The SECRET To Burning BODY FAT Explained! | Shawn Stevenson & Lewis Howes

so it is that deep this is how powerful food is you know it becomes everything about you the things you see in the mirror how you feel it's all based on food i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome welcome back everyone to the school of greatness i've got my dear friend sean stevenson in the house brother good to see you brother very excited about this you've got a new book called eat smarter use the power of food to reboot your metabolism upgrade your brain and transform your life and i want to jump in and ask you a question about something i've been insecure about my entire life belly fat never had a six-pack never and no matter how hard i've trained as an athlete in the past no matter how matter how hard i try to bio hack optimize sleep which i did in your last book to eating the right foods to eating just chicken and broccoli all day it seems like i've always got a little belly fat that i can never get rid of i'm curious is there a way you think i'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good through the things that i'm eating in a better way first of all folks need to know that you are ridiculously masculine you know what i mean like you've got a great frame yeah uh just an incredible athlete you know we've done a lot of stuff together together in st louis yeah and um basketball together right man dude i've got a story about that i can tell everybody but afterwards driving home because we were just gonna shoot around a little bit then we ended up playing three games and then lifting afterwards yes and on the way home i've never felt like that i had to pull over and take a nap really i've never felt like that before played hard because you and me were both like no i'm not gonna let him win but yeah there's a there's a component of course with genetics now with that said we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon is epigenetics yes and things that are above genetic control now with that said i think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is and most folks have no idea unfortunately like we're at war with something we don't even understand and so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum and a couple of these folks might have heard before but we're gonna go even deeper so the first type is subcutaneous fat and subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue this is the fat that's just below your skin and so if you're trying to if you think about like fat on your arms or your thighs your butt you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly but that's the stuff you can pinch now the i can pinch a lot right here the other type of fat is visceral fat and that's also it's also known as omentum fat and omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity right so this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs you know kind of putting if you have a lot of visceral fat putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in your core this is the fat inside your your not on the outside of your muscles but inside your body yeah so it's like your abdominal cavity gosh your visceral fat and you want less of that yeah this is the most dangerous type of fat this is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease with alzheimer's with type 2 diabetes you know it's just putting stress on your core everything which there's so much around there digestive tract your organs your liver your stomach everything and this is the stuff it's a little bit more firm to the touch it's a little bit harder to get your hands around and so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue these are storage fats okay so your body's storing energy and before i go on let me preface by saying this our fat is actually amazing it's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do it's just doing what it's programmed to do it's very good at it though and it can be a little bit clingy you know so you have to give the right messages and that's part of the issue so i just want to make that clear and fat is also it's not we tend to think it's like scattered droplets of of cells or unhappiness throughout our body but it's really an organ itself so that is an organ it's an organ it's an organ that has this interconnected communication and being that it's an organ it produces its own hormones all right so it's like making producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand all right so i went to preface by saying that wait is it an organ or is it like an organ it's an organ fat is an organ just like for example so fat in our body is one organ and it's all connected from the brain from the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe now there's different types of fat communities all right so this is another conversation this i go through all of these i literally call it the fat communities and eat smarter and break this stuff down so there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about it's called intramuscular fat all right intramuscular fat that's the third type of fat yeah and so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles now when i went to school my conventional education i really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of they have this dichotomy like they're two different things they're separate but they actually work together and intramuscular fat really provides and just to think about what it looks like if you think about the marbling of a steak all right that's that's your intramuscular fat now that can get out of hand too and you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles all right with the intramuscular fat so that's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community all right so these three are white adipose tissue these are storage fats now here's what's really amazing and a lot of folks might know about this next one we also have body fat that burns fat so they're not storage fats these are fats that contribute to the burning of energy the first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue all right or bat brown adipose tissue or brown fat now brown fat the reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria all right microphones are good right yeah mitochondria are really the energy power plants of ourselves really producing the energy when we talk about having energy these are the power plants creating that energy and mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned all right so folks don't we're taught these like diet paradigms like where the how does it work where does the fat go how does it get burned your mitochondria actually you're the place where the triglycerides get shipped to to actually burn them and use them as fat so brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria side note how how do i go to bed weighing a certain amount and then i wake up and i lose two pounds where does that go is that just a burn through sweat is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating into the air what is happening this is such a great question so in each smart this is the first time in book form like we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens and it's just the the question should be like where the hell does fat go where did it go does it go to just poop it out do you sweat it out does it you got that like breathing in you've got that thanos keychain did you go to another dimension but what they did when this was so fascinating they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated and so what they discovered was that about 84 of the fat because okay we have to preface by saying this for us psychologically in our culture we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it it's sweating yeah like we're out there we're at the gym we're sweating it out that's like that's your fat cells crying having a good breakup cry you know that's how we that's what we think yeah but in actuality about 84 of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing what yeah it's eliminated via your lungs yeah it's carbon dioxide so it no way so fast in the body and then it goes what into your lungs it's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out it's it's an eliminatory organ you know we don't think about that we tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract or bladders eliminatory organs your lungs and so you breathe about 84 of the fat that you lose comes out via your br your breath and about a third of that happens while you're while you're sleeping at night so you breathe fat out that's how you burn it yeah 80 how much caesar milan is the dog whisperer whisper exactly i burn it in my sleep um so wait a minute how much fat do we burn through our our lungs about 84 of it so all of our fat so if i'm 100 but this is not the just you're breathing it's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoot so it just comes through right through the breathing you also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids so about you know somewhere around the ballpark of about 15 16 to 14 sweat and urine yeah tears you can all of these things are eliminating uh fat products is the fat it looks coagulated when you look at it in like a in your body right so how does it break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see yeah it's like it's a very complex and beautiful process body is fascinating it is it is and we go through we and it can be so overwhelming but what i did was i made it an analogy in the book of a theater making your body like a cellular movie theater and there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats so we tend to think that fat cells we're trying to quote kill fat or burn fat but that's not really how it works actually your fat cells are storage containers and what they're getting filled with the fat cells basically when you're when you're born you have a certain allotment of fat cells all right you can't just indiscriminately kill them they get filled with more and more energy it makes the fat cell expand so we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel right all right and so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats the the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell or they usher them out when it's time to leave so one of his hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater right lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater all right and then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing you know namely your your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles one of them is insulin and the other one its brother is glucagon all right insulin is so man when you think of insulin what do you think of though eating sugar yeah that's right insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar right yeah and most folks think of diabetes too it's like tied into that lexus but insulin is so important for our survival it's just it's super amazing we need it yes you absolutely have to have insulin and if you're born you know in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin like you can die your cells won't get energy so now here's the thing insulin's job is to store energy right yeah and to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well so when it's out of hand when insulin is too active it can be a problem it's storing too much fat yeah and it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin it's getting overrun and and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly that's where you get insulin resistance all right and then you have something called um this kind of instant cell fat cell creation that can take place with the liver it'll just start making its own fat as well so but we'll circle back to that a little bit but here's the thing so you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage glucagon does the opposite it encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy but glucagon cannot do its job when unless his brother sits his ass down somewhere and he stops yes so how do you get insulin to stop doing its job that's what it's all about man that's what it's all about but we don't want it to stop we just want to be efficient efficient and it's now here's another thing we do know that as you mentioned sugar is a big driver of insulin carbohydrates in general breads pastas right yeah protein but protein does as well it incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree for sure and even fat in a kind of backdoor way does drive insulin function too or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance so it's not just this one thing but we do know that in our culture you know on average folks eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year you know so that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over over activity of insulin to the to the point that we have insulin resistance because 100 years ago we weren't eating as much sugar i'm assuming it's not even close it's not even close but it's but available we're getting sick sicker and being out and being able yes it's very different and this is the first generation we are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us all right this is the first time we're seeing this downtick we're supposed to be seeing folks well basically the life expectancy has gone down for the first time really in like recent history yeah yeah so we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or what do you mean so we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old mm-hmm now it's 79. really you know so it's just going a life expectancy has gone down for the first time previous generation got jesus dude it's interesting i was asking uh dr david sinclair about this yeah i love him he was like the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable he's like i've seen that in too many people the goal is to live as long as you can healthy flexible abundant you know not with chronic pain and then die quickly right to get sick and then die within a week not get sick within 20 years of misery he's like that's not a great life yeah we don't just want lifespan we want health span and it all really boils down and this is the most beautiful part about this and what i'm really hoping