Dhru Purohit Show - The Top 3 Nutrient Deficiencies and How to Fix Them with Chris Kresser

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Pendulum. In an ideal world where soils are rich and air and water are pure, we would be able to get the vitamins and nutrients we need to optimally support and sustain a disease-free life through diet alone. However, I’ve learned for most, that's just not practical in our toxic, modern world. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Chris Kresser to talk about the increasing issue of nutritional deficiencies, how we got here, and how to add back in what the modern world squeezed out.  Chris Kresser is the cofounder of the California Center for Functional Medicine, the founder of Kresser Institute, the host of the top-ranked health podcast Revolution Health Radio, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Cure and Unconventional Medicine. He has recently launched Adapt Naturals, a supplement line designed to add back into your diet what the modern world has crowded out and help people perform and feel their best. In this episode, we dive into: -The top three reasons why people end up having a nutrient deficiency (2:01) -The top three nutrient deficiencies (9:04) -Why the RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) is inadequate as a standard for nutrient intake (13:34) -Signs of nutrient deficiencies (18:49) -Nutrients that people can get too much of (35:19) -Optimal vitamin D levels (38:11)  -Nutrients people should people be careful supplementing with (41:53) -How to get more organ meats into your diet (43:40) -Why some people can thrive on a vegan or vegetarian diet and others can’t (1:05:19) -Why phytonutrients are so important (1:12:40) Also mentioned in this episode: -Adapt Naturals -Revolution Health Radio -Kresser Institute -Vitamin D Optimal Levels  For more on Chris Kresser, follow him on Instagram @chriskresser, YouTube @chriskresser, and through his website, chriskresser.com. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Pendulum. ​​Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizers really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. It contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. There isn't anything else like it on the market. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru, with code DHRU10. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code DHRU20. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are dealing with this epidemic of nutrient deficiency, and as much in my heart of hearts as I would like to be able to solve that 100% with food, I just no longer think that's possible. Welcome to the Drew Prood podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is my dear friend, Chris Cressor. Chris Cressor is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most respected clinicians and educators in the field of functional medicine and ancestral health. On today's episode, Chris is here talking to us about the top nutrient deficiencies that many of us out there have and how we can go about correcting them using the power of food

and supplementation. Now, a little bit more about Chris. Chris and his organization, the Cresor Institute, have trained over 2,000 clinicians and health coaches from over 50 countries in his unique approach and methodology. A couple years ago, Chris was named one of the hundred most influential people in health and fitness by greatest.com, and his work has been featured in everything from Time Magazine, The Atlantic, NPR, Fox and Friends, and many other national media outlets. Speaking of media, Chris also has his own top podcast. It's called the Revolution Health Radio, and he's been providing quality health information that's evidence-based for many years now. Most recently,

Chris has launched his newest company called Adapt Naturales, a supplement line designed to add back in what the modern world has squeezed out and help people perform and feel their best. Stay tuned for a fantastic episode with Chris Cressor on some of the top nutrients we're missing in our diet and what we can do to correct this. Chris, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here in the new studio. I want to jump right in and provide our audience with a little bit of value. You know, you and I were chatting a little bit and you shared something really fascinating to me. So I'm going to use that as a form of our first question. What are the top three reasons that even people who eat pretty healthy would end up having a nutrient deficiency?

A lot of people think I'm eating super healthy. How could I be someone that is likely to have a nutrient deficiency? So you're going to give us three reasons why. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that actually surprised me as I learned about this over time. So the first is a change in soil quality. So it's not that nutrients aren't in the soil anymore. it's that we've disrupted the microbiome of the soil.

So in a very similar way that we've messed up our own guts, industrial agriculture, pesticides, fertilizers, and the chemicals that we put into the soil have changed the biome of the soil in such a way that the plants can no longer extract the same level of nutrients from the soil that they used to be able to. So one of the examples I saw on a paper I read

is that today we'd have to eat eight oranges to get the same level of nutrition that our grandparents got from just eating one orange. So this is across the board, both vitamins and minerals, and we've seen declines ranging from 20 to 60% or higher over the past 100 years alone. So that's a profound change just in recent times. So the second issue is the increase in toxins in the food supply. So we have heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, et cetera.

and then we have things like glyphosate, bisphenol A, chemicals that are now ubiquitous in the environment and that have gotten into the soil and the food supply. And what happens there is these chemicals often bind to nutrients, primarily minerals, but also in some cases vitamins. So then we either don't absorb them at all or we absorb those nutrients with a toxin on board and we don't get the same benefit and can even be harmed by that. So toxins can block the absorption. of key nutrients. Absolutely. And in some ways, nutrients like take the hit because that's one of the

jobs that nutrients can do is try to protect us against toxins. But as a result, we don't get the benefit of the nutrient that we get if it wasn't bound to a toxin. Wow. And then the third reason is is an increase in chronic disease. So this hits us on both ends. Chronic disease increases the demand for nutrients. A good example would be vitamin D, people with obesity and metabolic problems, often do not absorb as much vitamin D from food, and they are not as efficient at converting sunlight into vitamin D. So they might need 10,000 IU per day of vitamin D just to maintain normal levels because of their health status, whereas someone who's lean and healthy, you know, needs maybe 2,000 IU or 1,000 IU per day. On the other hand, people with chronic disease

