DO THESE 4 Daily Things To PREVENT DISEASE! | Rangan Chatterjee

more than anything else it's the number one cause of disease and if you're deficient in any of those you will impair your immune system it is great it's like a vaccination and natural vaccination where you make your body the way nature meant to be [Music] 11 million people die every single year from eating bad food and not eating enough good food i think that's an underestimate and it's the number one killer on the planet more than smoking more than lack of exercise more than accidents guns violence more than anything else it's the number one cause of disease i mean think about it if ebola or zika was killing 11 million people a year don't you think there'd be a massive global collective effort to change that scientists policymakers businesses everybody'd be on board to solve these terrible epidemics but we have it right in front of us and nobody's dealing with it so so why is that mark because the stats you've just mentioned are mind-blowing you know i i hope by now most listens to this podcast are aware that actually food is not important just for our physical health but our minds our emotional health it's so many different components of our health but why are we not giving it the attention societally that we are you know on an individual level because you have spent your career writing you know best seller after the bestseller trying to empower people to make better food choices more helpful food choices for them you've spent your career seeing patients one-on-one and helping them on an individual level change their food choices and see a consequent improvement in their health that's true so you've seen that but are you or have you found like i have found that sometimes you give the best advice that you possibly can to the patient in front of you yet they then go out into a food landscape where they simply cannot or it is too challenging to make those choices that you and i would like them to make it's true i mean we live in a food system where it's super easy to make the wrong choice and super hard to make the right choice you know we're in america 23 million americans live in a food desert where they can't find a vegetable you know i met a woman from cleveland who lived in the project she said her mother wanted to feed her healthy food she had to literally take four buses on a two-hour round trip to just buy some vegetables for her family that's the world we live in we live in a world where uh 80 of the food in grocery stores is processed and contains sugar where the food we're eating is all commodities you know 60 of the food we eat is basically derived from a number of few products wheat corn and soy which is basically flour sugar and refined oils that are turned into all varieties of processed food basically if you cover the front of the package you couldn't tell what's in the box if it's a pizza or a corn dog because it's all the same nonsense and and so we we have a very tough time for people to change and that's why i realize it's not people's fault when when they're advertised food that is addictive when the food's designed to be biologically hijacking their brain chemistry and their metabolism when we know the science is so clear on this and yet we do nothing about it you know in america we have one in two people with a chronic disease and that's increasing dramatically we have you know children 40 overweight 70 of americans overweight and increasingly across the globe we're seeing the same thing as the food industry is exporting its toxic products across the globe we're seeing people suffering mental illness we're seeing people driven which is driven in part by the food we're eating and and we're still trying to solve the problem in the doctor's office yeah and the costs are staggering i mean just in america alone over the next 35 years the cost of chronic illness both direct and indirect costs is 95 trillion dollars let me just put that in perspective that's 3.1 trillion dollars a year and the entire federal tax revenue the amount that the government collects from the citizens is three point eight million so it's almost the entire federal budget that's needed to pay for companies i'm glad you put that on concepts because these figures they're so big they're so staggering that for many of us we don't even know what that means what is one trillion two trillion what does that mean let me tell you a trillion if you take 95 trillion dollars and you stack them in dollar bills up into the sky it would reach 6.4 billion miles now the the new new horizon spaceship has been traveling for 13 years to get past pluto at 36 000 miles an hour and it's only gone four billion miles so can you imagine how much money that is it's basically the entire economy of the entire world and and i guess that is what you were saying at the start that food is yes it's about health but you're making the case that it's so much more than that it's about politics it's about the economy it's about the environment it's about climate change all of these things come from food which is very powerful yeah if we figured out how to fix this money thing we'd have money for free education for everybody on the planet for free health care for social services for the needy among us we'd be able to create a very vibrant economy in society rather than being burdened by this food-caused epidemic of chronic disease it's kind of as if on one level we've got this the wrong way around we're accepting the food system the way it is and saying okay that's the food system we need to pour more money into this system because it's not working you know in the uk the national health says we need to pour more money into the national health service but actually no it looks so you know we're both interested against the root cause of our patients problems but actually the root cause of many of society's problems from what you're saying also food is foods yeah let's go into it so we've got the chronic disease epidemic we've got the economic burden let's talk about some of the social justice issues around this yeah well i think what will tie in really nicely there is is something you said which is i realize that for many of my patients it's not their fault now i think that was really poignant because when people talk about healthy food choices a lot of people on social media a lot of people in the media will still think it is the person's fault they know what they should be doing they're simply not following the advice they need more willpower they need to get a grip of their life it's not good enough but i guess what you're saying is it's not their fault why do so many people think it is their fault and why do you think it's not their fault well that's a great question so the reason people think it's their fault is because we've been told by doctors nutritionists our governments and of course the food industry that all calories are the same that calories in calories out exercise more eat less you'll lose weight and if you don't do it it's your fault that all calories are the same it's just about moderation and that you know 20 ounce soda with 250 calories is exactly the same as eight half cups of broccoli with 250 calories that i mean even a five-year-old can get that's ridiculous but that's exactly the message out there and when all calories the same then you know there's a sense of well just you know control yourself right control yourself it's your fault but the truth is we know from the science that not all calories are the same and ultra processed food calories affect the body the brain and metabolism very differently so what are ultra processed foods for people who are listening to this it's pretty much everything in the supermarket in the middle aisles it's packaged food it's it's refined foods it's white flour it's white sugar it's high fructose corium trans fats all the food adders the chemicals that are in food when you buy a package of processed food it's basically what's made by the food industry it's the opposite of whole foods right yes i mean i make it really simple when i teach in churches i say you know it's really simple to know what to eat leave the food that man made eat the food that god made did god make a twinkie no did god make an avocado yeah does it have an ingredient list it's probably not good to eat now of course there are some foods that are simple and greenless sardines olive oil and salt or tomatoes water and salt or you know there's stuff that you can buy that's canned or packaged that is real food but most of them are not and what's true and this is this is this is validated with over in 300 interviews with food industry insiders whistleblowers food scientists that was done by michael moss these foods are designed to be biologically addictive they have craving and experts that work in taste institutes to create the bliss point of food the quote bliss point of food designed to create what they call heavy users these are their internal terms that they use within the food industry they know actually how to create that perfect mouth feel that perfect brain hook where your brain is literally addicted so it's like if i said to a patient listen i want you to hold your breath under water for 10 minutes i'm going to give you 5 million dollars darn right they're going to want to do that but they won't be able to do that right and it's the same thing when we're eating these foods they alter our brain chemistry and our hormones in a way that affects our ability to control our behavior and if you if you shut that off it changes everything so i'll just tell you a quick story about this woman janice who came to our center um at the center for functional medicine in cleveland and joined one of our groups and she was 66 she had type 2 diabetes she demanded insulin for 10 years she had a body mass index of 43 which is very overweight 25 or less is normal 30 is obese she was 43. she had high blood pressure heart failure kidneys were starting to fail her liver was starting to fail and she was on a boatload of medications blood thinners blood pressure medications cholesterol meds diuretics you name it she was on it and her whole life i mean she's a very educated woman but her whole life she had never learned about food she grew up in a home that all they ate was packaged and processed food she grew up in a home where they didn't cook and she was just focused on her career and her life and was doing really great things but was really on her way out uh and we just literally put her on a whole foods anti-inflammatory detoxifying diet basically similar to the 10-day detox diet the book that i wrote which is very low in starch and sugar within three days she was off her insulin in three months she was off all her medications her blood sugar was normal her a1c went from 11 to 5 and a half which as a doctor you know is extremely dramatic and i mean that just to putting concepts of people listening that's from being a very very poorly controlled type 2 diabetic to not actually going into the pre-diabetic range actually into the normal range yeah and then her heart failure which by the way heart failure never reverses in conventional medicine you can manage it with medications her ejection fraction was 35 if it's under 30 you're headed towards a heart transplant and it went up to 50 after her three months and her kidney failure which was on her way to dialysis reversed just using the power of food and putting her in a group setting where she was given support and education and knowledge wow i mean that is so inspiring and she lost she lost over the course of a year 116 pounds and now has her life back and is off all medication and saved about 20 000 in co-pays for her medication and i don't know what her insurance company was paid yeah i mean mark you have got countless stories like that because you have been talking about using food as medicine for years now you know i remember before i even got into this uh way of thinking you know i was reading blogs that you'd been writing and and thinking wow this is incredible i wonder if that will work if i try that yeah you can see how impassioned you are talking about this but you know you mentioned the addictive qualities of foods and i think it reminds me of a conversation i had recently on the podcast with professor felice jacker uh you probably you may not know her but you'll be familiar with her work she was in charge of the first randomized control trial the smiles trial that was done in australia to look at um whether diet can uh you know can improve depression depression yeah the first exactly 67 patients so she she showed that the group who changed their diet to a modified mediterranean diet after 12 weeks had above a 30 remission rate compared to only 8 in the control group which is social support and when i spoke to online podcast i also mentioned to her that my cousin uh who's in his late 20s he's now working he drives to work every day in his car and he says when he's driving home after a day after a busy day's work there is one roundabout in particular where there is a kfc yeah and he says i can smell the food every time i go through that roundabout and i can't always resist i will often succumb to that smell so put his windows up in the recirculation button on his car so he doesn't yeah but what's interesting is that you mentioned the taste of these foods is formulated in such a way that they they almost have that sort of addictive quality to them not almost actually measurable on brain scans looking at the part of the brain that's affected just like heroin or cocaine it's not it's not an emotional addiction it's a biological addiction wow do you know much about the smell of these foods whether it can do similar things i bet it can i mean i i've been succumbing it sometimes like yes i had a very stressful trip and i was coming back from somewhere and it was i was my flame was delayed i was gonna get at two in the morning and i'd see patients the next day and i thought sorry for myself and there was a cinnabun stand and they blow that like i think they have a family they blow the smell towards you and i just went had a cinnabon but yeah it was terrible i felt horrible after yeah but but you're just showing that we're all human we can know as much as we want about the right food choices yeah you clearly know about the right food choices but even you are susceptible when life gets tough when you're stressed when