DRIVING FACTORS Of Systemic Inflammation & How To REDUCE IT TODAY! | Rangan Chatterjee

these sort of conditions require a different approach and that's why life expectancy is going down and this might be causing the immune cells to act abnormally and become more pro-inflammatory cause and effect of disease is inflammation [Music] i think it really goes to what is our definition of disease so i've been a medical doctor now for you know almost 20 years i can tell you that the bulk of what i see i'd say probably 80 percent of what i see is in some way driven by our collective modern lifestyles and when we change our lifestyles in the in the right way i have seen so many of these so-called diseases disappear that's what i managed to demonstrate on my bbc show that's been shown now in 70 countries around the world i've shown things like type 2 diabetes you know vanished within 30 days a change that has proved sustainable two or three years later panic attacks anxiety gone down by 70 80 in just six weeks by making these changes chronic back pain for 30 years right once we started addressing the cause completely gone okay and and the list goes on i realized that no matter who they were no matter what the name of their disease was you know what when you make simple changes in four key areas to your lifestyle it is amazing how many of those symptoms just start to vanish you've said that this is the first generation being born now that has a shorter life expectancy than the generation before them which is pretty terrifying yeah you know in the united states and i think in the uk now as well the current generation that are being born you know have got a lower life expectancy than any previous generation before them or certainly in our recent history and that's pretty worrying actually you know i've got two young kids at home myself and and that makes me worry is what sort of world are they being born into you know are are there now issues with health that are gonna mean they're gonna be less well-off than the generation before them and i think this this really sort of plays into why there's such disillusionments at the moment with the way medicine is practiced in the 20th century right even 30 40 years ago the bulk of what we were seeing as doctors the bulk of what was coming in and people what people were complaining of were what we call acute problems they responded very well to the sort of pharmaceutical model the the one pill for every ill model so let's say you have a pneumonia for example okay this one modern medicine is brilliant so a pneumonia the overgrowth of a bug in your lung right you're coming to see the doctor the doctor says yeah this is the issue right i'm going to give you a pill to get rid of that bug and then within a week within two weeks you know your problem's gone right the model of medicine we have now responds you know what was set up in that era what we're seeing today in the 21st century is chronic disease whether it's type 2 diabetes okay which is like a modern epidemic whether it's mental health problems right in the uk right one in four people in any given year are gonna have a mental health problem um whether it's alzheimer's disease which you know as we're living longer people are now worrying you know as i get older you know how am i going to be am i going to be able to function am i going to be able to talk to my family or i'm going to start losing my brain health and my memory um so these sort of conditions require a different approach and that's why life expectancy is going down because we're we're not really well equipped to tackle these problems because these problems don't respond to a one pill for every real model you've got to change multiple things right you've got to understand and a lot of people still don't understand including a lot of the profession that these are conditions there may be a genetic tendency right you may have a genetic predisposition that is not your destiny though it doesn't mean you're going to get that condition right we know there's a um the field is called epigenetics which is basically this whole idea that you know you're born with some genes but your environment how you live your life that shapes and that determines whether those genes are switched on if they're switched off how those genes are expressed and that's a big shift actually and that's exciting because that means that we've in a huge part we've got control over what happens to us i think that's incredibly exciting so we need to start teaching our children we need to teach our doctors we need to educate the public we need to change the ethos in schools in institutions to so helping us foster a community where health is absolutely valued at the top because if it isn't right we're going to struggle in our lives so you know i've watched many of your your your videos tom and um you know when we talk about trying to make a difference trying to live a meaningful and purposeful life right health is an ingredient of that when we feel better we live more so much of the time the problems people are telling me about that the disagreements are having the family disharmony they're having often it's because they don't feel good right they're putting the wrong things into their body whether it's food they're not sleeping enough that's changing their hormones that's making them moody that's causing them to have tension with their children with their partner with their work colleagues and it all starts to add up and i've realized that often my training has taught me to suppress that downstream symptom right with a pill without actually going upstream and figuring out what's causing this in the first place and the approach i try and take on my tv show with my patients with my book it's really about saying we've over complicated health right i want to simplify it and we've overly focused on one area so obviously everyone talks about food when we talk about health and food's important right but it's not the only thing there are there are other factors that i would say are equally important that even if you'd asked me five years ago i wouldn't have known that you know five six years ago i thought it was all about food right but i've changed my mind now you might be better off saying your diet is good enough maybe the fact that you're on netflix or youtube till 1am every night and you're only sleeping five hours a night actually if you go to bed one hour earlier you will find you get more bang for your buck than trying to cut out a little bit more sugar in your diet yeah one of the most interesting things about your approach is this whole notion of lifestyle over diet as in it's it's more important than that and i thought whoa that's pretty radical and five years ago i would have said the same thing i was at the height of building quest nutrition all i i thought the answer to everything was what you were eating a hundred people meets right yeah and then my wife ends up having this catastrophic problem with her microbiome and it came on like that it went from no sense of we have a problem to our life got put on hold for a year because she just couldn't eat and she was malnutrition it was it really actually got scary at one point and i thought my wife's diet is perfect so clearly there's something going on here that i don't fully understand part of it was my definition of perfect was totally screwed up and then the other part was that there are so many other lifestyle factors talk about this notion of the threshold effect which i think is so important for people to understand yeah it's this idea that we've all got our personal threshold okay so the way i explain it if you were in my clinic with me right now and i pretty much go through this with every patient i say well let's say you were born in perfect health here right we've got this sort of personal we've got a threshold right so we can deal with multiple insults up to a point so that could be you know poor diet the fact that we don't move very much we might have had a relationship breakup which is a stress on our body we may have a job we don't like right it's all building us building up building up getting closer to our threshold that's when they get sick right what i mean by that is often a patient will come in to see me and they'll say you know doc i was fine everything's going fine and then you know i changed my job i don't like my new boss and then you know they they come down with an autoimmune illness right but when you go into their history you see things were not fine at all they you know we're very resilient as humans we can deal with lots of stresses right but something is like the straw that breaks the camel's back and and you can sort of you can find the last stressor that tips you up that pushes you over right but when you've gone over your threshold often it's not a case anymore of taking off that last stressor right often you have to go back to basics and build from scratch again it's like you know if we were juggling balls i have to say you know in your life when things get busy you can juggle one ball two balls three balls four balls and then someone chucks a fifth one in and what happens everything falls down and you know we we we always look for what's that one thing that it is can i give you a case story right right this is um a very typical patient of mine but this is a it was it was a guy in his 50s and he's 52 year old guy right he's got type 2 diabetes now he's a successful businessman he's go go go all the time right he's you know working hard working weekends he's always on his email right and he got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes so he saw on tv in the uk he saw my bbc show the first series and he saw what i did with that type 2 diabetic patient so he uh drastically reduced the refined and processed carbs in his diet okay and then he'd read some other blogs and he really got obsessed with low carb and he was getting some changes right his budget was coming down but then it plateaued and he was getting frustrated because he kept reading more and more blogs he kept lowering his carbon sake and and he just wasn't getting anywhere so he you know he ends up on my waiting list he comes in to see me and i remember going through everything with him and i thought to myself this is not a dietary issue anymore right because he didn't realize like many people don't that your stress levels contribute to your blood sugar levels your sleep quality contributes to your blood sugar levels it's not just your diet even their diet is something we can we get it you know we eat a bit of sugar that's going to put the sugar up in our blood we get that but we don't get right and there's some really good studies on this that if you only sleep four to five hours a night for six nights okay you are 40 percent less good at managing your blood sugar right you become pre-diabetic after five to six days just from the lag just from a lack of sleep it's incredible when you start understanding that you think well of course we need a more balanced holistic approach to helping these people so this this chap so what i did with him i said look your diet is brill okay arguably it's too good arguably you're almost you're trying too hard now and it's stressing you out i said it's sleep and stress for you so i i talk about these four pillars right i talk about food movement sleep and relaxation that it's not about perfection in any one pillar but it's about balance across all four this approach takes the pressure off people it's not about the perfect diet or the perfect gym routine it's about making sure your dog is good enough making sure you're moving enough making sure you're doing something for your sleep and something for your stress levels it's it's an approach that works in the short term but it's also going to be working six months down the line 12 months down the line so this this chat with diabetes with type 2 diabetes we came up with a with a system i said look ideally you'd have a 90 minute switch off before bed where you don't look at work emails you don't go on your computer because i can't do that 90 minutes no way that's all right what about 30 minutes so he goes okay so we started with 30 minutes okay we also we agreed in the consultation i spoke to him about meditation and again he was a bit skeptical on meditation i said okay look hear me out here i tell you what let's get an app right so we downloaded an app in the clinic right i said okay this is free right down like this all i want you to do is commit to five minutes a day that's it okay so all we agreed on was 30 minutes before bed he'd switch off his computer and his tech and his work emails and he'd do five minutes meditation per day with his app okay that was it and he starts somebody comes back in four weeks and he's like okay i'm already starting to feel better you know he's sleeping better he feels less anxious and stressed the whole time so that was my way in then we got to increase it so it was an hour in the evening okay it was uh he only stuck to five minutes meditation but we then introduced something that i call the three four five breath when you breathe in for three you hold for four and breathe out for five and he did that a few times throughout the week and bit by bit he started to introduce these practices he increased his carbon say because i said you're being too aggressive you don't need to be that aggressive with your carbs okay six months later the guy's blood sugar is no longer in the type 2 diabetic range okay so he puts his carbs up he improves his sleep he gets the stress levels down and his blood sugar starts to come down and that's why i'm so passionate tom that when we take this rounded 360 degree approach to health not only does it yield fantastic results okay but it's just it feels more accessible it feels more achievable for people um i've got countless more case studies like that but that that's i think rather counter-intuitive because you know five six years ago i had i was using that what is called a low carb approach a lot with my patients um and again i'm not a huge fan of the term low carb i think the beauty the beautiful thing about it is that it it