don't absorb nutrients as well. So this is a big problem because now six and ten Americans have a chronic disease and four in ten Americans have multiple chronic diseases. So we're not just talking about a small section of the population that's affected by this. We're talking about the majority of Americans and also, you know, other people in the industrialized world. So let's flip this question and there's a lot to drill down there, which we're going to get into. But let's flip this question for everyone listening and say just if we're trying to understand from a top line level and I'm going to, you know, I know there's more to this question than what I'll present it first as if people are paying attention to at least what are those top three nutrient deficiencies,

right? What are those top three ones as they start to think about, okay, hey, I'm susceptible, even if I have organic, the soil is being changed, you know, toxins, other things, we all have, we all are exposed to them in the environment. So if there was three of those, it would be the top three, and I know there's more than that that we're going to drill down on, but what would be those top three? So I think vitamin D is probably the most important. So 94% of Americans don't get enough vitamin D, and there are similar statistics in other countries around the world. And we now know from thousands of studies that have been published over the past 20 to 30 years that vitamin D is essential for everything from immune function to bone health, to cardiovascular

health to metabolic function, it's really kind of a do everything type of nutrient, even a hormone. You know, it plays some functions of a hormone. And if you look at almost every chronic disease that is on, you know, the top 20 lists in the U.S., it's in some way connected to vitamin D and vitamin D deficiency. So this is, I think, one of the biggest, you know, health issues of our time. And it's relatively easy to correct once you become aware of it and pay attention to it. But even with the attention that it's had over the past, you know, couple of decades, we still see really high rates of vitamin D deficiency. The next would be potassium. And actually, the rates of potassium deficiency are even higher than vitamin D. Or I should at least, I should say, the number of people that are not

getting enough potassium, it might not be outright deficiency, but they're not getting enough potassium to meet their needs. And this is a huge problem because potassium and sodium exists in a tight relationship. And when you have too much sodium, which you get from eating a lot of processed and refined foods, which make up 60% of the calories that the average American eats now, and not enough potassium, one of the worst outcomes of that is hypertension, high blood pressure. And high blood pressure is the number one risk factor for cardiovascular disease and heart attack, which is still the number one cause of death. So that's a very big deal.

The potassium intake today in the modern world are as low as one-tenth of what they were for our ancestors. So the problem, just to do a little sidebar, it's not just that we're getting too much sodium, which most of the sodium is coming from processed foods. It's not coming from the sea salt that we're all putting on our food because you really couldn't even eat that much sodium and still enjoy a meal. It would taste like crap. is that we're not getting the right amount of potassium, which cause a whole bunch of challenges. That's right. And this is, it's a good point that you bring up. And it's true for so many other

nutrients as well. So for vitamin D, vitamin D doesn't just exist in isolation on our body. There are many other nutrients that support vitamin D's function. Magnesium is another, and I'll use that as the third nutrient that I don't think people are getting enough of. magnesium is a co-factor for vitamin D. So what that means is that magnesium is needed for vitamin D to perform its functions. So you could potentially have enough vitamin D, but if you're magnesium deficient or not getting enough magnesium, you're still going to actually manifest vitamin D deficiency symptoms because you don't have enough magnesium. Now, magnesium is a little bit trickier to tease out how many people are deficient because I think the statistics are misleading.

They say about 52% are deficient. So still, the majority of Americans not getting enough. But I think that's a significant underestimate because the RDA a recommended dietary allowance for magnesium was last updated in 1997. RDA is based on body weight. The average body weight for a female at that point, adult, was 135 pounds and for a male was 165 pounds.

Today, in 2022, the average weight of a female, is about the same as it was for male then, about 165 pounds, 170 pounds. The average weight of a male is almost 200 pounds. And a paper was published last year in 2021 that said, hey, we need to update the RDAs now based on the average body weight. Well, when they did that, they found that the RDA had increased by over 200 milligrams per day for both males and females. and that the average person is getting 200 to 300 milligrams per day less of magnesium than they need.

So again, not a small amount. That's like way more than you would get in a multivitamin if you were taking. And it's twice the amount that people are eating generally. I think the other thing that you sent over to me is that you were sharing that the RDA is kind of like the minimum dosages that are there. A lot of people don't understand that. Can you tease that out? Yeah.

So the RDA was originally developed in World War II as a way of, determining the nutrient levels that needed to be in military rations for soldiers. And do you by any chance know, what was that based off of? Was that based off of like them doing studies or looking at the data that was there? Like, how do they come up even with that? It was, yeah, it's very murky because it's mostly based on nutrient intake and not blood biomarkers of nutrient levels, which are notoriously difficult to measure. and often require different tissues or body fluids for different vitamins or minerals.

So, for example, magnesium, which we were just talking about, 99.8% or something of magnesium exists inside of our cells, inside of tissue or bone. So if you measure magnesium in the serum and the blood, you're not getting an accurate assessment of actual magnesium levels. You're only measuring that, like, 0.2% of magnesium that is in the blood. the blood and you're not actually getting the amount of magnesium that's in the tissues and bone, which is what you really want to know. And the same is true for so many other minerals and vitamins. So they're just sort of assessing people's trying to assess people's intake of the nutrients.

