Dhru Purohit Show - Longevity Doctor Shares Mind Blowing Science on the Importance of Sleep, Movement, Fiber, and Why Lectins Don’t Matter with Dr. Darshan Shah

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Lifeforce, BiOptimizers, and Lumebox. We are constantly bombarded with the newest technology or hacks that can increase our longevity. But when it comes to true health and disease prevention, we know that consistently putting effort into our daily habits can have the most effective results. Today’s guest is here to remind us which daily habits matter the most.   Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Darshan Shah to discuss the pillars of the Shah Protocol. Dr. Shah emphasizes the significance of dialing in the basics: sleep, diet, and movement. He also shares the ten blood markers everyone should obtain and truly understand. Dr. Shah also discusses the tools he uses to assess and reduce the risk of chronic disease and increase longevity and shares his journey to becoming healthier.  Darshan Shah, MD, is a health and wellness specialist, board-certified surgeon, published author, entrepreneur, and founder of Next Health, the world's first and largest Health Optimization and Longevity clinic.   In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Shah dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The first step in Dr. Shah’s protocol (0:00:29 / 0:00:29) One habit that would change energy levels (3:33 / 3:33) Setting up your ideal sleep routine in the morning (11:53 / 11:53) What Dr. Shah has doubled down on and what he no longer prioritizes (25:39 / 21:35) Dr. Shah’s journey to become healthier (31:20 / 25:54) Eating whole foods and finding what works for you (37:10 / 31:41) The benefits of fiber for your microbiome (41:30 / 35:48) Metabolically fit individuals with higher A1C levels (48:45 / 43:35) Ten blood markers that must be checked (51:12 / 45:27) The importance of moving each day (1:08:42 / 1:03:00) Preventing osteoporosis and osteopenia (1:15:57 / 1:11:59) VO2 Max as a longevity assessment (1:19:45 / 1:14:40) Heart disease and early cancer detection screenings (1:27:09 / 1:21:30) Also mentioned in this episode: Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events Dhru’s apoB results Next Health  Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order and up to 2 travel-size bottles of Magnesium Breakthrough for a limited time.  Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-approved portable Red Light device! That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Shah, welcome to the podcast. Today you're here to talk to us about doubling down on the basics, the basics that if all of us just put a little bit more attention on those and not as much as attention on the next latest gadget, although we're both fans of those things, we might actually be able to live, most likely, a healthier and potentially a longer life. So let's get into some of those basics that are here. You have a whole protocol. That's the give a step one or the first pillar that you talk about in your protocol. Yeah, so the protocol is basically, you know, I see hundreds of patients every year. And it's so funny, like you say, people are like, okay, how many times do I need to get into the sauna?

And for how long and how many minutes of cold after? And I'm like, wait a minute, let's take it a step back. And what we really try to do is laid out for them. You know, I feel like there's also a lot of confusion out there about like there's so much advice on Instagram and on blogs and on podcasts. And people don't even know where to start. So we always try to talk to people about let's start with the basics. Let's make sure we got your nutrition, your sleep, and your movement correct. And then we move on to, you know, I come from the traditional Western medical background.

How do we bring the best of Western medicine into your overall routine and protocols on a yearly basis? So what can we do to do things like avoid cancer, metabolic disease, heart attacks, heart disease, and Alzheimer's? And then from there, we talk about functional medicine, all the great stuff that functional medicine, as it teaches. So we talk about gut health, hormonal health, mental health, and, you know, de-stressing your life and also detoxifying your life. And once we get through all that, is now we can start focusing on this latest and greatest in longevity medicine and biohacking and all of that stuff. But it starts way back with sleep, nutrition, and exercise, as we know. And because the idea is that if you jump ahead to the latest and greatest where there are a lot

are really cool things, but you don't focus on the basic pillars, your core aspects of your energy metabolism, your sleep, your mood, they can be wildly thrown off if you're just not hitting the basics that are out there. That's exactly right. So all of the bio-ecking technology out there, it really gets you that last 10%, right? That 90% really lives in your day-to-day routine, it lives in your habits, it lives in the things that you're doing and not doing on a day-to-day basis. And it's really, you got to put in the work. There's no shortcut from A to Z on longevity, right? You got to put the work in up front. And that's where we really take people's mindset a step back. But we also use the most modern technology has to offer, right? So we have

biomarkers that we follow. We talk a lot about becoming the CEO of your own health. And how do you follow these KPIs of your health? You know, if you run a business, you're not going to look at your KPI's your key performance indicators once a year and have someone else tell you what to do with them, right? Like most people go to their doctor, they check the blood work and the doctor's like everything's fine and you have no idea what they're even talking about. So we try to empower people with what are the KPI's of your nutrition, your sleep and your exercise and your hormones and your stress, et cetera. So you can actually take that in your own hands and have some control over it. You know, before we jump into the shot protocol, just a wild question for you. Yeah. If we could get

let's say 100% of America, right, adults 18 and older, although your advice might be for kids, if we could get 100% of America doing one habit, it doesn't have to be an order of your protocol, that would add the most amount of energy to people's day. What do you think that habit would be? There's actually a few of them, but I will tell you my number one thing on energy is getting into a good sleep routine. I mean, that is just so monumentally. impactful to your day-to-day energy.

And when I talk about sleep routine, I talk about it's not just about, you know, how many hours you're sleeping. It's really about what time you're waking up, how you're waking up. Your sleep routine starts the moment you wake up, actually, believe it or not. It's not like at nighttime. And so we talk a lot about how do we optimize that sleep routine to maximize your energy. Yeah. Since we're on that topic, just give us a little preview of that.

So what does that look like? You wake up, we want to feel good. We want to get the most amount of energy for the next day ahead. What are some of the components that you talk about with your patients and the individuals that go to Next Health? Let's see the doctors there. What are some of the things and the key pillars on the sleep routine? Okay. So like we talked about, it starts the moment you wake up, okay?

And so really it's how you wake up that makes a massive amount of difference in your energy level. So people are trying to get to sleep at the right time. Maybe they pick 9 o'clock a night or 10 o'clock a night. And there's a lot of research now around different chronotypes, as you probably heard of, where some people are late sleepers and earlier sleepers. But really, you want to wake up when your body is telling you to wake up, not an alarm clock, all right? And I know that's hard for some people.

So say you have to get to work at 6 o'clock in the morning. You've got to wake up at 5. Well, then you've got to count backwards from there, the 8 hours, and that's when you get into bed, all right? And so waking up without an alarm clock, letting your body naturally go into that wake cycle is huge. And then the first thing you do, what's the first thing most people do? They pick up their phone and they start looking through.

their messages and stuff like that. And that's the last thing you want to do when you wake up. The first thing you want to do is get up and go outside and expose your eyes, expose your retina to that low light level sun, right? The low level sun in the morning, which is more orange, red, get some sun exposure, even if it's a cloudy day, just exposing yourself to that natural light, set your circadian rhythm,

set your melatonin production to go off in 14 hours. And that's what's going to get your sleep routine over time. usually takes about 21 days for most people to see an overall effect in their sleep routine. But in 21 days, we can double triple someone's energy levels just by doing that one thing. This episode is brought to you by Lifeforce, the diagnostic company. I personally use every quarter. You know, I love learning about the latest longevity research. But ever since I turned 40, I'm even more interested in learning how to apply it to my life

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includes seven unique forms of magnesium for stress resilience and better sleep all in one bottom. Simply go to buy optimizers.com slash drew to get 10% off any order. In addition to the discount, if you use the promo code D-H-R-U-10, there's always an amazing gift with each purchase. So head over to buy optimizers.com slash D-H-R-U and use the code Drew 10, D-H-R-U-10, to get your magnesium breakthrough out of discount and find out this month's gift with purchase. That's great. Okay. Now, I'm an entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur. I want to ask you an honest, honest question. Do you think it's realistic to wake up and not check your phone? You have locations in multiple countries. You have employees

all around the world. There's something. And listen, you could give the honest answer. If it is, you don't check your phone. It's great. I always like to provide the transparency for my audience. I love the idea of not checking my phone. But the practicality is I wake up in the morning. And usually I get up before my wife. So she's not, she's not interested. like cuddle. She does, do not mess with her sleep. Like, I'm up earlier than her.

Like, don't fuck with it. Right. Right. So I wake up. And the first thing I do is sort of like, I have a big family. I'm very connected to them. I have parents that are getting older. And I have employees that are in different

time zones. I first screen to see that there's no emergency. For sure. There's usually a bunch of text messages that are already there because we're on the West Coast. I got a team on the East Coast. And as long as I don't see any emergency, right? Then I'm like, okay, cool.

Like now, like my regular routine starts. But it kind of gives me the peace of mind to feel like I can go into my routine of making a little bit of coffee, opening the balcony windows, sitting in the sun a little bit, getting the sunlight in my eyes. What are your thoughts about? I think you're absolutely, you know, right being realistic about this. And so if you have a profession where there could potentially be emergencies in the middle of the night and you have your phone program to where we can at a glance just make sure that

like, you know, the sky's in falling and they get back into your morning routine after a couple minutes. I think that's probably going to be okay. For me, what I realized, honestly, is just like you, I have locations all over the world now and we have aging parents and I want to make sure everything's okay, but I just delayed that by 10 minutes by putting my phone in my closet and charging it in the closet. And that way, you know, you wake up, you go to the bathroom, right? you go to the bathroom, you do your stuff you need to do in the bathroom, and then I'm like, let me just get a cup of coffee real quick before I like expose myself to my phone, you know? And I go to get that cup of coffee.

And before you know, 10 minutes has gone by. And now you've delayed it just by 10 minutes because I do that cup of coffee outside, actually. I take it outside, expose my eyes. So it's just you have to find these little, you know, there's this whole body of work that I talk about a lot, which is the keys to habit forming. You have to become a habit forming ninja. and some of it is just tricking your body, your mind, your routines into these little micro-habit changes by doing something like putting the phone in your closet.

