The plant-based solution with Dr. Joel Kahn

On episode 329 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we meet Dr. Joel Kahn and discuss his book, The Plant-Based Solution.

 

Allan (0:46): Our guest today is a world leading cardiologist, a best-selling author, and a popular lecturer who inspires others to think scientifically and critically about the body's ability to heal through proper nutrition. He serves as a clinical professor of medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, and is founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity. He also opened a restaurant for healthy food called GreenSpace Cafe. With no further ado, here's Dr. Joel Kahn.

Dr. Khan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Kahn (1:20): Good day. Wherever you're listening, whatever time of day. And thank you, I'm excited to be on this and chat about some important stuff with you.

Allan (1:29): And it is very important. There's so much information out there, that I think it's hard for people to really grasp how much diet means, and then actually get to the bottom of, what is a good eating strategy for us to be healthy, to live longer, to have energy, to do all the things we want to do in our lives? We need good nutrition to do those things. Your book The Plant-Based Solution, I think is a very good primer for someone that wants to understand the eating style of being a vegan. So I appreciate this because there was a lot of information, a lot of science in here, a lot of things that I sat back for a moment and pondered. There are not many health and fitness books that do that to me anymore, because I've read so many. But yours was one where I sat down and read it, and then I wanted to just absorb what that study was about, or absorb what you were talking about in one of your classic rants in this book. So again, I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you.

Dr. Kahn (2:32): Thank you very much. I appreciate the podcast both takes time and effort, and the whole idea is to have an impact.

Allan (2:39): Yes, absolutely. I think one of the things that I found really interesting as I got into it was that folks will try an eating style, and vegan is what I would term as a more restrictive eating style than a lot of others. You had a background in having somewhat of a restrictive eating style, and then you noted in the book that when the eating style is associated with ethics, that it has a much better uptake than when we're just doing it for health reasons. I think that's a commitment thing that comes out of that, because of the emotion associated with it. But let's take a moment and get into CAFOs the and how our meat now is produced, because I think that's one of the big stepping stones for people that want to consider. Can you tell us a little bit about how our meat is produced and what's going on out there? Because we're trying to feed almost 8 billion people as we go, but we're not doing a very good job of managing our resources, are we?

Dr. Kahn (3:45): No. There is pressure to produce food for more people, and it lead 60-70 years ago to adopting some of the strategies that Henry Ford and production lines, assembly lines did in my home town of Detroit to make higher production and more efficiency. But that meant concentrating animals not free to graze and live a life of clover and grass, but putting them into buildings without sunlight, with food that was cost-effective and rapid growing, but not their natural food, nor the healthiest food. And it's led to both a nutritional disaster and an environmental disaster. And if you care at all and have been around for the last decade, you can’t help but have seen on occasion videos, that despite all these tough laws and trying to keep the public isolated from the idea that their burger or steak actually ever was connected to a living animal with feelings that probably went through absolute hell to end up on their plate – if you care at all about that, you realize this system has to change. Even the media industry and visionaries – Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines and such are talking about, this is the worst thing we could have created, and it will be different from technology.

But the pressure there is still to feed a lot of mouths, and I agree. I’ll just make one comment on your intro. A fully plant-based diet is restrictive in that at Thanksgiving and some corporate functions, there's going to be a moment that you pause, because the things on the table may not all meet your criteria. But almost every health diet out there is different than the standard American fare. And it requires some restriction, mindfulness and decision-making, until we have it that a corporate celebration, a hospital celebration, National Nurses Day actually is carrots, celery, hummus, salad and bean burgers, which is not what's happening now. It's ice cream, cakes, donuts and sugary drinks, all versions; it's not just the plant-based vegan version. I've had lunch sometimes with some of my friends that would sit on the other side of the table doing hardcore Paleo, hardcore keto diets. And they have more difficulty than I do eating in a cafeteria, eating at an office building where we lectured on a panel. So, nutritional excellence takes work and nutritional excellence is crucial. But I think sometimes it's easier just to grab an apple, a banana, an orange or some steamed broccoli than it is to try and construct the perfect alternative health movement menus of the Paleo movement, even the Mediterranean diet. Garbage food is everywhere. That's still the “go-to”, unfortunately.

Allan (6:57): I agree. I've tried various types of eating styles, and you're right – you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to be mindful about it. Probably to me that might be one of the best benefits of the vegan diet initially, is that it really gets you thinking about the food that you're putting in your body. There's a lot of science to back up the vegan diet from a health perspective, but there's actually also a lot of science out there that supports the DASH Diet, which is an Americanized version of the Mediterranean diet. You talked about the DASH diet a little bit in your book and you cited some studies where the DASH diet was actually put forward as a healthy diet. And then you said there's also a vegan version of the Mediterranean diet that they could have included in the study but didn't. Can you go a little bit into the DASH diet and why maybe having a small amount of meat and some fish is a problem?

Dr. Kahn (8:00): I think a lot of the public, if you ask them questions about what's a Mediterranean diet, would be like a Jimmy Kimmel interview on the street and you'd get all kinds of interesting responses. The Med diet might be Meditation diet or something. Trying to define what is the Mediterranean diet, even amongst health experts engenders controversy, but amongst the public, it's probably almost uninterpretable. When indeed it’s, reduce red meat, fish if you choose, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, wine and olive oil. That's the traditional Mediterranean diet. There is a cardiologist in England trying to turn the Mediterranean diet into a low-carb, high-fat version and taking away all the grains and putting in coconut oil. It's a total insanity. I only point that out because we disagree about some things.

The DASH diet stands for Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension. It's a research study that our government has done twice, paid for twice – DASH1 and DASH2. It’s a way to eat to reduce the burden of high blood pressure on the public health. In fact, high blood pressure worldwide is the single number one cause of death from its consequences – heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, blood vessel disease like aneurysms, so it's a big deal. And they did it further and they repeated it. You’re right – when the planning committee went to sit down and they positioned Dr. Frank Sacks from Harvard, it really was geared to be a vegetarian diet, and then they backed off before they launched it, saying that they don't think the acceptance amongst the public was going to take a full vegetarian diet. So they allowed it to be a version of the Mediterranean diet, I agree. It proved to be beneficial and it proved that reducing salt, adding in plants, cutting back red meat, increasing your whole grains, fruits and vegetables was beneficial and lowered blood pressure. Even though that's 10 to 15-year-old news, lately when the US news and world report rates the overall best diet for anyone in America to follow, the DASH diet is popped up as number one on the list, and that's reasonable. It's way better than what most people are eating. You can always refine it, but if we could instantly flip the switch and every work cafeteria, hospital cafeteria, vending machine all supported only the DASH diet, we'd be, from a health standpoint, way down the road towards a better place.

Allan (10:30): It's funny how much people will take something that works and there's a study saying, “This diet's great”, and then they want to spin it a little bit and add something or take something away and say, “This should be just as good.” There's no science behind coconut oil with the DASH diet, so obviously it's not the DASH diet. I understand what they're trying to do there with the big popularity of ketosis and ketogenic diet. I don't know that adapting the Mediterranean diet to that style is going to give you the same health effects that you would have had with that. And I'm guessing also with the DASH diet and him trying to make it a little bit more fatty, that we're talking about adding a little bit more olive oil than you would normally have in a DASH diet. You're not a big fan of olive oil. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Kahn (11:22): Yeah. I actually want to make sure – let me just quickly circle back. You asked about how food is produced, particularly meat. More than 95% of any meal an American is eating, whether it's a burger, a piece of pork, a piece of chicken, a piece of beef, other fowl, turkey, are not out there enjoying life like Sound of Music and Julie Andrews. They’re in contained, high-efficiency organizations called CAFOs – confined animal factory organizations. And because of the inability of these animals to have any kind of reasonable fresh air, fresh food, free existence, there are horrible abusive practices – the need for antibiotics is uniform. In fact I think it's about 85% of all antibiotics in the United States are given to animals in this setting to allow them to live long enough without mass infection, to allow the manufacturer to garner some profits from selling them to a slaughter house. Plus hormones to grow them as quick as possible, plus terrible, terrible, terrible abuse. The workers in these CAFOs suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, and others suffering premature diseases from the occupational exposure to unbelievable dust and chemicals, as well as just the emotional stress of dealing with this situation. And then they spill all the contents into surrounding ground water. The unbelievable quantities of manure and such have to be dealt with.

So it's easy, and you hear many meat-based podcasts talking about that they’re absolutely in agreement that CAFO raised meat is the worst choice amongst any animal eater. But when you get down to the reality, if you live near whole foods and you’ve got a few extra dollars, you can buy all the grass-fed beef you want – maybe that's a better choice. But for 95% plus of Americans, eating at a work cafeteria, hospital cafeteria, vending machine or in fast food, even most restaurants – they're not getting that. They're supporting the CAFO world and they're experiencing a dirty form of food for their own health.

And then you get to olive oil, in teaching that's promoted by both the Harvard School of Public Health and a very well-known and close friend of mine, Dr. David Katz of Yale. When we talk about a single food you want to talk about, is it good, is it bad, is it healthy, but what are you using it in place of? There's clear cut data from the Harvard School of Public Health that if your “go to” is ghee, butter and lard to sauté, to cook, to spread on bread, as is a common practice – lard on bread – and you substitute, unbelievably, vegetable oils or olive oil as a slightly different vegetable oil than, let’s say, safflower oil, sunflower oil, that you will lower your risk of developing heart disease by that substitute. And in a very large study last July, it was estimated with way over 100,000 data points that if you switch to vegetable oils, and I’d put in the word “organic” right away, you can actually lower your risk of heart attacks and such by 25% plus percent. And if you substitute olive oil, it's actually not as much of an advantage, but it's still about a 10% advantage compared to lard, butter and ghee. So it's the better choice for somebody that says, “I'm putting something slimy or oily or greasy on my food.”

Then you still ask the basic question, what’s in olive oil? And it's mainly what are called monounsaturated fatty acids, which is better than the mixes on lard, butter and ghee. There still is a reasonable amount of saturated fat. It's plant-based saturated fat, but our body doesn't always discern where it's coming from; about 15%. And there's a mix of data out there. I'm a cardiologist – if you're dealing with serious heart disease, and there's millions of people out there that are, and you're wanting to use your diet to prevent serious heart disease, stop serious heart disease, or reverse serious heart disease, as has been shown to be possible by Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, approved by Medicare as an authorized treatment plan for heart patients – oil drops out of the picture. It's actually dropped out of the picture since the 1940s, when some very bright researchers identified that diets free of added fats, diets free of added oils, actually seemed to make heart patients live longer. So in my world, olive oil is not a health food for the sick heart patients that I’m seeing in my office. You're 28 years old, you're at a restaurant and you could make the choice of putting a creamy, buttery dressing on your salad or a mixture of balsamic and olive oil – for the reason I just told you…

You’ve got to be as careful with olive oil as you’ve got to be with your meat source. There's a lot of fraud and the olive oil world and you can pay extra for extra virgin olive oil at the store and not always is it extra virgin olive oil. It's more expensive, so it's a no brainer for people with no ethics to put in a cheaper version and charge more. So you want to get a good source, know where it’s coming from. Spain, Italy, Greece are some of the big countries that you might want to strive to find a better source from. So, I do not live a complete olive oil free diet. I don't have heart disease and I know that as a fact. I do the proper testing. But I keep it very, very light. Now, in my restaurants – I own three restaurants – we always have a multitude of entrees that require no oil to produce, to allow patients who are following that to have an option that's healthy and without oil. You sauté in water, you sauté in wine. It's an easy process to cook without oil.

Allan (17:38): Yes. Now, with any diet that is going to be restricting certain foods, limits certain foods that we're just not going to eat – there's the potential that we're not going to get all the nutrition that we need. In being mindful of, if we're going to go vegan, what are the supplements that we would need to consider because we're just not getting enough of them or any of them from our foods?

Dr. Kahn (18:06): I want to just intro this. If you construct an entirely vegan diet – a whole food, plant-based, lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds diet – the odds are your health will be enhanced. It's not a 100% guarantee, but the odds are very favorable. Let's talk about the things you're not going to need if you, early in life or anytime in life, follow the whole food, plant-based diet. Many medications, Viagra been one, diabetic medications, blood pressure medications, heart medications – it’s not 100% guarantee, but you are favoring the chance that you’re not going to need to be that. I’m almost 60 years old, I've had the pleasure of being completely plant-based for 40 years, which started as an accident, but it was a very good accident. I was 18 years old. Now I’m taking no prescription drugs and feel good every day. That's a pretty good place to be as you're approaching 60, and I wish that on everybody. A healthy plant diet is a great foundation to get to that point. But if you're going to eat nothing but plants, beans, seeds, grains and such, you want to be cognizant that B12 is in dirt, and cows graze on dirt and their meat gets enriched with B12 because they’re beasts. If we would get down and eat some dirty carrots, we wouldn't need to consider supplementing, but we do. It’s just inappropriate to be on long-term completely plant diet and not be aware that B12 can be a deficient nutrient. It's in some soy milks and hemp milks and such. But take a B12 pill three or four times a week.

Vitamin D is a challenging nutrient for everybody to get – meat eaters, fish eaters, plant eaters. There’s a lot in mushrooms. A lot of the plant milks are fortified with vitamin D as is cow milk, but Dr. Michael Greger recommends, I recommend 2,000 international units of vitamin D3 a day, maybe 250 micrograms of vitamin B12 three, four, five times a week. And finally the new one on the block is Omega-3. Fish don't make Omega-3 fatty acids like EPA, DHA. Fish eat algae, algae make it. So now there are algae-based supplements that have EPA, DHA, just enough to make sure you're getting enough to make your membranes in your brain and your other organs work optimally. Adding in one a day. There are some multivitamins out there for vegans that have all of these; makes it brainless. There's a spray out there you can take that has all these and it makes it very easy and brainless. It's a very, very small price, literally in terms of what it costs, and habit-wise to say, “I've constructed the whole food, plant-based diet that favors longevity and health. I've watched the amount of oils or limited them. I take a couple of vitamins a day.” Really in my practice of advanced cardiology in Detroit, where everybody gets nutritional testing, my meat eaters are missing as much or more than plant eaters. Be a smart plant-eater, not a sloppy one.

Allan (21:17): I think there were two really good points that you had in there. One is that we have a need for some of these. If we're eating whole foods, and I think that's one of the big things I want to put out there, they are not manufactured in a box foods. These are the whole foods. You get them in the produce section, you get them at the farmer's market, and you're starting from that base. The other side of this that I wanted to get into was that you had mentioned that you can actually get a blood test for vitamin D and vitamin B12. You can actually test for that when you get your labs done. I don't think there's anything for Omega-3 at this point.

Dr. Kahn (22:02): There is, there is. If your healthcare provider doesn't want to do it, some of the online companies like WellnessFX or LifeExtension.com – you can pay to get an Omega-3 blood level and such. So they are out there and I do them on every patient. Some of my patients are so deficient in Omega-3, and what follows that is your cholesterol goes up, inflammation goes up, sometimes blood sugar goes up. And you don't need a diabetic drug, a cholesterol drug or a blood pressure drug. You need to start eating two tablespoons a day of ground flaxseed and maybe some hemp, maybe some chia seeds, walnuts, leafy greens, and maybe taking one small capsule a day of algae Omega-3. I routinely six weeks later repeat their blood work, and the Omega-3 levels are up and all those other numbers are down. Sophisticated but really widely available nutritional analysis should be pretty darn good at this stuff.

Allan (23:04): Now, one of the important things that’s out there when people are going to try to start something is, I think, having a plan that gets us at least into it long enough. Three weeks – 21 days – is probably enough time for you to start recognizing some of the health benefits to get some of the hard parts of it out of the way. You actually have a plant-based solution – 21-day menu set in here that I think is actually quite brilliant, because there's enough variety there. We're not talking all you're going to get is celery and carrots. These are actually foods, whole food meals that you can get by with, and you actually recognize as a meal, not a salad all the time. Do you want to take a few moments to talk about your 21-day menu and the recipes?

Dr. Kahn (23:58): Sure, thank you for that. I am not a culinary trained chef. I mentioned it briefly, I do own three restaurants – two in Detroit, one in Austin, Texas, that are completely plant-based. So I'm around food people, I employ food people, I research food people, but I am in the kitchen a pretty primitive guy. I'll tinker around and make some mistakes, but I'm not making mirepoix. The 21-day program is based… First of all, many, many people say that when they feel better is when they switched from their previous diet to a plant-based diet. And after about three weeks the dairy is gone, then the processed food is gone, and the fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds have been increased. And number two, it takes about that long to acquire the taste there. Some people are just aren’t grooving on Brussels sprouts and such. You sometimes can bite into an apple and it's an explosion of flavor after a few weeks of not having had a burger, bacon, cheese fries, and eating in a healthier pattern.

So that's the three-week part and why, and more importantly the recipes are simple. Let’s get some simple breakfast with overnight oats, overnight chia pudding, easy smoothies, chickpea omelets, some stir fries for breakfast. Frankly, I didn't put it in the book – half of Europe eats salad for breakfast. When you go to the salad bar in a European hotel, just cut up some cucumbers and tomatoes and mint and cilantro, and if you're into it, some olive oil, and you'll be in a good place. And then, also simple lunches. The one that's been the biggest hit in the book is a chickpea mash. I take a tuna sandwich to work every day. What am I going to take instead of a tuna sandwich? Well, get two pieces of good whole grain bread like Killer Dave’s or Ezekiel, put a chickpea mash in the middle. You don't need to do it with mayonnaise and eggs and high fat. There are now some plant-based mayonnaises out there. Put a lot of spices. Almost all the recipes enjoy health-boosting benefits of turmeric, ginger, garlic, parsley, rosemary and such. This chickpea mash has been great. And then we just need a few staples for dinner. We need a good soup, a good chili, a good casserole. For people who are on the move, one good bean burger. So there's a variety of choices in this three-week eating plan that really will satisfy most everybody. There’s the ability to explore, people can alter the recipes a bit. Some people don't like cilantro, some people do. Some people hate mushrooms, some people like them. I think people will find it pleasing. They come right out of my kitchen. They’re not gourmet recipes out of my restaurant that might challenge people. It would be practical. And I think at the end of three weeks, maybe a few pounds less, maybe a little bit clearer skin, maybe a little better digestive track with less heartburn and easier bowel movement. These will be some of the expectations people could actually expect to see happen.

Allan (27:23): As I look at and think about all the different eating styles that are out there – and they're coming up with new ones every day, it seems like – I just want to put this out there, that vegetables have to be a core of our diet. They are going to be what's providing us with the nutrition, the fiber, all the things that are going to keep us healthy. So any move that you can make towards a more plant-based, and by that we mean whole food, plant-based diet – I believe is a helpful decision. I really appreciate the opportunity to review your book. Like I said, it had me thinking through things, at times just stopping to meditate on them. I learned a lot and I really appreciate the opportunity to have you on the podcast. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Kahn (28:10): Probably the central point where I live on the web is my website, DrJoelKahn.com. Lots of blogs, lots of YouTube connections, Twitter connections, Instagram connections, Facebook connections. Then the book is there, and that’s the fifth book I've written. There will be more. I enjoy the process of writing blogs and writing books. And I appreciate it too. Like you say, the worst meal with a salad is a dramatically better meal. The worst pizza piled up with arugula, green peppers, garlic and onion is a far better choice. And you can learn to say, “Actually the part here that’s really good for you is if I take the cheese off and leave the marinara and all the vegetables.” You’ll actually have an amazing platform for health. So it's a process. For most people, inch by inch it’s a cinch, yard by yard it’s hard. Not a bad place to be, but get going, start today. Eat more plants, eat less animals. Save the world by closing down these CAFOs. These are real issues right now today.

Allan (29:19): I agree. So this is episode 329. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/329 and I'll make sure to have a link to Dr. Khan's website and whatnot there. Dr. Khan, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Kahn (29:36): Thank you. And 40+ is really the time when the body starts to kick back from the habits during those first decades, and there couldn't be a better title or why a whole food, plant-based diet like the plant-based solution is a path to getting your mojo back. Maybe that'll be in my next book.

Allan (29:56): You have some very intriguing titles, I have to say that. Again, thank you, Dr. Kahn.

Dr. Kahn (30:02): Thank you, sir.

Allan (30:08): I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Khan. I think we can all agree that there is room for more plant-based foods on our plate each night and each day. Do take to heart the things you learned today and try to apply them in your life. And if you got something valuable from today's episode, I'd really appreciate if you would go to iTunes and tell me about it in a review. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Review, and that'll give you an opportunity to give us a rating. I hope you give us a 5-star, and you can give us a review. So if there's something you took special out of today's episode, I really would appreciate if you take the time to go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Review and leave that short review today. Thank you.

Also, I really want to encourage you to join our Facebook group. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Group, and that's a great place for you to generally interact with me. If you have questions, that's a really good place to be. It's a lot of likeminded people and a great opportunity for you to share your winds, ask your questions, and really have a very supportive group of people that all want the same thing that you do, and that's to be healthier and more fit while we're over 40.

And then finally, I want to apologize – I had put a link in the show a couple of weeks ago for an opportunity to have a 15-minute session with me. I inadvertently blew up on the tech. Apparently I didn't flip a certain button, and as a result people got some errors when they were trying to go through that link. And I sincerely apologize about that. It was a little technical glitch, it's my fault, so I do apologize about it. But if you go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Talk, that's actually going to take you to some spots I've put on my calendar to have a specific answer session with you. So if there are some questions you've got about health and fitness, some topics you want me to talk about on the podcast, this is the place to go. Just go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Talk. It'll allow you to book a 15-minute time with me, and then we'll go ahead and get on the phone or on Zoom and we'll have that conversation. So, go ahead and go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Talk, and we can have a conversation about the things that matter most to you.

Short of that, I do hope that you enjoyed the podcast, and I do want to see you back here next week. Next time on the 40+ Fitness podcast, we'll discuss modes of transportation. How are you going to get through your wellness journey? Until then, have a happy and healthy day.

 

 

 

Guy gone keto with Thom King

Our guest today is the founder and CEO of Steviva Brands – one of the largest importers, manufacturers and distributors of natural sweeteners. He is a self-described biohacker, and he’s made his life work trying to figure out ways to get people off of sugar. Today we’re going to talk about his book, Guy Gone Keto, and his journey from finding himself a busy executive who was not taking care of himself to being as healthy as he can be. I know you’re going to enjoy this conversation, so with no further ado, here’s Thom King.

Allan (1:15):  Thom, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Thom King (1:21): Thanks, Allan. I appreciate you having me on your show. It’s truly an honor. So thank you.

Allan (1:28): So, the book today we’re going to talk about is Guy Gone Keto, and I really enjoyed the book from the perspective of your story and how it really did in a sense parallel mine, although I think you fast-tracked a lot better than I did in getting from the decision point to actually making things happen. Mine took nearly eight years; yours took slightly over a year. But we both were sitting in what I would call a very miserable state and we were frustrated with that, and we made a decision that we were going to change that. I happened to be in Puerto Vallarta when I did mine; you happened to be in Las Vegas. Would you mind sharing your story about that and how that frustration then led to your change?