And that's usually based on recall questionnaire. So I ask you, Drew, what did you eat three days ago? And you tell me roughly what you remember about what you ate three days ago. Good luck with that. Those studies have shown that those are notoriously inaccurate. And so, even that RDA, which itself was never designed to tell us the optimal amount of nutrients that we need to get for vibrant health. It was just what do we feed soldiers so they don't die and get acute diseases like rickets and scurvy. I think we all want to do better than that. So the lasting legacy of that is that there are people today that pick up packaged food, which is what most people are eating. Even a lot of people who shop at Whole Foods are really relying on a lot of packaged food.

that's there. They look on the back. If they do look on the back and they'll see, oh, great, this has 100% of my magnesium. Well, 100% according to what? We've got to have to dig in a little bit more. And I wrote this newsletter on magnesium and the different types of magnesium recently. And I was emailing a few friends about some of the latest literature. Because a couple years ago, the latest number that we had, probably about five years, six years ago was like, okay, magnesium is a co-factor in over 300 different functions in the body. Then the next year, it was 435. The next year it was 500. And I emailed a buddy of mine, Sean Stevenson, he based here in LA, the Model Health Show. And I was like, hey, man, you mentioned something about magnesium

being responsible now for like 600 plus items? I, is that right? Like, can you send me that paper? And boom, he sent me the paper and the number had gone up even further to like 600 something. So every year, we're finding out more and more about what these key nutrients are responsible for, which is another reason to remember that like, food is truly information and we don't even fully understand how much that information is doing for our bodies. Yeah, we're barely scratching the surface. And then when you start to add nutrient synergy to the equation, it gets almost hopelessly complex for our puny human brains. Maybe AI will figure it out. But as I said, with magnesium and vitamin D, none of these nutrients exist

in isolation. So when you look at the 600 plus functions of magnesium, then you expand to well, how does magnesium interact with vitamin D and calcium and other nutrients? And you start to get an exponential effect of how all of these nutrients are existing in this complex ecosystem and interacting in ways that we have barely even begun to comprehend. And this is one of the problems with the typical approach to nutrient repletion or, you know, restoring nutrient levels is they don't understand those relationships. And so they just, you know, you may be. take, so let's talk about iron deficiency. You know, an iron deficiency anemia still affects

two billion people worldwide. It's not as big of a problem in the U.S., but as a functional medicine clinician who've treated thousands of patients, I've seen, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people with iron deficiency anemia. And in some cases, they're getting plenty of iron, but they're not getting enough copper. And copper is required for iron to enter into the cell. And so these people were suffering from sometimes a severe iron deficiency. The doctor was giving them more and more iron. Nothing was happening. They weren't getting better.

And then I test them and find out they have a copper deficiency. And so we give them a little bit of copper. And all of a sudden, their iron levels are back to normal. So there's so much potential here for really increasing our understanding of all of these relationships and really fully finally being. able to leverage that information to make people healthier. And that's what my passion is right now. You know, you have a practice as well where you have a group of doctors that work with you. You see patients as well too. What are some of the signs? And I know mostly people that come to you

are usually individuals that are really suffering and I've not been able to get an answer. We can chat about those folks in a second. But occasionally you get people who are generally doing pretty good, but now all of a sudden maybe not are doing well. What are some signs for people who eat healthy who feel like they have things under control for some of those top deficiencies you mentioned? Like, they're not suffering from like maybe a deep chronic disease or if they are. It's they've kept it at bay because their lifestyle is so on point. What are some of those signs that they might notice this individual who is eating pretty healthy that are related to nutrient deficiency?

What are things that they would notice on their body or cognition or other stuff? Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. I think fatigue is one of the telltale symptoms for sure. So I'm just more tired than normal. I can't recover the same way. Yeah. Poor recovery from exercise, exercise intolerance, poor sleep, which has become epidemic,

skin issues, hair issues, you know, hair loss, both for men and women, problems with you know, sexual function or vitality, digestive issues, big one, mood problems. So like either mild depression, anxiety, cognitive issues, a really big one, like brain fog, gaps in memory, like can't, you know, can't quite get that word, you know, difficulty with word recall, problems with focusing. Those are probably, you know, the ones that stand out the most to me. And and, you know, I like the way Mark Hyman talks about it feels like crud. Not that crap is a curse word on here, but you can curse. Just doesn't feel right.