simplifies the concept so you know so clearly that people get it um but i think you know we have unfairly demonized fats for 30 40 years i i worry we're gonna do the same uh with another food group in the same way and i think you know ultimately you look at these blue zones around the world these areas around the world where people are have got high rates of longevity they're living to a ripe old age in good health and you look at what they're doing and i find it really interesting because a lot of a lot of them are having high carb diets like in okinawa in japan they're having an 80 carbohydrate diets but the carbs are not the refined and processed carbs that we're having here in the west right there they're local sweet potatoes right which is very nourishing you mentioned the gut microbiome sweet potatoes and those sort of colorful vegetables are fantastic for our gut health absolutely fantastic and i actually think that's what holds all the diets around the world which work well right i think the commonality is not the carb content or the fat concept the commonality is that all a local minimally processed food that nourishes our microbiome that's what i think is the unifying factor and the other thing i think when we look at these blue zones like okinawa and we try and figure out well why are they why are they doing so well we're trying to figure out what is it in their diet that's the magic but it ain't just the diet it's the whole lifestyle right these guys have low stress levels they sleep well right they're physically active every day they prioritize community right that's why those guys are healthy right it's not just the one thing and i think why is it that this low-carb approach seems to have such a fantastically beneficial role for so many people in the west well i think what's going on here in the west we are physically inactive we are under slept we're over stressed we're having highly processed food okay maybe it's an and all those things make you insulin resistant which is what actually leads to type 2 diabetes and it's behind a lot of cases of obesity maybe it's in this environment in our highly stressed out under western environment maybe it's in this environment that that low-carb approach has such a beneficial role maybe those guys they stay under their threshold in a different way they don't need to be as aggressive with their carbs let's say because they're you know they're getting all that sleep they're getting their stress levels down i think food is much more than fat versus carbs but good health is much more than food right wow that's really strong yeah i've always been interested as a doctor as to what works in real life right i love the research papers i love the science but i'm more interested in how do you convert that into real life action for that person sitting in front of me and i can tell you today one of one of my um one of the most popular things from this book is what i call the five-minute kitchen workouts and this this again came out of a need that i saw from my patients right so you know strength training is very much undervalued in society you know when we talk about activity and movement and exercise right we're always talking about you know walking more or you know doing more cardio and there's nothing wrong with that necessarily but we neglect strength and once we hit 30 right once we get above the age of 30 we can lose three to five percent of our muscle mass every decade we can be even more above the age of 50 and you know your muscle mass independently predicts your mortality it's one of the strongest factors to determine how well you're going to be when you get older so i was seeing all the research on this about five or six years ago and i remember patients were coming in and i say to them okay guys uh you know strength training is really important you know i want you to work out for about 30 40 minutes three times a week you know maybe get to the gym if you can and i thought okay right i've told them i've told them about the research come back six weeks later i said hey guys how are you getting on hey doc you know it's been busy you know the gym's a bit expensive it's not on the way back from work i've not really done it much i thought okay i'm clearly not giving them advice in a way that they feel is practical for them that they feel they can do in the context of their life so i've got to do something better and in that in that moment in my consultation room that five minute kitchen workout was born i said all right i'll tell you what let's forget about the gym let's forget about gym memberships forget about buying equipment i'm going to show you a workout you can do right here right now in your kitchen i've got 20 year old patients doing it i've got 70 year old patients doing it you can modify it for any ability level and you know i find that by setting the bar low with people right and they achieve that they feel good about themselves they start to do more it's about simple approaches that work in real life yeah the science is all in there but the science interests me but it doesn't dictate what i do i've got to convert that into what's going to really help my patients real-life people with busy jobs with busy lives right who want to be healthy i want to talk about the show for a second because being with people living with them for four to six weeks and getting in there what are you seeing that are patterns of um i'll call it bad behavior but i don't mean that in like the moral sense i just mean it has an unintended consequence um that they may not even realize and then what are some of the fixes that are these simple things so like in the movement pillar you've got that something simple they can do in the kitchen but what are things that you see over and over and over that people do wrong that have a really simple fix so i'll tell you a few things yeah food was food was a big one there's no question you know when you open people's cupboards you open their drawers and you see what's in there you see the naughty drawers and you see the stuff that's in there and then you also not only look at what's in there which is basically all the highly processed food it's all the sugary treats that live inside the house right but it's then as you're looking there you see the family dynamic you see like the wife oh you know that's not mine that's he always brings that and i tell him not to bring that in because no no the husband's like no no that's not the case at all i bring these in because you like them right you see that in every house so there's obviously this dynamic that um you know who's responsible for it you know everyone's putting the blame without realizing it on other people it's not me it's you know i'm doing it for the family so i find that quite interesting so one of the fixes there is to control the environment you can control right if you're trying to make healthy let's say food choices right don't keep that stuff in your house right so i say to them when you walk outside your front door these days you are having to exercise your willpower every step of the way you go to a gas station right and you go to pay you're walking past all the chocolates or the bags of chips everything right you're having to exert your willpower there if you want to buy coffee in a coffee shop right you stand in line you water you you're walking past the muffins the pastries the croissants you're constantly having to use the willpower when you step outside your house i'm saying don't use it inside your house right if you're serious about making those choices and you want to sugary treat you know what have it once a week once every two weeks when you go out and meet your buddies and you sit in a cafe and have have it there don't bring it in your house because what will happen is that you will come back tired you'll come back stress one day from work you'll feel a bit low and you will start gorging on what's in the house you know a few months ago i came i was going through a very stressful time at work and all kinds of things were going on and i'm sitting at home and even my wife and i thought you know i fancy something sweet but i looked in the cupboards there was nuts there was olives i was like you know i don't feel like though see i want something sweet but there was nothing there and you know what ten minutes later that craving goes it's what i call an itchy mouth i'm not hungry it's just you know i fancy something to put in my mouth so you're controlling the environment you can control i think it's a very important thing that i taught all of those families to do and they really although they were resistant at first they really saw the benefit all right two things i want to dive a little deeper there so number one do you ever get into the psychology of like oh i got this for you no you got it for you what are you talking about do you ever just like put a finger on and say hey let's talk about what's driving that yeah absolutely and more more these days than i even used to do because i've realized that people have got very powerful emotional attachments as to why they do certain things i'm going to tell you about the very first day i ever filmed for this documentary series right this is the first family this is i i rock up into this town called shoesby in the uk and you know a little bit nervous because i'm there's a camera crew that's going to watch me be a doctor and try and help these guys right first time i've done that and i meet the family lovely family that's been struggling with the health whole variety of health issues and they i said guys what would you typically eat right so the father says to the says to the family hey guys you know just the usual tonight said yeah dad just usual please he says come on doc come with me so i go sit in the car right we drive 15 minutes out of town to go to a mcdonald's drive-through on the way there the guy says to me he says doc you know what i know this stuff isn't good for us and it's really really embarrassing for me to actually be taking you here but this is what we do right and i don't think i quite got it back then but i reflected on this a lot since then which is these guys knew that these weren't healthy choices he knew that but it's only when this third party comes in someone who's got no emotional uh attachment to this family he starts to feel really guilty and he feels you know he feels he has to apologize to me for the choices he's making which he which first of all he doesn't need to apologize but i found that really interesting what's going on there why do people make choices that you know are not serving them why do you think they do it for real because i think those choices you know i think those choices on some level nourish them you know they they if they're lacking something in some aspects of their life they're getting that they're feeding their reward pathways you know so many people will eat to make themselves feel better you know if they had a stressful day at work or they're feeling a bit low food is a comfort for them food helps them feel better about themselves albeit for a short period of time you know we all know that feeling if we have a sugary treat you know we can feel good yeah you know we so we know intuitively that food can change our mood right there's a lot of science now behind all of that but i think it's because on a deep emotional level maybe when they were a kid they were conditioned that you know you're not feeling so good you're thinking well oh should we have some nice sweet treats and this particular family for example again you know the the the dad would say that i buy this stuff because it makes my wife happy she really likes it so in some way he felt that he was doing a really nice thing for his wife you know his wife really enjoyed that sort of food so he felt as a loving husband i'm going to give it to her you know so i feel on some level he felt that was him helping you know his part of being a good husband um but i tell you on that on that with that particular family that as as we went to mcdonald's and he ordered the food and what was incredible for me is that he ordered it was about it was 48 pounds it was that figure is locked into my head so that's about 65 70 maybe something like that just for one meal for a family of four but then we got back to the house with the food right and check this we got there and in the kitchen they've got trays right so they've got mcdonald's trays in their kitchen so they dish up onto the traits and they serve them so this is what happened then the son is sitting at the dining table eating by himself whilst sort of scrolling his phone at the same time okay the mom i think was watching television okay and she was eating watching television i think the daughter might have been on her phone a different part of the living room but i can't remember where the dad was the point is is that they're a family of four the food is already at the same time yet they weren't eating together okay they were mindlessly eating whilst also you know doing their emails sending text messages doing their social media updates whatever and so the intervention i made with them and i made it with the lots of those families is to have one meal a day with someone else if possible sitting around the table and i'm telling you tom that was transformative that whole social connection piece when and one of the recommendations i make in the relaxed pill is that eat around a dinner table for at least one meal a day with someone else if you can you eat less when you do that right why because you're not mindlessly eating we can easily over eat when we're doing something else there are studies showing if you eat whilst watching television you eat much more right we know the feeling i know when i used to watch a lot of sports games on on on tv with my buddies and there'd be like a a bowl of crisps there or tortilla chips how many of those things can you do whilst you're whilst you're watching the game yeah it's super interesting the way that people deal with food there's a really interesting study that um it looked at sort of these five major personality types so they are kind of roughly divided