Dhru Purohit Show - How to Get Better, Deeper, and More Impactful Sleep (Rebroadcast)

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. We all know the importance of getting enough sleep, though many of us scrape by with as little as possible. It turns out that sleep can make or break your ability to lose weight, age slowly, prevent cancer, and perform at a high level. When your sleep suffers, you suffer major consequences far beyond the dark circles under your eyes.  In today’s mini-episode, Dhru speaks with Shawn Stevenson and Dr. Carlos Ritter about how sleep is the foundation of health and how it impacts your body, brain function, performance, and so much more. They discuss how to create the ideal sleep sanctuary, how to regulate your circadian rhythm, and the most important sleep nutrients. They also talk about how EMFs interfere with sleep pathways and what we can do about it.  Shawn Stevenson is the author of the international bestselling book, Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the #1 health podcast on iTunes. Shawn is the founder of the Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide.  Dr. Carlos Ritter has spent the last 15 years working to actively mitigate the effects of electromagnetic radiation. Now as CEO of EMF Knights, Dr. Ritter shields homes from EMFs, protecting individual’s “biological restoration pathways” during sleep. As a doctor in pediatric neurology and extensive research in brain function, biology, and physics, Dr. Ritter has developed new protective technologies to safeguard people from the harmful effects of EMFs.  Find Dhru’s full-length conversation with Shawn Stevenson here: https://lnk.to/dhru-53/ Find Dhru’s full-length conversation with Dr. Carlos Ritter here: https://lnk.to/dhru-106/ For more on Dhru Purohit, follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, on Facebook @dhruxpurohit, on Twitter @dhrupurohit, and on YouTube @dhrupurohit. You can also text Dhru at [phone]. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. There’s nothing worse than restlessness, nasty night sweats, and constant tossing and turning when you just want some restful deep sleep. If any of these problems are plaguing your sleep, it might be time to get serious about your sleep hygiene by investing in Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is the only system on the market that actively regulates temperature using their patented hydro-powered cooling technology and automatically gives you personalized recommendations on your ideal temperature zone. Go to eightsleep.com/dhru and use code DHRU to check out the Pod Pro mattress or mattress cover and save $150 at checkout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming up on this week's mini episode of the Drew Perrault podcast. We're seeing now with conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's. It's looking like it's not only are we referencing like type 3 diabetes, but it's very strongly looking like it's an inability of the brain to detoxify itself. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. There is nothing worse than restlessness, nasty night sweats and constant tossing and turning when you just want some restful deep sleep. But did you know that studies actually show that our body temperature could play a major factor in how soundly we sleep at night?

So if any of these problems are plaguing your sleep, it might be time to get serious about your sleep hygiene by investing in eight sleep. Eight sleep is the only system on the market that actively regulates temperature using their patented hydro-powered cooling technology and automatically gives you personalized recommendations on your ideal temperature. zone. Picture this. Your bed is so freaking smart that it not only adjusts the right temperature for you, but it also gives you and your partner's specific individualized recommendations on how to sleep better the next night. We're living in the future, y'all. Eight sleep has so many amazing reviews. They've even found that their users on average fall asleep 32% faster. They reduce their interruptions during sleep by 40% and get overall more restful sleep. I can vouch for it. I've been

using it for the last two months and it's a game changer. And by the way, they aren't just looking at temperature. Eight sleep system is also measuring respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability to give you a sleep score with, again, targeted recommendations on how to optimize your overall health. You can get the eight sleep system either as a whole new mattress if you're in the market for a new mattress or just as a mattress cover if you already love the mattress that you have. Both of them come with the Sleep OS app that works with any smartphone, including Apple or Samsung. There's a reason the Pod Pro by 8 Sleep is so popular

and it has garnered the attention from CEOs, like myself, pro athletes, and overall high performers who know how essential it is to focus on sleep fitness. Sleep is so key. None of us can afford to ignore it. Go to 8Sleep.com backslash Drew and use the code D-H-R-U-Drew to check out the Pod Pro mattress or mattress cover and save $150 at checkout.

That's 8Sleep, E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P dot com backslash Drew D-H-R-U to make the investment in your sleep fitness today. Hey, everyone. I'm Melanie, producer of the Drew Pruitt podcast. For the month of December, we're going to be rebroadcasting our most popular mini episodes every Monday. Today we're rebroadcasting our mini episode with Sean Stevenson and Dr. Carlos Ritter, and we're talking all about sleep and how it impacts your body brain function. performance, and so much more. We'll also talk about how EMFs interfere with sleep pathways and what we can do about it.