to impress upon culture because when we tend to think of food we tend to think of it in relationship in our culture we think of diet and relationship to weight it's just like what's connected when in reality food is one of the greatest if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times and this is what i really want to get across is of course i'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food but also how does food affect your cognitive performance and it's shocking when you find this date out how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people want to break that down as well what are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion and what are they before before we get to that yeah the the fat storage there was one more were you talking about brown fat yeah brown fat and there was another fat yeah so there's one other fact and so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria right so these energy power plants that's why it's brown babies have a lot of brown fat it's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia you know just to basically keep thermogenesis going as you become an adult you have a lot less brown adipose tissue it's mostly located like around your collarbones your shoulder blades down your spine and brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated if you have enough brown adipose tissue which you can create more and the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition so this type of fat is burning fat for you if you know it's probably fat yeah all right so that's a we've got three storage fats and then we've got two other types of fat and that's body fat that burns fat yes and so this other one and this is one a lot of folks might know might not know a lot about yet is beige fat this is the fifth type of fat yeah so this is beige fat beige fat and so beige fat is really really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat all right based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming turning into a fat storing type of fat or fat burning type of fat and the browning of this fat one of the things and i'll just throw this out there for folks since you asked about specific uh food when we go through so many different but i'm gonna throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy a little controversial is coffee coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells and in fact one of the studies that i cited in each smarter found they actually use uh fmri and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up signaling increased thermogenesis and one of the studies found that there's about a three to eleven percent increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine now there's a u-shaped curve of benefits right some is good once we get to a certain place we can mess ourselves up yeah and also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with right is it just is it coffee are you consuming coffee with doughnuts and crap and like you know these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals that's not good and even the coffee itself are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut so there's a big conversation there we dive into all these pieces to see like there's so many wonderful things that we have access to but in our culture we've been a little bit led astray and it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad it's been utilized for by humans for centuries but it's the quality in how you're going about it that can make all the difference and the quantity probably and yeah yeah and so just going back to your original question when we're targeting that you know the belly fat specifically and this is something that is not talked about enough it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning right and this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat and it's not that calories don't matter i want to make that clear i want to preface but with this but when i was in my nutritional science class in college the ver like the king the monarch the warden of diet is calories and i say warden intentionally because it's a little it gets into this kind of prison or mentality yeah and diets are really revolving around this and i i'm always asking this question and i'm so grateful that i've kind of hard wired myself to do this where did it come from where the hell did this idea start and so i went back and examined the entire history of calories and it actually for me it's just like when we find like egyptian pyramids like they didn't have any about calories you know right nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it even when it was discovered and it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition it was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering and it means yeah and this was in 1800s and then it made its transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named wilbur atwater but he's just kind of a little side note as well and i basically i go back and talk about all the people involved but this is what changed america this is what changed the world really was a physician she's a pioneer for sure her name was dr lulu hunt peters and she's the one who popularized the term calorie and she sold this was back in the early 1900s she created a nutrition book a diet book and they sold two million copies back then which is basically everybody in their mother's house right all right now what was it called this was diet and health and the keto calories something like that the keto calories but i went back and read these old fangled writings there's like a lot of pieces of it online and this began the indoctrination of our culture and starting to look at food in terms of numbers it's no longer this dynamic multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems now it's numbers and she specifically said we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread you won't say us one slice of bread you'll save 100 calories of bread you'll no longer say a slice of pie you say 350 calories of pie and so wow we stopped looking at food as food we started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers and she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake and now let me also make this clear dr lula hunt peter's battle with her weight for her lifetime all right and it's that term of like teach what you want to learn kind of thing now this is also crucial and some people this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit this was also the beginning of this indoctrination associating food with character associating food with morality and so she basically asserted that it's a character defect if you're not able to manage your weight there's something wrong with you and started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food and this was also during the time of like world war one so food rationing was a big thing happening and she said one of her quotes i put in the book and i'm paraphrasing that for every pang of hunger you feel you should have a double joy knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or you know with soldiers and what so she's basically saying this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss if you're hungry you're doing it right and this started to really change the psychology of dieting right and so calories began to become the king and the big focus now i want to say this calories matter for sure it's a it's a measurement of energy and food just like a meter is a measure of energy and distance but that meter is consistent if we measure this room consistently it's going to be the same same distance however calories are different completely ignore when you're talking about a measurement of energy it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function it's going to be different every day the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body because our hormones are changing our bodies are changing our timelines are changing what we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50 exactly let alone you versus another person and this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person but it doesn't work for someone else and it's i'm sick of it man wow because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them and they're not getting these very fundamental principles and so so folks can start to free themselves of this caloric prison i can share there's five really powerful metrics that are not examined there's really five major things that control what calories do in your body what are those so if we think about i keep mentioning hormones but just to give a good analogy of what hormones are hormones are really biochemical messengers that help your cells this cellular community that you have this amazing cellular community to communicate with each other it's like metabolic dms right it's like text messages emails how many hormones do we have there's about 50 50 different hormones about 50. are hormones what is a hormone is it a a cell is it an organ is it a connecting point what is it so horm the the building the most important fundamental building block block of our hormones are proteins all right so i want to i want to really reiterate this how important protein is because it's needed to build your freaking hormones right where are hormones stored all throughout your body you know even like that fat organ that we talked about is making its own hormones but there are hormones that are being produced and secreted by your pituitary gland your hypothalamus is like a master regulator of your hormonal system your endocrine system it's in your brain and so one of the things we talk about in the book is this growing epidemic of neural inflammation that is messing up people's hypothalamic function that's screwing up what's happening downstream like your thyroid is on that hpa axis it's a thyroid here or something in your throat so that's largely considered like the metabolic regulator like your master gland associated with fat loss or fat storage and it definitely plays a role so these are all pieces and it's in this web now what's actually determining what these calories are doing and so i mentioned i gave a little preface of what our hormones are so when we're talking about calories these five things and i'll give an analogy i give like an acronym the dm all right we're going to use that as our letters so it goes down in the dm you know what i'm talking about so the first thing that's controlling what calories are doing the tea stands for the type of food itself determines what the calories are doing your body and this is highlighted in this crazy study this was published in food and nutrition research listen to this this is this is freaking crazy they went to find out what would happen with a meal of the same calories that's either a meal of whole foods or processed food same amount of calories so a bowl of cereal and some fruits and vegetables so what they did was they had sandwiches and so one set of folks got the sandwich that was considered whole food sandwich was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese the other folks received the processed food sandwich which was white bread and cheese product right oh no and that's that's craft craft slices that american cheese tastes so good i can't call it cheese and so here's what happened after and i love this study because they tracked the pathway of calorie burn their metabolic rate and what happened when they ate these two respective sandwiches after they compiled the data the folks even though the calories were the same the folks who consumed the processed food sandwich had a 50 reduction in calorie burn after eating that dance what 50 reduction why is that because the body it so this gets into some of the other things we'll talk about but that the processed nature of those foods created some metabolic dysfunction and some confusion for your endocrine system oh man and your nervous system and all these the cellular community that that communication so now the body is less apt to let go of that energy it's confused it's trying to hang on to it all right now what are most folks eating processed processed foods all right so it's literally changing their way changing the way their body even associates with calories and they're trying to count these damn points and not understanding that the very nature of how their bodies operating is skewed so that's just the t that's the type of food all right so the h is how the food is prepared has a massive impact on what the calories do in your body so i mean whether it's cooked whether it's raw whether it's stir-fried i don't know all of that right exactly yes so to give a good example if you think about spinach right spinach a lot of folks of course consider it's a healthy food popeye was like knocking it down in a can i don't know if have you ever had spinach out of a can it must have been tough times so spinach is a good this is a good one because these green leafy vegetables there's nutrition that's locked in this inside the cell wall and you have to basically crack open the cell wall to extract the calories and some of the nutrients and as the as the spinach gets older that's why we have this baby spinach and as the spinach gets more mature the cell walls become harder to break into all right so just right off the bat baby spinach versus the same quantity of mature spinach you're going to get more calories out of the baby spinach is that better for you or this is not about better or worse right now this is just like understanding there's some other stuff happening okay now but here's another thing cooking the spinach too breaks down the cell wall so regardless if it's a baby spinach cooked spinach i mean a mature spinach and when this happens it also the density of the spinach like you've seen it you can drink whole bag comes this little teeny baby teaspoon right and so this is one of the things and i really start the book talking about this that most experts will agree that it was our ability to cook that really created like a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain because we're now able to extract more nutrients and and calories from our food even though this this term wasn't invented yet not to say that it's good or