you're tired if the food environment around you is blowing out that smell is um you know tempting you with their offerings ultimately it's gonna be very hard to make those good choices that's why we have to change the food system that's why this book food fix is for me such an important part of how i think about the world now and i think about yes you know it's it's about obesity and diabetes and chronic disease but also it's about mental health as you said and even in our kids you know we see our kids not functioning well one in 10 kids have attention deficit 40 of our kids in america overweight in school we have uh increasing amounts of performance issues we have what we call an achievement gap you know we're 31st in the world and in education math and reading and so forth worse than vietnam and and the reason is because it's affecting our kids brains and their cognitive function this is well documented these kids are nutritionally deficient and the kids who grow up in poor environments or don't have adequate high quality nutrition their brains are 10 smaller their iq points seven points lower their we've literally lost millions of iq points in our children you mentioned kids who are growing up in poor environments so these deprived communities and we know full well what the research says about people living in in areas of lower socioeconomic status is the way the food industry is set up does it unfairly penalize those with the least in society so when we look at the social injustice around food it's massive you know when you look at how the food industry targets porn minorities it's disproportionate so they're targeting them with more ads and more marketing and they're providing their communities with more of these foods such as soda and processed food and it has a big impact on them african-americans are 80 more likely to get diabetes they're you know four times more likely to get kidney failure they're three and a half more times more likely to get amputations and and these communities are being targeted by the food industry in direct ways and and then there's accessibility they're living for environments where there's no grocery stores whether you know convenience stores and and no produce stores yeah so so for seven years mark i worked in a place called oldham in north manchester in the uk and it was in right at the center of oldham and the practice was in quite a deprived area what most people consider a deprived area most of my patients were uh you know were certainly on very low incomes many were working two jobs but what was interesting is these guys really cared about themselves and their families they were trying to make the best decisions and i think it's really important to highlight this because i think a lot of blame gets put on people who are totally trained who are struggling with their health and are making certain food choices but i saw firsthand how like for example for example i would usually bring my lunch into work with me on the rare occasion where i forgot to bring it sometimes i think okay i'm just going to go and walk and buy something it's certainly it's not like santa monica where we're recording this podcast which is probably the wellness capital in the world where it's super easy to buy something healthy yes right i would walk for about a mile in diameter around that practice and i struggled to find anything because there were there was at least seven or eight fried chicken and kebab shops with big signs on there saying something like you know one pound 99 eat as much as you can you know that's what two pounds that's what maybe about three dollars you it's very hard to compete with that and i thought i thought i can give them the best advice i possibly can but they're moving into an environment where it's simply too difficult day in day out to make those healthy choices in addition they they i found were very trusting of the government and the supermarkets so when i explained to them about certain breakfast cereals that they were having in the morning it was all sugar yeah they were shocked yeah and they said what dots yeah but why they've been sold in the supermarkets there's a picture of you know heart that says hearts healthy on it because there's no fat no no but what's interesting for me mark is that these guys were trying their best yeah they literally were shocked when i was telling this information so when we think that everyone knows this stuff now they don't and it is these deprived areas which are getting hit the hardest absolutely i remember when i was in helping with this movie fed up which was released a few years ago about the effect food industry and sugar on the health of our nation there was a family that i worked with and they lived in one of the worst food deserts in america they were very overweight the father was 42 already had kidney failure on dialysis from diabetes at 42. the mother was severely overweight the son was severely overweight at 16 had almost diabetes and struggled and they lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability they were you know trying to lose weight because the father couldn't get a new kidney until he lost 40 pounds but they didn't know what to do and they were eating all this stuff that they thought was healthy like cool whip because it had zero trans fats which is basically all trans fats and sugar it just basically threw a loophole in the government that allowed them to actually say zero trans fat they had processed salad dressings they used iceberg lettuce they didn't never knew how to cook they didn't have any utensils they didn't have knives cutting knives they didn't have cutting boards so i said well rather than me giving you a lecture on you know how to eat healthy let's just go into your kitchen let's get some groceries and make simple food we had turkey chili we made a salad from like real lettuce and real vegetables and olive oil and vinegar dressing we roasted some sweet potatoes with some herbs we stir-fried some asparagus they didn't know how to do any of that they know how to roast they know how to saute they don't have nothing and they what vegetables they had were canned green beans and iceberg lettuce and that was pretty much it everything else was from a box or package and they really didn't know and i said here's what it's going on and i took everything out of their cupboard i showed them everything i covered the like front of the boxes and said what is this they couldn't tell by looking at the ingredient list i said it's all the same stuff just in different size shapes and some colors and and they were so eager and they i said let's cook a meal together so we sat together we cooked we talked we had fun they loved the food it was delicious and i said look i you guys can do this here's a cookbook here's a guide on idiot eat well for less you know good food on a tight budget and i didn't know what was going to happen in the first week she texted me back we lost 18 pounds as a family within a year the mother lost about 100 pounds the son lost 50 gained it back by working at a best food restaurant which uh is only place to work down there but eventually got his act together he lost 138 pounds he asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school and now he's in medical school wow you know which is just staggering and amazing and we have you know the ability to actually do this if people understand what's going on but most people don't understand that they're being taken advantage of that they're being targeted the system is set up for them to fail and and it's not an accident you know we have sort of alluding to the reason we have these policies is because the food industry controls the government uh they spend half a billion dollars just on our farm bill in the us which is controls our food and ag policy there's a hundred percent of the senate and house ag committee members are on the take from big food and big ag in terms of campaign donations um who do you think they're gonna support corporate interests or citizens and it's really unfortunate the the uh the policies we have are so destructive i'll just go through them one you know we we support the growing of commodity foods corn soy and wheat which gets turned into processed foods so we make it cheap to have processed food it's high fructose corn syrup i mean the vice chairman of pepsi said when i asked him why do you use high fructose corn syrup he said because the government makes this too cheap for us not to use it and i said you know we we have policies that allow unlimited marketing of junk food to our children and the rest of us where it's proven to cause harm we'll uh the fda makes food labels the federal drug food and drug administration they're so confusing that the average person can't understand them and doesn't prohibit the use of toxic chemicals that are used in our food supply which are mostly banned in europe things like bht and other things we have policies that support food stamps in other words not only helping grow the food that's the bad food but then we provide it to our poor with 75 billion dollars a year in food stamps seven billion of which is soda and coca-cola's major source of american revenue twenty percent of it comes from food stamps that is so they're the biggest welfare queen could you for for a lot of my uk listeners could you explain what food stamps are yeah food stamps basically food assistance if you're poor and they're 46 million americans who need food support because they're basically you know it's like a card credit card that you can go buy food with uh and they can't afford to buy food so the government gives them money to do it but it's all processed food and one in four children in this country depend on food stamps so so it seems seems maddening this because on one hand you've got potentially the government doing a good thing which is okay you can't afford food we're gonna help you but with the other hand they're supporting if i understand this right they're supporting completely the wrong food choices or the unhelpful food choices so they could keep the food stamp system but encourage whole foods to sell processed foods and then suddenly you're helping these communities out and supporting their health absolutely and it's been shown you could save billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths by incentivizing good food and and de-incentivizing bad food both you and i have spoken to dan buettner on our podcasts um the chap who has studied extensively these so-called blue zones around the world these areas of um high longevities these longevity hot spots and what's what's striking about that is that a lot of people are you know you know debating what are the various components of that but one thing that seems to be really consistent is that the environment is set up in such a way that it makes the healthy choice the easy choice yeah right and right you mentioned a statistic something like if you if you serve healthy food in a prison yeah it what it was 50 something percent basically we're looking at you know you talked about the smile study about the effect of food on depression and we know mental illness is really driven by a lot of nutritional deficiencies in in violence and behavior change we don't really think about it that way but in prisons they've done randomized trials where they put half the group on a healthy diet half the group on the same prison diet who were violent criminals violent in prison and they reduced violent crime by 56 and if they added a multivitamin they reduced it by 80 and i remember once coming home from i mean coming into my office at work and there was a letter hand written letter that was from a prisoner in prison who said dr hyman i read your book in prison i changed my diet and i don't know how he did it in prison he said i realized my whole life as a violent criminal was because of what i was eating i feel like a completely different person so that is powerful isn't it that is so incredibly powerful to see the power of foods yeah there is something going on in the uk at the moment actually which i'm just going to bring up here and a lot of people are getting quite annoyed and very frustrated with the term food as medicine or food as medicine it's really interesting yeah and i know they have a quarrel with hippocrates huh yeah i know my thoughts on it and i think they're probably very similar to yours but maybe it's just be a nice little offshoot here to to touch on you know these stories you're mentioning the smiles trial this prisoner who wrote to you all the countless case studies you've got and i've got um you know is food medicine absolutely i mean there is no doubt about it i'm william lee just wrote a book called eat to beat disease who's a harvard uh uh physician yeah i'm not ready i've seen it everywhere i'm not actually ready it's really brilliant but he he showed a slide and there's very sophisticated analyses testing food components compared to drug components so a blood pressure drug a cholesterol drug you know heart failure drug whatever the drug is and looked at various food components and how it compared in terms of the effectiveness using very sophisticated models for testing these in in biology and they found that almost every single time food beat out the drug in terms of effectiveness wow and what food is is far more than calories as i was talking about not all calories are the same that's the biggest myth that's perpetuating everything because in in the fast food world if all calories the same it doesn't matter if it's kfc or soda or french fries as long as you balance your calories doesn't matter what you eat that's not true because food is information so we know that food influences the body in multiple ways one it changes gene expression you literally can turn on or off genes by which you if you eat broccoli you can turn on genes that help you detoxify and produce glutathione right if you eat green tea drink green tea you increase the level of catechins which have the ability to detoxify heavy metals and activate various enzymes if you if you eat the right foods you can balance your hormones if you eat the wrong foods you eat too much insulin your testosterone goes down if you have too much sugar be eat the right fats it's the opposite if you look at what it does to your brain chemistry it can either hijack your brain chemistry it can make you calm and peaceful in your mood it can change your