I hope you enjoy it. Hey, everyone, Drew Prode here. We all know the importance of getting enough sleep, though many of us, here's the truth, many of us scrape by with as little as possible. It turns out that sleep can make or break, your ability to lose weight, age slower, prevent cancer, and even perform at a high level. When your sleep suffers, you suffer. major consequences far beyond the dark circles under your eyes. My guest on today's mini-episode,

Sean Stevenson and Dr. Carlos Ritter, talk to us about how sleep is the foundation of health and how it impacts your body and your brain function, your performance, and so much more. They discuss how to create the ideal sleep sanctuary, how to regulate your circadian rhythm, and the most important sleep nutrients. They also talk about how EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies from Wi-Fi and cell phone, interfere with sleep pathways and what we can do about it. Let's listen in starting with my interview with my good friend Sean Stevenson, author of the international bestselling book, Sleep Smarter, and Creator of the Model Health Show, featured as one of the top podcast on iTunes. The number one thing driving our brain is our sleep quality,

which we'll talk about today. Just hopefully people have their socks knocked off. And so what is sleep really? Well, all we can do is just look at what's happening in the brain when we're sleeping. That's how we know we're sleeping is a change in your brain waves. And so right now we're in a normal waking state, which is beta. We can get into some gamma. But as we start to transition to sleep, we get more into alpha.

And the brainwave start to slow down. Then we go to theta. And then from there we go to deep delta sleep, slow wave. non-rimmed delta sleep. And this is the most anabolic stage that the human body can be in. Just being up as catabolic. Even if you're sitting doing nothing, your body is in this kind of catabolic state is breaking down faster. It's like you're plugging into this infinite energy source when you're sleeping and getting that deep delta sleep. Because this is when you're producing the vast majority of your human growth hormone. You produce 70% of your human growth hormone during sleep.

Kids have so much of it. This is why they have so much energy. But for us, it's right around 18 to 20, there's a pretty sharp decline in HGH production. And my argument is it's a cultural thing too because around 18 to 20, you don't have rules. Like, you know, you're out of the house and you don't abide by a schedule. And so, I know for me, when I went to college, like, I didn't think about it ever about getting, you know, whatever amount of sleep. And so what we want to do is, and we actually, we can look at the research now, people who are getting six hours of high quality sleep. crushing it with their blood sugar levels, memory test, performance, folks who might be getting eight hours of crappy sleep, right? So it's not just the quantity does matter, but the quality

matters a lot. And what it really boils down to is getting efficient sleep cycles, spending the appropriate amount of time in each cycle for you, which is going to be a little bit different for everybody. And sleep cycles on average are about 75 minutes to maybe hundred and fifteen minutes but we'll just say 90 for average so 90 minute sleep cycles i recommend that you do get four a night so that for the average person that would be around six at minimum and from there but you might need a next year sleep cycle complete so that would be like seven and a half some folks it's nine hours lebron james he nine hours like he's part of his training you know and i quoted him in the book as well and usain bolt fastest human ever

He said this, that sleep is a part of his training because it enables his body to absorb the training better. And those were his words. And so that's what it really boils down to. And there are certain things, and we'll talk about some of them today, that throw your sleep cycles totally out of balance. And you might think you're getting eight hours of sleep. But objectively, if we use a sleep monitor, you can be missing several hours of sleep by making some of these mistakes. I love it. And going back to the brain waves.

everything you were sharing. I mean, we now know that your brain is going into a deep DNA repair mode at night when it's sleeping. It's got its little trash can cells, trash dump truck cells that are going in and offloading. And, I mean, you probably know science on it way better than I do. We talked about a bunch about it in broken brain, but there's so many factors that are happening while we sleep, especially inside the brain. Oh, listen to this. And this might freak you out a little bit, but your brain shrinks while you're sleeping. And it can shrink, you know, it can shrink about 30%.

And it's because... Physically in size? Like literally in size. Yes, yes. And this is because when you're awake, there are a lot... I mean, your brain is doing just... So many things.

