might be the blessings of having good genes in your makeup. But a lot of it, I think we can control as well. And certainly thriving and striving and being fit past 40 or 40 plus fitness, excuse me, are things that resonate with me and maybe some others will too. [00:04:18.710] – Allan
Yes. Yes. Now, you talked about lifestyle, and I want to get into that because this is really what this is all about. It's the things that are in our control. You mentioned that there are some genetic factors of how long we're going to live, but it makes up a percentage. We'll just say a lower percentage and we'll just leave it at that. But as far as lifestyle goes, in the book, you list seven elements of a long and healthy life.Can you. Can you go through those seven elements? [00:04:46.220] – Allan
Love to. And I'm a simple guy, so I picked the letter “S” it seemed to fit. So the seven elements, Allan, that you did mention are; STRENGTH, which can't wait. And we know that one of the greatest things about resistance is it can help us in so many ways, whether it's insulin sensitivity, metabolism, lean skeletal muscle, all those sorts of things. So strength is one of the ones that we go back to the Greek philosophers that talked about brandishing weights in the centers of their shoulders. [00:05:19.910] – David
This is not a new idea. That resistance exercise is really good for us. And we also have learned, as you mentioned, we're blessed to have more research than our forebears did that we can continue to. It's hard. We know past 40. It's hard, but we can, as we know that smart people have said that we can continue to build muscle into our 80s. So that kind of is a little bit of a springboard to those blowing out those 90 candles that you mentioned. So that's strength. I believe that the bedrock is STAMINA for staying alive. We're living, breathing organisms and motion is medicine. So stamina. Meaning get moving. Moving to sweat. Almost every day of the week is absolutely critical for our vitality, helps us sleep better, we eat better because our body knows what it should be eating instead of what's available on the shelf. [00:06:16.580] – David
So I in my model, I call stamina the bedrock for staying alive then that capstone, believe it or not, I wish we folks like you and I that are in the personal training business think that we'd love to claim that we're more responsible for lifestyle than we are. But sleep is the capstone in my model. So that's the third S restorative restful SLEEP. So our brains can do their magic and we can recover. Particularly for those of us that are a little bit older and do take a little longer to recover from our stamina or our strength worked. [00:06:52.100] – David
So that's our capstone. I'd like to highlight one. That's a take away. It's a thief. STRESS. Stress is good of a great white shark is chasing you or chasing me in the shallows of the ocean. But stress is not good if it becomes chronic. So that's the take away the thief in my physical 401K model. A couple of others. Anti aging sustenance. That's really the currency and my physical 401K. If we eat the colors of the rainbow I described as vitamin P because I can't remember all those vitamins very well. [00:07:28.990] – David
But I call vitamin P that collection of wonderful, somewhat macro nutrients, but mostly micro nutrients that make our organisms what they are. Then we have some minerals that we can hopefully absorb as well to keep us vital, muscles, brain health. All those sorts of good things. [00:07:48.620] – David
So the anti aging food is really, to me, the currency of our 401K and two additional ones. The flexible account part of our physical bay is stretching. In the book, one person I respect talked about oiling up the Tin Man. If our joints are not limber, if our connective tissue is not doing what it's supposed to do, we tend to hunker down and not be you know, we lose height as we get older because that happens. [00:08:23.120] – David
But why not keep them? Why not keep the limbs oiled up so we can both play with the grandkids and enjoy life? And then the last item is our accident insurance, which is STABILITY. Stability is so important. Starting with a great toes. One of the mergers along levity. I wish I could claim credit for this, I can't. And we all can get better at this, just screw one foot into the ground, raise the other foot off the ground. Close your eyes and see if you can, at my age, if I can stay erect and not topple over with my eyes closed. One foot on the ground for 20 seconds. That's a great indicator of longevity. And if we do believe, like I do, that some longevity is what we can control. [00:09:12.500] – David
That's simple, yet hard thing to do. So strength, stability, stamina, strength, stretching, stress, not because that's a thief, restorative sleep and substance that hit seven. It's a long list, but that's a long list. [00:09:28.750] – Allan
Yeah. And, you know, the interesting thing about all seven of those is that they are all generally interrelated. If you're not eating well, you may not be sleeping well. If you're stressed, you may not be eating well or sleeping well and your body's not going to want to put on muscle. When you're lifting trying to do your strength work and you just may not have the energy and stamina to do the things you want to do. [00:09:53.930] – Allan
So everything's interrelated. And we have to take care of really all seven of those elements. We really want to live a long, healthy life. I want to talk about a few of a couple of them I guess, because we really don't have enough time to go into all seven and one of the core ones. And you kind of put this in the front because you consider this one of, if not the most important to at least make sure you're working on on a daily basis and that is stamina. Can you talk a little bit about how you define stamina and then how we can build stamina as a healthy. [00:10:25.430] – David
Thanks so much, Allan. Stamina to pain my laman or trainers definition is stamina is your ability to be active or to do work or to exercise to a period where you sweat and by sweating your bodies do some amazing things. You know, you hear the phrase. No pain, no gain or tear down to build up. But by challenging our systems, our cardio respiratory system and our muscles, the sweat equates to being at the right level of intensity for stamina and to make good things happen. [00:11:04.010] – David
And so kind of in a three level model, if we spend most of our time, perhaps up to 80 percent of our time, moving at a pace where we can be conversational. And how about those damn Yankees or what's this crazy pandemic is, as you're moving. That's at the right intensity to help your system build capillaries, to help your cells build more mitochondria, those little powerhouses. And to build capacity. We we should spend most of our time in a low intensity zone where we can be conversant. [00:11:42.470] – David
Now, to get a little technical and it's in the book, but it's pretty well documented that that equates to about two thirds of your maximum heart rate. So there's equation's in the book to kind of guesstimate where your training zone is for most of your work to build stamina for staying alive. In my case, I'm blessed to have a maximum heart rate of about 180. So when I do most of my work rowing, heavy yard work, playing with the grandkids, if I keep my heart rate below 120 for 30 minutes, I know I'm sweating or the ladies would be glistening, but that is in the right zone to build capacity. [00:12:23.390] – David
So that's zone one. That's two thirds of max heart rate, measured heart rate. And that's conversational. So important to invest the time in that low intensity zone to build capacity for staying alive. There is a second zone which feels really good. Your heart rate gets higher, perhaps up to 85 percent of your max. 80 to 85 percent of your maximum heart rate. And if you can maintain, you know, it depends on your your level of fitness entering in as a 40 plus fitness person or as a KA boomer, you can. [00:12:55.430] – David
It feels really, really good. But you can't sustain it for for as long as you would for the zone I mentioned previously to Staying Alive conversational range. Once in a while, when your doctor gives you the OK again I'm Medicare age. And we strongly encourage everyone over the age of 60 to get a physical aptitude readiness question signed by your medical professional so that you, be a he or she, you are approved to raise your heart rate episodically, raise your blood pressure and move. [00:13:26.720] – David
And there is that third zone, which I kind of call red zone, or you can call it a sprinting zone where you get up to about 90, 95 percent of your maximum heart rate. You don't do it very long. You don't do it very often. There's a quote in the book, A legendary doctor I believe he is now at university, now he's at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Joyner, he has a haiku that talks about stamina, run a lot of miles, some faster than race pace and rest a lot or words to that effect. And that is so true for staying alive and building endurance. It's it's the bedrock in the models that you describe, the model that I talked about in the seven S's. If we don't have a bedrock foundation of stamina, we're probably not going to blow out those 90 candles very well. [00:14:14.880] – Allan
Yeah, the way I like to think about it in terms of just I do like to think of it in terms of exertion because it's hard, you know, you can stop and you can check your heart rate, every one in a while if you choose to. But then you've stopped. And so a lot of times what I like to do is say, OK, if generally you're walking with, say, walking with one of your best friends and you guys go out and going to either walk or run, depending on your fitness level at the level you're talking about, you're right at that edge where you can have a full sentence of five or more words and not have a problem talking. [00:14:46.970] – Allan
Once you get to a point where you're talking in three or four word bursts. Now you're getting into that zone two. And it's OK to be in the zone two, for a while, but you're just not gonna be able to hold that out for too too long. But it's OK to be there for once. Just recognize when you're in there and realize that you're probably not going to be able to keep it up. And that might enjoy your walk or your run earlier than you'd like. [00:15:07.430] – Allan
So slowing down a little bit. Getting back in the zone one would allow you to keep going. And then that zone three is the point where like you said, maybe its the shark and you're in the sallow water. You grab up the grandchild, you start running. You're not trying to stay in zone one at that point. Get the heck out of the water. So you're probably going in zone to my right perspective, but you can perceive that exertion pretty easily if you pay attention to your body. What I found. [00:15:36.860] – David
You know, absolutely. My sentiment and my experience as well, Allan, is that feedback loop in listening to your body, perceived exception or perceived exertion, can do it. I think. Well, it's my prediction, and I would ask you if it's your sense as well. You don't have to get overly crazy with appliances like smartwatches, fitness watches or other things that are about our body, if we listen to it, is a wonderful feedback mechanism to help us build that bedrock of stamina. [00:16:09.310] – Allan
Yeah, some. Somehow we live for tens of thousands of years without an Apple Watch. Go figure. [00:16:16.240] – David
Yes. [00:16:17.230] – Allan
Now, this episode of 40 Plus Firtness podcast is sponsored by Audible, is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audio books ranging from bestsellers to celebrity memoirs. News, business, history fiction. And, of course, health and fitness. The audible app is completely free to download and use on Apple or Android devices, have a smartphone and a tablet and like to switch between the two, no worries. The Audible app lets you pick right up where you left off. I find their app to be better and easier to use than any podcast App out there. By the way, they're also producing podcasts. I love Audible because it lets me get out and about and enjoy wonderful audiobooks when I want to go on a long walk, I'll pick up something in my library based on my mood fiction or nonfiction and hit the road. Power user tip. I put it on one point five times speed as I found when the narrator is talking faster, I walk faster. I love having audible as my walking companion. Audible is offering you a free trial at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/audible. That's a u. D. I. B. L. E. [00:17:35.330] – Allan
You're listening to a podcast. So I know you understand the value of On-Demand audio content. In my opinion, Audible is the best at that. Get your free trial at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/audible. [00:17:54.120] – Allan
The other one of your seven that I really want to get into today is strength. This is this is one of my favorites and I think it's one of those concepts that it's hard for some people to wrap their head around because there's such a culture in this in this world now of being thin, you know, being, you know, light, not weighing a lot. Having this look and that look typically has them concerned that if they if they do build strength, they're just going to become these big hulking monsters and they don't wanna look like that. [00:18:30.870] – Allan
So but strength is so important and it's really hard to get people to recognize that they need to do this. Would you go through some facts to help us understand why strength is so important? [00:18:42.600] – David
Sure. And again, I'm not a strength expert and not a kinesthesiologist, but I am a boomer blessed to have a fair amount of skeletal muscle. Some of it's nature. Some of it's nurture. But studies, and it's very valid. I think most of us that have reached Medicare age know that are what we call we used to call the neck to butt ratio. Now it's a formal name for the waist to hip ratio to change. Statistics are that starting at the age of about 30, you may lose almost a percent of your skeletal muscle per year, with a terrible sounding word symptom called Sarcopenia, loss of flesh or muscle. [00:19:23.970] – David
And if we don't work to slow that down or rest it, we will become shrunken over and we can joke. Folks my age remember Laughin andArtie Johnson was a character on Laughin who was shrunken over and always playing that kind of the wheezy couch potato. And I don't want to be that. And the way to avoid doing it is to challenge your muscles. Resistance, exercise. And we can talk about the variations that, just like you mentioned, for exertion, with the stamina bedrock, with the foundational strength that people can work on and matter. [00:20:05.160] – David
I've never seen a study that said no matter what your physical or special condition is, be it cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis or Type two diabetes. I have never. There may be one or two, but I have never seen a study that said that resistance exercise was counter indicated. It is so good for offsetting the loss of flesh so that we can stay upright. We all kinda know those older people who have to use a walker because they can't stand up straight. [00:20:38.550] – David
And that's not good. They've let their big muscles and their supporting muscles atrophy, if you will. And that that terrible sounding word. I'm glad it's a terrible sounding word. If more people heard sarcopenia. Maybe they would pick up that 10 pound bag of rice and move some metal and do some things like that. [00:20:59.670] – Allan
And it goes beyond Sarcopenia because there is a related villain in this story called Osteopenia, which is about the weakening or loss intensity in your bones and strength training actually helps you fight both of those. [00:21:16.030] – David
It sure does. And of course, we encourage the ladies, half of boomers and those striving to be well past 40, 40 plus fitness. They have to experience the gentle. This gets back to stamina as you shared, the interrelated factors are so true. Ladies have to work on their bone density. They do not want a broken hip or a broken ankle, a broken wrist because their calcium is out of whack because they haven't done resistance training. [00:21:46.260] – David
So it's so true that we were born to move. We were born to push others around and move stuff and and move to sweat and again, back to the interrelation. Moving heavy stuff as heavy as you can. Doctors directives and you're trained if you have a trainer, it is so important. for those of us my age in the 65 plus age category, we generally recommend if you work all the major muscles, if your body just to do it twice a week, we recover a little bit slower than you folks that are not boomer aged. [00:22:23.580] – David
So we do advocate religiously doing moving heavy stuff as heavy as you can twice a week. Maybe some can get away with three times a week. I personally do it twice a week and I mix it up. There is four times the types of lifting. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, is a 80 plus. She's a cancer survivor. She lifts weights. There are power lifters who can generate extraordinary. Meaning lifting heavy weights very quickly. And that's that's a powerful thing. [00:22:57.380] – David
Or you could think the football player, JJ Watt, who is published that he was able to do a box jump of fifty seven inches and that's explosive strength. And then there's endured strength and that farmers. A farmer that has a long day in the fields is probably a pretty fit guy. He or she is a pretty fit guy because they move heavy bales of hay or things like that. So one of the great functional exercises that we advocate for people my age is a farmer's walk. [00:23:29.200] – David
Grab some heavy things in each hand and walk. Functional exercise for people our age is really, really important. So endured, explosive and I'm drawn a blank on the third on the other flights. It's great. [00:23:40.430] – Allan