Yeah, what I like about it too is that obviously this conversation is also about personalization, making all these things work and fit for you. And I inherently, without even thinking about it, like I sort of was stating that my morning routine is a little bit of a longer thing, which it sometimes can be a little bit of stretching, a little bit of phone rolling. I don't have kids yet. One day I will. Let's see how that changes and everything.

And what you really reminded the audience of, which was so beautiful, is that, look, we're talking about 10 minutes. 10 minutes of you're still drinking your coffee. You're just getting a little bit of sunlight in the morning to get that photo biomodulation in the eyes early in the day, which goes back to your sleep protocol. We're going to come back to that. And it's just 10 minutes. It's just you're delaying it for 10 minutes.

And I've been an entrepreneur who's been working for home since pretty much. university. I dropped out of school. I became an entrepreneur. I've worked very hard on my HRV, my nervous system, other stuff. Even if I do see something that's like semi, like whatever, like a red flag, I'm not a medical doctor like you. So I'm not dealing with real emergencies here. A website is down. This thing doesn't work. Whatever, right? Like fake emergencies, business emergencies. But a lot of people see that. And my wife, not to throw under the bus at all in any sense, her nervous system will immediately freak out of that. And that's where I actually do think for her following that advice that you shared, which is just delayed 10 minutes to protect yourself

a little bit and then get into the demands of the rest of the world. Exactly. And like you said, personalization is so key here. And what I realize is a lot of people hear advice on, you know, podcasts, they read a book maybe, right? Or they see a post on TikTok. And a A lot of times that advice is that one person's experience for himself or herself trying to spare that to everybody. And what I try to tell my patience is, look, that might work for that one human being, but you're a different human being. Every human being is different.

So like you said, your wife, she will pick up the phone and potentially just that could ruin her day, right? Like one little emergency. And a lot of people start dealing with that emergency right there and then in that moment. So I see a lot of people, they tell me, I check my phone. and I spent an hour in bed answering all the text messages and emails before I even get out of bed. Like, is that really necessary? Right?

Like none of that stuff was really an urgent matter. But for you, you're different. Like you can look at it and you can regulate and be like, okay, I can take care of that later. So once again, fitting it to that individual's personality, their way of handling stress, it's so key. Yeah. So we were jumping around a little bit and I asked you, what's the one thing that everybody could focus on to radically improve their energy. You brought up sleep. And then you said your sleep routine starts in the morning. And you were kind of walking us through that. And the first step is when you wake up, delay that phone pick up

by 10 minutes and go outside. And we all know through, you know, the famous Andrew Huberman, you know, even if it's not sunny outside, you're still getting a lot of light, way more light exposure than you're getting inside. And that makes a massive difference. Okay. So we're at that place. walk us through a little bit further on some of those steps that set up an ideal night of rest but start you know early in the day yeah exactly so then um the other part of this whole um equation for sleep is like i said it starts first thing in the morning and then your next kind of alarm that you want to set on your phone is a sleep alarm and what i talked about this is an hour before it is your bedtime you want to start winding down and so a really critical there's a few critical

points to that. One is, of course, once again, this is where you start winding down off electronic devices. I tried to plug in my phone to charge about 30 minutes to an hour before I go to bed in my closet, like I told you about. It doesn't always happen. Again, being realistic, it doesn't always happen that way, but I try to do that. And that, it's incredible how much that disconnects your brain from stress, just getting rid of these devices. You know, it's so incredible to me that just, this has really only happened over the last 20 years where we now live with this kind of attached to us. It's almost like a second brain that connects us to the entire world. And we never had that before. Humans have not evolved to deal with constant input of information, right? Humans have not evolved to be,

like we evolved basically in like this 10 mile radius around where we lived. And now the whole world is our radius through these devices. So getting rid of this device an hour before, if possible, is incredibly beneficial. And then the second thing is most of us, you know, we're inside at night. And so we need to change the color of our light from these white, bright lights that we expose ourselves to all day to a more muted yellow red tone. And that starts setting off once again through your visual optics, your brain to start switching the entire hormonal milieu of your body just from that light exposure. Okay.

And then on a practical level, what's your favorite way of doing that in your own home? Are you dealing with like red light bulbs? Do you have red light devices you turn on? Like, what's the practical component of how you do that? Red light bulbs. Yep, absolutely. That's what you do in your home. Yep.

So basically in our lamps, we have red light bulbs that we can just pull the little, you know, thing that turns on the lamp and it turns it red and I turn off the ceiling lights. That's the easiest thing for us. You know, I have friends that have installed lights that automatically change throughout your entire house, that kind of a thing. I have friends that have blue blocker glasses that kind of changes it based on, you know, the glasses that you're wearing. But for us, it's just been like, and it's actually makes the house a whole different

quality. It's like more relaxed. It takes a stress off of everybody. Even my kids have been like less stressed at night with the light changing, believe it or not. It's pretty interesting. And then the other part of all this, you know, always whenever I talk about sleep, there's three main components to sleep.

And there's your sleep environment and your sleep routine. And then also making sure that you don't have any. medical sleep issues. Okay. So whenever I see a patient, the first thing we do is you rule out sleep apnea, which is a condition where at nighttime your throat closes in on itself and you lose oxygen up to your brain and to all your organs for several seconds every few minutes. And that's obviously cannot be good for your body or your brain. So we make sure they don't have sleep apnea. If you have sleep apnea, that is the first thing you get taken care of. But other than that, if you don't, then your sleep environment is key. We've evolved for genera, for, you know, for centuries.

sleep sleeping in a cold, dark cave, right? So it has to be dark. So even the little red lights on your alarm clocks and your video and your TV, all that needs to all go away. Every little bit of light can affect how you sleep. So, and if you can't get it totally dark, then just wearing like an eye mask, cold, less than 65 degrees in your room, if it all possible. And there's all fancy ways of doing that now as well. And then quiet, right? So, as quiet as you can make it in the room. And I personally can't stand it when it's too quiet. It's almost noisier when it's quiet for me.

So he's a white noise machine, which has been really beneficial to me. I'm a big fan, actually, for all of our patients that come in. We have them do some sort of sleep tracking, and we don't do it forever. We just do it for six to eight weeks. Once again, this is so personalized because some people will freak out when they see their sleep score is 80,

and they want to know, like, what happened? And it just ruins their day. some people though we we on those people we don't let it ruin their day we do it for a very limited amount of time and we see how each one of these little interventions either improves their sleep or detract from their sleep and so in six to eight weeks using a good sleep tracking device we can usually get people to having optimal sleep so that's like a hundred sleep score that's getting an hour and a half of deep sleep enough REM sleep and getting their sleep phased out right throughout the night yeah that's great another piece of advice

that I've heard you share on a few other podcasts that you're a big fan of that plays into this, and it kind of gets into this next category of kind of food, food, energy, metabolism, but also its impact on sleep. You talk about making sure that you're not eating right up until that point that you're going to bed. How does that impact sleep? Absolutely. I mean, it impacts sleep in a lot of different ways. One main reason is getting that glucose surge at the end of the night and having your body to start deal with it is not good for your metabolism. overall. Your body is not meant to handle large loads of glucose in night before you go to bed. That's when your metabolism means to kind of take a break is a nighttime. So that's one way.

The other way is that just digesting the food and getting reflux through your esophagus can also impact your sleep as well. So no food two to three hours before going to bed is very important. And just that one thing, I can't tell you. the number of patients that we've changed their entire sleep and their energy levels just from that one little piece of advice. Eating a little bit earlier. And so your recommendation is like at least maybe two hours, two to three hours. Two or three hours.

Two hours, right. Before bed. Exactly. I feel amazing when I have an early dinner. Yeah. It's like our grandparents had it right. Like they eat at like six o'clock and I should think like what the heck is going on. Right.

It's like I, it's like to me modern day luxury is like eating early, right? early, like having a great meal early, and then having plenty of time in the evening to be able to like do your own thing, read a little bit, reflect, whatever, maybe watching a little bit of TV if people are into that, and then getting to bed by like in my house, nine o'clock, the red light goes on. Same as my house, exactly. And when I first, my wife and I, we got married a couple years ago. and when we first moved in together a little bit before that when we got engaged

I noticed this thing I would put on the red light and I would like helping her like sleep earlier she's from you know lived in New York for a little while was in the banking you know days like used to like working and like going out at like 12 midnight is like when the day you know the evening starts for like going out and the red light would be on but then she'd come back to bed and she'd be like very like hyper and a lot of energy and like what the heck's going on we had different bathrooms. So her bathroom is in the master bedroom and my bathroom I use in like the guest bedroom

and have my stuff. She's very particular about her things, as she should be. And I realized she would go into the bathroom and she'd turn all the lights on. And the red light was on in the bedroom, but it wasn't on in the bathroom. I've shared the story before,

but she would get a surge of energy. She was so sensitive. She'd get a surge of energy from all this light. Right. And then so we just basically put a little red light inside of air. and it started like calm her nervous system.

She felt more relaxed. She felt like, okay, now it's a little bit easier. And she totally reprogrammed how she approached sleep. And I bring it up from the main point of so many people think, and I do believe in the sleep chronotypes and Matthew Walker's work. I do believe in all that. And so many people think, like, I'm just a night person. But their entire day, starting from when they drink and how late they drink coffee,

to like doing it. emails right up against at night or the fact that they are working in a job where so much of their day is meetings and they can't actually get real work done and they feel like the real work starts to get done at like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 p.m. because that's the only time that they can focus. So there's so many ways that we've organized our life to make our nervous system feel that we are an evening person, which I do believe some people are naturally that. And if you can try to shift things up a little bit differently, maybe you're not an quote-unquote evening person.

Maybe your body actually wants to, you know, go to bed a little bit earlier. You wouldn't know unless you just tried something different. That is such a great point. You're right. People make themselves evening people by keeping the stress going, by keeping the lights on, by going out late at night, eating late. They make themselves evening people. But in reality, they're not.