into like openness to experience conscientiousness extrovertedness agreeableness and neuroticism so in psychology terms are kind of ways that we can be categorized based on our personality and each of these personality types have specific immunological features and one of the most interesting thing is that um some of them are more likely to be pro-inflammatory and have higher levels of c-reactive protein which is a marker in the blood for for inflammation um and things like being neurotic and um being uh less introverted it can affect the inflammation in our body is because i guess we're all very different we're all on a sort of spectrum of different personalities but that's evolved from maybe different roles you might play within a community um and then what your exposure to different infections might be or your risk of getting injured and things like anger is known to prime the body for um for becoming damaged because maybe anger preceded violence and throughout our evolution we've like okay if you're angry something might happen that might damage you so we need to prime parts of our immune system to prepare for that you mentioned anger and it's something i wrote about field question five is the importance of forgiveness there is good research on forgiveness a guy called fred luskin's done the stanford university i think forgiveness trial or research that i can't remember the exact name yeah his research is incredible and i i shared in my last book a story about one of my patients who had high blood pressure and which again you know to to make it relevant to our conversation you know high blood pressure is a chronic non-communicable illness that you know will have chronic inflammation playing a role yeah in some way and you know what she had changed her lifestyle though i was you know i was doing this stuff i try and uh talk about food and movement and sleep you know what it wasn't budging and it was to do with um you know basically her um her husband of many years had cheated on her and they had split up and it was only once she started practicing forgiveness right that her blood pressure started going down it it was incredible and so that's a look that's an anecdotal story from my clinic but i it really i think it does stand uh firm and consistent with the research that is out there in terms of if you're holding on to resentment and anger that will influence your biology and your immune system exactly and maybe that is culturally what we see dividing different groups and how they deal with illness as well because they may feel marginalized i think social status is also really important i know that in the animal kingdom being lowered down the pecking order can be quite stressful for an animal and that can be seen in its its blood chemistry but also for us humans um and i think that's you know something that we see playing out with the sort of lower social economic um uh demographics are worse hit by some of these lifestyle-related diseases yeah they may have more stressful lifestyles and but we always we put it down don't we to oh less access to good food more stress and of course i think those play a role but what if it's also related to stasis as it is the animal kingdom what you know that's something i haven't properly given as much thought to and it's probably not as common a narrative it's where do you i guess it's you know in many ways it's do you feel your life has purpose yes yeah you know how do you see your life what's the meaning behind it because that as well in itself has a huge amount of research suggesting it's just you know if you feel your life has meaning and value you tend to have a happier and healthier life yeah i mean another piece of research it came across recently was comparing um samoan individuals to european individuals with um epstein-barr virus which is a virus that almost all of us harbor but when we activate our stress chemistry um this can be actually a sign that the virus uses to allow itself to reactivate and cause problems and we know in the western culture that being of a lower socio-economic status means that you're more likely to experience spiral reactivation but in the samoan culture um being in a lower socioeconomic status has a totally different impact on the stress chemistry that actually meant it was the people in the higher social economic brackets that were worse affected by latent viral reactivation and this is just you know they use the viral reactivation as a readout an empirical way of measuring the immune system changes but in different cultures you know you and we never think about this in medicine i mean what's that like for you as a scientist and as a lecturer these are the kind of yeah these would be these would be perceived as a kind of softer yes yes aspects of health and science but it's you know that data right exactly we need to bring it together a lot of the data is actually quite old now but i guess it's just been parked there and we have this real kind of biomedical model where we focus in on one cell type and what is that cell doing and it's really reductionist and then we try and piece the jigsaw together and we kind of need to fuse it with the anthropology and be like okay now how do we bring these two fields together because that's the only way we can tackle i think where we're at yeah with our health and you know you sort of you really beautifully bridge it throughout the book all these different components emotions food movement sleep stress yeah you know you've got a nice section on supplements as well which you probably won't be able to get into today um the joy of the table so the joy of tavola which is an italian phrase for enjoying being at the table and linking what we were talking about earlier with food to emotions you know make your table a joyous place to be because endorphins from enjoying being at your table with your family your friends or even on your own and just enjoying the meal endorphins can alter the function of our immune cells because they have receptors for those on them so those feel good hormones that actually helps nurture things like the t-rex the regulatory t cells so bringing the food together with the emotion and enjoying that that's so so important yeah we haven't had a kitchen for the last four months so we've had no table no joy but we've still been trying to cobble together as a family you know little meals on the floor and it's you know what i'm so delighted to hear you speak about these things because i think these are things we've missed in health advice yeah it has been too reductionist you know eating at a table with you know your community your tribe has kind of always been a part of human culture yeah and i think in in if you sort of extend the argument that you're making it's kind of like well you could potentially eat the same food feeling stressed out and lonely yeah and the same food might have a different response if you're eating it with good friends when you're feeling relaxed and calm i'm convinced that you know one thing i've really i've observed clinically maybe for two three years now a lot of people these days are reacting or perceive themselves as reacting to foods yes and i think what's really interesting for me is and i think i really got this in the year preceding me writing the stress solution because i thought well the stress changes your uh your guts and your gi tracts in your digestion significantly as it does well are they actually reacting to the foods or are they reacting to the fat that they're eating in a stressed state and i've seen with some patients the same food if they do some sort of what i call a transition between you know action states and eating when they do that for one or two minutes before eating yeah they're no longer reacting to the same foods yeah which you know i think this has even been shown with gluten as the nocebo effect yes which i don't know people say this all the time i go on holiday i can eat the bread it doesn't make me feel bloated but the bread at home must be somehow different maybe it's different but also you're different you're in a different frame of mind when you're on holiday and you're eating and you're chewing your food as you look at the lovely vista and you're just feeling more relaxed and that's affecting your digestion this stuff matters yeah people think you know when i i really don't i hardly pretty much don't drink anymore um but when i did i used to remember that i'd go on a holiday and like you know a glass of red wine would affect my sleep in the uk or you know i feel a bit groggy the next day but i found when i was on holiday i could have a glass or two with dinner i felt nothing yeah i thought this is stress this is like there's no like stress load on my life chilling with my wife and my kids and there's a bee yeah so it's not bothering me but if your life is chronically overly busy you're stressed out the whole time not only are you going to get sick more or potentially you know you're going to be able to not tolerate yeah various things you're gonna you're gonna you're not gonna have to manage those insults as well exactly i call it the food prison you know i see so many people who are so stressed about eating the perfect diet that that's that's just eroding their health you never mind what they're eating being being helpful um but i guess you know you asked me earlier about what i do to manage my stress and i think it's my it's still my learning curve but it's just on my radar now that i'm i'm i'm always experimenting i'm learning how to say no i think having boundaries was one of the biggest things i learned as an adult like why are we not teaching kids this in school and saying that was okay and there's a time and a place for projects if i want to get involved and it it can't be now because that compromises my time as a mother or my time spent with family or my time just you know being on my own or doing the things that nurture my day then i have to say no and let go of that and i guess that's like you know the catharticism of writing or some ways of you know putting a narrative to what's stressing as i has a release to it and that you can feel that you know like a big physiological sigh that your body is making when you're like okay and once the decisions made you move on from it i've said no to that it's sad and i wish i could say yes but i don't think about it the next day when i've moved on and other things are you know it's very freeing actually you know something i've struggled with for years and it's i'm getting much better at it but it's it feels good yeah yeah half the time i used to say yes and stuff and then i would just be stressed out why did i say yes i've got to do this i've committed now they've started advertising and i'm i'm getting much better at nipping it in the bud yeah yes you know but it's taken a lot of work oh yeah i had to learn the hard way yeah um but i started feeling like i was doing everything badly when you start to feel like you're being a bad parent probably i wasn't but in my mind i wasn't doing what i wanted to do and that i think with my kids i just that had to be a firm line that i couldn't ever cross again wow now you mentioned eating and you said um that you know there's some studies that our immune system operates differently if we're eating in company feeling joy feeling happy that reminds me of something else i read in your book about it's something to do with you were giving a list of strategies to people but it was about you know like walking whilst listening to music it was about putting two senses in together could you expand on that yeah that this is it's really interesting actually so this was um data that was generated in the 1980s there's some scientists who were trying to disprove research that had come out of russia around that time about conditioning so the classical example of conditioning is pavlov's dogs um most people will be aware of that but there are these experiments they had done where they they had looked to try and condition the immune system and so these scientists were like this this can't be right you know we're going to redo the experiments much more stringently and um see if it is really what it makes out to be can you condition your immune system with various rituals and routines and what they did was they they used an animal uh model experiment and they gave the the animals a sweet solution to drink and one group got the sweet solution that also had a particular chemical inside it that would modulate antibody responses so they could measure the antibody responses in the blood and see um if that there was an effect happening some kind of readout tangible piece of data that they could observe um so the mice were given these this sugar solution with this chemical for a period of time and after a while when they just gave the sugar solution on its own they got the same effect happening to the immune system so it's kind of like a placebo effect it's like you expect something the most expected this effect to take place in its body on some kind of subconscious level because it was so used to that happening that the the effect happens anyway even without the chemical presence to actually cause the modulation to the immune system and people have been scratching around to try and understand the mechanism and i think the best we've come up with is the placebo effect like it's it's there's some part of us that we don't quite understand that embodies things and when there's a response expected that the biology changes and we can start to pair things together so what you're referring to in the book is like the kind of little stress relieving rituals like you know playing your favorite music whilst you're doing something like taking a nice bath or having a particular scent being in the room while you're doing something else and eventually then you just can play that music and you start to feel the same relaxed feeling that you do when you're in a nice warm bath even without taking the bath yeah you know it makes me think about you know if your home is or has been a stressful place then you know that it kind of works that you may come into that and you your body may start to