microbiome you literally have trillions of bacteria in your gut that control almost every function of your body and when you eat the wrong foods you grow the bad ones that make you sick and when you eat the right foods you grow the good ones that make you healthy so literally with every bite in real time you're changing your biochemistry your physiology your genetics every single minute of the day yeah yep you're absolutely right i mean it is that powerful i mean this is not in my opinion by the way this is just hard science yeah and i would extend that out of course we're talking about food but but even sleep there's a there's really good studies showing that a single night sleep deprivation changes the expression i think of over 700 genes you know that if you haven't slept well uh you your the genes are actually predisposed to inflammation the pro-inflammatory genes get turned on and the anti-inflammatory ones started getting switched off so our lifestyle literally is medicine it's not just prevention of uh health problems it can often be used as the treatment as well and that's something that i think is still not recognized enough it's still it always comes down to prevention and of course prevention is better than cure but you can use lifestyle a lot of the time as treatment as well as like the story with janice i mean we weren't preventing her heart failure preventing her diabetes preventing her high blood pressure we were treating it with food and with lifestyle so yes food is medicine exercise is medicine sleep is medicine stress reduction is medicine you know connection and love is medicine yeah these are all medicines and that and they work well better and most importantly this is the medicine we need primarily for the health problems of the 21st century yeah that's the key maybe 30 40 years ago you know what maybe we didn't need these things as medicine in the same way maybe our conventional opinion of medicine like a drug that we prescribe you know if you've got an acute problem and you come in with that you know i can understand where that rationale has come from but the health landscape of the us of the uk has changed dramatically so we now need these lifestyle tools as are medicine by the way twice as many people die from chronic lifestyle diseases as infectious diseases not just here but globally yeah so in africa they're suffering the double burden of malnutrition and obesity i mean exactly it's slightly ironic in many ways and it's i think not calling food medicine i think is doing our patients a disservice because then it's not put on the same level or a higher level than let's say the pharmaceutical drug that we might have to offer and i think that's the danger when we don't talk about it in these terms i mean listen what happened to jess there's no drug on the planet that can do that there's no drug on the planet that can reverse your need for insulin in three days or can reverse your heart failure or it can reverse your kidney failure they just don't exist yeah and food can do it and i've seen it over and over again i may sound like a crazy man but the truth is this is actually what the science shows is actually what people who are using food in this way see all the time well you know you don't sound crazy you know what you sound like you sound like someone a little crazy who has been practicing medicine for many years how many years now 32 years of seeing tens of thousands of patients you have seen firsthand the impact and literally you just sound someone to me who's just very passionate you've seen it you've seen the structural problems and you want to take on something that not many people are taking on you're not writing another book um you've written many great books but this feels very different to me this is taking on the political structure the economic structure you're looking at food in a different way and i think that's very very important and i want to thank you for that because i think it's very important that this sort of message gets out there coming back to systemic change and we talked about making the food environment easier and we're talking about prisons i want to talk about schools so i'm a father as you are i've got two young children they're both at primary school at the moment and what's interesting for me is that while my kids are a bit younger you know they're currently nine and six i was okay at sort of i won't say controlling but i could i could sort of control in many ways you feed them breakfast before what they're eating yeah and as my children are getting older particularly my son now who's nine and he's been exposed to more and more things it's getting harder and harder so this may be controversial to some but i'm going to share my view on this so on the final day of school last year before the summer break a lot of the teachers brought in haribos for the kids what's that uh so harry bows are a very popular food mate certainly in the uk of sweets uh candy basically i don't know if they're here or you must have an equivalent here yeah these are bags of sweets that are very very common now the reality is my kids don't eat that stuff because i've never given it to them um now you know a lot of people will probably say well i've you know that's too brutal you need to expose them to this sort of stuff and you know i like all parents i'm trying to do the best that i can this is what i consider to be the best decision maybe tom will tell that i was wrong but i'm certainly trying to do the best that i can we've given them more junk food no but it's about trying to teach them a balance and i just think the norm in society is so skewed away from health at the moment that fitting in with what is quite a sick society i don't think necessarily is biologically normal i don't think it's that the right thing as i'm trying to protect my kids as much as possible now jamie oliver has been involved with trying to change various things in the uk i helped someone this last campaign about junk food advertising and i think that's something that is different in europe compared to america we do have some regulation around that maybe it's not perfect but there is something still there now at the last meeting i was down at in jamie's office where a lot of opinion makers were there we were we were discussing this this whole idea of schools being a safe zone yeah came up and for me i really like that something i've been talking about for years that that essentially a school or a hospital or even a prison right but but let's get back to schools particularly schools either schools should be the model educationally but also health-wise i genuinely don't see why there is a case in 2019 and 2020 why when we're facing this chronic disease epidemic when in the uk one in three kids leave primary school to go to secondary school the age of 10 or 11 are either overweight or obese i find it very hard to justify the case now where any school should be serving these sort of uh these sweets sugar sweetened beverages packets of sweets because what that also does is it normalizes the food it allows us to start associating reward and doing well with sweet food and you know what i had difficult conversations with my son my son said to me daddy why is everyone having a haribo at school and you've been telling me this isn't very good for my health but why is why is everyone giving it out and so what does that do this is another problem which is not getting spoken about enough mark is that if you are a parent who is trying to do the right thing with your children you are then you're then making your children social outcasts because they're not engaging in a society that is actually engaging in a lot of unhealthy behaviors i'm confused help me out well you know i don't know what it's like in the uk but in the united states schools have been infiltrated by the food industry eighty percent of schools have contract with soda companies fifty percent of schools sell brand name fast food at lunch mcdonald's burger king domino's pizza in schools in schools i mean i i don't know thomas in the uk if anyone knows about it please tweet me and mark and let us know we'll let us know on instagram it'll be super interesting i went to a school but i'm not aware of that i went to an underserved school in cleveland and um it was a poor african-american hispanic school they 43 of kids are absent one percent one percent by the time they graduate are qualified to go to college i walk down the hall there was a young girl very overweight one hand she had a 32 ounce like a liter slushie and another 32 ounce or a liter soda in the other hand and you know these schools have fast you know food in them and they have deep fryers and microwaves in the kitchen i walked through the kitchen there was not a stove you couldn't cook food it all came out of boxes packages processed food burgers fries clearly this is a problem it's probably for that health but but there's advertising at school so that in the bathroom stalls there's like coca-cola and i mean it's everywhere in the city where i see the problem mark is that yes that's bad for their health but i think the problem's deeper than that because what that does is it almost ingrains the kids of course in a certain way of thinking while they're young absolutely that's the science of what they're doing and they're deliberate and intentional about it and there are schools that are fighting back there's for example a friend of mine who's created a program with the schools to rehab the kitchens to get local chefs to create great recipes that are within the school lunch budget and the school lunch guidelines and has revolutionized the boston city school district and the mayor is now involved and they literally have transformed schools and getting these kids eating real whole healthy food that they love what about the parents who say that actually our kids should be allowed to be sweet treats at school it's too draconian not allowing them to have this at school what what is your view there maybe they should just give them a few lines of cocaine in school along with their lunch or a little heroin booth there where they can get a shot of heroin i mean listen the science is so clear that these foods are harmful they're deadly they're addictive why would you give them to your kids yes you can have a sweet treat yes you can have sugar of course but make it from real food not ultra processed food that's going to hijack your brain and your metabolism you say that everyone sh would benefit from taking a cold shower every day why is the cold so powerful the cold without a doubt very directly very effectively very strongly is able to tackle our the biggest health problem in the world which is the cardiovascular related diseases and uh we have a a uh uh this the the organ which is called our skin and we never expose it to natural elements and it is built to be able to still to be uh to be stimulated the electroreceptors thermoreceptors they are all in the surface of our skin that directly goes when we take a cold shower like an electrical jolt through our spine to our the deepest part of our brain the brainstem it's being alive oh yeah the shocking experience that you are surviving that is a great way to not only give a jolt to a say electroshock to your brain for people who are into depression this is great you just take the cold shower and you depression is going to be depressed so that that is one the other thing is and we got all of us we have 100 000 kilometers like is 70 000 miles of vascular little channels capillaries arteries and veins hundreds more like hundred thousand kilometers that is a lot that is like two and a half times the world is in each and every one of us they contain millions of little muscles and they help the blood flow going through but not if it is in a condition after we have lived been living with clothes all the time which is a destinative behavior and which makes the muscle tone go low and who has got to compensate for that that is our heart our heart is pumping more than it should it's pumping more because it tries to get the blood flow full of oxygen the nutrients and the vitamins to the cells and it is not able to do that you weaken yourself because you are in stress and that stress and that creates oxidative stress through a continuous presence of cortisol and that is when the heart rate goes up that is normally done when there is danger to pump the glucose through the body and the adrenaline that is danger now it is danger because we have a weak condition within our vascular system maybe not when you are young still but when you are 30 35 40 it begins really to wear out a cold shower stimulates all the vascular uh muscle tone and thus the blood flow will go better to the cells heart rate goes down with 20 to 30 beats a minute 24 hours a day and the energy is being fat the energy processes the metabolic uh mitochondrial processes are being fed with all the oxygen nutrients vitamins all what is needed you get plenty of energy so when you take a cold shower a day it does not only keep the doctor away as a saying also the doctor is doing it and it because it is great it's like a vaccination and natural vaccination where you make your body the way nature meant to be with a great blood flow which doesn't know inhibition fears blockages sclerosis or anything like that because it's flowing there is no cortisol no oxidative stress going on this is the way nature managed to be everybody in the world should take the damn beautiful cold shower a day it is not difficult and the investment is by far the outcome you get so much more energy and so much more peace because the stress will go out of your body we can think of muscles right everyone understands muscles and they know if you go to the gym and work your muscles they will grow stronger so as you were describing that about cold showers i'm thinking we live these comfortable lives we have temperature-controlled houses if we go out we don't want to feel hot we don't want to feel cold we put on our jackets and our fleeces so our blood vessels are never in some way you could say i've never been exposed to those sort of extremes where our body then responds and adapts and i guess having that cold shower is an intentional way of providing i guess like a helpful dose of stress to the to the vascular system which will cause it to to grow back stronger is that is that a fair analogy absolutely absolutely the