bad or that raw food isn't good it's just understanding when you how the food is prepared changes what calories do in your body interesting so if you're cooking spinach it has less calories in it if you're cooking spinach calories become more available so what does that mean when you consume it yeah your body's consuming more able to extract more of the calories when it's cooked so if it's raw it's got less calories a little bit less a less that you can extract from it in general these are these minutiae these are small things but they matter so this gets into the conversation of what food is and so even when we talk about calories the way that this was initially kind of brought to the forefront they used something called a bomb calorimeter all right a bomb calorometer and what they do is they took the food and they put into a box and they put that box into another box that's filled with water and then they would burn the food with electrical energy to find out all of the available calories that were in this food that was used to heat the water and so once they did this they were like okay there's 200 calories in this particular food product the problem is you might you might be the bomb lewis but you're not a bomb calorometer all right your body is very different there are indigestible components of that food for example whereas the bomb calorimeters is basically saying all the calories that are here when you don't absorb all the calories from the food that you eat okay so this creates this schism all right so those indigestible components could be they're going to be more in raw spinach this you're not going to digest as much yeah i hope that makes sense yeah so you're not going to digest as much and you're not going to pull as many calories in however there's bioavailable micronutrients that you're going to get it's not that raw spinach versus cooked spinach is good or bad it's just there's different ways that it impacts your body sure so that's how the food is prepared types of food how it's prepared right so the dm it goes down in the dm all right the next one is the e and the e stands for energy exchange now this one here this is something folks might have learned about a little bit in school i know i did in my university class however i don't think we really get this it costs energy it costs calories to digest calories your body uses calories to digest calories to burn or digest the calories to produce the the chew the saliva to chew to swallow through the intestinal wall like everything right to produce stomach acid to move it to take the food from your gastrointestinal tract through your uh small intestine and move it through uh into your bloodstream and move those cells those those nutrients to your to your brain to your eyeballs to your toes how much does how much do we burn from one meal from eating chewing to eliminating how long does that take typically is that a 12 or 24 hour window one meal that's that's such a very diverse question because it depends on the type of food it depends on matter of fact we'll get to that in a moment okay i'll get to that so energy exchange yeah energy exchange now this energy exchange how how many calories or how much the caloric expense is in digesting food depends on the type of food too the macronutrients specifically is what people know about but it's a little bit more diverse processed food it's going to be harder to digest it's going to be more work or less work it depends on the type of food got it but let's we'll stick with the overarching because we could do the whole show just on that one topic but just on the macronutrient side proteins are well noted to be more calorically expensive to digest it costs you about 20 to 30 percent of the protein that you eat is the calories in there are used to digest the protein so we'll just say if you consume 100 grams of protein 20 to 30 i'm sorry 100 calories of protein 20 to 30 calories are used to digest that wow that's pretty good so you get a net profit of calories of 70. all right so you can have more calories and realize it's going to be less that you're actually yeah with protein with protein with carbohydrates it's going to cost you it's about 10 to 15 percent of that energy that you take in caloric energy is used to digest it for fats is about zero to somewhere in the ballpark about five percent to digest it so more protein equals more burning this thermometer it's called the thermic effect of food all right and protein is largely kept out of the conversation today it's people are battling about carbs and fats right these are the big diet frameworks and protein is like rodney dangerfield it's like you know i get no respect you know what i mean it's just like so it was so fascinating because i think too in our culture we believe that most americans are just eating a ton of protein when the data actually shows something very different there are populations that are eating um a very high amount of protein but the quality of their protein too is a problem and then but there's a large portion of our society that's not eating enough protein they don't not even near what are they eating sugar and carbs yeah because we've replaced so many things in food with more with more sugar you know so the thermic effect of food this is not taken into consideration this does not show up on your product label and just to give people a food tip here um one of them is almonds almonds is a really great example and there was actually a study that was done and they was looking at basically saying there's a discrepancy in the atwater system of caloric so what you see on the back of a product label peop companies are not using a bond calorimeter anymore to measure calories in a food they're just doing some math right all right they're just like okay there's four um four calories per gram of protein right and they're just doing some math all right so that's the atwater system but what they found was that even though it might be 170 calories of almonds are consuming that's on the product label in actuality you only get a net caloric intake of 129 of those calories all right say one more time 170 calories you're consuming almonds yeah you're only netting you're actually only getting 129 because you're burning yeah the other energy being used there's a thermic effect of food right so almonds are great now is that true for everyone is that based on your hormones and your metabolic rate that gets to the next one all right so the e so it's going down in the dm all right the dm so the d is digestive efficiency all right digestive efficiency and this leads us into the conversation of your unique metabolic fingerprint all right every single human being is incredibly unique in what their metabolism and their digestion is doing there's never been a digestion like you before in human history that will never be after and you are not even the same today as you'll be tomorrow exactly it is always fluid it is changing and the problem is we think that we are we put ourselves in this box even a diet a diet might work for us for a year and then all of a sudden we're doing the same things and it stops working and we blame us it's like no i just need to paleo harder i need a keto harder i need to vegan harder calories more yeah and these are great frameworks but we don't want to we don't want them to imprison us because we change our bodies are continuously changing and evolving not to say that any of those aren't wonderful and eat smart is really a unifier of whatever diet framework you want to to go with i support that but there are principles that apply for success in all of them so digestive efficiency means your ability to produce uh stomach acid is one factor of that your your enzyme production like folks that produce lactase the enzyme that can break down lactose right milk sugar about 75 of population don't produce adequate amounts if any of lactase enzymes so they're not digesting right and so they're not extracting as many calories from it not that this is a good thing though because your bacteria in your body are going to go crazy if you're not digesting it properly thus you know running off to the bathroom you know because you don't know if you have to fart or whatever you know what i mean and you're not fun to be around if you're lactose intolerant like you have a you know extreme case of that and you're like down in some you know some some milk you're on the gallon day diet right so these are all factors that influence your digestive efficiency and also for you for example your gastrointestinal tract is probably longer than the average person right so this is bigger and taller yeah and there's more time for it to kind of stay in your body that that super highway is just longer because it has to try to fuel this bigger vessel how long is our intestinal tract it depends on the person how long is it several feet i'll just put it like that yeah it's it depends on the person and it's but it's also we tend to think it's very uniform we think these things are uniform across the board right like this five foot two girl is supposed to be doing the same protocol as a six foot four lewis house right you should drink the same amount of water eight glasses of eight ounces a day no we have everything is unique we gotta get back to these principles so digestive efficiency that's the e the d the d goes down in the dm so i'm sorry that's the d yeah the d that's the d the m all right goes down to the dms this one right here oh this is really this one man this is like the final frontier when we're talking about nutrition and health and where we're at with science right now and the m is your microbiome makeup the makeup of your microbiome has a massive impact on your body's association with calories this is part of the lexicon now i know just about everybody listening has probably heard of the microbiome right this incredible ecology this this dynamic uh plethora of microbes that inhabit our bodies that are in and on our bodies even right now dude you got like 400 trillion viruses yeah i know the viruses are on people's minds bugs right all over the body all over crazy 400 trillion and many of them are opportunistic right but that means that when you're compromised they can take control but the thing is while the day around they all play a role it's not good or bad it's about us being a good state of health because viruses have actually helped us to evolve as humans as a matter of fact when the human genome was decoded they found that humans the human gene itself is eight percent virus right it's like alien right it's like uh dude it's it's crazy it's crazy and we're at war with these things we're war with microbes we want to kill viruses we want to kill bacteria not to say that novel things or things that the body doesn't have an innate immunity towards we we shouldn't be careful about but we also have an adaptive immune system that this is how we got here and what the greatest science that we have right now shows that our immune system itself was started by viruses that were defending itself against other viruses and that's how we became the kind of dynamic adaptive immune system that we have today and so this is the b cells t cells you know these interferons natural killer cells all these things so but going back to the microbiome and the association with calories this this this is going to freak you out listen to this so to start with the this was published in the journal cell they found that there's specific bacteria in mice that actually block their intestines from absorbing as many calories all right so the bacteria in their gut blocked the absorption of calories now some folks are like well we're not mice i get that now we have human studies and now we know that folks that start to lean into being overweight and obese there's a very distinct shift in the microbiome cascade we can literally just look at somebody's microbiome cascade not even know what they look like what their body composition is and know that they're overweight based on their bacteria all right and so what they did was they took these human quote fat bacteria and implanted them into lean mice and what happened was the mice who were in uh who had the fat bacteria put into their bodies began to gain weight they became insulin resistant and gained body fat rapidly versus taking human samples from healthy test subjects leans have subjects and putting them into mice and they begin they they stayed lean all right well i'm getting excited this is the one this is this this study right here is the freakiest one to me they took identical twins all right humans humans yeah they took identical twins and they looked at their microbiome cascade and they found that the again these are identical twins same caloric intake all right the the twin who had a higher ratio of bacteria associated with obesity gained more weight had a tendency towards gaining more weight and body fat even though they're eating the same diet and they're identical freaking people they're identical twins the calories became such a lower tier thing they're eating the same amount yet one's gaining fat and one isn't so this conversation is so much bigger than just managing calories and telling your patients that they need to be in a caloric deficit we're way past that right now these things matter they absolutely matter but there's so much more to the picture and so many people are suffering because they keep doing calorie restricting and trying all these different diets and not understanding we need to get your microbiome healthy how do we get the microbiome healthy so that's the solution yeah it's always on the michael brown not the calorie deficit yeah this is a big part of the book too you know we focus on these things so yeah yeah uh we can get into that so one of the the most important things that the research is showing is that one of the most remarkable things in association with fat loss and weight loss is associated with having a higher diversity of microbes in your gut specifically bacteria the higher the diversity the lower your body weight and body fat percentage the correlation the problem is here in the western world our diversity of our microbes is just like we've got a lot of endangered species and a lot of things are extinct versus folks who are in more of a kind