almost the immune system might sense that and go okay this is a stressful place and react even if nothing stressful happens yes but then you can also flip and you know i'm a huge fan of ritual and sort of daily practices that even if they only take five minutes they can be very powerful and i think when i hear that i think of a morning routine and i think what if someone you know can design their ideal morning routine let's say let's say it was five ten minutes yeah you know a bit of maybe a minute or two of breathing yeah um you know three or four minutes of some light movement practice yeah and then let's say five minutes of reading a positive book yeah for example i mean that's you know i in the stress season i write about the three m's every morning we've seen mindfulness movement and mindsets i think you can create one that lasts an hour you can create one last five minutes but the point i'm trying to make is if someone started doing that in the same room let's say they lit a candle yeah in the room did that but even on a day when they're a little bit busy or they haven't quite they can't quite switch off and they just you know sat there with their coffee with the candle on yes maybe that will also condition their immune system the other way and go hey things are okay because he's got the candle on yeah it's quite it's quite powerful well all the sensors kind of integrating so it might be particular scent that you're burning there might be a particular song or playlist that you always play when you're doing those activities for your morning routine and then the morning you wake up and you're just tired and you don't want to do your movements you just want to sit and enjoy a tea but you're in that room with that space and you still may be reaping the benefits of the meditation and the movement that you would normally do and i think as a human being we just seem to be anchored by routines for me especially becoming a mother it's been it's been hugely important so much so that now i can buffer the lack of routine more because i can circle back to a really strong routine that i've built over time and i think when we went into lockdown this year everything kind of got off kilter and we haven't we we're living in a building site basically at the moment so i'm stressing it's stressful the routine is is shock you know each shot has really done a number on us but i think having been someone who needs routine particularly as a bit of a stress head it didn't take long for us to find a new rhythm uh being at home and that's anchoring i think that's i i love the way you the way you say certain things you said you know we can build a routine like you can build your immune system yeah it's a very empowering word yeah build means we can do that right it doesn't mean it's fixed exactly we've got some agency over that yeah um it's really interesting as you know as i mentioned right at the start this is you know day one in the new studio yeah and gareth who's videoing and sitting there in the corner um we've been talking about you know how do we create a stress-free space that allows a really deep authentic vulnerable conversation to happen yeah and you know it's not quite ready yet you know bringing plants in is one thing you know um we're gonna probably have a candle on or some sort of you know a nice scent yeah you know my my dream is because my this podcast is all about authentic conversation it's not interviews it's conversation i want um someone like you to walk in and within you know i almost want to program it so that people feel calm and they go they want to open up and actually yeah do you know what i mean yeah i think you've done a really good job already but also i think that what you give off as a person really helps so the way people's eyes feel relaxed you know when we're angry we like narrow our eyes or if we're feeling quite negative or stressed and then we pick that up when we're sort of reading the body language and so if somebody has a relaxed disposition that's going to be interpreted by the other person and make them feel at ease as well so and interpreted by our immune systems yes exactly as this is a safe environment it's all about all of those millions of inputs that are going in yeah every minute of every day and our immune systems reading those shaping and responding science has allowed us to dive into what are the components in food and how do they interact with their biology in ways that we've never really understood and it turns out you know we know that what's in food right it's protein fat fiber carbohydrates vitamins and minerals and that's true but that's not all that's in there it's uh it's all this other stuff that turns out it's really important it may not be causing an acute deficiency disease like scurvy but if you don't have enough of these powerful medicines and food over your lifetime your own biology doesn't work quite well and and for example you know when you get grass-fed animals there they can forage on 100 different plants and they eat this plant to get this phytochemical and this medicine they eat this plant to get this nutrient and over time they really are able to modulate their health through a robust array of a wide variety of different plant foods it turns out there's 25 000 25 000 plus molecules in food that are medicines these phytochemicals and the rockefeller foundation is spending i think 200 million dollars trying to map out the periodic table of food of phytochemicals and how they interact with their biology and and and the concepts of these chemicals in our biology is really quite interesting i call it symbiotic phytoadaptation which is a big mouthful but essentially it means that we've evolved symbiotically with these plants and have adapted our biology to use their compounds for our own benefit which is you know we do this all the time we you know we take a vitamin from vitamin c from an orange we don't make vitamin c so we use it for our benefit well it turns out that you know if you want your detoxification system to work well you need certain classes of compounds in broccoli family called glucosinolates and sulforaphanes it turns out if you want to clean up your mitochondria and recycle all the old parts so you have healthy aging you might need a compound that comes from pomegranate called urolithia maybe if you want to you know regulate your gut and have a no no damage to the barrier and it can lead to autoimmune disease heart disease cancer you want to grow bacteria call acromancy that bug likes certain things like cranberry pomegranate and green tea or or maybe you know you have these zombie cells running around from your white blood cells that have been damaged from various kinds of insults over the years and and they're causing aging and maybe if you eat this these phytochemicals there's over 132 phytochemicals from this buckwheat that jeffrey bland has just got rediscovered that are some are 100 times more potent than any other food source and you eat these it kills the zombie cells these phytochemicals so the question is how do we begin to incorporate all these principles into upgrading our biology and healing disease yeah i mean just hearing all those powerful compounds that exist within foods you know it's mind-blowing really i'm sure we're going to discover more there's probably probably plenty out there we don't even know yet we don't even know the names what they do but that time is coming but you know i think about this concept food as medicine and philosophically i think in a culture where eighty percent of what we see is driven by our collective modern lifestyles i kind of feel philosophically as doctors i feel unless we give it the same priority and call it medicine it's not going to have that same impact right with our patients so we prioritize the drugs and say oh we've got to give it that weight but then culturally i feel well hold on a minute well i grew up in an asian family in an indian family where we grow up with the concept of food as medicine you know if we're if we're not doing so well or we've got a cold or something our mom might give us more food with turmeric in and um you know with the south american cultures where they talk about the concepts of food as medicine so i i kind of find i find there's a slight arrogance when we try and say food is not medicine and it almost there's almost this kind of um attitude of oh you know we we now in western medicine we figured this out in 2021 we figured out actually that food is not medicine okay great i'll go and tell my grandparents that and everyone else who's done all that research for years do you know what i mean i kind of feel i feel that's a no-brainer yeah yeah it's pretty striking um you know the um there's a quote from rd language the psychiatrist back in the 60s that scientists can't see the way they see with their way of seeing in other words paradigms are really hard to break when you're a doctor and you're saying well eat better and exercise more or eat less and exercise more and it doesn't work you go well well nutrition doesn't really work but that's not really helpful that's the site as i was saying why don't you just uh fly to fly to london well how do i fly there do i need a plane like how do i get there do i swim you know and and what's what's really striking is that is that most doctors don't know how to apply food as medicine so if if you have a headache and i would say well i'm going to give you like one milligram of aspirin you think it's gonna work right it's like you need 600 milligrams of aspirin to get your headache to go away so we say well you know food didn't work well it didn't work because you didn't know the right medicine which were foods to use you didn't know the dose you didn't know the frequency you know like it's really sophisticated that's why the peak in diet isn't really like a fixed diet it's really a set of principles that allows you to sort of eat in a way that meets your dietary preferences and cultural preferences but also helps you to figure out which are the foods in each category that you should be eating that have the most medicine and what are the principles that we might want to learn about personalized nutrition or how to eat like a vegenitarian which we can talk about or how to eat for your mood or longevity or how to feed your kids or how to eat in a way that's affordable so it's a really practical guide sort of one of those things you can kind of refer back to over and over again to see exactly you know what's the the uh digestible bit it's sort of like little snacks of information that allow you to really get the point and and follow through on it there's a ton of theory i've written about before in the science but this this is there's a lot of science in it but it's really a very very practical book yeah and on the book i i agree it's it's really good uh digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods the various properties and different foods and the various principles and as you say it's kind of it's called the pagan diet but it's kind of not really a diet in the conventional term right it's the way we think about diets it's really not that as you say it's 21 foundational principles which frankly are going to be helpful for so many of us yeah i mean that's sort of the joke of it all that's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps we're all fighting with each other and that's how the this whole name came i was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a militant paleo doctor and they were fighting and i'm like hey if you're paleo and you're vegan i must be pig and i'm really cracked up and i thought okay well there's something here and i went home and thought about it as i was flying home and i was like wait a minute they're identical they're exactly the same principles except for one which is where you get your protein which is animals or grains and beans otherwise no dairy no sugar no processed food whole foods vegetables good fats you know all the same principles except except that one and and the truth is they have far more in common with each other than the traditional american diet and so i began to sort of realize maybe we can all come together with a movement that actually helps to you know crystallize what we do know and and then personalize it and that's really the whole point of the peeking diet instead of an undiet it says wait a minute if you're focusing on i mean the traditional american diet yes that's that's an easy sort of win uh but if you're you know keto or vegan i mean how do you be a healthy vegan i see i see people running into trouble with that all the time and so you know i talk about how to do that in the book so i think it's really kind of a fun little uh sort of kaleidoscope and as actually someone someone someone has said to me after say dr hyman there's no chapter on weight loss and i said that's right i said there's no chapter on weight loss because i never tell patients to lose weight i just don't i i don't actually think it works and i don't think it's helpful advice and i think what i teach them is how their body works how to work with it and the weight loss is automatic i don't i don't say starve yourself restrict calories eat these foods don't eat these foods this is really what is going to help you thrive and people just have the most amazing results i mean literally 100 pounds 50 pounds 75 pounds that's really pretty amazing but it's never it was never a goal and i i think uh you know it was sort of shocking to people there's a book on diet with no no no mention of weight loss but that's how it goes yeah no absolutely so there are all these principles in the book i want to sort of dive into some of them uh and you mentioned eat like a regenitarian and i think that would be i think it'll be a good place to go into um before we do that then mark can we just sort of set out the the foundations off the pagan diets you know uh you sort of touched on a few of those principles so for people who are coming to your work for the first time and are trying to understand well you know what is the component you know is it paleo is it vegan you know what is it what are these sort