I don't feel right. You know, that's like people come in and say, I just don't feel the way that I used to. And then, you know, the typical doctor would be like, oh, you're just getting older, pat on the back, you know, send you on your way. But I don't think that that's necessarily a natural consequence. of aging. I think that what is happening there in all likelihood is the body needs 40 micronutrients to function properly. That's like these nutrients that we've been talking about are like the fuel that you put in your car. And if you're putting in low octane fuel or your car is constantly running out

of gas and doesn't have enough, it's not going to operate the way that it should. And this is what's so tricky with nutrient issues is we're not talking about deficiencies at the level that will cause like scurvy, you know, vitamin C or rickets or where people are going to die or they're going to develop like a life-threatening condition and end up in the hospital. If it was that, you know, there would be like all hands on deck, you know, this would be a national crisis, global. And certainly there are people who are dealing with it at that level. But most of the people listening to this show don't fall into that group. The problem with this and what makes it even tougher to deal with is that they are lower level

nutrient inadequacies that don't cause typically life-threatening issues, at least not right in the moment. They can contribute to chronic diseases that threaten our life over time, but they're not going to put you in the hospital tomorrow. What they're going to do is slowly degrade your quality of life. And they're going to do it in a way that you're not even aware of why that's, why that's happening. And you might often start looking for other causes that are, yes, they might be related, but they're missing that key underlying issue, which is that I'm not getting

enough nutrients. You know, when we were chatting before we hit record, one of the other things that you mentioned to me that I didn't even really think of that is related to this is specialized diets. So there's a lot of people that are listening today, including myself, who have gone on a specialized diet, which usually means some form of a limit. things because they found that taking out certain key foods, whether forever or for a period of time, helps them function better and especially with their gut health. So how is that specialized diets, something that a lot of people might be trying that actually gives them some good, could also lead to this problem of increasing nutrient deficiencies? Yeah, this is a tough one.

Because as a clinician, myself, I've put a ton of people on those diets. I myself have been on those diets, you know, off and on for many years. Name a few, just so people know what we're talking about. You know, a ketogenic diet, a very low carbohydrate diet, the carnivore diet, which is more recent focus that people some people do autoimmune protocol or AIP, a low FODMap diet, intermittent fasting where people are skipping breakfast and, you know, maybe condensing their food intake into like a six or eight hour window. All of these approaches, as you pointed out, can be incredibly beneficial and even, you know, life-saving or life-transforming for the carnivore diet, for example, it's not something that I typically recommend for people long-term, but I have had patients who have

been gone from being like almost completely non-functional and debilitated with like severe autoimmune disease to being able to live a pretty normal and healthy life with that diet. So I'm not saying that there isn't huge potential for improvement. And that doesn't mean that there aren't potential consequences. So, you know, to use an extreme analogy, in medicine, there's this saying, fasting is the cure for all disease. Well, it's also the cure for life if you do it long enough, right? You know, you can't fast forever. And so that's a good example of something that can provide tremendous benefit in the short term or if it's used with a particular therapeutic focus, but is not meant to be a long-term strategy because we understand that there are some downsides to it,

the longer you do it. So the reason that these special diets can be problematic is that they often restrict either food overall in the case of fasting or intermittent fasting or they restrict certain types of foods that can be beneficial. You know, autoimmune protocol takes out nuts and seeds and nightshades and a whole bunch of different categories of foods that there's nothing inherently wrong with them. Like they're very nutrient dense and they have lots of good vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and things like that in them. But they don't, you know, people with those conditions may not be able to, you know, may react to them. And so they remove those from their diet and then they're

missing out now on those nutrients and it just becomes harder and harder to get the nutrients that they need. So I am concerned about that. And with my patients, I would typically, you know, my approach is to do those diets for the minimum amount of time necessary and then try to get them back onto a broader spectrum of foods as soon as possible because I know that even when you are eating a full diet, it's still difficult to meet nutrient needs. So anything you do to reduce the spectrum of foods that you're eating is going to further threaten that. How much do you think that the water that we drink plays into it and asking from, you know, a lot of people here have filters and other stuff, is all these super reverse

osmosis filter also one of the things or coffee inside of our diet? How much truth is there to those being nutrient zappers in our modern world? I think it all adds up. So I wouldn't say that that is a, you know, I didn't include that in my list of major causes, because I don't think it is for most people. But if you, if it's one of many other causes that are present, I think it can play a role. And so, you know, I'm not a huge fan of reverse osmosis filters for that reason unless, you know, there are some companies that add back in minerals. They run the water through a kind of mineral filter after it's been through the reverse osmosis. And I think that's a good

idea generally because water has historically been a source of minerals for us. Yeah. When we take all those out, we're taking out one of the sources of minerals. We have a water here, no affiliation with them, just love the company. They've been around forever. It's Mountain Valley. And if you look at the back, I mentioned this on another podcast. There's calcium, magnesium, potassium, and probably a whole host of other things that are

inside of it, just like naturally occurring. Yeah. And this is the water that our ancestors, you know, regularly had. So probably was one of their sources, probably in addition to organ meats, which we'll get to in a second, of making sure we had a constant drip of these nutrients in our diet. Absolutely. And I, you know, I feel like this is somewhat related. But another huge issue is for most of our history as human beings, we ate food that was

harvested that day if we were growing food or gathered, gathered it, picked it off a vine or something like that in our immediate local environment. And the reason that's important is that once a food is taken out of the ground, it immediately starts to lose nutritional value because all plants depend on light and photosynthesis for nutrient production. And if you take a food out of the ground, and especially if you put it in a dark truck and drive that truck 3,000 miles across the country, and then that food goes into a warehouse that's dark.