of an indigenous culture a plethora of fruits and vegetables and uniqueness right somewhere around four times as many different microbes right so take yours multiply it times four the different um the different species of microbes all right so in the western world our diversity is going down and this is also associated with some of the problems we're seeing that we don't we think it's just associated to it's it's people are they don't have willpower industry right but here in the united states and i want people to really get this we have an epidemic and nobody's talking about this and nobody's talking about this right now and associating to the problems we're seeing we have an epidemic of obesity over 200 million people here in this country right now are overweight or obese all right this is the definition of obesity obesity how much this is body fat you know unfortunately this is tied to some questionable metrics with like with bmi you know because somebody can be like have a lot of muscle on their frame but we're not talking about that all right we're talking about we know what's happening here in the united states and a recent study came out this meta-analysis determined that about only 12 of united states citizens are metabolically healthy all right so we've got over 200 million people who are overweight or obese how much body fat is overweight on a person or how much body fat percentage would that be it's like it depends twenty percent thirty percent for what yeah i mean even these numbers man can be a little bit um you know for just for example you know it doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthier because your body fat percentage is low right like i had a four percent 4.6 body fat at one point i was not healthy right right but just in general you know guys can be somewhere in the ballpark of 12 15 um and that's still but then it's just like the the vanity aspect like i can't see my i can't see my lines yeah yeah yeah i got kids i'm right now i'm like 16 yeah and i just checked but you're a healthy guy like this what i'm saying like when i say that it depends on you these numbers we have a big problem with these numbers but i'm using the numbers as a leverage as far as with statistics to try to like get our eyes open but there's so much variance within that because again like some people would sell their like their name their first born child rumpelstiltskin like to have your body right you know what i mean so yeah we got to keep this stuff in common sure sure yeah okay 200 million people in the united states are obese obese overweight yeah on top of that over 130 million people in the united states have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes 130 yes wow yeah that's crazy it is crazy it's crazy so diabetes are pre-diabetes and on top of that about 60 of the united states population has some degree of heart disease right now what's what does heart disease consist of what are the types of heart disease yeah in that category so this is a such a diverse topic too because even our definition of these things is a little skewed you know hardening of the arteries for example like how does all this stuff work but i want to point back to a really important point because i i just i don't want this to go left unsaid some of my best friends are like the top cardiovascular surgeon in the world or the top gastroenterologist uh in in the united states all right these are my friend's colleagues and they will tell you so top gastroenterologist just talked with him recently he was in school for like 15 years 15 years and he shared with me he got and he he specializes in the treatment of of systems associated with digesting your food the systems but guess how much education you got on food one month two weeks yeah like you even a month versus 15 years of education learning about food for two weeks you treat organs that deal with food right they have a big problem so in the cardiovascular domain same thing elective right and your heart is made of the food that you eat your arteries are made of the food that you eat your blood is made of the food that you eat how do we not have education on these things you know like our attention is so the system itself these are incredibly smart people these are some of the best and brightest but if you take a really smart person and you mis-educate them or you teach them the wrong thing they become world-class and doing the wrong thing and we keep trying to treat symptoms we're treating the symptoms of not knowing how food creates all these things so it is that deep this is how powerful food is you know it becomes everything about you the things you see in the mirror how you feel it's all based on food you know it's so powerful so what is i'm talking about how to uh optimize the microbiome yeah and i'm hearing you say it's the diversity of the whole foods that we should be eating and in america specifically we have very limited diversity of these whole foods these vegetables these fruits these uh healthy fats and meats and nuts i'm assuming is that what it is it's having a diversity and the more diverse we can have the better our microbiome makeup will become yeah and in the book i cite a brand new study that found that increasing your diversity in your fruits and vegetables inherently increases the diversity of your microbes so this is a very simple thing we can do even if we're eating healthy we tend to get caught in our little like food meal prep gone awry you know what i mean like chicken rice yeah same thing every day chicken rice you know but i'm eating healthier compared to the but what are you doing for your microbes they need a diversity and really the heart of the matter is i've been talking about probiotics for 15 years taking probiotics yeah not taking but just the science of probiotics and of course that's one input but you can take all the probiotics you want they're not going to colonize if they don't have the food that they want it's kind of like going to a party and you're hungry and they don't have snacks that you want you're going to have to leave there soon they'll talk about life let me know i'm going to talk about about 10 years dude i would get the 10 pack oh man i can say louis yes can uh taco bell you've come a long way steak and shake oh man that's if you want to get fancy you know so here's the thing and it's it's so wonderful because you know when we get into these principles and how all of this stuff kind of fits together um this is a simple input is increasing the diversity of the fruits and vegetables helps to give helps to create the preferred food choice or the prebiotics so there's probiotics prebiotics prebiotics are the food that the microbes want in order for them to stick around so we're losing all of these species because they don't have their preferred food in our system anymore all right and then we have postbiotic so we have pre pro and post the postbiotics are basically the vitamins minerals scaffolds these short-chain fatty acids all the nutrients your bacteria create in you for you it's a symbiotic relationship and that's really the front line right now it's the you know the like i said the the final frontier that we're studying let me ask you a hypothetical question obviously this would never happen but i've asked this to different nutritionists and doctors and scientists have come on hypothetically you're only able to eat five foods for the rest of your life just say hypothetical you're on an island there's only five food groups there yeah or you're only able to choose five every day for the rest of your life if you had to choose what would those five foods be to try to optimize your hormones your mitochondria your microbiome you know everything to optimize obviously be very limited but if you can only choose five yeah and you get to choose five vitamins and supplements if you wanted to yeah so five foods five bottoms obviously hypothetical yeah but what would you say louis i don't know if anybody's ever done this on your show before but i'm gonna have to plead the fifth like i can't answer that question it goes against everything you know and there are you know that even that if i had to choose like my five favorite or whatever you know i could do that but it's it's really getting away from the the the urgency of us increasing our diversity of food it's it's an urgent situation right really and on top of that i gotta share this too we go to the grocery store it looks like there's all this different stuff to choose from but the majority of foods that the average american eats are from the same 12 foods just packaged up differently like most of those like wheat corn soy you know sugar oranges made the top of the list too a largely orange juice you know but we're just eating the same stuff packaged up over and over and over wondering why our gastrointestinal tract and our microbiome so many species are becoming extinct within the same stuff so yeah it's becoming extinct because we're not eating more diversity yes diversity why grow it why plant it why you know develop it if we're not eating it essentially right it's it's the way that this this gets into the most important part of the book for me which is the systems behind why we're eating the way that we're eating and how do we fix those systems you know our governments unfortunately a lot of our food policies are controlled by lobbyists who you know work for these major food companies and our government and i shared one of the studies in the book which is this should be really eye opening for folks provide government subsidies for processed food creation you know like billions hundreds of billions of dollars and there was and the thing is it's like okay does that actually correlate with worse health and there was actually a study done looking at the people who consume the highest amount of these government subsidized foods and about a 40 greater incidence of being obese so there's a direct link between what's being provided to our citizens and it started off with good intentions providing government subsidies to farmers but now it's these big agricultural businesses that are growing the same genetically altered food crops that become the very basis of the human foundation of our food yeah and the fruits and vegetables aren't getting anything and so this also leads to the reason it's so damn cheap for us to go to taco bell and get a whole damn taco first right not just one but you get two for 99 cents right two for 99 cent tacos and an avocado costs four bucks for three dollars and it falls off a damn tree right how how is that possible yeah and it gets into how the money is managed and where money is being funneled and it's being funneled into the processed food system so what would you say on a on a weekly basis are the types of foods you're eating in your house what do you eat then what's the diversity of foods if you're not eating five you're eating 50 what are those foods those main foods for you okay so key word here diversity okay diversity and i hesitant to say because i don't want people to base on what i'm doing because they need to do what's best for them and what we do is we go through all of the the stuff that has some clinical efficacy like actual peer-reviewed evidence to support how this food is effective in blank things so whether it's helping the diversity of your gut whether it's helping mental performance yeah that and also since we're on the subject of metabolism still i'll give you one of my favorite food groups in what i do on a regular basis and this is highlighted in an incredible peer-reviewed study that found that the consumption of green leafy vegetables everybody hears it eat your veg eat your veggies why now we know why so what they found was that the consumption of non-starchy green leafy vegetables led to a direct increase in the production of our body's major satiety hormones like glp1 leptin right so the things that control our satiety because that's one of the issues with any diet framework is you need to you need to make sure that you're avoiding the thing like i call these these kind of three amigos of body fat growth and one of them is hunger and managing your hunger hormones and neurotransmitters related to that that's one of the things so green leafy vegetables and another study found that to help with metabolism yeah so they found that for every serving of vegetables that you have in a day correlated with a one-third reduction in waist circumference what's that mean so every serving of vegetable led to about a third less fat being on your waist really yeah yeah really fascinating and then if we want to make the jump to the cognitive side what would be the top veggies leafy gr leafy greens so many diversity man spinach kale bok choy all of it just killed all all of it diverse now cooked raw in a salad what's both really diverse doesn't matter and it also keeps things fresh and fun and also let me be clear about this too when i'm talking about green leafy vegetables you know this man well it might you might not have you might not remember i didn't eat a salad until i was 25. yeah it took me all about 25. maybe i was 30 when i got sweet greens it was dirty in new york city yeah the greatness bowl yeah exactly exactly but i'm i think part of why i'm so good at this is that i was really really messed up you know and i just grew up in a culture where you know this just wasn't a part of my reality there's no way that i would eat a salad right and so please understand a big part of that is association and culture and environment we talk about in the book that in the book but also if food tastes good it makes it a whole lot easier what if we make those vegetables take tastes phenomenal right and that's the thing that's missing oftentimes and we also have this thing in our minds that if it tastes good it's not healthy there's like this little thing like this can't be good for me but it's actually why do you think food tastes good it tastes good for you to eat it it encourages we're hardwired to take for to seek tasty things but food manufacturers have leveraged that desire to eat tasty things to our detriment you know and so i talk about that food science and the science of flavor because even flavors and foods are indicators of nutritional content if we were living in a natural