blood flow is going to be better the muscle tone is going to be better the heart rate goes absolutely down uh absence of uh cortisol presence thus oxidative stress and uh yeah sleep is better anything is better the hormonal system is the endocrine system is being fat a lot better it's all about the blood flow the blood flow is everywhere in our body only we cover up our bodies and thus actually we suffocate our body we it's breathing the body needs to breathe and the cold shower does it it compensates for our covering up the rest of the day and we get great amounts of energy back if someone's listening to this and thinking okay when i see what you're saying i i can't take it i i you know i get cold a lot you know i i it's too cold for me what would you say to that person the people who have a low energy because when it's cold they feel sensitive is because the maintenance of their body is at work at that moment and it takes all the energy at that moment to maintain a normal uh a core body temperature and for the rest they feel like shivering because there's no energy left take the cold shower i know this for thousands of people with problems with the cold having low energy levels and uh being sick a lot of times because of the lowering energy it's a it's a lower alertness of the immune system after taking the cold showers suddenly they burst with a lot more uh energy they don't become sick anymore and it's all logical because that muscle tone is back and with that the oxidative stress goes out you get more energy so you will never feel cold anymore taking the taking the cold shower is a hormetic stress uh exercise yeah a hormetic stress which actually is positive stress exercise which neurologically at will makes you able to control your body whenever you get stressed out in any shape could be emotional stress mental stress physical bacterial viral it does not matter now at will because you are the one who goes consciously into the cold shower you learn to change your neurology your power of will against any stressor the cold is only a mirror the cold is a way to enter into the stress mechanisms inside of the brain i know you want it uh only we have this paradigm in our society that and that is from the prehistorics when it was called outside that was the enemy and it's still built in this this primal adversion aversive uh feeling of hey cold out there no we have to win out there no the cold can be a positive stressor to like a vaccination it's like a vaccination it feels very much as though with that intentional dose of stress each morning or each evening you start to build up that immune system resilience that vascular resilience that stress resilience which is going to help you for the other 23 and a half hours of the day and and that it feels like an exactly exciting practice that we can do but then you just mentioned a phrase and it's as i was um i was reading your book this morning and you said in there's there's a phrase in it that you just mentioned which is the cold is a mirror and i stopped i put my drink down and i read it again it was one of those phrases that makes me stop and just think and i think wow that's so profound because i was then thinking ah so if you're someone who doesn't like the cold teaching you something about what else you don't like in life it's teaching you about your resistance to certain things i i don't know i mean i wonder if you could expand all that i think that's a really interesting perspective the cold is a mirror oh yes the cold is a mirror it shows you how your physiologically not only also mentally spiritually are uh in in a lockdown when you go into the cold showers suddenly it locks down you you are paralyzed and and it could be very much that it has got to do with a traumatic experience in the past that it has psychosomatically has set in and you think it is the cold i don't like the cold no you gotta solve something because that all trauma is coming to the surface when you take a cold trigger which takes away your normal conditioning you have to learn to let go and that learning to let go at that moment is so beautiful because very soon after you go into the culture suddenly you feel oh i can do this i can't even sing i can make a dance and wow and i feel so great yes that is the nature of trauma blockages if fears our uh our concept of what uh uh or what the cold is it is a great way to get into the depth of who you are and what you are if you learn about the cold and you see you can learn to let go therein then suddenly you will see that you are ready for any stressor like you look in the mirror in the morning do i look right yeah maybe this air a little bit this way and nice ah good yeah i'm ready so if you take the cold shower you are going to be ready for any kind of stress in the world and that could be uh soliciting for a job or get a big deal or a marriage or you want to ask your your future wife would you please marry with all your brilliance of being and all that you got within the control because you learn to tap into the the fullness of your blood flow the fullness of being by going into the cold shower you break the conditioning and you step out into the fullness of your whole being and then suddenly the flow is there and that becomes one with who you are what you are in your consciousness because in the end the consciousness is that what they say is still 16 we showed hundred percent 100 it's it's like a little baby in your hands there's nothing wrong with the baby it the fee the legs there's nothing wrong with the baby it's beautiful baby but it is still not able to walk it takes a little time to neurologically set it takes a little time to neurologically set the access and uh linking up into all the parts of our brain but that's the way nature meant us to be to learn to walk spiritually strong being brilliant and full bloom and realized the soul as it is the purpose of our life that's a cold shower yeah that's a mirror i mean you might be able to see uh just behind me there in the war yeah it already intrigued me i didn't intrigue you yes so for people watching on youtube uh there's i i talk to my kids a lot about this stuff but we do a bit of breathing together and i talked to him about my favorite victor frankel quotes and my daughter has summarized it there between stimulus and response as a space and in that space it's choice that's her summary of what daddy's been teaching her wow and i thought about that in the context of the cold shower you're saying and i know breathing would come into this as well but these regular daily practices help you know help grow that space between stressor and response you make that space bigger right so you can actually start to choose the way you respond to the world rather than the world kind of you know making you almost a slave to it so you're just responding and reacting to everyone around you you start to be in control of your life exactly just over a year ago uh i have mentioned this on the podcast before i i i went and did something called a swim run event where you uh you know you you're in a wetsuit and and you're trainers and you run in your wetsuit then you jump in the ocean you swim and then you get out and you run and then you swim i went and signed up for an event even though i'd never ever been in the ocean before to swim and you know maybe a hundred meters in i freaked out i was scared i had a panic attack it was cold it was you know it was in it was in the uk uh early on in the season so the ocean was still very cold i had never done it before and in that moment i you know i was scared now i did manage to overcome it and then complete the whole race which i was very very proud of um but that was cold exposure that was fear of never having been in the ocean before and i suspect now talking to you but had i let's say for two months prior to that taken a cold shower every day and done your breathing practice every day of course i'll never know but i suspect that maybe i wouldn't have reacted in that way maybe i would have been used to the cold maybe i would have had a tool to control my breath in that moment i mean what do you think yes i get people within two days even the they are 80 years of age and never have been in an ice bath and even with the heart problems like cardiac bypasses and uh yes and they tell me and i i to learn to have them at ease with feeling uh go into the iceberg breathe as i've taught them it's not difficult and then they are able to stay within two days or even winter in one day to stay like for two minutes in freezing ice water and be completely in control and this is only showing that people of any age actually innately capacitated to meet their stressor and they it's built in only we are so conditioned and so conditioned in our mindset that we panic when we do not have our control anymore while our control should be over much more inside but we never got into that it's like the house only 16 of the house you think is yours no it's all the house there is much more to me and the cold shows you could stay there in the water you completed it but it was uh at the cost of a sort of a panic moment and uh feeling uh painful uh maybe at that moment but you got through you got at that moment through your own conditioning that what otherwise you would not have survived but your conditioning got passed and then you let go and you could do it that's what you saw and so it is we have a limited con a power through our conditioned brain and then uh we are in fear with that what possibly is able to happen in our lives like stresses of any kind emotional mental uh bacterial any kind of stressor because we are too much learned and schooled that we are not able to take on those stresses and i tell now the people the cold has shown me a cold has shown me how to control these stress mechanisms inside my brain which makes me able to deal about with any kind of stress and in the end it is to get on my path to the realization of my soul and the purpose is to get through any kind of stressor coming to you in peace through observation contemplation toward the realization of my goal and that sounds far-fetched but here it is that is going to be the new paradigm where everybody is able to take on any stress and that's what we have to teach the people uh it is there guys we we found ways very accessible very effective and scientifically endorsed that enables you to take on the stress in your life much better because you will learn to have a control over the stress mechanisms inside of you and this was not before but now it's here when someone's underneath the cold water right first of all how cold does it need to be it doesn't need to be cold enough to give them a shock is the first question then the second question just to be super practical you can have cold water over your head and you can tense up and last 10 or 15 seconds if you have to but that's going to be very different than if you have the cold water and you lean into it and you relax and you breathe so for people who feel inspired to go okay all right when i'm going to try and have a cold shower what is the minimum amount of time they need what is the temperature they need it to be and is there a difference if they're tensed or whether they're relaxed and slow breathing exactly so first of all know that everybody is uh capacitated by nature by birthright to go into this stressful uh natural environment called the cold so a cold shower is called a cold shower you are able to take on any any day that that's first one to know now if you're if you are in a vascular condition which has been alienated from going into the cold stress ever then of course you have to take it step by step but it goes very fast you begin with a hot shower and then you get into the last 30 seconds of cold turn it to cold and then your uh your vascular system is very well able to in this case passively because you got into the heat of the hot shower then it works like a sauna and then have a cold dip it's passive because you got a lot of heat and so you are able to lose a lot of heat passively through taking on the cold shower but 30 seconds to begin with is activating igniting the mammary cells within you the genome expressions in the cell to adapt to the situation that's why the way the dna works so in 30 seconds it's able to be activated to give this spark of neural activity that that initiates a different neural activity that directly influences into the vascular system the vascular system and the neuro neurology are tied together and they know how to act and in the uh 30 seconds to begin with anybody can do that and from 30 seconds the other day you do 40 seconds 50 seconds up to 2 minutes in 10 days everybody is able to take for two minutes a cold shower two three minutes and at that point you are back at your natural condition of your vascular system is when you are able to get into say natural bodies of water like in the uk in wintertime and we are in the end mammals guys and it's great to feel the mammal inside because it's very powerful you know that mammals are very powerful in weather they sleep outside in rain and the cold and this and that see how far we got away from that yeah so once a day getting into a cold shower everybody is able to do and with that uh it's it the outcome is tremendous it's many books can be written just on the outcome of what a cold shower is doing physically mentally astrally spiritually emotionally it's all different bodies at work because it all relates to a great blood flow the transportation of ours the vascular system is being uptown through the cold shower so so in the winter in the netherlands if you were to go into a lake like a cold natural lake you're gonna go with no wetsuits is that right oh yeah absolutely i have wetsuits no and okay so i have no money for wetsuit so uh okay so look let's say then it's july now in the uk as we have this conversation right if i have a cold shower from now every day until winter yes right do you think i can in november or december whether here or whether i fly out to see you do you think i can also swim in a lake that's super cold without wetsuits yes always take it easy remember the breathing you're breathing we haven't been talking about the breathing yet we're coming to that we'll get to that for sure yes so uh i see you think it's you think it's possible yes absolutely i train people within two days to do incredible stuff and it's amazing because it's