Yeah, we're talking like millions and millions of processes every microsecond. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that occur from that. And that's all good. But we have to get those things out. Your brain has to... flesh that stuff out. And it's kind of hanging on to a lot of it until it can go into rest mode

and do its deep cleaning. And it wouldn't be like that if our lymphatic system was connected, like, but we have the blood-brain barrier. And so they don't directly like link up because, you know, this is kind of this extracellular fluid throughout our bodies. But your brain has its own kind of lymphatic system, the extracellular waste management system called the glimphatic system, which is a little shout-out to the glial cells that run out. And the crazy thing about it is that when you're sleeping, it's upwards of 10 times more active than when you're awake, this glymphatic system. So I'm talking, it is going into hyperactivity to clean your brain and to get rid of these metabolic waste products while you're sleeping. And one of the craziest

things that we're seeing now with conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's is looking like it's not only are we referencing like type 3 diabetes, but it's very strongly looking at like it's an inability of the brain to detoxify itself. And so what are we seeing? A build up of waste and plaque and all sorts of things. What are we seeing this epidemic of sleep deprivation? Let's talk about, we've set the problem up, right? What can happen to your health when you don't get good sleep?

We talked about why sleep is important. What are the things that typically throw people off when the conversation comes to, hey, how did you sleep last night? It's primarily focused on what you were saying earlier, which is quantity over quality. Take us through some of the things that impact the quality of our sleep. Absolutely. And can throw it off or on. Absolutely.

You know, let's talk about, since I've got this little kombucha here. Yeah. Let's talk about this because, you know, and kombucha, shout out to kombucha. It's wonderful. I hope I didn't do a product placement, but, you know, send a check to the show, broken brain. But, you know, it's made with black tea, right? So it's caffeinated. There's some caffeine in here.

And depending on your metabolism for caffeine, wow. I'll just share one study with you. So what they did was they took test subjects and they gave them caffeine directly before they go to sleep, three hours before they go to sleep, and even six hours before they go to sleep. And they found that even six hours out was enough to dramatically suppress their sleep quality. So what happened was subjectively the test subjects thought that, say, they got eight hours of sleep. objectively by having caffeine even six hours before bed, they lost one hour of their sleep. Wow.

So they were unconscious so you don't know it, but it's because they're not going through their sleep cycles effectively. And immediately, so first of all, it's just like, wow, that's kind of crazy, but I'm asking why, what's going on? Two things. Number one, we do know caffeine is a pretty powerful nervous system stimulant. And kombucha is on the lower end of the scale, by the way. But if you're sensitive, it could be a problem at night.

But, you know, an average cup of coffee, you know, we'll just say 200 milligrams. Caffeine is a very powerful nervous system stimulant. And it has a half-life on average somewhere around eight hours. So that means we'll say you get a grande, right? So it's like maybe 400. And so after eight hours, since it has an eight-hour half-life, 200 milligrams are still active in your system. And that can really kind of keep your nervous system lit up, which controls your neurotransmitters, which are related to your sleep.

and eight hours after that, half of that is still active. So 100 milligrams and so on and so on. Some people have a better metabolism for caffeine. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. Some people can't really touch it at all and they're doing it every day and don't know that this is the reason they need more caffeine is this mess in their sleep up. So that's number one.

Number two is the role of this was considered like a throwaway, like a byproduct of metabolism. It's called adenosine, all right, adenosine. Now we know that it's pretty important. because as you're going through the day and you're building up these byproducts, this adenosine molecules, they fit into receptor sites that as they start to get filled up, it starts to nudge your body to go into sleep mode. It starts to nudge you to go to sleep. And caffeine has this really interesting ability because the structure is so similar to adenosine,

it fits into those adenicine receptor sites. And so even though your body's producing these metabolic waste that should be fitting in to nudge you to go to sleep mode, they can't fit in there. And so caffeine basically tricks your body into not knowing how tired you are. So I hope that makes sense. It makes absolute sense. And I think there's a lot of people that are out there that can relate. There's a lot of people who even feel that, oh, caffeine doesn't affect me.

I know I never really grew up drinking coffee. I never drank coffee. And when I was at university, a little bit of green tea, that sort of stuff. And then when I finally started having coffee, I am a fast metabolizer of caffeine. I got my genetics done and I can see it on there. And I also just have always felt it. but I used to think, oh, I could have a little espresso at night. It doesn't bug me.

And I don't drink coffee regularly, so I probably have a better tolerance in general. And the quality of my sleep, when I really started paying attention and tracking my sleep better, I realized the quality was off. I still may have slept and fell asleep pretty quickly. And maybe I still got seven, eight hours, but my quality would always be thrown off. Yeah, and that's ultimately what we want to get people to. We don't need all of these fancy tracking things. Those can be great.