way right so that we we just do we develop these flavor preferences based on we might be deficient in selenium and omega-3s so we have these flavor associations we know like okay i need to go and eat blank food you know i need to go and catch some fish because my body is wanting this thing now we just go to 7-eleven right you know what i mean like but we can take back control of these systems and recalibrate them and i was going to share earlier one of the things that i wanted to do was stack conditions so when i give you this food it's not just one thing it's good for there's another side with the cognitive function side and this was conducted by researchers at rush university in chicago and what they did was they looked at folks who were beginning you know into their senior years and actually looked at their brains and looked at their diets and they found that folks who ate two or more servings of green leafy vegetables each day had brains that were about 11 years younger on got up yes yes that's why i was so stupid in school i say sugar all day i never ate any vegetables yeah man me too me too man i'll get that uh personal pizza oh man get the ch to get the pretzel with cheese dip the pretzel into the cheese and then dip the pizza into it oh that sounds like my life so i'm over there game day you know like the muscle totally dinner when am i when the offense is in i'm doing my thing what defense i'm i'm yawning i'm tired like i was so tired all the time yeah working out practice always yawning yeah never eat anything healthy yeah did i think i told you this when i went to principia at the boarding school there was a milk dispenser in our dorm that's 13 years old a five gallon milk dispenser what a milk dispenser no dispenser not two percent whole milk that whole milk this is the cafeteria milk dispenser you know what i'm talking about you like oh yeah for the series they put the big bag in there like big five gallon bag they put in there cut it open and then you open it up i got them to move it into my room and i swear to you i swear to you i would go through five gallons every week no this is crazy to you drink it throughout the morning drink it at night when i'm studying drinking it all day because this is how i was conditioned as a kid my dad would give me a glass of milk every night it was just like drink more milk yeah commercials all this stuff i had a five gallon dispenser for a year in my dorm just drinking it all day and i was like man why am i always tired i can only imagine the the quality of athlete i could have been had i learned nutrition when i was a teenager because i didn't eat anything quality yeah that's crazy man like that's literally blowing my mind you got them into right next to my bed just drinking it all day wow dude that's crazy and like you said what could have been what could have been same thing for me you know and i ran a 45 40 when i was 15. you know imagine eating healthy dude but it was that same six feet tall if you ate healthy this in the same season in the same season i was doing track practice 200 meter time trial and as i was coming off the curve into the straightaway you know the story my hip broke my bones were so brittle i was dude i was five nine in eighth grade like i was towering you know you're in the back row and then everything just started to break down right you know my bones and it wasn't until i was 20 when i got diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease determinative disc disease so my spine was just deteriorating and nobody stopped to ask like how could this happen to a 20 year old kid or a 15 year old kid just breaking his hip at track practice and from there my dreams of you know college football everything start to become vanquished i've got game films where i break away like 39 sweep i'm gone i'm five yards from the end zone nobody's behind me and then i i start to fall like breaking down you know carrying you know tearing muscles yeah like i've got on game films and i'm like limping into the end zone and falling down it was a nightmare man and i couldn't stay on the field anymore because my body was just breaking down and what i was exposed to is what's called standard of care which standard of care means they gave me some nsaids gave me some crutches like you'll heal up i did but like nobody asked how is his bones breaking from running and when this diagnosis happened man it was earth shattering because i was always like this fit guy like capable and like now i can't even really walk right because of this pain in my from my spine that's going into my leg and my physician at the time um he put the mri up and i was just like okay like how do we fix this you know just working with the trainers they're like okay what do we do on the field you know and he's just like pump basically like pump your brakes like slow down son this is this is bad you know this is incurable and he told me that i have this i had the spine of an 80 year old man wow when i was 20 and not a healthy 80 year old either you know like shout out to mark sisson you know wow but um is he 80 he's like right he's 70 i think he's 70 or 72 now no no no he's yeah he's gotta be like no no i think he's in the 70s i think he's late 50s he's just 16. and he's definitely not everybody he's definitely at least in his 60s i think he said i don't think he's 70. that's amazing if he looks that great at 70. yeah but this is what's also possible even wherever he is is he's freak he's like a six pack had 60 something or seven whatever it is yeah yeah and but i was the opposite how was what you would think about with the 80 year old person breaking down and you know a lot of chronic pain and you know he sent me on my way and that was that you know he gave me some medication prescribed bed rest now i want to encourage anybody if you've ever if you ever get a diagnosis with something life-altering like this do your best to get a second and or third opinion before taking any dramatic action and i did unfortunately it was the same thing and it was until two and by the way for the next two years every doctor that i saw told me bed rest so i just kept doing nothing yeah just sitting around like the worst thing you can do for yourself not only not only was my spine beginning to atrophy in my hips and my bones but now everything else is muscles everything your gains are not producing they're not yeah your body works on this user to lose a basis so i'm literally just decaying you know you're dying at 22. yeah accelerating that process and two years later man it was it was a little over two years it's tough man stuff to talk about incredibly i i was in fear i i got into a place where i was scared to stand up because the pain i would have to like walk very gently because i know like the sciatic nerve has to like hit and then i can walk normally like a normal gait and so i just decided not to get up because i was scared to wow and being that i'm eating the food that i was eating at the time what i call the tough diet typical university food i was made out of this oh my body was made out of this and i'm not moving now so i gained so much weight pretzels and cheese dip yeah i eat fast food every day every day not a day went by because it's cheap and tasty tastes amazing yeah and so but everything changed and it was i don't remember if it was that day or the day after but i went to see the last physician um because i had hope and i had this chronic question going on in my mind all the time why me why won't somebody help me just like but i didn't realize it and our brains are really run on the questions that we ask it's just it's an it's a reflexive thing it's called instinctive elaboration because our brains are like a servo mechanism is even right now we're exposed to trillions hundreds and hundreds of trillions of bits of data and information that our brain has to filter and only present to us consciously the thing that we hold most important right because even now like you'd be focused on your toes you know and probably thought about your toes a little bit you know for people that are listening but where your toes not existing before they're there but it's not a top priority and so that serval mechanism is guided by the questions you ask and so if i'm asking all the time why me why this happened to me why won't anybody help me my brain is just looking for reason to affirm why my life sucks and after i got that last diagnosis he again gave me a new prescription told me bed rest two years later and sent me on my way wow he meant well he meant well but i realized it was either that night or the next night that i'm by myself they're not thinking about me even though they mean well they are not walking in my shoes and dealing with the suffering and it was the first time that i asked a different question i asked what can i do to feel better what can i do to get healthy is the first time i ever looked at like what can i actually do because i've been like why won't somebody else help me and it changed everything man that was the first night i slept through the night in like two years without drugs and um i woke up with just a renewed sense of purpose because i had already i went to school i was in the auditorium nutrition class yeah but i got out of it because i i hated it i hated science ironically which you gotta love it science is my boot now yeah you know what i mean but it's the way that i was taught it didn't really have an association it didn't have that connective tissue wow and i began to dive back into my training because i always did good in school you know i had you know straight a's but i would get into trouble you know i would um i didn't enjoy the process of like learning science because it just it didn't stick and so asking a different question i did the low-hanging fruit first which was exercise like i just went and started like going on a a cycle you know just got on a stationary bike at the gym just started pedaling it was hard the next week i started doing a little walking and just built up from there the first thing i did was i did slim fast first because that's the commercial yeah right i'm like i got to lose weight to a shake up for for breakfast shake for lunch a sense of banana right but thank goodness i quickly transitioned out of that and because of that question somebody that i knew for two years no three years at that time she was a you know somebody that i'd you know kind of hung out with for a while you know just hung up anyway she was a chiropractor wow you know she was older she was like you know 10 years older and she took me to wild oats i'd known her this whole time we never went to wild oats went to wildlife i'd walk into this entirely different dimension like i'm like why is there grass sitting up there on the counter [Laughter] and but there was this nutrition prescription book is this massive like nutritional bible there and i began to look at all this like peer-reviewed evidence on this nutrient working for this thing and i was shocked that this stuff existed i had no idea and this goes to the conversation of exposure you know so many people are we're born into these conditions when i was growing up man you know we were on wic we you know food food stamp christmas would come around you know the 1st and 15th and we even got food from you know shelters and you know food pantries and um we didn't know that there was a difference with food you know it's just stuff that you eat and i just want stuff to taste good that's the end of story i didn't know that it mattered i thought that if you want to be healthy you exercise because i looked fit you know but it was my body was made out of straight crap yeah yeah sugar crap processed food but going going there i started to this then i went from slim fast to becoming a natural pill popper all right because now it's like all these isolated nutrients but i quickly thank goodness again transition out of that you mean supplements yeah because not to say that supplements aren't helpful especially the right ones but it's still looking at food through this allopathic lens that i was taught in school which is like a pill for this yeah yeah you know a pill for every ill do you take supplements now definitely not as many and there's a reason why too that we talk about and eat smarter which it went from about seven percent of all liver damage to about 20 in recent years being associated with supplements shut up over consumption yeah yeah it's real because your liver has to handle the processing of these isolated nutrients oftentimes it's not a very regulated system either not to say supplements aren't good but we're taking like some people taking 20 30 different supplements a day so what happens when we take that many supplements a day consistently over time it affects our liver so your liver is responsible for number one like drug metabolism we have over somewhere around 70 percent of the united states population is on prescription drugs your liver is handling that first and foremost and also your liver is responsible for food you know food metabolism that interaction as well which and your lip the name live er it's responsible for you being alive like massively we can't survive without your liver there's only one liver right it's two kidneys one liver yeah you got two eyes there's some pirates out there you can have you know but you can only you can have one kidney and survive yeah but you can only there's only one even with your liver like you can lose portion of your liver and grow grow it back in a way yeah that's pretty cool it's regenerative magical like seemingly magical how big is the liver it's pretty big i mean as far as like the internal organs but here's the crazy thing is that with it again i want to reiterate it's not that supplements are bad especially the rights food-based supplements especially but synthetic isolated synthetic chemicals right so about 20 of hospitalizations from liver problems is associated with supplement consumption now no come on yeah yeah from self-destruct not not pill prescription pills but actual over-the-counter supplements yeah 20 percent of liver challenges in the hospitals are due to this yeah how do they know it's based on supplements and they just do an intake and like look at what the person is consuming you know so again this these