only two days what is that what is happening when people suddenly double their push-ups without breathing when they are suddenly able to do endurance feats and they they thought of they could not do even the half of it and then within two days it doubles what is that and then going into the cold like freezing ice water how to do that and going yes within 25 minutes up to three minutes without air in the lungs yeah that is tapping into a greater potential within yourself and that is only the start that's only the beginning yeah so i want to get to the breath but just to finish off on the cold then if you don't mind um when they're in the cold shower do they then need to do anything with their breath or you know is is there something people should be trying to do or they just need to tolerate the cold for as long as they can yes don't cramp up follow the breath don't cramp up don't cur no contraction of your muscles you can what do you do is when you really feel cold and i it's not cold right now guys the cold shower is good it's thermogenesis you are exercising the vascular system when you take a cold shower now that is great but in winter you're gonna meet your true self within the elements of nature and that is a great experience and that for that we condition our vascular system and it always goes through long out breaths this is the way you go into the cold shower and then the body is able not to get into panic not into paranoia paranoid no it's able to adapt the thermogenesis is able to do what the body is able to do if you do this then the body is not able to do what the body is able to do and then can you build up from this into let's say if you have a bath in your house you can run a bath with cold water and then you can take a cold bath as well is that is that is that like a progression along the sort of oh yes oh yes yes absolutely and listen if you if you don't make it just take on one of my and we have a free app you know we built a app yeah that app is for free so it has all what you need yeah what's it called uh i don't know what's called but it's the wim hof method yeah dot com and there is an app i never i use the app once i know together with my son and i have to say it works and i took it on i was listen to myself i did the breathing together with my voice together with my son and we had a great time but young man i don't know how i got there it was my son who activated the app on the phone so i don't know exactly but it is for free and every month we make sure we we i don't know we pay about 10 000 euros a month to empty the app and it's all for free so we want everybody to know this that health is at your choice that the breathing the cold exercises and doors by sides are fully there fully exposed so there is no confusion about it it's very clear very effective very accessible and very powerful it really is so that's about uh the cold and the breathing yeah let's go to breathing yes let's move to breathing i mean before we do could we just say the cold if all you do right is take a cold shower each day and you do nothing with your breath right even that i'm guessing will have some benefit but the benefit is magnified if you also do the breathing is that right absolutely absolutely here comes in the power of the mind because once you learn to control your breath going into the cold shower you enter into changing a a getting a hold on the stress upon the body through holding your breath to stay on with the breath and with that you only it's the beginning of getting into the stress mechanisms inside the brain and then the unlocking of the potential to neurologically control the stress mechanisms of your brain is beginning and it can go very fast can go very fast that you learn to control what you could not control in the past which then created fear instead of confidence now you will learn to have confidence because your brain now is able to be uh entered into these stress mechanisms to activate it whenever you need it it's like instead of being helpless suddenly you have a gun in your hand you are powerful you are powerful against the stressor coming in i'm i i'm not into war guys and uh i'm not a cowboy i'm into peace and bringing peace is bringing a true confidence that you are able to uh uh to confront yourself with any kind of stressor is that is the way you bring peace to yourself because you are not on the watch out hey is it going to come oh oh my work oh this oh that all that you learn to pacify within to observe that's what the cold does and and the breathing together exponentially is a stairway to the mind and that's what we have shown it's it's quite mystic it was all very esoteric before and now it's gone and become very accessible and effective for people pretty much every chronic long-term health complaint strict condition that we have in many ways the immune system plays a central role and i don't think people realize that no no why do you think that might be i mean when i was an undergraduate and learning about the immune system it was through the lens of infection protection and that kind of is a historical thing you know from maybe over 100 years ago when the first kind of ties were made between these white blood cells and susceptibility to infection and we've just always maintained this lens through which we look at the immune system as protecting us from infection and then suddenly you start to dive into the field of immunology and you realize it's not just protecting us from infection it's doing a whole array of other things and i i kind of um like to move away from that military analogy we often have about the immune system as going out to battle off the germs because most of the time it's not doing that most of the time it's kind of like your housekeeper you know it's just taking care it's working hard it's it's learning from your environment inside and outside and it's processing all that information and it's maintaining the kind of state school in your body yeah i like that i think a lot of us do think um still to this day that oh if i get cold symptoms in november my immune system in adverse ecommerce kicks in yes to fight it off exactly but the immune system is constantly running it's constantly working yeah right now as we sit here it's working hard it's involved in so many processes you know like cells in your body have a finite lifespan so eventually they die and they have to be disposed of and special immune cells are removing those and keeping things tidy they're repairing damage when it happens even if there's no infection so last year i broke my arm but i didn't rip the skin open there was no infection getting in there but there was still signs of my immune system working hard to knit that all back together so it's it's sensing it's a real kind of uh it's like a mobile brain i think it's it's very dynamic and it's listening integrating all these signals from our environment from insiders and then reducing the appropriate response to kind of keep things in balance yeah and what's fascinating for me is that and i hope we get into this today is that it's not something passive that we have no influence over there is a lot that we can do a lot of it quite simple stuff that can positively impact how our immune system works yeah i don't know you've you know you you've you basically done a fabulous job of summarizing in your in your book immunity the science is staying well which is well worth the weed i think for anyone who's interested in learning more about the immune system and how they can use the lifestyle to help them so well done on such a great job thank you let's dive in should we should we start with food yeah yeah exactly i think that's a good place to start i put the food chapter at the end because i was really sick of seeing you know the whole immune boosting food supplement whatever being pushed on you know the media social media everything so i was kind of like people are gonna want to open a book about immunity and expect to see on like the first page vitamin c does this to your immune cell so take a vitamin c supplement or eat these vitamin c rich foods and i kind of just wanted to emphasize it's not that simple you know and and almost um make people look at the other aspects of lifestyle first before you dive into food i i just wanna i i love that you did that um that's what i did in the full pillow plan my first book i thought i'm not people are expecting this will start with food i'm not going to start yeah i'm going to start with stress because i think that's what no one's thinking about yeah but then i'm interested so you did that in your book but when the book came out yeah and you started to write you know articles or a bit of pr in newspaper columns yes i bet you or i'm gonna guess what were they wanting you to say oh definitely yeah it was all about you know my book came out in march which was you know covered pandemic you know going through the roof so all of the press and publicity was you know how can we make ourselves invincible to covet what what supplements can we take to be invincible and i'm going to let everyone down and say well you know nothing's going to make you invincible because from the dawn of time we've always had this battle with with germs you know like they're trying to infect us we're trying to keep them out we just cohabit this earth together so there's always going to be infection and a pandemic's an unfortunate situation but it's a very real one yeah i mean i'd love people just to sit with what you said there which is we all cohabit this sir together us and the bugs you know it's it's really quite profound that you know it's not i think humans have we've we've often felt i think particularly in the times that i've been around on planet earth that you know we kind of know best and we sort of we can dominate everything around us but i think we're learning well not the nature right nature is pretty powerful and they've been around a long long time and there's there's a certain urban flow there's certain dynamic we are not the only um living species in the world there's animals yes bugs and bugs no doubt we'll get into yeah bugs are not all bad there's a lot of bugs yes exactly very good 99 of them won't hurt us and they're everywhere they're you know right now as we're sitting here there's there's bugs even in the air we breathe and they're not you know causing us harm so most of them are good but there's obvious ones that come along and um you know sideswipe you like um sorry as kobe 2 has yeah uh as a sort of reminder a stark reminder that yeah infection protection is really important yeah and i think i think the the thing i would sort of reiterate to people is what i think the last few months have highlighted for us is that looking after your immune system it's really important yes and i would say i've said it a lot in the press like taking care of your immune system is for life it's not just for for covings you know suddenly everybody's really interested in it there's lots of marketing of immune boosting products you know all of the supermarkets and pharmacies were sold out of vitamin c supplements at the start of the lockdown um but it's something that we should all have been thinking of before coped because it's it's it's for the long game you know immunity is really entwined with how we age so you know if you want to live a long and healthy life we are as a population living much longer than the generations before us but we're not necessarily living better so if you want to you know i don't necessarily want to live forever but i want to be able to enjoy my years and feel well and not be sort of burdened with chronic disease and we can't bulletproof ourselves but there's definitely things we can do now that that are for the long game and when i wrote the book it was before we knew about um the current coronavirus pandemic so i was really hoping to try and get people thinking about the long game for their health yeah well you know i'm sure in many ways people if they weren't going to take it seriously before are really going to now so that would be our hope so in terms of the things people can do yeah uh if we if we sort of dive into diets and food there exactly um what are some of the things that people can do to help their immune system yeah well i mean there's the sort of ones that people often think about which is vitamins and minerals and we have a whole selection of essential we call them micronutrients so the vitamins and minerals that we need to function and if you're deficient in any of those you will impair your immune system and i think that there's certain ones that are highlighted so vitamin a the b vitamins vitamin c vitamin d vitamin e but you could sort of say that taking more than than you need if you're not deficient isn't going to make your immune system work better than it already does at its baseline but the subclinical deficiencies in our populations are not really clear it's very hard to measure you know if somebody has an ever deficiency in vitamin d you would see it clinically as rickets but if they're subclinically deficient that would sort of fly under the radar and being sub-clinically deficient is in one micronutrient is often a sign that there's other micronutrients that might not be quite at the right levels for people who i just want to clarify for people that sub-clinical so you know a lot of people are used to getting blood tests and there's a normal range and often if you are with you know out with that normal range you will be it will said you are deficient yeah um but we're learning more and more like b12 for example is a prime example for me that the normal range is so big yeah you know it's something like you know 200-ish to 700 or 800 depending on what lab you're in but for some people here at 250 although it's technically normal actually they're symptomatic with it like they can have um you know they can have all sorts of things fatigue they have confusion they can have muscle aches and i really think medicine i would say has been quite black and white for a number of years i think we need to evolve a little bit to go there's optimal yeah you know there's normal there's abnormal but there's also optimal yeah and and and i think i think that's just a really important concept for people to grasp yeah and i you know um if you're if you know have problems with any of these micronutrients the vitamins and minerals it's going to impact your immune