But we want to start to pay more attention to the subtle. things like how do you feel how do you look how are you performing throughout the day how is your brain working like paying attention to those things and full disclosure i just want to share this i'm a fan of caffeine and i just started drinking coffee actually maybe it's getting close to two years ago and like my whole life i was just like because i'm very big on not having disgusting things and so i thought coffee was super disgusting things i know it sounds crazy but i'm very driven by pleasure you know like we're pleasure creatures and so for with my experience with coffee I was like I was a little kid and I had some of my grandmas I took a sip and I was like I'll never have that again it's like a

little kid having beer maybe you know yeah exactly and so it's like Folgers like it was like folders you know and so then I had some really good coffee and my wife kept raving about it first of all and it's organic it's that all the little good things and so I tried it one day and I was like oh my God this is good like and now I get it like I really it's coffee isn't just coffee it's a it's experience you know it's a thing you know and so I'm a big fan but it's just so the the question is okay so how do we modulate this so we can enjoy our coffee and our caffeine or your tea without it damaging your sleep and so the number one thing is very simply having a caffeine curfew you know giving yourself a cutoff time if if at all possible

if you feel that this is something that's bothering you it could potentially be bothering you and so for me it's noon like I don't have caffeine after that I've actually had it one time and after that, like in all these couple of years. And so that's number one. But sometimes you might find yourself in a situation. Maybe you got work to do, you know, you're working, you know, research paper or something like that. And so what do you do?

And if you do have some caffeine a little bit later, there's a little hack. And I don't like to do this very often because I want you to just do the thing, but elthianine, all right? Elthianine kind of counteracts the effects of caffeine. And I shared this study recently on my show, but so folks who were, and this is like doing, you know, cognitive tests, folks who were given caffeine

performed, you know, better than not having caffeine, which we kind of know. But when they were given Lthianine with the caffeine, they performed even better. So it has a synergistic effect on giving you this kind of calm energy because it counterbalances, but also from my experience in folks who take it in the evening, just by itself, not along with the caffeine, but it helps them to go into that sleep mode a little bit easier. So it's a little hack if you ever find yourself in that situation. But just do, you know, do a little doctor Google on it, L-Penine and caffeine, and it's pretty interesting stuff. I think you mentioned something earlier is that sometimes you don't know what's affecting you. So if you've never gone two weeks not having

coffee afternoon, it's almost like it can be part of a sleep cleanse, right? It can be part of something you try because until you try it, it's almost like how they use a medical elimination diet until you've gotten rid of gluten, dairy, sugar, all at the same time in functional medicine, they put you on an elimination diet. You don't really know what your sensitivities are until you bring it back in. So I think getting off of coffee for not having caffeine afternoon, just for two weeks can be enough that people start to see if they have any insights. Yeah. And one of the things we want to be aware of, you know, even if you draw back on the amount of caffeine you've been having it so long, especially coffee, you know, there's like this

you know, people, people know about the coffee and poop connection. Yeah. So there can be some rebound like constipation. So make sure that you're getting hydrated, having some prebiotics and some resistant starch and things like that to help the digestion as well. Like I've dealt with this with a lot of different patients over the years. And so also, and I usually don't pull people off. I have them switch it up because caffeine is not the same in everything.

It is subtly different. So like some grubimate or green tea switching to that? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You know, and so there's so many cool ways and we can experience and get vibes and different nutrients from other things. And that's a good segue to the next issue that could be causing people problems. Yeah, tell us.

Break it down. And this has to do with nutrition deficiencies, you know, and it's something so simple. You could be doing all the sleep hygiene stuff correctly, you know, the caffeine and the dark environment and like getting to bed by a certain time. But if you're deficient in key nutrients, like, and I call them, I've got a list of them. They're good sleep nutrients. these are prerequisites for making sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters that enable you to actually go through your sleep cycle. For example, we'll use a public library of science published a study looking at a simple vitamin C deficiency and found the test subjects who were deficient of vitamin C had more

interrupted sleep. So they woke up more frequently during the night. And simply balancing out that deficiency enabled them to have more consistent sleep. So we want to be mindful. of that and making sure we're getting these key nutrients in, but also the form of the nutrient, too. Because even vitamin C, there's like, see, this is what, I wasn't taught this in school. You know, this was a miseducation of Sean Stevenson. So you vitamin C is vitamin C is vitamin C. That's it. You know, even like Mendel's Table of elements. Like, that's not how nature works. Like magnesium on that table is like ash. That's not even like live magnesium. How does it work when it's alive? And so now we know that