types of science this type of science is still like very there's nuance there but just first people do just for us to be aware that this exists that hey wait a minute maybe i want to pump the brakes a little bit on taking all these pills so this was game changer for me man i asked the question okay so i've got degenerative disc disease my spinal discs have degenerated i have two herniated discs it caused me all this pain what are they made of i asked this simple question what am i my diss made of what are they made of what is my spot what are my bones made of i'm my my my bones are so my bone disease solo what are they made of we think of calcium right because of the marketing but there was like 20 other things that were as important if not more important for the formation of bones and our bone density really that i had no idea about magnesium even omega-3s that we think about in associating to like brain health omega-3s are needed for bone formation as well all right so i wasn't getting any of that stuff in my diet so i started taking pills first but then i was like supplements or supplements yeah so i asked what foods are these things found in and then i understood the seemingly magical aspect of food which there are all these other things that are there too these cofactors and biopotentiators and the game-changing insight was that what have we been consuming the longest this supplement is new this drug is new humans we have millions of years of evolution in relationship with eating foods that have supported our development what am i what do my jeans expect me to eat where is it expected to come from from a concentrated pill supplement or from food yeah so i started to make my mandate then 20 years ago was food first and that was a game changer so once i did that man six weeks after that moment of decision like revelation the pain that i've been experiencing every day that had me in fear standing up was gone wow and i was scared i was even more scared then because i felt like i'm gonna do something that's gonna happen so i'm like freaking out but i'm also like let me just keep going with this let me keep going and i was feeling so good i lost about 18 pounds at that point which is not typical but i was like the skinny kid in my family for a while and now like it just those you know fat cold fat jeans these epigenetic influences turned on so weight just came off of me and the most wonderful part of why i'm sitting here today with my with my man lewis house is my professors students you know at the school they started they saw me and it wasn't like i looked like somebody just lost weight it looked like somebody who was like really happy and lied yeah because when i see my pictures of myself then i look like freaking like casper the goats like i look like a shell of myself like there's something missing the light is not there and so people started coming up to me and the first person who like specifically asked me for help she's somebody i went to high school with who went to end up going to college i was at and she saw this transformation she was like can you help me you know to do to to do what you did and i was like absolutely and so i was just like gonna like schedule time to like meet up with her and then she was like how much should i pay you and like time froze you're like wait a minute i can make money helping people live better no idea it was a thing you know and i was like um seven dollars and that was the beginning man so then i went on to like certification for personal training uh strength conditioning coach then you know graduating shifting all my coursework like to biology and all those things and then opening my clinical practice and working as a nutritionist for over a decade man and just seeing some amazing transformations um you know we specifically work with a lot of folks with chronic diseases you know diabetes heart disease people coming in they got blood sugars like 300 400 they're on metformin sometimes insulin oftentimes somewhere around 80 percent of the time were able to uh normalize their blood sugar without medication you know working alongside with their physicians and you know just but we did that by education because that's the thing that's not that's not given to them you know this nobody's telling them why it's just like sugar's bad okay but i would reverse engineer it i would like literally walk them through here's how your body actually does this thing here's how diabetes is created here's how insulin resistance happened and you could see the light come on in their eyes and it's proper education yeah what's your thoughts then on fasting in general because i don't know if you've seen dr jason fung's work uh the obesity code the cancer code where he's talking about fasting a lot to reverse type 2 diabetes in a lot of his patients as part of the process of part of the treatment plan i guess is is adding fasting into your life how does that apply to things to the hormones when we fast whether it's a one day fast three-day fast how does it apply to our metabolism does it slow down our metabolism when we fast again whether it's intermittent or three days what does that do to the body oh man this is in this is i could not not put this in there because the data exists and it's just and i want to make this clear i also have a protocol for if you don't want to fast and you just want to have your three square meals a day you know like but for all of us if we can put our nutrition even into a 12-hour window and that 12-hour of fasting of not eating which is just that even includes your sleep time 12 hour window of not eating eight hour window of eating it just say you finish your last meal at 8 o'clock and then you sleep you get a good night's sleep you wake up the next day you have your first meal at 8 a.m wow let me tell you some of the things that can happen number one we see a substantial increase in the production of human growth hormone right which is largely it's considered the quote youth hormone you know it's associated with you know healthy body composition but also like cognitive development and especially in recovery you know protection from illnesses and speed of recovery from injury and things like that goes it just goes on and on and on it's why kids have so much energy too it's really tied to energy right hgh but i know we talked about this before i think of like barry bonds yeah like you know jason giambi yeah you know we've been for st louis mark mcguire big mac they named the highway after highway 70. they took it back though they took it back down but um yeah so by having a little bit of fasting that process uh is elicited and you know you produce more hgh but also improvement in insulin sensitivity like we see marked results with that too and one of the studies that i put into the book was so shocking for me that i could not not talk about it they had folks to consume essentially the same amount of calories but once they partitioned it all they did they gave them this one restriction of like okay let's take this consumption of caloric you know availability that we're giving you and put it into this 12 hour window and then they saw increased weight loss simply by having the same amount of calories but in this window instead same amount of calories they also saw increased production of satiety hormones or normalization of like leptin and gorilla they saw biomarkers associated with longevity as well so and i can go on and on just by putting your nutrition into a window and then there's so many different types of fasting too yeah yeah you know and i can't talk about anything with efficacy or ethically without me doing it so man that's part of what happened to me too of going too far i've tried all of them whatever diet framework you know i've done it raw food yeah everything vegan but i'll do it for like a year two years three years you know and that that change in the and i didn't know at the time of my microbiome and taking away certain foods that really might for myself personally were associated with good health by removing those prebiotics sources like that can cause gut dysbiosis and so i was dealing with that for a couple of years and like i started to become food have these all these food sensitivities that rooted in this change in my microbiome and so my even my story of like what did i do to fix this because it's like one of the biggest things growing right now is dysbiosis of gut bacteria and you might not have stomach problems or digestive problems but it might show up with migraines it might show up as issues with your thyroid it might show up with arthritis interesting this is important because even our methods of testing look man i'm just going to say the thing nobody else is willing to say dude like honestly man we've gone through a lot of stuff today but we don't know [ __ ] yeah we don't know anything man like even the top virologists in the world knows less than a fraction of a percent about all the viruses there are and how they function we don't know anything but we act like we do you know and it's it gives us a sense of certainty we do we we know so much more than we did but and that's the beautiful part too even our innovations in the last couple of decades have been amazing but what have we done as a result like we're not getting any healthier you know the data exists and part of this problem is that on average when we have a peer-reviewed even if it's a placebo controlled double blind like everything gold standard of study we get a result finding that say curcumin active component in turmeric has anti-angiogenesis properties meaning it helps to cut off the blood supply to cancer cells and fat cells selectively that's a curcumin yeah all right well we'll circle back to that but we find that it has it's been proven it takes on average from proof to being in clinical practice in medicine 17 years we don't got that kind of time lewis that's part of the problem is that these studies are often designed and speaking to in this language of academia to sound smart to other people instead of like how can people take this information and use it in their lives because i don't have to wait 17 years to find out that this thing can help me right so we don't know anything but the that gatekeeper system and also the the level of information getting to people is changing thanks to the work that you're doing what i'm doing taking this information and making it available to everybody but making it make sense because it doesn't have to be food is complex yeah but it's also incredibly simple you just put in your mouth and chew your body fat here is the fine print yeah but it's very complex in that it affects so much you know like there's so many different factors and that's one of the things i moved towards in my clinical practice is that personalization and also looking at where do people come from like what's their lineage maybe we can eat what your ancestors ate you know a little bit more like that and i would find great effects with that too before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day you know there's so many different things to consider but the basics are often not addressed you know for most folks in our society and again we tend to like try to treat a symptom but at the end of the day we have to cover the basics and make sure that we are getting the nutrition that our body needs right now which can be different next week well um what let me give you an example here right now as we're recording this we're at a probably the most stressful time in human history and the the number one mineral that's really associated with the modulation of stress like our body stress systems is magnesium and prior to this experience we're having right now as a culture 56 of the united states population was chronically deficient in magnesium yeah and it's responsible over 350 biochemical processes in the body so that means there's 350 things your body can't do or can't do without properly without it you know so that one getting that one nutrient addressed can help to elicit the parasympathetic nervous system response turn off that fight or flight and start that healing to deal with stress because what i was going to say is the nutrition side stress it seems invisible that's the thing like you can't see stress but it is very real and it can kill you mm-hmm one of the most interesting reports this was in my first book about over 90 percent of all physician visits today are for stress related illnesses they have a stress component yeah i'm stressed i'm anxious i'm overwhelmed because what is what does that mean what is it doing this related to your hormones your neurotransmitters the things that are determining what your liver is doing what your heart's doing what your body fats doing you could overeat your weight fat you can under sleep your weight fat you can under exercise your weight fat and you can over stress your your cell fat as well and now most people have issues with all of these things because 150 115 million americans are regularly sleep deprived what are we doing again we're looking for another drug to solve our problems right now we are we are the sickest nation in the history of the world self-inflicted let me be clear self-inflicted right that's the route and the system that all of this that's governing all of this is sick in and of itself and unfortunately you know again we have a a great medical system especially for emergency care but as far as the treatment of our biggest killers sucks everything continues to get worse heart disease cancer diabetes alzheimer's obesity nothing is getting solved because we continue to treat symptoms not the root yeah with pharmacology and not addressing the issues that cause these things how many people go in that have alzheimer's and or even early onset how many people go in and get counseling on sleep because now we know that sleep deprivation is correlated with alzheimer's and this is the stuff that's going to continue even alzheimer's also is in many aspects is being called type three diabetes so the relationship with insulin in the brain you have receptors in your brain too and your body's ability because your brain runs largely on glucose and it needs to be able to do that process right but what happens when insulin resistance happens in your brain man