They're just pushing their bodies to his limit every single night. Yeah. It's so true. You know, I want to step away from the protocol for a second and go back to this theme that we started off the podcast with, which was, you know, today on today's episode, we're talking about you're in these two worlds, right? Next Health, which is a great, you know, great place. I'll have you describe it in a little bit, but a great destination for all things, health and wellness, getting to the root of what's going on and the latest like biohacking technology. And then there's your personal message, which is really about. expanding to as many people as possible that while those tools and tips and things are there for those individuals, which might be the last 10%, as you said, it's really about doubling down on the basics. Part of what I've been doing on this podcast over the last, especially three years, two years, I've changed my mind on a bunch of things when it comes to like health and wellness. Give us an idea in your personal life before we get into your sort of origin story.

Give us an idea of a couple of things that you have deprioritized over the last couple of years. And by sake of, you know, distributing energy appropriately, you have doubled down on something else. So what's something that you've doubled down personally on? And maybe you've deprioritized on other stuff that didn't matter as much as you were giving that attention to before. Yeah. Yeah. Believe it now, this is actually an easy question for me to answer because I have totally changed my mindset. This is what I talk about with all my patients is using the Pareto principle.

Do you know what that is? Yeah. 20% of the information is going to give you 80% of the results. So what that means is there are certain habits and routines, things you should do and things you shouldn't do that will work for universally almost everybody. And I 100% focus most of my energy on that because that's what's going to give me the most result. And then what I've stopped doing is going down a rabbit hole on little things such as, you know, do lectins destroy your gut and like should I eat tomatoes or not, etc. So, for example, nutrition is a perfect example of this. This is where I always start with my patients is, you know what, let's stop talking about your

food sensitivity test and your, you know, and your fear of things like lectins, for example, et cetera. Let's focus on like what, like how much processed food do you eat on a day to day basis? I'm like, oh, you know, like, I eat out at a restaurant at least twice a day. I'm like, okay, so let me hear the restaurants you're going to. And most of the restaurants people go to, they have no idea what's on their plate, right? is mostly processed junk and seed oils and things like that. And so I, the 20% the Pareto principle on nutrition is cutting out ultra-process food.

Once you get the ultra-processed food out, you can almost eat pretty much anything as long as it's not ultra-processed and you're getting to feel healthier, right? That's so true. Right? And then you can go down the rabbit hole. Now, now that we've got you mostly eating like whole foods, now let's go down the rabbit hole of like, you know, how much protein do you need to have? What are your phytonutrients that are going to work for you?

What are your food sensitivities, et cetera? So I would say that in my personal life on the nutrition aspect, just cutting out the ultra-processed food, the sodas, et cetera, has made the most massive difference. And the same goes for like, you know, things like even my movement and my exercise. So, you know, I used to think that if I just go to the gym for an hour or two every day, I'm going to get super healthy. But in, and I would go down the rabbit hole on like, you know, like how much time under tension

do I have with each set of weights that I'm doing and things like that. But in reality, what was really like killing me from metabolically was being sedentary all day. The Pareto principle on movement is eliminating sedentary behavior. And so what I did there was I would sit at a desk sometimes eight hours a day or, you know, my previous history is I'm a surgeon, so I would just be standing there in front of the surgical table for 12, 14 hours and not moving, that's what was causing a lot of metabolic derangements in my own body. And so I got myself a walking desk and that was a game changer for me. Just moving every, you know, every 45 minutes I would also get up off, if I was sitting, get up and walk around,

take a little exercise snack. And so for a lot of my patients, before I even have them focusing in on an exercise routine, I say, let's get you not sedentary anymore. Let's figure out that piece first. So that's a couple of examples I can give you. This episode is brought to you by Lombox. Red Light Therapy with Lombox is a part of my daily practice. If you've tuned into my conversations with experts like Dr. Anthony Yun, you're already familiar with the incredible benefits of red light therapy. And let me tell you, Lombox takes it to a whole new level. This portable red light device is not only FDA registered, but also extremely affordable. What sets Loonbox apart is their commitment to quality and safety in addition to affordability, with third-party lab testing,

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wrinkles, and even enhancing collagen production. This is one therapy I'm committed to, and I think you're going to love it too, Right now, Lombox is offering my community $260 off their portable red light device. That's over 50% off. Just go to the loombox.com slash Drew to get your device. That's the L-U-M-E-B-O-X.com, the loombox.com slash D-H-R-U to start stimulating your mitochondria today. Yeah, you mentioned your life as a surgeon. You know, a lot of people looking at you,

today and knowing you're, you know, seeing a little bit of your story of, you know, being the CEO of this very successful company and it's on the latest of health and wellness and biohacking, they may not know or fully get that like you were really sick before. Yeah. Can you share about that? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I started off in medicine at a really young age. I graduated from medical school when I was 21 years old.

And I just really loved being in the operating room. That was like that was like a passion for me. I saw my first surgery when I was 18. I helped someone do an heart surgery actually and it held the heart while they were operating on the heart. And I was like, this is what I want to do. And so I did that. And I became, you know, very successful surgeon.

I did trauma surgery, general surgery. Then I decided I wanted to learn even more in depth on surgeries. I went to the Mayo Clinic. I trained in reconstructive surgery and I did plastic surgery. And I built this huge business around owning surgical centers. That was my first kind of like foray into medicine and business at the same time. And so what I was doing was I was working 12 hours a day in surgery and then another 12 hours a day on the business trying to make sure like the P&L was okay, you know, that kind of a thing.

And so it's like any entrepreneur, I was putting myself last and I became very sick. I was, you know, 50 pounds heavier than I am now. But even worse than that was I was pre-diabetic and going to be a diabetic. So I was already on pills for that. I was on three blood pressure medications to control my heart, control my blood pressure, and it was still uncontrolled. And I was getting an autoimmune problem as well. So my autoimmune markers got up to like dangerous levels, and they were putting me on immune suppressive medication. And so I got really sick myself. And, you know, I talk about this a lot. It's a Western medicine has a lot of incredible tools at our disposal, but it's only ones you're sick.

And so the tools are not really there in how to get yourself healthy and how to optimize and maximize your health. So I didn't really have the tools I needed to become healthy myself because all I knew what to do is treat sick people with surgery and with medicines that are advanced. And so what I went out and did was I went out and learned everything I could about nutrition, about exercise, about sleep, from going to like conferences on nutrition. going, I became a certified personal trainer myself. And then I found the whole field of functional medicine, which really opened my eyes to

root causes of illness. And so treating myself from a functional medicine standpoint, from the basics of sleep, nutrition, and exercise is what got me healthy. But, you know, I could tell you, like with our patients at Next Health, we tie in the best of all world. So there's still a lot of stuff in Western medicine that once you take it out of Western medicine and apply it to health optimization, it's actually extremely beneficial and useful as well. Yeah, that's great. And I think also some of the stuff that you're sharing today about like

doubling down on the basics is also something that even a lot more functional medicine doctors himself are not only recommending but practicing. Exactly. You know, functional medicine, and you know, we've had on so many other, you know, people that have been a part of it like Jeff Bland and the foundation of it is, has been incredible for so many, uh, has been. and so incredible for understanding like the systems of the body and how these systems of the body are all connected. And like anything, you can naturally go down a rabbit hole where you can get a little bit to focused on one area or another area or some micronutrient or something.

And we don't really have fully the way to make all of it make sense yet. And like every field, there's great doctors. There's doctors that are just learning and there's ones that are maybe motivated by something different. Right. Right. That happens in everything. even in the world of wellness.

And so it's been amazing to see through this larger sort of precision medicine conversation, it's been amazing to see how so many of my friends, I can tell you this, like they never were strength training before, which I know is one of your recommendations to your patients. And all of a sudden they started strength training. They just doubled down in their sleep. They didn't change their diet at all. Maybe they worried about it a little bit less.

They got a little bit more flexible. But they did prioritize things like protein, right? another thing that you talk about and we took them on this podcast and so many of the things that they were dealing with before just weren't as bad right i'm so thankful for traditional medicine as i know you are and i'm so thankful for functional medicine when people have very like unique things that are going on and then there's the vast majority of the people who will generally feel better and also notice their gut health improve and other areas of life improved by just really truly, I don't even want to say doubling down on the basics, it's really like

tripling down, right? And just focusing on those core, core pillars and see how you feel now. Drew, I mean, that is such an astute observation, because I could tell you, what I tell my patients is, look, functional medicine is still medicine, is still trying to, is still trying to treat you when you're sick, right? Like we're talking about gut health. We're talking about detoxifying your life because we live in one of the most toxic environments humans have ever lived in. And really, you know, functional medicine is incredible because it does tie all the systems together and it does focus on the root causes of why you're sick in the first place. But the reality of the situation is you don't want to be sick to begin with, right?