Yeah, I really I'm really keen on on the functional because when we start thinking about, you know, real life, for example, I see your grandchild comes running up to you and the first thing you want to do is grab that grandchild and swing them up into your lap. You want to bring them up to you and lift them. Well, you know, if you don't have the strength to do that, then, you know, that's that's where you are. [00:24:03.920] – Allan
You're not as close. You're not having that opportunity that to be with your grandchild the way you want to. So something as simple as learning how to do a good deadlift and learning how to do maybe a kettlebell swing or two functional exercises to help you be in strength mode to be able to to do something like that. And then you've mentioned farmers lifts, farmers carriers. Grip strength is so, so important. You mentioned it in the book. But I always tell people, you know, we we're not just doing this to live longer, as you mentioned earlier, we're doing this to live better. And the first time you get a jar of something, you're trying to make dinner and you can't open that jar. You've lost some independence. And that's the first signal, you know, like you talked about the walker, but you know, just not even being able to open a jar and hopefully someone else in the house is there that can open that jar for you. Otherwise. You do without or then you start implementing tools like the Walker. [00:25:06.820] – Allan
Now you've got this little jar opener thing to help you open jars, but now you don't open jars. So you don't have the strength, open jars, but you're losing your independence. You can either lose it to a tool or you can lose it to a person. But, you know, strength is such an important part of keeping the lifestyle that we want to have. [00:25:25.240] – David
Boy, how true. And activities of daily life. I mean, we talk about it so often in your profession and my profession. Working with others and helping them live longer and live better. But if and when we can ever travel again, are you going to would you want to be that person that says, would you lift my carry on up into the overhead bin because I can't? Or would you be the one who grabs a couple for other people and tosses them into the overhead bin? [00:25:49.580] – David
It's, you know, humbly. Being strong is not an apology. There is a phrase that I'm sure many of your listeners have heard. Strong is the new skinny. Boy, I believe it. You know, the days of Twiggy are over. The days of being able to handle the activities of daily life are so important. They are for me, grandkids are getting heavier, you know, and I want to be able to try to stay as young with them as I can for as long as I can. [00:26:19.990] – Allan
You can ask my wife, one of the reason she keeps me around is I can lift heavy things. [00:26:24.850] – David
There you go. [00:26:28.690] – Allan
I'm good at carrying heavy things around. Put this over there. Lift that. Put that over there. Anyway, I'm really good at that. And a few other things, but that's that's the big one. I put my hat on. [00:26:40.620] – David
By the way, that little mentioning you're the inter related aspect of this wellness that you cited a couple of times, Allan. Humor is a big part of it. You know, the fact that, you know your wife and you figure out how to get things heavy lifted and have a chuckle. Chuckles Good exercise. And it's certainly good medicine. We sort of know that. But do we really laugh as much as we should? [00:27:05.840] – Allan
Yes. It goes into your others, into one of your S's, and it's the stress, you know. You can't be laughing and be stressed at the same time. At least not a good belly laugh happy. For that moment in time, you found joy and you let that stress go, which is a hugely valuable for well-being. So I agree with you. Yeah. Having having some fun is all part of this. And, you know, I'm looking for that every every moment I can get as we go. [00:27:35.800] – Allan
That's the cool part of that. But I wanted to talk about, you know, someone someone's considering going into training and they've never trained before or they have trained. But, you know, it's the it's the it was the Jane Fonda videos for a while. And then they went with Ghil'ad when he was on ESPN, and then they picked up with something else. And now most recently, maybe they did a little bit of the body part for less miles videos, but they really haven't gotten into what we would call core resistance training, strength training. [00:28:11.980] – Allan
So someone's gonna go in and sign up at the gym, be at a big box gym or small gym in their neighborhood. What are some of the things they need to do to be safe when they're lifting? [00:28:25.460] – David
Yeah. Safety first. But almost no one is not to be psyched out by a big box gym, where there may be younger or fitter, maybe more grunting specimens that are seemingly doing amazing things on isolated lifts. For folks my age, it's for folks of all ages. But as we get older, I advocate it is so important to work multiple muscle groups and do complex exercises. And free standing weights don't have to be heavy. But getting away from the crutches of fixed machines, there is there is a place for those, you know, those open cycle exercises. [00:29:03.520] – David
But I'm much more an advocate of complex exercises where you use major muscle groups, perhaps a lunge again, if your doctor improves, you safely do lunges and maybe some transverse work with a twisting and an overhead lift. You're working your body in pretty planes. You're working on strength, stability and stretching all in the same routine. It does not take a lot of time and you'll be a better boomer by doing that. So safety first. If you can afford a trainer, I would advocate everybody see if a trainer adds value to your journey for this physical 401K, you may be able to do it on your own. But please don't be psyched out if you're in the presence of others. Do your own thing. Zone out and meet your goals. Have a plan going in for safety. Know the proper routines to lift. There are your certifying body, NASM and my certifying body, NFPT, National Federation of Professional Trainers, outlined the protocols for how to lift safely so that we are able to get our work in and not be injured. [00:30:16.230] – David
So, yeah, safety first, starting with your doctor's approval to go into the gym in the first place, but then having a protocol, having a plan. Use a trainer or try a trainer if you think that it might add value, at least until you get going on your own and then enjoy the journey. Emotion is medicine. We do have a phrase exercise over drugs, as you mentioned. There are so many interrelated factors that relate. [00:30:45.320] – David
Resistance training leads to a better diet, bone density, insulin sensitivity, better sleep, you look better in the mirror. You know, we joke that mirrors Lululemon leotards and little kids and drunks don't lie. They will let a boomer know if he or she doesn't look fit. You know? So does the mirror lie? No, it doesn't. So resisting training helps you to be proud of what you see in the mirror. It takes a while. [00:31:15.860] – David
You safely lift it for a couple of times a week for a period, eight weeks. I almost guarantee you you will see a difference and you will be proud of that difference. So it's a journey. It's got to be a safe one like you asked at the get go there for strength training. But complex exercises done safely done in the right emotions. The protocols of proper lifting. And you'll be KA boomer. [00:31:42.780] – Allan
Yeah. Know, one of the cores that I want to put out there before we sign off on this topic is, you know, when you're when you're learning a strength exercise, don't immediately think that you're just going to jump in to adding a load, adding weight onto what you're doing. You really need to learn the routine. Learn the exercise well to know the true forms. And so sometimes I get strange looks. I'll be in the gym and all I have is a little PVC pipe. [00:32:09.940] – Allan
And I'm trying to learn a movement. I'm trying to make sure that I perfected before I put any load at all on myself. And they look at me and say, well, you know, obviously you could lift that. And I'm like, yeah, I could lift that. But I'm not going to lift that until I know that I can get this lift functionally right. And once I get my form right, then I start what I call gentle nudging, which is putting a little bit of resistance on top of that, making sure I keep that form. [00:32:36.500] – Allan
And then slowly progressing from there. And if you if you push your body too fast, it will break. Particularly when you're over 40 or over 60. Your body will break if you're not taking care of it and getting good form when you're doing these movements. So that's one of the core. And as you mentioned, Dave, I think it's important for us to consider it is a personal trainer good for us. And I'd say for most beginners, absolutely. [00:33:02.030] – Allan
Having a trainer there to teach you that form that they give you a customized workout is specifically for you. To give you what you want, which you know you need, going through those and learning the form well from a well qualified personal trainer, is gonna go a long way towards helping you avoid these injuries. So do consider that investment? It's an investment that'll keep you in the gym. It will be investment will keep you from hurting. [00:33:28.190] – Allan
And it'll be an investment that will get you stronger, faster, because you'll learn the movement well and then the movement will actually do what it's supposed to do when you add weight to it. [00:33:38.230] – David
And maybe a little bit of the social interaction there as well. Studies show and you and I both know that lots of times it helps to have a workout buddy. Whether that buddy is a trainer or a friend of yours, could be a sibling, could be somebody from your family. Sometimes working out together is a great way to inspire and keep moving because everyone has a day when I don't feel like it today. Well, you know, taking that first step is important and making that a safe step as you mentioned. And a trainer, I believe, can also help with that fascinating mind body alignment. [00:34:18.260] – David
Those that are in the zone lift more effectively, recruit more muscles. It's not always the biggest athlete that does amazing things. It's the one that has that great alignment, communicates, recruits more muscles to do the lifts. And that's what it's about. I mean, at my age, we're not going to build, as you mentioned, back to, you know, Jane Fonda and Skinny and so on. At our age, if you're natural, it is very, very, very hard to build mass. [00:34:50.570] – David
However, what we're looking for is to offset the loss of mass, that sarcopenia thing and then the loss of bone density also. So this is important stuff. And I hope that, you know, the words that you're putting out and get people's attention and they learn how to move stuff and enjoy it. [00:35:09.040] – Allan
Yeah, my my trainer, when I was I was living in Louisiana, my trainer's name was also David. And so David made the mistake one time of needing to reschedule me. He said, you know, I've got someone that wants to train during this time for a competition. Would you be willing to move? And I said, OK, well, what do you want to do here? He said five o'clock and he said it before he actually realized what came out of his mouth. [00:35:42.910] – Allan
and I was already warmed up, ready to go. So I hope that I was one of his favorite clients all the way. If he was telling me to do something I knew was wrong. I didn't mind telling him. So maybe I wasn't. But you're right. Having having a trainer, knowing that trainers, they are knowing you're paying that trainer, you've got that investment, you're you're in it. And then just like you said, having someone there that's going to advise you learning together. In my case, Dave and I were learning together because we're both really into this. And eventually you might be, too. So just recognize that if you're starting out, it's good to have a coach that'll get you that ground faster, help you feel more comfortable and get you more engaged and just having a lot more fun because you become friends with your trainers for sure. [00:36:25.600] – David
Oh, and any accountability there is. I've had some world class rowers and that's a favorite passion of mine is a sport of rowing or crew. I've had some wonderful rowers say if it's worth doing, it's worth having a coach tell you the little things that you can do better. Not that you're doing things wrong, but the little things that you can do better. There's the safety issue, but there's a performance issue, too. And again, some people may not need it, some people can find YouTube or Doctor Google to find the resources they need to build the plan. But how important as you know, and I know how important it is to have that plan, planning the execution and execute the plan regularly, build those habits so you can look in the mirror and say, wow, who is that guy or gal? [00:37:13.130] – Allan
You talked about rowing and in the book I was like. I missed my rower. I'm almost I'm almost convinced I just need to go and buy another rower and have it shipped here to Panama. So I'll have one. I'm trying to push off on that. [00:37:29.160] – David
Well, you know, back to the bedrock part of it. When we are building capacity, it does not matter the type of activity that you do as long as you shared, you can have those sentences hopefully with a buddy you're talking to yourself or talking back to the podcast you're listening to. But if you are, I kind of trearsh things. I have three levels of fitness I talk about for both stamina and strength. And one is decent. One is good enough and one is extra. [00:38:00.090] – David
There are some people that are very competitive, want to strive for excellence. And by doing that, generally you have a specific exercise. It just so happens that my exercise, my lifelong passion is the sport of rowing. For a lot of reasons, perseverance. Some folks may have read Boys in the Boat. It's a tremendous story about those types of things. Teamwork, perseverance, alchemy, beating Hitler's youth in the 36 Olympics and eight years later, beating Hitler's use on the battlefields of Europe. [00:38:33.540] – David
But it's it's it's a special thing to me. And why as special is because it's a whole body sport. I mentioned earlier how important was when you can combine things like strength, stability, stamina and stretching and the sport of rowing is does that. And by the way, it's the most intense Olympic sport for kilocalories burn per minute of the event. So I'm a nut about it, but hey, I'll go off line and talk to you about getting that rower in your in your place. Good to have. [00:39:03.390] – Allan
Yes. Dave, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well. [00:39:14.950] – David
Three strategies to live up to that so important definition that you just mentioned, that kind of integrative or holistic view of wellness. One, get started. Two say and not but, you know, we've all heard it. You've heard it. I've heard it. [00:39:32.720] – David
And perhaps I'm guilty of it more than I should be about. Yes but. you know, I'm sorry today I shouldn't work out. So either plan say yes and instead of yes but and then celebrate the journey. Please note that there is no Madison Avenue of fountain of youth that, you know, take a potent potion. Take a pill to build your wellness. It is a journey. It is earned. And I talk about this. Boomers are very interested in their retirement, whether it's fixed or variable income. But those seven S's, Allan, that you brought up earlier, to me that is a physical with a P physical 401K account. The strength, stability, stamina, striking restorative sleep. Don't stress and clean eating. That's a physical 401K. That's an investment. That's one. You have a plan. And that's one where you you have work arounds, the yes ands and the yes buts. So the three that I would suggest from Dave Frost, boomer point of view, have a plan. Say yes. And then know it's a journey, it's an investment. And you'll be far better to live longer and live better. [00:40:47.810] – Allan
And that's a hard are I to argue with. [00:40:51.500] – David
No arguments. Simple yet hard. [00:40:54.350] – Allan
So, David, if someone wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about you, learn more about the book, KABoomer; Thriving and Striving Into Your 90s, where would you like me to send them. [00:41:05.180] – David
Thanks Allan. The book was released in the merry month of June. Hopefully it will be a merry month of June by the time it ends with this craziness going on around us. But the book is available on Amazon and in paperback and in Kindle or e-book versions right now. The audio book will be available next month. You could always reach out to me. Wellpast40.com. And there's a boomer page on that Web site. But thanks. I'd love people to be as excited about wellness as you are. And hopefully I am. And I would love other people to join the movement. Maybe reducing the systematic health care costs of society for Medicare. And, you know, we can play with the grandkids and get those carry on bags lifted if and when we can ever travel again. So wellpast40.com. [00:42:00.020] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/443 and I'll be sure to have links there. David, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness. [00:42:09.200] – David
Well, Allan, thank you for the chance to chat about something that's near and dear to both of us. Those simple yet hard steps to gain stamina 90. That's a term we use and it meaning some may say that's cute. But if you think about stamina, 90, having the stamina to blow out 90 candles, that appeals to me. So thank you so much for the chance to chat.