just like the B vitamins. Like there's many of them. There are also many forms. of vitamin C, there are many forms of vitamin D, and the list goes on and on. We get that intelligence through food. It's very difficult to get it in a pill, in a supplement that are synthetic forms of those things. Because our body can't absorb it properly. Most of the time. It's not used to it. It doesn't look familiar. Yeah, because your genes have really evolved communicating with food stuff, you know. So vitamin C is one. Another one is magnesium is a huge one. Absolutely. This is probably the biggest one for most people. Because in our culture, in our society, it's the number one mineral deficiency. And I remember having a conversation with Mark Hyman, and he was talking about,

is responsible for over 300 biochemical processes in the body. Now we know it's over 325 biochemical processes. We've discovered a few more. And so when you're deficient in magnesium, what that really means is that's 325 things your body can't do. Or can't do efficiently if you're deficient in it. So your body wants to do all this cool stuff for you, but it can't even do it. it if you have this one mineral deficiency and over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium. All right. So one of the studies, and so they were actually looking at insomniacs and every one of

them had a magnesium deficiency. Simply balancing out and getting their magnesium levels up enable them to have a more normal sleep. Almost comparable as if they didn't have insomnia simply by balancing out that one deficiency. So the question is how do we do this? Food first. Anything green is going to be a good source of magnesium. But that's probably not going to be enough because it's responsible for so much. That's why it gets zapped so quickly. Especially people have been deficient for years. Yeah. And also just stress. Like we have a totally different stress. Magnetium operates, how to best put this, it's really more of like a comitive mineral in the channels that it's related to like relaxation of the muscles, proper muscle function, pathways with sleep. And so these are things that are

really stressed today. And so I reckon a lot of people that, you know, clients that would come in, this was probably the one thing that I did recommend people do supplementally. Because again, it's really food first approach. But there are great supplements out there. There's magnesium citrate. Natural calm. Yeah.

And there's, here's a thing too, man. Epsons salt, right? And it's storied to help people to sleep better, heal muscles faster. It's just a form of magnesium. It's magnesium. salt. And so taking it internally, but here's the catch, though, is it's difficult to take an oral magnesium supplement to get your levels up because it pulls water to your bowels. And so it can cause like, I call it clinically a disaster pants, is what I call it.

Especially if it's a citrate versus the glycinate. Yeah, glycinate, yeah. And so it just depends on the person and how they're going to respond. Some people could take a little bit more, but, and some people might, it might be helpful. to get a little poop action going. Especially off coffee and they're moving over to green tea. There you go. You need a little bit of... Little assistance.

Little assistance. You know, a little Steve Nash in there, you know? And so that's one thing is... But for me, I love topical magnesium, you know, spray it on your skin. Some of them, the really good ones are like 99% absorbable. Your body can only use as much as it... Is it a brand that you like? Ease.

Yeah, I've been using that for like five years. I literally travel with it. Just keep it with it all the time. I love this stuff. Amazing. So, yeah, but even, we can't even talk about the nutrient stuff without understanding that. Can your gut bugs even associate with these nutrients? Because that's where the real final frontier is.

We're talking about human health and wellness. And, of course, there's so much conversation. People who listen to shows like this are very much aware of the microbiome. But I've been in it. Like, just really, like, talking to the top people and researching the subject matter. And, man, if, there's anything that's going to affect your sleep, it's your gut health. And I was surprised to find this out. And this is because many of the sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters are made and

stored in your gut. And if your microbiome is off, it can mess up the whole system. For example, everybody's heard of serotonin, you know, at this point and how important it is with your mood, is related to happiness. We know now over 80% of your serotonin is made and stored in your gut, to interchromifin cells. And here's how this relates to sleep. Serotonin is a precursor to making melatonin. All right. And so it's part of that process.

And so if you're into chromophant cells, and so as Kyle Tech researchers found that these bacteria in our gut communicate directly with cells that make this stuff. And so that's number one, but melatonin itself. And just being here and being able to geek out, man, I got to share this.

Please. Melatonin, I was taught in college that melatonin is made in the pineal gland. That's it. Next, you know, next page. We now know that there's 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain. And you can actually have your pineal gland removed, which I'm not saying to do that. Don't just go do that. But it's called pinealectomy.