Thom King (2:19): It was definitely frustration, but I think that the biggest part was just being disappointed in myself and feeling like I had poor integrity. I run a food ingredient company and we cater to ketogenic products and sports nutrition, and I was exceptionally unhealthy. My blood pressure was 199 over 99 and I was 35 pounds heavier than I am now. I was drinking a bottle of wine every night and eating bread and cookies and all sorts of garbage. I think I bottomed out when I was in Las Vegas. I was there for a trade show. I went to dinner with a client and way overate, had a couple of glasses of wine, came back to the room. The room that I stayed in smelt like stale booze and regret. And I found myself waking up the next morning, not feeling really great and looking in the mirror and seeing really how fat I was and how disgusted I was with myself. And at that point, I think that the pain of being out of integrity and the pain of my sloth and overweightness exceeded the pleasure that I was deriving from drinking too much wine and eating too many sweets and carbohydrates. So at that point I just told myself, “This is the end. I’m going to be making a major shift in my lifestyle.” That’s when I got on board with leading a ketogenic lifestyle from that point forward.

Allan (4:10): Okay. And I like the way that you approach that. It’s a unique way to approach it, where you’re talking about the pain of failure is greater than the value you’re getting from the activities you’re doing. I’ll be honest with everyone here – when I go to a tailgate, I drink the beer and I hang out. I typically try to get a higher quality beer, but I drink the beer nonetheless and know that I’m not going to feel so great. But the social interaction in those events – I actually do feel they are valuable enough to me at this point in my life that I don’t want to forego those. So I go through what I call my “feasting period”, where I back away from keto a little bit. I’m really interested in your thought patterns around using pain as a leverage tool to get something going, to basically make you change something in your life.

Thom King (5:11): For me, pain is the great teacher. I don’t avoid pain. I probably seek it out more than I avoid it. I think that human beings are driven by two things. I think they’re driven by the avoidance of pain and they are driven by seeking pleasure. If you’re seeking pleasure and the pleasure that you’re seeking is drinking too much, eating too much, whatever habit you’ve got – if you’re able to really attach pain to that, like when you take a look at, “Is eating this donut going to be painful or is it going to be enjoyable?” It’ll be enjoyable for that first few minutes, but if you really are mindful and present in what you’re doing, you can take a good look at what eating the donut really means. It’s going to raise your blood sugar level, it’s going to contribute to metabolic disease. It’s also going to lead to lower self-esteem, because are you going to really feel good about yourself after you eat the donut? If you start associating so much pain with something that you’re deriving pleasure from, once the pain exceeds the pleasure, you’ll be able to break that habit.

Allan (6:41): I liked your example of a donut, because I don’t have the same draw to a donut, and I know the reward is not worth the pain. For me the time with family and friends, and the socializing aspects of all of it, and not being that guy that’s not having the beer – to me is a little different. But I get that, particularly if you’re in a bad state and if you’re looking to improve yourself. It’s a very stoic kind of approach to thinking about how to solve that problem.

Thom King (7:12): Yeah, and I do derive a lot of that from stoicism. One of my daily practices is to read from The Daily Stoic, and I do leverage that quite a bit. So, being able to find answers in pain and in situations that are challenging – that’s part of my routine.

Allan (7:39): I have a copy of that book sitting on my desk right here, along with your book. Now, in the book Guy Gone Keto, you have your first steps. I really liked your approach to this. I really liked how you lay this out, that these are the things that need to be going through your mind, this is what you need to be doing to get this whole process going. In the case of the book, we’re talking about getting ourselves into ketosis, but I think this really applies to anytime you want to address a health or fitness issue.

Thom King (8:14): Definitely. Anything that you do want to achieve – it’s being able to set the goal. I think it is creating the intention and really being able to outline the outcome you’re looking for. And then on top of that, using a lot of data collection so you can see where you started and where you’re going. If you can see progress and you’re starting to see yourself getting closer to the outcome that you’re looking for, those are the best first steps that you can take.

Allan (8:52): There was another thing you had in here that I liked, and this is really something that’s hard for people to wrap their minds around when they want to lose weight. They want that 35 pounds or 55 pounds gone tomorrow. And I can say from my start to finish of when I really got committed and started doing the right things, it started with the Paleo, found myself naturally in ketosis, started reading on what ketosis is and then really bear down on that. But this was not something that just happened in a day or a week, or even a month. It took me nearly 11 months to really drop that kind of weight. So it was a slow progression – a few plateaus, but just a slow progression. I like how in the book you explain to us why going slow is important.

Thom King (9:43): I think that if people are looking to lose weight fast, that’s more of a diet situation. I also think that’s pretty unhealthy, because I think that if you adopt a diet, you’re going to get yo-yo weight. So you’re going to be on the diet, you’re going to lose the weight, then you’re going to go off the diet, you’re going to gain the weight back, and maybe a little bit more. So that’s the big difference. There’s a difference between diet and adopting a particular lifestyle. I think that if you adopt the particular lifestyle, it becomes more about the process than the outcome. You can definitely define the outcome – say, “I want to lose 35 pounds”, but the process is what you do every day to get there. And I would say don’t be in a hurry, don’t lose the weight too fast. Lose it a pound at a time, because if you lose a whole bunch of weight really fast, you’re going to be dealing with other issues like loose, saggy skin, and also it’s very taxing on your liver. So take your time and immerse yourself in the process, and then naturally the outcome will manifest itself.

Allan (11:06): Cool. Now, I do want to get into a little bit of discussion about ketosis. One of the things that you also had in your first steps was to avoid the high glycemic foods, because those are definitely not going to allow us to be in ketosis, but they’re also the items that are going to spike our blood sugar and get us to a point where we’re not able to lose weight or keep ourselves from potentially gaining weight.

Thom King (11:38): The shift from getting into ketosis is your body actually shifting from burning glucose as a form of energy to burning fat as a source of energy. So the ketogenic lifestyle or ketogenic diet basically is 70% fat, 20% proteins, and 10% vegetables. And these vegetables are going to be green leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. Basically if it grows underground, meaning a potato or a carrot or something like that, those are going to tend to be more on the high-glycemic end. So you’ve got this pretty big option of food that you can eat.

Allan (12:26): Yeah. When we start talking about these types of macros, it’s easy to think that you’re in that macro range, but if you’re really not paying attention to what you’re eating, you can easily slide one way or the other and not get the benefits that you’re after. This leads me to the next area I want to talk about, which is journaling. I’ve had clients that were on the calls or with me and they’re saying, “Allan, I just don’t understand it. I’m eating really, really well and I don’t understand why I’m not losing the weight. I’m doing the exercises, I’m eating well. Everything is going great.” I’m like, “Get yourself a notebook and start a journal.”

Thom King (13:12): 100%. That’s the data collection part of your journey. Definitely go out, buy yourself a journal and start doing data collection. Do data collection on how much you weigh, what your ketones are, what your blood sugar level is. This is a process, and the more data collection you do and the more you journal, the more you’re going to find the areas where you can make improvements. If you’re writing down everything that you ate in a day and you think, “I’m eating 2,000 calories a day. I’m probably burning 2,200 calories a day, so I’m at a 200-calorie deficit” – that might not be true at all, because particularly when you’re eating keto, a lot of the stuff that you’re eating is going to be high fat, and when it’s high fat, it means it’s high calories. So, you might have some almonds in the palm of your hand – it might be 5 to 10 almonds – you’re looking at about 200 calories there. So when you start writing these things down and understanding where the holes are, you can really plug the dike.

Allan (14:24): One almond is basically 16 calories, so if you’re off by one almond, that could be potentially 10 pounds of weight gain in a year. It’s not that you have to be exact, because calories are not really ever exact, or their estimates anyway, but you go three weeks and track what you’ve eaten, the volumes you’ve eaten, and you really pay attention to those numbers – you’re going to get to a point where you understand 2,000 calories is maybe a little too much, or maybe you need 2,500 because you’re losing weight a little too fast. So, taking the time to write those things down, and even to go further than just the data collection is, how do you feel when you wake up? What’s your energy level throughout the day? Do you find yourself needing to take a nap at 2:00 in the afternoon? How much coffee are you drinking now? Are you getting your electrolytes? Are you getting enough salt and enough water? There’s so much that a journal will allow you to collect and understand about yourself, to include your mood and your stress. I press it on with my clients all the time, that I do think a journal is a great tool for anyone that’s looking to make a change or at least understand why they are where they are.

Thom King (15:39): Absolutely. I don’t just use my journal for tracking macros and my behavior, but I also use my journal to set the stage for my day. I do write down what are the things that I’m most grateful for today, and what am I going to do today to make this day great and excellent? And then I just end it with an affirmation of, “With every breath I take in, I attract and create abundance and health and wellness in my life. And with each exhale I lovingly release any and all self-limiting beliefs that no longer serve me.” Combining that with breathing exercises, I found that journaling is something that I must do every day.

Allan (16:32): Yes, and I’m doing it. I wish I were better at doing it all the time, but that’s one of those practices that I really struggle with. But when I’m doing it, I feel so much better organized, I feel so much more complete and like I have everything together with my relationships, my food, my sleep, with all of it. So I do think it’s a great practice to understand what’s going on, to have a path forward and to be always affecting change. So if you’re someone that’s in the continuous improvement model with your life, a journal is a must have.

Thom King (17:14): Absolutely. It’s a daily event for me.

Allan (17:19): We talked a little bit about calories, and for a lot of folks, they’ll say, “They’re telling me I’ve got to cut the sugars and I’ve got to cut calories.” But as we call it down in the South – they love their Coke, which down here “Coke” just means any soda. So you come down here and you want to order a soft drink, you just ask for a Coke, and then they’ll ask you what flavor. You have to repeat yourself and say, “Coke, just a regular Coke.” And you’ll wonder why you had to repeat yourself – because “Coke” is just our word for soda, or a soft drink, or pop or whatever you want to call it. So they’ll say, “That’s one of the easy cuts. Immediately I’m going to give up my pop, my soda, my Coke, and I’m going to move over to this diet soda, because the diet soda has zero calories. So it’s the perfect drink because it tastes almost like the regular thing. And once I get used to it it’ll be fine. And it has no calories.” So they go into this mindset of, “This is the diet drink. This is what I need.” And they’ll say “diet” or “light” – “This is what I need to drink.” Can you tell us why that’s not necessarily the best path to health?

Thom King (18:30): I do a lot of experiments on myself. I would consider myself a bit of a biohacker. So, I was drinking a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, thinking that it’s going to help me maintain good blood sugar levels, it’ll keep me in ketosis. But what I found is that if I was drinking diet soda at night, when I wake up the next morning, my blood sugar level would be elevated, and I was having a hard time getting myself into deep nutritional ketosis. So, I just conducted a little bit of an experiment and I also talked to a couple of PhDs about what’s potentially going on with diet soda. I’ve tested blood sugar before, blood sugar after, same with ketones. And I found that diet soda that contains aspartame or sucralose, which is Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi – that those will actually elevate my blood sugar levels and they will slightly decrease the amount of ketone bodies. And when I talked to a couple of doctors about it, what came up for them is that your body doesn’t recognize these manmade chemicals. It recognizes that it’s sweet, but it doesn’t recognize them because we don’t have the receptors for them. With Stevia or monk fruit, with natural high intensity sweeteners, our body recognizes it because we’ve got the receptors to recognize it, so it says, “This is Stevia, or this is monk fruit. This tastes sweet, but it’s not impacting blood sugar levels at all. This is how we’ll metabolize it.” But with aspartame and sucralose, your brain doesn’t recognize it. We don’t have receptors for it, which means that your body is basically going to function like you just had sugar, and the only benefit that you could get from chemically-sweetened soft drinks is the calorie abatement, but you’re still going to get a rise in your blood sugar level and you’re still going to get your ketone levels to drop, because your body doesn’t know what it is.

Allan (20:46): So, even though it’s not sugar and even though it’s zero calorie, it’s doing a sugar-like thing to you. Or maybe not exactly like sugar, but it’s changing your metabolism by causing your insulin and sugar responses to kind of go out of whack.

Thom King (21:05): Absolutely. And I’ve done this experiment several times. Occasionally, I’ll indulge myself with a Diet Coke – I love Diet Coke – but I do so with the knowledge that it is going to probably take me out of ketosis and it is probably going to raise my blood sugar levels a little bit. The fact that it doesn’t have any calories is a plus, but when you’re leading a ketogenic lifestyle, the goal is to keep yourself above, say, 0.6 to 1.5 millimoles of ketone bodies. So, there’s going to be a cost to it. But there are plenty of good replacements out there, like Zevia. Zevia is a soft drink that’s made with Stevia and it’s actually really good. If I’m going to indulge with a diet soft drink, I will certainly go with something that’s naturally sweetened over something that’s artificially sweetened.

Allan (22:09): When I moved away from Diet Coke, I was definitely an addict. Getting away from it was painful. So it’s not easy, but I did replace that with the green teas and coffee and things like that. There are now some products that are Stevia-based that are really good, if you want to continue the Cola route. There’s also tea and coffee, or good old water.

Thom King (22:37): When you’re on a ketogenic diet, drinking plenty of water is really important. You want to keep your body definitely hydrated, so your kidneys aren’t working overtime.

Allan (22:50): That is a big, big thing that a lot of folks struggle with ketosis. They get what they think is hunger, and the reality of it is either they’re not getting enough water or they’re not getting enough electrolytes. Once they figure that out for themselves, they’re so much better off and they have so much more energy.

Thom King (23:10): Absolutely, and that is key. I do keep little packets of electrolytes, and I have an app on my phone that reminds me to drink water every hour.

Allan (23:20): And then there is your journal, so full circle.

Thom King (23:24): It’s true. I hold myself accountable.

Allan (23:27): Good deal. Thom, if someone wanted to get to know you, get to know more about Guy Gone Keto and all the other things you’re doing, because you’ve got a lot going on – where would you like for me to send them?

Thom King (23:43): You can find me on any and all socials under Guy Gone Keto. You could also find me personally on all of the socials, and that’s Thom King PDX, as in Portland. My personal website is ThomKing.com. And my company is Steviva Brands, and you can go to Steviva.com. Yeah, any of the socials, and feel free to reach out, direct message me. I’m available to answer anybody’s questions.

Allan (24:25): I will have all of those links and all those social media outputs available in the show notes. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/328 and find all of those links there. Thom, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Thom King (24:41): Allan, it was an absolute pleasure. It was an honor to be on your podcast.

Allan (24:47): Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Thom. I know I did. The similarities in some of our storylines and the things that we went through were very, very interesting. And it’s also interesting that both of us found keto as a way to address our issues. It turns out July for me is becoming this month of book editing. It’s not fun; I don’t really enjoy the process of doing the editing of something that I wrote or said. And as I go through it, it’s a struggle, but I’m seeing the book come to life and that’s really, really exciting. I’m calling the book The Wellness Roadmap. I’m going to start putting together a page for that real soon. It’ll probably be at WellnessRoadmap.net. If you go out there right now, you probably won’t find too much, but I am putting that together and it’s just really exciting to see a book come together. We’re working through cover art and we’re talking about layout, and we’re, of course, dealing with pages and pages of text.

But it got me to thinking, there are certain things that are true in life. If you want something, it’s not always a direct path. You can’t necessarily be a better human, can’t do the things you always want to do just by doing them. I like playing volleyball, but I know that I’m not going to be as good a volleyball player if I don’t put in the time to do other things – some of the things that we don’t like, like sweating or lifting weights or when the weather doesn’t let us get outside, doing our runs on a treadmill. There are going to be those times when there are things that we don’t enjoy, that we should still do to improve our health.

One of the caveats out there, “What’s the best exercise?”, and the answer that’s typically given is, “The one you’ll do.” I completely, wholeheartedly agree with that. When we were looking at cover art, there was one with the couple being relatively athletic on the page, I said that people might not like that. They might not like that you have to do workouts to get the things you want. And you don’t “have to”, but if you want optimal health, if you want true wellness, then sometimes you are going to probably have to do a few things that you don’t enjoy. I want you to think about those things from the perspective of why you’re trying to get where you’re trying to get, and it does make those things just a little more tolerable. So, do the things you don’t want to do when it’s getting you to a place where you want to be – that’s the short story of all that. So, I’m going to be spending a lot of time editing a book, even though it’s not the funnest thing for me. I am very excited about what it’s going to do when I’m done.

Also, this week I’m getting on a plane to New London, Connecticut. Actually flying into Boston, and I think it’s about a 2.5-hour drive from there. Then I’m going to go to New London, Connecticut – 20th to the 22nd I’ll be there. If you’re in the area, you can email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, and I’ll be glad to catch a coffee or a drink with you. Let’s have a good time, let’s get to know each other. I really like talking to people that have heard the podcast and get your advice on some things that I can do better as a podcaster and as a coach.

And I’ll talk about coaching. I mentioned this last week – I’m looking for clients, I want to help you do this. If you’re looking for a coach, you think you might get some value from a coach – let’s talk about it. I know a lot of this is you go online, you see a forum, you see a page. I’m not a pressure salesman. I’m not going to say, “Do this or else.” I see a lot of that. I see a lot of, “Lose 20 pounds in three weeks and…” And that’s great – you can lose 20 pounds in three weeks. It’s completely possible. It’s not healthy and it’s not going to make you well. It’s going to make you thinner, but it’s not necessarily going to make you well.

I, as a coach, try to empower my clients. I try to teach my clients and I help my clients, and as a result they get well. And that’s what I want for you. So if you’re on the fence, you think this is something that might be good for you, you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com – I’ve got some information there. I can tell you about all the programs I have if you want to know. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Talk, and that’s going to take you to a calendar link, where you can actually book a 15-minute block of time and we can just talk. We can talk through whatever issues you’re dealing with, whatever your health concerns are, whatever your fitness goals are. We can talk through what they are and make a decision if coaching is right for you. It’s not right for everybody, but I can tell you having someone there to keep you accountable, someone there coaching you, teaching you, empowering you to take your fitness journey, your health journey, your wellness journey to the next level – I think there’s a lot of value there that you might be missing out on. So I’d encourage you to go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Talk and learn more today. Thank you. Next time on the 40+ Fitness podcast, we meet Dr. Joel Kahn and discuss his book, The Plant-Based Solution. Until then, have a happy and healthy week.

 

Another episode you may enjoy

Easy keto with Carolyn Ketchum

 

Clean those dirty genes with Dr. Ben Lynch

Allan (0:00): On episode 327 of the 40+ Fitness podcast, we meet Dr. Ben Lynch and discuss his book Dirty Genes, a breakthrough program to treat the root cause of illness and optimize your health. You can find the full show notes for this episode at FortyPlusFitnessPodcast.com/327.

Allan (0:50): Our guest today received his doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University. He has supported thousands of clients and trained thousands of physicians and health professionals across the globe in using insights from epigenetics to optimize health. He is the founder of Seeking Health – a company that helps educate both the public and health professionals on how to overcome genetic dysfunction through diet, lifestyle, and supplements. I bring you Dr. Ben Lynch. Dr. Lynch, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Lynch (1:20): Great to be here, Allan.

Allan (1:22): Your book, Dirty Genes – and I’m sure that was somewhat of a play on words – but it was really interesting to me as I got into the book that my eye color is because of my genes. I had a receding hairline when I was younger, and now I shave my head. That’s a part of what my genes were. So what we were taught in school about our genes and how they define who we are – it makes it seem like you can take them almost like they were a predestination, like this is who we’re going to be, this is what we’re going to be. But when it comes to our actual health, we have a lot of say in what our genes do or don’t do for us.

Dr. Lynch (2:11): 100%. I had the same exact philosophy as we all did back in the day. It’s like, “Oh God, what was our family history? Oh, I’m next.” And now it’s totally the opposite. It’s as malleable as Play-Doh, almost. Nice, new Play-Doh. As we get older, our genes are about as malleable as old Play-Doh, but the good news is we have different symptoms that come and go every day. Some days we’re more tired, some days we’re full of energy, other days we’re grumpy and don’t really want to meet anybody, other days we want to go party hard. Our genes are responsive for that, but they’re responding to the things that we are providing them. We’re giving them either the tools that they want to use and perform, or we’re giving them hindrances and roadblocks and they’re saying, “Dang it, now I can’t get my job done.” Because that’s all genes do. They just do work, and we better give them the right tools to do it.

Allan (3:15): This is not going to mean anything to anyone unless they owned a computer back in the 1980s. But if you owned a personal computer back in the 1980s, they had this series of dip switches in the back. You could turn them on and turn them off. When you first get your computer and you’re trying to set it all up, it wasn’t as simple as just plug-and-play and some of the things we have today. You had to almost have a computer science engineering degree to sit down and know how those dip switches work. Our genes are in many ways the same thing, that you can basically turn a gene on or off. And the series of them all working together can create, for lack of a better word, a symphony. It can make us very, very healthy or very, very sick. Can you go through just a little brief description of what epigenetics is all about and what this “on switch, off switch” stuff is all really working for?

Dr. Lynch (4:10): I’ve related our bodies to a symphony before, where we are the conductor, and the orchestra are the genes. Actually they’re not their genes. I’m forgetting my analogy, how it worked. It was so good when I presented on it. But you could have a great sounding orchestra or band, or you could have a horrible sounding band. And it could be because the instruments aren’t tuned, and it could be because the player isn’t very good, or all of the above.

Epigenetics is simply how our genes are responding to the environment. “Epi” means “above”, and genetics is genetics. So it literally is “above the genetics”, and that doesn’t really help you out that much, but what you need to know is genes are buried inside your nucleus, which is buried inside your cell, and your cell contains all this stuff inside a cell membrane. The cell membranes have these antennas or receptors and they’re constantly sensing their environment around them. From that, there’s hormones, neurotransmitters, vitamins and stuff floating around. Ultimately when we eat something or see, hear, taste, or touch something – we are sending signals that get all the way down to the surface of the cell, which sends a signal down into the nucleus, which tells certain genes to turn on, certain genes to turn off, and they produce something because of that. When we touch a hot stove, we immediately go, “Ow”, right? And that is a very, very quick response; it’s nerve response. But we also have neuro transmitters in our brain fire because of that, where we get stressed out and we get a flood of norepinephrine probably. That is all responses from our environment and our perception of it.

Allan (6:25): There are hundreds of thousands of genes throughout our body and they’re all going to respond differently. Some are going to have very little effect, as far as what we would notice, because they are doing something not benign, but something that’s probably very important, just not something that overall we’re going to see a huge, huge benefit. But there are seven, and you call them the “Super Seven”. Do you mind going through those? As I was reading through them, the first one – the methylation gene – I’m very familiar with that one because everybody likes to talk about that one. And it’s very, very important – don’t get me wrong – but there are six others that I think also are. This is I think where it really connected for me is, when I first got your book and I said, “Okay, we’re going to talk about genes.” And I was almost immediately like, “I should send him my 23andMe and say, ‘Tell me, Doc, what do I have to look forward to in the next 5, 10, 15, 50 years?’” But then as I got into the book, I’m like, “This is not something where you just do a 23andMe kind of thing and say, ‘This is everything.’” There’s a lot more going on, but these seven really are the defining ones that for most of us, if we can address these seven, we’re going to live a lot better.