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Transcript
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Dr. Skillicorn, welcome to 40+ Fitness. [00:04:29.890] – Dr. Skillicorn
I'm happy to be here. [00:04:31.000] – Allan
You know, I'm a geek on anything that has to do with health and fitness. And, you know, I had a call which we're going to listen to later from a listener that had some questions for me, trying to find a guest that could could talk about this issue and your book, Healing Depression Without Medication. I got into it thinking, OK, this is another depression. [00:04:54.880] – Allan
It's depression. So you're talking about depression. And, you know, we're talking about without medication, which, you know, I'm all for it. The fewer medications we can be on, particularly as we get older. For me, the better the side effects and everything else. And you had so many references and stories and you know all this. I go down those rabbit holes, I'm the guy that goes down them rabbit holes. [00:05:16.030] – Allan
And you created a lot of rabbit hole, which is a good thing. I love love learning new things and getting down into the deep of some of this. So I really appreciated your book. It was it was well researched and well put together. [00:05:30.980] – Dr. Skillicorn
Thank you. [00:05:32.070] – Allan
And I know in the subtitle you say Psychiatrist Guide. But this is this is written for everybody. [00:05:39.300] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes. Yes. [00:05:41.750] – Allan
Now, one of the big things that is in science and we've known about it for a long time, it's just kind of surprising to me that we don't take advantage of it more often is the placebo-nocebo effect. Can you talk about those two things? And then I want to dive a little bit deeper into that. [00:06:00.470] – Dr. Skillicorn
Sure. Absolutely. So placebo comes from the Latin root to please. And so we often placebo, we kind of dismiss, like most people when they talk about it, maybe like, oh, it's just placebo, as if it is this thing for gullible people. [00:06:15.930] – Dr. Skillicorn
But the reality is we're all influenced by a placebo and placebo is powerful. And pharmaceutical companies spend a whole lot of money to try to figure out how to make it less powerful so that their medications come out slightly better than placebo. But it's actually really hard to do because it's incredibly powerful. It changes the brain and the body in a similar fashion to the medications themselves. And in fact, when we are talking about antidepressants, about 80 percent of the effectiveness of the medication is actually a placebo effect. [00:06:44.250] – Dr. Skillicorn
One of my favorite placebo studies is is actually one that was done with patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It was a 2010 study. And what they did is they actually divided people with Irritable Bowel into two groups. And so half of them received whatever the best, the most expensive, supposedly most effective medication at the time that was available. And the other group received placebo. But the hitch here was, is the bottle actually said placebo. They knew they were getting placebo, but they were educated on the power of placebo and how it can be just as effective as medications. [00:07:19.200] – Dr. Skillicorn
And so they told them how effective it could be. And that particularly have seemed to have a strong effect for those with Irritable Bowel. And the results were that those with that came out the same were equally effective. So it's it's very real and very powerful. And unfortunately what we give too often is the opposite. The nocebo effect, which is which means I shall harm. And unfortunately they often all too often, patients that's exactly what they're getting from their doctor. [00:07:49.830] – Dr. Skillicorn
They're being told that, you know, this is a common problem that has no solutions, which is in effect sort of this pseudo effect of that now, there is no solution available, right? It. It creates hopelessness and a sense of powerlessness. And there's a great story of one of my favorite stories for the nocebo effect, though, was it was a case study of some guys a twenty six year old guy named Mr. A. And he had started, he was put on a drug trial for antidepressants. A couple months after a breakup, which in and of itself is questionable at why he would be on medication for our breakup. But anyway, so he was put on his medication. He started to feel better. And then a couple weeks later, he got in a fight with his ex girlfriend and impulsively overdosed on the medication. And he immediately felt bad about it and called for help. And in the ambulance, it was documented that he was drowsy and lethargic and his blood pressure was low. [00:08:46.860] – Dr. Skillicorn
He was sweaty. His heart rate was up. And so they called to figure out what he was on, on the trial. And a couple hours someone from the trial came up and told them that basically that he was on placebo. And within 15 minutes he was totally normal again. But the power of, so it's equally powerful. This is what we think and what we perceive and what we believe influences us on every level. [00:09:17.650] – Allan
Yeah, I had a Marcus Freudenmann on the podcast. He was talking about cancer, curing cancer. And he was one of things he said in the beginning of his book was, you know, you go into your doctor and the diagnosis is cancer and they tell you you have three months to live. [00:09:34.020] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes. [00:09:34.310] – Allan
And most people live three months almost to the day. [00:09:37.310] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes. [00:09:37.610] – Allan
Because their brain is so powerful over what the body's doing. And in many cases, most cases, I guess, actually is more powerful than medication.What I found fascinating in your book was you talked about exposing people to poison ivy. Rather, it was real or imaginary poison ivy. And the results were phenomenal. [00:10:01.660] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes. What we think and what we believe in fluids is how our body responds. And yet in the study they took this group of participants were actually exposed to real poison ivy, but they were asked to imagine that the plant was harmless. So this was just using their own the power of their own minds. And over 80 percent of them were able to completely eliminate the histamine response that leads to the itchiness and the redness and the blisters. And then they did a reverse experiment where they exposed a group of people to a perfectly harmless plant, but they imagine it to be poison ivy. [00:10:35.310] – Dr. Skillicorn
And they broke, a large percent of them broke out in rashes. And it just just shows right, how how important it is to learn to start to notice our thoughts and how we can so that we end up creating a reality. It can be a better reality or worse reality, depending on how we perceive it. Another great story line that lines. You know, given what you do is there was an amazing story that chambermaids. I'll let Dr. Ellen Langer did this study. And in this study, they took a group of women who were just leads in a hotel and they divided into two groups. And, well, at the beginning, they you know, they took a lot of doing their weight and their cortisol levels and their blood pressure and all that kind of stuff. [00:11:25.280] – Dr. Skillicorn
And all of them were basically reporting that they were barely getting any exercise. I mean, they pretty much just went home and sat on the couch and did nothing or couch potatoes. And then they divided into two groups. And the one group just kind of went about their business and it was doing the exact same thing. But the other group was given a class, just a simple 15 minute class on how in reality all their work at the hotel way exceeded what most people get an exercise in any given day. [00:11:51.590] – Dr. Skillicorn
And within just a couple weeks, they lost weight and their blood pressure and dropped their sugar levels had dropped and they were looking and feeling better. And all that achieved was a little education in how they perceived what they were actually doing on a daily basis. [00:12:08.740] – Allan
And that's and that's what's so amazing. You know, just just a thought. Just a positive thought or a belief system that you create for yourself can be that powerful. And when we're talking about depression, you know, I'm not going to say that it's all in your head because there's trauma and things that have happened in your past that you have to work past those things. But there's so many side effects to these medications and they're marginally effective and maybe not even more effective than what we talked about, the placebo. [00:12:37.510] – Allan
The reason I think it's the reason I reached out and wanted to talk about this topic is one and you put the stats in the book that the number of people on prescription drugs for depression is just astronomical. You know, I have an ex-wife that was using them quite regularly and it was an interesting little rollercoaster we were on. But one of the big, big problems with these drugs is that it makes it extremely difficult to be healthy in other ways to lose weight and whatnot. [00:13:04.990] – Allan
So I'm going to go ahead, play her recording here. [00:13:08.260] – Susan
Hello, Allan. This is Susan. And I have a question for you. Have you ever considered doing a program on anti-depressants and anxiety medicines and how they impact metabolism and weight? I am curious about that, because ever since I've been taking Cymbalta and Abilify to deal with my depression and anxiety, my ability to lose weight, I've actually gained weight and then trying to take it off has just been very, very challenging. So I didn't know if you had any resources you could go to share about what are best ways to to deal with that. Thanks. [00:14:00.160] – Allan
So, Dr. Skillicorn, what do you think about that? [00:14:03.700] – Dr. Skillicorn
So Susan's absolutely right. So often, all too often, physicians and psychiatrist to blame the patient for the weight gain. But the reality is, is 65 percent of studies on antidepressants are even more when it comes to antipsychotics, which is what Abilify is, show weight gain and not just a little weight gain. But the studies show around fifteen to twenty five pounds within six months to one year are often accumulated after starting these medications. And antipsychotics are getting worse and they've been shown to change our microbiomes. [00:14:41.170] – Dr. Skillicorn
The balance of make the bacteria in our gut so that it makes it much harder to lose weight. And I'm not sure they figured out what the link is specifically with antidepressants, I think there's different ones. But it is very, very real and very much not mentioned. And in fact, that weight gain actually doubles the risk for diabetes for those who are on antidepressants. [00:15:07.960] – Allan
Well, you know, we know hormones and mood and a lot of other things do affect how we feel, stress, those types of things. They do impact our body physically. I know when I was working in corporate and the stress levels were higher, it didn't matter how well I felt like I was eating or how hard I was working out, it was just really difficult for me to have the body composition I wanted because the stress was just holding me back. [00:15:38.800] – Dr. Skillicorn
Absolutely. [00:15:39.420] – Allan
You know, and it's kind of one of those those catch twenty twos. If you want to workout harder, you're pushing yourself harder. You're creating more stress because you're not seeing what you want. And so, yeah, the meds. If there's a way around the meds, we have to take that path. We have to try that path. And a lot of what you've talked about in the book, I think is huge. We're going to get into a little bit of that in a minute.
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[00:17:39.880] – AllanOne of the things you went into that is hard for me to talk about, because I I had an interesting child, I just I call it an interesting childhood. I scored pretty well on ACE score, let's just put it that way. And, you know, for me, that was that was just growing up in a in a in a tough environment. And maybe it had something to do with how I lived my thirties and early 40s before I figured a few things out and then. Know how I deal with stress today. Can you talk about the ACE score and how it correlates with some of the health issues that we're dealing with today? [00:18:17.590] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah, so the evidence is overwhelming. So these these adverse childhood events, which could be, you know, more obvious things like abuse, obviously physical, sexual, but also emotional, it can also be emotional to neglect or disconnection. It can be a parent who's depressed and just can't connect. [00:18:34.720] – Dr. Skillicorn
It can be a parent who's often jail or parents that get divorced or so all these kinds of things or just growing up as a minority, which is becoming painfully obvious these days. I mean, it always has, but it's even more so right now. It's all in our face. But. All of these things cause the nervous system to become more hyper vigilant and more on high alert. So that stress response is amplified to a certain point. [00:19:01.120] – Dr. Skillicorn
And then at some point it can be cops start to shut down because it's so wrapped up for so long. And that leads to all kinds of physiological changes and inflammation. And even in these childhood events 20 years later, right. There's still signs of inflammation from especially untended acknowledged trauma from from childhood. As far as depression, what the data shows is someone who's had no adverse childhood, and frankly, I haven't met that person yet. But in theory, if the rate is about 15 percent chance for depression, but add in one childhood trauma and it goes up to 25%, 2 and it goes up to 40%. [00:19:43.000] – Dr. Skillicorn
And by the time you're at 4, it's over 400%. And the risk of suicidality is over a 1000%. The risk of alcoholism, 800% increase and drug addiction 500% increase. And of these people was on more than four cases, 97% of them end up on psychiatric medications. And yet they're the less likely to benefit from them because it's not the issue. The issue is maybe what I think of as a sole wound is that has hasn't been tended. [00:20:13.660] – Dr. Skillicorn
And just covering it up with meds, I think almost adds to it because that's what kind of children are sort of taught anyway, as you just kind of ignore these things, get on with that buried under the rug. That's often what's happening in these households. And so it's certainly it's not helping the problem whatsoever, but it also physical illness as well. [00:20:32.980] – Dr. Skillicorn
It doubles the risk of heart disease and cancer, coronary artery disease, stroke quadruples the risk of COPD. So the effects are very, very real and very, very unaddressed in our society. [00:20:47.380] – Allan
You know, it's interesting that we look back at it the way that doctors treated patients and we're like, that's medieval, you know, who would cut someone's brain in half or electrocute them or, you know, all the little things that doctors have done over the years or big things that doctors have done over the years. [00:21:04.020] – Allan
And in your your synopsis, as you kind of went through that the history of the medications, it was like, let's let's try this and see what happens. It seems like that's how a lot of it works. And when we're when we're talking about trying to, you know, deal with the disease or, you know, like or something like that, like right now, you know, going through COVID, they're talking about, you know, treatment protocols and things, OK, they're using real science and they're trying some things. Some of them are working on, many of them or not. And it is trial and error. But when you're talking about your brain, that's that's scary. [00:21:39.390] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah. And yet the underlying story with the brain and this is a fairly recent story, is that it is not able to change really that we have a set number of neurons. And so, you know, that doesn't change. In fact, my daughter was showing me hers, reading me from her science book on the brain and the nervous system cell. And she was meeting about neurons and that's what it said in there. I looked and the date of the book was 2004. [00:22:05.840] – Dr. Skillicorn
I told her she got to tell her teacher. That was totally incorrect. But the reality is that's not true. Our brains are constantly changing with every thought and with every action. Our brains are constantly shifting and rewiring. It's just it appears to be static because all too often we keep sending the exact same message. We keep living our lives in the same way, thinking the same thoughts. And so we get the same results. But if we change the input, we change. We change the wiring. We change the output. [00:22:34.430] – Allan
Yeah. For me a big part of knowing that you're changing. So it's like it's so easy to stay in our little ruts. You know, this is how it stays. [00:22:42.750] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah. [00:22:43.880] – Allan
It's like everybody you're like, you look at Facebook and every personal trainer out there or Instagram or whatever, they all want to seem to be like these perfect human beings walking the earth, you know, where the gods of earth and you want to be like us. And I'm like jeez, I'm this dweeb human being that's trying to be a personal trainer that understands what we're supposed to be doing. And so what I know is that you need tools, you need strategies, and you need some tactics. [00:23:11.950] – Allan
And so I spent a lot of time on the podcast kind of thinking what what are some things that people can be doing? Obviously, they have a why they're listening to this podcast. They have an interest. They want to make some changes. One of the tools that I've always found hugely valuable for me, every time I've done something big, I use a journal. [00:23:32.400] – Allan
Can you talk about that, because you go in this several times throughout that the the exercises and the things that you have in the book, you talk about journaling. So can you talk about the journal in various ways that journal can help us through this journey? [00:23:45.650] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah. Well, the studies on journaling so that writing for 20 minutes a day for even just a few days can improve mood, decrease our stress and anxiety and even improve our immune systems. That's a pretty powerful way to spend 20 minutes. But more than that, right? I think it's important because we also forget. We forget so often. I see you know, I see people who start to do these tools. They start to feel better and they're doing great. [00:24:14.420] – Dr. Skillicorn
And then I don't see them for a while. And then they come back and, you know, they're like, nothing's working. I need to go back on meds. And I'm like, remember, you came to me on meds and you weren't doing well. And have you been doing you know, have you been doing a breathing, been exercising, have been eating, you know, what have you been eating? And pretty much they kind of stopped everything that made them start to feel better. [00:24:33.470] – Dr. Skillicorn
They kind of just forgotten. And that's part of the part of something that we all kind of go through, that you kind of have to go into levels and realize, you know, I mean, these are the tools that actually did make us better. It didn't just magically happen. And then often they become so convinced in that moment. Right. That that's the way they were before that. That's the way it was. [00:24:54.680] – Dr. Skillicorn
So journals can also just be a really powerful reminder of we hear this. This is actually these are your own words. This is what was going on. You got through it. And so a reminder that we can and we have. And we will again. [00:25:09.490] – Allan
Yeah. You know, a lot of people, you know, rather we're talking about this or are talking about fitness or anything else. And, you know, I always tell him it's like there's sort of this plateau. But what I want you to do is I want you to go back and look at your journal from three months ago and look at what you were doing then and what where you are now. Yeah. And I said, so, you know, while you're on a plateau, I don't want you to think that you're not on the mountain anymore. [00:25:33.260] – Allan
You're on basically a ridge and you've got to walk the length of that ridge and you're not. Yeah. You're not going up, which you're still working your way up the mountain range, setting it up, you know. [00:25:44.090] – Allan
Trust me. And it's like, so just take that look down. Take that look down to see how far you've come. The Journal gives you that. The journal lets you get stuff out. It lets you say, OK, I don't really want to tell someone what I'm thinking, what I. Yeah. And because that, you know, is particularly a guy. It's like, oh, I've got to tell people, you know, how you know. [00:26:03.950] – Allan
And so just kind of being that vulnerable is really, really hard. So here's an opportunity for you to be vulnerable to yourself, which I think is that self that's self-awareness is so important. [00:26:13.680] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes. Yes. [00:26:14.840] – Allan [00:26:14.840] – Allan
And so and then the other thing is, I find, you know, once I start journaling. It's this, you know, I want to get the next one, I need to, you know, I need to keep this series going. I don't want to drop my streak, you know. Yeah. You know, I've been doing this running or walking or doing this since training or eating a certain way or doing my meditation or, you know, doing my morning ritual. And I've been doing it for this many days. I want to keep that streak going. So, There are so many ways that you can make a journal valuable. I can't stress enough the value of journaling. [00:26:50.560] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah, it is. In fact, we just moved and I had all these boxes of journals. This is a really heavy habit to have and a lot of space. [00:27:04.900] – Allan
I've moved to electronic. We moved down to Panama and there's just no way I could I could keep hard copy and have the space down here that we have. So. Yeah. Okay, I have to go to electronic. So, I'm journalling electronic. I'm on my phone or my computer. [00:27:21.280] – Dr. Skillicorn
Probably much wiser. [00:27:27.490] – Allan
This is not as nice as writing stuff out. There's just something, there's something different about taking a pencil or a pen to paper and writing. So I wouldn't get away from that entirely. If you if you can do it. Do it. But I do this, you know, stuff here for me is not a not a good thing. So I had to move to electronic for my own sake. But if you can do paper to pen, I think that's that's so much better now. [00:27:49.840] – Allan
One of the other things you're going into and there's so much in the book that we can be doing to improve that is outside of what medicine would require, but just things that we can do to improve our mood to get past depression can glue going to a counselor can and clearly things. But within the physical realm, you use this thing called shaking. And when I was reading it, I was thinking, this sounds a lot like rebounding. You talk about shaking and then I want to come back around to why I think it's a lot like rebounding. [00:28:18.430] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah, so shaking is actually the oldest form of mind for me. It dates back over a hundred thousand years. They found evidence of people taking pictures on cables. And it's basically and it's used it's also part of Qi Gong. So lots of people learn from actually working as part of that. But it's just it's literally just grounding your feet into the earth. It is ideal if it's in the earth, like actually outside on the ground, but it works anywhere. [00:28:46.540] – Dr. Skillicorn
And then just shaking your body right by you just needs to move. That's how the toxins get released, how the lymphatic fluid. And it's my body. And so it's a form of exercise, but it's a grounded form so that you can kind of do anywhere any time. [00:29:01.870] – Dr. Skillicorn
I suppose you would want to do it around a whole bunch of people that quite a bit, I would say, but… [00:29:06.990] – Allan
They would send you to a psychiatrist in the psych ward.