and then goes into, you know, the side of, like the produce section of a grocery store, by the time somebody eats that food, it could have been weeks since it's been in the ground. And that is a profound loss of nutrient value. And I don't think most people are aware of that or think about that. And this is, of course, why the local food movement and, you know, shopping at farmer's markets or even growing your own food is so, so another reason that it's so beneficial is that the nutrient levels you're going to get from local food are so much higher than you're going to get from food that's been shipped from across the country or even from some other country,

you know, like basil from Guatemala or something. We have this global food system and there are reasons that we went in that direction, but it's really not serving us in terms of nutrient value. Totally. And I know people are just doing the best they can and at different stages that are there, but these important subjects to talk about because it's not you rush out and you're immediately thinking, okay, I need to grow all my food. Okay, great. If you have the resources, you maybe have the space to do it, fantastic, community gardens. There's a lot of great things that are out there. But with this awareness, you start, you know what, there's a farmer's market nearby me. I've never been in a while. Let me just go and pick up some things that are cheap, maybe even cheaper than the grocery store that are there.

And it's a fun adventure and you take your kids and it's like a good way to get out and you stack all the habits together at the same time. So we're not trying to paint this romantic portrayal of how things should be, but it's more about having awareness about why are we in this mess in the first place. And I want to come back to water because, you know, I've been a big, I think that the water in a lot of places is pretty bad. If you look at EWG, they have a report that they did. And I think that Aaron Brockovich was also part of helping them spread the word with that report. And one of the things that you see is that even the local municipalities, they're testing, even here in Los Angeles, there was like 20 more chemicals that was found in the water than what is being reported by the local

municipalities in their sort of centralized water treatment facilities. So there's a lot of stuff that's in the water and there's a lot of contamination in that last mile and the piping and the aging infrastructure. So I think having a filter is great. And if you do have a reverse osmosis filter, which I do, just, you know, adding back in some minerals and things in the morning when you have your water is an easy fix to making sure that you can still get filtered water, but have it the way you want to. That being said, what do you do for water? You know, just curious. Yeah, we have, we've done a bunch of different things over time. So we had a Berkey filter at one time, which is pretty popular, you know, on top, countertop filter. And then we had a reverse

osmosis filter that adds minerals back in. And that's probably what we've had for most time. I'm trying out a different filter type right now because I'm always doing that sort of thing like you. But yeah, I think for me, just removing the toxins is number one. Because as you said, it's not only a question of just toxins being, you know, not being fully reported. It's that I don't trust the levels of tolerance that the municipalities use. Talk about that for a second. I think that's important. It is.

Yeah. And not just with water. It's kind of important for all exposure. Yeah. So with toxic exposure, historically the study of toxic exposure was limited to what causes acute toxicity. So like mercury poisoning, lead poisoning, cadmium or arsenic poisoning. This one toxin at this level is associated with this very specific thing that we could see short by the way. You're going to end up in the hospital.

You know, you're going to be very sick. you're going to end up and you know, you're going to need medical care. It's going to be obvious. And that really was the history of toxicity study for many, many years. It's only been in the last maybe two to three decades that scientists have been independently looking at low-level toxic exposure. And what they discovered was really surprising. And that is that at low levels, toxins can have paradoxical effects. So, they might even have the opposite effect that they have at a high level. And this is what really confused toxicologists for a while because they expected to just see like a monotonic relationship,

the more the toxin was reduced in terms of exposure, the less effect it would have and it would have the same effects at a lower level. That's not what they found. They found that at lower levels, toxins will have different effects. And sometimes those effects can be as almost as bad as a much higher level. And that's true with like BPA. It can be true with heavy metals, glyphosate, etc. And so a lot of these thresholds at municipalities and other organizations that kind of are testing the water and telling us whether it's okay, the range that they're using for the allowable amount of toxins is based on that old toxin research and not on the new research that's looking at what lower levels of exposure do over time. And then as you alluded to in the question,

how do these toxins interact in the environment? I talked about that in terms of nutrients, how do nutrients interact in our body? But there's, of course, how toxins interact in the environment. And we often find that you take two toxins and you're exposed to them that has an additive effect or they have a synergistic effect where the effect of both of those toxins is greater than the effect of either one of them alone because they combine in ways that are really not good for us. So again, you know, purpose of this isn't to terrify people. I think there are a lot of steps that we can take to help mitigate the impact of chronic

exposure. And fortunately, there's the same steps that we take to mitigate the impact of nutrient deficiency. We get more nutrients because these nutrients protect us against toxic exposure. Totally. If all you do is you get more nutrients and you cut out ultra-processed foods, which are a huge source of toxins for people because of artificial, you know, colors and everything and the compounding effects of all the pesticides. So just let's keep a basic for the people that are listening that are feeling even remotely overwhelmed is that just even cutting out those eating a healthier diet, getting more nutrients. That already you're like light years ahead of most people and you're going to see significant results in your life. So let's go back to this one

other idea that you had shared with me, which is that which nutrients can you get too much of, right? I think that's important this day and age where we all, I'm guilty as included. First, I'm in this industry. I'm always trying different stuff that are there. But like anybody else, I have a big cabinet full of a lot of different supplements that are there. And even though I'm the person in this field that's asking questions, I'm by no means the expert. I'm just proximity to a lot of experts like you out there. I often wonder myself, like, am I getting too much of this particular thing? So are people or is there a risk of getting too much nutrients, especially when people are looking at their diet with supplementation? Yeah, I think with food, it's pretty unusual to

get too much of a nutrient because the body has mechanisms for avoiding that when the intake is through food. So, for example, with iron, Usually, if you eat more iron than you need, you just excrete the remainder. And there is a caveat there where some people who have a genetic condition called hemacromatosis, that leads to excess storage of iron, even when they don't need any more iron and they can get dangerously high iron levels. But that's a genetic issue. It doesn't affect, you know, most people. So usually when you're eating food, you're going to, it's going to be much safer.