of foods that you're recommending how would you sort of simplify the concept for them yeah it's it's really pretty easy i mean it i it's embarrassingly easy actually because it's like people aren't gonna really be able to sort of disagree with anything because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward so the first thing is you know really use your food as your pharmacy so when you are eating think of what you're eating as medicine are you eating a french fry that's fried in rancid oils that's you know got 14 different ingredients in it that is going to kind of fry your arteries and you know cause all kinds of problems or are you going to eat let's say a wild blueberry and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth so how do you how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine the second is you want to eat a lot of medicine so eat the rainbow which is essentially all the colors and plant foods are where all the benefits are so the more deeper darker colors and pigments that's where all the phytochemicals are and also think about your diet is mostly vegetables like it should be 75 non-starchy veggies which is like really what the majority of your plates should be a little side of protein when you're picking any kind of category food whether it's beans or grains or nuts and seeds um it's important to understand which ones in each category are the best for example peanuts might have aflatoxin which you want to stay away from or be careful when you source it or you know you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten and grains here but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat at all or which beans are the best beans or which which seeds are the best seeds and so forth and then i have a whole section there on you know meat which is i think a little shocking for people but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine and some of the research on this is just stunning that that these grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents just like plants and have all these health benefits so we're learning more about it this is out of duke so whether you're eating any kind of protein how do you pick the best eggs or chicken how do you how do you understand what are the right fats to eat how do you think about dairy which is you know really often a big problem and it's and the modern cows we have are pretty harmful and then there's some you know just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you but not only good for you but good for the planet and good for society like eat like a virginitarian or you know think about uh sugar is fine but it's like recreational drug you know how do you personalize your nutrition or detox or eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or or how do you afford what you're or you're doing in a way that actually is makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive so it really guides people through a way of thinking about food that it will last them as a road map for their life you mentioned meats there you mentioned phytonutrients so let's just let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are and then i agree that that selection on meat is really fascinating and you know me has become one of these controversial items as well and one thing i do know like myself you're very respectful of people's individual choices their ethics and how they choose to live and their cultural beliefs so yeah just walk me through phytochemicals but then also let's then go from that into meat and how meat potentially might be medicine for some people yeah for sure i mean before we get down in the weeds i just i just want to say that you know i my personal goal is to live healthy and vibrant to be 120 at least so i i don't want to eat a meat or anything else if it's going to hurt me so i i took the time to really dive into all the research i locked myself away for a week with you know stack of scientific papers you know four feet high and went through it all and these are the i mean there's a hundred thousand papers online on meat on the national library medicine but if you define the major ones you can find you know what does it say and what is it not saying really there were three issues one was moral and ethical and and the other is in climate environment and the last is health and so they're all kind of smooshed together right so if you want to be saving the planet if you want to be healthy and you want to do the right thing morally ethically you should be a vegan and then everybody should be vegan because that kind of deals with all that but unfortunately it's not so simple um and and and you know kind of getting back to like what is meat and phytochemicals it also sort of speaks to the theme of the book which is meat is not meat is not meat right if you're eating a feed lot cow is different than eating wild elk in terms of your health the well-being of the animal you know the the effect on the environment climate so people need to understand that quality matters in every aspect of what you're eating and that's the whole premise of the peak and diet is how do you pick quality in each area so in terms of meat you know most of the meat that's eaten and consumed and even that we've done research on is feedlot industrial meat which is fed all kinds of weird garbage and is is really full of hormones antibiotics and it's mostly corn but wild wild or grass finished animals can forage on hundreds of different plants each with diminishing properties and those chemicals from the plants these phytochemicals we call them phytonutrients or phytochemicals phyto means plant they get absorbed and they start to become part of these animals tissue and you eat them you actually can get for example for example goat milk if the goats are foraging on different shrubs you can have the same level of catechins which is the powerful anti-cancer antioxidant detoxifying compound in green tea as green tea so so it's like drinking green tea when you're drinking goat's milk that's bet on certain bushes that's just an example but we're learning more and more about about these powerful medicinal properties and then how it affects your biology and if you look at kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat in a study in australia they found that when they eat the feedlot meat same portion they got inflammation when they eat the kangaroo meat their biology was totally different they actually reduced the inflammation so that's kind of striking to me when you see you know eating identical amounts of food kangaroo feed lot profoundly different effects on biology on that mark in the in the spirit of the book which is um you know pagan bringing in you know paleo and vegan and where this where the sort of similarities are yeah and where do we all agree i think one thing we can all agree on no matter what side you sit on on and the dietary wars potentially is that factory farming is a bad thing would you agree with that i mean listen you know the the moral ethical issues really have to do a lot around that but you know factory farming is an abomination it's bad for the cows and the animals that are raised in these confined animal feeding operations it's bad for the environment i mean just tyson chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the united states after u.s steel i think it's like and the health of the animals is the moral ethical issues and the health of the meat that it produces or lack thereof so i think you know it's sort of a triple whammy for for the planet for the animals and for humans and it should be banned and there's no question about that and i do think that there's a evidence that uh it's moving in this right direction that there's a bill produced by i think um a couple of senators who who put forth the idea that we should get ready for genera we get rid of factory farming by 2040 which is no 20 years from now so i think where we're heading there but i think yeah it's an abomination and we should never eat factory farming so i think the other consideration around eating animals is what is the effect on ecology and climate and i think we know that factory farming is a huge contributor that traditional farming and is is probably the number one contributor to climate change when you add in deforestation soil erosion factory farming animals food waste transportation refrigeration all of it end to end probably half of all climate change and and so the question is you know um is it is it all animals that will do that and i think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea which is not the cow it's the how right so it's not it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals it's how you're doing it and the truth is that most of the land we we now farm is used to grow food for animals um about 70 percent and and it is soy and corn all the sort of stuff that we feed them that's highly uh different than their normal diet which is grass and it creates all sorts of secondary problems changes the quality of the meat and so forth but the but the way we grow these foods actually destroys the soil uses tons of water from irrigation causes and collapse of ecosystems in biodiversity because of use of pesticides and herbicides the nitrogen fertilizer runs off into the rivers and streams and oceans and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year so we really have this sort of destructive agricultural system that that is often used to produce food for animals and then that that's just a bad idea because the way we grow it is the number one cause of climate change and how we do that so i think we need to sort of change what's happening with the animals and put them back where they belong which is on rangeland and forty percent of our land of agriculture so we should just grow vegetables well you can't 40 is is not uh suitable for growing crops it's only suitable for grazing so what do you do with that well you have to put animals on it turns out that they will build soil they'll conserve water they'll reduce it or eliminate the need for pesticides herbicides and they will draw down carbon out of the atmosphere because the soil gets built and produced better quality and and even more scalable than traditional agriculture right now for for animals so we have this potential and everybody's talking about it there's movies like kiss the ground there's books on it there's conversations that are happening in washington dc now about it so i think we're we're on the precipice of a real sea change around thinking about how we grow food in a way that's regenerative and and and meat has got to be a key part of that you can't have an ecosystem on a farm that actually builds soil without actually having animals poop and pee and you know put their saliva on the grass which makes it grow it's like actually a growth factor for the grass so we want to keep building roots and building soil and that's really through the the kind of reuse of animals rotating through a farm ecosystem so i think we have to sort of think about all these pieces now the last piece is health so if people are thinking oh well meat's going to kill me i don't want to eat it it causes heart disease and cancer pretty much you can go and find any study that you know supports any belief that you have and you can ignore all the rest but when you look at the totality of the evidence and you look at the kind of ways of what studies were done you know i i'm not convinced that meat is bad for you in fact you know there are many large reviews recently that sort of refuted that idea and and looked at all the data and when it turns out when a lot of studies were done on meat there were population studies they looked at groups of people over time they really can't prove cause and effect they said well what did you eat for the last 30 years oh you ate more meat than this guy okay you had more heart attacks it's probably the meat but you can't prove that it doesn't create proof and it may be something else right when you look at the habits of the meat eaters in those studies because this was done when we were told meat was bad so if you ate meat you you were basically somebody probably didn't care about their health right so yes it was true you smoked more drank more ate less fruits and veggies more processed food more sugar you know didn't exercise so it didn't take your vitamins of course you had more more disease was it the meat or was it all the other stuff so and then when they looked like as i mentioned when they looked at people who shopped at health food stores um who both were were eating healthy food some made meat in the context of a whole foods diet others just didn't and it was the same reduction in death in both groups by half and when you look at cultures like the maasai you know we live on milk and meat they live very long they're very healthy but they also do something really interesting was they actually it's not even necessarily how you how you raise the animals it's maybe how you prepare the meat for example if you're cooking it on high char grilling that's probably not good it's slow cooking with tons of spices those spices have phytochemicals that alter any kind of harmful reactions that can happen from cooking meat so there's there's a lot of incredible science around how we actually can include meat as a healthful part of our diet in fact probably for most of us we probably need to especially as we age because it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein cause and effect of disease is inflammation infection inflammation it's all caused by uh inflammation inflammatory markers and we have shown people being injected after a couple of days and this was after 16 000 people taking the same experimental model with an injection of a e coli bacteria becoming sick for three to six hours now suddenly i trained a group of people within a couple of days they took the injection and after 16 000 people who became sick suddenly 12 people exposed in the into the same experimental model were able to nullify the reaction caused by the e coli bacteria on the immune system they did not became sick and then they found out that these