[00:29:10.950] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes, crazy person over there. [00:29:12.200]- Dr. Skillicorn
But yes, just moving everything is just letting it all out. You can literally just feel the stress. Like releasing through the body into the ground. It's it's such a powerful. And so I mean, ideally, I like to go outside and if you do it with music, it's even better. You write just music, kind of getting into the movement and letting the body just move how it needs to move to release what it needs to release. [00:29:36.670] – Allan
Yeah. What was cause it was you went through about an eight-minute series of shaking and then have your music ready to then just turn it into a dance and enjoy the rest. [00:29:46.670] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah, just joyful dancing. [00:29:47.650] – Allan
And the reason I say it, it reminds me of rebounding was again, you know, when we're talking about depression. And this is my impression from book is there's toxic feelings, toxic thoughts, toxic experiences from our past that we're trying to get out of our body and the lymphatic system. There are no pumps for us. It's not like our heart or our which is a pump or are our lungs, which have muscles that also cause it to do what it's supposed to do. [00:30:15.580]
The only way we're gonna get the lymph, which is removing toxins from our body to move, is through skeletal movement, through moving our muscles and moving around. And so movement is very, very valuable. Shaking was one cool one because, again, it kind of gets you moving, getting out nature, walking around, doing those types of things, grounding and moving around again. All those are very, very important. And I'm not just saying this is a personal trainer. You're going to feel better moving around. [00:30:46.320] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yes, absolutely. I know every time I'm feeling sluggish, right, the last thing you want to do is get up and move, right? You kind of just sink into the couch. And it's hard to move, but it's. But as soon as you do. And I think we've all had this experience. We just instantly do feel better. And especially if it can be, you know, around trees and green. [00:31:06.590] – Dr. Skillicorn
It's been shown that even 15 minutes outside can improve our mood and decrease stress and anxiety. And again, it can concern main system. And that can last for up to a few weeks. And yet, unfortunately, fewer and fewer of us get outside on a daily basis. Again, less than 10 percent of kids these days spend time outside every day, which is so sad. [00:31:27.410] – Allan
Dr. Skillicorn, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well? [00:31:37.680] – Dr. Skillicorn
So I think we've already mentioned a few of them right? Moving and getting outside. And then, of course, food, food, every every bite of food is energetic. Message to our body is sending a message of imbalance or a balance. [00:31:54.320]- Dr. Skillicorn
And so really, you know, the more we can avoid processed foods and really eat real foods or fruits and vegetables and whole grains. And, you know, if you eat meat, organic, grass-fed meats, but that's critical for health for both our body and our brain. So that's definitely important when it's been shown that even then, you know, we can decrease our risk of depression by 50 percent just by making small changes to our diet and including more of those whole foods. [00:32:35.570] – Dr. Skillicorn
And then the other really important one is sleep again, something in our culture that gets undervalued. And there's almost a macho attitude of right. [00:32:46.880] – Dr. Skillicorn
I can get by on less and I can get more done if I get less. But less than six hours of sleep. And again, we put ourselves at risk for inflammation and we triple or quadruple our risk for depression and dementia and heart disease and strokes and even death is critical for our house. In fact, one night without sleep in our amygdala. So that part of the brain that fight flight freeze, the threat detector gets activated by 60 percent. [00:33:12.170] – Dr. Skillicorn
So we look around the world and we start to see threats everywhere, even in neutral expressions, even when things are going fine. So it's it's maybe even the importance and sleep it's actually been shown. This was amazing to me. I did not know this before researching for the book. It actually acts as a form of free therapy. So it kind of diffuses our natural experiences through dreams. So it has it's very real valuable in maintaining our emotional and physical health. [00:33:41.780] – Allan
Thank you, Dr. Skillicorn. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, Healing Depression Without Medication and all the wonderful things that you're doing. Where would you like me to send them? [00:33:52.420] – Dr. Skillicorn
Yeah. So the book can be found just about anywhere. And I have a website, jodieskillicorn.com. They can find information there. And I also have a Facebook page which is mindful psychiatry. And then also Dr. Jodie is going to question there's two of them. [00:34:09.910] – Allan
OK. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/441. And I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Skillicorn, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness. [00:34:21.080] – Dr. Skillicorn
Thanks for having me.
If you haven't already, I strongly encourage you to check us out on Facebook. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. There you'll find our Facebook group. We do weekly challenges and I post all kinds of cool stuff during the week. Great conversations. Great people. Love to have you there. Good. A 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and join the 40+ Fitness Podcast Group today.
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Allan (04:23):
Dr. Tan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Tan (04:25):
Hi, glad to be on.
Allan (04:28):
Now, you know, for a long time, I'm going to admit, I would read about vitamin E and it's this antioxidant that you're supposed to have. And then I'd be reading on vitamin E and it's like, well, maybe vitamin D is and all that good for you. Maybe you don't need as much as we thought you did. Maybe it isn't as good an antioxidant. Just drink red wine, and you'll be fine. You know, but in your book, The Truth About Vitamin E, you shed a lot of light on why, not only what vitamin E is, but why maybe the science, had a hard time catching on. Why vitamin E is valuable and why we may have missed it because we didn't truly understand the nature of vitamin E at the beginning.
Dr. Tan (05:14):
Yeah. I think that, you know, sometime there things that we are Hotwire in life. Just, you know, and vitamin E is one of those. The Popular vitamin E, or the one that is known for 40 50 years before is something called Tocopherol. You can see it on the cereal box and before say. Take your vitamin E Tocopherols and nothing intrinsically wrong with that. And then in the 1980s, a lot of studies were done on them. This has been, I was a young assistant professor at University of Massachusetts then, and then I was also swept in and wanted to learn more about vitamin E as an antioxidant, all these wonderful thing that it will intervene chronic conditions. So if somebody were to go online and search for vitamin E, you'll find that nothing happened to it. At the very best it didn't work. And then at worst, it may do some harm. That vitamin E could cause cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Dr. Tan (06:15):
You can look. So now the audience don't need to be alarmed. You just to feel well, why is that? So that is referring to the vitamin E Tocopherol because it's known for 50 to 70 years before, somewhere along that time, I got interested in the much, much less than known vitamin E called tocotrienol. Its a mouth full of word. Later, when you get to get a copy of the book, you can see, and then you spell out for you there. This at that time is little known, but meanwhile, that public knows vitamin E as Tocopherol. But I get fixated to study tocotrienol much less is known then. It was already known to the scientists and few scientists. So I decided to stick it on there and then study what plant material make this kind of lesser known vitamin E. And so that started my career in 1982. So it was a long time coming.
Dr. Tan (07:16):
It's no flash in the pants. So for the audience, this is just a love of my life. Wanting to pass the information on. There may be something unusual about this lesson on vitamin E. So that's the backdrop why people read and study and want to know more about Vitamin E.
Allan (07:34):
Okay. And so scientists have identified that vitamin E is an antioxidant. One of many. Tell us just a minute. What, what does an antioxidant do for us and why is it important?
Dr. Tan (07:49):
Okay. The word antioxidant before I say that vitamin E is a little bit overused, but it's a quick take for the public to understand that it protects you, that it does. Now,I'm not trying to get into the science, but just to the cartoony version of it, each of us contain 37, 38 trillion cells. That's a lot of numbers. The world population is about seven and a half billion.
Dr. Tan (08:18):
So approximately 5,000 times of population of diverse are the number of cells continue on human body. And a cell looks like a bean shaped. Its just like a cell wall, round and a bean and inside are all the constituent of the cell, like the nucleus, the mitochondria, all of these things that do good things for the body, but it had to be contained into a cell wall. And the cell wall, are fat, they are lipids, they are fat. And fat is it easiest thing to be oxidized. I'm trying to get to the word antioxidant like that. And people use the word. Antioxidant is overused. So every darn thing is an antioxidant. It is not good for the public to appreciate this. So if you asked me, I care for the things that are easiest to oxidize. If you put a stick of butter in a summer day, it'll go rancid, see.
Dr. Tan (09:14):
Even if you need to stick an uncooked piece of meat into open. When it go off after a couple of hours on a hot day, you're not smelling the protein going off in a week, you're smelling this fat going off. So then after a while, we got the gist that when you say things are oxidized, it's the fat that is oxidized. So now back to the cell wall. They are all fat. So therefore I got very interested to know. I need to know what are the antioxidants that protect the cell? Because that is the motion, not any antioxidant. About 30, 40 years ago an Austrian professor did just that. They harvested all the antioxidant on the cell wall of the fat and all of the lipid protein, the particle that float around in the blood. They also have these cell walls. So they, and then he found out that, let's say you have a hundred pieces of antioxidant in the cell wall that actually protect the lipid in the cell wall.
Dr. Tan (10:24):
More than about 90 to 95 of them. Yeah. Vitamin E molecule, the remaining five to no more than 10 are other antioxidant. There are thousands of them. So that gave me a big clue that most of the important antioxidants are protective fat. They look like vitamin E and vitamin E, now I'm reducing it down to the funnel now. Of the vitamin E we just discussed it, two groups tocopherol and tocotrienol. The difference of tocopherols. They're both antioxidant. They both catch the bad guy. You know, the difference is a tocotrienol, because the tail is a little bit shorter. It cooks, it anchors into the lipid membrane. If it goes around the cell like that. A Tocopherol goes around the cell slower figure out like five miles an hour like that a tocotrienol goes around at 50 to a hundred miles per hour.
Dr. Tan (11:30):
In other words, it brings up oxygen here to under oxidize the fat, because it spins around 50 times faster, it captures the oxygen and then annuls it. So you want oxidize the fat. Those things have published scientifically that's it. So therefore, often 90, 95% of the antioxidant vitamin E, I am now segue to the tocotrienol, because at 50 times more potent. So therefore now to the public inflammation, if somebody need to protect themself of antioxidant, first think of them protecting the fat. And the fat would be your cell wall. And the best way to protect the antioxidant should be a tocotrienol, because at 50 times more potent. Now I have a hard challenge to communicate this to the public. There's a public, mostly about tocopherol not tocotrienol. So that's, I hope that explained somewhat on that.
Allan (12:35):
It does. It does. So I think you know, we know when we start talking about the B vitamins, you know, there's B6, B12, B2 and they've got their own little names just to make it more complicated, but we tend to stick to those numbers, you know, B1, B2, B6, B12 the E vitamins also kind of have their own types as well. And there are eight of them. Do you mind going through the eight and kind of comparing and contrasting those for us.
Dr. Tan (13:04):
Since you brought up the B vitamin, the B vitamins are very complex. Where the complexity of the B vitamin is reduced to simplistic service. All B vitamin have two things. I know I'm digressing, but I hope this is useful information to your listener. The B vitamins are all water soluble. So it's not really something to use in your body, but they're all water soluble and a B vitamin chemically they're totally different. And one last thing on a, B vitamin, they all have to do with growth factor. It had to help a young and chick, a young animal to grow. So we, and then they become a B vitamin because it can help, but chemically, they are very diverse. However, in the E vitamin, sometime people call it E vitamins. They're only, they're very similar molecules. They are just tocopherol where the tail is longer, anchors less deep, and move around the cell wall slower, and tocotrienol shorter tail and it goes around the cell wall faster. Just two.
Dr. Tan (14:08):
Each one of them have four numbers on them. It's not called one, two, three, four. You have the Greek letter, alpha beta, Delta, and gamma tocopherols, alpha beta Delta, and gamma tocotrienol. If one were to do a Google search, you will find more than 90% of the research that shows vitamin E to actually work today are only two of the eight possibilities. And the two of them are Delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienol everything else pale, including all the Tocopherols and all the tocotrienol, except these two. Now, to share with you my excitement in the discovery from annato which is growing all over in South America, it does not grow on Argentina and Chile where you see great country growing is too cold.
Dr. Tan (15:10):
So anything from Argentina and Chile coming up North all the way to Mexico, you see this, the Spanish people call this achote, the Americans called it annato, and the British have nicknamed it, the lipstick plant because it's intense red color like that. So now we, I discovered this about 22, 23 years ago when I was in Ecuador and Peru. And I found out that this red color is intensely oxidizable. So I was surmising that there's got to be something that protect the color of going back quickly. I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a polyphenol. And surprising to me is a vitamin E molecule. And even more surprising to me, it only contained tocotrienol with no tocopherol. And most surprising to me, it only contained Delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienol the two of the eight that I told you that is most potent.
Dr. Tan (16:12):
So the plant know what they are doing. And I'm just fortunate to be there, spiritually to discover it. They figured it out to the evolution of time, you know, like that. So now when I discovered that this plan contained the two most potent antioxidant to protect lipid, then I said, I think I stumbled into this. And that was 22, 23 years ago. So I spent the last 20 years doing just about nothing else, but figuring out how can I show this that would help first in animal studies and then later in clinical studies that is really useful to people. That's what I've been spending most of my life.
Allan (16:58):
Okay.
SPONSOR BREAK
Allan (17:57):
Now, I think people can relate to the word rancid. The thought that our cell walls are getting rancid because of an oxygen molecule. One of the ways I've heard it said before, it's a little easier to understand basically the same thing as rust. Rust is an oxidation of a metal. And I think you can think that's probably good, but there's some real health benefits that we can get from an antioxidant like tocotrienol.