system so it's not so simple as saying i'll take a vitamin c supplement and that's going to make me more invincible so it doesn't quite work like that um the other thing about the micronutrients is if we're low in any of those it can actually increase oxidative stress in our body so this is kind of the balance between oxidants and antioxidants and what we've actually come to realize is this can affect how badly uh an infection causes us symptoms so if you're in a more oxidative state so you're not um your imbalance of antioxidants to oxidants is out that bug if you if you catch an infection like you know coronavirus for example it can cause a much worse pathology in you and it can also cause that virus to be under a greater pressure to mutate to become more virulent so let's let's take a winter flu for example a winter flu type virus that we are exposed to are you saying then that the state of your immune system at that time potentially can influence whether you actually get sick with that infection yeah or whether you fight it off with no problem and how sick you get and whether you the environment that your body provides when that infection is inside you can shape how that infection behaves how that virus might be under more pressure to mutate or more likely to mutate because of the the environment of your body which is really is this why you can have 10 people in the same room with the same person with let's say a cold virus coughing all over 10 of them but not all 10 will get symptoms of the virus will they yes exactly and we've known this for a really long time but i think coronavirus and the current pandemic has really kind of put that under the microscope because people are like why are some people getting really really sick and others have no symptoms and this is quite commonly seen with infections that we have this huge diversity of how we respond now you mentioned oxidative stress and this balance between the oxidative stress and the antioxidant so one of you we could just make that super clear for people so what is oxidative stress exactly so we have um oxidation like things that are are produced when uh like byproducts of of our cells normally working things in our environment various different things can can cause that oxidative stress in our body and then we have our own internal antioxidant systems we have the micronutrients vitamins and minerals that support production of antioxidants and we also get antioxidants from foods and we kind of need this to be in balance so we don't want to completely extinguish the oxidative side and we don't want to have too few antioxidants because they both play roles in different ways and just being alive and functioning and going around your day yeah today is going to increase oxidative stress yeah because it's a normal it's like all these things you want it you as you say it's a balance you want that but you want enough going on in your lifestyle to balance that out yeah i think that's a good way to put it and oxidative stress is something that our immune cells do when they're fighting an infection because they want to make our body's environment very hostile to the infection so they produce all these kind of um reactive oxygen species like free radicals and stuff to try and fight off infections and make that environment hostile and then you have the antioxidants gonna quench that and bring things back to normal once you no longer need to be fighting the infection so is this why it's a good idea to eat antioxidant rich foods because it helps with this balance exactly and a lot of the minerals and vitamins in our diet are sort of co-factors in all of the processes that are involved in achieving this balance and then you have all the kind of phytonutrients so these are plant chemicals that are not considered in the recommended daily allowance like we we don't have a sort of reference amount that you should be taking uh and there's 20 odd thousands of them recorded so far so um they're kind of they're the things that plants use as their own defense system because they cannot run away when a little um you know insect comes along and tries to bite it so they'll produce their own little chemicals phytochemicals that will try and make it hostile and when we eat these they help our own internal antioxidant systems and they also have their antioxidant properties themselves so that's why we should focus on like a plant-rich diet and most of these phytonutrients are found in the pigments of different plants so something i do with my kids is that we talk about eating different colors and you know red fruits and vegetables we have leafy greens orange fruits and vegetables um yellow then even like the browns and whites like cauliflower and those kind of things um and the purples and the blacks you know they're real and that are found in berries and kind of trying to eat from a whole range of these foods rather than focusing on one particular phytonutrient like curcumin and turmeric so that's one that we commonly see in the sort of wellness arena that people take um supplements of this and i think the most sort of basic thing that you should think about is that they work in concert like an orchestra so you don't want to isolate one particular phytonutrient or antioxidants and put it in a pill and take it because you might actually be removing some of its power because it's not being consumed in situ of all the other phytonutrients and parts of your diet that help with that digestion and absorption so i think food first it's what everyone should be thinking of when it comes to their immune system trying to get your nutrition from foods so that you're not deficient in any of the micronutrients which are the vitamins and minerals and then getting all these phytonutrients which are kind of like the icing on the cake to really um nourish our immune system and they have their own natural antioxidant properties some of them are antimicrobial antibacterial anti-inflammatory and they're often considered longevity compounds so we know that we don't need a certain amount to be able to function but we know that over the course of a lifetime they're very important for longevity so and you know food first seems really simple and if you have a chronic condition or some underlying health problem then you might that might not be an approach that works for you but i think that is the best thing that we can sort of aim for i think that's a nice approach it's it's saying look there may be some value in some supplements at some time depending on your state of health but let's get the basics right first let's focus on food first and it's the pattern of your diet it's the consistency it's not what you ate this morning but what did you eat all week what did you eat all month you know maybe you had a few meals that were not the best but if the majority if the pattern overall is is strong then i think that's that's what you need to be looking at rather than getting stressed about every meal being perfect yeah that's a very empowering message i think for people because you know we are living in stressful times people do you sometimes struggle with energy or motivation to you know cook that perfect meal that they want to but your approach is saying look that's okay why don't beat yourself up if now and again you have a meal that isn't let's say what you would ideally have okay fine yeah maybe enjoy it you know don't feel guilty about it yes but try to make most of your meals as much as possible yes exactly you know natural minimally processed foods i would like i think so one of the one of the tips you're saying is colors focus on colors different colors yep exactly rather than maxing out on one color yeah you're saying go for a voice for a variety and the other thing is you know food when you focus on food first it's conveniently packaged up with other things that your body needs and one of the key things that is often not linked to your immune system but i'd say it's like massive for the resilience of your immune system is fiber so pills and and potions and whatever are not full of fiber but the fresh produce is full of fiber and people might be thinking why is fiber important for your immune system because your gut bugs the microbiota at the interface of your digestion and the rest of your body are one of the key educators of the immune system you did mention saturated fats um let's just quickly go through the macronutrients then like yeah because there was a really nice bit in the book about protein and immunity which i found really interesting um but saturated fat is is a very hot topic of conversation and uh how can i put it the twitter diets wars yes definitely you're clear up yeah i i do these days i'm just like okay i'm over it really yeah i don't find it particularly helpful um but also when we talk about saturated fat there's so many different types of saturated fat it gets quite a nuanced discussion but i wonder if you could let's talk about protein maybe we can talk about fats and carbs and actually yeah and how you see them impacting the immune system exactly so i think carbs is the quality and the quantity so these are where we're getting the fiber to feed our microbiota so um thinking of that diverse colorful produce that we're trying to eat 30 different plant foods and over the course of a week carbohydrates are fueling our immune responses and then protein i think protein malnutrition is probably globally one of the biggest factors that has a negative impact on our immune system because it's it's protein breaks down into amino acids and these are the building blocks to make so many other proteins in our bodies and the immune system is a huge sink for that because it needs you know antibodies are made from protein the communication molecule so we need protein for the fabric of our immune system exactly yeah and i think you know that's probably one of the key things like i said globally that impacts our immunity what's sort of less understood is which particular amino acids these building blocks of proteins are more or less important for different aspects of the immune system and i think that's something we'll see coming out in the next few years under this kind of immuno-metabolism field i think he beautifully addressed animal versus plants in the book where you said you know animal proteins are typically more complete yeah but plant-based proteins a lot of cultures have actually learned how to combine them yeah to give you that completeness and i thought that was a very inclusive and very empowering way because people you know people these days are choosing to eat in very different ways and yeah of course choosing how you eat is a very modern it's quite a privileged phenomenon the first place to be able to choose the dark you wish to follow yeah um but i thought it was really nice how you did that what are some of those examples of combining so i think um i think rice and beans thank you problem yeah and you find these in sort of different uh cultural diets as well and the complete proteins the complete proteins are the ones that contain all of the amino acids that are considered essential we cannot make them ourselves and then there's certain amino acids that we can make ourselves and there's some that are conditionally essential so in certain situations they become essential so most animal products tend to um you know generally speaking contain all the essential ones whereas most plant products tend to only contain some or other of them but you can piece them together and i think anyone who's switching out all animal products for plant-based uh protein sources should really make sure they get some sort of nutritional advice to ensure that they're not lacking in any of these amino acids and study traditional diets i guess or traditional cultures who eat that way you know there is a lot of kind of ancestral wisdom there that we've noticed humans before that yeah we've sort of forgotten maybe it's the human condition you know like when our parents try and tell us stuff and we're like no we'll do it anyway um and then we're like oh yes they were right that's what they were trying to tell us yeah i think we all know that yeah exactly yeah so what's the deal with fats then so fats um i think for a long time we kind of thought of fat as one thing but it's not it's lots of different things and there's the unsaturated fat so there's the mono and the polyunsaturated fats so olive oil is probably the best example of a monounsaturated fat and there's lots of um epidemiological research around why it's important for health and it has lots of these phytonutrients that i mentioned earlier included in it and my own personal bias because of my hybrid italian family is like you know olive oil is life so it's all that i use and um yeah hold my hands up to that um so it's it's something that's um really important to include uh in your diet i think people get afraid of cooking with olive oil but it's for the short-term sort of home cooking it's been shown to be stabilized by the presence of these phytonutrients so it's it's a good healthful oil to use and you know people have been using it for millennia and it's associated with some of the most healthful diets in the world like the mediterranean region um then the polyunsaturated fats are kind of interesting because you have the omega-3 and the omega-6 so some people might be familiar with these omega-3 supplements are quite popular now um and i would say if you're not eating oily fish then you should really think about an omega-3 supplement because these are they're making up the the cell membranes of our our cells but their immune system is using these as a resource to produce different um molecules that it uses to do its job and this includes production of inflammation but also resolution of inflammation and resolution of inflammation was something that was really neglected in the field for a long time it's only maybe 10 years ago that we started to understand oh it's an active process inflammation just doesn't go away by itself simply the act of having inflammation in the body having the presence of certain inflammatory cell types causes the switch to the next phase um which is the pro-resolving um resolution of inflammation which is healing and repair and this is where our immune cells utilize these omega-3 fats from their cell membrane to produce pro-resolving molecules that help dampen down this and and heal and repair