Dr. Lynch (7:47): A lot better. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why I picked these seven. The biggest reason is because when you support these seven, they help clean up all the other genes in your body. You have to find genes that are one, well-researched; two, I had to have enough clinical experience with them; three, you have to be able to support them through basic lifestyle habits and supplementation and environmental changes; and four, they had to make a huge impact in day-to-day life. Those are the reasons why I picked these seven. And there are approximately 19,000 to 20,000 some genes in the human body, and there are millions of genetic variations. So there are a lot of things that you can choose from, but I just picked genes in general. I didn’t pick snips, I didn’t pick mutations, I didn’t pick variations. I picked genes, period. Because if you understand how the genes work, that’s what you need to understand.

These Super Seven – their jobs are massively important. One gene – MTHFR – it’s the master of methylation. And what that means is that it helps control over 200 other genes, which affects your ability to think, sleep, and support your cardiovascular system, support your cell membrane production. If your cell membranes are not healthy, it’s like you’re not having skin on your body. It’s that important. You’ve got to have healthy cell membranes or you’re in trouble. Then you have COMT, and COMT’s job is to help really process your estrogen levels, in men too. It also helps process your dopamine and norepinephrine, and that’s really important. And then it also helps process your epinephrine, so your neurotransmitters. And then I can work faster or slower, and there’s pros and cons to that. There’s another gene called DAO, and this one lives primarily in your digestive system, and its job is to break down histamine. Histamine is this compound that is very, very common in the population, where it’s elevated. When you have high histamine, you’ve got seasonal allergies, itchy, scratchy, skin, you can’t sleep, you’re irritable, you get migraines, headaches, nose bleeds, rashes, urticaria, psoriasis, eczema, diarrhea, acid reflux, low blood pressure. These are really, really common problems. You get bit by a mosquito and you’re super, super itchy. Exercise-induced asthma, asthma – that’s majorly impacted by this gene, which is in your gut and it’s very easily dirtied. And then there’s another one called MAO, and MAO also works for neurotransmitters. A really big one for serotonin, which is kind of your feel-good, happy neurotransmitter, like dopamine, but it also is needed for your melatonin for sleep. And then you have PEMT, which really no one talks about, and PEMT’s job is to help make your cell membranes. It’s kind of a tag team with MTHFR; they all kind of tag team each other. Throughout the book I interweave them and explain how and why. It helps make your cell membranes and it also helps make your bile, which is this product your liver makes so you can absorb fats and kill bad bugs in your small intestine, hence small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So if you have SIBO or struggling with gut issues, PEMT is a factor that a lot of people need to start digging into more, and a lot of doctors don’t know the connection there. Then we’ve got NOS3, and this one’s super important. If any of those other six genes are dirty, this NOS3 gene is dirty. It’s very, very sensitive. And if it gets dirty, you have neurological issues, mental issues, and cardiovascular issues. And cardiovascular disease is the number one killer for women. There’s so much emphasis on breast cancer, and there should be, but the number one killer actually in women is cardiovascular disease. And this gene has a big, big role to play here.

Allan (12:23): Okay. And then there was the GST.

Dr. Lynch (12:27): I forgot one.

Allan (12:28): That’s alright. I’m here to help.

Dr. Lynch (12:30): I appreciate that. So, glutathione – so GST/GPX. It’s kind of a tag team, these two. It’s a Super Eight, but that doesn’t sound good. Super Seven sounds better.

Allan (12:42): It has to be an odd number.

Dr. Lynch (12:44): Yeah, it’s got to be an odd number for Feng Shui in the book. So, we combine these two because I was just doing GST or GPX alone, and I could not write the chapter effectively. I kept intertwining them and it was like, “It doesn’t work”, so I combined them both. Glutathione is your body’s number one antioxidant. When you’re fighting an infection, the cleanup crew is glutathione to clean up all the mess. If you’re exercising and you have really bad post workout soreness, glutathione levels are probably low and you probably need to support those. When you have asthma, you are struggling with low glutathione . When you have exposures to chemicals in the environment, which we all do, especially formaldehyde. It’s everywhere – in our building materials and furniture, and your clothing, your carpets, your cabinets, your mattresses. When you’re breathing this, you’re using up your glutathione, and that gene is very, very easily dirtied. And if your glutathione levels get low, you’re in trouble, period. All the other genes are dirty too.

Allan (14:00): I think that’s one of the things that you did really, really well in the book, was you took something that I would say might be one of the most complex topics in the health and fitness arena, and you made it relatively simple. There is a lot of interplay and a lot of complexity to this, but you did a really good job in the book, at least in my opinion, of making this attainable, making this something we can wrap our heads around. I think it’s because we all like these very simple rules. “If this, then that” health and fitness rules seem to be kind of the rage. “If you cut your calories, you’re going to lose weight. If you eat this supplement, then you’re going to have this result”. And so a lot of people are out looking for those very, very simple, “What’s something I can do?” One that typically comes up for me with a lot of my clients is, “What supplements should I be taking?” And I always have to caution them to start with the food. Let’s get better food, because that’s going to give you 99% of what you need. And then if there’s a reason, we can look at these other supplements as just that, a supplement. However, in particular with the first gene – the methylation gene – folate is a big deal, and we want to make sure that we’re getting adequate folate. That’s leafy greens and things like that. But we really struggle with our vegetables, so the simple thing is, “Let’s go pop one of these benign pills. Let’s get our vitamins that way.” And so they get the multivitamin with the folic acid. And I told you this just before we started here – I had to put the book down because I got angry. I can’t believe that the vitamin manufacturers are allowed to feed us this stuff. Can you take just a moment to explain folate, why it’s important, and actually what the difference is between that and folic acid?

Dr. Lynch (16:01): You share a lot of great points here. First of all, I’m glad you got irritated and pissed off, and second, I’m sorry that you did that because you dirtied your genes from doing that.

Allan (16:14): I know, I know.

Dr. Lynch (16:16): But folate is one of those things that isn’t very sexy. You eat a salad; it’s not like biting into a big dark decadent chocolate cake and getting that sugar rush. Eating a salad tastes good, but it’s not exciting to make, it’s not exciting to eat, but it’s super, super important and super fundamental. One of the things we forget all the time is, we are animals. We should be outside like all the other ones that are out there. Every other animal’s outside and they are grazing, they are foraging, they are harvesting, they are storing. And we don’t. We eat processed foods that fill the void and stick a lot of neurotransmitters because food scientists get it right, to do wrong.

Folic acid is a synthetic form of folate. What you need to know about folate is, I think it’s Latin – “folar”, if I’m not mistaken, or “folium”, and it means “leaf”, “foliage”. So it’s pretty simple, that folate comes from green, leafy vegetables – the darker the green, the more folate typically. It also is found in liver and some other foods as well, like beans, but it’s not very absorbable. So you can get folate from food. If you’re reading the book and you just found out you have an MTHFR variant, and you’re told to run out and take a supplement – no, just eat more leafy greens, because leafy greens are helping you out. What you do need to do is stop taking a supplement, more importantly, and that is folic acid. That’s what irritated you so much from reading that in the book. Folic acid is one of those things that was literally invented by humans, because we decided, geniusly, to have basically bread flour, stripped of all nutrients, so it’ll live on the shelf longer. It’s great for business, it’s great for convenience, but you are literally eating dust without nutritional value. And we had a lot of issues with that from history, and they figured out, “We’re actually getting a lot of birth defects and fertility issues, so we have to fix this problem. Instead of stripping the nutrients anymore from the grains, we’re going to synthesize a nutrient that looks very close to the body’s natural form of folate.” And they did a great job. It’s so close to the natural form of folate that is recognized by the human body, that it does get well absorbed and it does bind to folate receptors, and it does get bound to the transportation systems in our bodies to carry the folate around. The problem is, it does it too well, and it sticks to them. It’s like, if you have honey on your fingers and you’re trying to type on your keyboard, or you’ve ever made dough and you need to add more flour on the counter, otherwise it’s sticking. This synthetic folic acid really binds strongly to your receptors and also your folate-binding proteins.

What does all that mean? I’ll give you an example. If you have a car key or a house key, and you insert the key into your door, you unlock it and you go inside. You try to take your key out, and you do, and you put it on the key hooks right inside your door – you’re good. But if you go later on and you stick your key in the door, you unlock it, and you try to take the key out again – you can’t, it’s stuck. So folic acid is the key, and the doorknob is the receptor or the folate-binding protein. You need to have that folate dock and get off, dock and get off. But what happens is that folic acid has no human physiological benefit at all in the human body. It has to be transformed into something that’s usable, and that requires genes. And the genes in the human beings do not work fast to process folic acid. It’s extremely slow. Very, very slow. All the research that was done on folic acid was done on rats, and rats can process folic acid, no problem. Humans, on the other hand – very, very slow. There are genetic variations in this gene called DHFR that are known to be very, very slow at processing folic acid, and they’re very common actually. So if you’re an individual and you’re consuming folic acid and you have symptoms, the first thing you need to do is stop taking the folic acid. It’s literally gumming up your genetics and your whole body. It’s going to affect your neurotransmission, your cardiovascular system, your detoxification, your hair, your nails, your blood cells – white blood cells, red blood cells. It’s going to affect all that. So you get rid of it. The good thing is, they’ll get out of your system in about, I would say two weeks. Your genes will get rid of it and it’ll be gone. Another good thing is folic acid is typically found in processed foods, so if you limit your processed food intake, you’re also reducing your folic acid intake. So it’s kind of a double benefit there by avoiding folic acid.

Allan (21:59): Like I said, that’s what really frustrated me, was, they’re selling you a fortified breakfast cereal. It has all the vitamins and minerals that a growing body needs, and now we’re eating that and /or we’re feeding that to our children. We’re taking our supplements, because that’s what we think we’re supposed to do, and really it’s not doing us any good, and in fact actually harming us. So that was really what frustrated me – just the whole concept of, we’re trying to do the right thing. We’re trying to fix our health and we think that the companies are out there providing us a tool to help us do that, but that tool is actually the key that sticks. And therefore we’re not actually improving our health, and in many cases we’re actually making it worse.

Dr. Lynch (22:49): Let me drive this point home with the final blow. And the final blow is, standard medicine knows that folic acid is bad. It does. When you dig hard enough in the research, looking for reasons why folic acid is bad, you find it. But very, very few people are actively looking for why folic acid is bad. I work hard on that, because I’m vehemently against it. In fact, I bought the domain FolicAcid.com for a lot of money to make this a public health issue. There are a lot of people that Google “folic acid”, so if I can make a website FolicAcid.com, and I will be, I’m going to be garnering a lot of attention and making a lot of noise with the help of social media. But the point that I want to make is that folic acid is a known contraindication, meaning do not do it for a condition called cerebral folate deficiency. What that means is, you have low levels of folate in your brain. You can have all the folate you want in your blood, but you have to get the folate into your brain. If you don’t, you have seizures, you have epileptic seizures, you have neurotransmitter deficiencies. You’re not making your dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin. You’re not generating that stuff, so big issues happen. When you have the condition of cerebral folate deficiency, which a lot of autistic children have, then folic acid is a known contraindication when that occurs, because they know that it’s going to cause further folate deficiency in the brain. You’re supposed to use a more active form of folate, called folinic acid or methylfolate, and everything is merry, and it’s pretty simple and pretty cheap.

Allan (24:47): Cool. Now, in your book, you have the 4-week Clean Gene Protocol. And I like this, because it takes something that’s relatively complex and it applies lifestyle choices for the vast majority of us to make sure that we are maximizing our opportunity with our genes. There is a quiz in the book where you can go through and ask yourself some questions. And it’s not just physical; there are some mood-based things in there as well, or tendencies, like if you have a tendency to be a little bit more focused or single-minded or a little bit more out there with the ADHD kind of stuff. Those are all indicators of your genes. But you put together a very simple protocol for us to go through over the course of four weeks. Do you mind taking some time to walk us through that protocol?

Dr. Lynch (25:41): Yeah, for sure. And I equate this to general cleanup. So, if you tell your kid to clean the room, or you’re going to clean the kitchen – you’re not going to clean the kitchen by unloading all the stuff in your cabinets and dusting the back of one cabinet, right? That’s something you do once every few years. But when people get their genetic tests done, that’s kind of what they’re doing. That’s how they’re cleaning their genes – they’re targeting one tiny little area that’s pretty insignificant, and it really doesn’t make any difference. When you want to clean your kitchen, you start with the dishes – they’re glaring there on the counter. You clean those, you put them away. Now you’ve got a huge improvement already. Then you tackle the counters. Counters are full of stuff. You put it away, put it in the cabinets, in the fridge. You throw the old stuff away and wipe the counters. Wow, now your kitchen’s looking really good. In fact, you can walk away.

So the biggest things I like to hit are the ones that are going to have the biggest impact. And you already hit it, Allan – that’s food. Genes do work, and if you give your genes healthy food, they can do healthy work. If you give your genes bad food, now you’re taking the genes that want to make your dopamine and norepinephrine, but they can’t because now you’ve eaten all this garbage food that is telling all these other genes to get to work and try to get it out of your system. Now you’re dealing with high blood sugar and you’ve got inflammation and you’ve got a yeast overgrowth, and all these other genes are triggering because of that. Instead, if you had a salad with a bit of protein and a bit of fat that would’ve been all nourishing, genes would have been firing, but they would have been healthy firing.

So you’ve got to start with healthy food and you also have to start with basically understanding that breathing is an automatic thing, the autonomic nervous system, but if you are not breathing properly, then your genes are very, very dirty. A simple a way to understand if you’re mouth-breathing or breathing poorly, is if your hands are routinely cold. If your hands are always cold, or your feet are always cold, or both, then you’re not breathing right. It’s that simple. If you change your breathing, you can warm up your hands and your feet very quickly, within minutes. I do it in conferences all the time with people. “Whose hands are cold?” 20% or 30% of the hands go up. And we’ll follow a certain exercise of closing their mouth, breathing through their nose slowly, out through their nose slowly. Then after a couple minutes I say, “Whose hands are much warmer?”, and about 50% of those people will already have a huge improvement. Breathing is super, super important. So food, breathing, hydration.

If you’re 1% dehydrated – just 1% – you’re becoming not only more fatigued, but you’re becoming dumber. A lot of people don’t understand this, Allan, that food provides energy and it also provides the necessary building blocks for things in our body, which our genes use to make things. But water is needed in order to make our energy work. It’s a conductor, so it has to be present. If you’re dehydrated, your energy levels literally decline. Just yesterday I walked into the house and I was like, “God, I’m tired.” And I opened the fridge looking for something to give me a perk up. I looked at my supplement shelf, looking for something to perk me up, and I was like, “No, that’s not it.” And so I reached for a glass, I filled it up with water. I drank a glass of water – bam! Within seconds I got my energy back and I was like, “Thank you. That was it.” So you’ve got to really tune in to yourself and understand and really figure out why you’re actually tired. For me, I kind of resonate and I look at things and I will pretend that I’d taken that supplement or I’ve eaten that food, and then I look at myself about 20, 30 minutes in the future and see if that was going to help me. It sounds kind of weird, but it really, really helps. But hydration is a huge one and you’ve got to hydrate with filtered water, not chlorinated water. So you’ve got to clean up your environment because you breathe 11,000 liters of air every day. So you’ve got to make sure that your air is clean.

That’s what I call the ABCs of clean genes – A is Avoidance. So avoidance of chemicals is number one, because if you breathe in a chemical, your genes are dirty. B is Breathe. If you’re not breathing, you’ve got issues. Those are probably the two biggest ones, and then C is Chew. A lot of people don’t chew their food, and our stomach doesn’t have teeth. A lot of people are stressed out, and if you’re stressed out, you’re not secreting stomach acid. And if you’re not secreting stomach acid, you’re not breaking the food down. Food contains what? If you’re eating healthy food, it contains nutrients that your body uses so your genes can work and build things. But if you’re stressed out, chewing quickly and eating garbage food, your genes aren’t getting any benefit. Breathing is primary, food would be secondary, and tertiary I would say your environment, and I would say air and water are equally important, because if you’re hydrating with dirty, polluted water out of the tap – no, don’t. I know it sounds not like these are big changes, and they’re not, which is the cool thing, but the impact you will feel is massive.

There was a couple that just recently shared in our Dirty Genes Facebook group. She said her husband is as a building contractor, he’s actually a plumber, and he was reading Dirty Genes, which was cool. And he went up to his wife and said, “You know what? I’m reading this book. And what it’s basically telling me is that my environment is super, super important, and if I don’t clean up my environment, my genes are going to be dealing with all these chemicals and not working on my health.” And he’s absolutely right. So he started changing his furnace filters, making them better. He got a water filter, he ripped out carpets, he ripped off flooring, he ripped out all sorts of stuff, and they immediately noticed benefits. So, it was pretty cool.

Allan (32:36): I think there are two things that really resonated with me with what you just talked about, the first being really having this self-awareness, slowing down just a little bit to say, “What makes me feel which way?” You talked about kind of looking into the future to get a view of where you’re going to be or how that was going to affect you. But you can only do that because you’ve got this experience where you actually paid attention. “When I drank water, I immediately felt energized. When I had this supplement, this is how it affected me.” So you’ve built sort of a user manual for yourself. I think that’s what I really liked about this book, was that it gave us some tools. It is probably even more complex than rocket science, but that said, from a lifestyle perspective, there are really basic, simple things we can do, and it is the nutrition, it’s our environment, it’s being sure that we’re breathing. And then wrapping that all around to that self-awareness. You put that all together and you now have a manual. And the four weeks that you have here for the clean gene – I think when people sit down and actually go through that four weeks, they’re going to feel so much better that it’s not just going to be four weeks.

Dr. Lynch (34:00): No. And that’s the other point of it. Our publisher said, “Ben, we need a 30-day or a 28-day program for people.” I just laughed when they told me that on the phone. I said, “Are you serious?” And he goes, “Yeah, we need a 30-day program.” I said this is a program to help people clean their genes for the rest of their life; this is not a 30-day thing. He goes, “It needs to be 30 days.” So we went back and forth, back and forth. And I said some people are going to need two weeks, some people are going to need no days because they’ve already been living it. Other people are going to need to be doing it for six months before they move on to the next section. So you do it for as long as you need to, and you do it in a way that is not overwhelming to you. There’s a lot of people that fear change or resist change, or are perfectionists, or they have to do all of them at once. I really want people to welcome the concept that it is okay to pick up the book Dirty Genes, read it, and when you learn something and you say, “Wow, that breathing thing really resonated with me” – put the book down. Let it sit there for two weeks, three weeks, and focus on your breathing. When you feel better, your hands are warm again – pick up the book, start reading where you left off. It’s like, “Wow, that chewing thing – I definitely need to work on that.” Put the book down. Put it down.

I almost dedicated the book to… It was going to say something along the lines, “This book is dedicated to those who read and actually implement what they read.” Because you can read all you want, but if you don’t actually implement, no book is going to serve you and you’re going to be complaining that the book didn’t help you out. And Dirty Genes is a manual for you. As you pointed out, Allan, I do have a huge personal reservoir of, “Yes, I know this supplement can do this. It’s going to make me feel good if I take it then. It’s going to make me feel worse if I take it when I feel these symptoms.” And so, I take a mental file. I file everything away mentally about how everything makes me feel. I remember when I was in the grocery store with my boys years ago. I’ve got three boys, and right now they’re 15, 13 and 10. We were walking through the store and we’d walk by and the donuts, and they were just baked. They were like, “Those look good. Dad, how do you walk by those without any issue?” I said, because I put myself one hour into the future, after I’ve enjoyed them, and I realize that they’re going to make me super tired, have a headache, they’re going make the yeast overgrow and I’ll be battling that for probably two months. And I’m just not going to feel good, so I don’t eat it. I move past the impulse and think what it’s actually going to do to me. And then it’s like, “Heck no, I don’t want it.”

Allan (37:07): That’s a cost-benefit. We don’t always make the right decision for ourselves, but there’s a cost-benefit to pretty much everything we do. So having and taking the time. And like I said, I can’t stress that enough – the self-awareness to say, “I know that this is not going to do for me what I need to have done. This is not going to make me better tomorrow. It might make me feel better for five minutes, I’ll enjoy it, but then I know the repercussions of what my next day, two days, two weeks, or in some cases even longer – I know what that’s going to mean to me.”

Dr. Lynch (37:40): Yeah. And sometimes I will walk by a bag of chips or a 4 pack of alcoholic apple cider. And once in a blue moon I will pick it up and I will take it home. I’ll say, “I know the repercussions, but the heck with it. I’m going to enjoy it.” And if you want to stay up late and watch a movie, just know how you’re going to feel tomorrow and don’t blame others for your bad day. You’ve got to make some adjustments. If I eat chips and garbage, which I do at times, I will compensate the next day by doing something different to make it up. And if it’s not the next day, it’s pretty soon thereafter. So, I clean myself up after.

Allan (38:27): It’s just like your kitchen – you clean it once, you’re going to use it again, you’re going to need to clean it again. So this is just a function of something relatively simple that we can incorporate in our lives to improve our health overall. And then we have these tools in our tool chest. There’s something we can pull out when we know, “I really shouldn’t have had that bag of M&M’s, so I know I’m going to feel crappy because of the carbs and all the other stuff. I know why I wanted them. I know that I enjoyed them when I had them, but now I’ve got to make that up and clean myself up with the breathing, with the water, and finding good quality food that’s going to actually nourish me, because I didn’t really get any nourishment out of that snack.”

Dr. Lynch (39:10): That’s right. You actually went backwards in your health. My kids, I’ll let them eat stuff that they shouldn’t eat. Someday they’re going to be adults and living on their own, and I want them to feel the repercussion of eating fast food. I want them to feel the repercussions of chowing on a bunch of garbage and getting acne all over their face or getting symptoms of congested noses, or irritable or depressed from it. I let them know how that’s happening, why it’s happening, how to clean it up, why they gravitated towards it. So they’re getting it, and they make their own choices. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see them make those choices, but at the end of the day they’re going to be not living under my roof and they’re going to make grown decisions as an adult and I’m not going to be there for them. So they need to know now how they’re going to feel if they eat garbage, and they’re already experiencing it. They’re still kids; they bounce back faster than adults do, but they still experience repercussions – performance in soccer games goes down, their moods get altered, their noses get messed up, their faces get messed up, they do worse in school. You’ve got to let them learn and experience it. I used to do the opposite. I used to be super strict about all this stuff. I’m still pretty strict, but I will let them go for it. And it’s been great that I’ve done that.

Allan (40:45): You can give each of them a signed copy of Dirty Genes and they can learn for themselves. Dr. Lynch, this has been a wonderful conversation. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about what you’re doing, more about the book and get to that Facebook group that you talked about, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Lynch (41:05): I think the best thing to do, Allan, is just invest in the book. It’s only $19 now, or $17 on Amazon, which is very, very affordable for what you get. I was talking with a colleague of mine and he said we should charge thousands for our books. It’s only $17.

Allan (41:24): All the research and all the time that goes into writing a book, yes.