Dr. Tan (18:23):
Yeah. That's it. And tocotrienol now when people show picture that rubbed something on a cut apple, so to the browning will go slower. That would be an example of an oxidation that is not lipid because there's no fat in Apple. So if you put in vitamin C the vitamin C, which is ascorbic acid, you just drop a little bit on it, then it just doesn't turn Brown. Usually mothers or my wife would do this even to keep apple fresh. This is a simple way to do it. You'll put acidic acid, vinegar. That's a different process. The vinegar is a knocking off the enzyme. So the enzyme would not cause browning effect. So it's not working as an antitoxic, but it does the same job. But vitamin C would be, if you put tocotrienol on an apple, it doesn't work because it's not a lipid, a cell wall like that.
Dr. Tan (19:20):
Under rusting it is a direct oxidation on the iron. And iron from iron oxide C and then they took an oxidation. They'll all oxidation. So you go right. Those are ideas of oxidation, how easily our body can get oxidized. Because in air is about 20 to 22% oxygen. So plenty of oxygen in the air. So you can oxidize thing, but lipid. Each human body holds about 20 to 25% of lipid. That needs to be protected. And it's not like we don't need oxygen and excluded without oxygen. We die. You know, you can see this ventilator thing on a COVID thing is very clear. They need to breathe. Otherwise we died. And now with the news, let me breathe, you know, like that, is just that we need oxygen, but as we need oxygen. There are one in a thousand oxygen we reason is going to turn rogue. That rogue oxygen will oxidize your fat.
Dr. Tan (20:27):
The other 99.9% oxygen is for exchanging the carbon dioxide. All good like that. So the tocotrienol is there like a police. To capture the one in 1000 things gone bad. Otherwise there'll be a good, so that is usually fat related right? On the fat on the cell wall. And that's where tocotrienol play the best role in protecting the fat.
Allan (20:52):
Okay. And there's some definite health benefits that we can, I mean, like real health benefits, like cancer, dementia, heart disease, things like that. That this relates to.
Allan (21:04):
yeah, And on those we've done first, we did probably 10 years or more of animal study. So we're pretty confident in this area is worth studying before we put our resources against clinical study with human. So one of the earliest study we did on the cardiovascular benefit, people would have high lipids are no good meaning, high cholesterol, high triglyceride, you know, people, diabetes have high triglycerides.
Dr. Tan (21:33):
People have heart disease have high cholesterol, so we studied it. When we did. We found that in the lipid, the cholesterol typically drop about 15% and the triglyceride drop about 20%. That's good news, enough for me because I'm not on medication. I also asked that researcher that sometimes people have heart disease also caused by inflammation, distress to their body. So they study something called C reactive protein, a measurement of inflammation. And that also dropped typically about 30 to 40%. So we got that done at University of Missouri, probably about 10 years ago. Then we also study directly on inflammation, not no cardiovascular disease. And we found that C reactive protein continues to drop. So we're good with that. It helped people to lower the inflammation, the stress in your life that become biological. Usually distress is a physical one, but it translate to biological in their body.
Dr. Tan (22:38):
And it does no good to the body. And we noticed that it quenched inflammation in your body. So that part is good. Then we studied bone in postmenopausal. Women say 55 years old. We did this study in Texas. So in bone bone is organic. The growing of the bone cell is called osteoblasts, the growing cell. And the cell, the breakdown is called ostioclass. These two are in perfect balance in life. There's no such thing as just grow. And then you don't have to because the bone turn over once every 24 months like that. But as we get into menopause, the estrogen drop. Either way, Estrogen is an antioxidant. So when an estrogen drop, this is, let's say, this is the growing bone, the growing bone start to drop and to break down bone, start to increase why the breakdown increase and the growing drop. So on average, the bone is beginning to sink.
Dr. Tan (23:40):
So it's a balance on it when we gave them the vitamin E or, you know, the growing of the bone start to increase and ostioclass, that breakdown of the bone, rather than you go up is suppressed. So in other words it make the mineralization and breakdown of the bone from 55 to 65 years old dropping precipitously like that. It dropped like this over time. In other words, it cannot stop it, but it resists the bone loss. So we are very happy that that study was done and that they take about 300 milligram or so. I forgot to say in the earlier cardiovascular study, it was 200 to 500 milligrams. I'll summarize a little later. There was the second study. And the third study, I'll leave the cancer be last, the third study is fatty liver because the American diet is increasingly having more fat.
Dr. Tan (24:44):
So there's a silent disease in make the liver fatty, not a good thing. Who would have guessed 30 years ago. And people have fatty liver are people that consume too much alcohol. So to alcohol not able to be processed in the liver adequately. And the liver becomes very fatty and it causes cirrhosis. Today we see example of cirrhotic liver to a person that is non alcohol drinker. And that condition was first identified by Mayo clinic in the 1980s is called. It actually is an awkwardly long phrase is NAFLD, for non alcohol fatty liver disease. So if you want to go, go to read up, just put non alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD. It was first identified in Mayo clinic in Minneapolis, in the 1980 like that. And that is simply caused by, as the phrase said, non-alcohol related and due to fatty acid, we decided to study that silent group because they had no pain, no exempt, no anything.
Dr. Tan (25:59):
Unless you do a blood test show, blood enzyme of liver, it gets stressed up like that. So we did that. We did a three month study and a six months study. So now we are, so under a three and six months study, we found that surprising to us, not intended for surprising to us that the people lost 10 pounds in three months, not as dramatic as you're exercising that you told on your story, but still it is something exciting. They did not do exercise like that. So it somehow is able to work with the body to quench the inflammation. And in six months they lost 16 pounds. So it is the time dependent like that. We, we now decided so convinced by the study, we're doing a 12 month study. We don't know the weight loss. Remember we did not design this study for weight loss.
Dr. Tan (26:54):
We actually to see, so to bring back the body back in proper shelter and therefore it beginning to work properly, the C reactive protein dropped significantly. I'm thrilled about that. They took 600 milligram like that. So in the six, in the 12 month study, we asked them to increase exercise and improve their food habits, to not, not continue to eat very high, fat food, which costs their liver damage to begin with. So that's it. The last one, probably our most dramatic study of them all with a cancer study. These cancer studies were done in Denmark. It's still ongoing and we're doing five different cancers. And the one that is published is ovarian cancer. And actually five cancer, actually six of them total, but some of them are duplicating more than the same cancer, but the four different kinds of cancer on the six studies of ovarian cancer that's published.
Dr. Tan (27:57):
And the others three, because it's four different cancers. A lung, breast, and colon cancer. And those are big types of cancer. Chronic, for sure. If you go to the state of Florida, a huge number of the elderly population have colon cancer. And of course, if they are a smoker which is not a good thing to begin with, they also exposed himself to lung cancer, much higher risks. But this ovarian cancer thing is probably related to the menopausal time is related to endometrial problems like that. But on ovarian cancer, the results publish. We started this study with stage four cancer patient. Stage four, meaning that they can say have gone everywhere. The options are not good. The doctors can not do anything, that group of people. So they have standard care that take medication that make them really sick. But if they know that it's even worse.
Dr. Tan (28:58):
So most of them after six months they are no longer living. And then the other group is taking the standard of care with the vitamin E tocotrienol. After six to six months, half of them still living. And even after 12 months continue to be after 24 months, 25% still living. I am talking about a nutritional supplement. This is nothing short of a miracle. You know, if it's a drug, it would be all over Wall Street Journal, but it isn't. So we published this, but we have great confidence. So we're down to wait for the clinical trial, for the breast, lung, and colon cancer to come out, hopefully will yield the exciting news. And these patient takes 900 milligrams, higher dose because they are at the end stage. And once we are successful with the stage four, then we will do the stage three, two, and one, you follow?
Dr. Tan (30:03):
So we did that because with stage four, you have nothing to lose. So we begin with that and we'll graduate to the one. So just so for the audience, you know, we don't have all the answers now we are providing. You know, research is like that. Easy to ask question, but results are not easy to come by. But I would take tocotrienol for the prevention of cancer. Because nobody had dodged the bullet, you know. Your DNA could go act out and then you have cancer causing. So not everything is dietary, not so days that genetic component also. So if I can ward it away by taking 300 milligrams, why not? It's a very inexpensive insurance.
Allan (30:48):
It definitely is.
Dr. Tan (30:49):
Those are the studies.
Allan (30:51):
Now in a lot of cases when you're taking a mineral, you're taking a vitamin, they'll talk about how it has a symbiotic relationship with something else. And then other times you take something and it could actually harms you from getting what you need out of something else. So taking it is not in your best interest. And so you talked in the book about when you supplement or your food stuff is pretty high in tocopherols, that that can actually be, bad for getting the tocotrienol to work the way you need. I'm going to say it wrong, right?
Dr. Tan (31:32):
No, I understand your question. You are referring to, is there anything that would be antagonistic or interfer.
Allan (31:41):
Because yeah, more of a good thing is not always a good thing.
Dr. Tan (31:44):
That is correct. I think there, let me take one step back before the show you had asked me about, if you can get something from food, let's get it from food. So I should address that. In a dietary manner in which is eating from food. We typically can get about 10 to 12 milligrams of tocopherol. If you just eat healthy food with vegetable like that, you'll get mostly tocopherol you can get from oil, vegetable oil. If you add them up and USDA have these kind of numbers, we were on a Western diet, probably 10 to 12 milligram of tocopherol. That 10 to 12 milligram of tocopherol is ducky. No problem with that. It's good. If you take supplement for tocopherol, It's a different story. People take 400 IU, 600, 1000 IU, approximate to 400, 600 to 1000 milligrams. That is not, you cannot get that from diet. You have to get it from a supplement and tocotrienol, if you eat a Western diet, typically you have about two milligram of tocotrienol, and from the citation I mentioned on this study, there are approximately about 200 to 600 milligram.
Dr. Tan (33:05):
So if you take it from food, 200 milligrams, you need approximately a hundred times more. So therefore it's not possible to get in now. So tocotrienol from the diet. So just to set the stage for that. So now on the interference and the antagonistic component, if a person takes supplemental vitamin E tocopherol then the supplemental vitamin E tocopherol would interfere with the function of tocotrienol. If you want to see the benefit of tocotrienol. So for me, because tococpherol and tocotrienol protect the cell wall equally. I mean, to protect the cell wall, but not equally, I meant, but tocotrienol protects it 50 times better. I have stopped taking tocopherol more than 20 years. If I get tocopherol from diet, which I mentioned is 10, 12 milligram of data is fine. That will not interfere.
Dr. Tan (34:08):
It's too small to interfere because I take 300 milligrams, 300 milligrams of tocotrienol 10 milligram of tocopherol no interference. But if I take 300 milligrams of tocotrienol, then I take 300 milligrams of supplement tocopherol. I have a problem because basically I, my leg, my right leg is on the gas pedal. And my left leg is on the brake petal. It's like this, but if I dietarily have 10 milligram to cough, my, my gas pedal right leg is on nothing on the left leg. So you would not interfere. So I hope I help to clarify that.
Allan (34:54):
You did, you did. We want our foot on the brake, not pushing it, and our gas peddle pushing it and that's gonna move us forward. Alright. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
Dr. Tan (35:12):
That, you know, I don't get asked that kind of question a lot, but I liked the way you, you raised that question. I thought about it a little bit. So thank you for doing it at different interview, at different slang on things. Some, some are very critically scientific, some which is a larger audience and some is holistic. I see these questions that you have, you asked healthiest, and I translate in my mind as wellness. You mentioned fitness, I translate in my mind as exercise. And then you use the word happiness. Happiness sometime can be elusive, you know, by translate in my mind, happiness as spiritual, you know, I'm in my sixties, you have things that have happiness come but they're fleeting. After a while it flies away, that's not a character of happiness. So I thought of happiness as spiritual something is intrinsic within me like that. So I think I now describe this three thing. It's not a strategy, you know, not so intentional like that.
Dr. Tan (36:20):
I think of this three as something I got into. So maybe learning to ally. So not so intentional. The first one is I just described it in my way. The first one is I moved from deleterious. People know the word, things, bad things, deleterious to nutritional, you know, if it's in life and it would be toxic to nontoxic, I, I, that the phrase is loaded somewhat, but in your, in my study in science is deleterious to a nutritional. Why do I use the word deleterious? When I was a young assistant professor, I got a lot of grant from the EPA, the environmental protection agency. So I just, I studied fish Fish of cancer all over their face, you know, it's terrible, you know, and then I study oil spill and then they have pesticide in the thing. So any good news, I can't bare bad news. I appreciate that.
Dr. Tan (37:21):
But then I said, wow, this is such a downer. But of course, if people tell me, Barrie, you better not eat that, that have a lot of lead, but man, thank you very much for telling me, you know, because I don't want you to stop. Right. So, but then I said, I don't want to spend my time bearing bad news all the time. So I don't want to say deleterious thing. I greatly appreciate people who do that and inform me about that, but I started my career and then I move on to nutritional thing. I wanted to know what makes me healthy. So then moved from that. So I went from that position then I began to be very concentrated in my scientific affairs, in wellness and healthy thing. So now my, all my scientific thinking is like that. And I think that it contributes much to my personal health.
Dr. Tan (38:11):
I have genetic hypercholesterolemia like that. So I have to watch what I eat. You know, you know, I can love, I can do many things, but a non beating heart cannot work. A non-beaing heart cannot love. So I got to take care of a few things, so I won't get into problem, you know? So that part talks about your wellness healthier. The second part is I move from moral to spiritual. It's touching on your happy component part. In early on in my life because of my parents, which I'm very grateful. They teach me that Barrie, you want to live life doing the right thing. People say like that that's important. So that galvanized me to have rules right, and wrong. Still there like that, but I move away from that. I didn't want it to be just black and white. And then I moved from moral to spiritual.
Dr. Tan (39:10):
Here I am more aware. My wife teaches me more on this than I am naturally like this, you know, hi, I egocentric doesn't help, you know, like that, but you know, I'm a homosapien, you know, I can't think away from that kind of thing, but it helped the spiritual part help me to be aware and helped me off my being. So in helping me to be aware of my being, I actually am able to focus on things that are non-matter. The first one is matter. You would take this, you don't take this. And this one is non-matter. It helps me. So spiritual being helps me and this kind of component helped me to be happy. Hard to have things that are material, making me happy. It did a little bit and then it just is fleeting, you know? Great.
Dr. Tan (40:04):
And they don't last, you know, so, and so I touched a happy component. The third one, I did not put these contextualized, but they actually fit your three things. The third one has to do with the exercise component. Today, with the advent of Google and computer, I'm tempted to sit. But of course, I started my scientific career before the advent of computers and before Google, but I also sit. Because I'll go to the library to get journal article. And then I said, all day long to read, then I said, wow, this is not good. So then now I walking. So in the last two years in particular, I should have done earlier, not a weekend warrior run like mad. I don't have that in me, but I need to be cardiovascular. If you just walk enough for 20 minutes, you'll heart will increase pulse rate.