the issues start with supplementation typically and you know I want to provide the caveat that nutrient inadequacy is a way way bigger problem so I almost hesitate to talk about this but I think you're right it is a bigger problem now because you have so many people that are supplementing and so many people that are supplementing with unfortunately without maybe the right guidance or fully understanding not you know their own fall but just there is isn't enough guidance on the supplementation process. So one example would be vitamin D. I just mentioned that it's vitamin D deficiency is a way, way bigger problem. And I've had patients come in to my clinic and I've tested their vitamin D and it's 130. And that's a toxic level of vitamin D that can cause

kidney stones and make your arteries stiff and increase the risk of heart disease. It's definitely problematic and I asked them, you know, what's going on? Have you been supplementing with vitamin D? Yeah, they've been taking 50,000 IU per day of vitamin D for like 10 years, you know, which is a dose that was way, way too high. And they never should have been prescribed that dose probably in the first place or they should have been told very explicitly, you know, only do this for a week and then stop and go back to like a more maintenance dose. But that's, that's happened more times than I can count in the last 15 years. Iron, I mentioned is another issue.

And just real quick, before you go to iron, share your thoughts on where you think ideal vitamin D numbers are meant to be in the body. And it might be a little bit nuanced compared to maybe some of the stuff that people are hearing out there. And you written a whole article on the subject that I came across years ago. We'll link to it in the show notes as well. But yeah, can you share a little bit more about that? Yeah, it is nuanced. And most recently I've heard vitamin D scientists, people who have pretty much.

dedicated their entire career to studying vitamin D, advocate for what they call a personal vitamin D range. So this is an attempt to recognize that there are many different individual factors that affect vitamin D absorption and utilization and even demand and need, and that we need to really up our game and get more specific about what an appropriate level of vitamin D is for each different population or group of people. And I'll give you an example. people of African-American descent tend to be more efficient at converting the inactive form of vitamin D to the active form of vitamin D.

So they might not need to have serum vitamin D levels as high as someone of Northern European descent who is less efficient at making that conversion. We know that I mentioned earlier in the show, people with obesity and metabolic issues have problems absorbing vitamin D from food and also. converting sunlight into vitamin D. So they need more vitamin D than somebody who doesn't have those issues. Same for people with chronic disease. Vitamin D production from sunlight depends on so many different factors. Like here we are in Santa Monica. It's sunny and outside.

It's summertime. You could go outside and in 20 minutes probably produce all the vitamin D that you need. But if you're in Stockholm in the winter, you could spend, eight hours outside and you're not going to produce enough vitamin D. So all of those factors combine, I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible. I think for the vast majority of people, a range between 40 and 60 is a good thing to shoot for. That's a range that studies have shown will optimize all of the functions of vitamin D and minimize any downside risks of having too much vitamin D. Now, in terms of how you get there, that's where the variance is pretty high. So some people

don't even need to supplement at all, although that's in a distinct minority, just getting enough sun exposure and eating, you know, cold water fatty fish and pasture raised meats and other foods that have, you know, some amount of vitamin D is enough for them. I'm actually in that category for most of the year. Other people need 10,000 IU per day. I have many patients. that need that just to maintain that range of 40 to 60. So what I recommend generally is people start with maybe 4,000, 2 to 4,000 IU per day and then they test, get themselves tested maybe at the beginning of the fall before they're going into, or in the fall before they're going into the winter,

see what their level is. If it's lower than that, they bump up the dose, especially because they're going into a time of year, typically that is less sunlight, less sun exposure. and then they test again the following spring, see where their levels are, and adjust accordingly. If you don't have access to testing, 5,000 IU per day has been shown in numerous studies to be a safe dose for the vast majority of people and to be effective at reaching those levels for the vast majority of people. So if I were to boil it all down and simplify it to that, that would be my recommendation. And other key nutrients, again, there's probably a whole list,

but specifically with vitamin D, if people are taking vitamin D, I think there's been a little bit of education, but still some people are in the dark about this. You know, you hear about K2. How important is K2? How important is magnesium? What do you want people who have been taking vitamin D, especially because of everything that's happened over the last couple years?