Dr. Lynch (41:29): Yeah, but it’s great that it’s so available. That’s the cool thing. I really highly recommend people grab the book wherever it’s solid. It’s sold everywhere and it’s been translated into 11 languages. But if you don’t want to invest the money in the book right now, go to DrBenLynch.com, and there’s a free download of a bonus chapter that I really wanted to be included in the book, but the book was already 300 some pages and the publisher said, “No, make it a bonus chapter, give it away.” It’s the ABCs of clean genes. Every letter is something that you can do, and we already talked about Avoid, Breath and Chew. I forget what D was, and E, and all these other ones. But it’s a very, very good chapter. It’ll give you a great understanding of the writing style, the simplicity, the tone, the empowerment, and just reading that might be enough to get you started. It’s like the soak and scrub 4-week protocol for free for you. So go to DrBenLynch.com, download that. And when you’re on DrBenLynch.com, there’s a bunch of articles there. And every Thursday – in fact I just got done with one today – at 2:30 PM Pacific Time, I do a Facebook Live for about an hour on a specific topic, and they’re all recorded. I answer people’s questions and they all stay there for free. So we have tons of video on Dr Ben Lynch Facebook page that are freely available, and a lot of great questions, a lot of comments. We have thousands and thousands of views on each one, and they’re a lot of fun. I really walk through people’s specific questions and tell them why and how their body is working. Because if you understand how your body works and why it’s important to breathe properly and why it’s important to eat certain foods and avoid certain foods at certain times; even healthy food you need to avoid at certain times, and I explain why – it will really make sense to you, especially when you apply it and you’re aware of the changes. For example, somebody posted just yesterday, “I can’t fall asleep at night. I had dinner at 8:30 and it was a big protein dinner and I had a protein shake. Why can’t I fall asleep?” I was like, “One, you eat late; and two, you had a lot of protein. Protein stimulates histamine and dopamine, and those are two alert-causing compounds.” So, that’s what happens on these Facebook pages and it’s a great community.

Allan (43:57): Cool. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/327 and I’ll make sure to have links to both the Facebook group and to Dr. Lynch’s website and to the book. Dr. Lynch, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Lynch (44:12): My pleasure. And now that I’m 40+, I’ve got to tune into some of your podcasts.

Allan (44:16): Outstanding.

 

Allan (44:22): I hope you enjoyed that interview with Dr. Lynch. I really enjoyed the conversation. Epigenetics is a very complex topic, but he does a really good job in his book Dirty Genes on explaining how all this stuff works in a way that’s applicable. So I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed that conversation, and I hope you did too. I’m recording this on the 4th of July. That means for me from a scheduling perspective, I’m way behind, but that’s cool. I’ll get caught up. The show notes might not be there when you’re first listening to this, but they’ll be out there soon, I promise. I’m putting a lot of pressure on the people behind me, I know. But I needed to get a few things done for Ketofest and for the book, so this has been a really big push week for me and I’m glad to have a day off.

And that’s where I wanted to start this discussion today. It is the 4th of July, which in the United States is a pretty big holiday for a lot of us. It’s a time for us to be with friends and family. I’m pretty excited. One of my neighbors has decided to host a little pop-up party for the 4th of July. Nothing famous, nothing fancy, just a get-together as a neighborhood and friends and hang out, and I’m pretty excited about that. In The Blue Zones, which was a book by Dan Buettner, but it was brought up by Michelle Poulin, and it’s basically a concept of where people live and how based on where they live and how they’re living their lives, they live longer. And one of the big aspects of that was social structure – having friends, having family and really being interconnected with your community, neighbors, friends, family. That was also brought up by Dr. John and Jane Day in their book The Longevity Plan. I had Dr. John Day on the show for episode 272. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/272 and listen to the longevity plan discussion we had. Again, a very fascinating study that he did in a small location in China that’s known as Longevity Village. So, really worth a listen. After you get through with this episode, you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/272 and listen to Dr. Day. But that said, do take time when you get time to really enjoy time with your family and your friends. Life is precious, and a big part of the way that I am now structuring the way I look at things is what I call “wellness”. My definition of wellness is going to include of course health, fitness, which is where most people stop, but I want you to add happiness to that definition, because when you have all three of those, you really have all three legs of the stool that make you feel and be well. So, make sure you’re making happiness a big priority in your life and it’ll go a long way towards your wellness journey.

I did talk about Ketofest. I’ll be a presenter at Ketofest, not just a trainer, which means yesterday I did plans for all of my group training. I’ve got that done and I’m about halfway through with putting together my slides for my presentation. It’s in PowerPoint. I prefer Keynote, but the host of the event is a big Microsoft guy, so I’m pretty sure he’s going to only want to run Microsoft equipment, and that means that I’ve got to do it in PowerPoint. So, a little bit of a learning curve to get back into PowerPoint. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a presentation, a live speaking engagement. In fact, the last one I did was on how to put together a fraud investigation. This one should be a lot more interesting than that, as I am talking about wellness and keto and how those things really do give you an opportunity, because the ketosis that you’re in a lot of times with the extra energy – I really do think that can be a super power for people that want to go that route, they want to eat that way. And when they have that extra energy, I want to help them focus it and make it something special. So I’m really, really excited about my talk and how that’s coming along. Ketofest is in New London, Connecticut, from the 20th of July to the 22nd. Now I’m planning to be in that area. If you’re anywhere up in the Northeast, anywhere close to New London, Connecticut, and you want to meet up – please do send me an email. It’s allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. We can sit down and have a coffee, we can have a drink afterwards, in the evening, or whatever you want to do if you can make it down there and want to spend some time. If you can go to Ketofest, that’s even better. Again, it’s in New London, Connecticut, July 20th to the 22nd. You can go to Ketofest.com and learn more there. They’ve got it all broken down, you can buy tickets to the different things. I’ll be arriving I think on the 19th. I’ll probably be there in the evening. I don’t think they have anything planned. So again, if you want to catch up for a drink or something, or a coffee in the morning – please, by all means, do reach out. I would like to meet with you.

And then finally I do want to talk about the personal training. I’ve talked to a few people lately and it’s kind of interesting. I was in a mastermind meeting, so we’re not talking about fitness, we’re talking about our businesses. And one of the concepts that came up was how when someone’s trying to teach you how to do an online business, most of the people that were successful at that are actually just selling to other people that want to run online businesses. So it’s this racket of, “I know how to run an online business. I’ll teach you how to run an online business.” And that’s how they make their money. Very few of them make money doing anything else. So we were talking about that, and one of the theories I have is that people who are in business know that you have to spend money to make money. That’s a known concept that I think anyone would generally agree with. You can’t start a business from nothing, really, and expect. You need some seed capital, some money, some investment to make things start. I’m not saying that’s completely necessarily true in health and fitness, but I can say if you want to accelerate your health and fitness journey, you do need to make an investment. You need to make an investment in time, you need to make an investment of effort, and in many cases you do need to make an investment in money, so that you can have the accountability, so you can have the structure, so you cannot make the mistakes that a lot of other people are making, and so you can be the most efficient and effective at your health and fitness work, so you’re getting the most out of your time and effort.

If you’re on the fence about hiring a coach, please do give me a call. You can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/talk. That’s going to put a time on my calendar. You can give me your phone number, you can give me your email. I’ll send you a conference call. I prefer if you give me your phone number so I can call you at the prescribed time. But go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/talk, get a little slot with me and we can just talk through what your issues are, what’s going on with you right now. What can I do to help you? Or maybe I can’t help you, but we can kind of diagnose that right there. We can figure that out. Am I the right coach for you? Is this the right time for you? I’m telling you, there’s never a bad time to start. There’s only a time when you look back and wish you had started earlier. So I do hope that you’re thinking about this, that you’re considering this. And if you are on that fence, if you’re right there saying, “Maybe I do want to make this investment, maybe this would help me” – let’s talk, and we can figure out if I’m the right coach for you right then and there. So again, go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/talk.

 

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Health hacking with TJ Anderson

TJ Anderson, the author of The Art of Health Hacking is the guest for episode 326 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast.  We discuss the 5 Ps of health hacking, the essential health tracking you should be doing, and a really cool model to practice being present.

Allan (0:46): Our guest today is a clinical health coach, self-proclaimed health hacker, and founder of Elevate Your State – a growing community of health conscious leaders dedicated to optimizing their health and performance. He is TJ Anderson. TJ, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

TJ (1:04): It’s an honor to be here.

Allan (1:05): I always am hesitant when I’m talking to my clients. I say health hacking is a good thing to consider. Biohacking is the more common term. I think you’re coining more of the health side of it. So many biohackers get into these little crevices of health of, “Let’s take a biopsy of our leg, and let’s see if I take this particular supplement, is it going to change the cellular structure of my muscle?” Or someone will come across and say, “You should take intravenous vitamin C. That’s the key to life, that’s the key to health.” And I try to explain to them, until you’ve taken care of those bigger rocks of health and fitness, where you’re actually eating right and you’re trying to get good sleep and you’re trying to de-stress and you do have a movement practice of some sort – some of these little things are not worth your time at this point.

You get into that in the book, where we’re taking the quantified self, and then we’re also taking this health hacking and they’re merging into a field of study that a lot of people are really engaged with. I really liked your quote, because I think this sums it up in the way that I like to think about it. You say, “Health data are not the finish line; they are the starting block.” I think that’s one of the core things. If you’ve got something else wrong with you, like diabetes or heart disease or something like that – you’ve got other things you might want to focus on. But if you’re in generally good health and you want to improve your 5K time, or you want to just feel a little bit more energized in the morning, or you want to sleep just a little bit better – there’s a lot in this book to help us out.

TJ (2:48): Rock and roll. You bet. To your point, the biohacking space, any sort of space – health, fitness, and the whole self-improvement movement, as I like to call it, can focus a lot on the finer details, the finer points, which can be of value, depending on context. And at the end of the day, addressing the whole – so holistic, and also the fundamentals of optimal health and happiness are top priority. When it comes to taking inventory on our lifestyle, in my opinion and my experience, it’s much easier and more fun when we set our priorities and focus on what matters. As the subtitle suggests, it’s a personal guide to elevate your state of health and performance, stress less and build healthy habits that matter. It’s all about asking ourselves, “What matters to me? What are the highest levers that I can pull in my lifestyle that can generate the biggest impact?” I’m glad you brought that up. That quote was not just one I espouse and promote others to embody. That realization in my own lifestyle is what brought a lot of ease and less angst around the perfection mindset, which can creep up in the quantified self world. So yeah, health data is not the finish line; it’s the starting block. There’s so much more beyond the quantitative. So yes, a big aspect of the book is exploring the qualitative self, those things that are tougher to measure.

Allan (4:45): I’m glad you said that. And I want to take one step back, because I think some folks might not actually understand when we’re talking about quantified self, biohacking and those types of things, exactly what that is. In a general sense, the quantified self is where you’re measuring things about yourself. So, maybe you wake up each morning and you check your blood pressure, your heart rate variability, your pulse rate. Maybe you do some blood sugar testing, check your ketones. You wear a Fitbit so you know what your heart rate is throughout the day, you also know how many steps you took. People are collecting more and more data as technology has made it easier for us to collect that data. And that’s the quantified self, where people are measuring what’s going on in their lives. A biohacker is in my mind defined as someone who is looking for ways to enhance their health or fitness through some technology means.

So that might be that they’re now taking a different supplement, or it may be that they’re doing something in their room with the sounds or the light. I know that you are a big fan of the blue blocker glasses that block out the blue light, so that basically your body knows to start creating melatonin when it’s supposed to. That’s bio or health hacking, where you’re trying to look for ways that technology can protect us from maybe what we’re already doing – getting away from blue light, or it can at least give us opportunities to enhance what we already have. So those are the two definitions, but I like how you put that it’s really about the quality, not the quantity. It’s not about me getting more steps tomorrow than I got today. It’s about making those steps have more quality to them. Having my sleep have more quality to it, not the fact that I just got more sleep. I liked that aspect of it.

TJ (6:31): Cool. I appreciate it.

Allan (6:34): In the book you go through the five Ps of health hacking, and I think that’s a really good parameter for someone to understand what are the steps that someone would go through if they’re looking for these opportunities to enhance their health.

TJ (6:50): You bet. Yes, exactly. The five Ps of health hacking are a chance for people to take inventory on the different aspects and relationships with their health that make a big difference. So I start the book off with a little vulnerable story, with my own visit to the emergency room. The first chapter is titled Goodbye Sick Care, Hello Self-Care: Your Health Is in Your Hands. The reason I bring that up is at the end of that first chapter and in that first act I really have people take inventory, scoring themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, in terms of macro areas of health – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, as well as the micro areas, like nutrition, nature, technology, movement, etcetera. That’s a way to look at specific areas, but when approaching our health holistically, the 5 Ps provide a way for us to connect the dots between how we are focused on our health. I’ll just share what those 5 Ps are, and it could really help to fuel progress and action and mindfulness around your overall approach.

So P number one – preparation; how well do you prepare during your day, during your week, with your health as a priority? So, are you cooking multiple meals early in the week so it’s easier to consume them throughout the week? Are you making it to the grocery store on a day that’s convenient and works for you, so that you don’t eat out as much, for example? How can you prepare, and really connect the dots between your preparation and your health?

Next one is prevention – connecting the dots between your thoughts, actions, behaviors, environment, and how all that impacts your overall health. So preventing the things that we don’t want to happen – poor health, poor energy, disease, sickness, etcetera, down the road, is one of the Ps that I find is key for overall health hacking.

Next one is performance – connecting the dots between how your health impacts your performance in the present day. That’s really a big one. Honestly, I work with a lot of high performers, business leaders, etcetera. And one of the objections that people often share is, “I don’t have enough time. I’ve got so many work responsibilities or family responsibilities.” And maybe that’s often what goes on in the minds of your listeners and those that you serve, Allan. But what I found is that when you synergize health with performance, it takes on a different meaning, and your approach with work and health all blends. If you listen to your body more and realize how your self-care strategy, your healthy habits can really fuel better energy, better mental clarity and less stress and less sick days – your performance can shine.

The next one is progress. Focusing on progress over prevention is a big part of my own personal journey. I was a model in South Beach about four years ago, which was the impetus of the book. My six pack wasn’t good enough for the cameras, and I fell into perfection mindset. I was focusing on the physical body and trying to achieve the perfect six pack and working out like crazy. Thankfully I healed from that experience and realized the importance of both approaching your health holistically, as well as focusing on progress, not perfection.

And then the final P – last but not least – presence. I love ending with that one, because it’s my favorite one. It’s super powerful in my life. The more I can intentionally cultivate present moment awareness inside of my life, the less stress, the more happiness and ease I have with things that could have brought me stress in the past.

Allan (11:19): I do want to circle back around and talk about presence, but I think one of the cores of all this is when we use terms like “performance” and “progress”, those can sound like sports words at times. I think a lot of people will equate those, and I would put it forward to say, this is about life. Your grandchild might weigh 25 pounds today, and in a year from now she’s very likely to weigh 35 pounds. So, if you want to be able to still lift your granddaughter next year when she goes from being two to three, you’re going to have to do some things to build some strength. If you want to continue to be able to open a jar for yourself when you’re 85 years old, you’re going to have to continue to focus on progress and strength. There’s also the mobility and the balance and all the other areas. So when we’re talking about performance, I like how you put that it’s normal life. It’s being ready for the things that are happening to you. If you happen to be an athlete, if you happen to be doing those other things, then by all means, you’re measuring that performance, you’re getting the data and you’re trying to find those things that are going to give you that advantage. But in everyday life we also need to be looking for ways to get an advantage when it’s the right thing to do.

TJ (12:35): Of course, yes. I’m glad you brought that up. There’s value in looking at performance, in terms of how well you might perform in your workouts, in your fitness, and your performance outside of fitness – so how well you sleep, your relationship with technology and nature and your fundamental way of how you walk and how you get out of bed, how you get in and out of the shower, the muscles you activate in your patterns. Those small things impact your actual performance in fitness so much more. That’s one of the things I’ve personally learned in my own lifestyle. For instance, I’ve had some right hip issues, kind of popping. So for me, small things like crossing my legs was an unconscious pattern while I sat down that I would always do in that unconscious way of just existing, and crossing my foot over my left knee for instance. My right hip was just conditioned to open up a lot. So, it’s the small things that can make a big impact when it comes to our overall physical health and our performance.

Allan (13:54): Yeah. And I like how it all really comes back to data. You can observe yourself and see, “My hip’s got a problem. There’s an imbalance there” – that’s a data point. Someone can measure their weight – that’s a data point. They can measure some other things, like their blood work and whatnot. You’re really focused on four categories that you say are essential if we really want to have optimal health; the four areas that we should be at least getting some data from and tracking and then trying to improve. Can you get into those four?

TJ (14:29): You bet. So you mentioned aspects earlier that people can track, such as blood pressure, resting heart rate, ketone levels, fasting blood sugar and all that. Those are all great. What I explored in the book was a little bit more non-traditional, more advanced, if you will, that I find is very essential for longevity, for true health. Those other ones are great, and these are some other new ones that I explored. Number one for me was blood work – advanced biochemistry blood work to really understand. Beyond what Western medicine tells us with their access to blood testing, there’s so much more that exists out there. The direct-to-consumer healthcare movement – being able to, for instance, order labs on your own through WellnessFX, and be able to get access to advanced blood testing through companies like that, really paves the way for us to take our health into our own hands. But actually making sense of that is the next step, and then taking action on it.

For me the advanced blood work was a big aspect of my lifestyle, because for instance, I used to just look at HDL and LDL and think that was the end all, be all. And then I read a book called Cholesterol Clarity and heard about a company called WellnessFX to see how advanced blood testing can really show you what’s your true lipid panel and true overall risk of potential heart disease and looking at things like particle sizes and apo, and all these different aspects that are not talked about in traditional healthcare. So, advanced blood work – number one.

Number two for me was getting full-scale genetic testing, and then specific understanding around those perhaps more important mutations. For instance, I walk people through how I did it for myself, but 23andMe, as a lot of people have probably heard of, is one great resource to get your full raw genetic data. And I say “raw” because it’s a lot of data points; you need to make sense of it. So, guiding people in the book around, after you get your raw data, what’s next? You need a third-party app to make sense of that. For instance, Genetic Genie and MTHFRSupport.com were a few for me.

Those are a couple of key aspects, and then nutrients would be number three. What’s cool is that you can really start to connect the dots between all of these. So you can understand what’s going on inside of your body through these health tracking categories, and then they connect. They tell a story when you’re able to lay them all out and understand what’s going on individually and how they impact each other. For instance, for me, I had a genetic mutation for my Vitamin D, my ability to receive and properly synthesize and process Vitamin D – I had a mutation for that. That connected the dots with my micronutrient deficiency test, which showed me my Vitamin D levels were low. I think there are only two companies; maybe there are more now but there were two when I wrote the book, that offer a micronutrient deficiency test, which measures on an intra-cellular level your reserves, if you will, in terms of these really essential, important, key micronutrients. For me, Vitamin D was one that was low, so I connected that with my genetic mutation.

So those are the first three, and then the last one is stress, for instance, and HRV. So you mentioned HRV – heart rate variability, earlier on in the show. That was a definite big one for me, that I would spend time in my breath and in my body going through HRV training. Heart Math is a great organization that makes a great tool called The Inner Balance. If people haven’t heard of that, The Inner Balance is a beautiful tool that you can actually sync and connect with your iPhone, or whatever smartphone you might have. And then you connect on the other end of this a sensor that is attached to your ear lobe. So instead of simply measuring heart rate, they are able to measure heart rate variability. HRV is a key overall metric; it’s getting more and more respect, in terms of overall mortality rates. It’s a key aspect of health. So building coherence through HRV training, focusing on the breath, of course heart-centered breathing, as well as positive thoughts, can actually build more emotional resilience in your life. So those are four core topics that I explore.

Allan (19:49): And they do overlap. I think that’s one of the cool things about it, is you’ll start seeing how this all plays out. I also have a low sodium and low potassium level as a base. When I don’t eat right, then I see my potassium and sodium go down in my blood work. I also know that I’m a very good caffeine synthesizer, so I beat down my caffeine pretty fast. But even then I know I probably shouldn’t have caffeine after noon. So I can kind of watch my nutrition. And as far as the stress, mine has been up there from time to time. If you’re looking at your blood test and your rested cortisol level in the morning, and then you’re also looking at how your HRV is working, you can actually see those correlations over time. If you’re checking it regularly and you’re looking at your blood work, you’re finding out, ”Things that I do to improve my stress reduction help me with my cortisol, which also helps me lose weight, which helps me do a lot of these other things better.” So it really is an overlapping system here that you’ve got, that where we put all that data together, it gives us a really good mapping to know, “This is why this is happening.” Not just what to do, but, “This is why it’s going to be good for me, or it won’t matter to me.” So, I do appreciate each of those as data points to start your journey.

TJ (21:14): Yeah, you bet. As you said, they can each have a trickledown effect in the different aspects of your health and your lifestyle.

Allan (21:25): Okay. Now, we talked about presence. And right now I think more than any other time in my life, this has become my year of, or period of time of really focusing on being present in the moment. In the past I’ve been very engaged in work, and the project that’s coming up, or the trip I have to take, or the things that are going on in the future. And I’m getting better and better of saying, “What’s going on right now? What is Allan feeling right now? What state am I in, and is that a helpful state? Is that putting me further down the path of feeling better tomorrow or being better tomorrow?” You put a very interesting feedback loop that I guess I’d never really thought through as a tool, that someone can use to really get into a solid presence, to really be present in the moment. Do you mind going through your feedback loop, because I do think for me that’s probably the most incredible thing from the book that I enjoyed, that I got the most out of, is this feedback loop that you have for presence?

TJ (22:33): That’s great. Yeah, of course. First off, I appreciate and I’m grateful that that was of value for you. This book took three years to write, by the way. I didn’t write this overnight, so I had a chance to get a bit creative. First and foremost I want to take a step back and take a breath, and get back into my body here a little bit. So, presence for me – I learned the biggest lesson through reading a book called The Presence Process by Michael Brown. If anyone ever wants to read a book on presence, this is at the top of my list. It’s in the top five books I recommend to everyone. So, in that journey, what I learned was through a quote that the author offered up – that it’s not about feeling better; it’s about getting better at feeling. And that mindset shift, that 180 there is a complete game-changer, or at least it was for me, in terms of how I relate to myself and to the world around me.

And it was a beautiful realization that brought a lot of healing and unraveling in my life, and a good unraveling. And so, not trying to feel better, but getting better at feeling. Even often in the health space, I sometimes get an urge to, for instance, go to a certain food or a certain supplement, and really enjoy that, and think that that’s what I need. And at the end of the day, it could be of value. Perhaps what’s even more important is getting into the reflection, the ability to hit “Pause” and really reflect on your current state, get into your breath and your body and see how you really feel. And so this feedback loop you mentioned I created, has five points, and it’s breathe, feel, ask, listen, and choose.

So breathe, feel, ask, listen, and choose are what came up for me when I asked myself what does this process look like? So, how am I able to consciously check in with myself, with my body? What does this process look like, of responding to that, as opposed to reacting, and how can I choose to move forward? How can I truly have a lifestyle filled with ease? This idea of starting with the breath and checking in with ourselves, spending some time – it can be anywhere from five seconds to 5 to 10 minutes or longer – and to really just breathe and notice what you’re noticing, and moving on to making sense of, what are some feelings maybe that are popping up? What am I noticing here, in terms of my physical body, my emotional body? And then we can ask ourselves questions as well. A big aspect of the book is really empowering people to become their own health coach in a way. A bit about my background is in health coaching, so the book is ultimately a self-coaching tool, and empowering people with the courage and the skillsets to ask themselves the right questions at the right time. That can really go a long way.