guys threw blood samples so there is no speculation about it had a control over the autonomic nervous system over the immune system far more than was stated in science and i'm trying to tell that through science and through publications in the best of papers in the world and try to get it to the people and i think these podcasts like we do right now is the way to get there to the people to the listeners disease and mood feeling happy it's your choice you've taken a group who've had this injection but i think a few years ago i read about when you did it for the first time i think from recollection you were injected with lipopolysaccharide or lps which is this this endotoxin and i know as a doctor they've you know i've seen the studies i've seen the trials if somebody gets injected with that they typically will go into septic shock they'll drop their blood pressure they'll become very unwell but you manage to not get sick by controlling your immune system so i'd love to hear about that because you were injected with it what happened did you feel something did you feel yourself starting to get sick did you breathe in preparation of that or once you felt it were you able to then control that i'd love to i'd love to understand that it's so interesting to me that you had this endotoxin in your vein but you didn't get sick yes exactly so when uh the professor injected me he said oh but it takes an hour before it's really working i said no it is being injected now now i'm going to start i'm just going to try i do my best that's what i said i was for sure determined to succeed in my attempt to show that the immune system the innate immune system and the specific immune system both can be activated at will influenced at will so the innate immune system for example get it down at the specific immune system get it on so specific solutions at the core at the start of things happen so what i did i started my breathing exercises when he injected me i began to start you see how simple it is determined my mind was not out there my mind was in the breath in the biochemistry neurology influences the biochemistry that's that's a lot it's logic so i was into the breathing and then when normally the police saccharide had to have its influence you know like uh uncontrolled shivering headaches uh fever uh all over agony backaches muscle aches uh things even vomiting all that can happen uh for sure that it happens a lot and nothing happened nothing they came to me they said yeah it's now let it speak i said but before they told me i asked them when is it going to happen and that he said yeah actually just now at its peak they said yeah i i do not really feel something so can i can i so so basically let's say a week before you were practicing your own breathing techniques at home right was this just like you being in the hospital and you're just practicing as per usual yes you're getting injected but you didn't feel anything you you could you could be in your own bedroom doing the same thing right so there there i go and say everybody is able to do this and yes directly afterwards they said because they saw such a low cytokine release the cytokine storm was less than a breeze it i felt good i felt and i at a certain moment i let the breathing go and a little bit came to me a little bit but uh i did not do i had won i had done i had shown what uh breathing techniques are able to do together with your determination your your being here in the now here and now you have neurology when i say your your i don't know if you have two children yes or no i don't have two children yeah yes so uh if i say if i would say your children are in danger you know for real so then you would be full of epinephrine adrenaline and run like a animal to to what where are they word or whatever and find out and all that barely in control now that is what happened at that moment the epinephrine got so high it went higher in the blood and they compared it to another study where people jumped for the first time into a bungee jump they took the blood of those people and the level of adrenaline within the people lying there on the bed was higher than the people going for the first time into a bungee jump you see yeah that is what we do with these breathing techniques we enter consciously into the depth of our brain the brainstem into the brainstem and thus the adrenal axis is being uh activated it resets the body and then suddenly the immune system is much more alert and it is able to handle back cell and virus and and and bacteria in any kind because that's the nature of ours only we alienate it from our own brain we they say we have 16 control within our own brain it's like you have a house and only 16 of your own house are able to be accessed by you the rest is of the government or by the people in power i don't know who but it is hundred percent my friend rangan my friend rangan it is 100 100 and that means we are able to tap into our emotional uh areas of the brain into our uh opioids into our cannabinoids uh endorphins serotonin adrenal axis anything that is within our brain is ours to be commanded by by us and i think nature has it built in a happy person doesn't make war a happy person is not into thieving or taking what is not his a happy person is like radiating positive energy all the time and he is happy and that's where he wants to stay only we did not know how to get there and now we found these ways and in brain scans showing that we are able to tap into those areas of the brain the autonomous processes of the brain we this is the way they published it we found compelling evidence of the key components of the autonomous processes in the brain related to mood regulation so we found the keys to into those areas which were not controllable at will now they are we found them and now we are able to regulate our moon uh mood and that is emotion and that emotion is who we are what we are and the source and that power of of uh sanity is happiness happiness all the time that's irradiance that is flow that is uninhibited flow that is not narrowed consciousness a a narrowed perception narrowed neurology it's full bloom neurology we are born to be holy beings not half beings holy beings that means 100 percent neurology sane insanity full flow going within our beautiful mind our command that's that's that's what it is and i'm just giving evidence through signs you can look it up only the old paradigm is about yeah happens wars uh yeah that is human-like uh abuse yeah uh uh humans you know uh uh insensitivity exploiting the world sodomizing the planet polluting the planet it's all there we don't know we don't know it doesn't make sense and this time we are to bring sense to the people that they are in control over their own happiness which is the hormonal system their own health which is their immune system and their own uh power strength energy which are the metabolic processes in in the cell and we are able to control all the three of them that's the message and what i what i really love about breath work per se is it's free right it's not something that people have to spend a lot of money on it's something that the richest in society and the poorest in society have access to and i think that's really really exciting now when if we go to some specifics there seems to be two broad arms to your method breathing and cold and i wonder if we can start with cold i this morning because i was interviewing you today i thought hey if i'm not going to have a cold shower today on the day that i'm interviewing wim when am i going to do it right and you mentioned my kids before actually beforehand when i told them today i was interviewing you my son was like daddy you actually interviewed the iceman today i said yeah i am darling i am and he was really excited did you know he's in the guinness book of records you see the new generation i see a lot of the new generation already knowing me and they love it they love it they need direction so yeah about the cold and what i always say a cold shower a day keeps the doctor away now i know where you were there for 45 minutes exactly i was i was holding my breath oh what's going to happen but cold right so people so look i think there's gonna be people listening to this who have heard about uh the amazing things you've done they'll be interested and i wanna make sure you make it super practical so they think after this actually you know what i could do something so if we talk about the cold right you are a big fan of cold immersion and you always recommend certainly i've read an early copy of your book which is really really good it's really interesting um and 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 we have a a uh uh this 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 thermal receptors 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 uh 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 job to 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 a 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 de-stimulative 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 when there 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 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 got 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 the 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 uh 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 for 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 hormonic stress 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 uh and that is from the prehistorics when it was called outside that was the enemy and uh 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 that's 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 or because 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 uh concept of what the gold 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 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 [Music] 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 and again this is something that's probably exploded in the field of of immunology in the last 10 15 years if you do not so if you take an experimental animal model where the animals have a reduced or a minimal um collection of good bacteria in their gut their immune system doesn't develop and they're very impaired in how they can respond and heal and even things like you know protection from cancer because our immune system is the main cancer surveillance system so these bugs are helping to educate and teach and mature our immune system and this happens potentially in utero before we're born but predominantly when we enter the world because we go from a relatively sterile there is some evidence that there may be some bugs in the placenta but we go into this hugely germy world and suddenly our immune system has to cope with that because you know it's um it's got all these receptors on it to to detect pathogens as being problematic so it has to learn to tolerate those because you know most of the bugs around us are safe and harmless and we need them because they're helping us and that's actually how the immune system develops isn't it it is by exposure to the environment around it to the bugs around it to sort of give it that sort of ongoing education so it starts to learn oh i respond to this i don't need to respond to that exactly i often say that you know the immune system's made it's not born there's maybe a percentage in the genetics that we inherit but then it's made it's built throughout our life and it changes throughout our life so that's a lovely idea it's a maine not born we can we can build and we can sort of develop it the way we want to if we give it the right inputs yeah and i i often think about the inputs as a way to shape the immune system and i was trying i was working on a talk the other day and i was trying to make a slide of all the inputs some that we can control some that we can't that are shaping our immune system from birth and then it just became a really busy messy slide because there was too much to put on there but yeah a lot of it happens in childhood and in some ways i find that quite daunting as a mother and you think well you know there's sort of first three years i would say is when you're being colonized by all these good bacteria and there's huge changes going on in the immune system during that time um and there's this kind of interaction happening these bacteria they help protect the gut barrier to keep it very nice and and tight and stop any bacteria going into the body because they're only good bacteria if they're in the right location so they're not meant to cross over the gut and enter our body yeah um because then they become a problem um but one of the biggest things that they're doing to help our immune system is they're they're eating our foods and i often think your diet's only as good as your microbiota in your gut because they are they're the interface they're eating your food they're helping you to produce these vitamins and minerals from your diet but they're also producing these postbiotics um and people might have heard of prebiotics and probiotics but postbiotics are basically the metabolic waste of the bugs in your gut so they're producing stuff that is their kind of you know waste product of eating your foods like short-sharing fatty acids fatty acids is the classic one i i used to work on these when i lived in switzerland um and looking at how they influence um inflammation in the gut and beyond so short-chained fatty acids are kind of a metabolic by-product of the the bugs in your gut and they directly bind to the immune cells at that site and they help educate them and teach them to sort of tolerate anything that you're throwing down your mouth because we're not supposed to um react to that because it should be you know benign things that are going in there but they have to help strike that balance that if you did get some kind of food poisoning they also can identify the bad bugs so they help create an environment that's what we call tolerogenic so it's encouraging um tolerance of the food that you're eating and there's a very kind of dynamic interaction between these bugs and the immune cells and i'd say what happens in