And the reason we get sick is because of kind of the people just not really focusing in on the basics of nutrition, exercise, movement, sleep, etc. Yeah. Well, let's come back to some of those basics that are there. You know, I asked you kind of out of order, what's one thing you said sleep. But take us back to, you know, the core pillars and the way that you organize them. And walk us through the next one that you have there. Yeah. So let's talk about nutrition. So we talked about the Pareto principle there is cutting out ultra-processed food. Once you do that, you kind of almost won 80% of the battle right there, right? Getting rid of sodas, getting rid of seed oils and, and, you know, you know, manufactured oils and just trying to even just shop for your food at the supermarket yourself and bring the food home and cook it. Like try to get organic as much as possible. If organic is not a possibility for you, then even go to the EWG website and look at the list of their dirty dozen and try to stay away from those and focus on the clean dozen. And bring the food home and start cooking it yourself and really get to a point where you understand

like what your body likes and what your body doesn't like, right? And I think most people will find, you know, I know there's a whole cadre of people out there that believe in the carnivore diet or the keto diet or, you know, veganism. But in reality, most people's bodies can handle all of those different diets if done properly. I'm a big fan of just, you know, both vegetables and meat. And I eat both of those. And then what I try to get people to do is really now look at the, their biomarkers or their metabolism, and let's try to get those better, right? And so some of the

biomarkers that everyone needs to know is people should know what their hemoglobin A1C is, for example, right? If your hemoglobin A1C is 5.7 or above, you're pre-diabetic, but really, this biomarker changes 30 years before you ever get to diabetes. So it's so important to know these at a younger age and watch what direction they're going in. So if you're going from like 5.2 to 5.4, now 5.5, 5.6, you're going in the wrong direction, right? And so we need to make some changes in what you're intaking into your body. And so that's where we use things like continuous glucose monitors, teach some people how, you know, different foods affect the way their body handles sugar and carbohydrates as well. So on the nutrition front, it's really just cutting out the

ultra-process stuff, getting all that stuff just, you know, in the background as much as possible. And look, you're not going to avoid it 100% of the time, but I think with just some mindful approaches to that, you will avoid it 80% of the time, which for most people is good enough. And then we can start diving in a little bit by using the continuous glucose monitor and then just kind of discovering what diet works best

and personalize that for that one person. It's great. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that when they think of like a, you know, a classic sort of breakfast that a lot of people eat, especially kids, you have like a glass of orange juice, maybe, you know, some white bread toast, right? It doesn't have to be McDonald's to be ultra processed. That's ultra process right there.

Right there. Right. That's ultra process right there. If you're buying storebought, highly refined orange juice, no pulp and white bread, that's ultra processed foods. And in fact, you see a lot of in this explosion of the wellness space, you know, this coming week we have Expo West coming up, right? which is for those that are not familiar, it's a big conference on the natural foods industry. A little overwhelming if you haven't been before. You know, acres and acres of different brands.

And I'm so, as an entrepreneur, I love seeing all the different brands that are there. And it's okay to say that the wellness community has never had more processed food and even some ultra-processed food in the wellness space. And a lot of that food tastes amazing. There's never been as many keto cookies and this thing and that thing and gluten-free. whatever, and because it all tastes good and it sounds like it's healthy is very easy for individuals who even think that they're eating quite healthy if they haven't done an audit check on their diet to not know that they're actually a large percentage of their diet is either highly or ultra-processed even if they're, quote-unquote, trying to be healthy.

So I think zooming out a little bit, you know, making sure we have some of the basics that are covered. Another thing that you talk about when it comes to nutrition is making sure we don't skip the fiber in our diet. A lot of those foods are devoid of fiber. Do you want to just touch on that for a second? Yeah, I mean, I think fiber is one of the most important substances that we can put in our body because it has a lot of beneficial effects in your gut. So, you know, your microbiome feeds off the fiber that we eat. And also it protects you from things like colon cancer. And so, you know, avoiding fiber in your diet by eating ultra-processed food, you're by design just going to get sicker quicker. And so I think fiber is extremely important. And I know a lot of people that are on a

meat-only diet, sometimes they have to supplement fiber as well with a fiber supplement. But I would say that you can't go without fiber for too long. And so really making sure you're getting fiber in your diet is extremely important. But where you get your fiber from is also extremely important. If you're getting it from natural food sources, it's going to be so much more beneficial in smaller quantities and taking like a fiber supplement product powder. Yeah. I've seen this big trend recently where a lot of people who might have a complicated gut history or dealing with gut issues from a combination of a lot of different things, them even just, you know, for a long time, people were trying to demonize fruit, right? And like,

fruit is back, right? And just even having fiber. that are a little bit easier for them to, you know, handle and process at, like, and a lot of fruit fibers. Right. You know, avocado has a little bit of fiber in it, pears, some of the lower glycemic fruits that are out there, like kiwis. Yeah. That could be a good source of fiber for people who are just starting to get back on the fiber train

if they're noticing that a lot of vegetables makes them feel bloated or, or whatever. There's a lot of ways to personalize a conversation of fiber. Exactly. You know, you brought up a really good point, too, like all these wellness foods out there that come in packaging now. and like you said, like an Expo West, there's going to be a massive onslaught of these foods. And look, I'm not going to say any of them are good or bad or not, but what I am trying to get all my patients to really focus on is you can have some of that, but still 80% of your diet

needs to be whole foods. Like it needs to be like actual foods that you can get from the ground or from a farm or, right? Totally. Not just in packaging. And so I think that I think just really educating yourself on what ultra-processed foods are is super important as well. It also seems it's a great way to help us minimize the exposure that we're all getting to these microplastics. Absolutely. I don't know if you saw this study that just came out last week.

Yeah, I did. We'll link to it in the show notes. But basically a group of research went in and removed researchers went in and removed plaque from the arteries of individuals who had plaque in their arteries. and then went to go look at that and see what is that arterial plaque made on of. What can they find inside of it? And one of the things they found is that a lot of the plaque had microplastics inside of it. And the theory and the idea would be. And then they went back and they did a second aspect of the study,

which was the people that had the most amount of microplastics had the most arterial plaque that was there. So it seemed to be that plaque, this was the pontification, was acting, sorry, it seemed to be that the microplastics were acting as some sort of scaffolding that would make it easier for the plaque to build up in the arteries that were there. And that was like, first of all, that's super scary if that's the case. Crazy. Right.

And then the second thing that they saw, I didn't realize this until I was listening to the All In podcast. And I heard one of the guys on there talking about it. He was saying that they found that the type of plastic that was making a, up these microplastics, one of them, you know, not surprisingly similar type of plastic that people would find in like plastic water bottles and things like that. The second one that was most common, and I got to fact check this and look into it, is he was saying it was the type of plastic that is associated with PVC, which is the piping that is used in a lot of locations.

Absolutely. In houses and other stuff, the last mile of piping. Right. which is goes back to this, you know, quote that I stole from from the sky a long time ago, which is like either you get a filter or you become the filter. I love that. When it comes to a water filter, either you get a water filter or your body becomes the filter. So just reducing the amount of things that are touching our food when it comes to these plastic and casings and other stuff, which are all creating these microplastics,

generally seems to be something that would be a good thing for us, which comes back to shifting our diet more towards whole foods. Absolutely. And so the water thing is funny, too, because one of the things I ask all by patients is, tell me about where do you get your water from? And a lot of people will answer. A lot of people answer, oh, I have the best water. I only drink bottled water.

And I'm like, wait a minute. Plastic bottle, you saw the study a few weeks before that where they found that plastic bottles, people are getting 10,000 times the amount of microplastics they thought they were. There was 250,000 pieces. for like a single serving of water of microplastics that we're coming inside of the body. Exactly. It's like drinking bottled water out of plastic bottles is actually more unhealthy than just drinking

standard tap water. You know, it's crazy. And a lot of pipes and houses now, the newer houses are being built with the flexible plastic coated pipes as well. So you got to be, like you said, filtering your water is so key. and at our house, I filter all the water that we drink, and then we also put it into glass bottles where really good metal containers.

So just that little change makes a massive difference in your toxin exposure. Yeah, absolutely. And not to mention, you know, other things that are typically lurking in our water, heavy metals, we used to think, oh, America, it's got this cleanest water, you know, that's out there. And yes, we're not suffering with typhoid.

You know, you and I are both Indian. and the water in India can be crazy. It's getting better, and India's modernizing, but there's all sorts of things that are going on over there. Luckily, we're not suffering with these bacterial outbreaks and other stuff, but we do have all sorts of forever chemicals inside of there, Phas, Pufas, all that stuff, and now the microplastics. And so it's cheaper.

It's a little bit of an investment, but get a reverse osmosis or some other high-quality filter. It'll save money. It's way cheaper than buying plastic water, bottle from Costco or wherever else. Right. And it's a no-brainer. Like an underwater, an under-sync reverse-hismosis filter you can get for now like

$5,600, which in the long run will save you so much money on buying bottled water. And it's probably some of the best water out there for you. And a lot of people will say that, you know, it demineralizes the water, which is true. So there are mineral powders you can put back in. But we get most of our minerals from food anyway. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. You know, you mentioned something previously about A1C. and how everybody should be aware of it, you know, and especially tracking it over a period of time

because in your instance, you started noticing your A1C going up and up and up, and your doctor wasn't really your primary care physician at the time. They weren't putting together a protocol or telling you about food or other things because they were waiting for you to kind of essentially have disease before they treated it. Exactly. You were pre-diabetic, but they were waiting for you to become diabetic before we actually did something about it. situation, right? And that's the thing that we're all trying to avoid by having more health transparency, having access to better labs. Obviously, you guys do labs. I'm an investor in a few

different companies that also do labs as well, too, and make it easier for consumers to get it. Something super random, and I'd love to actually get your thoughts on this, when it comes to A1C, have you heard this thing where individuals who are of, you know, they're not overweight, they have good body composition, they're metabolically healthy, but because some people are their red blood cells stay around longer, there's this phenomenon where you have healthy people, often younger, whose A1C is a little elevated,

and it's just a byproduct of the fact that their red blood cells are sticking around longer and that you cross-reference it with like a fasting insulin to make sure that they're in a good position. Have you heard about this? Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. And it is true. If your hemoglobin is sticking around longer,

it has more time for glucose to kind of stick to it, and that's why you get this hemoglobin A1C. elevation, but I would say that is pretty rare. Yeah, this is a super rare thing. I'm asking because it happened to me. Ah, amazing. It happened to me, and I've noticed a couple of other people. Yes, yes.

There's a friend of mine on Instagram that was saying, listen, I'm doing everything right. I wear a continuous glucose monitor. I do this other stuff. And this is crazy. Like my levels are like bumping up against prediabetic. Right. And I was like, hey, listen, this kind of happened to me.

And I went down a little bit of this rabbit hole. And I found out that that, that in some people, by far not the vast majority. So if you're listening here and your A1C is elevated, it's probably not you. No offense. But it doesn't happen to a lot of people. But some very healthy people have this situation where their red blood cells seems to be sticking around a little longer.