Ask is next, step three in that feedback loop. And that’s followed by listen. So listen to what comes up as the answer that your body, that your soul is sharing with you. And then you can choose a path, and you can choose to respond in a certain way. It’s a nice little reminder for people and if they want to follow it specifically, it can be a nice tool to guide them daily or whenever they want to use the practice, or they can just hear those five words once – breathe, feel, ask, listen and choose, and those are in the back of their mind, and so allowing themselves to maybe tap into those every now and then, throughout their days.

Allan (27:05): I think one of the reasons that this really resonated with me was I had had a conversation with Dr. Michael Galitzer. He wrote the book Outstanding Health. In his book, one of the things he talked about, and when we were talking he got into a little bit more detail, is that in his mind the root of all stress is our failure to accept what’s happening to us as just something that’s there. We react to it because we don’t want it, and because it’s something that we don’t want to happen but we still can’t affect it, we bring that inside instead of letting that go. So your cycle here, your feedback loop, really gives someone a tool to actually do what he said, which is to just let it go. It is what it is, accept what’s going on. It’s raining. Yes, you wanted to have a picnic, but it’s raining. Just breathe, feel. Yes, that frustrates you because you did all that preparation for the picnic. Listen to what your body’s telling you. It’s like, “This is an opportunity for me to go read a book, this is an opportunity for me to do all these other things that I needed to do or wanted to do.” And then you listen to it and say, “Okay, I guess I’ll go read that book.” You make that choice.

So I really like how this slows you down in the moment, where you can really take inventory of why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. Go ahead and be okay with that, but then choose the path that you’re going to take, because you know you want to take a path that’s going to lead to less stress, to a better life. So, you can make better choices regardless. That’s why I like your loop, because I think it gives someone a tool to very easily manage a situation that is giving them stress, to understand that stress, to understand what their body’s telling them about it, and then to properly respond, rather than continue to bury that and hold that in.

TJ (28:55): Amen. Yeah, exactly. You talk about, what’s the root cause of this? And often times it’s the presence of feelings that we don’t want to feel, or experiences that are not what we want. At the end of the day, I see a lot of those experiences as messages or messengers for us to learn from and explore. It’s okay that you don’t feel okay. That’s okay. And another core topic that connects with this is the power of self-compassion. I find that can really help to support someone with their deepening of presence and acknowledging and appreciating their feelings for what they are – just feelings. So, self-compassion is a topic I also explore in the book for people to deepen their relationship with themselves. I’m grateful we’re having this conversation – it’s life stuff. It’s a very important conversation, and work for people to explore in their own life.

Allan (30:12): I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the cores of this is, we have control of our own health to some extent. Things are going to happen that we don’t have a say over, but we can make the choices and we can work with our medical professionals to make better choices for our health and what we do. The more we understand what the data’s telling us, the more we’re going to be in a position to set our feet down and say, “This is a time to fight, or this is the time to accept. I’m not going to be able to play in the NFL like I wanted to when I was in high school. Not going to happen, but I can accept that, and there’s no reason for me to be frustrated about it. Let it go.” Or I can be frustrated that it’s raining on a picnic, and let that bother my life and mess with my life when it shouldn’t.

Again, I think you’ve got lots of great tools in here. You were very vulnerable in the book. You shared a lot of yourself that I think a lot of people would have probably not said, but I thank you for taking the time to actually do that. I went through, not a modeling career, but an illness that put me in an emergency room for the very same reason, so I could really relate with that story. And I could relate with the position you were in as you were going through your modeling things, because it was real, and it was a moment where you found yourself on a treadmill, trying to accomplish something that really was not necessarily beyond you, but it wasn’t congruent with who you were. I think that’s the way I read it. So I think the stories that you shared in the book were really, really good in helping someone understand that we all have a place where we’re not perfect, and accepting that and turning that around and saying, “But what can I do with the tools that I have? What can I do with the mind that I have? What can I do with the body that I have” puts you into a better place. Now you’re a health coach, now you’re helping others. And this book, which is The Art of Health Hacking, is also helping people. So TJ, thank you so much for sharing this book with me.

TJ (32:10): Of course. To add one more key point, if people are wondering what’s the thesis of this, how’s it different? What I fully embody in the book and believe in my life is that we don’t lack the science, information or technology to live healthy. We lack the art to know how to use those things effectively and properly. That kind of shift, that opening, allows for people to realize how much is possible in terms of becoming more artful and creative in our own approach towards health. That’s our greatest opportunity, I firmly and wholeheartedly believe. So, it’s much more empowering-based. And being creative allows for more fun, I find. I end the book with, I think the title of the last chapter is Nature, Music, and Enjoying the Ride. At the end of the day, if we don’t enjoy the ride we’re on, then we’re missing out of what’s truly possible.

Allan (33:18): Big time. TJ, if you wanted me to send people somewhere to learn more about you and about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

TJ (33:28): HealthHackerBook.com is where people can pick up a copy – free shipping, $19.95, right there at HealthHackerBook.com. You can also read more about the book, and read some of the quotes from people I interviewed for the book, like Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, JJ Virgin, to name a few. I’m also over at ThisIsTJ.com. For everyone that’s listening, if you are interested in the copy – great, awesome. We also have a free book club. My big thing is, I didn’t write this book just to write a book or try to become a best seller. It was to truly make an impact. And if this episode wasn’t enough reason to realize that, do know that there is a free book club. We have a great Facebook group rocking – Health Hacker Book Club on Facebook for people to get access to and book-club the book together with other like-minded, like-hearted health-conscious leaders in the life, going through the book.

Allan (34:34): And I am in the book club too. I’m there. Go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/326, and I’ll make sure to have all the links there. TJ, thank you so much for being a part of the 40+ Fitness podcast.

TJ (34:49): It was an honor. Thanks, Allan.

Allan (34:55): I hope you enjoyed that conversation with TJ. I certainly did. I’m making a slight change in the format of the podcast. You may have noticed that, in that now we’re having a little bit more of a conversation. I’m moving that to the end. I used to have a little bit of this at the front end. Due to some listener feedback and whatnot, I’ve decided I’m going to push that back here. If you just want to hear the interviews, the interviews will be upfront, and then when you’re done, you’re done. That’s cool. But if you want to know more about what’s going on with me, what’s going on with the podcast, other opportunities and things like that, that’s what I’m going to put here. Another change in the format is I’m not going to do sponsors anymore. I’ve found that it’s a little too stressful for me in the long run, it’s taking me away from what I want to do, which is help you. Even though it does generate some revenue for the podcast, in my mind – and I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and meditate on this – it’s not core to what I want to do for you. So I’m doing away with the sponsorships and now I’m just going to focus on what I do, which is this podcast and my personal training. So, you will notice that difference. I want to share a lot more with you here. If you’re listening after the interview, then obviously you care. And that’s what I want to know, is that I’m talking to the people that actually want to hear what I have to say.

It’s interesting. I got back from vacation and I’m trying to get myself back into a cycle. You’ve been on vacation and then you get back and you’re just trying to get back into that circle, that way things were, that pattern. And I got a certified letter that one of my properties up in North Florida, I’d let it kind of decline, and they wanted me to clean it up, which meant four days of beating down the bush. I had let it go because someone had stolen my mower and I really didn’t want to invest in another mower at that time. So I let it go. I have bought another mower, and I was able to get out there with the sling blade and the mower and beat that down. It was four days of not so much fun, because bumblebees nest under the ground and when you run over them with a mower, they are not too happy about it. So I got some stings, I got quite a few ant bites and mosquito bites.

So it was not a pleasant four days, but it did reinforce to me that for the life I want to have, I do need to have a good general fitness level. If I didn’t have a good general fitness level, I would not have been able to do that myself. I would have hired it out, which is not a problem, but it’s just that recognition that if there are things that you used to be able to do and you can’t do them today – that’s something you really want to think about. Is it something you should do, something you should be considering as a part of your lifestyle, the things that you used to do, particularly if it’s something that you used to enjoy? And I’m not going to say I ever really enjoyed landscaping or yard work or beating down the bush, which I had plenty of when I was younger, but it is one of those things.

And another one for me, and I’ve shared this with you before, is I love volleyball. I went on vacation and part of what I was really looking forward to during my vacation was the week in Mexico, because the resort we stay at has a daily volleyball game. But this time, because it was June and it was so hot and humid, nobody wanted to play. So for the entire week, there was no volleyball. And then when I got back, the league I’m in had a bye week. So it’s been three weeks since I’ve played volleyball. I’m a little frustrated with that but happy to say this week, we have two games. They’ve moved one of our games up. We’re having one Wednesday and then Thursday. So I’m going to get to play a good bit more volleyball than I have. I’m really excited about that, and that’s what I want to share with you today.

I want you to come onto our Facebook group at 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/group, and share your joy. What is your hobby, what is your sport, what is the thing that you really enjoy doing, and what are you doing in your health and fitness to improve at that sport or to continue to be able to do that sport? For me, volleyball involves so many different fitness modalities. There’s balance, mobility, agility, speed, hand-eye coordination. It’s just a really fun way for me to get a full body experience of being fit. And so I work out to be better at volleyball and I enjoy volleyball because it’s somewhat of a workout. So please, do go to our Facebook group and share what your fun thing is. What is the one thing that you really enjoy doing as a hobby or a sport that you believe improves your health and fitness?

And then I’m really happy to announce that I will be a speaker and the personal trainer at Ketofest. This runs from July 20th to the 22nd. It’s in New London, Connecticut. So if you’re in the Northeast or you want to get up to the Northeast because it’s going to be a little bit cooler there than where you are, please do come up to Ketofest. You can go to Ketofest.com and learn more. It’s a really cool thing because of the 2 Keto Dudes. There is podcast with Carl Franklin and Richard Morris – really cool guys. They’re preaching the keto lifestyle, they interview a lot of keto people. They’re bringing a lot of those keto people to New London. The whole town pretty much goes keto-crazy, in that they have cooking classes, they have walking tours. A lot of the restaurants will serve keto dishes. If you get in on the VIP, which may or may not be available, they have a dinner the first night, typically over at Carl’s house. And then on Sunday, there are all these different speakers. So it runs from Friday to Sunday and there’s a lot going on during that period of time. I’ll be speaking, I’ll be putting on some personal fitness classes. So it’s really, really cool. I hope you will go check it out – Ketofest.com.

And then finally, I did want to remind you that I have openings in my personal training. So if you’re sitting on the fence or you’re wondering or thinking you might want to improve your fitness and you just need a little boost, I’d strongly encourage you to go check out my personal training. You can go to the main page, 40+ Fitness Podcast. I’ve got most of the information there. If you have any questions, you can hit me up on the chat. When you’re on that page, you’ll see the little “Chat” button. I try to be on chat all day each day. I do take breaks, so sometimes you’ll miss me, but I get your email address, I email you right back. So, if you have any questions or any doubts, please do reach out and let me know, because I want to talk to you about it and make sure you understand what I’m trying to accomplish here. The reality of what I do with my clients is, I don’t give you a cookie cutter, “This is what everybody does, this is the program everybody’s doing.” I sit down and listen to you and talk to you about what your goals are, what you’re trying to accomplish, and then I help put together the bits and pieces to help guide you down that road. So if you’re looking for just a little boost, a little bit more – now is the time. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is right now. You don’t want to get six months down the line and say, “Gee, I should have done that”, and you didn’t. So please go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com and check out my personal training services. Thank you.

 

 

Another episode you may enjoy

How to make disease disappear with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Living in the chemical age with Janet Newman

In her book, Living in the Chemical Age, Janet Newman lays out a solid plan to protect your family and yourself using some basic protective measures.  In our discussion, Janet and I cover why chemicals are an issue, what is wrong with our drinking water, and how mold can become a huge issue.

Allan (3:09): Janet, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Janet Newman (3:13): Thank you so much, Allan. It’s great to be here.

Allan (3:16): So your book is Living in the Chemical Age, and it’s something that I’m always just vaguely aware of in the back of my head. It’s like, is this the best thing for me, and how am I doing this, or am I doing the right thing here? Your book really is a good primer, I think, for someone that is beginning to think about these things and how they can go about cleaning up their lives and trying to get some of these chemicals out of our life, rather than constantly be dealing with the toxic issues that we have. Both you and your husband had suffered from some of these problems, and that’s, I guess, what got you really interested in writing the book.

Janet Newman (4:01): Yes, that’s true. I always was aware of what I ate and really tried to be health-conscious pretty much from my young adulthood on, but I wasn’t really aware of all the toxins that we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. It wasn’t until I started having my own health challenges in my early 40s that really started getting me on that track of, what is it that’s in our food and water and personal care products that might be causing some of these issues?

Allan (4:45): I like how in the book you put the whole concept that our body is kind of like a silo. And as we just continue to pile on these different chemical exposures, there’s a cumulative impact. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Janet Newman (5:01): Yes, I can. So I used the description of a silo, because I think it’s from my upbringing. I grew up in Michigan, and although I wasn’t in a rural setting, I did see grain silos periodically. And for me, when I think of the body’s immune system, if you will, and all the toxins that are accumulating, it’s easy for me to imagine a cylinder or a grain silo, if you will, that has different layers of these chemicals filling it up. I believe that if we take in more than we’re able to excrete, then those just keep piling up and up and up until it gets to the top. And that’s when we usually see some kinds of disease, or even just troublesome symptoms that start to appear, when our body can’t tolerate anymore and it just starts rebelling, if you will. It says that there’s a problem, and it could manifest itself in many different ways, from skin eruptions to headaches to inflammation. I think most of these chemicals that we’re being exposed to are man-made; they didn’t exist before the Industrial Age or maybe 100 years ago. So, I don’t think that our bodies have had an evolutionary chance to really adapt to all of these chemicals. And since our bodies can’t utilize or digest these synthetic chemicals, we’re challenged by them and they have a chance to potentially wreak havoc on our body.

Allan (6:50): Yeah. And I don’t know that we want to adapt to these things, because there are some animals that do reproduce a lot faster than we do, and they’ve somewhat adapted to some of these things and it’s not all that pretty. So I’m not sure that adaptation is the right answer here. Probably 20,000 years from now, we might be able to handle something we’re doing today. But there are things we can do today and I wanted to get into a few of the things, because they’re all around us. I try to forget that it’s there sometimes, just for sanity’s sake, but it is always there. So, a few things that I did want to talk about. The first one is water, because I think more and more people are saying, “I’m not going to drink the tap water because of X, Y, Z problems”, and they’re going to the bottled water. But really, one might not be any better than the other. Could you talk a little bit about water, what we’re exposed to in a lot of our tap water, what we can do about it, and then when and how maybe bottled water could be an alternative? What are some things that we could consider as we’re going through this whole process of having cleaner water?

Janet Newman (8:07): Sure, absolutely. Our bodies crave water, they need water to function. It’s just a matter of how clean the water is, and that’s what we really need to focus on. It’s not a matter of, “Should we switch to other beverages?” We need pure water to drink. One of the problems that I have discovered with our tap water – and we’ve all heard about the Flint water crisis and the lead. And that’s not just Flint, Michigan that has the problem; it’s anywhere that has corrosive pipes. There are several things that I discuss in my book that can lead to corrosion in pipes, but there are so many contaminants in our water. Part of it is that our municipalities that filter the tap water weren’t designed to filter out things like prescription drugs or birth control pills or industrial runoff. Some of the chemicals that we’re seeing are beyond what the filter’s capabilities are. So that’s definitely part of the problem with our tap water, is that we just don’t know what we’re getting. And I advise in my book to get your water tested professionally and see what is in there, so you know how to filter for it. There are different filters and filtration systems that you can put on your tap, and depending on what you’re encountering, what kind of chemicals there are, we’ll tell you what kind of filtration system you need.

And I do want to talk about bottled water. I’m actually thinking about doing a challenge for my people that are on my website, people that have read my book, but I think it’s really important. The challenge is to stop drinking bottled water out of plastic for 30 days. It really is not that hard, but I think we’ve just become so accustomed to the convenience of reaching for a plastic water bottle that sometimes we don’t even think about what the ramifications of that might be. One of the issues with plastic water bottles is the plastic itself. The plastic that is being used, if you look on the bottom, there’s a triangle and there’s a number 1 inside. That means that it’s made with PET plastic, and PET is an endocrine-disrupting chemical. What happens is when that ever heats up, say in a hot truck, or if you buy water that comes from overseas, for instance – there are many brands here, but there are many brands that we import. We don’t know the status of the temperature of those ships or those trucks that bring that water to our grocery store. So, when the PET gets hot, it leaches those chemicals into the water. So that’s the first problem.

The second problem is that – and I just saw another study about this last week – little micro particles of plastic that are in the water from the plastic itself. The study last week that I saw said that most of the plastic is coming from the actual top of the water bottle. So that’s the second thing. We don’t want to be ingesting plastic, nor do we want to be ingesting the chemicals that come from the plastic. And the third thing is that the bottled water industry isn’t required to disclose the results of their water testing. So we may be just getting tap water anyway in there; it might not have any filtration. A lot of the bottled water that I’ve looked at the label and it does say that it has reverse osmosis or other types of steam distillation, other types of filtering processes, but some of them don’t. So, when we reach for that bottle of water, I think it’s really important to start thinking about all the different things that could be in that water.

Allan (12:46): Yeah. It wasn’t this way 20 years ago, but now there’s an entire water section in the grocery store. There’s an entire bottled water section in the convenience store, if you’re traveling and you stop to get some gasoline, you walk in. Some of them are spring water, some of them if you actually read the label, it’s just municipal water, it’s tap water in a bottle. So now you’ve gotten the tap water and you’re drinking that; you’re just drinking it out of the bottle, which now, like you said, may be subjecting you to even more chemicals than it had when it was in the water system.

Janet Newman (13:25): It’s true. There are two other factors with bottled water that a lot of people don’t think about, and that is the expense. It’s very costly to produce these bottle, and they’re produced through the oil and gas industry. PET is based from that. I think we’re thinking about cost and we’re also thinking about, what happens when we dump that water bottle? Where is it going? If we throw it in the garbage, then we have pollution to think about that eventually goes into the ground water and eventually it could make its way into our oceans. We have such a problem with plastic in our oceans. I’m sure everyone’s seen recently on Earth Day, some photographs of our plastic garbage patches in our oceans. It’s really kind of disgraceful that we’ve allowed it to get that way. So just thinking about, when you reach for that bottled water there are so many different avenues of why there is a better choice. I always say, filter your water at home, bring it in a stainless steel or a glass bottle, and carry that around with you every day. It’s not going to leach chemicals, we know that it’s filtered and it doesn’t contain any of the harmful chemicals in it from the beginning, and you’re not contributing to our environmental problem.

Sponsor

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Allan (15:15): Now, one of the other things about tap water that I think is interesting, and you highlighted this in the book as well, was not just what they’re not filtering out, but what they’re actually putting in. So they’re putting fluoride because we’re eating so much more sugar now, so our teeth are rotting. So they’re putting fluoride in the water to help keep our teeth from rotting. But that fluoride is not in the best interest of our health. Data is coming out now to basically show us that it’s really messing us up.

Janet Newman (15:53): Yes. I think that in the 1940s there was a study that showed that people who lived near certain types of rocks called “calcium fluoride” had really great teeth. Unfortunately the type of fluoride that we’re putting in our water now is not calcium fluoride, it’s sodium fluoride, and it’s actually a byproduct of the fertilizer and aluminum industry. Basically this type of fluoride has shown to have many adverse effects to our health. One of the things that are most troubling is that it accumulates in the brain. It’s been shown to lower IQ and interfere with memory. So, definitely problematic. And from an aesthetic perspective, if you have too much fluoride in your body, it causes something called “dental fluorosis”. You may have seen people with this, but it’s like mottling of the enamel that has bright white spots on their teeth. Who wants that, really? But there are some good things that are starting to occur. They are doing more studies, and there are definitely some activists out there. One is called the Fluoride Action Network and they’re working with the EPA to try to eliminate fluoride in our municipal water supply.

Allan (17:37): Well, good luck with that, because the EPA doesn’t really seem to want to help us out when it’s human health. It’s just crazy. Now, it’s starting to warm up and more and more people are going to be outside, and I encourage people to get outside. They’re going to want to probably apply some sunscreen. And you had a very interesting story. You were basically looking for a particular type of sunscreen that had zinc in it, rather than some of the other chemicals that they might use. And you were at what we would call it a “health store”. They build themselves out as a health store, but they weren’t carrying any brands that had zinc in them, because they said the customer demands sunscreen that absorbs in and doesn’t show white on their skin, and therefore they don’t carry it. At least carry one brand, even if no one’s hardly buying it. Carry it – you’re a health food place, after all. But could you talk a little bit about sunscreen, what we should look for when we’re trying to buy a good quality, healthy sunscreen?

Janet Newman (18:45): Yes, absolutely. Sunscreens are basically divided into two categories – there are chemical sunscreens and there are mineral sunscreens. You can probably tell I’m going to tell you to use the mineral sunscreens. The chemical ones – a lot of them have been banned in other countries, which makes you sit up and take notice, why hasn’t the United States banned those? But they’ve been shown to cause free radical damage. They tend to enter the bloodstream. Instead of just coating your skin, they actually get absorbed into your body and they can do some not so nice things to your body. And it also is linked to the bleaching of coral reef. So if you’re going on a vacation where there is scuba diving or anything like that, just know that you could be potentially harming the environment as well.

I like to stick to products that have zinc oxide in them. Titanium dioxide is another mineral sunscreen; it’s the only other mineral sunscreen. There have been a few studies lately, actually since this book has been written, where it shows that titanium dioxide may cause some issues to be concerned about as well, but that’s primarily when it’s in nanoparticle form. What I mean by that is when the particles are so small that they can be sprayed as opposed to applied like a cream or gel formulation. So because they’re so small, they tend to get absorbed into your skin as well, and there’s some speculation that that can cause damage. So what I like to say is that anything with zinc oxide is definitely safe, it stays on top of the skin. They’re starting to create formulas that aren’t nanoparticle size, but they’re not going to be as white and pasty looking as they used to be. When I think of zinc oxide, I think of those pictures in the ‘50s with surfers with the big white stripe on their nose. It’s not as bright as that anymore. But I think that sticking with mineral sunscreens is definitely going to be your safest bet.

Allan (21:22): Okay, cool. I was sitting on my balcony this morning, and typically the wind blows well enough here that I don’t have to deal with mosquitoes too much, but I guess it wasn’t blowing enough this morning. So I’m sitting outside and the mosquitoes are having a nice feast breakfast on Allan. I don’t typically wear insect repellent at all. I have on occasion when I know I’m going someplace – particularly I’ve had some travels to Africa, and that’s not a place you necessarily want to play around with mosquitoes. If we’re looking for an insect repellent, what are some things that we should consider and be looking for with that?

Janet Newman (22:04): Good question. A lot of people reach for the heaviest possible insecticide that they can find, carrying DEET. And DEET, I have to tell you, is a little stronger than you want to put on your body. It was formulated for World War II soldiers that were in jungle-like conditions to prevent malaria. But honestly, it is so strong and toxic that it can melt synthetic fibers, it can damage paint. I just think that if it’s something that strong, you really don’t want to put it on your body. DEET has been shown to absorb through the skin and it gets excreted through your kidneys. And who knows what it’s doing from point of entry to point of exit? I personally wouldn’t want something that can melt synthetic fabric being put into my body. The EPA says it’s safe, of course, and there are lots of products on the market that contain DEET, but I just don’t think we need something that strong.