Dr. Tan (41:05):
And my reading would increase. I want at least that I want my blood to be circulating. Of course, if I can run like the jock fantastic. But I can't, you know, my doctor said, Barrie you're in your 60s. You cannot get your heartbeat of 140. That's dangerous. Your heart will collapse. You know, you're not in your twenties. You can do that. So I watched that he, my doctor make me run on a treadmill. So when I get my heartbeat of 140, is that very, I can see not rhythm mixing happening to your heart. So you gotta make sure that you can overdo this because you're not in your twenties, you know, like that. So I always want my height to be cardiovascular and cardiovascular is not difficult to do. I just walk 20 minutes. My height will be cardiovascular like that. So I ended up right now, I'm trying to meet the challenge of resistance exercise.
Dr. Tan (41:57):
I would like to do that because they'll help me a strong, good bones built a little bit better muscle. I know that when you lost weight, you said that a portion of your weight gain is your muscle mass. I would like to do that. So I'm working on that.
Allan (42:11):
So Dr. Tan, when we get off this call, let's talk.
Dr. Tan (42:16):
Okay. So those are my three things, you know, so sorry it took a little long winded to answer that, but I'm with you on that how you address this to your audience.
Allan (42:29):
Okay. Great. Thank you. So Dr. Tan, thank you for being on 40 plus fitness. If someone wanted to learn more about, you learn more about your book, The Truth About Vitamin E and your product Delta gold, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Tan (42:44):
Okay. First under book, it was a labor of love. So you can get a download free copy of the book. You go on the website, my name Barrie, is B A R R I E. It is a British style of saying Barry. Barrietan.com. They would go on it. And then, because you come to this, to this show, so you can say 40 fitness and you'd be able to download a free copy. If the audience like to get the autograph hand copy you send me an email through the website, and then we'll be happy to send you a copy. Otherwise you can download it fast. So you can read it yourself as to buying the supplement. If you type online, just make sure that the tocotrienol have to work annatto. A N N A T T O two ends and two T are not tocotrienol then that's tocotrienol you're want. Not from any other sources, then you will get it. If you want specific names of company to do, to buy it from, you can buy it from Amazon, the two or three companies that I recommend you all come from our factory, like that would be Designs For Health. Designs, Plural designs for health. Nutricology, synthesizing the word, nutrition and pharmacology Nutricology they have it too. And then AC Grace capital a capital C grace as in grace to our life AC grace. So these three companies have them. And if you still have difficulty sending us an email, we will direct you. How to get, I hope to answer your questions.
Allan (44:41):
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/440 and I'll have all the links there. Dr. Tan, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Tan (44:51):
And thank you and thanks for the audience for so patiently. Hopefully you find something useful to your application, to your health. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.
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June 22, 2020
- in guest/interview , health by allan
Trick yourself to sleep with Kim Jones
Sleep is a fundamental health requirement. In her book, Trick Yourself to Sleep, Kim Jones shows us over 200 ways we can work with our body and mind to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
Transcript
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Allan (03:44):
Kim, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Kim (03:47):
Hello. How are you?
Allan (03:48):
I'm really good. And today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things, sleep. You wrote the book, Trick Yourself to Sleep, 222 Ways to Fall and Stay Asleep from the Science of Slumber. And going through all of those 222 of them, I would say I probably knew maybe half of them. So there's a lot in this book for someone to try if they're struggling with their sleep.
Kim (04:16):
Good. I'm glad to hear that you've not heard of all of them because I think that was the whole reason I wrote the book. There's just so much out there you can do to help yourself sleep. It's not necessarily doing something just before bed. It can be doing things all through the day that can help set the scene for a perfect night's sleep. So, you know, there are a lot of things you can do. So my book, I hope people will be able to dip into, try test out a few things and find some new ways to get that perfect night's sleep
Allan (04:46):
Excellent. Now, one that I hadn't really thought of, obviously as an adult, but it's something we do with our children is rocking. Can you talk about why rocking helps us sleep, and then a couple of ways that we can incorporate rocking into our lives. You know, cause like I'm not going to get my wife to do it. I weigh a little bit too much.
Kim (05:08):
Exactly. That's the problem. I mean, it's obviously something we all do to our babies and our children when they're small enough to do it naturally, it's innate to naturally rock them to sleep, it's soothing. And you know, researchers have wanted to find out if the same sort of feelings can, the same drowsy things can be experienced by adults who rock. So a University of Geneva study. For example, they monitored people, adults who check in that rocking bed, which was like a hammock. And they found that they did in fact fall asleep faster. But what was really, really interesting was that they monitored their brain wave activity and they found that in those people who were rocking in this hammock, there was an increase in the type of brainwave activity that's associated with deep sleep. So it actually should suggest that rocking motions can synchronize your brainwave activity to that, to associate you with sleep. So how do we do it? Like you say, you're too big to be rocks by anybody. But of course there's the good old rocking chair. They are coming back into Vogue at the moment, especially with nursing mothers. There are lots of these chairs that have been sold might be able to find one an antique shop.
Allan (06:28):
Well, no, no, they actually have them. If you live in the Southeast, I think mostly they're in Southeast, it's a store called Cracker Barrel, and they have these rockers outside when they have their long waits. If someone wants to sit out in the rocker and they actually do sell those rocking chairs. So if you're anywhere near the Southeast, you're going to be able to find a rocking chair at the Cracker Barrel.
Kim (06:50):
Perfect. Well, there you go. There you go. So if you can't get hold of rocking chair, apparently now that aren't rocking beds, commercially being developed as we speak, I think in the US actually. And they are sort of as they fit onto your existing beds and they do actually have that beautiful, slow rocking motion. Again, they're quite expensive. So they might not be something we can get your hands on quite easily, but just simply rocking on your feet before bedtime can be relaxing. So it's very simple. You just, before bed, just stand with your feet about shoulder with the parts and just shift your body weight onto your heels. So that's backwards. So your toes lift off the floor and then shift your weight on to your toes so that your heels rockets the floor. And if you just continue rocking back and forth really slowly, breathing deeply as you do so you are setting that rocking motion in your body and you are hopefully then synchronizing your brainwave activity into that associated with deep sleep. And you've got the added advantage of stimulating acupressure points on your feet, which can come and relax you as well. So that's an easy way to do a rock some sort of rocking motion before bed, and then very calmly when you are finished rocking on the heels for a while and to do a stretch, then get into bed and it'll have calmed you down.
Allan (08:25):
Yeah. And that's one thing, you know, at the end of a workout, you know, a lot of times if we're doing group training or you've done any group training, they'll finish up with some stretching and it's always kind of that just that relaxing you're laying on the floor, you're stretching out. So stretching and yoga actually are protocols that could help us sleep better. Could you tell us about that?
Kim (08:46):
Yeah, absolutely. So yoga, myself I've not sort of ever been a huge yoga convert because I think before I tried it, I always thought it was difficult. You had to be really flexible, but of course that's totally not true. You can do so many yoga moves in the comfort of your own home, which are really easy and they don't require much flexibility. And when yoga moves is constantly mentioned when it comes to helping you sleep, nearly every yoga teacher I've talked to is totally, this one is the one to try. It's called legs up the wall. And it's thought to trigger your parasympathetic nervous system. That's the part of your nervous system that helps slow your heartbeat is helps you to relax and, you know, drop your blood pressures, everything down. It's really simple and you don't have to be flexible at all to do it.
Kim (09:44):
So you simply, I don't know if you know this one, but you just sit on the floor with either your left or your right hip the wall, turn your body, keeping your bottom close to the wall. Then you bring your legs up on to the wall. And don't worry too much about how much your knees are bent. If it's more comfortable, you can keep your knees bent. Cause some people don't, can't actually straighten their legs completely against the wall. You can use pillows next to the wall or under your hips to support your back. It's gotta be comfortable for you to be in this position. Basically you are laying there with your legs up against the wall for a few minutes, breathing deeply. And it's really, really thought to somehow calm the nervous system and you can do it in bed against the headboard if that's at all feasible as well.
Kim (10:33):
But that's definitely one pose, which I think you've got to try before anything, if you are going to do some yoga. And then do you want me to talk about any other poses? Like child's? Great stuff. So child's pose. If you are a yoga fan, you'll know the smell quite well, but again, it's one that is supposed to relax your body and mind very, very quickly, but you don't have to be too flexible again. And you can use lots of cushions and that kind of thing to help you. So you just get into a kneeling position. So you're sitting on your heels, their knees either together or it distance apart, whatever you feel more comfortable in and then roll the top half of your body forward. And if you can go a little forward until your forehead rests on the bed or the floor, wherever you're doing this particular exercise with your arms out stretched in front of you, that's fine.
Kim (11:32):
But if you can't get your head to rest on the floor, I know I can't, I'm not that flexible, just rest your head on a pillow. So hold the pose for as long as it's comfortable and probably for a better maximum of three minutes. And just breathe slowly as you do, you're feeling your body, feel all your muscles sort of just getting out of that position. You've been in all day and it's a nice, relaxing, but easy blend, but there are even, there's an even easier one, which I like, which is just simply dangle there like a rag doll. So again, this is one that apparently in yoga, any head below heart pose, it's called an inversion in yoga is supposed to calm and relax the nervous system. So anywhere where you're putting your head below where your heart usually is, then that thought to really, really come down.
Kim (12:32):
So again, with this one, you simply, you don't need much flexibility at all. You don't need really much strength or balance to hold the pose, but it can help release the tension and help people wind down. So if you want me to just quickly explain how it's done, you simply stand, start with your arms raised or the head, and then fold forward from your hips, reaching down towards your toes and then just hang there like a rag doll. Just as far as you can, no further, don't try to push it. Just allow all your muscles and your hair to hang heavily down and you'll feel the tension released from your shoulders. So just shake your arms loosely, back and forth, just like a ragdoll, soften your knees, if you need to. And just dangle there as long as you feel comfortable closing your eyes and breathing slowly and just letting your thoughts drift away.
Kim (13:26):
And one important thing to do as well is to let out a big sigh because research shows that the actual act of sighing while you're doing this particular exercise can relieve stress and muscle tension. So there's a real reason why we say it is actually to release all that tension. So that's a nice one to do. And if you don't want to do while you're standing up, if you feel like you just want to do it when you're sitting down, you can do that at the edge of the bed as well. Simply fall forward like a rag doll at the at the edge of the bed and just get into bed afterwards. And hopefully that will have sort of loosens you up a bit more calm and relaxed.
Allan (14:06):
Yeah. Stretching seems to always do that for me. It's just anytime I've ever done a class or whether it was yoga or just any other kind of fitness class, you get to the stretching part. And it's actually sometimes hard to not fall asleep on the floor.
Kim (14:22):
Studies really have shown that stretching does help give you better sleep. So it doesn't matter what stretches you do as long as they're not really, you're not forcing anything to hurting yourself, but yeah, you're right. They will just calm you down. And like, you know, the science shows that study showed that women actually, who did a regular stretching routine for a few months, they reported better sleep afterwards. And things like stretching your legs can help. I don't know if you suffer like cramps at all in bed or restless leg syndrome, not something that really haunts a lot of people. They can't get to sleep with it, but if you do lots of leg stretches that can help with those such problems as well. And just generally sort of opening your chest as well. You know, we've all been in that position. If you're anything like me, you spend hours on the computer every day.
Kim (15:13):
If you just open your chest before bed just means standing up straight and bringing your arms slightly behind you so that, you know, you're sort of correcting the rounded shoulders position that you might have been in all day. That's a nice one to do as well. That sort of loosens everything up because you don't want to get into bed with muscles that are tight and full of all the stress and tension that you've been living with through the day. Yes. So definitely like you say, like you do at the end of a workout, a nice stretch before bed really sort of loosens up.
Allan (15:50):
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Allan (16:44):
I'm a big fan, anything you want to change a journal is just your best friend. And you have several, you know, acts or tactics in the book that we can use a journal for. So do you mind going through a few of those and why they're valuable?
Kim (17:01):
Yeah, of course. So really important to sort of get sort of worries out of your head before you get into bed. So a really good idea is to sort of schedule a time before bed. Quite a way before bed actually, cause you don't want these things particularly on your mind. So about six o'clock schedule, 15 minutes, which is called your worry time. And that's where you sit down with a pen and paper and you write out anything that's bothering you. And then you also write out some solutions, possible solutions to the problem. So, you know, this, it could be anything from, Oh, I know there's going to be a big bill coming in and you might want to write on the possible solutions. Okay, we going to have to cut back on this or that, but it sort of frees your mind from any niggles that might be there when you go to bed and it sort of stops you from worrying in bed.
Kim (18:06):
So for example, if worry does come into mind at bedtime, you can actually say to yourself, I'm not going to worry about that now, because that'll be in my worry time tomorrow, it's scheduled for that 15 minute slot tomorrow. That's when I'll sorted out. That's when I'll worry about it. So it's sort of a way of putting your worries to bed if you like. And again, writing it to do list is really good. I mean, there's even been studies on this, where scientists have looked at a group of people who wrote out a detailed to do list. And then they looked at another group who wrote out a list of things they'd completed tasks they'd completed in the last few days. And it was actually the group who had written out their to do list before bed fell asleep quicker. And the more detailed the list they'd written, the quicker they fell asleep.
Kim (18:57):
And again, it's the whole process of offloading on paper, things that have to be done. It helps free your mind from that responsibility and stops that list from going round and round in your head when you are in bed. So that's a good thing to do. Write all your worries and write your to do list before bed. And then another nice thing to do is think of good things, break down five good things every night that happened to you in the day. So it can be simple things such as getting a text from a friend or eating a great meal, just writing down things that are good in your life or something that you're grateful for. Again, studies, scientific studies have shown that writing these sort of a gratitude journal, or even just thinking about what's good and not bad in your life can help you fall asleep faster and longer.
Kim (19:51):
So another nice reason to do that. And then keeping a sleep diary. I think you might've heard of that where you, I think you mentioned that, you know, it's a good way to find out what you're maybe doing wrong in the day that's a making you sleep badly. So in the book, I've got the details of how you can do that. You know, just buy a nice notebook. Then online, you can find really good sleep diary templates, where you can copy that section of the book and you fill in every day sort of what happened, what time you went to bed, what time you woke up, how many times in the night you might've woken. And then there's another section to put in what you ate and drank and when, and what exercise you had, whether you napped, and what you did in that hour before bed. So at the end of every week you can examine your diary for any patterns and you can see what's maybe helping or hindering your that way. So that's a nice way to sort of keep track of what you're doing and what you can make better. Yeah. So yeah, lots of ways, just sort of just writing things out on paper. I think actually I'd prefer to do it with a pen and paper myself. I think it sort of goes in better than doing anything on the computer.