the gut is not just staying there this um influence this sort of tolerogenic influence of things like short-chain fatty acids is also being absorbed into your bloodstream and helping regulate the immune system at distal sites from the gut as well it helps makes he regulates yourself exactly i think i mean you mentioned the term peacekeeper i think the first time i read that i think it was in a nature paper in 2014 i think i think i think i used that one of my slide decks it's where it calls them our peacekeepers yeah i think for the first time when i saw it in prince which is kind of what they are yeah really and i i sort of yeah i mean i i really think we a lot of people talk about gut health these days but i don't think people understand the immune systems linked to it you know they think the gut is something separate but i often teach uh doctors about this triad between our diets our in uh our gut bugs and our immune system and how they all sort of cross talk oh definitely yeah there's bi-directional communication between you know diets and gut bugs diets and immune system and gut bugs and immune system together it's like this so you know if you if you make certain dietary choices you're going to improve the health of your gut bugs which is going to improve the health of your immune system yes exactly just empowering right because we can do something about that yes exactly and i think as a nation we're not eating enough fiber and also fiber in the uk has a really bad like image problem i think like most people i think come on let's give this a pr yeah if i was to ask my husband what he thinks fiverr is he's not in any kind of medical nutrition wellness field he'd um in fact the other day he came home with some crackers that said he's like look they say they've got added fiber and i was like okay because we kind of think of it as being like you know breakfast cereals like cardboard with the big fiber logo on it and um or fiber as being one thing but again it's the diversity different bugs need different forms of fiber and we find it in all the plant-based foods so it's not just the fruits and vegetables nuts and seeds legumes beans pulses and and whole grains and it's about trying to bring in the diversity i think in the last few years there's a publication about the sort of trying to get 30 different plant-based foods into your diet because it's about per week yeah because it's about the diversity but also it's that includes i think lentils and nuts yeah you know and you know i think it's very achievable yeah once people have it in their minds exactly and they're very common in in traditional diets i remember growing up you know my mom would would add lots of different um grains and beans and pulses to spin things out as she put it so that you could make a dish go a lot further yeah wonderful advice so so far we've said that lots of different colors lots of different diversity of plants is going to help your gut microbiome it's going to help your immune system eating less is also something that might be helpful right yeah so this is another field i've just got fascinated with um and that's the immuno metabolism i don't know if you've heard anything about that word you know metabolism words together yeah and it's only just in the last five years that it's really kind of popped up um and people have started looking at this but metabolism metabolism is basically breaking down of um the major components of our diet so the protein carbohydrate and fats into energy and building blocks that our cells can use and people might hear things about metabolic rate or i've got a good metabolism these kind of things that people say um and you know metabolism and the immune system are really intimately entwined and i don't know why it's taken us so long to figure that out because immune responses are energetically very costly you know it has to be sort of triaging of resources to be like right we're going to fight this infection and turn on all the inflammation turn on all the antibody producing and all those molecules that are being produced and the proliferation of immune cells that takes a lot of resources so it needs energy it needs building blocks is this why we feel tired when we're fighting an infection because the body's diverting resource to making all that stuff exactly and you might find that you need to kind of build yourself back up again after you've been sick um particularly if you've been sick for quite a long time or if you have an ongoing illness your nutritional needs might be very different from somebody who doesn't have that so in immunometabolism is the field that's trying to understand how metabolism can shape immune responses and vice versa so this happens at the level of the individual immune cell but also can happen in the environment of a tissue and an environment of our whole body and this is something that there's not really any kind of absolute concrete um understanding yet in this area but we know that when an immune cell is fighting an infection it goes through a metabolic switch and it goes from being in this kind of resting state to suddenly sucking up lots more um glucose to fuel uh proliferation the immune cells are making armies of themselves building antibodies requires you know the building blocks of proteins all of this kind of thing is happening and that metabolic switch is known as the warburg effect this is also what's happening to cancer cells but immune cells do this when and it's perfectly normal when they're fighting an infection or fighting any kind of um um problem and then it's switched back off when the immune cells go back to normal and they're they don't have this huge need for metabolites anymore but what people are starting to to wonder is can the overall environment of a body influence um the the metabolic switches inside our immune cells and switch them on aberrantly when they're not needed so we know that um diabetics with poorly controlled blood sugar so they have elevated blood sugar and and their body this creates an environment that causes some of our immune cells like neutrophils to not work so well so it affects so immune cells have nutrient sensing um switches inside them so they can sense what nutrients are are available and they're taking in that information and then that affects how they can work now what is not known is can we feed someone different um macronutrients proteins carbs or fats and influence how their immune system is working so can you switch unwanted immune responses off or on based on the different macronutrients that your body's metabolizing i think this is where the field of immunology is going to be headed in terms of treating chronic diseases because we know that people with chronic diseases like metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes heart disease or people who are carrying too much visceral fat that the whole environment of their bodies is metabolically different and this might be causing the immune cells to act abnormally and become more pro-inflammatory for example wow super interesting yeah a lot of research to come in that area exactly and i think we just don't know enough to say specifics yet but i think that's you know for so long we've been focused on the micronutrients but actually it's the macronutrient so you could adjust someone's diet give them different proportions of protein fat and carb to maybe alter their metabolism and alter immune cells that were going wrong so somebody who had a chronic inflammatory disease we can kind of steer that around and incredibly exciting isn't it on the other side of it what you said about eating less um another thing that i bring up in the book because i wanted to get people away from just thinking about you know a vitamin supplement for their immune system is that the immune function is impacted by over nutrition and under nutrition so if you're not eating enough or you're eating too much this is going to send your immune system awry and i should context that by saying if you're doing that consistently and then we have this field of research coming out about fasting and immune function and i remember being at conferences decades ago and they were talking about fasting and how it would regenerate um all sorts of parts of the body it was kind of mind-blowing and now we kind of see it more in the mainstream and we have all these kind of forms of different diets um and this again is causing metabolic switches in the body that then when you go on to refeed after someone has had a period without food you get increasing in growth hormone you get production of fresh new immune cells from the bone marrow and the stress of the lack of eating kind of causes some of the older immune cells and ones that might be more likely to malfunction to be deleted so you're kind of replenishing your immune system and we start to see in experimental models of autoimmune disease that this is you know highly therapeutic yeah it's fascinating that it's not necessarily just what we're eating know how much or how little it's are we fasting are we not fasting all these kind of different components that all play i guess they'll play a role in the signals the body is receiving because i guess that's all that immune system is trying to interpret the signals and sort of going okay what does that mean is it is it sort of safe or is it unsaid do i need to take action yes or can i just stay calm i guess everything we do even our thoughts our words our sleep our stress they're all giving a signal in some ways our immune system exactly is do i need to respond or is it okay exactly yeah yeah it's that simple isn't it it's core yes yeah yeah it's it's this decision making that's ongoing and constant it's integrating all these different inputs to decide and i think the thing with the sort of so-called western diets that that you know we talk about as being having a negative impact on our health and it's just it's just really tasty and we just want to eat it all the time it's salty it's sweet it's delicious everywhere we can quickly override any lack of hunger cues just to to eat we kind of pathologize being hungry it's like you're not ever allowed to be hungry you have to have 10 snacks in your bag in case you might not be able to reach some food and and then we have millions of incidences of eating across a huge portion of our waking time and part of the research i was involved in several years ago was looking at postprandial inflammation so when we eat there's an inflammation a subtle inflammation that happens in the body and this is quite normal we have plenty of checks and balances in place to keep that in check and actually dietary fiber is one of the best ways to kind of seal that up again and prevent that from happening as is having a period of um time without food in between meals so eating enough and the right things at one meal that you do not need to eat then until the next meal um is actually quite good for overall gut health but the whole body health i i i'm sort of super fascinated by this research as well and you know not only do many of us eat too much we eat too often in the day and as you just said there you know the act of eating is inflammatory yeah so that's a response to eating is that your body will become inflamed as you say nothing to worry about it's sort of that's part of the process but i guess you know and you know i know uh sachin panda's done a lot of look at this professor panda um and i think when when he started his app in 2015 i think it's called my circadian clock i i can't remember the figures off hands but it's something like 20 30 years ago most people were eating three times a day in the u.s i think you could probably infer in the uk as well and then in 2015 when he was measuring and people were impulsing into the app i think the top ten percent of people were eating 15 times a day and it was yes you know so that if we think about that let's say let's say i'm eating 15 times a day and let's say in theory it is all whole food right it's all nice uh health what what is considered yeah you've got to be careful with the language but what is considered sort of helpful foods for our health you do have to ask the question is eating them 15 times a day helpful that's that's like 15 bouts of inflammation whereas if you had the same sort of food over you know it's not a perfect analogy but three times a day over five days you're still getting 15 bouts of inflammation but that's over the whole week yeah as opposed to in just one day and i i really do think societally culturally there's a problem with how much we're being encouraged to eat even healthy foods like you can buy healthy snacks here and healthy snacks there but you're you're sort of inflaming yourself each time and i don't know what what would you make of that yeah no i think that's a real uh issue i think it's not well enough understood in the scientific community to really translate into a kind of clear health message for people but from the research i was involved in and from work like what sachin panda has done and others i definitely think we need to look at the incidence of eating as well as um you know the the stretch of time that we're eating i think some of the studies show that we're spending 18 hours a day eating it's just like the whole time we're awake um and i don't think that we are designed to cope with that on a long-term consistent basis you know going back to the traditional diets i you know my grandparents weren't eating all day every day um because that just wasn't how it was constructed in different cultures or eat in different ways but certainly it's not common to eat all the time and i i want to fuse the tradition with the modern life somehow because i think that's the key that we need we can't go back to times gone by but we can bring bits that we've left behind and kind of integrate it into what we have to work with right now somehow when i i find a very effective and powerful recommendation i use in my patients is to try not to eat for 12 hours and every 24 hours so uh you know basically eating all your food within a 12-hour window uh which you know really was the norm for pretty much yeah everyone maybe 