That's totally true. And you said the key is we always cross-check it with the fasting insulin level as well, which is a really good biomarker of metabolic disease. Any other blood markers that are the basics that you are educating your clients on, and the folks that come into Next Health and that you want people to know here, you know, that they should be paying attention to. Yeah, so there's about 10 of them. So I tell people, you know, if you don't know anything else about your blood test,

there's about 10 or so that you really need to make sure that you're even keeping a little spreadsheet and a little diary of this on a quarterly or every six-month basis. So hemoglobin A1C is one of them. We also track the HSCRP, which is your inflammation levels. Another inflammatory marker that we check is homocysteine. we have people know their testosterone and estrogen levels and their thyroid levels as well, T-S-H. And, you know, if any of those are out of whack, which happens as we age, it's like a normal thing

for hormones to decline as we age, then we can do a deeper investigation, but those give you good tracking mechanisms in those areas. Cholesterol markers, like APOB is my favorite cholesterol marker, is kind of an aggregation of all of the bad cholesterol. that's kind of roaming around in our bloodstream. And we could talk more about heart disease as well because that's not the only marker you need to know about. And I even have them track things like their blood pressure.

Most people don't realize this, but blood pressure is really one of the main causes of having heart disease. It's not your cholesterol, it's your blood pressure, actually. About 50% of the population has a high blood pressure, even at a young age over 20 years old, and they don't even know it. And that's a silent killer, too, that the damage builds up over time. So, and then I have them track their skeletal muscle mass

and have them track their body fat percentage. And so just these few markers are so incredibly important for you to know and make sure you understand what they should be, what's the optimal range, not the disease range. So you can track what direction you're moving in. You mentioned blood pressure. You were one of those individuals that had high blood pressure, right? Right.

diet, lifestyle, stress, nutrition, whatever, sleep, that you think were the biggest contributors to the fact that you had high blood pressure. Yeah, so blood pressure is like one of those end markers that combines all the bad stuff going on into one marker. Everything ends up influencing it negatively and then positively. Yeah, for me, it was like probably diet soda combined with not sleeping more than four hours. Why do you think diet soda was driving your high blood pressure? I just think that even artificial sweeteners can cause metabolic derangements.

And so your brain looks at it as being a sweet. And then sweets make you crave more food. And so you just want to eat more as well. So I think that's part of it. I think that also, you know, the amount of sleep I was getting four hours of sleep is definitely going to lead to high blood pressure. Stress, obviously, is another big, big reason. And just my overall weight, you know, I was having a lot of.

hard time just even moving around and I was because I was sedentary because of that as well. So all of those combined factors can cause my blood pressure to be uncontrolled. So uncontrolled eye blood pressure, the definition is despite multimodal therapy, you just can't get it close to 120 over 70. And did you know that for every 10% increase you have over 135 over 80, you have a 10% increase of mortality from blood pressure? So you really need to get it controlled under 1.30. over 80. And most people live, like, you know, they go to their doctor and they get their blood

pressure checked. And by the way, that's the crappiest blood pressure measurement you can do is the one at your doctor's office because your stress is usually being done like in the wrong position. The person doing it isn't a rush. And most of the time it just gets thrown out anyway as, you know, it's probably just because you're here at the doctor's office. So everyone should have their own blood pressure cuff at home and they should be measuring it three times in the appropriate position once a month, in my opinion. That's where we have our patients to do. especially over the age of 40. Yeah, no, that's great.

You know, when it comes to blood pressure, a lot of people get told at their doctor's office sometimes when it's very elevated, like, hey, you just need to cut down on salt in your diet and other stuff. We've had multiple people that have come on this podcast and talked about, well, let's look at that for a second, right? So the crazy thing about sodium and a lot of the, quote-unquote,

you know, salt and sodium, obviously two different things. But the sodium, yes, that has been shown, a lot of high concentration of sodium has been shown. We had one of the top, you know, nephrologists on here and, you know, other individuals that are there. High concentrations of sodium, yes, they do tick up, you know, blood pressure and create a few other problems inside of the body, too. But if we actually look at the American diet that's there, the vast majority of sodium exposure comes from bread rolls, white bread, and other ultra-processing. foods. Oh yeah. It's not because people are dumping Himalayan sea salt. I guess emily and sea salt are two different things.

It's not because they're dumping high quality sea salt onto their broccoli that they're grilling or roasting or whatever. It's coming from again ultra processed foods, drinks, other things, even things like orange juice and whatever that's there. That's the biggest contributors. So it's always funny. You see people at restaurants saying, oh, I'm avoiding salt. And it's like, okay, there might be a deeper story to this whole thing. And the second thing along that is that, you know, salt is actually, we've known now, can be very healthy for us, right?

The electrolytes and other things that we get inside of the body, and some people don't have enough. But it's important to have adequate amount of hydration. Exactly. Right. We don't want to be under hydrated because when we're under hydrated, we do end up increasing the concentration of sodium inside of the blood, which then becomes problematic. That's exactly right.

So, you know, we're basically just helping people. understand that their doctors are doing the best that they can, but they're often overwhelmed. And as you've shared before, they don't have a lot of the background on these interventions like nutrition. And it's not their fault. It's just the landscape of the medical education system. Right. And, you know, the thing is, you know, I trained in the Western medical education system.

And so blood pressure is a perfect example. You get diagnosed with high blood pressure. And then the conversation is everything you're taught about is here are the eight different classes of blood pressure meds and how you start which one you pick for the person and then what can you add if that doesn't work and then what do you add if that doesn't work that's the whole conversation in medical school no one ever told me that white bread and packaged food has a ton of salt in it like just eliminating the package food and the process ultra-process food could have potentially even solved my problem right before i got on blood pressure medications excuse me

And, excuse me, before I got in blood pressure medications, it could have just solved the problem just there because that's 90% of my diet was the ultra-processed food. Yeah. And obviously, as you mentioned, it's multifaceted. I had a buddy that was just in town, and we did a little write-up in our newsletter about him. He noticed he went in for an appointment with his functional medicine doctor. His C-reactive protein was up, his high blood pressure. He was dealing with, you know, being a little bit overweight.

And, of course, there's a lot of factors that went into it, right? there was an overconsumption of calories, right, that were there, even though he was making healthier decisions. And you mentioned something that he ended up later finding out. I said, you know, we were roommates in college, right? So I was like, I think you have sleep apnea. Right. Yes. And, you know, back in the day, I used to tell people, go get, like, I'm not a physician, but I would say, you know, go find a physician or somebody to order a test for you. Right. These days, you know, I think that, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, right? If you find somebody that knows what they're doing and has, you know, ordered CPAP devices for people or treated apnea that's there through whatever means, sometimes even a study is not needed.

They'll just go right into like, let's go to the most obvious treatment. Exactly. Right. He was given us CPAP and he ended up losing like the last like 15 pounds that he was trying to lose and his CRP came to. down just by fixing his sleep, which is obviously the first recommendation that you had. Exactly. Sometimes it's not the obvious thing that we think of that is the thing that will move us forward in our next wellness goal that we're trying to reach.

Absolutely. And, you know, I think for your audience out there, I think a lot of people think of sleep apnea as this weird diagnosis that you have to go to a sleep lab and, you know, sleep there overnight and get diagnosed with it. And it's not, 40% of people have some degree of sleep apnea. It's a huge percentage of people, and we don't even realize it and we don't treat it because of that. And that could be the one trigger, just treating that one thing, making that one thing better, that improves every aspect of your health.

Even your nutrition is improved because you're not as hungry the next day, for example. Your hormones will improve as well. So it's so much easier to get checked for sleep apnea now. So first of all, if you think you have sleep apnea, you should get checked for it. Why would you think that? You snore a lot at night. Your significant other tells you you're snoring and you're waking up gasping for air. You wake up and you're still tired or you get tired like an hour after you wake up.

Those are all signs that you might have sleep apnea. And you can even get like an app on your phone that measures the amount of snoring that you're doing. This is a great one that is free. I have no connection to the company. It's called Snor Lab. You just let your phone listen to you sleep at night and it gives you a snore score. And if you have a high snore score, there's a high chance that you have sleep apnea. If you come see at Next Health, we have actually.

a great device we can send you home with. It's called a watch pat. It's like a little watch you wear at night. And we'll know within one night if you have sleep apnea or not. And then we can get it treated. Yeah, that's great. Amazing. Well, I took us around a little bit all over the place with my personal anecdotes and stories over there. But let's bring us back. Sure. You were taking us through the pillars. We ended up on the topic of nutrition after we chatted about your story a little bit. Take us further from nutrition or is there anything else on the nutrition side that

you didn't feel like we hit. You hit the fiber. You hit the staying away, minimizing, greatly minimizing ultra-processed foods. It's not about being perfect, but that 80% of your diet is focused on these whole foods that are out there. Anything else you want to touch on nutrition before we go forward? On the nutrition standpoint, one thing I talk about there is preventing metabolic disease, right? So not diabetes, but all the metabolic diseases out there. And the best way to do that is, like we talked about, you know, the hemoglobin A1C, knowing you've headed that way. But what's even better is the continuous glucose monitor. I think this is an incredible tool that we now have in our toolbox of really understanding for your particular biology,

what are things that gets your insulin to shoot up, right? And it could be different. For example, for me, if I eat a banana, my insulin levels, my glucose levels go crazy. I have a huge spike. And for other people, that might not be the case. And so understanding what foods and specifically kind of what order you eat foods in as well can cause a glucose spike can make a massive difference. That could be a habit that you take with you from that learning and incorporate into your life for the next 50, 60 years. One of the biggest habits that I learned by using a continuous glucose monitor is by eating your fiber first. So you know when you go to a restaurant, they're bringing you bread first or chips first. That's the last thing you want to eat. You want to put that towards the

end of the meal, you start every meal with a vegetable or some, you know, a fibrous vegetable, green leafy vegetables, whether it be a salad or even like a vegetable plate or a crudite, and then you move on to your protein. Some people say start with protein. That's probably fine as well, just to make sure you get enough protein if you're not going to be able to get enough by starting with a fiber. But put the carbs at the end of your meal, that's going to change your insulin reaction and then change your glucose reaction. So I think that's another big component of the nutrition aspect, and that's pretty much it. You know, a lot of people ask, like, what's the best diet?