If you’re going to Africa or somewhere where there are a lot of mosquitoes and you’re bushwhacking through the rainforest or something, then there is something called “picaridin”. And picaridin is derived from black pepper, and it is super, super effective. In studies they show that it’s as effective as DEET, and it’s not going to have any of the safety risks that DEET does. So, my husband just went to Africa last summer and he used picaridin and he had amazing success with that. He didn’t get bit once. So, if you really need something strong and effective, I would suggest looking for picaridin. Now, if you’re just in the backyard or your kids are out playing, I would use something that has oil of lemon eucalyptus, because that is one of the only plant-based insect repellents that has been approved by the CDC to be super effective.

A lot of times it’s used with other oils, such as lavender or tea tree oil or citronella or things like that, that may be used in addition to it. But what they found is that the oil of lemon eucalyptus is an oxygen mask for your bodily scent. When we sweat or when we exhale, those are the scents that mosquitoes are attracted to, and when you use oil of lemon eucalyptus, it masks those scents in such a way that it confuses the mosquito. So they may see you but they’re not going to smell you, and the likelihood of you getting bit is much, much lower.

Allan (25:21): Cool. There was one part of the book that you got into when you started talking about mold that really, really hit home, because we bought this house and we got inside and there was a mold problem. My wife just knew it. She was like, “I’m sensitive, there’s a mold problem. We need to get this taken care of.” And so we brought in some guys and they went to clean our ducts. They’re like, “We can just clean the ducts and that’ll probably solve your problem.” Well, they actually stirred up all the mold spores, so within three days it was everywhere. It was horrible. So we had to bring in another expert, and this guy stripped out all of our duct work, got all of the insulation out of the attic, because there was mold everywhere. He helped us clean that up. It was not cheap by any stretch, but we got it done and now we’re in a mold-free house. Can you talk a little bit about mold, why it’s such a big problem for us and what people should be doing to one, determine that they don’t have a mold problem, and two, if they do have a mold problem, what steps should they take to remediate the problem?

Janet Newman (26:29): First off I have to say, I’m so sorry that you went through that and I can completely empathize. Secondly, I’m so glad that your wife is sensitive because she was able to sense that something was off, and a lot of people can’t tell. Sometimes mold just doesn’t have an odor and it can lurk behind walls and ceilings and in air ducts and things, and they have no idea. And people just become ill and they don’t know why. So, mold is such a big problem, especially for flood-prone zones, but anytime that you have a leak or a spill in your home, mold only requires 24 hours to start growing. I should point out too that mold requires four things to grow. It needs moisture – obviously that’s a big one. It needs oxygen. It also needs the right temperature, usually between 40 and 100 degrees is kind of the sweet spot for mold. And it also needs a nutrient source. And when I talk about that, I mean things like paper or cardboard, dry wall, even carpeting.

Those four things are in our homes all the time. And so it’s really important – the first thing I say to people is to make sure that you have a really good dehumidifier that is controllable, and that you can adjust the settings to about the sweet spot. Again, it’s about 45% humidity. It can be between 40% and 50% to be safe, but that’s the goal that you’re trying to reach, because mold is tricky. I think there are thousands of types of mold; I think it’s 100,000 types of mold that I read in one source. So we don’t always see it, we don’t always know it’s there, we can’t always smell it. If you suspect that you have mold in your home, there are so many different tests on the market today that you can use. Usually it’s just you take a dust sample and you send it off to a lab, and there are instruction on how to do all of that in the kit. Knowing what kind of mold you have is key. You can also hire someone – it sounds like you did, and we also had to do as well. They have all kinds of different little gadgets, but one of them is a moisture meter, and they can go around your home and test all of your baseboards and your walls to see if there’s potentially any moisture behind that you can’t detect with your eye.

So yes, mold can cause a lot of health problems. My husband and I both had completely different symptoms to the mold that we were exposed to, and that’s why we didn’t think there was a common denominator there. He had arthritis symptoms and was actually diagnosed with an auto-immune form of arthritis. I was having migraine headaches that were just awful brain fog, migraines. And because those are so different, we didn’t think that it was being caused by the same issue. It wasn’t until my husband went to a functional medicine doctor, where she said she kind of noted the timing of our new home and when his symptoms started. And she said, “I think I want to test you and your wife for mold.” And it came back that we both had pretty severe mold exposure. It took a long time, and like you said, it’s not cheap. We had to remediate our home; it took almost a year. We had the cost of remediating the home and the cost of detoxing from the mold in our bodies. It took us quite a long time, it was about a year for both.

Allan (30:56): My wife had to go in for surgery, because her sinuses had gotten so bad. They went in and thought the mold was in there, so they did some work there to basically scrape out her sinuses, for lack of a better description of what it was. She went through that. But the guy came in and was really good. Of course I was getting a lot of bad news. Every time he did something, he’d say, “Well, we pulled this away and we found that, and we did this and found that.” And it’s like the cash register’s ringing, but you have to do it. So we have all new duct work in the house. We have a dehumidifier that actually sits up in our attic and runs full time now. He did the black light irradiating and spraying stuff with, I guess it was peroxide, and probably some other chemicals I might not want in my house. But at that point the mold was the enemy, and it’s all hands on deck.

This book, Living in the Chemical Age – I think it’s really a good opportunity for us to take that step back and really start to assess what our health is, and maybe some of these things that just might be around us that we haven’t paid enough attention to – the fluoride in our water, the chemicals that might be in our water, what’s in our air, what’s in our skin products and our sunscreens and our insect repellents, and obviously mold and other things that could be going on around us.

And I like that I can get your book and say, “If I’m dealing with this kind of problem here, I want to know about this, I can go to that part of the book.” And it’s a really good brief understanding of saying, “These are the things I need to look for. I know what kind of filter I want now, once I get the test”, and all that kind of stuff. It’s really an actionable book to basically help get yourself away from some of these chemicals. I don’t think anyone can ever be completely chemical-free. As long as you’re breathing or bathing or eating or anything, there’s probably going to be some chemicals. But this book does go a long way towards helping us get healthier and being able to use that to somewhat diagnose if we might have a problem with the product, and then we can just exchange that product for something else. That form of substitution might be enough for you to realize, “I did have a problem with that chemical, or maybe I didn’t, but I go and do something else.” But the chemicals are all around us, so that’s the scary part of the book. But I think the good part of this book is that there are things that we can do about it. We just have to be aware.

Janet Newman (33:35): Exactly. You can’t eliminate all the toxins in your environment; it’s impossible. One expert said that we’re exposed to 250 pounds of chemicals on a daily basis. So it’s impossible, they’re everywhere at this point in our lives. But you can definitely do a lot of things to reduce your exposure and to reduce that toxic burden in your silo. I try to give a lot of helpful tips and resources for people, so that it’s not so scary and people feel empowered that they can actually make healthier choices and really take control of their own health.

Allan (34:18): Yeah.

Janet Newman (34:20): I’m glad you liked it.

Allan (34:21): I did, I did. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

Janet Newman (34:27): Sure. You can go to my website – LivingInTheChemicalAge.com. I’m also on Instagram and Twitter, and my book is available on Amazon. So, there are lots of different ways to find me.

Allan (34:41): Alright. Well, this is episode 323, so you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/323, and I’ll be sure to have links there to the resources that Janet just mentioned. So again, Janet, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Janet Newman (34:56): Thank you, Allan. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much.

Another episode you may enjoy:

Manage your microbiome with Danielle Capalino

How to deal with lyme disease with Darin Ingles

Dr. Darin Ingles is the author of The Lyme Solution.  He is a respected leader in natural medicine with numerous publications, international lectures, and more than 26 years of experience in the healthcare field. His practice focuses on chronic immune disorders including Lyme disease, autism, allergies, asthma, recurrent or persistent infections, and other immune problems. He uses diet, nutrients, herbs, homoeopathy and immunology to help his patients achieve better health.

Allan (4:00): Dr. Ingels, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Darin Ingels (4:05): Thanks for having me, Allan.

Allan (4:07): The book, The Lyme Solution – I admitted this offline to you and I guess I’ll go ahead and make this admission now – I have zero experience with Lyme disease. I’ve never known anybody that’s had it personally, I’ve never seen anyone experience it. So I am coming from a position of complete ignorance, if you will. But I think that’s really important, because as it gets warm and I want my clients out and about, I say, “I want you out there getting into nature, I want you moving around, I want you experiencing nature, getting the sunshine, enjoying the outdoors.” That’s a big function of health. At the same time, there is an exposure out there, and without fully understanding the nature of that exposure, it’s this scary thing. “What if I get bit by a tick, what happens then?” I do think it’s a valuable conversation to have, or at least good knowledge base to have, even if you’ve never experienced it, and hopefully never will. Coming from my point, it was really good to understand there is a risk when I get outside. And I can put those in numerical context – I think you said there were 300,000 cases per year of Lyme disease, which seems like a lot. But when you figure there’s 360+ million people in the United States, it’s not a huge, huge number, but those that are affected, many of them are in really, really bad shape. So again, it’s really a good overall primer and education to understand there is a risk and what to look for, which I think is probably the more important thing.

Dr. Darin Ingels (5:48): Right. Lyme disease has really become epidemic, not just in the United States but really around the world. As you mentioned, we have about 300,000 new cases that are reported, and most of us who are in this world would argue that that’s grossly underreported. We don’t know what that true number is, but consider it’s probably half a million people or more. And remember, that’s every year. So as you start stratifying that over the course of a decade, we’re now talking millions and millions of people dealing with chronic Lyme disease. It’s become one of these things that, particularly for people who really enjoy being outdoors. We know that New England and the central part of the US are areas that tend to be endemic for Lyme disease, but really Lyme disease has been reported in every state in the country. So whether you live in Washington state or Arizona or Texas, in places that we don’t typically think of Lyme disease as being problematic, in reality it is possible. And I think people who spend a lot of time outdoors have to be very vigilant about protecting themselves against ticks because they are out there, and for some people can become very damaging in the long term.

Allan (7:01): Yeah. My wife is the worrier of the two. One of us has to do it, I guess. She’s constantly worried about tick bites and things like that when we’re outdoors. I have a property about seven acres out here and I’ll get out there in the bush of it and be cleaning it up, and she’s like, “Check your body for ticks, check your body for ticks.” And I do. I guess that’s one of the things that I came to learn from your book, is that the deer tick that we’re talking about is actually not the tick I’m used to dealing with in the Southeast as often. The ticks we’re dealing with are a little bit bigger than this deer tick. The deer tick would actually be much smaller, which is something I didn’t know. So let’s take a step back. Things I knew was Lyme disease was an auto-immune disease, I knew that it was passed by certain ticks, I knew about the potential of a bull’s eye type mark where you got bit, those types of things. But could you take a step back and tell us what is Lyme disease, how does it get spread and how do we contract it, as a start to get us going in this conversation?

Dr. Darin Ingels (8:11): Lyme disease is actually a bacterial infection and it’s transmitted primarily through a tick bite, and as you mentioned, it’s mostly through the bite of a deer tick. However, these ticks can transmit other types of bacteria and viruses, independent of Lyme disease. We know up in New England where I spend part of my time, 30 plus percent of the ticks up there carry Lyme disease plus something else. So there’s an additional risk of getting some other illness that’s not Lyme disease, that you can get through those tick bites. Down in the Southeast where the deer ticks aren’t as endemic, there are other types of ticks. There’s the dog tick or the wood tick, and as you migrate over towards Texas, there’s the lone star tick. All these ticks can transmit various types of infections, some of which are Lyme disease, others which are something else.

When people get exposed to these ticks and if they have transmitted that bacteria, you can basically feel flu-like, and a lot of people when they are experiencing symptoms – they get a headache and joint pain and body aches, they might spike a fever and chills. It’s kind of a nondescript illness, and often it gets passed off as you’ve got a virus or some other kind of bug running through you and hopefully it will pass. But that bull’s eye rash that you mentioned is the telltale sign that if you see it, there really is nothing else that we know of that causes that kind of rash. That’s very stereotypical for Lyme disease. Unfortunately, when you look at the research, we know that maybe 40% or less of people who get bit by a tick that carries Lyme disease actually gets that rash. So the lack of the rash certainly doesn’t tell us about whether you do or do not have Lyme disease.

One of the characteristic things we also see in Lyme disease that’s very unusual is what we call “migratory joint pain”. What this means is one day your right shoulder hurts, and the next day it’s your left knee, and the next day it’s your right ankle. When you start getting this pain syndrome that seems to vary from joint to joint and body part to body part – there’s nothing really else that looks like that, other than Lyme disease. So the deer tick is still the biggest transmitter of Lyme disease. There’s some information out of Europe that suggests that perhaps even mosquitoes and fleas may transmit Lyme disease, and that might make sense in that I see a lot of patients who live in areas that aren’t known for having Lyme disease that actually have Lyme disease. So perhaps there is another insect factor that’s spreading it. But again, as of now, when you look at the statistics, New England and the Central Midwest are really the big endemic parts of Lyme.

Allan (10:51): Yeah. And I guess that’s one of the hard parts of this – you may think that you’re just getting a spring or a fall flu, or you might be thinking, “My joints hurt because of the weather. It’s getting a little moist out, it’s probably going to rain tomorrow.” As we get a little older, there are the aches and pains, and we’ve gone through enough flus to say, “This is a flu. It goes away in a few days, and then I’ll be fine. If I’m not okay on Monday I’ll go to the doctor and he can give me a shot or an antibiotic or whatever he wants to do.” So, Lyme disease often gets missed. And I know that in the book you put a quiz that takes us through a series of questions that if we get to the end of that and we score better than, I think it was 45 on this particular quiz, it’s very likely that we do have Lyme disease. It can be confirmed with some tests.

I’ve gone over things in here with podcasts before; we’ve talk about acute and chronic. So I’ll just quickly go through. Acute is something that’s right there – something happened and you know what happened. Here’s the event, you can actually point to it. Chronic is when something sticks around for a while and you might not even know when the actual event, so to speak, occurred. It’s just continuing illness or a continuing problem. You’ve identified acute and chronic with regards to Lyme disease. Can you talk a little bit about what those differentials are of how it’s acute versus chronic and what the basis is? And then what are some of the symptoms that we would look for on the basis of whether we’re dealing with something that’s immediate, like acute, or something that’s a little bit more long-term, like chronic?

Dr. Darin Ingels (12:35): In acute Lyme disease, as I mentioned, you feel really ill and it’s like if you had any other type of infection. You can get a high fever, swollen glands, chills, body aches, joint pain. You can get a headache, you can get back pain. You just feel like you’ve got a bug that often will knock people down for a handful of days. I think the big difference, when you get a virus, a cold, things like that – you might be sick for a few days to a week, maybe 10 days, and then it seems to resolve on its own. Or maybe you’ve gone to your doctor and got a prescription for antibiotics, and that cleared it up and you feel fine.

What happens in Lyme disease often is that you might feel a little better or you don’t feel any better at all. And you start getting into two weeks, three weeks, a month or longer, and really not feeling well. And as it migrates out of that acute phase into a chronic phase, what we really start to see are more neurological symptoms. So people will complain of this condition called neuropathy, where you get numbness and tingling in your hands, your feet and other places on your skin. People will describe these sensory distortions where you feel a burning in the skin and yet you look at the skin and it looks completely normal and pink. People complain of feeling clumsy, they trip a lot, they drop things a lot. They start having memory problems, cognitive impairment, short-term memory loss.

All of these various neurological symptoms can be a sign that you’ve gone out of that acute infection stage and now it’s becoming more of this auto-immune problem. We’ve got some pretty good evidence in the literature that Lyme disease has the capacity to trigger your immune system in a way that it starts making antibodies against your own neurological tissues in your brain, and that inflammation in the brain can really start to cause a lot of these various neurological symptoms. It’s interesting when you look at all of the symptoms that have been associated with Lyme disease – there’s almost 100 symptoms. It’s really pretty varied. We call Lyme “the great imitator” or “the great mimic”, because it looks like so many different things. That’s why when I have people who come into my office who’ve basically been sick for weeks and months on end and they’ve been tested 20 ways to Sunday, and can’t seem to find an explanation of why they feel the way they feel – Lyme disease is always something that’s on my mind, because it is one of the few things out there that can cause this sort of long-term illness, particularly when we hear about a lot of joint and muscle problems, and the neurological symptoms.

 

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Allan (15:31): I think the thing that struck me with all of this as I was going through the reading – there’s a theory about mitochondria, that it was basically at one point a separate bacteria that moved into our system and became a part of humans and animals over time. It really seems like Lyme disease has a little bit of that nature to itself, that it’s somewhat trying to take over us as an organism. It’s actually very, very smart. I guess maybe not intelligent, so to speak, but the way it works and the things that it does make it very hard to, one, diagnose, and two, to actually get rid of.

Dr. Darin Ingels (16:16): Yeah. Lyme diseas is really the ultimate shapeshifter of its characteristics. For people who don’t know, Lyme disease is what’s called a “spirochaete”. If you look at it under a microscope, most bacteria are like little balls or rod-shaped organisms. Spirochaete is a very long corkscrew-shaped organism. And even though it’s technically a bacteria, it actually behaves more like a virus and therefore it can penetrate tissues, it can penetrate cells and it can literally ball itself up so that the immune system essentially can’t identify it. I think part of the reason that people end up with the chronic Lyme disease is that this organism will change its shape, hide from the immune system so the immune system doesn’t get rid of it the way it should. It kind of hides in the corners of the body where the immune system is either not looking or if it gets inside your cell, the immune system can’t see at all. Then given the right set of circumstances, it starts to rear its ugly head again and uncoils itself, and then it becomes more problematic and can continue to stimulate more inflammation. So like you said, it’s a very clever organism. Out of all the bacteria and viruses that I know of, I think it’s the one that has the greatest capacity to evade the immune system.

Allan (17:31): I think that’s really important to emphasize – we need our immune system to basically deal with this. Initially, I think you said within the first 72 hours, maybe some antibiotics would be able to knock it out, but once it’s gotten embedded, once it’s done its thing and it’s in your body and it’s replicated to a point where it’s got its fountainhead, it’s got its foothold in you – at that point you really need your immune system to fight this, because dealing with antibiotics for month after month, year after year really isn’t a practical solution. But your book does actually provide some practical solutions. And one of the things I really liked about the way you put this out there was, a lot of the things that you’re talking about in what you call the five stages of immune-boosting plan – those stages are probably things we should do getting ready for cold and flu season, getting ready for any other thing that we’re going to do it. We need our immune system to protect us. That’s what it is. It starts with the gut and everything else, but the reality is, these are practical tips you can use. Even if you don’t have Lyme disease, it’s just going to make you healthier overall. Do you mind going through the five stages of your immune-boosting plan?

Dr. Darin Ingels (18:58): Sure. The first step is really about gut health. What we know from science is that 80% of your immune system is, so if there’s anything in your gut that’s not functioning well, it’s harder for your immune system to function well. So many people I work with that have chronic Lyme disease have a history of chronic gastrointestinal problems. Whether it’s constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, there’s usually some element that something in that system hasn’t been working well. I can imagine for a lot of people, they already had an underlying gut problem, and then they got bit by the tick that carried Lyme, and that just went from bad to worse. So the stage was already set to start having immune problems. We really talk a lot about how to repair the gut, how to restore it. Certainly for anyone who’s been on antibiotics, perhaps for sinus infections, bronchitis, pneumonia – every time you take an antibiotic, you start eradicating a lot of your normal bacteria. There’s so much research coming out about how important your normal microbiome is, your normal bacteria, for maintaining so much of your good health, and it’s tied into weight, metabolism, mood, of course all the gastrointestinal issues – so really a critical part of having a healthy immune system. So I walk you through certain nutrients that can help repair the gut. I talk about specifically probiotics and their health benefits, having the right strains at the right amount is very important, particularly for people who’ve already been on antibiotics. We can talk about things like glutamine and digestive enzymes that can help your body break down the food and make sure you’re absorbing it the way you should. So, it really is about looking at what specifically for you may not be functioning as well as it could in the gut, and then helping repair that.

The second step of the plan is really about diet. I had Lyme disease, myself – that’s really why I wrote this book. I’ve tried various diets for myself and with my patients, and what I found is what we call an “alkaline diet” seems to work best. What I like about it is that it’s really geared on eating foods that help keep inflammation down in your body, because ultimately it’s the inflammation that people really feel and that’s what triggers a lot of the symptoms. In a nutshell, what an alkaline diet entails is eating a mostly vegetarian diet, where we try and limit animal protein and fruits to about 20% of your total dietary intake. And then we eliminate any junk food, processed food, dairy products and coffee. These are foods that tend to be very acid-forming in the body and therefore are more prone to stimulate inflammation. So if we can control it that way, it helps reduce inflammation in the gut and potentially in the joints and the brain and elsewhere on the body. Coffee is the one that people will always kind of sneer at me when I say that. I love coffee, but I found for myself that even a sip of coffee, my neuropathy would get a lot worse. So I know people say, “Well, it’s just a little bit, it’s okay.” But for some people that little bit can be a bit too much. So, when people are starting any kind of diet change, I really recommend following it 100%. That way you can really feel the full impact of what that diet is doing for your body.

Allan (22:15): I think that’s a really important thing. There’s a big push out there, “Let’s do 80 / 20. If you’re doing it right 80% of the time, you’re going to be fine.” And I would say you’re going to be fine about 80% of the time if you’re dealing with something. A lot of folks that are listening to the podcast are wanting to lose weight, and I’m like, “You’re not in that 80% of your time right now. You’re in that 20%.” So we’ve got to ratchet down on things a little bit until we can find the balance, and when we find that balance we’re there. And you’re talking about a similar situation. We’re dealing with a disease here that can really wreck us if we don’t take care of it, so this is not the time to be thinking about justifying or trying to get to a point where we’re saying, “But it’s okay because everybody else is doing it” kind of mindset. Not everybody else right now is dealing with Lyme disease. If you want to get past this, you want to fix yourself, then you have to make these tough choices. You’re not going to like it, but it might not be permanent and you’ll get back into that point where you can be the 80 / 20 and everything will be cool. But we’re talking about actually trying to fix a disease. So, taking that time right now to follow this anti-inflammatory type of eating is going to improve your overall health and put you in a better position to fight this bug.

Dr. Darin Ingels (23:41): Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It really is about choices. And when you’re not feeling well, you have a choice to make the change or not, but when people do make those choices, they feel a lot better, faster. And again, as you get to a point where you’re feeling better, you could be more liberal with the diet, but when you’re really feeling horrible and tired and achy, it’s better just to toe the line and follow the program, and you’ll feel much better, faster.

Then the third step of the plan is really about treating the act of infection. I walk you through a series of herbal protocols that I’ve personally used and what I’ve used on thousands of Lyme patients. And again, it’s different than just taking antibiotics. Where the antibiotics are geared to just killing the bug, herbal protocols not only will help eradicate the bug, but will also work on everything else that Lyme does to your body. A lot of these herbs are anti-inflammatory, they help improve circulation, they help boost your immune systems, they’re nutritive to your gut. We’re really encompassing a much broader scope of what Lyme has done to your body than just the eradicating the organism. Plus we don’t get all the negative side effects that you typically get when you’re on antibiotics long-term. People don’t generally get diarrhea, they don’t get this infection called “Clostridium difficile”, which can happen. All those negative things that we tend to see with long-term antibiotics, we don’t see what the herbs. There are a lot of different herbal protocols out there; I highlight the ones that I’ve seen the best success with. People can get those herbs online, the dosing’s on there, exactly how much to take, what to take. My recommendation always is when you start on herbs – six to eight weeks on each protocol to really give it a fair shake. If you get to a point where you really aren’t feeling any different, then it’s time to move on to the next protocol. That’s all outlined in the third step.