so how often are we getting this kind of education we're not we're not but we can change it that's the beautiful part about right now is that so much is fluxed up right you know so much is in flux and it's so malleable now that it can be changed it's getting shaken before the systems are very sturdy and i'm just like out there promote like don't go to mcdonald's no like i'm not gonna get very far doing that but right now when things are so shaken up i really i'm so grateful to be alive right now i really feel that eat smarter coming out right now is not an accident and i even share with you like we have a national campaign we're going to be at essentially every target store in the united states i used to work at target yeah i was a floater i'm out there pushing the carts now my book is going to be in target and not just in the book section special 2021 wellness initiative i'm not playing man let's go man you know we were born for this moment this is the time right now all the stuff that we've done to prepare ourselves this is the time to do it yeah and we really have to work to get our our communities healthier at the end of the day that's our greatest defense that's our greatest defense because unfortunately this isn't being talked about enough a cdc report came out which i've been talking about this stuff since april and and also in march looking at the numbers coming out of italy and finding that about 88 of the folks who passed away with this virus had pre-existing chronic diseases and co-morbidities uh somewhere around two to three on average co-morbidities what's that so these are additional causes of death additional causes of death right and or pre-existing chronic diseases right so heart disease the main three were heart disease uh diabetes and obesity and i was like oh we're we're in trouble they were a co-cause of death with coven they got cobid but because they had these other elements it's what also caused the death so this and what tends to happen right now is people get skewed because everything is so polarizing right now so thank you more recently there was 250 death 250 000 deaths in usa related to covert is that so let's let's be clear because we get so skewed on what this means this does not mean that covid19 is not a factor and some folks can lean so heavy into this just like well these people would have been alive or these people died because they were going to die anyways because they had heart disease not saying that let's be clear what i am saying and what the data now shows even here in the united states because when i saw the numbers i was like we're in trouble here we're the sickest nation in history and so the cdc report found that 94 of the folks who lost their lives with this virus had an average of 2.6 pre-existing chronic diseases so would had they this only six percent of people didn't didn't quote have a health problem which there might have been some health problems right because these are opportunistic viruses that i talked about earlier you could be compromised being sleep-deprived and being overstressed right but 94 of these folks and nobody is scratching their head and nobody is saying a thing on major media and our health leaders like we have to get our people healthier yeah we see the number one risk factor is being sick having pre-existing lifestyle related chronic diseases and i'm not saying this because it sounds good the journal of the american medical association one of the most prestigious journals 2018 publisher report massive meta-analysis they concluded diet poor diet is the number one cause of our chronic diseases in america wow number one it's right it's the root that causes so many things obesity heart diabetes all these other things but we're not talking about that yeah we're not talking about it it's the root we're talking about let's get another drug to treat a symptom we really need to be talking about how do we get our citizens healthier you know and so in truth our chronic diseases loaded the gun and covid pulled the trigger you know that's really a good way to look at it it was setting us up for trouble and this isn't the last time this isn't the last time there's gonna be more oh yes absolutely this is just especially if you look at the trend we've got sars we've got murs all this stuff is just happening in the last couple of decades people keep talking about the the flu from back in 1990 but it's been pretty quiet now all of a sudden why we are more susceptible than we've ever been before and humans are tinkering with stuff that we've never tinkered with before messing with our food system all genetically modified crops and you know we're of course in the lab tinkering with viruses and not really understanding like we keep carrying this level of arrogance like we can outsmart a virus what like how's that working out for us right just look at the numbers and we keep blaming we keep blaming people and not the systems that are governing all this stuff you know there is absolutely a degree of personal responsibility but i grew up in a situation i didn't know that there was a choice i didn't know there was a difference you know and i want to make sure we have access that's one of the things that changed my life is just getting access getting exposure and we can provide that for everyone truly yeah so many things i could go down there but what i'm hearing you say is going back to the basics with nutrition and if we could go back to the basics if we give people one prescription today around types of foods and or types of supplements they should be adding to give himself the best chance to have a strong immune system burn the unnecessary fats they don't need optimize the metabolism what would you say we should be eating and taking in general obviously each person's unique in different stages of life but i'm hearing green leafy leafy greens a mixture of diversity is this a mixture of our diversity of meats fruits nuts oils as well okay or is it more in the leafy green category so that's one facet for sure another thing it's so funny i've been talking about this stuff for years but now like we've got really cutting edge data on this stuff another major thing i want everybody to focus on from today forward is their omega-3 fatty acids a lot of folks have heard of this now we have a wonderful study that was just released and it's highlighted in heat smarter where they're looking at the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids in human tissue the ratio as we evolve was about three to one omega-6 to omega-3s and omega-6 are known to be the kind of more pro-inflammatory of the omega-3 of the omega family omega-3s are more of anti-inflammatory but omega-6 are important they're important for many processes in the body but when that ratio gets skewed we see increased inflammation which inflammation is tied with every hormonal problem you can name and i talk about that as well and also inflammation in the brain and so now that ratio is twenty to one thirty to one for some people omega six is to mega threes and what they found in this particular study was that as folks improve their omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is directly correlated with decreased body fat this is a major regulator of what your fat is doing right your fat communicates with each other the fats you consume part of the problem is i know i was indoctrinated with the idea that eating fat makes you fat you know i i thought we were past this but we're not because it keeps coming up in the media every now and then like saturated fat saturated guys it's going to kill you and i've got studies that show the opposite not to say but they're not taken into account where does it come from the types of that yeah yes the quality yes and so one thing you can do immediately is improve your omega-3 ratio all right so avoid consuming things that are um extremely high in these inflammatory omega-6s which for most of us we primarily get that through these highly processed seed oils right so corn oil so-called vegetable oil which is not it's not damn broccoli oil right like these are pros these are highly processed seed oils and dude what happens like canola oil canola even at whole foods if you go to a hot food bar if it's open um a lot of it's cooked in whole in a canola oil like it's organic canola oil healthy no canola oil is how what it takes to make these oils they they smell and taste disgusting they would but they have to be deodorized highly processed and refined and then can you just even that and of itself should tell you because these oils are very delicate they're very delicate it makes them rancid and increases their uh the capacity of like uh oxidative stress right for your body what are the top oils we should be eating then olive oil is number one right i wouldn't say number one very important important one very important it's also a lot of calories right yeah but there's some really cool studies that i put into the book showing this direct correlation with increased olive oil consumption and weight loss wow so yeah something special there but here's the thing olive oil is not highly processed right right it's often cold it can be cold pressed and is bottled in dark glass bottles because it's sensitive to light so don't get your olive oil in clear plastic you can see it don't don't buy it it's already it's denaturing extra virgin olive oil is that better extra virgin organic or if you know the farm they're not using like pesticides olive oil is good yeah but with the omega-3s the number one source is through fish cold water fish now some people listen like i can't do that i don't mess with the fish and some people you know i've heard this so many times in my years of of clinical work that you know they're vegetarian i'm sorry they say they're vegetarian but i only eat fish pescetarian but they wouldn't they wouldn't say like like the term it's more like i don't eat meat right i don't eat meat but i'm pretty sure yeah it's just just say i don't eat land meat yeah exactly so but if you don't if you don't eat fish or that's okay we have there's other ways however this is the most dense source that humans have been eating the longest if we're talking about real whole food sources which we want food first and so specifically i'm saying this because of the dha and epa these are the omega-3s that are clinically proven to have all the benefits i've been talking about whether it's cognitive performance and or stuff with the metabolism there are omega-3s and plants but they're in the form of ala all right ala is very different your body can convert some of the your your ala into epa and dha but you lose about 95 of it in the process conversion process so you got to eat like clinically speaking a buttload of chia seeds like daily like you got to be shoveling it um whereas wild caught well asking salmon might be just like a higher source over the over the top you know um how so again but what do we do algae oil look for a high quality algae oil yeah it's good for your huh yeah super hot cook it or you just drink so algae oil will come in capsules very concentrated sources of of of algae or krill oil so krill is like a microscopic shrimp so maybe that on your f on your uh uh ethics maybe that is like a you know more viable source yeah super high astaxanthin which is correlated with longevity and reductions of heart disease and all this stuff so that's really cool um so krill oil or algae oil now to be clear 99.9 of the studies on the effectiveness of omega-3s they're done on fish and fish oil not these other things the oil the the the compounds are there but we just don't know if they have the same effect okay so just be aware of all that stuff green leafy vegetables we covered omega-3s one other thing i want to make sure everybody walks away with today because we talked a little bit about the macronutrients but there's not just three so in school again we're taught fats proteins carbohydrate there's actually six the other one's alcohol it's a macronutrient and we talk about that all the ins and outs of that as well which yeah we can't even get into that but you got to read it the data is is bananas yeah not to say good or bad but you need to know yeah also the sixth man coming off the bench for the macronutrients is fiber but that fifth player that doesn't get a lot of attention is water water is probably the most profound of all these macronutrients so here's the question how much water days should we be drinking all right so this is i'm going to give you i'm going to give you the answer okay but even it doesn't matter if i tell you what to do unless you really have a connection why to do it water your body your everything about you is based on water we hear this stuff you're mostly made of water what the hell does that mean in the in the book i cite a study that had folks to drink 17 ounces of water and just within a couple of no just within a couple of minutes and what happened is something called water induced thermogenesis they ended up burning about 25 calories from drinking water now is the quality of water mattered is it yes temperature matter no hot or cold not as much okay that's a personal preference there are like the ayurvedic principles like i know about all this stuff but yeah yeah okay so here's the cool thing so wait they burned burn 25 calories from drinking water louise one just one little 30 minutes or something no if you do that four five times a day you're burning you know 100 200 calories just from drinking water 17 ounces of water that's what was used in this study okay that's like a a tall cup right but the question is why why why the hell how can you burn calories like that i thought you had to go exercise your face off not just drink water it's because water makes everything work better every single hormone we talked about is operating in a water medium your mitochondria is based on water all your neurotransmitters are based on water and it moves throughout your body in this water superhighway and when you become deficient which most people are just habitually through the day all these systems start to basically these wide super highways start to become these like dark back alleys where like batman's parents got killed you know what i mean yeah and so how do we fix this drink drink the water but