Allan (21:07):
Well, one of the advantages of doing it, I mean, my to do list is on my computer. As far as the rest of it, you know, journaling on paper, you're doing this, you can do this by candlelight because we know blue light computers, screens, are not necessarily things we need to be doing that the last hour before we go to bed. So if you're sitting there and particularly one of the things you had in there was just to write down a reminder. So if you were turning out the light and get ready to go to bed, and all of a sudden it was, Oh, boom, I've got to meet someone at seven o'clock, you know, or I've got to go do this thing. I need to write myself a reminder, or I need to, you know, or you're going to stay awake all night thinking about it? So it's just, you know, your alarm is set when it needs to be set, you know, you're going to be up, but just the reminder so that, okay, I know I have to do this thing, or, you know, so just getting that off your chest. And if you, again, if you get on your computer or your phone to do that, then you're dismantling some of the things we've done with the other work we've been doing.
Kim (22:04):
Yeah, absolutely. That's right. So keep that pen and paper by the bed. Don't, whatever you do, like you say, don't pick up your phone to put it on your list because that's going to hold that light, that blue light coming from your phone is going to stop you from producing melatonin, which is your sleepy hormone. So just literally scroll on that piece of paper in the dark. I mean, it might look like a complete mess in the morning, but I'm sure you'll know what it says, but that's what you should do. Keep the lights up and just scroll. So you're giving your mind permission to forget about it. So it's not going to stop you from falling asleep.
Allan (22:39):
Yeah. Now I have this client and you know, I go through a lot of the protocols with her but she's blind. So it's obviously, you know, the red light/blue light thing is not something that she can really do. You know, we've talked about her meds, everything she's taking shouldn't be a problem. She's got her hormones pretty much in check for a woman her age and what she's gone through in life, but she still really, really struggles with sleep. And from a health and wellness perspective, it's really bringing her down. What's some advice that you would give to someone who pretty much feels like they've just about tried everything, but still struggling to fall asleep.
Kim (23:19):
Yeah. It's not nice, is it? And it happens to a lot of us. I think that the problem is sometimes we get into a vicious circle where, you know, we've had trouble with sleeping and then we walk into our bedroom. And as soon as we walk in, we associate that room with worry and sleeplessness, and it's just an awful sort of, is almost waiting to happen. You know, just know I'm not going to be able to sleep in it. It's sort of a self fulfilling really. But you know, sometimes anxiety can keep us awake. The whole thing of feeling that there's something wrong with us. Why can't we sleep? And cognitive behavioral therapy is really good helping tackle that the sort of mindset you have to sleep. And there is a particular branch of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia CVTI, which is really helpful for helping reduce that anxiety we feel.
Kim (24:15):
And it's recognizing all of that negative and exaggerated thoughts we have about sleep and then challenging them and then replacing them with more realistic, really telling us that it's normal. Everybody wakes up at certain points in the night, but we do all have the capacity to sleep. So you can actually try, you can get told of therapists who can help you with that obviously. Or you can train yourself by making sort of a thought record and that involves again, getting a nice book you feel happy writing in. And sort of writing out your thoughts and sort of what's maybe you could say the thoughts I'm having about sleep at the moment might be, you know, I'm laying in bed. I really can't sleep. Or gosh, I need 8 hours tonight, why can't I sleep? There's something wrong with me. And then you write how this all makes you feel.
Kim (25:09):
And then obviously that thought will make you feel anxious or panicky or hopeless. And then you write a more realistic, balanced version of your thoughts and where you might say something like, okay, well, it would be nice to get that solid 8 hours, but not everybody really needs 8 hours to function. Well, there's plenty of evidence that support the beliefs that, you know, people can get by on six or seven hours. So there's lots of ways to do this particular exercise, but my book does explain quite easily how to do it. And eventually if you start challenging or negative thoughts in this way, not only at night, but even through the day, if you start to recognize when you're getting into a negative thought pattern and then you try and look at it in a more sort of calm and balanced way, and then it just becomes more of a habit that you start to challenge your thoughts, and then you actually sort of stop panicking in your mind so that, you know you're actually calming down your whole nervous system by thinking in this way. You're being kind to yourself, you know, sort of all the good fit, the feel good hormones are coming out rather than the anxiety inducing hormones is switching off the adrenaline in your mind, and that all can help with falling asleep.
Kim (26:28):
In the end, it takes a little bit of practice, I've got to say, because you know, your initial thoughts when you're laying there for two hours, and you're not always likely to feel that way, but you can train your mind to be less catastrophic. If you like you can train your thoughts to veer away from that side of a feeling to a more calm and realistic side. So, you know, maybe that's something that your client could look at.
Allan (26:56):
Well, cause the, the mind/body thing is, is so, so huge in anything that you're telling yourself you know, sweats was it Ford who said, if you think you can, you can, if you think you can't you're right. You know, either way, something like something like that. Anyway, I butchered that, but you know, what we tell ourselves is typically going to be true, unless we take the time to remap the way we think about things, the way we structure it, then we're setting ourselves up. So I see that, you know, and when you're getting hormone responses and the fight or flight, just out of being in the bedroom, that's not how to start a good night's sleep.
Kim (27:41):
It's really not. And there's another section called acceptance therapy where you actually accept worrying thoughts in a way that's almost you know, you welcome them. There's a particular proponent in the UK, Dr. Guy Magis, who I interviewed him once. And he said to me, what you should do, if a worrying thought enters your mind at night, you should welcome it as if it's a friend. So you should say something like, Oh, hello, worry. Here you are again, how are you? And by welcoming this in that way, you are switching off the stress, you're, like you just said, you know, you are changing your whole mindset, your body reactions then become different. You're not under threat. So your fight or flight system is not coming on. So that's another sort of way to try and change your thoughts, sort of welcome those thoughts as you would a friend.
Allan (28:41):
Yeah. Now, as I mentioned, when we first started the show, I'm a huge fan of sleep and also a huge fan of napping when you need to nap and I'm a regular napper. But in the book you go through and I've seen this advice several times, but it doesn't really fit the way I like to nap. So, you know, as you share in the book, and many people may know a standard sleep cycle typically lasts about 90 minutes. And so there's about four or five, depending on what school of thought you want to term things, as you go through there's lite, sleep REM sleep, and then deep, deeper. But anyway, as you go through those sleep cycles, it's, you want to go through all of them. And if you're getting good sleep, that's what's happening. So for me taking a nap, I want that 90 minute nap because I go through a full sleep cycle and I wake up feeling really good.
Allan (29:32):
And if I do that early enough in the afternoon, waking up no later than say 3:30/4:00, I'm, I'm good to go. But other people may need to nap less. Can you kinda just talk about napping and you know, the shorter version, cause I've done that too, you know, like at work and you can't, they're not gonna let you lay at your desk for an hour and a half. So going out to the car and taking a quick little 20 minute snooze was what, all the time I had so I've done both, but I can tell you, they both have value.
Kim (30:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that just sort of illustrates the fact that everybody's different. Everybody needs different amounts of sleep. Everybody, you know, some people can do things during the day, like have a long nap and it doesn't interfere with nighttime sleep. Other people, you know, even if they do 5/10 minutes, that's going to interfere with heir night time. So there's no one size fits all. But the general advice is that your nap should be 10 to 20 minutes, no longer than 30 minutes. Because after that, you get into that deep stage of sleep. It's very typical to wake up from you get brain fog, you're sluggish and you know, if you can carry on and go through the whole sleep cycle, like you've done then brilliant. But like you're saying not many of us have that time during the day to do that.
Kim (30:50):
But one thing I would say is the timing of your nap is really important because between 1 and 3:00 PM in the afternoon, we experienced a small drop in our core body temperature. Now that's something that happens every night and it acts as a signal to our brain to release melatonin, our sleeping hormone. And so that drop in body temperature happens every night about 9:00 PM or when dusk falls or whenever, just sort of starts to make you feel sleepy. It also happens at this time between 1 and 3:00 PM. If you want to work with that natural depth in your body temperature and work with your body's natural circadian rhythm, then maybe 2:00 PM would be the ideal time to have that sleep. And as I say, if you just don't want to get into, if you don't want to be woken from the deep stage of your asleep, then stick to 10 to 20 minutes and definitely no longer. But yeah, it would be nice to have the 90 minute nap every day, but I don't think we've all got that luxury unfortunately.
Allan (32:02):
I just thought I hate being woken up during my deep sleep time. It just, I get angry, which is why I stopped using an alarm clock four years ago. Unless I have to get up for a flight. I'm like, I'm going to use my natural rhythms and I'm going to wake up when it's light sleep and I'll look at it. But if I wake up, you know, I'm supposed to be up at six o'clock and I wake up at 5:30, I'm up, you know, there's no sense in me trying to get another round of sleep because it's not going to happen for me. So yeah, I'm one of those that I hate alarms and I hate being woken up and you can ask my wife, that's just, don't wake him up when he's in deep sleep.
Kim (32:39):
Yeah. Same with my other half yeah, let sleeping dogs lie, as they say, just leave them alone. But there's another bonus to not napping during the day because I know a lot of specialists actually say, don't nap it'll interfere with your natural drive to sleep later in the night. But I think a really good bonus side to napping is that it helps retrain your brain to realize that falling asleep can be easy because usually if you're having a nap during the day, you're tired, it's not difficult to fall asleep. So you're actually telling, your brain is saying, Oh, okay, well that was easy, I fell asleep. So in a way, it you know, it could help retrain you to sleep better at night as well.
Allan (33:30):
Now, again, the book has 222 ways, and there's no way we could cover all of them in a podcast. And some of them are really, really good. We, like I said, I love sleep. We could talk, I could talk about it for hours. So this is, this is just really cool to be able to try these things out, get a journal together, start recording the things that are working for you and those that aren't and find the right thing for you. Kim, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
Kim (34:05):
Okay. So I'm obviously gonna say get enough exercise more because we're all, so many of us are just sitting at a desk for 7 to 10 hours a day and that's just not natural. So I definitely advise everybody to move about more and to get your exercise. It doesn't matter what sort of exercise, you know, as long as you enjoy it, it's gotta be enjoyable for you to stick at it. So whether, you know, you like walking or tennis or whatever, just make it a regular habit. And again, you're going to help your sleep by doing that. All the research points to, if you are a regular exercise, it doesn't matter if you do aerobic or a mix of aerobic and resistance training, all this science points to the fact that you can sleep better because sometimes if you go to bed and you haven't done any exercise during the day, you're not going to be tired enough to fall asleep usually.
Kim (35:00):
So I'd say definitely get enough exercise and move more. Personally. I also, what makes me happy is getting my daily dose of being outdoors. I think if we stay cooped up indoors all day, we're exposed to so much artificial light from our electric lights, our TVs, iPads, blah, blah, blah. It's sort of what we're exposed to unnatural light patterns that confuses our body clocks. So keep your body clued up, but getting outside, I love being outside exposed to all the natural patterns of daylight and dusk helps my body clock. I just love being surrounded by nature. I'm lucky enough to live near woods, you know, plenty of outdoor spaces, but no matter where you live, I think just being outside and connecting somehow, no matter how small with nature is just so good for you, good for your body, good for your mind, it helps you slow down.
Kim (35:57):
You know, listen to that bird song, listen to the ocean waves, walk and enjoy what's around you. And you're getting all that natural benefits of the, you know, what time of day it is, you're keeping your body aware of what time it is. And you're likely to get better sleep that way as well because your body knows when to start producing melatonin because it's getting dark or it knows when to stop producing melatonin because it's daylight. And the other thing I'd say is, and this is something that I've only really started doing in the last few years is meditating, but it's not meditating in a really big way. It's not something that has to take up hours of your time. My meditation will be just literally, if I am, if I've gone to bed and I'm not falling asleep quickly, I just do a very quick meditation, which is something like the hundred steps.
Kim (36:51):
Like just pretend I'm at the top of this beautiful mountain and counting down from a hundred and each step I take down takes me sort of, lowers everything and my heart rate, my breathing slows and meditation is fantastic for sleeping because actually loads of research has been done into how it actually changes the structure of your brain. And it sort of diminishes the concentration of gray matter the amygdala, which is the area of the brain associated with anxiety and stress. And it's even find that people who meditate before bed can increase their output of melatonin, the sleepy hormone. So it's got to be good for you just slowing down your breathing, slowing down your heart rate and taking yourself somewhere in your mind that's really pretty and calming. So yeah, those are my three things that I think can help you live a healthy life.
Allan (37:54):
Thank you, Kim. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about the book, Trick Yourself to Sleep, where would you like for me to send them?
Kim (38:04):
Okay, so it's published by a fantastic and the experiment. So you can find them at theexperimentpublishing.com they're based in New York. My website is KimJoneswrites.co.uk. The book is available from all good stockists and online places like Amazon and Barnes and noble and Books-A-Million that kind of thing. And it's all information's on the website.
Allan (38:28):
Okay. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/439, and I'll be sure to have the links. So Kim, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Kim (38:42)
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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Another episode you may enjoy
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Allan (02:56):
James, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
James (02:59):
Thanks a lot for having me.
Allan (03:01):
So today we're going to talk about your book, Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art. And I have to say that in the law, particularly intellect, like the last four or five years, there's been like kind of a reawakening on how important breath and breathwork is.
James (03:18):
Oh, I would say . And I was lucky enough to sort of jump into that scene right as things were really just stating in the scientific communities.
Allan (03:27):
And so, yeah. So we're hearing, you know about monks and you talk about it in the book monks that can basically change the, their heart rate. They can change the temperature, they can do that just with breath. There's of course there's Wim Hof, which is, he's just a fascinating individual and again, you get into him in the book, but I think really where I want to go with this conversation is to talk a little bit more about how we can use breath in an everyday sense to just manage our overall health and wellbeing.
James (03:58):
Sure. And I think that so many people view breath as something that's binary. It's either about doing it, which is good, which means you're alive, or not doing it, which is very bad word. It means you're dead. But it's the subtleties and the nuances of breathing that are so fascinating to me because there's such a clear reflection of how efficiently our bodies are working, how our minds are functioning, nervous system, organ function, heart rate, mental state, on and on and on. And from what I've found from years of being in this world and researching with these scientists is how we breathe is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise and all that other stuff. It's really a missing pillar of health.
Allan (04:44):
Yeah, it is. It is. You know, as I was, as I was getting into the book and I was thinking, you know, when do I ever actually think about breathing other than one when I can't because I've got, you know, I'm stuffed up or congested or have a cold or flu. I think about breathing a lot. And then when I'm doing meditation and more focused on breath is pretty much the two times that I find myself most focusing on breath. And I guess maybe the third would be when I'm lifting weights or running or doing something like that where how I breathe matters with regards to performance in the South. I don't know if this is everywhere, I guess it is everywhere, but there's this kind of moniker of calling someone a mouth breather. And it's not a nice thing to say to someone, or say about someone calling them a mouth breather. But beyond just the fact that that it's, you know, you're calling them out on something. There is something really, really wrong with breathing out of your mouth. Can you talk about that a little bit?
James (05:40):
Sure. And you know that is a derogatory term that people have bandied around and for good reason. Breathing out of your mouth is extremely unhealthy and it will even after a while start affecting how you look, the skeleton ture of your face and it will start affecting how often you snore, whether or not you get sleep apnea. And there's just this laundry list of problems associated with mouth breathing because what happens when we breathe through our mouth is we're taking an unfiltered, unheated and raw air. The SAPs us of moisture irritates the lungs and loosens the soft tissues at the back of the mouth. So the more we mouth breathe, the more we're going to mouth breathe in the future. And mouth breathing has been even associated with neurological disorders, periodontal disease, increased risk of respiratory infection and on and on and on.