30 40 years ago i mean yeah you know we we might stop eating at 8 p.m and maybe we wouldn't have breakfast too late i mean i'm not talking about an extreme fast i'm just saying i said i think it's quite i certainly know when i managed to stick to that consistently i sleep better i feel more energetic yeah and i think there really is this idea that you know you need time for the body to regenerate a little bit if your gut is constantly having to use up energy to constantly digest food that's going to impact your immune system it's going to impact you know the resource it has for something else yes exactly there's um you know the the guts lining as well there's a kind of um uh it's energetically costly because it's there's a turnover of those cells quite regularly and things like the short-chain fatty acids we mentioned earlier that are produced when our gut bugs digest fiber they are really nurturing to the growth of and repair of the the cells that line the gut barrier and those are kind of the interface cells between what's going on in the guts and what's being put in the bloodstream that could exacerbate that inflammation and we know that certain things like um saturated fats high fructose diets um fiber poor diets um as well as other things like stress and extreme exercise can alter the integrity of that gut barrier and exacerbate the sort of inflammation that you see postprandially [Music] the reason in america we're overwhelmed by copper is because we're metabolically so unhealthy 88 of americans have poor metabolic health which means that they're like in the spectrum of pre-diabetes which means they have belly fat which means they have inflammation and so when the covet lands on them it's almost 9 out of 10 americans they're like a sitting duck and so it's like putting gasoline on a fire and all of a sudden you get this cytokine storm that ends up killing people and and wherever you are in that spectrum we know that the poor metabolic health is a driver uh for for for really bad outcomes with that said people don't understand that within a very short time a couple of weeks maybe you can really radically reverse your meta poor metabolic health and i'll just give you a quick example you know we had a type type by two diabetic on insulin for 10 years heart failure angina liver kidneys failing i mean just she was a mess she was had a body mass index of 43 which you know normal is under 25 over 30 is obese she was in the severely obese category uh 65 years old and taking insulin every day and tons of medications within three days of changing her diet like three days she was off her insulin completely within three months she was off all her medications and her metabolic parameters were all normal in blood sugar cholesterol blood pressure everything kidneys liver and so it doesn't it might take 30 years to get there it can be very quick to get back and even if you don't lose all the weight i mean if you're for example a gastric bypass patient and you have diabetes you get your gastric bypass within a week or so your diabetes is gone you're still very overweight because it takes a little longer to lose weight but your diabetes is gone so your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet so i wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues i would double down on eating what we've talked about today on the show the pekin diet or just a similar whole foods philosophy approach and and it will have a profound effect on your immune system i just wanted to touch on you one of the principles is around habit change one of the chapters which is super interesting and there's a few things in there i really likes but one of the things that you wrote was friend power is more important than will power and you shared how at the cleveland clinic how you guys use groups and how powerful that can be and so you know for people listening who have tried to change before struggle to do it by themselves i think this could be quite a helpful tip for them right absolutely i mean i think you know um for years i i studied the minutia of functional medicine i was sort of a nerd about the biochemistry the genomics the physiology the microbiome i just wanted to know every little aspect of our cellular functioning and bio all this sort of nerdy stuff and i was really good at getting people healthy if they did what i tell them to do but often you know we know in medicine and half of people don't feel the prescriptions they get and half that do don't take them so the doctor writes prescription for statin 25 of people take it and 75 don't so that's not a good odds and i think in in medicine and nutrition and what we're doing is maybe even harder so uh you know i had this epiphany a number of years ago well over 10 years ago um when i went to haiti and met paul farmer who was able to deal with tb and aids in one of the worst places in terms of health care and poverty in the world haiti not by better drugs or surgery or technology but just by the power of community he called it accompaniment and he trained thousands of community health workers to help each other accompany each other health and make sure they took their medications because we know how to cure tbna's essentially treat them using the right cocktails and medications but these people didn't have a wash they didn't have running water they didn't have they often a place to be i mean so it was dealing with a lot of these these fundamental we call structural violence issues the social economic and political conditions that drive disease we see that in this country you know with food swamps and food deserts i'm sure it's like that in the uk too and i think we we have a tremendous um sort of deficit of understanding how how we really can environment that supports people to health and so the big epiphany for me was okay i know how to change biology but i'm going to fail unless i understand how to change behavior and so so i realized at the same time when paul was treating infectious disease using this this model i was like wait a minute um i said wait a minute you know chronic disease is also contagious right obesity is also contagious you're far more likely to be overweight if you're friends overweight that if your family is overweight we know that that you're social threatened to get you or maybe more in your genetic threads in determining your health outcomes we just know this from the science so if that's true you know if your bad behavior uh it goes along with with uh you know bad habits in other words if all your friends are you know eating mcdonald's and smoking and drinking beer and having coca-cola you're probably going to be doing the same thing but if all your friends are you know drinking green juices and going to yoga well you might be doing that so so there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure that that we all are subjected to because we're social animals uh it's how we as how we live we have to be social or else we would die as humans we just we're not we're not like a a wild you know lion that can roam around by himself or whatever and just eat whatever responsibility we're we're dependent on each other and so what we know is that it's much more effective to use friend power than than to use willpower when you want to change behavior and particularly for chronic disease so so i kind of had this experiment that we did with this church in southern california where we got 15 000 people to sign up for a six-week healthy living program sort of faith-based wellness program and it was striking what happened people just did so well they lost over the course of a year they lost a quarter of a million pounds probably like i don't know how many stone that is but it's a lot of weight and i think we we we saw that the power of these community-based solutions was so massive uh and it wasn't even an expert they had these groups that they had in the church that were met every week to support each other so that would mean six to eight uh people and it would have these little learning sessions and we just sort of substitute in the curriculum for the healthy living and they support each other they encourage each other they held each other accountable they had jogging for jesus you know and like all kinds of stuff that they did uh to actually do stuff together and that was really was an insight for me that was like wait a minute this is how we have to change medicine and so at cleveland clinic we're doing the same thing we're about to publish our data in the british medical journal actually uh soon uh where we show that that the the group visits the community support uh was more effective than one-on-one visits with a functional message doctor which were more effective than with a traditional doctor so we've got some interesting data about the power of this model to really accelerate change because the speed of recovery and getting better but also the adherence and the level of change so i i'm excited about using this model and we're trying to scale this up around the country and and use this power of community i call it love is medicine so food is medicine love is also medicine yeah i love it mark mark you you've just you know you're someone who has been dedicated to the cause of empowering and inspiring people both patients and physicians all over the world for so many years i can't imagine what it's been like for you you know i'm sure you've faced all kinds of opposition at various times but you know you're driven in that mission and you know it's it's fantastic to see it's very inspiring i know for many um you know for many of my colleagues or myself we see what you have been doing and how you have paved the way for many of us to start spreading our messages i want to publicly acknowledge you for that and say thank you and just to finish off mark you know it's as i say it's the piggy knight is a brilliant book i think it really helps to simplify nutrition for people uh some really some core principles there um i always love to leave my listeners with some actionable tips so we we covered a lot of ground today um phytonutrients we covered the climate regenerative farming kids all kinds of things but just to bring it all down for people at the ends this is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life what are some of your top tips for people listening to the show right now well i try to synthesize this at the end of the book and you know sort of getting started and it's just some simple things that are easy to remember first when you're going to eat something ask yourself a simple question did god make this or did man make it if you don't believe in god is it a nature mate so did god make an avocado yeah did he make a twinkie no if if if god made it you can eat it if nature made it you could eat it but if man made it you probably don't want to eat it right the second is a similar idea is you know try not to eat food with labels or if it has a label make sure you read very carefully what the ingredients are if it's broccoli it just says broccoli if it's a piece of chicken it's chicken if it's an egg it's an egg if it's an almond it's an almond it doesn't have a label or nutrition facts and so most of the food i like to use without labels now sometimes you know if you want to buy a package of nuts it might say a label on it and then it has your little nutrition facts on it might say salt or something or if you buy a can of sardines i might say olive oil and sardines and salt that's okay but just try to avoid foods with labels the next the next kind of principle is if you don't have it in your kitchen cupboard or you can't pronounce it you probably won't want to eat it right so if you have a jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your stir fries probably not but it's otherwise known as bht banned in most of europe but available here in the united states and it's a it's a carcinogenic preservative so you don't want to eat that stuff also when you go shopping don't go down the middle of the aisles stick around the outside where there's just real food vegetables and the produce and the dairy in the meat section uh if you're eating just focus on plants like i i always focus on two or three servings of plant dishes at each meal whether it's just serb asparagus or mushrooms or salad so last night i had beets we had mushrooms that has salad uh and we have sweet potato so we like four four vegetable dishes and you know a small piece of meat on the side so that's where meat is a condiment or a condom meat and fat is so important so remember to eat good fats olive oil avocados are my favorite but there's other good fats too make sure you eat a lot of phytonutrients you want to pick your medicines and your foods so like learn about some of the colors and what they have and try to eat like the rainbow as a way of getting phytochemicals it's an easy thing to do and you know enjoy nuts and seeds and and and certain beans are fine so i just enjoy your food i mean it's just got to be fun and delicious and pleasureful so i wouldn't really um get crazy about following a particular thing i don't i don't count calories i don't count carb grams fat grams protein grams i don't i don't think any of that i just think about what i eat if you focus on what you eat and quality you don't have to worry about how much you eat literally i mean i could eat you know a giant bowl of salad until i couldn't move and nothing would happen right so i think i think you can you can find out what your natural rhythm is in your biology by just getting the unreal food and then and then actually just focusing on quality and if you focus on quality all the rest takes care of itself diseases weight metabolism all that yeah love it mark 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 so i think that's really important

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 224,625

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, reduce inflammation, driving force of inflammation, gut health connection, leaky gut, anti inflammatory foods, brain inflammation, mark hyman inflammation

Id: H_geh0wGIGw

Length: 129min 16sec (7756 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021