like you said the type of water matters and we go through all of that too but just to give some simple principles there was one study this was done from testing houses from southern california all the way to new jersey and they found that tap water was contained dozens of pharmaceutical chemicals all right metabolic waste from people taking chemotherapy medications antidepressants uh lisinoprils you know stuff for heart disease this was showing up in our water supply it's like what the hell why how's that possible we're all we're really this we're in this earth bubble you know and this stuff is getting recycled you know there is toilet to tap water there's new projects that are taking yeah and taking the water from our you know from our bathrooms and putting it back to the faucet but it's one of the things trying to solve our problem with water here on the planet but oftentimes it's not due to that it's just the hydrological cycle and stuff that we're as humans putting into the environment now that never existed before and we don't have filtering processes that can get these are microscopic amounts let me be clear but they're there nonetheless you know so just understand if you don't get a water filter you are the filter you become the filter all right so i highly recommend getting a water filter but ideally this would be um something like reverse osmosis but that makes it like blank water there's no vitamins and minerals in the water right it's like dead water exactly dude you need like rich vitamins and minerals in our water correct this goes back to nature when i was in school we were taught waters h2o but there is no h2o anywhere in nature by itself there is no plain h2o anywhere in nature it's called the universal solvent water is always combining with other things and it's what gives water this character and structure is the minerals that's in that water so when you take all the minerals out yeah what is that doing to our body when we're just drinking dead water so one of the things that i was like even battling with the publisher on is like putting this whole story of water and how our cells actually get hydrated so i'll just put it to put it simply it affects the hydration levels of your cells and your extracellular fluid and it can cause some serious problems but what if water has too many minerals like ocean water it'll kill you right so it's just it's a basic so where do you get your water from okay right but i mean like throughout the recent centuries it's like top water no no people go to where the springs are at in the world i'm talking about recently oh like super recent yes but like we used to go to wells we would humans would have set up shop and civilization where the water was at and and dig a well yeah and go to technology for that yeah so that's what would determine what we're doing right so that's ideal human water is spring water yes but now we're getting it from bottled sources or we're bottling it and yeah right they're great they're great sources that you know um maybe bottling glass we get in the conversation about bpa and all that kind of stuff where do you drink your water from you know when you came to my house in st louis we lived on a well we had well water that's crazy right but we moved here very different so we get like you know spring water delivered bottled in glass come you know got like a water dispenser what's it called mountain valley everybody knows about mountain biking right now but again i've been on this for like 20 years you know waking up every day i'll drink about um 20 to 30 ounces of water start the day how much so how much should we drink throughout the whole day to give people a simple barometer yes the number one marker for you to know how much water to drink is listening to your body unfortunately we're largely disconnected from what our bodies are telling us all right so to give people a barometer as just a starting point take the take your weight and divide that number in half and just say if you're 150 pounds you divide it in half that's 75 that's the number of ounces that i want you to drink as a baseline so half your weight yeah now once you get to 200 pounds and up just 100 ounces 100 salad because i'm 230 right now so 100 ounces yeah yeah that would be the idea is that it's not that much it's really not that much but a gallon how much is in the gallon how much is is that 64 ounces see you remember man you went to stop trying to remember this stuff yeah so it's okay so 100 ounces a day for me yeah wow it's a long and this is i know but this is if you're active you know what i'm saying like all right and they're working out yeah and so like even given that barometer it's gonna depend on your lifestyle so that's why i don't even like giving these numbers right because okay let me ask you a few things on better relationships what are the foods we should be eating to have better moods and a higher chance of quality intimate relationships this is the most this is the most important part for me personally of this work because relationships are a big factor of stress for people which causes a lot of bad habits and obesity and all these things it's the level of stress so if we can have better relationships with everyone our lives would be better so what are those foods that can support that and have you ever seen as many people fighting like arguing and like is so much polarization and people being separate it's it's that's the major epidemic because we can't solve our greatest problems with everybody fighting and nobody's willing to listen and what the data shows clearly and that i really brought forward for the first time in book form and just getting this out to everyday folks is how much our food affects our ability to perspective take and have patience and to have empathy and this is highlighted one of them is the you know study this is from the ohio state university yeah the ohio state and what they did was they had couples they just looked at their blood sugar which largely what they found was that these blood sugar spikes and crashes you know you consider like hypoglycemia in your blood sugar going low which is largely related to what you eat when the the study i mean the study participants these couples when their blood sugar would go low they found that they were more aggressive and irritable towards their partners and less likely to perspective take and to resolve their conflicts because of their blood sugar being wow um disturbed too long so yeah so how do we do we want the blood sugar to be high or high just normal medium level normal and the reason that it could go so low and but here's the thing when your blood sugar goes low it will normalize but it usually does that because it's like a survival response it increases your production of stress hormones to get it back up so cortisol your body can literally it's a process called gluconeogenesis it can break your muscle tissue down and use it for fuel to get your blood sugar back up right there's so many different ways your body does to figure out the problem but it makes you more irritable and aggressive and so many times in relationships people are not fighting the other person they're fighting their biology people people are not fighting a real actual issue they're creating we often create issues how many times do you get into it when you're tired how many times you get into it when you're actually just hungry you're hangry this term is used now it's cute but it's real like we've got science on this and how many times you get into it when you're when you're just stressed out about stuff right and you get into an argument about you know some damn like i don't know house shoes or something like why'd you put my house shoes here you know it's like some the stupidest thing you know and it's just because you're not showing up as your best self because our biological needs or our biological uh thermostats are off right so we have to address these things so that's number one one of the most shocking things and this is more so than ever right now we're seeing these we're seeing violence displayed right social unrest due to violent incidents and there was this is kind of messed up what i'm about to say um but it's a it's a great community to study because it is a controlled environment but they took prison inmates and they went to see how nutrition would affect their behavior interesting and so this was oxford university researchers and because it's a ward study it's controlled environment they wanted to see if they gave these inmates increased nutrition so vitamins minerals omega-3 fatty acids the crap they're getting every day they didn't change their food that's another study where they changed their food and the results were even bigger than what i'm about to share with you but i want to give you the baseline so they gave they had a control group who didn't get these additional nutrients and they had the study group after they compiled all the data they found that the prisoners who were getting increased nutrition had a 30 reduction in overall behavioral fences and they had almost a 40 reduction in violent wow offenses now is that because they were just happier they were getting good food no this was not this was not the mood they had a placebo group everybody's taking pills they don't even know what they're taking it's just supplements that's it that's why i wanted to share this study first supplements only right and just getting everyone's taking the same supplement right or told wow yeah 40 almost a 40 reduction in violent offenses wow by improving the nutrition available in their body wow so food the nutritional value really affects our mood yeah and it can affect our relationships this study was so profound another set of research researchers saw this and it was like this this can't be possible 40 reduction in violence no way so they repeated the study with another set of prisoners and this was published in the journal aggressive behavior which there's journals for everything um but they found almost the exact same thing happened we can increase our propensity towards violence by improving our nutrition and then so studies that we've done actually implementing more whole foods saw even better results because food wow that's something else it does something really special so with that said um right now in communities that are in conflict we're oftentimes your likelihood you let's be clear you can have empathy and compassion and patience for someone else when you're not well it's just harder so much harder and when you're stacking all the stresses and sleep deprivation and not working out and you're lacking community and you're doing all these things and stacking it you're gonna explode yeah at some point yeah it's just a matter of time and just just your ability to have patience hmm you know your ability to see the other person's point of view your ability to have compassion and understanding it's harder to elicit those things but it's not impossible what we're experiencing right now because we know that we are the sickest nation in human history self-inflicted a nation of sick people are arguing against other sick people and wondering why nobody's listening if we can get folks healthier we can start to have healthier conversations it's not that it's impossible if you're not well it's just harder harder and i know some folks are listening they think you know i might not be that healthy but i know that i i'm compassionate and i have empathy absolutely but please understand it's not just about your perception of who you are when you're not well your biology starts to act very different and we start to see shifts in your brain activity in your prefrontal cortex that's responsible for decision making and social control and distinguishing between right and wrong starts to go cold and your amygdala you know these more primitive parts of our brain start to take over yeah and we're just not our best self so this is my big mission that you know i might not say that often but this is imbued into the pages of the book is let's get our citizens healthier let's make this a mission because just imagine what we can do once we start to feel better absolutely man man this is powerful make sure you guys get this book eat smarter use the power of food to reboot your metabolism upgrade your brain and transform your life this is going to be extremely helpful for you guys definitely check it out some amazing research lots of studies in here and a 30-day smart plan of action at the end which you're going to really want to take on which breaks down everything on what foods to eat how much when to eat so if you need some sauces dips dressings everything that is the best stuff for you make sure you check this out it'll be very powerful check out shawn eat smarterbook.com also get sleep smarter while you're at it because sleep is such important to our overall health and wellness and when i started out to my sleep from your teachings it really helped my overall well-being so just getting quality sleep and it's not just the amount of time it's also the environment everything so it gets sleep smarter make sure to follow sean on the model health show podcast one of the top fitness nutrition podcasts in the country check him out on instagram sean model uh twitter facebook youtube which we're gonna get you up on youtube more i want you to get more videos out there so man this is powerful be smarter thank you man thank you so much for being here brother it's my pleasure man love you bro love you too man you want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health make sure to watch this video right here are really important and the food that you're going to find micro foods that you're going to find them in are whole foods you're going to find them in plants you're going to find them in meats meats are a great source of micronutrients organ meats are also a great source of people yeah organ meat

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 853,153

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, shawn stevenson, Shawn stevenson interview, shawn stevenson sleep, shawn stevenson sleep smarter, shawn stevenson diet, shawn stevenson podcast, burn body fat

Id: Zhq18gOrkrM

Length: 117min 12sec (7032 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020