But you can have it removed and the levels of melatonin still stay relatively the same in your gut. And so with that said, melatonin is not just related to sleep. We hear melatonin that's what we think about. Melatonin is a major driver, if not the master controller of your circadian system, your biological clock, your body clock that is as real as the time on your cell phone and on your watch. It is the most real thing in our universe. We are lined up with the durnal patterns, nocturnal patterns of life itself.

And the thing about humans is we can manufacture time, like daytime. And we can manufacture nighttime. Through lights, through technology. Yeah. But your body is always looking to be on rhythm because melatonin, being that it's a master driver of your circadian clock, it's regulating and influencing all of your other hormones because they're all being produced based on the time of day it is. And so that's one part of it.

It's also a very powerful anti-cancer hormone as well. And so one of the studies I cited in the book related, it was a huge, you know, nurses study. And they found that the nurses who were working the night shift, you know, doing the shift work and working overnight had over 30% greater incidence of breast cancer. And it was just like a very interesting finding. And it's just like what's going on there. And it's really related to this. Well, one of the big components is this relationship to insulin and also melatonin because it's like it really does a great job at helping to regulate your immune system, which is thus. killing cancer cells. So that and also now we know it's powerful fat burning potential driver of

fat loss as well, which might sound crazy to some people like I've never heard anything like that. And so what was discovered, and this was published in the journal Obesity Reviews, they found that melatonin secretion triggers your body's production and mobilization of brown adipose tissue. So this is a type of fat that burns fat, right? So when we're trying to get rid of body fat, we're generally talking about white adipose tissue or wet. So brown adipose tissue or bat, such a cool name. It's bad fat. So I'm bad fat.

Brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria. You know, it's like, you know, people may, I know they've heard this many times of the show, but it's the energy power plants basically in ourselves. And it's so dense in energy. Babies have a lot of brown adipose tissue. It's involved in heating us up. So we know that we can produce. immobilize more brown out of post tissue by getting ourselves cold. So this is like a big movement now

with everybody doing cryotherapy and cold thermogenesis techniques. But sleep, if you just have a normal sleep cycle and you're in darkness, there's two prerequisites to make melatonin. You need darkness and you need a cyclical pattern to make it adequately. And you're going to boost your fat loss. To the degree, a study published, and this was conducted by researchers at Chicago University. Now I'm just going to super synthesize it, but basically they found that when folks were sleep deprived on the same exact diet, they sleep deprived them. Then they put them in its, you know, calorie restricted diet to see how to sleep impact fat loss, not weight loss. And so they had test subjects in one phase and they sleep deprived them. So they're getting like five hours of sleep, five and a half hours to be exact.

Another phase of study, they let them get adequate sleep, which if you're sleeping more, you're going to tend to sleep better, eight and a half hours of sleep. They compiled all the data. and they found that the test subjects lost 55% more body fat simply by sleeping more, right? Which is crazy because we think we need to exercise more, we got to cut more calories. They didn't do any of that. They just got more sleep and they lost more fat.

It's like you start pulling the threat of sleep and you see how fundamentally it's tied into every single aspect of our life. And if there's anything that anybody's taking away from this podcast, it's just that sleep is so much more than sleep and just laying down. I love that, man. Sleep is so much more than sleep. So let's talk about EMFs.

EMFs is a tricky subject. First of all, there are natural EMFs. There are natural frequencies, electromagnetic frequencies, and electromagnetic radiation that come from the Earth and the sun itself. So we've been exposed to that since the beginning of time here on Earth. Where things are getting challenging now is that through all the amazing communications, through things like cellular technology, which is allowing many of you to listen to this podcast here and allows us to go online through

Wi-Fi, which is again amazing. But because of all these great technologies, there are some concerns with the level of exposure that we're having to these electromagnetic frequencies and sometimes the radiation that they produce. Now, a lot is not known about EMFs, but one thing that is known is that our brain is most vulnerable to EMFs at night when it goes into the deep detox period and begins to repair its DNA. My next guest, Dr. Carlos Ritter, has spent the last 15 years working to actively mitigate the effects of electromagnetic radiation. In this next clip, Dr. Ritter talks to us about how EMFs affect our sleep and damage sleep pathways in the body and in the brain. He also shares simple steps and tips that we can take to reduce EMF exposure in our

home specifically to support our sleep, but also our overall health. Let's listen in. What is the purpose of sleep we were talking about? The purpose of sleeping is so you can restore so you can repair the damage that you have. Each cell has DNA because each cell has to repair the damage that individually has. So it turns out that EMFs, electromagnetic fields, and this goes to the beginning of my research, start destroying as well restoration pathways. So the activation of these pathways,

they are extremely big and complex, they start having some and some not activation problems. It's like, so part of the DNA is dead. like a wrecking ball if somebody imagines a building and there's a tiny wrecking ball and that wrecking ball slams into the building great okay over and know maybe the building isn't knocked down but the window is out yeah that's right right and then next time it's like the second floor is out and then the door breaks down and then this happens so every time that dysfunction happens the