the the body that that is super fascinating so you know we we were saying at the start that inflammation is a normal process you know it's but it's it's meant to be short-lived so it's meant to be there to help you find something like a you know broken ankle yeah sorry sprained ankle you don't get red hot swollen for a few days and then it resolves the the chronic inflammation the chronic unresolved inflammation that's behind you know type 2 diabetes high blood pressure yeah a lot of cases of depression all kinds of autoimmune diseases is this sort of chronic unresolved inflammation and you're saying that omega-3s help to resolve inflammation yes which is which is you know it's like it's quite nice to actually be able to draw a direct say oh that's going to help me you know in in colloquium switch it off i guess yeah to a certain and you have to also consider whatever stimulating the inflammation in the first place needs to be somehow removed or contained as well there's a lot of studies in things like heart disease depression i think probably um rheumatoid arthritis is one that springs to mind because there's you know dozens of um clinical trials now that show that high doses of omega-3 is really beneficial to the overall um patient's quality of life and you know their pain and disease management but yet the nice guidelines are still not suggesting that we treat people with this it's still that they're welcome to explore something like a mediterranean diet so for me rheumatoid arthritis is the one that holds the strongest evidence but it's just challenging to get that into clinical practice i think there's also things like allergies where omega-3s the evidence is really quite mixed but we have a sort of picture appearing where what the mother is eating when she's pregnant and the fish which is a great source of omega-3s is really important to help prevent allergies in the unborn child so again not a really strong um clinical message yet but i think that's some something that we're going to see coming out in the next few years yeah and i think you know this is one of the big problems at the moment is with how information is communicated um we can easily get over excited by certain things but at the same time i also think we put the brakes on a lot of things as well of course we often need more evidence but i also think sometimes with some things when the risk of harm is low we should really be starting to think about well look and when you when for example we say mixed evidence that implies well some evidence is suggesting it may work and some are suggesting it it's not so it could be that in certain populations it works brilliantly exactly and another population is it doesn't work at all but now we're gonna have a global recommendation that you don't do it because we don't have the evidence yeah i just don't think it's i really think we need to think about a better way sometimes to communicate somewhere else with the public it's really hard especially you know the thing with pregnant women and and fish because there's mixed messages about how much fish pregnant women should mercury because of mercury but yet we we're starting to see a picture where having omega-3s are really important during pregnancy but pregnant women might decide to not eat fish at all during pregnancy rather than the kind of gray area of you're allowed so many portions but not this fish and only so many times a week um and in which case then maybe a supplement would be suitable but that's not again it's very difficult to communicate um this kind of information into very clear public health messages it says saturated fats you have written about this in the book uh i think you cover it really well um as i say there's lots of different kinds of saturated fats and i think sometimes i i find it confusing in the literature as to it's a specific type or they often it's an animal study with a high sucrose high saturated fat diet so you can one might be confusing sort of the high sugar and the high fat exactly combination and i sort of think some people seem to do okay with a little bit of saturated fat in the context of a natural sort of more traditional diet and i think that's where and as you yourself said it it's very hard when we just go to individual nutrients and try and say good or bad exactly it's kind of a lot more nuanced yeah so we do know that saturated fat can be something that causes the gut barrier to open up more than other um foods and that in itself can cause this of transient post-eating inflammation but we also know that eating it in the context of a fiber-rich diet is going to kind of counterbalance that and i think no food is just 100 saturated fat every food has a mix of different nutrients so we're not just eating saturated fat on its own um but you can eat foods that are higher or lower in saturated fat and for some people it may be beneficial to eat a lower saturated fat diet for other healthy people maybe it's not even something that needs to be on your radar because your overall pattern is quite bad and then it also comes down to doesn't it like what's your current state of health so if you have for whatever reason had a lot of insults to your body whether it was stress poor diets inadequate movement insomnia maybe you work night shifts for for 20 years or whatever maybe at that point maybe the gut is a little bit more leaky than um than we would call physiological or normal or obstacle maybe in that context foods can start to become problematic on the background of that compared to someone who's got their their health and their microbiome yeah in a completely different state yeah exactly i really i so strongly feel that that nuance is getting lost in health communication i really think it gets lost on social media a lot of the time where things have become black and white yeah it's like and i don't know i i i am heavily influenced by my experience as a clinician seeing patients i've just realized that it's very hard to say one thing for sure that is applicable in every single situation yeah yeah and i guess that's where you know we're not going to be able to deliver personalized diets to everyone but we can help sort of nurture intuition and yeah and steer people towards the helpful sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation right now the recommendation is for most adults get seven to nine hours of sleep and to get by the way to get seven hours of sleep you probably need at least a seven and a half hour sleep opportunity i think that's what many people miss in recommendations from sort of experts they say get your seven hours of sleep so people think that means you know well if i go to bed at you know 11 p.m and i wake up at 6 00 a.m then i've got my seven hours of sleep that's not true you probably will have only logged about sort of six hours and 40 minutes and and that's that's not enough so you need to think about the sleep opportunity time as being probably around about eight hours optimally what we also know is that once you get below seven we can start to measure objective impairments in your body and in your brain as well the problem is that most people don't realize that they're sleep deprived when they're sleep deprived this is a big problem with sleep loss and you know the analogy i guess would be a drunk driver at a bar you know they've had a couple of pints maybe a few shots and they pick up their car keys and they say to you you know look i'm fine to drive home and you say no i know that you think you you're fine to drive home but trust me you're not you are objectively you're impaired it's the same way with a lack of sleep that our subjective sense is a miserable predictor of objectively how well we're doing with a lack of sleep and i think that's one of the one of the issues that i try to sort of help dismiss in terms of a notion i think the other thing that's problematic too about getting too little sleep is that your baseline level of how you think your health and your wellness is just becomes chronically low and you accept that as if that's just where i am in life this is just me this is as good as it can be and people don't realize that if you're to change something like sleep or stress or diet or physical activity there's actually a better form of you waiting on the other side of those things it just requires perhaps you know some knowledge and an invitation to go there matthew i i call this podcast feel better live more for a reason and it really just echoes what you what you just said then you know when we feel better by you know prioritizing sleep by you know looking at these other pillars that i talk about we get more out of life we're a better version of ourselves we have better relationships we have you know much deeper more meaningful interactions with the world around us when we're feeling better and i guess you would argue that when we sleep better we live more we do i mean firstly that data is very clear that if you look across epidemiological studies millions of individuals in these studies a very simple truth comes out which is that the shorter your sleep the shorter your life that short sleep predicts all-cause mortality wow and so you know i think we just need to stop and just let let that sink in for a minute depriving ourselves from sleep will shorten our life yeah yeah i mean that's the the powerful data that you know the global sleep loss epidemic that is underway right now which i believe is probably one of the greatest public health challenges that we now face in the 21st century it is a slow form of self-euthanasia that's a very powerful statement one that i absolutely would agree with um have we as a society i thought it over prioritizes the right words but um yeah let's go with overpriced as have we let have we put too much focus on the right food and the right physical activity at the expense of sleep yeah it's a great question i've thought about this a lot um i i don't think we've done it at the expense of sleep perhaps but i do resonate with your comment that i think sleep has perhaps been the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today and i think it's been left out in the cold there's probably a number of reasons for that the first is just because scientists like me are to blame what i mean is that we have not adequately communicated to the public or to medicine or to health care professionals in general how critical the importance and necessity of sleep is you know and i liken where we are with sleep with where we were for smoking 50 years ago you know all of the science was there but it hadn't trickled down into the public knowledge base or even into medicine that's what you do so great with your book is you're bringing that awareness to the general public all over the world which is fantastic and that was part of the motivation for the book you know i could see the disease and sickness and ill health that was caused by insufficient sleep and there wasn't you know um there wasn't a blueprint guide there wasn't some kind of a manifesto for sleep and so that was part of the reason to write the book but i think to come back you know to why sleep is being left out in the cold i think part of it is people like you know well at least my fault i think the other thing too is that unlike diet and exercise sleep has an image problem you know i think nobody feels ashamed about saying i went out for a run at lunchtime or you know i i went i had a great run this morning nobody necessarily feels ashamed about you know putting salad on their plate you know and making a really healthy meal but i do think people feel sometimes ashamed by saying well i i need at least eight and a half hours of sleep a night you know and sometimes i've heard the reaction of people saying really and that really has a hint in it to suggest that if you're getting sufficient sleep and i choose that word carefully sufficient then you must be lazy that you're slothful because we've tagged and we've associated this thing called necessary sleep with that luggage of you know something to be ashamed about and in fact if anything it's what happens is that people have this braggadocio attitude this almost sort of sleep machismo attitude that you're very proud to tell people how little sleep that you're getting as though it's you know a badge of honor i see that in some people not all not all people but some people so i think to change that part of the sleep discussion and bring it in to the health equation we need to destigmatize sleep uh in a way too i think those are at least two of the reasons why it's being left out in the cold yeah yeah absolutely i mean i you know i've shared this before on the podcast that a few years ago for me it was probably when i had kids actually because my kids were early risers and you know that's that's the understatement of the year that there were early risers but i realized that if i didn't alter my going to bed time i was going to be exhausted every single day which is what was happening and i sort of altered my whole sleep schedule a few years back and it's something now that i really do prioritize you know i will have a shut up time in the evening after which i'm not on my computer i'm not working i will wait because i know that if i don't do that the next day i won't be performing at anywhere near the level i want to um and it actually reminds me that that facebook conversation we had the facebook live chat we did so yeah so guys we were trying to schedule this chat for a little while and i love this here we we bought a date in and then uh matthew had to move move the time and i got an email i think from your publicist saying you know can we move this time and i thought that's 9 p.m uk time man that's really late because you know i've just i've just written a book saying how important sleep is as well and i'm you know trying to educate and inspire my audience that actually these things are really important so i actually declined your very kind invitation to do it at night i just actually asked to see if we could change the time yeah i certainly wouldn't have suggested yeah i said guys look if we chat between nine and ten and we talk about how detrimental sleep is and you know uh you know and and all the problems associated with it yet we're doing it late in the evening for my uk audience um where i'm going to expose everyone to blue light in the evening right on their devices emotionally work them up before beds i