Should I go carnivore? Should I go keto? I always tell them, like, you know, the most steady diet in the world is a Mediterranean diet, and we know for a fact. This has incredible effects on preventing heart disease, preventing diabetes, even reversing some of these things. But it's really just a dietary pattern, and there's a lot of fiber in it. There's good protein in it, and there's good healthy,

fats in it. And if you just follow that kind of overarching rules on your diet, you're going to do great. That's awesome. Yeah. You know, just a personal question I have for you because, you know, we come from the same background. Yeah. We're, you're Indian. I'm Indian. We're both from the state, our ancestors from the state of Gujarat. Right. I wasn't born in India, neither were you, but I was born in Kenya. My grandparents, my parents are all born in Gujarat. And, you know, a big mission of mine when I got into health and wellness like 20 years ago, it was like, okay, growing up, I was told that this sort of vegetarian diet that we all were eating. I grew up vegetarian.

I don't know about if you did. I did too, yeah. I was always told like this is like a super healthy diet, this is this. And yet you were seeing, you know, family members in America and even in India, you know, South Asians here in America have the highest risk of heart disease. They have this. And people would say, oh, it's just genetics. and one day we'll figure it out, it'll be some medicine.

And the Indian diet, I'd be looking at it. Like, obviously the Indian diet means so many different things. There's like, what, 28 states in India or something. Each of them had their own diet that's out there. They all eat different stuff that's there and have different influences. But largely, if I would summarize it, it's been a diet that has, especially from the part that we're from, which tends to be more vegetarian. It doesn't have a lot of protein inside of it.

And increasingly, it's, less and less fiber. It's a lot of fried food. Right. And there's a lot of sugar that's added to stuff that is like random, like dolls. They'll add like sugar and other stuff too. Yeah. So I was on a mission. I was like, I want my parents who eat a lot healthier than that, but still have those influences. And grew up, we grew up cooking with all the seed oils and other stuff. They probably were cooking with ghee first and then they were told to stop cooking the ghee and then use all the seed oils. Right. And hats off to my parents because they've made a huge shift in their diets. And they eat like way healthier and they're working out and they're doing all these things.

They're doubling down on their sleep. A lot of what we're talking about in this conversation today. How has it been with your family members as you've sort of shifted your own journey? How has it been even with your own parents? You know, when it comes to getting them to eat a little bit healthier and kind of moving away from, you know, some of the things that are not as healthy when it comes to the traditional Gujarati or Indian diets that are out there. Yeah, you and I are brothers from a different mother. for sure because I've struggled with that with my parents for years. But hats off of them as well, they've really changed like what they cook their food in,

for example. Like you said, there's a lot of fried food in the Indian diet, unfortunately. And so just kind of de-emphasizing away from anything that's fried. So even the breads now that we use are not fried breads that we eat with. And adding, you know, adding more protein focusing on more. They're still vegetarians, so more beans and more vegetarian. sources of protein has been huge as well. But, you know, it's always, it's always a struggle, like that, especially from our region of the, of India in Gujarat, the, the, I feel like the food

is very saucy. Like you say, they add a lot of sugar to it for really no reason. Like, why is there sugar and dull? Like, it doesn't even need it, right? And so, I think you can get people to make microchanges and stack those microchanges up over time. And that's how I focus What was it one of the biggest changes you made for your parents or that they made that you saw that, like, again, it's not about being perfect. It's like this is a big step in the right direction. Yeah. So, you know, I think with every meal, we would start off with a lot of what's called booties, right? Those are the fried bread.

Flat breads. Fried flat breads. Right, exactly. So we went away from anything fried to eating mostly nons, which are more just like cooked, baked breads, right? And so that was a major change for them, but it's much better. Yeah. Awesome. Well, always, you know, getting your parents, it's like when you're younger,

your parents are telling you all these things that you need to do to get healthy. And as you get older and your parents get older and you're in the wellness space, you're like on top of them of like, hey, you got to try this, you got to try to that. And I try to have compassion. And, you know, again, my parents have done a lot. And they, I'm very lucky. They live with my sister in San Diego and her husband, who's a cardiologist, you know, got his training in functional medicine and everything, really incredible guy, Dr. Neil Patel,

and he just seeing him and kind of learning through osmosis, they've made so many incredible changes. And because he's one step removed, right, there are his in-laws, even though he treats them as his parents, it's less of the pressure, right? Oh, yeah. Of there, right? Exactly. There's lots of the pressure that's there. Right, right. Well, let's go from nutrition to, we covered nutrition. You talked about sleep. Right. Is there another category that's part of your Shaw Protocol. Yeah. So on the on the basics part of this, we talk a lot about your exercise routine, your movement routine. The Pareto principle there, once I said this before, was to not be sedentary. So I look at someone's like day-to-day routine. A lot of people spend a lot of time in their car.

They go straight to work and then they sit down at a desk and they don't take a break for like four hours. They get into a flow or they get into like stressful work and they don't take a break for four or five hours before lunch. And this is where, where I really try to modify, like, once again, microbehavior. So I have them buy like an egg timer, and we put the egg timer on their desk, and it's like a 45-minute twist. You twist it to 45 minutes. Every 45 minutes, I have them get up and take what I call an exercise snack. It's not what I call it. It's just what's in the research. It's been proven that exercise snacks, five minutes of activity after 45 minutes of being sedentary, can completely reverse the negative effects of being sedentary.

So the opposite is after four hours of being sedentary, for every 10% increase you have in time being sedentary, you increase your mortality by 10%. So imagine eight hours of just sitting there, you have almost a 40% increase in mortality just from sitting there at work every day. So taking an exercise snack is something I put into people's life. I try to get them either a standing desk or what I prefer is a walking desk. And then after lunch going for a quick walk, after every meal going for a quick walk, after every meal going for a quick. walk, just putting those little actions into effect make a big difference. On the exercise front, I think after 40, you got to start, you know, before 40, you know, I did, I ran a lot of track, and so all I would do is run. Like I run for hours and hours and hours a day, sometimes a week.

I get many hours of running in a week. And that was probably fine when I was in my 20s, but after 40, your body is genetically programmed to start breaking down muscle, right? And so we get into the situation after not having any strength training. for 40 plus years of what we call sarcopenia, where there's not enough muscle to even support our bones, and then our bones start deteriorating. There's a lot of falls. You know, people, 50% of people that fall at an elderly age never walk again.

I think I've actually heard that on one of your podcasts. It's probably with Dr. Gabriel Lyme. Yeah, exactly, probably with her, right. And so really making sure that we hone in a workout routine that is meant for longevity and for keeping you healthy versus something. that you're just used to doing. And so we talk about getting adequate zone two exercise. So we put in a zone two protocol, a VO2 max protocol, which is to help your mitochondrial health and a strength training protocol. That's great. Yeah. Strength training has definitely been as somebody,

you know, I share, I share my background on the podcast all the time. You know, I grew up. And because I was just not really, I was under eating on protein, even though you can get protein from vegetarian sources. We were not sort of really thinking about that as much. Right. We just thought, okay, whatever diet we're eating, that's enough. And probably was from a minimum standards part. But when I would have these bouts of having friends who would say, even in high school, like, hey, let's like go to the gym. Let's like start to put on some muscle mass and everything. I would work out hard for like a month or two. And yeah, that's a short amount of time. But also when you are like 16, 17, when you go to the gym for a month and as long as you're eating enough calories and eating enough protein, you should see actually big results. And all my friends were and I'd just be like, oh, I guess, you know, you know, just going to be like a skinny Indian, you know, vegetarian kid. You know, that's just like my, you know, genetics or whatever.

So I never really got into the gym because I just thought I didn't really see any progress or it wasn't for me. I had all these sort of stories around it. And then really through connecting with some great people on this podcast, including Dr. Gabriel Lyon and really shifting my understanding of, you know, protein like, what was that, like two, three, four years ago. and then going back into the gym, I was working out with this group here in L.A. called Ultimate Performance, you know, highly recommend them. And through consistently having strain training and eating the appropriate amount of protein in my diet, I actually for the first time, even at the age of 40, I'm 41 now. So I was 38 or 39 then.

I saw a real shift in my body composition. I came in. It was after a trip to Italy. And I came in for my sort of caliber measuring test. And, you know, it was after eating a bunch of pasta, drinking a bunch of wine. I came in and I measured. And I was very shocked to see, like, I fell perfectly into that category of skinny fat. Right.

So even though I was lean and still lean right now, I measured in a 25% body composition, 25.5%. I got to go back to it. It's all inside of the app. Somewhere between 25 and 26. And then in a matter of just six months of being very focused. looking at what I eat, getting 10,000 steps a day, and then doing strength training. It's more of an intense program. I'm not recommending this here for everybody, but I was strength training three to four days a week.

In that time period, six to eight months, I added almost about a pound of lean muscle mass for every month. It was about 8.9 pounds. Amazing. Right? Amazing. My body composition at its lowest got to about 12.5%. That was a little too lean for me. And it kind of settled at around 15%.

And it just really showed me that it's like all these ideas that I had that my, you know, body couldn't change or couldn't shift or wasn't for me. I just was not doing really the right things that actually influence it. And here's the reason why I brought it up besides to tell my story. Connecting the exercise side to the nutrition side, I'm a huge fan of glucose monitors. I'm an investor in levels. I actually think I have a level shirt on and read this. You know, I recommend it.