Allan (25:34): I like how you prioritize them. You say, “This one’s the one that I’ve found to be the most effective for the most people.” And then you say, “If that one doesn’t work, you can start these other ones.” Some of them you say are relatively intense; the dosing and what you’re doing are a little bit tougher to handle. But you’re trying to start someone out at one that you’ve seen good results with, that you feel is the best for the most number of people. I like the fact that you’ve organized it in a way that gives them that kind of information, because so many times it’s like, “We’ll try this protocol. Well, that didn’t work. Okay, we’ll try this one.” And it sounds like you’re throwing things at it, whereas you actually take the time to describe all of them and explain why you’ve put one protocol in front of another.

Dr. Darin Ingels (26:20): It’s been my own personal experience and what I’ve seen with thousands of patients. This is the hierarchy in which I’ve seen the best results with the least side effects. But if that’s not working for you, here’s plan B. There are some people who just happen to do better on one protocol over another for no real logical reason. But you do have to give it a fair shake, you do have to give it enough time to do what we want it to do. But at some point you have to draw a line in the sand and if it’s not working – time to move on to the next one.

So the fourth step of the plan is really about environmental control. We all get exposed to so many different things in the environment that undermine our immune system. The average American gets exposed to over 80,000 chemicals a year, and all of that is potentially damaging to your immune system and perhaps other body systems. There’s a lot of this stuff that you can do at home – you can control what you use in your home, and this includes things like Windex, Tilex, 409, lawn care products, pesticides, herbicides. All of that stuff can have a cumulative effect on your body. And we know a lot of these chemicals get stored in our fat cells, so I do talk a little bit about ways to detoxify your body to help eliminate those, to reduce your body burden. But certainly anything that you can control at home, stop using these products, stop buying these products – that just lowers the burden on your body and potentially on your immune system.

One of the big things I highlight in that section is about mold. Depending on where you live in the country – where I am, in the Northeast, mold is a huge problem. Most people have a lot of exposure, whether it’s in their home, school or work environment. Mold toxicity is probably the one thing that mimics Lyme disease the most. When I’ve been working with patients for a while and we’ve been doing their Lyme treatment and we’re not seeing the kind of success we’d like, mold is always the next thing on my list that we need to examine. I recommend if you live in most of the country that gets humidity or moisture, it’s a good idea to have your home tested and make sure you don’t have any hidden mold. You don’t have to see mold to have a problem. Most people who have these issues don’t know that it’s there, which is why it’s a problem. Unless it peeks through your drywall and you see water stains, you would have no idea. But sometimes you can get just a little pinhole leak in your roof. It’s in your attic and mold is growing and you can’t see it. You don’t know, but it’s enough there that can affect your health. So that’s something worth investigating.

Allan (28:45): We have a horror story on that. We bought a house and it needed some repairs – we knew it when we bought it. But my wife said she just knew there was a mold problem. She could just feel it, something was wrong. So we brought in an expert, they came in and he was really proud to say he was a walking mold detector. If there was mold in the house, he would know. He went up into my attic and ducked around a little bit, and came out and said, “You’ve got a moisture problem but doesn’t seem to be any mold.” And then he asked about our duct work and said maybe it’s an allergy issue. He says, “When was the last time you had the ducts cleaned?” I’m like, “We just bought the house, so probably never.” He says, “Well, we’ll clean the ducts.” And so he comes in and cleans the ducts and we pay the bill, and three days later, one of our bathroom walls is just coated with mold because he had stirred up these mold spores that were actually in the ducts. So we had to bring out someone else, because when we tried calling them, they didn’t come back.

Dr. Darin Ingels (29:52): Of course.

Allan (29:54): So we called someone else, and he comes out and he’s like, “Oh my goodness, we’ve got to pull all this duct work out.” He said we can’t keep this duct work. So he gives me a price on that, and then he starts pulling the duct work out and he’s like, “We’ve got a bigger problem. I picked up the installation underneath the ducts, and there’s mold all underneath the ducts that I didn’t see before.” And I’m like, “Okay, great.” So, all the installation, everything cleaned out. Fortunately it had not gotten into the drywall and the roof, or in that bathroom. So they were able to eradicate it. It was a very expensive problem to have, but it’s one of those things where you have to do it right. It is something that could really negatively impact your health. I was less sensitive; fortunately my wife was sensitive enough to know something was drastically wrong. To me, if I get a little bit nasally, it’s not a big deal. I don’t have to think a lot about it. But for her it was a big deal, so we did bring someone in and fortunately we did, because it could have been a much worse problem if we let it go any longer.

So, mold is a big, big deal. If you have moisture or live in a moist area similar to the Northeast – not an area where you want to play around. If you have mold and if you do find that you have mold, it is something to really go ahead and get cleaned up, because it can cause you some massive mess. I know we’re here to talk about Lyme, so I had to go off on a mold rant, but it can really wreck you too. If that turns out to be the problem, then really get that done.

Dr. Darin Ingels (31:28): Lyme disease, when people get infected, often it can alter your immune system in a way that you become more hypersensitive to environmental things like mold. I never really had a mold problem until I got Lyme disease. So I feel like it sensitized me in some way to mold. Mold is really the only allergen that still bothers me today. I’m not as hypersensitive where I can smell it when I walk in every musty building, like other people do, but it’s something that does have the capacity to really undermine your immune system. If you live in a part of the country where there’s a lot of moisture, that should be on your list to at least rule it out as a contributing factor to your overall health, definitely.

So the fifth part of the plan is really about lifestyle. One of the things I see for a lot of people after they get Lyme disease is that they don’t sleep well. And sleep is such an important part of when your body has an opportunity to restore and repair itself. We’ve got a lot of evidence that the brain repairs itself when you’re in that deep restorative sleep. And the more you miss it, the less opportunity your body has to really recover. I see so many people after they get infected with Lyme disease, they just don’t sleep well, whether it’s difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and sometimes it’s a little bit of both. I outline various things you can do naturally to encourage getting better sleep, deeper sleep. The problem with a lot of the sleep medications is that they might put you to sleep, but they don’t necessarily get you into that deep restorative sleep. Whereas in the natural world there are a lot of nutrients and herbs that I think do a better job of accomplishing that. So, sleep is terribly important.

I think moving your body is incredibly important. When you’re achy and tired… I know when I was in the throes of Lyme disease, the last thing on my mind was going out and walking or hiking or doing anything physically active. It actually took me many years to get to a point where I feel like I could really do it again. But I talk a lot about different strategies that are very gentle, simple and inexpensive, that I think regardless of your physical state, there’s something there you can do to get your body moving. Because as you move your body, that’s when you move your oxygen, you get more nutrients to the tissue, you get rid of all that inflammatory material. It might be something as simple as stretching, it could be walking, swimming, yoga, tai chi. It’s just a function of what you enjoy, what you have access to, what you feel like you want to do. But I think it’s important that people get in the habit of doing something. As humans, we are designed to move, and again, for a lot of people it really makes a big difference. I hate yoga with the passion of a thousand suns, but when I do it, I feel so much better. It’s one of those things I go reluctantly, I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I really feel so much better. I can just feel my body moving and my muscles stretching and that stiff. tight feeling that so many of us with Lyme disease experience, really dissipates after a good yoga session. It is important to find something you enjoy doing, otherwise you’re just not going to do it, and that’s not the goal either. So find something you like and just be committed to doing it on a regular basis.

And the last part of all that is about stress management. Of course we kind of half-jokingly say, “Well, don’t have stress in your life”, but if you live in this country particularly, there’s always stress. And being chronically ill is stressful, and it’s stressful for your partner and your spouse and your family. But having an outlet to be able to express that, I think is very important. I always felt like I had a good support network, but at some point your friends and family kind of get tired of hearing about the way you feel, and you feel bad about burdening them. And people ask, “Oh hey, how are you doing today?” And you’re just nice and you say, “I’m doing great. Thank you for asking.” You don’t really want to tell them, “I feel terrible today and everything hurts, and my brain’s not working.” Having whether a Lyme support group or a therapist or whatever it is that works for you – I think having that place where you can really be honest and discharge the way you feel, is important. I have some patients who do it through art, some people who do it through music, some people who do it through a therapist. But having that safe space to be able to express how you feel and know that it’s okay that you’re going to have days where you feel pretty terrible, and that’s okay, and understand that it will pass and it’s fleeting. But in the throes of it, it feels pretty horrible. So, we talk so much about the physical aspects of everything Lyme disease does to your body, we kind of forget about the psycho-emotional aspects, which are significant. Your brain and your body are connected, and what one does, the other follows. So I think as much as we can encourage positive imagery and happy thoughts, so to speak, that’s a way that we can start helping encourage better healing in the body. It’s the one piece I see with so many Lyme patients that really seems to be missing. And I think it’s just an important part of overall health.

Allan (36:28): Yeah. And like I said, of the five, I think there was one that might not apply to everybody, but the other four – if we’re doing those ourselves for our health, we’re going to be much better off. And I completely agree. When you get to the lifestyle pieces of the exercise, the stress reduction management, and then of course the sleep – those are three core health components that we should be focused on trying to improve all the time.

I want to pick your brain while I have you here because l get this question from time to time. There are sleep supplements out there, and they’ll be like, “Should I be taking melatonin? Should I be taking GABA?” I do tell people I take magnesium before I go to bed, and part of the reason I take it is I do have low electrolytes for the most part. So I tend to take electrolytes as a supplement from time to time. What I found is if I take a magnesium supplement before I go to bed, I get more of that vivid dreaming and feel like I’m really getting into a deeper sleep. And I’m fairly comfortable because magnesium is electrolytes and mineral. But when we start talking about melatonin and GABA… I’m not going to say melatonin is a hormone per se, but it is something our body would make by itself. And GABA is something our body has in our brain, but there are questions about if you took it orally, how to get in through the brain-blood barrier.

So I guess the question I’ll ask with those, if you don’t mind going through is, are they really doing anything, and is it safe for us to take those on a regular basis? Because with other hormones, like if you took testosterone, your body is going to quit making testosterone because it got plenty. Same thing with estrogen, same thing with some of the others. If you’re putting it in there, your body’s not going to make any because it’s going to know that there’s enough there. And I’m not sure that melatonin wouldn’t be any different. Can you talk about those, because that is a topic I get asked from time to time and I just tell them flat out I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nutritionist. But since I’ve got a doctor on the phone, I just thought, let’s ask this question. What are your thoughts about melatonin and GABA?

Dr. Darin Ingels (38:44): Coming back to your example about hormones – yes, if you take a lot of thyroid hormone or for women who take estrogen – if you take enough of it, it will actually suppress your normal production. Our hormone systems are built kind of like a thermostat, where as your temperature gets to a certain point, it shuts the heater or the air conditioning off. The same thing happens in our hormone systems. We don’t know that that’s necessarily true in our neurotransmitter system though. So in the case of melatonin, melatonin is a hormone, and when we talk about supplementing with melatonin, we’re really talking about supplementing at normal physiological levels. So we’re talking about supplementing a level that would be your normal production, not super physiological doses that are far beyond what your body would normally make. Now, there’s some research, particularly in cancer care, that certain tumors, when you take high doses of melatonin, like 20 milligrams or more a night, can actually help stop tumor production. So I know in the cancer world, a lot of naturopathic oncologists are using high doses of melatonin for stopping tumor growth. But for people who just have a hard time falling asleep, which is what melatonin is designed to do – it’s really for the people that can’t fall asleep; it’s not really great for the people who can’t stay asleep. So we differentiate when there’s a sleep disturbance, whether the issue is falling asleep, staying asleep or both.

But I think melatonin for people who can’t fall asleep – when you look at the research, which is generally between one and three milligrams at night, and certainly for an adult three milligrams is perfectly fine and safe, even with long-term use. I’ve not read anything that suggests that it suppresses your natural melatonin, nor makes you dependent on it. And I have some people who go on melatonin for a period of time until they get their sleep pattern back on track, and then they’re fine and they don’t need to take it anymore. Melatonin, without looking at other reasons why people aren’t sleeping well, would be a little bit of a miss. Melatonin deficiency is probably not the problem. There’s probably something else going on that’s interfering with melatonin metabolism, so you’ve got to find out what that thing is.

Allan (40:48): It’s probably their iPhone.

Dr. Darin Ingels (40:52): In all seriousness, we know that definitely the blue screen that comes off iPhones and iPads does interfere with your sleep pattern. They’ve now demonstrated this in research. I always tell people that have trouble sleeping, especially two hours before you want to go to bed, you’ve got to cut off your iPhone and iPad.

Allan (41:11): I cannot get my wife to do that, to save my life.

Dr. Darin Ingels (41:16): We’ve all become a very addicted society to our electronics. And of course I think it’s practical too, because by the time you get done with your work day, you cook dinner, you clean up, you get your kids to bed – that’s the time you now have to yourself to answer email and do that. So for many of us, that’s our quiet time. Unfortunately, the timing is terrible because again, that blue screen… Now they make glasses that you can buy online that block that blue light. So for people who insist that they have to do that work late in the evening – go spend the $10 and get the blue blockers that block that blue light, and it’s going to certainly help with your sleep pattern. But melatonin, again, is really designed for people who can’t fall asleep.

For people who can’t stay asleep, this is where I think GABA actually works pretty well. But you’re right, there are some forms of GABA that don’t get absorbed very well across the gut wall. There are a couple of forms of GABA that have been studied that show they do actually cross the blood-brain barrier. I particularly use one called Pharma GABA, and there’s a few supplement companies that make that particular type. Pharma GABA clinically seems to work really well for people in keeping them staying asleep. There’s another one that’s a liposomal form of GABA that also seems to get absorbed fairly well. But if you’re just buying regular GABA off the counter that’s not in one of those forms, it probably won’t work very well.

The other nutrient that I like a lot of is called glycine. Glycine is the most basic amino acid and it binds to a specific part of the brain called the “locus coeruleus”, which nobody cares about, but it’s the actual part of the brain that’s sort of the on and off switch between excitatory neurotransmitters and the ones that make you calm and quiet. So by binding to that part of the brain, it basically flips the switch and helps the brain quiet down and starts inducing more of your sedative neurotransmitters like serotonin and so forth. So glycine is very safe, it’s very cheap. You can take 3,000 milligrams of glycine before bedtime and often people report that they feel like they get a deeper, more restorative sleep.

And you mentioned magnesium. Magnesium is the one nutrient you burn through the fastest in your body. And certainly if you’re a physically active person, you’ll burn through magnesium faster. Magnesium is a cofactor in a lot of neurotransmitter metabolism, so I think feeding those pathways probably helps induce better sleep. A lot of my patients do tell me they sleep better when they take more magnesium. If you get too much magnesium, you’ll know – it’ll actually give you loose stool. But I have some people who take 500, 600, 800 milligrams a day and actually do very well with it.

Allan (43:49): Okay. Well again, Doctor, it has been so cool talking to you. The name of the book is The Lyme Solution. If someone wanted to learn more about you, get a copy of the book or just learn more about Lyme disease, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Darin Ingels (40:52): Yeah, if they just go to my website – it’s DarinIngelsND.com – we’ve got a lot of great information about Lyme disease, the book, and we’d love for people to follow us and get that information.

Allan (44:20): Cool. This is going to be episode 322, so you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/322 and you’ll find a link to a Dr. Ingels’ website and the book, The Lyme Solution.

Dr. Ingels, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Darin Ingels (44:37): Great. Thanks, Allan.

 

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The diabetes code with Megan Ramos

Today we meet Megan Ramos and discuss Dr Jason Fung’s book, the Diabetes Code. She co-founded the intensive dietary management clinic with Dr Fung and she's also a co-host with him on the Obesity Code Podcast. They talk about keto, obesity, diabetes, and fasting. It’s really fascinating things they're doing with their patients. I know you're gonna enjoy this. I heard her speak at Keto Fest last year. She's an active speaker and author.

Allan (3:45): Megan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Megan Ramos (3:47): Hi, thanks for having me today.

Allan (3:49): I'm really excited to have you here. It's funny, my Internet went down over the weekend and I haven't quite gotten it up, so I'm just putting this through my phone. So I'm hopeful that we can get everything in. This book we're talking about today is The Diabetes Code by Dr. Fung, and you work with Dr. Fung in his clinic so you see this stuff every day. I was driving down the road the other day and I saw this business, and it was a renal care facility where they basically do the dialysis. And I was thinking, how can that be a standalone business? But in some of the stats that were in the book, it's really amazing how many people are affected by diabetes and then go on to have kidney issues.

Megan Ramos (4:38): Almost all of them. I've worked with Jason for 20 years and we co-founded this clinic, the Dietary Management Clinic. It's within our nephrology practice. And over 80% of our patients that come in for intensive dietary management have a diabetic-related kidney disease. It might not be full blown, but they have the early onset of diabetic-related kidney disease. The number every year of people that come into the clinic with diabetic-kidney disease is incredible. When I first started doing research there 20 years ago, diabetic-kidney disease was not as common. The other causes of kidney disease were much more prevalent, but nowadays over 80% of these kidney patients have kidney disease because of their diabetes. This is the most disheartening thing to both Jason and I, was that as diabetes got worse, the kidneys totally failed. And there is nothing as people in the field of nephrology or as kidney specialists we could do for these people.

As the diabetes became more out of control, the kidneys declined and declined and declined, and we couldn't help these people. We were essentially watching them die, or watching their kidneys fail and just telling them they need to prep emotionally for dialysis, and helping guide them through dialysis education and emotional support and connecting them with other people on dialysis. Because that was all we could do for these people. We couldn't help them out. Probably until about five years ago, we had nothing that we could do to help these people. As long as the diabetes got worse, they were going to end up with complete kidney failure.

Allan (6:33): I guess that's what's shocking, because I looked it up – there are about 6,500 of these dialysis centers around the world, and growing. It's a growing industry. But this is mostly a preventable disease. I guess the doctors had always thought this is just a progressive thing that happens. But the subtitle of the book is Prevent and Reverse. So, if someone does have prediabetes or diabetes, there are some things that they can do to deal with those. And that's what you guys are getting into as part of what this book is about. We'll talk about in a minute, but I want to take a couple of little divergences, because there were things in this book that I found fascinating, and they're not topics that people talk about a lot. One of those was the TOFIs, which I know basically means that they look thin, they look healthy, but they have diabetes effectively, or they're close to having diabetes because of their visceral fat. Can you talk about TOFIs in particular, because I think a lot of people think, “If I lose weight or I'm thin, then I'm healthy.”? And that's not entirely true.

Megan Ramos (7:45): No, we spend a tremendous amount of time trying to explain body composition to our patients. Actually, I had a patient in clinic the other week. She was 98 pounds, but her liver was so fat and her pancreas was so fat. She was diabetic. As a result, even though she was 98 pounds, her body fat percentage was way over 40%. So she's clinically morbidly obese, even though she weighs 98 pounds and she's about five foot three. She looks very slender, she's a size zero, maybe a size two on a bloated day. But we spend a lot of time talking about body composition. A lot of the people who follow the standard North American diet have more fat than lean mass. They don't have a whole lot of muscle mass. We’re a very sedentary society here in North America, so we're not as active, we don't have as much lean mass, and our dietary choices too, especially in women, have led to destruction of our bone mass density. And now we're seeing osteoporosis more and more often in men too. So bad food choices, things like phosphoric acid being extremely abundant in a lot of the processed foods that we're eating, are really taking a toll on our bone mass density. So this woman is very petite, but she's just a little sack of fat. It's fine if you’re a certain weight, but the majority of your body is strong bone and good muscle mass that’s going protect your joints and your body and your organs in general as you age. So we try to talk to our patients about how the scale doesn't really matter. Of course you don't want to weigh 500 pounds, you don't want to weigh 600 pounds. But myself, I've been 90 pounds and I've been morbidly obese, and I've been 120 pounds and extremely healthy. So it's really about body composition.

Diabetes originates in the liver, and certain kinds of foods that we eat can make us more prone to developing a fatty liver, and that kickstarts diabetes. We have a lot of these patients come into the clinic, they're very slender and they have an extreme fatty liver and as a result they have diabetes. And they go on to tell me about how they've never really eaten that badly and they don't understand how they had a fatty liver, because they don't drink alcohol very often or not at all. And I say, “You're diabetic because you drink too much soda. You're diabetic because you drink too much fruit juice.” The fructose and the excessive sugar diet cause this fatty liver disease. As a result, you might not have a beer gut with your belly hanging over the edge of your pants, but your liver is much larger than it needs to be, and your liver has a beer gut in itself. So we have to eliminate the organ fat.

There are a lot of people out there that are digitally obese and that are in much healthier shape than the skinny people who have a lot of this organ fat. When you have so much organ fat, that fat's going to prevent your organ from functioning well. We see fatty liver, fatty pancreas, fatty spleen. When you have a fatty liver and it gets so fatty, you start to develop liver cirrhosis, hardening of the liver. Then the liver can't do its job at detoxifying the body, then you have fatty pancreas. We see this all the time now because we have these type 2 diabetics and we see that their liver is so fatty that they can no longer produce adequate insulin to be able to regulate their blood glucose levels. So they end up with very high blood glucose levels and they end up on insulin as a result.

Allan (11:45): Yeah. There was another thing. Like I said, I love these little tangents. Sometimes I get into a book because I think that's where I really learn some things that help me be better at talking with people. And one of them is the Randle cycle. The Randle cycle makes sense to me in a lot of ways because so many people will say, “I want to lose fat”, and then they're eating a low fat diet. But based on what the Randle cycle says a cell can only use sugar or it can use fat, but it really can't use both simultaneously. I think that's a really important fact to put out there, because if someone wants to burn body fat and they're eating a predominantly sugar-laden or carbohydrate-laden diet, they're making it that much harder for themselves, aren't they?

Megan Ramos (12:38): Absolutely. You can't be a sugar burner and a fat burner simultaneously. The hormones that are produced when you eat excessive carbohydrates block fat loss. So you can't be eating a diet that's producing hormones that are blocking fat loss, and actually expect to lose body fat. That's just not how it works.

Allan (13:03): I think a lot of people think, “If I eat less calories total…” There are more calories in fat than there are in carbs. When they want to do the calories in, calories out, it seems to make more sense from a math perspective. But our bodies don't actually work that way.

Megan Ramos (13:21): That's correct.

Allan (13:23): There’s a drug I know that a lot of people will get on when they're prediabetic or diabetic, because they go in, and the symptom and how we know someone is diabetic is effectively blood glucose. They get up to a certain level of blood glucose and they’re said they're prediabetic. And then if they get up to another level, at that point they're called diabetic. A drug that's very commonly prescribed is called metformin. Could you talk about metformin, when it is appropriate to have metformin and when it's not?