James (06:37):
There's been several studies looking at the difference of mouth breathing and nasal breathing in animals. And one Japanese study showed that mice who had their noses plugged took twice the amount of time to make their way through a maze. And they've also found in human studies that when we breathe through our mouth, there's a disturbance of oxygen in our prefrontal cortex. So this is the area of the brain that's associated with ADHD. So very clear correlations between how we're breathing in this air, the pathway in which we're breathing it, and how we're functioning. So there's a bunch of other physiological effects to that as well. But it's bad news across the board. And what's even worse news is that about 50% of the population, according to one estimate, says that we are chronic mouth breathers and humans are the only species to really suffer from this affliction.
James (07:33):
So if you look at 5,400 different mammals on the planet, they are breathing through their noses. Yeah, dogs are going to be breathing through the mouth, but that's for Thermo regulation. They're not doing it for any other reason. Beyond that, some people have told me, they're like, well, you know, my bulldog breathes through the mouth. My pug breathes through the mouth, but these highly inbred dogs have essentially became, become similar to the way humans have become where we've lost this ability to breathe through our nose. So we have just adapted to breathing through our mouth and it's caused all kinds of problems.
Allan (08:05):
Yeah, and you personally experienced some of these problems by going through this kind of a crazy experiment of of 10 days as a mouth breather. Can you talk about that experiment? Cause that was, that was really interesting and a little bit scary.
James (08:21):
Yeah. So we know all of these problems that are associated with mouth breathing. We just don't know how quickly they turn on. So no one's really studied this. So I was able to convince, I don't know how, but I was able to do it, the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. I had done a few interviews with him over the past several months and finally hatched this idea. I said, well, why don't we test this when we plug my nose with silicone balls and put some tape over it and we can do data panels, we can do pulmonary function tests, we can look at my cortisol levels on and on and on, 60 different markers and we can compare them to nasal breathing afterwards. So for 10 days, me and another subject, a breathing therapist of all people, a Swedish breathing therapist, one of the best breathers in the world, we made him one of the worst.
James (09:18):
And so for, for 10 days, we just breathed through our mouths and tried to live our regular lives. You know, this wasn't so much of a, like a supersize me stunt because what we were doing was placing our bodies into a state that most people have experienced and up to half of us experience regularly. So it's a feeling and you know, a certain level of functioning that we already really know. So you know, it was the data came out and proved everything that the ancients have been saying for thousands and thousands of years. That mouth breathing is just really, really bad news. Both of us started snoring the first night. Snoring increased about 1300%. It got worse and worse until I was snoring four hours throughout the night. We got sleep apnea. We were stressed, we were fatigued. I mean, all of the above. And what was so interesting to me about all this was not the damage afflicted during mouth breathing. It was what happened when we took out these plugs and just breathe through our noses for the next 10 days. All those problems went away. This wasn't just subjective, you know, we were recording everything the whole time, and it was a complete transformation by just changing the channel through which we breathe.
Allan (10:38):
And it was, it was really, really quick. Just, just a matter of a couple of days.
James (10:44):
A couple of days, Yeah.
Allan (10:45):
You're suddenly, it's like, I'm feeling horrible. I'm about to die. And then you change over to him to nose breathing actually. And within a day or two, you're well not fully recovered, but you're you feel drastically different. Your life is drastically different. You're sleeping drastic thing, so much better. No snoring or less snoring it down to no snoring. Sleep apnea goes away. So it was reversible.
James (11:10):
For sure, you know, we went from snoring up to four hours during our worst state of mouth breathing to snoring within that first night, snoring, seven minutes, and then I wasn't snoring at all a couple of days after. So you realize how malleable and how flexible the body is depending on what, what you, what inputs you give to it. So to us this was just a clarification and context on what the ancients have been saying for literally thousands of years. There's this one quote from the Chinese Tao that's 1200 years old. It says, “the breath inhaled through the mouth is called Nietzsche adverse breath, which is extremely harmful. Be careful to not have the breath inhaled through the mouth.” So people were saying this, you know, over a thousand years ago, and it seems to be mostly lost on modern populations. If you look around, a lot of people are habitually mouth breathing and it's bad news.
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Allan (13:29):
So beyond why mouth breathing is bad, let's talk about why nose breathing is actually good and some things about the nose that make it that way.
James (13:40):
Sure. And this is the fun part, right? So once you injure yourself, you can try to rebuild yourself through various means and we simply change the pathway through which we were breathing. So we were no longer breathing through our mouths. We instead put tape on little piece of tape on our mouths to remind us to keep our mouth shut. Obviously we'd open them to eat and to talk on occasion. But for the large part, we were breathing only through our noses. And breathing through the nose, will save you about 40% moisture. So that's one reason, especially while jogging to always breathe through the nose unless you want to be carrying around those silly water bottles, which which nobody wants to do. Also breathing through the nose will increase nitric oxide by six fold. Nitric oxide, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners know what this is, but a quick little recap. It's a molecule that plays an essential role in circulation and delivering oxygen into cells by just breathing through your nose. You can have a massive increase of nitric oxide. They're using nitric oxide now to treat patients with Covid. It's that effective at opening capillaries and increasing oxygenation. And we have a natural supply of this in our nasal passages. All we need to do is breathe through our nose.
Allan (15:01):
And just for the record, Viagra increases nitric oxide. That's why it does what it does. So breathing through the nose.
James (15:11):
That's true. That's true. And if you want to hum, if you want to hum, you can increase that nitric oxide at least 15 fold by humming. So that might be something you know you're out on a date. Things are heating up, something you might want to consider doing on the way home.
Allan (15:30):
Okay. I was actually just kind of blown away when you got into the structure, the nose and all of that and how it's, you know, people just think, okay, it's just a like a vent and then taking in the air. But it's not actually just taking in air, it's causing it to do some things like circulate through the air a little bit differently. It's warming it up, it's filtering it, it's doing all those really good things before it gets to our lungs.
James (15:54):
For sure. I mean this is a natural filter. It's our first line of defense against pathogens and bacteria. So nitric oxide will attack a lot of that stuff. But so will the natural filter of our noses. And if you would open a human nose up, it's pretty amazing to look at. You can find this on the internet or in an anatomy book, but it looks just like a conch shell because, and that's where it gets its name, nasal conchae. So, and it's designed that way. The same way that seashells are designed to keep invaders out. So we also have that function in our nose. What I found, what was so ironic is you look at the national institutes of health and there are 17 different departments investigating everything from skin to lungs to the heart, the brain on and on. But none of them are looking at the functions of the nose, the importance of the nose in health and in longevity.
James (16:54):
So beyond that filtering, the nose also adjust our levels of stress. It can calm us down, it can get us amped up and that is determined by which nostril you're breathing through. So the nose is covered with this erectile tissue, which is the same erectile tissue in our genitals and it responds to the same inputs. So whenever we get excited in one area, the nose will respond as well. And what happens throughout the day, every 30 minutes to about every four hours, the pathway through which air comes in through your nose, either your right nostril or your left nostril is going to switch. So one nostril is going to gently close and the other is going to gently open up. And one of the reasons it does this, some of this is theoretical, but a lot of it has been checked out and verified by scientists. Is that when we breathe through the right nostril, we heat the body up so the heart rate increases. We get a little drip of cortisol, blood pressure increases as well. And if we switch that pathway to the left nostril, the body cools down, heart rate decreases, blood pressure decreases, the heart lowers, heart rate lowers. So you can use this throughout the day depending on what you're doing. There's a whole school in yoga that studies this and that practices these alternate nostril breathing. But you don't need to do that because your body naturally does this. And it adjusts throughout the day and throughout the night.
Allan (18:38):
So we know that our body brings in oxygen and then basically expels carbon dioxide. That's kind of the cycle of what's happening here. One of the interesting things that I got from your book was that, it's not about the amount of oxygen that we take in that matters. It's about the amount of carbon dioxide we have in our blood. It needs to get out that actually keeps that thing working well. And if we don't have the carbon dioxide we're not gonna use the oxygen we're breathing in. So breathing slow and breathing less can actually work to our benefit. Can you get into that?
James (19:13):
For sure. And this is something that's been misinterpreted and still is today is for a healthy body. And that is for somebody who has about 95% or higher of oxygen in your bloodstream in any one time. You don't need more oxygen, so you have plenty of oxygen in your body. What you need is a way of offloading that oxygen efficiently into your cells and tissues and muscles. And that's what carbon dioxide helps us do. So carbon dioxide is, you know, in a lot of circles, considered a very bad thing. It's the stuff that plumes out of coal plants and it's heating up the planet. And all that's true, but for your body, it's essential to have the right balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen so it can work at peak efficiency. And often when we breathe too much, we are off gassing too much carbon dioxide.
James (20:07):
So our bodies enter into an alkaline state, which makes it harder for oxygen to enter into these tissues and muscles and do what our body naturally wants us to do. So when you see people at the gym or jogging or wherever, when they're breathing through the mouth and they're thinking they're getting, getting a good workout, they're actually doing the opposite so they're not burning any more fat. They're making their body work harder to do less. So for the vast majority of people, breathing less is going to give you more oxygen and it's going to do that by your carbon dioxide levels balanced. Now there's extremes to this, right? Somebody with covid or pneumonia or emphysema doesn't get enough oxygen in their bloodstream. They need oxygen. If they're below 90 especially if they're in the eighties but again, for healthy people having extra oxygen isn't going to do anything, which is why I find it so ironic with these oxygen bars.
James (21:12):
They have these people, Oh we're going to help you out. You're healthy, we're going to make you feel even better. It's not doing anything. What you need to do is allow your body to do what it naturally wants to do. You can breathe slowly and get much more benefit from doing that. You can also save a lot more money.
Allan (21:28):
So in, in some of the breathing that you talked about, you actually talked about the breathing rate of 5.5 per minute being kind of a sweet spot.
James (21:38):
Yeah. So these researchers about 20 years ago were looking at different prayers. They were looking at Catholic prayers, the rosary, the Ave Maria, they were looking at the Buddhist chant, Om mani padme hum, The Kundalini Chant on Sa ta na ma. And they found that to vocalize each of these, it takes about five to six seconds and then there's about five to six seconds to inhale.
James (22:09):
So you're inhaling for about five to six seconds, you're exhaling for about five to six seconds. So they got a bunch of subjects and they hook them up to all these sensors and they looked at what was happening to their brains and bodies when they breathe this way. And they found that blood flow increased in the brain. Circulation increased and the body entered a state of coherence. Where the heart, nervous system and everything else were coordinated at peak efficiency. So this really lessened the burden on the heart and allowed us to do more again with less. Just by breathing in this way. And they hypothesized that the healing effects of prayer were probably real, but it had more to do with how we were breathing than what we were saying. And since this discovery, I guess you could call it, various scientists and researchers and psychiatrists have used this breathing pattern in their patients with depression, anxiety, and even for to purge toxins from the lungs and with 9 to 11 survivors.
James (23:20):
So it's free, it's easy. Anyone can do it and the effects or they feel great, you know? And it's backed up by science. So I try to breathe in this way as often as possible. Sometimes I have timers around and even when I'm working out, if I'm at a gym on a stationary bike and I'm really huffing and puffing, I try to slow my breathing to about six or seven breaths per minute, which sounds like how are we possibly getting enough oxygen to support yourself? But I've worn a pulse oximeter and found that my oxygen level did not waver when I was breathing this slowly. So that's a way of really, if you're nervous, you're not getting enough oxygen that you're breathing too slowly. Try to get a pulse ox. You can get these things for for 20 bucks and try it out if you're geeky like me.
James (24:10):
But I was really blown away by this because I had always learned that the more you breathe, the more oxygen you're going to gain. You need that oxygen to go further and to work out harder and that's complete BS. You don't, you need to breathe inline with your metabolic needs, which for the vast majority of us is to breathe more slowly.
Allan (24:31):
Yeah. Because we're going to bring in enough oxygen into our lungs with that breath to be able to go for another minute or two. Actually, if we wanted to hold our breath, there's a guy he married the volleyball player, Gabrielle, and his name's Laird. He was a surfer. Yeah, he's got this protocol where they actually work out underwater, you know, they're lifting weights and running under water so they're not breathing, you know once, maybe a minute and you know, well, from what I've heard, it's pretty amazing stuff, performance in movements you can get when you start training your body to work that way. So a little different thing out there, but we don't have to breathe every two seconds just to make sure we have oxygen. We can, we can go with less.
James (25:19):
Yeah. And that protocol has been around for 70 years that Laird is using. So you know, scientists have known this for a long time. We have known about carbon dioxide benefits in the body for a hundred years. Some prominent scientists, Christian Boar discovered this and then Yen Del Henderson at Yale was a big promoter of the use of carbon dioxide, both in tanks and in our own bodies to allow us to function efficiently. He said this is something that's completely ignored by the medical community. What's ironic is they were doing these tests in the 1910s, 1920s and arguing that more people need to get hip to what's going on with these gases and to know the real benefits. And then today you still have a lot of misinformation and a lot of ignorance as far as how oxygen and carbon dioxide are used in human metabolism. And so it was fascinating to go through all of these medical stories and articles and studies and to see these things played out over again and again and again. People keep discovering the stuff and then disappears. They discover it and it disappears. So what Laire is doing and as part of a long tradition of conditioning the body to use more efficiently. And we do that by breathing less.
Allan (26:46):
I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
James (26:55):
I would argue that breathing is at the core of this. Along with eating well and exercising. So I've thrown in sleeping. You know, this isn't the most original list you've ever heard I'm sure.
Allan (27:11):
Well you started with breathing, that's a little bit more original than most, but yeah.
James (27:14):
I guess, but if you look at the Holy triumvirate of wellness, a longevity of feeling good every day, it's those three things. But breathing has to be considered in there. Because I've met so many people who are triathletes who go to the gym every day who eat, you know, only a keto diet or vegan diet, whatever. But they are not paying attention to their breathing. They have sleep apnea, they snore at night. They say, Oh, this is just this natural. Everyone I know snores. Everyone I know is sleep apnea, but it's not. You have to get control of that before, in my opinion, before you really double down on your food and your exercise. You have to be looking at how you're breathing because we breathe 25,000 times a day. And if you're doing that wrong, you're going to be injuring your body just a little bit, with each breath, so you need to get that right and then you can build upon that foundation and really sharing in good health after that.
Allan (28:16):
Well thank you James. The book is awesome. You know, you're not just giving us information, you're actually walking us through the story of you finding a lot of this stuff. So it was a really cool read. I really enjoyed it. If someone wanted to learn more about you or learn more about the book, Breathe, where would you like for me to send them?
James (28:33):
My website and all the links to the book are there as well. There are 550 scientific references with some videos and photos and a bunch of other stuff to support what sounds like a bunch of pseudoscience. It's all real stuff, people. And all the data's up there on my website at mrjamesnester.com.
Allan (28:50):
And you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/437 and I'll be sure to have the links there. So James, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
James (29:04):
Thanks a lot for having me. Really enjoyed it.
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