DNA and the cell can't do its job imagine now that okay we still have restoration pathways for that window that you just mentioned but the more you repair it, the more damage, the more errors you're going to have. That is one thing that we have. We repaired DNA and eventually we're going to have one error. What is cancer? Cancer is nothing else but mutations. And that is one thing that we didn't understand before. We thought, oh yeah, you have this DNA damage, this mutation. This mutation is not because you were born like that. Right. Over the time, you have DNA damage, you try to repair it. At the end of the day, you accumulated some mutations because those errors.

And now you have this mutation that actually is showing this type of cancer. Right. The previous understanding used to be that, okay, cancer is purely genetic. Somebody had it or didn't have it. And now we know that more than 75%, 80% of cancers are lifestyle-related. And even that, it might go even further more lifestyle as the research can I think that now we have to reclassify all chronic illnesses putting in the in the equation EMFs. One thing that we did is we classify illnesses without having this understanding

that we're exposed every day to something that it can break your DNA, that it can break your enzymes. So we classify things in one way. Then now, in my opinion, we need to reclassify it because we live now and this this world with a lot of radiation, main made radiation that we have. If the number one focus is to prioritize sleep so that our body gets as least exposure, give us a few things today that we can do to immediately, even if we don't have access or one day we will get access to somebody like you, what can we do today to reduce that exposure? I'm going to say it like the way that I told my kids.

I have teenagers. Yes. And people say that they're the hardheaded. in this world. They're not, actually. When you explain things, they have a reason why to do things. So one thing that I told my kids is, you're sleeping. Do you really need to use your cell phone when you're sleeping?

Maybe not. So would it kill you to put it in an airplane mode when you're sleeping? It makes a huge difference. Yeah. You can have that starting to get out there more. There's a lot more people that. are starting and understand that maybe I shouldn't keep, I had a friend for years and he's vegan too.

And he's all into his health and everything. He would take his cell phone, he would just put it right under his pillow. And he would sleep on that. He said he doesn't always wake up. So when the alarm is right there, it forces him to wake up and I'm like, bro, we don't need to do that.

So the first thing is, let's put our phone on airplane mode. Let's put the things that we don't need in airplane mode or unplug them. Yes. I asked my wife. Anything that's not needed to be plugged in because as you were saying earlier, anything that's plugged in where that plug is meeting the socket, there's an opportunity for dirty electricity to come out.

For electric fields, yeah. Yes. Okay, so even anything that's there, we can unplug. Yeah. Do we need lamps next to our beds? Well, people will think that they do. I've been living without lamps for nine years now. we really don't need them.

So whatever I try to do is, yeah, try to take away every distraction, electronic destruction that we can have in a sleeping location out of there and shut it. Yeah, a lot of people will say, hey, I cannot live without a cell phone. Or if something happened to my family, they need to reach me. Well, we can leave one cell phone far away of the sleeping locations. and have only one instead of having 10 cell phones on the whole entire night. Because sometimes what happens now, and we'll get to this next one, which is Wi-Fi, there's always a quenundrum for people who are in the know, right?

It's like, do I put my phone on airplane mode, but I leave Wi-Fi on? Because now most of these phones, they have Wi-Fi calling. So the cell phone signal is off, but they have Wi-Fi calling. But depending on where your Wi-Fi router is in your house or in your bedroom, you're getting exposure from that, too. So what's better? And we don't know because you have to measure each house. But in general, if you have to get some calls because some people are physicians or doctors or other stuff or they're worried about that whole case scenario, what if my family calls in the middle of the night?

I know. Should you go on airplane mode and leave your Wi-Fi router on? Or should you keep your cell phone on and keep it far away? The Wi-Fi router should be as far away as possible from the bad locations. Got it. And if we put them far away, the cell phone is more destructive. Let me ask you another question. Yeah.

Can you, some, you know, homes have, what's that box, the, that where you can turn different? Oh, yeah, the switches. The switchbox. Yeah, the switchbox. Is it, I've seen some people say that I just go and I just turn off all the electricity. Yeah, that's, can you do that? Yeah, you can do that. To the master switch box.