I think it's very good for people to understand the amount of glucose variation. that they have throughout the day and how it impacts their mood, how it impacts their energy levels, which I would eat like a high-carb meal and I'd feel sleepy afterwards. And I just thought, oh, that's just my digestion. But when I improved that, I had a lot of energy throughout the day. And the most interesting thing is when I added lean muscle mass to my body, I could get away with eating more carbs and my fasting insulin got even better. And so that's all to say that all these things are connected.

And I'm not the only person that has gone through that experience is that when you have the basics down in on all aspects, the sleep, the nutrition. Now you're talking about the fitness. You can have a little bit more variance. Your body can actually take a little bit more carbohydrates or this or that or whatever. It can be a little bit more resilient because muscle is one of the most metabolically active things inside of the body. And we don't have to always think that the exact way to fix it is through having the most perfect diet. Absolutely. You know, I always tell people that your metabolism lives in your muscle. So the healthier your muscle is, that's how you kind of avoid and get away from headed towards diabetes and metabolic syndrome. So we talked about our parents, right? Like our parents did not grow up in an era of weightlifting or exercise being important at all, right? And if anything, they just thought like taking a walk would be good enough. And when I started adding a little bit of strength training to their day-to-day. routine. And it doesn't need to be even every day. I think the dose response curve to strength

training is, it's incredible how much a little bit of strength training really improves your muscle mass. And then the benefits of adding more time kind of peter off where it kind of stabilizes. And so getting 20 minutes, three times a week, is monumentally going to take you in the right direction and you don't need to go to the gym, you know, for an hour a day doing heavy weightlifting. So just even doing that little bit makes a huge difference. And then it doesn't just make a difference in, you know, how you look and the quality of your muscles and the lean body mass, but it makes a huge difference in your metabolism, which is what you found as well, in controlling your glucose curve, controlling your insulin levels as well. And the other place where it makes a massive

difference is in preventing osteoporosis and reversing osteopenia. So people don't realize this, but your bones are strong because of your muscles. Your muscles actually hold your bones up. Like if we didn't have any muscles in our neck, our head would fall off of our spine. Our spinal cord does very little to actually hold our head up. It's the muscles that surround our bones that keeps us stable and that keeps us from falling, et cetera. And so having adequate muscle mass is probably one of the most important aspects of a good movement routine. When it comes to looking at lean body mass and also looking at like preventing osteopena, osteoporosis, what are the tools that you guys are using at Next Health to help people?

You mentioned in-body scan. So is that one of them? Yeah. So I have all of our patients actually get a bioimpedant scale for their home. And the one I like is the in-body H20N. Once again, have no connection to the company. It's just the one that I like to use because it's, out of all the scales out there, I find it to have the most accurate measurements. And we also use Dexa scanning as well. At the clinic, you use DeXA? We'll send people for a DexA scan.

Yeah, we'll send people for a Descan. We used to have our own, but it got to be too much because you have to hire a radiologist to kind of like manage it. But we still send, not everybody, but a lot of people for Dexa scan. And we have a really high-end in-body machine at Nexel that we use as well. I've seen a big difference between the high and in-body machine that a lot of clinics have and then the home one. Right.

I got a home one because I used to get mine done at the center here. Yeah. And they ended up closing. So I was like, okay, let me get one at home. And I used it. And there was a big swing that was happening. And so I asked my trainer about it because he also has one. He's like, look, they're not perfect.

Yeah. But for you, we're just looking. Are we trending in the right direction? That's exactly. Right. But if you want a baseline, it's better off. I used to sort of avoid, you know, wanting to go in for Dexa because it's radiation, other stuff. He's like, look, just do a Dexa once. You know, let's just get a baseline, especially because of all the extra information you're going to get about bone density and other stuff. I still have to schedule it. I haven't done it yet. And, and then, you know, you can use that bioimpedance to kind of just see that you're trending in the right direction. That's exactly right. The Dexa is a good measurement to do like maybe once in a while or if you're like, once a year or if you're trying to make a massive change in one particular aspect. But it's all about the trends. Don't get overly focused on the number and if it's accurate or not how it matches up with the decks. But it does kind of trend in the right direction for sure as long as you're using

it the same time of day. So I do it first thing in the morning. Yeah. That's fantastic. So that's the category of exercise. One of the thing on exercise and this is kind of having our feet in both worlds. For a lot of people, this looks like super advanced sort of biohacking, but the data is actually some of the most basic data that's out there. And that's this topic of V-O-2 Max. Yes. You know, we just did an episode with Andy Galpin on the podcast. And it was basically, it's coming out here in a couple of weeks, probably a little bit before this episode. So our audience will have heard it. It was V-O-2 Max for dummies, right? Which I would put myself in that category. It was only last year for the first time that I got my formal in sort of, you know, that

proper apparatus, the laboratory machine, my V-O-2-Max benchmarked. And for those that are not familiar, you know, just high-level, V-O-2-Max is one of the number one predictors. I think if not the number one, it is one of the number one predictors of longevity and getting a sense of your ability to turn oxygen into essentially energy inside of the body using obviously, you know, the macronutrients that you have to go through that process and how efficient are you? And as we age, often that capacity goes lower. And it's because our aerobic capacity goes down and that has all sorts of implications. You go to an elderly home, a nursing home and you go see people or maybe if you have an

elderly parent, somebody at home and they get out of a chair or somebody's trying to take groceries in and they're winded, that's an example of a low VO2 max. So in one sense, the data is so massive and so clear. In another sense, it's kind of a little bit tough for a lot of people to get it benchmarked, right? Are you guys doing V-O-2-Mex at Next Health? Yeah. Okay, so you guys are doing it right now. So here's the thing about VOTU-MX.

I think everyone should know. VOTU-2-Mex is a great measurement because it measures basically what you're talking about, oxygen turning in energy. That's mitochondrial health. What is the health of the mitochondria of every cell in our body? and how efficient are they in making energy, right? And so, you know, it's not just our muscles that need energy, not just our brain that needs energy, is every organ in our body that we need to have healthy mitochondria so they can do what they do so the liver can detoxify it so the kidneys

can make urine, et cetera. So having a VO2 max that is healthy basically means that your mitochondria are healthy. Now, when you train for VO2 max, that's great. You want to train your mitochondria, But in reality, it's really one of those end measurements of all of the actions that you're taking around diet, health, diet, exercise, and sleep that tie into improving your VO2 max. Just like you were talking about with blood pressure. Exactly, exactly. So your VO2 max will suffer if you're not getting good sleep as well. Okay.

And so a lot of people talk about training VO2 max by doing high intensity intermittent training. And that's fantastic. And I do high intensity intermittent training three, times a week myself to train my VO2 max, but it's really just getting everything else right. And it's something that, once again, it's a marker of putting the work in. You got to put the work in, you know, and do exercise and not be sedentary to improve your VO2 max. So I think it's good to know your VO2 max, but just you kind of know where you stand on these longevity charts, which we use that measurement a lot. But I think over-focusing on just that one number and having

it measured, like some people go and measure it once a month. I'm like, that's way too much. It's not going to change that fast number one. And what are you like really trying to achieve there, right? Yeah. And so I think, you know, the Apple Watch does give you an indication of VO2 Max. And studies have found it to be actually pretty accurate. So that, you know, if you don't have an Apple Watch, maybe borrow one from a friend for a little while and see and use the VO2 Max measurement there. It's not the funnest test to do, right? Did you do the VO2 Max test?

I did. I did. I did it running. Yes. And I scored a 46, but I ended up having to end the test early. I like, I hate running. Yeah. And I roar the wrong shoes. I didn't know we were doing running. I thought I had options, but they only gave me the option of running.

But they said, look, come back. And if you want to do rowing or cycling, we can do something else. I probably have bad biomechanics on running. And then I think mainly I had the wrong shoes. So like my knee was hurting. So like right towards then, I was like, I'm, okay, I'm not like fully gassed. Like I feel like I still have like another 10, 15, 20% more. But my knee was like hurting.

so much. I was like, hey, listen, I got to, I got to end this and I'm going to come back. Right. Still scored good. Right. Like 46 is pretty good. It's pretty good. It's not great. And that's what I was shooting for. And I think that I can score, you know, a great. I have to go back in. I have a men's group and we're all talking about like wanting to go in. There's a place here in Santa Monica. Oh, yeah. Where we're recording. It's called TriFit. And it's an example of a lot more gyms around the country are starting to now have VO2MAC sets there. And what I've found is that even though I think the test was like a couple hundred bucks. And it's one of those ones that if you are an individual who has been focusing on, you know, like wellness is kind of like your hobby for you. It's a good test to do because it's very humbling for a lot of people. They're like, man, I eat the perfect diet.

I do this. I do that. But maybe their movement has not been there. Exactly. Right? And just overall activity level, like you were saying, they just might be more of a sedentary individual. Right. And that was a big wake-up call for a lot of my friends to say, okay, I really want to double down in this area, which is not too different than the basics that

you've been talking about. So the test is not that expensive. You know, you do have to do it either rowing or bicycling or running. But it's definitely a big wake-up call for people who feel like they should be fitter than they are. And it gets them excited to want to improve that area of life. But like you said, it's holistic as part of all these things that are that are there. Exactly. They're going to improve when your sleep is better, when you're just having generally more an active lifestyle and some of other points you mentioned. Right. And you said, like, I have three patients I could think of right now that are gym rats and they're pretty muscular people, you know? And so they got their VO2 max down and they were surprised. They were in like the

30s and it was pretty low. And I think it's a good wake up call. Like, you said to kind of vary up your exercise routine a little bit, get the cardio in, do some VO2 max training. By the way, one of the best studied methods of improving your VO2 max is called sprint intermittent training or sit. It's a variation of hit where, and you can do this with anything. You can actually do this on a bike. You could do this on a rowing machine. You can even do it outside where you go all out for about two to three minutes and get your heart rate up and then you rest for about a minute or two until your heart rate comes back down to normal. And then you do it again. It's like only takes 20 minutes and you do that four times and that little bit of

that 20 minute exercise, even once a week, has been shown to dramatically improve VO2 max over the course of six weeks. Amazing. Awesome. What other parts of the protocol do we not touch on? Anything that we missed? In terms of the basics? No, not in terms of the basics. Then we take it to the next level, which I can just touch on Pondon real briefly if you like. Okay. So, you know, one of the things that people look at a lot as longevity. And so we pull out the chart of the CDC top 10 causes of death. And, you know, number one we all know is heart disease, right? A lot of people get a heart, the first time they're diagnosed with heart disease is that their first heart attack, 50% of people get diagnosed at their first heart attack, then 50% of those are fatal, right?