What should they know about taking vitamin D? Yeah, all of the fat soluble vitamins work synergistically together. So that's vitamin A, vitamin K2, and vitamin E are particularly important with vitamin D. K2 regulates calcium metabolism and helps with the, and vitamin D does that as well. So they work together to make sure that calcium gets deposited in the bones and the teeth and the hard tissues where we want it and stays out of the soft tissues. And that's one reason why when vitamin D is so high, it has the opposite effect. Actually, calcium ends up in the soft tissues and causes kidney stones and those other problems

that we mention. magnesium, as we talked about as a co-factor for vitamin D and vitamin D requires magnesium to fulfill all of its functions. So that's very important as well. And then vitamin A, one of its main functions is to reduce the toxicity threshold of vitamin D. So let's say your vitamin D is at 75 and your vitamin A deficient. Well, you might actually experience vitamin D toxicity symptoms at that level because of that vitamin A deficiency. Whereas if you have plenty of vitamin A, even if your vitamin D is 100 or 110, you might be okay because of vitamin A's ability to protect against the toxicity of vitamin D. We talked earlier about organ meat and how that was a regular part of people's diets back in the day.

What about you growing up? Was organ meat a part of your tradition background or did you have to kind of get yourself into it as you started to go further down this education? It was not. I wish it was. I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He said he grew up eating liver, brains, kidney, pancreas. My grandmother, his mother was from the south. And I know there's some people that are like, oh my gosh, like brain like this. But again, you go back far enough, like all these cultures around the world, even here in America. That's right. People were eating the whole animal. That's what my grandmother was preparing. And she was from the south. And that was a big part of her cultural tradition. And, um, And it extended to my dad, but it ended there. He didn't feed us that. But I do remember him ordering liver at restaurants sometimes. You know, when I was growing up, you know, good restaurants would still often have liver on the menu. And I unfortunately did not develop a taste for organ meats.

And I had, you know, still to this day, I struggle with it. I will sometimes eat them and I also supplement with them. but the organ meats are really ounce for ounce the most nutrient-dense foods we can eat. And this has been shown over and over in studies. And even studies that didn't take bioavailability into account, which was a huge shortcoming because one of the reasons organ meats are so beneficial is just how bioavailable the nutrients are in organ meats, which means how able we are to absorb and utilize those nutrients. And that was corrected in a recent study that was just published this year by Ty Biel and Flaminia Ortensi.

They were the first that I'm aware of to actually consider bioavailability in their nutrient analysis. They looked at a whole range of commonly consumed foods, and they quantified nutrient levels according to the most essential vitamins and minerals that we need. And they were coming to this from the perspective of global nutrients, you know, hunger and nutrient deficiency worldwide. Because they were trying to answer the question, if we're going to try to correct this problem worldwide of people suffering from severe malnutrition and nutrient deficiency, how are we going to do that? Like, what are the foods that ounce for ounce are going to have the biggest impact on nutrient status worldwide? Well, what they found was that four out of the seven most nutrient-dense foods were organs. So liver, heart, spleen, and kidney were four of the top seven foods. The other ones were small dried fish, dark leafy greens, and bivalves like oysters.

So you have shellfish, organ meats, and dark leafy greens are the top seven. And they were not even close to other foods. So even muscle meats like steak or ground beef or things that we typically tend to, to eat were orders of magnitude lower than that. And then when you start looking at like beans and whole grains, which are typically touted as, you know, very healthy foods, they're, you know, again, several orders of magnitude lower. So I'm going to do this from memory.

The lower score was better on the scale that they developed. Liver was 11 and whole grains were in the thousands, like 3,000, I think. So we're not talking about small differences. We're talking about huge, huge differences. And when I say nutrient density here, I should define that term. It's basically the concentration of micronutrients, vitamins and minerals and trace minerals, in a given amount of food relative to the calories that that food contains. So if you take a food like flour, you know, wheat flour or sugar, the calories are extremely high.

and the level of nutrients are almost zero. They're almost completely devoid of nutrients. So they were off the charts of this nutrient scale, meaning or meaning they were so low in nutrient value that they didn't even, couldn't even appear on the scale and be on the same graph, basically. Whereas liver is so, it's just almost pure nutrients based on the measurements that they did.

So I think, you know, if we're, interested in optimizing our nutrient density, adding organ meats and shellfish and dark leafy greens back into our diet is one of the best things that we can do. Any tips? You got kids? Any tips with integrating it into their life and world? Yeah. So do it early is the first tip because if they can develop a taste for it early on, it's much less likely that they'll have a problem with it later on. It doesn't seem weird. I mentioned this on a podcast recently, but just down the street from here, in, uh, we're in like the Santa Monica, Los Angeles region, there is a farm to table restaurant. It's called farm shop. And my first introduction to organ meat was a chicken liver moose that they make.

And it's like, if nobody told you what it was, you just be like, wow, this is a great paté that I can add to whatever. You can dip veggies in it, other stuff. And a couple months ago, I took my younger sister there. She was in town with her baby and her husband. And we all had breakfast there. And the chef was like, oh my gosh, like, I want to bring a few things for your baby to try. And he brought over the chicken liver moose and some caviar and other stuff. And my little sister was like, you know, she's in this world. And she actually went to, you know, school for nutrition and everything. She was a little bit like, I'm not sure.