thought actually you know what let's just decline that and do it another time so i thought that was quite nice yeah that was great wasn't it yeah it was just you know for someone to embrace you know sort of uh and practice what they preach and you know and i think for the two of us you know a lot of people of course will ask me also how much sleep do you get and i will tell them that i do honestly get a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night and it's i'm not trying to be you know a poster child for sleep i'm not trying to just sort of promote the book if you knew the data as i do and as i hope people um will after reading the book honestly you just would not choose to do anything else and you know i don't want to live a shorter life and i don't want to live a shorter life that is filled with with disease or sickness and from everything i can tell sleep is perhaps one of the most democratic freely available efficacious forms of um of health insurance that you could ever wish for and as a consequence the reason i get that much is because for selfish reasons you know i just want to be alive and well for as long as possible and i think you know it's interesting hearing you say why you prioritize it you know again it's selfish is the wrong word but it's for self-preservation reasons um and one of the things i actually if i if you don't mind i know this is your podcast and you're interviewing me but talk about but i would love to just ask you the question because you know when i saw the title of of the book you know and i saw that you know there on the front cover was this word called sleep and it was on your on the front cover of your book there was this thing called sleep relax eat move and sleep and i well imagine that the first three would be there of course from you know an eminent clinician but i was surprised by the fall i was lovely excited it was wonderful but tell me you know where did that decision come from to include sleep you know where did you get the awareness from where did you get the sensitivity to sleep you know was it boots on the ground with patients was it in a medical curriculum was it personally tell me i'd love to know yeah i think matthew that's it's a great question really i mean my i guess my journey into this um i've really been keen to promote lifestyle comes from a you know a real feeling that in medicine we've lost our way a little bit now we're not putting blame on anyone yeah but but i sort of feel that the medical system is set up around acute diseases acute problems that respond very well to our magic bullet pharmaceutical interventions but the health landscape even in my career and i've nearly been seeing patients now for about 20 years even in my career i have seen the health landscape of the patients that i see change dramatically whereas now the bulk of what i see in my daily practice you know i say 80 of it is in some way driven by a collective modern lifestyles and so i've been delving deep for a few years now in terms of you know what are those lifestyle factors that i can leverage with my patients to get a better outcome and of course when i first started going on this journey it was all about food right you know it's like okay you know it's all about diet you know if we were having this chat five or six years ago i would be saying you know most of what happens to us you know most of our health determinant is is basically foods but i disagree now you know because i think when you know the science when you have seen the science um as you detail so beautifully in your book the case is compelling you can't really ignore sleep so i'm a doctor who wants to get my patients better like every other doctor i want to do this in as harmless a way as possible and i also get very tired of suppressing downstream symptoms so i want to go upstream as far as possible see what lever can i turn this can have all these downstream consequences and food is one of those things that you know food isn't just calories you know it's not just fat and carbs it's information it changes our genetic expression so it's information for the body in a similar way physical activity can change hormones can change genetic expression all these kind of things and you know so obviously um that's food that's movements relaxation is a whole piece about stress you know which you know some research is showing that 90 up to 90 of what we see in primary care may have stress as a factor which is incredible and but i always thought i was missing one piece off the puzzle and you know i would see like if we take autoimmune disease for it as an example when i see my patients i often do what's called a timeline and i look you know i say okay you've got symptoms here today but let's look at your whole life let's see what's been happening sequentially because i don't think a lot of these chronic conditions just happen overnight there's been a build up for a period of time for a period of years and i would often see with autoimmune conditions that you know just a few months sometimes just one month before the onset of symptoms i would see either either well not either i would often see a really stressful episode happen that would reduce the quality of people's sleep and then i see symptoms come on yeah there was a doctor i always want to learn from my patients so you know your question is where does this come from well primarily it's come from listening to my patients and listening to the stories that they tell me because you know you're you know one of the world's eminent researchers of sleep i love research but i also love real life what happens at the cold face when i'm seeing patients what did they tell me is working what did they tell me they're struggling with that also influences a lot of my recommendations as well as the science you know if you can marry those two together i think that's when we can make a real difference with people and i also went to a conference in uh san diego about two years ago and the whole conference was on sleep and relaxation and and res and and i think it was uh phyllis zay do you know phillips yeah yeah she gave a couple of keynotes there um and i thought god this really is wetting my appetite it's really reinforcing what i'm seeing in my practice as i say when you look at the research i thought well how can i write a lifestyle book that is that is to empower people to take control of their health and not cover sleep you know i can't do it i i just i just can't so interesting about that is you know you had you know all of this time at medical school in practice you know and it took a conference yeah you know that you you know through your own sheer interest and just my own money my own sort of annual leave to go and do this yeah because i'm interested that's where you got your sleep education you know that that strikes me as a so you know unfortunate you know i want to think i want to work with medical systems to try and increase you know a sleep education component because wouldn't it be wonderful if all of our primary care physicians here in the united kingdom were you know as sleep aware and sleep motivated as you are and i'm sure they would be delighted to receive that information you know i know i have lots of friends here who are who are doctors and you know i know that they would embrace that and would love to try and increase wellness in their patients but there's just no pathway that we've engineered in the medical system to gift them with that knowledge and dispense wellness to their patients because sleep really is the tide that raises all of the other health boats it's just as you said it's the superordinate node that if you manipulate it you know it's like the archimedes lever you pull that everything else you know can start to come into place you get the sleep but it affects your brain affects your hormones it affects your genetic expression it affects all these sort of things that we might be looking for drugs to to affect those individual pathways but you can improve a lot of them by giving your sleep yeah you know and it's no we think well that sounds almost too good but don't forget you know it took mother nature 3.6 million years to evolve this necessity of eight hours of sleep in place which i should note by the way that if you look at the data back in the 1940s the average adult was sleeping about 7.9 hours of sleep now that number here in the united kingdom is closer to 6 hours and 30 minutes in other words within the space of 100 years which is a blink of an evolutionary eye we've lopped off almost 20 percent of our sleep need you know how could that not come with demonstrable health and disease consequence so i think you know there's that component there but i love what you're saying that you know in medicine we're often or even in research and pharmaceuticals we're often trying to sort of manipulate one pathway in one area of the metabolic system on one aspect of the immune system or one feature of the cardiovascular system and you know sleep affects all of those and we can you know i'll give you an example firstly we know that after if you get a patient and you have them um sleeping just six hours for one week this is someone let's say who is healthy at the end of that one week of short sleep their blood sugar levels are disrupted so significantly that they would be pre-diabetic that you would diagnose them as being in a state of pre-diabetes just from sleep deprivation when you control all of the factors you can also speak about sleep loss and the cardiovascular system and all it takes is one hour of lost sleep because there is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time and it turns out that when you look at that data in the spring when we lose an hour of sleep we see a subsequent 24 increase in heart attacks as a result it's just incredible but in the autumn you know when we gain an hour of sleep we see a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks so the date is there on a global level it's striking you know and you can even think you know you speak a lot about um you know the immune system it's so key for our health so what do tell us what does sleep do for the immune system so firstly we can look on both sides of the coin what happens when we don't get enough sleep firstly we know that people who are sleeping five hours a night are four times more likely to catch a cold than those people who are sleeping eight hours or more striking study very well controlled study we also know that it doesn't take one week of you know short sleep deprivation one night is enough what we've found is that if you take healthy individuals and then we limit them to just four hours of sleep for one single night what we see is a 70 drop in critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells which are these wonderful sort of immune assassins that you know help decrease our you know sort of you know cancer risk yeah and help with spice infections and fighting foreign immune response flip the the sort of the side of the coin and now what we find is that when you get sleep there is a change in what we call the autonomic nervous system which is sort of this automatic part of our nervous system and that automatic nervous system is split into two branches one that is sort of like the accelerator pedal that gets us revved up triggers the fight or flight response the other is the brake that sort of calms us down and when we go into deep sleep we apply that break to the nervous system and everything quiets down heart rate decreases deep sleep is the most wonderful form of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for but one of the other things is that we see as that nervous system quiets down levels of things like cortisol drop down that stress-related chemical and it's during that time that the body goes into an immune stimulation mode and it's where essentially you're going to restock the armament of your immune army so that when you wake up the next day you can battle and fight infection what's also fascinating i love this data and this tells you just how critical sleep is to a fighting uh for our health if you look at people who become infected or you actually infect them in the experimental laboratory let's say with sort of a cold uh vaccino you immediately trigger increased sleepiness and increased amounts of deep sleep and it turns out that the infection indicates to the immune system that you're under attack and the immune system will actually signal to the sleep system within the brain we need more sleep sleep is the best battle force that we have right now to combat this assault and so that's why when you're sick all you tend to want to do is just curl up in bed and go to sleep the reason is because your body is trying to sleep you well that's an appropriate response to what's going on exactly it's bodies are pretty clever right they are remarkably clever you know again mother nature has figured this out and so she brings up this thing called sleep which i would argue is probably like the swiss army knife of health you know whatever ailment you are facing it is more than likely that sleep has a tool in the box to try and help fight it that's so key whatever ailment you're facing guys if you're listening to this whatever you're suffering from whether it's you know lack of energy on a day-to-day basis whether it's that you're worried about your risk of developing a chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes or heart problems as you get older you know what matthew is saying what professor walker is saying is that sleep improving your quality of sleep is going to help you with all these different facets it's going to help reduce your risk it's going to help increase your energy it's also going to reduce your risk of actually getting disease in the future which is just absolutely incredible if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are going to love the one that i had with professor tim spector all about foods it's right there so give it a click and let me know what you think if you snack a couple of hours before a meal your metabolic response to that meal is poorer than if you didn't snack okay just say that again i think that's really important

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 4,375

Rating: 4.9509201 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: HpVsN2h6Zz8

Length: 125min 37sec (7537 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021