And so most people find out they have heart disease when they're already, unfortunately, an ambulance on the way to the hospital, right? And that's way too late. And so we know, that you can diagnose heart disease 30 years before it becomes a problem. So we send people for what's called a CT calcium score, which everyone over 40, in my opinion, needs to have one of those. On the second thing that's going to kill you is cancer. On the cancer front, I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed to stage one. So really making sure your cancer screening is up to date. There's a couple of newer modalities that are a little bit expensive right now, but I think over time they're going to really come down in price.

And so we add those to cancer screening modalities. And so, you know, everyone needs to get their colonoscopy done at age 40 and make sure they're keeping up with that. Their skin cancer looking for that. OBGYN checks, PSA levels of prostate for men. But if you add to that the full body MRI and the liquid biopsy, you dramatically increase your rate of diagnosing cancer at a much earlier stage. Yeah, like a pernovae or something else that's out there.

And then like a grails. blood test. Exactly. And then we have also Alzheimer's. That's the third thing that's going to take you out, right, on the causes of death. And so there's great screening tools out there now. Dr. Dale Bredesen, who is one of the experts in Alzheimer's of the world, I think. He's one of the most incredibly learned scientists in this, and he's put together a test on a website called mycognoscopy.com. we can take a simple test on the internet and find out if you have a risk factor for Alzheimer's. And now there's actually blood tests that are proving to be very specific for diagnosing Alzheimer's with a simple blood test.

We've never had that before. And what are they looking for? They're looking for tau protein and amyloid protein in your blood. Got it. So it's incredible new technology that's coming out. I think it's going to change the landscape of both being able to diagnose this stuff way earlier when you can still reverse the course of the disease. And almost all Alzheimer's, almost all, not all,

can still be reversed if you find it early enough. Same for heart disease and same for cancer. And so that's where we then do some advanced diagnostics to make sure you're not headed in those directions. Yeah. On the heart disease side, are you guys also ordering like these CCTVs that are out there? Yeah. Yep.

So those are kind of AI-enhanced CT scans of the heart, clearly is the test that we use. And for people that have risk factors, we will do this angiogram of the heart using a cat scan. And it's incredible. I love this test because you can actually see every blood vessel and exactly where the plaque is built up and how much is occluding flow.

And to be able to do that with a cat scan versus like doing a natural angiogram, it's a procedure. It's a game changer. And so we've used that a lot. We've actually been able to pre-diagnose heart attacks, years before they're going to happen and get people on the appropriate course of treatment. Yeah, I had my cardiologist on the podcast, and he walked everybody through my clearly scan.

We did my lipids and everything, just to kind of make people aware. Like, I like to be transparent, you know, like I have familial history of hyper cholesterolemia. I'm a hyper absorber. I have a lot of the genetic snips for it. My APOB. At one time, my APOB, when I first got it measured, and that time I was doing a lot more like saturated fat in the diet, you know, type, you know, type diet. Not keto, but like I was just having a lot more saturated fat in my diet. Yeah. And I think my highest in my APOB was like 1, like 90 or something

like that. Wow. That's a big number. Yeah. It was like somewhere really high up there. And then through a combination of just, you know, lifestyle changes, other stuff. And then also I did decide, I've shared with my audience, I started on a Zetamide for, because I'm a hyper reabsorber. Out of all the statins that were there is the one that I felt like had the least amount of, you know, side effects, other things, you know, made the decision with my cardiologist. And even though I feel like we don't know the full story on all those things and metabolically, it's very clear like high APOB levels, high LDL levels in people that are not metabolically healthy is absolutely 100% an issue. And then I feel like there are some questions about it in people

that are healthy. And obviously there's this, you know, subgroup that you've maybe heard people talk about, lean mass hyper responders and I think other areas. But I didn't want to roll the dice, you know, on it. So I decided to start that. And my APOB has come down now. I think the last test that I did through, I get my blood work done every quarter through Lifeforce. And I think my last one, I'll pull it up after this and put in the show notes, it was maybe like 80 or 70. Amazing. So it came down like, you know, a massive amount. And but yeah, you know, the clearly was really great because it's like, all right, regardless

what the LDL says, regardless what the APOB says, just like how much plaque is in the arteries. Exactly. Right. Exactly. And that's like, that's what we're actually looking for in mind was knock on wood, like super clean. Thank goodness. So just want to continue that pathway.

Yeah. Yeah. You bring up a really important point is that a lot of people out there think that cholesterol leads to heart disease. And that is not the case. Cholesterol, the bad kinds of cholesterol, which is APOB basically, groups them all together, is one of three or four factors that leads to block blood vessels. The other ones are damage of the arterial wall, which happens with high blood pressure. It's also inflammation, which can happen through gut health issues. microplastics we talked about earlier can serve as a scaffolding.

So having a lot of toxic exposure, hyperabsorption of cholesterol in the gut that you have. So Zetamide is not actually a statin. It actually prevents cholesterol absorption. So. But is it generally put into the statin category or no? What do they call it? Yeah. It just prevents absorption of cholesterol from the gut.

So there's no category name for that? Not one that I'm aware of. So I, you know, there's PCSK-9 inhibitors. one category, then there's statins and then there's absorption. Yeah. Absorption medications. And so I think a lot of people, they have this kind of, just from all the stuff they listen to, they have this thought process like high cholesterol equals statins equals heart

disease. Right. It's nowhere near that simple. It's so multifactorial that you can stop drinking out of plastic models and you're actually helping not form plaques. So it's really multifactorial. you got an incredible workup, which sounds awesome, and clearly is kind of the last step of that, which is making sure you don't have any plaque ins built up in the artery. And I think everyone

needs to go through that process. It's why statins are one of the most over-prescribed medications in humanity right now is because people, and including doctors, have made that kind of mental jump, high-LDL statin, high-L-Statin, and you've got to be multi-faceted about it in your evaluation and your thought process. Well, that really gets to, you know, that's what you guys are trying to do. Right. That's what you guys are doing at Next Health. And that's also what you are on the podcast here today to talk about because hopefully, you know, there's physicians that are listening.

There's researchers that are listening. This is the wave of where all medicine is headed. It's like all things, including electricity and plumbing. It's usually only for a small few in the beginning. The cost goes down. The technology gets better. These things get democratized. but in the beginning there's got to be pioneers that are willing to take a risk, right?

Nobody told you that this was going to be successful, even though you guys are successful now. You had to take a risk. You had to leave a successful career. You had to go and say that there has to be a better way to do things. Right. And so I want to give you, you know, hats off to you and your team for being able to do that. Thank you. For spreading the word.

I'm excited because now there's going to be a lot more next health locations around the world with you guys being a franchise model. If anybody's ever interested in reaching out, they just reach out to the next health team. Yeah. Yeah. Our website is next dashhealth.com. And we have a whole section on everything that we do and, you know, the franchise model, et cetera. We should be, we're opening in Dubai here pretty soon, Miami, Nashville, Austin, San Francisco,

Canada. So the next three, four years, we'll have a lot of locations. And really, for me, it was all about democratization of all of this stuff. Okay. So we actually have the technology on site. So we have sauna, cryo. hyperbaric oxygen, all of the things that people can add to their health routine. So it's impossible to find this stuff in a lot of cities. And if you do, it's really expensive. We make it

super affordable. And, you know, once full body MRI, once things like the genetic testing of your blood called the liquid biopsy, all of this stuff, like you said, is going to come down in price. And we will have the platform where everyone can get this stuff both now when it is a little bit more expensive now to do some of this stuff, but we are always looking to make it more accessible to more people, which we're doing with a lot of these technologies already. Yeah, totally. So there's next health. People can reach out on there. And then the other exciting thing is, like we use the vast majority of this podcast to be able to do, it's you really using your platform as a doctor, as an educator, as an entrepreneur to tell people

what is really the 80-20. What are the things that we need to double down on? So you have some free content that's out there that people can follow along. And then that's going to lead to hopefully maybe a book in the future. Yeah, yeah. I'm almost, you know, I would say 75, 80% of the way done done with a book. And I can't wait for it to come out because it really will lay out the entire protocol. Like you said, it's like tripling, quadrupling down to the basics. And a lot of this stuff is free or minimal expense right now to do to really move the needle of your health. And so that's what most of the book is going to be about. But also we're going to talk about how to dive a little bit deeper if you want to. And yeah, that should be out by the end of the year. So, and I really

appreciate you letting me talk about it out here on this podcast. We'll have you back on when the book is there. Thank you. In the meantime, people can follow you on Instagram and all those social channels that are there. We'll link to you in the show notes and, of course, the NextHealth website. Dr. Schott, thank you for coming on the podcast. This has been great. I've heard about your work for years. I've obviously been to Next Health. I think you guys are doing is great. But now we officially get to meet in person on the podcast, which was fantastic. So thank you. This has been fantastic. Thank you for everything you do, too. spreading the word like you do and giving your personal anecdotes,

I think it's so important that you can tie all this down into your own life. And, you know, I think it's important for people to know that as much as you're into health and wellness, as much as I am, we still struggle with the same things everyone else struggles with. These tools are out there, exactly. So true. Well, thank you again for being here. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone, Drew here.

Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter.

And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This,

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