Megan Ramos (13:58): Usually we’re not necessarily opposed to metformin in our clinic. It's a relatively benign medication and it does have some benefits that other medications don't have. The risk factor for taking metformin is much lower than a lot of the other medications on the market. But usually at our clinic, if someone is being proactive with their lifestyle and their diet, we usually don't put them on anything. We wouldn't start them on metformin until the sugars went over 10 or 180, or their hemoglobin A1c was over 9. If someone's being proactive with their diet and their lifestyle, so they've gone low carb, they increase the fats in their diet, they're not snacking, they're following a restricted eating protocol – we usually leave them off of metformin.

And we don't actually find it helps a lot with weight loss. A lot of our patients come into the clinic with lower hemoglobin A1c of 6.4, 7.1, and their doctors have told them that metformin will help them lose weight. I've never in 20 years have seen metformin help a patient actually lose weight, and the research out there on that is not very compelling. It's not really great quality research studies to go by. So when someone's blood sugar levels are excessively high… For us there's a certain range that we like to cap our patients under when they're being proactive with their lifestyle, because we do see their blood sugar levels drop really quickly. Cut out the carbs, stop snacking, stop eating late at night, skip breakfast. We see people's blood sugar levels drop by anywhere from 25% to 50% within two weeks, so we really don't engage in metformin until someone's blood sugar level’s over 180 or until their hemoglobin A1c is over 9 in our clinic.

Allan (16:01): Okay. And that's because at those levels now, this is dangerous to the brain and its function, because it needs the blood sugars in a fairly tight range and you're well outside that range at this point. So, a drastic measure like a medication actually does make some sense. And when they make the lifestyle changes, I'm guessing they start to come off the metformin as well.

Megan Ramos (16:23): Very much so. Usually most people who are just on metformin when they start can be off of it within a couple of months of being very proactive and consistent with their dietary changes. When the blood is so concentrated with sugar… Sugar is very pointy, it's spiky, it's like a little ball of spikes. And as it goes through your circulatory system, it has the potential to really scrape and scratch the sides of your blood vessels. When you lose integrity in your blood vessels, you prevent them from being able to expand and contract when they needed to, to allow more blood flow at certain times. So they can no longer expand, and this is where you run into a lot of difficulties. It's okay to have some spiky little balls of sugar go around in your circulatory system, but when you have so much and the blood is so concentrated with it, you can guarantee that your blood vessels are being scratched to heck. At that point when they can no longer expand the way they need to, then you're going to run into a lot of problems and have blockages and put yourself at high risk for stroke.

Allan (17:40): Yeah. Everybody loves simple rules. You can say something like calories in, calories out, step on the scale. It's a very easy number for us to use, and I think people love those simple things. But what I found is a lot of the times simple doesn't actually answer the whole thing. One of the cool things is you've taken the time to write basically three rules, and then there’s a fourth add-on to it, that are fairly simple. They're simple on the outside, but when you actually start drilling into them, it’s very important. In fact, for many of us it’s a huge life change to do some of these things. But I liked the idea that they're simple enough for you to know what the rule is, and then you can start applying it. The first rule that you have in here, and this is for reversing type 2 diabetes, is to avoid fructose.

Megan Ramos (18:39): Absolutely. So fructose doesn't go into your bloodstream. When you check your blood glucose levels, you're checking your blood glucose levels. You're not checking your blood fructose levels. So when you break out your glucometer, you're not measuring fructose. Fructose gets directly imported to your liver. If you give your liver a little bit of fructose, your liver can handle it, and it will process it and utilize it for energy. But when you dump a massive amount of fructose in your liver, it gets overwhelmed by it. And how it copes with that onslaught of fructose is to pump it out as fat and convert it to fat instantaneously. And when it gets so overwhelmed, that fat gets stuck in the liver, because the liver can't process it as effectively as it needs to. So that is the number one cause for fatty liver disease, is excessive fructose.

I was diagnosed at the age of 12 with fatty liver disease and I can tell you that was from excessive apple juice consumption during the first 12 years of my life on this planet. And I was a skinny kid. I was underweight until I was 26, and then I went from skinny fat to just plain out fat at 26. But it's just fructose; it really doesn't reflect in your bloodstream. This is why when you look at the glucose index, you'll see something like a popular mainstream chocolate bar is considered to be moderate, and that's because the sugar that we use is half fructose and have glucose. So if you look at the glucose index, you'll see something like a popular chocolate bar being considered moderately okay. Where something like a slice of bread is one of the top things, being the food most likely to raise your blood glucose levels. The sugar in bread is all glucose, but that in fruits and things like chocolate bars – those are all half fructose and half glucose, so you're only actually seeing half of the sugar that you're consuming with those items when you're checking your blood glucose levels. So fructose goes straight to your liver, it overwhelms your liver, it becomes fat instantaneously, and if it becomes so overwhelmed with fructose, you start to develop fat in the liver as well.

Allan (21:06): We're getting most of this fructose now from soft drinks, and it's a food additive now because it’s very cheap to get from corn, so they have the high fructose corn syrup that they use to sweeten just about everything that's processed. That's where we're getting a lot of this, and from the fruit juices, as you mentioned. This isn't to cry against fruit; there's a lot of nutritional benefits to having some fruit in your diet, but you shouldn't drink those calories as a form of juice, because then you're not getting the fiber and the other things you would be getting from that fruit. Rule number two is to reduce refined carbohydrates and enjoy natural fats. And I like that term, “natural fats” a lot, because I think that's been the struggle. We say “good fats” and “bad fats”, people want to try to define those in different ways. But I like the term “natural fats” because at that point it's very clear what it is. This is from a plant or an animal product and it's something that's naturally occurring. It's not something that you have to squeeze or process to make this thing happen. It’s just there. Can you talk a little bit about how eliminating refined carbohydrates and focusing on natural fats is going to help us?

Megan Ramos (22:25): Absolutely. When you consume carbohydrates, your body has to produce insulin to help you utilize the energy from those carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are large bunches of sugar molecules, primarily glucose. When we can consume a carbohydrate from our mouth, and then continuing down into our small intestine the carbohydrate is broken down into its individual sugar molecules, or glucose molecules, and they're released into the blood. In order for those glucose molecules to get into our cells, they need to be guided there by insulin. You need to have insulin latch onto the glucose and take it to the cell because the insulin molecule knows which cells need the glucose, and the insulin molecules have the key to enable the glucose to get into the cell, so the cell can gobble it up and utilize it for energy.

Our bodies only need so much energy, Allan. We don't need to be eating and constantly refilling our fuel tank, and this is what we do in society. We eat multiple times throughout the day, we're eating refined carbs, we're trying to bombard and completely overwhelm ourselves with energy, and our cells don't utilize this energy. So we have all this insulin and all this glucose hanging around, and then the insulin essentially packages the excess glucose that your cell doesn't need and stores it as body fat to be utilized later. So insulin is a fat-trapping hormone in a sense. Its purpose is to trap this excess sugar and store it for us to utilize later when our cells need it. We’re constantly feeding our bodies nowadays, so we're constantly storing excess sugar energy with insulin’s help, rather than going back and burning what's already been stored and saved to be utilized later on.

When you consume dietary fat though, you get very little insulin secretion. So a fat molecule is a bunch of fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone. When you consume fat and you're digesting fat, your body doesn't actually need to produce any insulin or any fat-trapping hormones to help your body break down the fatty acids to be able to utilize those for fuel in the body. You do require a little bit of insulin to metabolize that backbone of the fatty acid molecule, but you don't need a whole lot of insulin to be able to get rid of that glycerol backbone. So it's negligible. When you consume fat, you produce zero fat-trapping hormones. There are other fat-trapping hormones – estrogen and cortisol. You don't produce those when you consume fat.

Another thing about fat is that it's absolutely the most satiating macronutrient that we have. When you consume fat, it sends a powerful and rapid response to your brain that you're being fed all this energy. You can actually get satiated off of eating fat before your belly starts to expand. Whereas when you eat carbohydrates, the message that's being sent from the stomach to the brain is very slow. When you eat carbohydrates, you have to wait until your belly is fully expanded, and once that expansion has occurred, that's when your brain starts to receive faster messages saying that you're full. So you get quite bloated and you end up overeating when you eat carbohydrates, because you have to wait for that belly expansion to occur before your brain gets the message that you need to stop eating. You don't need that for fat, so people actually end up eating only what they need when they're eating primarily natural fats. So you don't end up bloated, you finish eating and you're quite satiated before you have to undo that belt notch and undo the button on your pants. That's one of the other great things about eating fat. We tend to just eat the fat that our bodies actually need at the time for energy. We tend not to overeat it because of that rapid messaging that occurs when we consume fat, to our brain, telling us to turn off our hunger.

Allan (27:02): I think another thing when you are eating high fat, low carb, is that you're not as hungry as often, whereas with carbohydrates and sugar, if you have a high carbohydrate breakfast, they now have a term called “second breakfast” that's become very popular. The fast food restaurants are latching onto that by serving breakfast foods later in the day, because they're high carb and it gets people eating another breakfast fairly soon after they ate the one they just ate. It’s insane, but it is what it is. I can't blame McDonald's for wanting to make that money if people are going to take them up on it. The third rule of these three rules and the plus, is actually my favorite, and it's because it's a very simple thing that I think if people wrap their heads around, they're like, “Yeah, that actually does make a lot of sense.” And it is, just eat real food.

Megan Ramos (28:00): Absolutely. A lot of our patients live on government assistance. They're in bad shape. They're given $700 a month to live off of. I can't imagine that, because of the cost of living in Toronto. That’s what I pay to rent two parking spaces a month downtown Toronto. So the fact that they have to pay for all of their expenses with that, it’s astounding to me that they can live off of that. So sometimes buying all these fancier food items that are labeled “ketogenic friendly” or have different stamps of approval on them from for low carb, aren't possible. But eating real food is the most important thing. If you can only afford to eat legumes and lentils because they're more economical, at least they're real food. So really trying to utilize this real food to keep away from the refined carbohydrates, preventing your blood from having this rush of glucose and this insulin surge and really damaging the connection between insulin and your cells in the body.

Allan (29:14): It's one of the strangest things, when I really started getting into food and understanding the foods that I should be eating versus not eating – I go to the farmer's market and I buy a stake. And it's a one-pound steak, which is normally what I would have eaten. That would be my dinner, a one-pound steak. But I get this grass-fed beef and I find that I only need about a quarter of it and then I’m full, because my body's getting the nutrition it needs, it's getting high quality fat, natural fat. So I feel satiated with actually less food, because it's a higher quality product. I know it can seem expensive when you start pricing out what these are, but there are two things that are going to happen here if you can do this, and do this more often than not.

One is, you're going to find that you get satiated by whole food, real food, much faster because you're getting the nutrition your body needs, and then two, if we're out there buying this stuff, the supermarkets are going to start trying to carry it more and more. And you're seeing that now – you can go into the Walmart supermarkets here and you can find higher quality meats, grass-fed meats and local meats in some cases, because they're trying to cater to what the demand is. So just adding one or two of these high quality meals and trying to stay away from the processed stuff I think is going to mean a world of difference.

Megan Ramos (30:46): I agree. The more of us that do it are going to put a lot of pressure on these big corporate organizations to be able to charge this at an affordable price. In Canada, we're a little bit slow on this. Costco every now and then is a bit better, but I've noticed a huge improvement in the States. My husband's American and every year we go down to Florida for a few weeks at some point to visit with his family. It's amazing how in some of the supermarkets down there like Publix, they actually have pretty affordable grass-fed beef and hormone-free, antibiotic-free free range chicken. It's cool to me now that you can see that even at regular chain supermarkets within the United States. It's really neat.

Allan (31:34): Yeah, and that's what I'm saying, I think they're getting on board and realizing there's a demand for this. As we create that demand, we're going to drive these stores to start carrying that type of food. Invariably they compete with the other stores. There's, like you said, Publix here, there's Winn-Dixie and there's the Walmart market. They're all within two miles of each other, so they've got to push for your business and that's going to drive the price down. So again, just eat real food. These three rules will work for the vast majority of us that have walked into your doctor and the doctor's like, “Your A1c, you're prediabetic”, and you're like, “Okay, what do I do?” These three rules are going to work for quite a few of us. But you get patients because of it being a kidney issue – they're typically a good bit further down the line of this, so some of the strategies, some of the things that you have to do go above and beyond these three rules. That's where we get to talking about fasting, both intermittent and in some cases extended fasting. Can you talk a little bit about fasting as a protocol? How someone should go about this and what they should look for, as far as how to do it and the benefits they're going to get from fasting?

Megan Ramos (32:51): In terms of how to do it, it's always very important to have physician supervision or have a nurse practitioner watching over you while you do this, because like I said earlier, we see really rapid reductions in blood glucose levels. We also see very rapid improvement with blood pressure too, even in our kidney patients. Kidneys control blood pressure, so usually when there's so much kidney damage, we can't do anything about blood pressure. But we even see huge improvements with our patients as they start to lose weight, as their blood sugar levels start to come down, with their blood pressure, and so patients will feel very dizzy and unwell. So always have physician supervision, have someone monitoring your meds, go to your doctor if you don't feel well, stop fasting if you don't feel well. You can always start again once your medications have been adjusted. But the best thing to do is just to start off slowly.

So if I have a patient who comes into the clinic who's quite nervous about fasting but has done some research and does understand that there are benefits to fasting, such as weight loss and blood sugar reduction, blood pressure reduction, less medications across the board, improved lipid panels. They want to do it, but they're frightened to do it or they're just someone who's always eaten. When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I probably ate every two hours that I was awake for about 27 years. So the idea of not eating for an entire day… It was just habitual, constantly eating. I ate 30 cups of popcorn every night for probably a good 25 years to satiate myself after dinner time. And it's just habit. You go to make it whether or not you actually feel like you need it. So there are habits that need to be adjusted too, and those definitely take a lot of time.

The first step that we have a patient do is we encourage them to eat real meals. Eat a proper sized breakfast, eat until you feel satiated. Eat a proper sized lunch; again, eat until you feel satiated. We really encourage our patients to start fasting between meals. Sometimes going from breakfast to lunch and lunch to dinner, and then from dinner to breakfast the next morning – that's a huge change for them. Women in particular are terrified of feeling full, because we have chronically followed these low calorie diets that are very low fat and very high carb and if we ever ate to satiation, that meant that we overate and that we didn't lose weight, and that we rather gained weight. A lot of women in particular have been conditioned to think that when they feel satiated, that's counterproductive.

I was one of those women. It took me years and actually seeing that in other patients to realize that was a big part of my own struggle too, was that if you ate a proper meal and you ate until you're satiated, that you had failed because you were going to gain weight. And in the past on a high carb, low fat diet, that's absolutely true. That’s not the case on a low carb, high fat diet. It's quite different in how your body produces these hormones when you consume these macronutrients. When you eat back to satiation, you don't overeat, you don't produce fat-stimulating or fat-trapping hormones – you're in the clear, you're perfectly safe. You’re just going to give your body the adequate amount of fuel that it needs. That's really difficult for women.

So first thing we do is try to teach our patients how to eat proper meals and eat until they're full, and just cut out all snacking. Sometimes that's still really hard for them, so we'll first work on cutting out evening snacking. And that's the biggest vice for everyone we work with, is that evening snacking, sitting around the television with your family or going on the computer and surfing the Internet and having your bag of snacks or your bowl of snacks with you. So the first thing to do is to cut out snacking. Then the next thing that we recommend is that people try cutting out one meal and going down to two meals a day. We usually encourage people to cut out breakfast first, because diabetics will know that no matter what they do, their morning blood sugar levels are always the highest, unless they take a lot of long-acting insulin at night time or a medication such as Diamicron or Glyburide in the evening time, which stimulates a lot of insulin to be produced and secreted by the pancreas throughout the night.

But otherwise, if we're not taking these medications in the evening, our blood sugar levels are high regardless of what we eat in the evening before. So we encourage our patients initially to try cutting out breakfast. At breakfast time our blood sugar levels are high, as a result our insulin levels are high and this is because your liver tries to dump out extra sugar and tries to get you to burn it in the morning time. It's a survival mechanism. You've got excess sugar in you, your body needs to burn it. It will dump it out in the morning time, because historically we never ate in the morning time. In cavemen days they didn't have cavemen cupboards or cavemen refrigerators.

Allan (38:16): Or microwaves.

Megan Ramos (38:18): Exactly. We've evolved to have this process where our body self-fuels in the morning time anyways. When your liver dumps out the sugar in the morning, your pancreas automatically secretes insulin first thing to help your body metabolize and utilizes glucose to fuel you. So your glucose is already higher, insulin is already high, so burn it out, use that fuel. If my car has a completely full tank of gas in the morning, I’m not going to go to the gas station and try to squeeze in more fuel. My gas tank doesn't need any more fuel; it's completely full. It's better that I drive to work in the morning time and do my errands, and then later on in the day when my fuel tank is no longer full to add some fuel to it.

So that's what we encourage patients to do next, once they've sort of mastered the eliminating snacking and eating proper meals, is just to cut out one meal and then see how they're feeling, see how their bodies respond. Usually by this point we can gauge whether or not they're going to be a quick case or a more challenging case. It's hard to predict because there are some people with very stubborn insulin resistance who were only diagnosed with diabetes a few months ago, and there are some people who are actually quite quick to respond to therapeutic fasting, even though they were diagnosed with diabetes before I was even born. So we gauge this. We use the 16/8 diet, which is where you just eat lunch and dinner, we gauge how well a patient will respond. From there we would either recommend an intermittent fasting regimen or a prolonged period of fasting. Of course that depends on the patients, how they're feeling about fasting – if they've decided to develop a good relationship with it, if they're willing to try to do a little bit more.

If someone looks like they're going to respond quite well to fasting and they're going to be able to come off their medications quite quickly and see a good reduction in weight loss in a short period of time, we would have them do an intermittent fasting regimen anywhere from three 24-hour fasts a week to three 42-hour fasts a week. So, the therapeutic intermittent fasting regimens we recommend are 24 hours, 36 hours or 42 hours. And the frequency at which we like our patients to do them is three times a week. We've experimented; three times a week gives us the best overall results. Sometimes twice a week is just not enough to give us consistent results or give the patients enough results that really motivates them to continue fasting. But three times a week seems to compensate for any blemishes they might have in their diets on the weekends or when they eat out on Friday nights. So we have stuck to this three-time-a-week rule for the last five years and we've had a lot of success with it. So we start someone out with 24 hours with the goal of working them up to doing a 42-hour fast three times a week if they're suitable to do so. We'll keep them there until they start to hit normal blood sugar ranges, normal fasting insulin levels and normal A1c. Then we start to bring them down into more of a maintenance range.

If someone looks like they're going to be more of a stubborn case in terms of losing body fat or reducing their blood glucose levels, we’ll try to work on more prolonged periods of fasting with them. This could be anywhere from doing two 48-hour fasts a week or a 72-hour fast a week to sometimes doing five to seven days. We usually cap patients at 14 days within our clinic. The odd time we have a patient that will surpass 14 days. Usually at that point we're checking their bloodwork once or twice a week, we're seeing them in clinic twice a week. So we get to know them pretty well in a short period of time. We just had one gentleman, I saw him last Thursday and he was on day 26 of a fast. And his A1c had come down from 13 to about 11, and his blood sugar levels in millimoles per liter were 14 when he started and he had finally broken the double digit barrier. So after 26 days of fasting his sugars dropped to 9. That's just a little bit below 180, I believe. So sugars were still that high and he was actually taking a little bit of insulin still. I joke with him and I say he's the sweetest man I've ever worked with, because his body is just full of sugar. And he's quite slender; it's all in his organs. It's all visceral fat.

Allan (43:15): I think there's a couple of key things here. One, this is not a protocol that you just up and do yourself. You work with your physician, because if you're on certain medications, those medications will very likely have to be adjusted at some point in there and you don't want to be in a situation where you've done something and your physician's not available to know that you're doing that, to guide you through that process. So, it is important to involve your physician. Then the other question I had was, as you're putting them into these fasting protocols, is this just them drinking water, are they taking any kind of electrolytes? I know some folks have used bone broth while they're on a fast. What is the protocol you're using most with your clients?

Megan Ramos (44:01): For people who are just looking to lose weight and for those who are trying to combat metabolic syndrome, diabetes and obesity – we do permit them to utilize bone broth – not unlimited quantities of it. If they're doing a 24-hour fast or even less, like 16 or 18 hours of fasting, we usually ask them to try to do the fast with just water, if they can. Usually bone broth we would recommend to someone who's doing 36 hours of fasting or longer, and no more than about one or two cups a day at most. We definitely recommend bone broth once a day for our patients who are doing longer than three days of fasting. That's sort of a guideline. Sometimes our patients choose to ignore us, but we make them sign a form saying they're ignoring us. The purpose for that is to prevent refeeding syndrome and to make sure that they are getting in phosphorus and magnesium and calcium when they're fasting.

But for shorter fasts, it's not much of a concern. Most of us nowadays, especially us who are obese and who are combating diabetes – we're not malnourished. We have too much excess body fat, we’re too nourished – that's why we’re struggling. For most of our patients with metabolic syndrome, we do recommend a bit of bone broth. We do let our patients have about three to six cups of coffee a day if they don't experience a glucose spike from drinking coffee. Some of our patients do, even with decaffeinated coffee, it's very bizarre. But I'd say most of our patients can consume coffee. About 10%-20% of them have quite a large glucose spike, so we'll take them off of coffee. They're allowed to drink herbal tea and water – flat water, mineral water or carbonated water. So that's what we use for metabolic syndrome.

We do treat patients with various neurological conditions and some cancer patients, and for them we focus on shorter bursts of water-only fasts. We don't do longer fasts with these patients, because we're trying to induce autophagy in these patients to help kill cancer cells and repair their mitochondrial function. We need to have some nutrient deprivation in order to induce that. We don't know if too much autophagy, too much of the cellular regeneration is a bad thing, so we do these shorter bursts of water-only fasts. And another reason why we keep them short is to, again, prevent refeeding syndrome in cancer patients. A lot of these cancer patients have already lost a substantial amount of weight and they're not as hungry, and there's lots of nausea associated with chemotherapy treatments as well. We try to keep them short, so there's lots of refeeding in between each round of fasting, just to prevent any issues when they are fasting.

Allan (47:06): Okay. Again, the book is called The Diabetes Code. I learned so much, and I do every time I read one of Dr. Fung’s and your books. It's fascinating, the tidbits here. But I think if people do follow those three basic rules… And whether you have diabetes or not, they're still really important rules for you to function by, so that you keep from getting diabetes with our current food supply. Eating real food, avoiding the processed stuff and cutting out fructose, particularly in your drinks, like apple juice, like you said, and sodas. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

Megan Ramos (47:50): People can check us out and learn more about Dr. Fung and myself and all the work that we're doing up here in Toronto on our website. Our website is IDMProgram.com. There's information about our podcast, our books (The Diabetes Code,  The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting, where you can get more information, what we're doing, clinic-recommended resources, as well as our program and how our program works, up on our website. And there's links to following both Dr. Fung and myself and the rest of our team on various social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, up on IDMProgram.com as well.

Allan (48:29): Okay, cool. This is episode 321, so you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/321, and I'll be sure to have a link there. Megan, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Megan Ramos (48:42): Thanks for having me on, Allan. It's great to talk diabetes code with you.

Allan (48:46): Absolutely, thank you.

 

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