Yeah. in your apartment or home. If you wanted to, there's like little things on there that say bedroom or other areas. And you can turn off. Usually they're wrong label. Wrong label. Because that's what I measured too. Sure.

But could you theoretically turn off all the electricity in the home? Let me say what I do in my house again. My house is shielded. I didn't build that house. So I would take care of those things. So you don't have to turn off the electricity if we build the house from scratch. but I didn't build that house. So yeah, whatever I do is every night,

I leave the AC on and the fridge on. The rest of the house, I told my kids, hey, it's already 9, 10, well, it goes to sometimes mean that. I have teenagers, so everybody understands. And they live with me. So, but it's a say in the house, hey, electricity is off and electricity is off. So we're going to sleep and we turn off all the switches

except the AC. I live in Texas. Yes, it gets very hot. You know what we really need? Is there another thing for you to work on, right? I'm going to give you a list of companies. We have it. I think that I know where you're going.

A switch for the house. We have it already. One switch that just turns off everything non-essential. Yeah. So, okay, so let me ask you a question. You have it already. You can go and install this in people's homes. That's right.

That's right. Got it. I want to tell people a lot of different solutions. This solution that we're talking about right now, it will cost $0. What, the off switch? The off switch. Them doing it or them installing an off switch in the house? Them going every night and turn off the switches?

It's just inconvenient. But the real question is now that you understand that it's 30 electric voltage. Yeah, right? Yeah, that's right. And the average homes that you're looking at is $250, then it's like, okay, let's, if we can do it, and you're interested in this topic. Yeah. You know, yeah.

It's worth doing. So yeah, it will cause you zero dollars. This is important for us because not everything has to make you spend money. Yeah. And I want people to do things. And not everything has to be measured too. Like sometimes functional medicine doctors say, look, you may me not don't have the money to go in work with a functional doctor because it's not covered by insurance right now, right?

Obviously, you know, Dr. Hyman's working on that and the Cleveland Clinic project that they have out there. But we know now that chances are you have exposure. So if you just go to the solicitor. Yeah, which is, let's say, for instance, if you're eating processed foods, we don't need to do all the test on you to tell you that that's bad for you. That's right. We could just say, okay, maybe let's eat a whole food diet. That's right. And let's figure out what foods don't necessarily work for you, but just going and doing it. 100% of the time. Great. So that's the same. The same here and thing in here. If you go in at night again, my house is like this. We have lanterns. And Kelly's house is the same. We have lanterns if you have to go somewhere when you already turn on. off the electricity. It's kind of like if we live in the 1700s, but it does feel different. When you turn off the electricity, it's quiet. It's quiet. It's quiet. Sometimes you don't even hear

that little buzz. That's right. Anybody that you don't even know that it's there until you don't hear it. One of my friends, Metabolic Mike, his name is Mike, and he has a show called Metabolic Mike, a podcast. That's out there. It'd be good for you to do his podcast in the future. He says, you know, he was making this series of Instagram stories saying that he had been camping for the first time and I think it was a while okay and then when he was camping out there and sleeping he's really big into like mouth taping okay right because a lot of people now breathe through their mouth at night which also causes some mild form of sleep apnea instead of breathing through your nose okay and he said I went camping and after a while and I went sleeping

outside I had the best sleep that ever anybody that knows it's slept outside or gone camping I went to Kenya with a group of friends okay and we went to this elephant sanctuary and they set up these tents out there. And there's wild elephants at night that are out there. So you're a little afraid. You're like, are they going to step on me? And they're like, no, they're not going to step on you. But I slept in this tent with no Wi-Fi, no cell phone towers.

We're in the remote area in Kenya in this area called like Namayak, northern Kenya, about an hour flight from Nairobi. I slept so amazingly well. Do you see why I did those studies with no radiation and with radiation? And the thing that you're describing me, I mean, I did the studies. but it's exactly the same thing. When you give a break to your body, when your body try to restore,

it will restore. Sleep is an incredible foundation for our overall health, and it's one that we must lay the groundwork for on a daily basis. We've got to give it the love and attention it deserves. Making small changes to our habits can pay off tremendously what it comes to getting better sleep and transforming our overall health. If you know someone that's trying to,

improve their health and specifically their sleep, do me a favor. Send them this episode. They will appreciate you for it. Until next week, I'll talk to you then.