Is it early? Too early? Is it not? And he's like, come on. Like all the, you know, we know now. And her daughter is about like eight months old. It's like we know like the early introduction, a lot of these foods. obviously, I think you've written a book on this topic or have a whole course on it so you can chime in.

Like, they're all safe. They're all safe and it's early enough. It's not like it's raw fish or whatever. And Lila, my niece, she loved it. She loved it. She ate it up. And we were all just chatting about, oh my gosh, imagine if we grew up with some of these super nutrient dense foods and they were just a part of our life, that how much of a different world would have been for us. Absolutely.

Yeah. So our daughter, we fed her paté and like moose. And we would, when we lived in Berkeley, there was a kitchen called Three Stone hearth where you could, they, they would prepare foods on the principles of the Western Price Foundation, which used, you know, really advocated for organ meats. And so we could go buy ground beef from them and it would already have liver chopped up, you know, and then season. And so that's just what our daughter thought ground beef was and tasted like, you know, for the first several years of her life. And then, you know, we started giving her oysters, smoked oysters. You know, you can get smoked oysters in olive oil from whole foods in a little tin, for example. And she loved those.

And so, yeah, like doing that, you know, combining liver with other foods, like in a meat loaf, like you could do meatloaf, grain-free kind of meatloaf with lots. of seasoning so you can do ground beef with like taco seasonings and chop up like just three ounces of liver to a pound or two pounds of beef. There are lots of ways that you can integrate it within your normal diet that's not just like eating plain, you know, sauteed liver. Like that's for most people, it's going to be hard to do that unless they grew up eating it and have already acquired not just a taste, but the texture of organ meats is different from the texture of muscle meats that we're used to eating.

So in where you live in Utah, are you buying these from like local providers or do you use any of the online services if you're going to look for that? Yeah. So in most places now, and, you know, Utah especially, there's so many ranches around. So we get like a box of meat from a local ranch. And then you can just ask to put in the, you know, to include organs. They don't get that request very often. They're happy to do it. like, oh, you must have a dog.

And you're like, nope, it's actually for us. It's for us. We also ask for the bones, you know, so we can make bone broth. But that's one option. A lot of places now have butchers. Like the idea of artisanal craft butchers are coming back in a lot of cities. We had one in the Bay Area. We've got one where we live in Utah now.

And you're going to almost always ask the butcher for the organs as well. And they might even have good suggestions for how to prepare them because they're, you they're more accustomed to that. And then you have companies like U.S. wellness meets and other online, and they sell like Braunschweiger and patte and a bunch of different traditionally prepared types of ready made. Ready made.

You just order it. It comes in a kind of almost like, I'm sure you've seen like it's like a tube of meat. It doesn't sound very appetizing, but it's how traditionally those were made. And then you stick it in your freezer. You can pull it out. You can cut slices of it and put it on different foods.

And so there's so many ways now to actually get it into your diet if you're motivated to do it. We started off the interview by talking about maybe the top three nutrients that are there. Let's expand on that a little bit further. So tease us out and take us down the list of other ones that are in the top ones, whatever it is, the top 10, 15, whatever, that are also key nutrients that we want to be paying attention to. So you talked a lot about vitamin D, magnesium, potassium, right? what are some other ones you want to drill down that you feel like don't get enough attention but are still an important part of us living optimally so uh vitamin k we've touched on k and k2 uh briefly

but um they're not the same you know they're in the same family of course but in the last 40 to 50 years i think uh you know we really discovered that vitamin k2 has different functions than vitamin k1 K1 is mostly about clotting. And K2, as I mentioned, helps to regulate calcium metabolism and ensure that calcium gets into the bones and teeth and stays out of the soft tissues. And not surprisingly, studies have shown that when you don't get enough K2, your risk of heart disease goes up and your risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, you know, bone-related disorders, goes up as well. And there are a lot of studies out of Japan showing that really high doses of K2 can help to even reverse osteoporosis in some cases. So K2 is a bit of a trickier one because it's not in a ton of foods that we eat in the U.S. today with the exception of cheese. So K2 is produced in the process of fermentation.

So hard cheeses tend to be pretty good sources of K2. pasture-raised eggs can be a decent source of K2, fermented foods like sourcrowd or kimchi, which I think more and more people are starting to eat are good sources. Kfir is a pretty good source. And then you have the top source, which almost no one I know eats, is called Nato, which is a fermented soy product that's popular in Japan, but it has a very, very strong flavor that people either. hate or I guess some people love it. I was going to say hate or tolerate, but there are people

who love it. So K2 is one that, you know, you could get enough of if you're eating dairy products and pasture raised eggs and other fermented foods, but if you're not eating those, you probably will need to supplement. Colleen is another really, really important nutrient that in some studies have shown that 100% don't get enough, that the nurse's health data says 92%. It's really important for cellular health because coline is a constituent in cell membranes. And so if you don't get enough chlorine, I mean, pretty much everything in the body is composed of cells. So if you don't get enough chlorine, nothing is going to work optimally, particularly brains and our brain and nervous system. So you can get all kinds of cognitive or

neurological and neurodegenerative issues as a result of of coline deficiency. And guess what one of the biggest sources of chlorine is? Liver. It's, again, not very easy to come by in the diet. So mostly animal foods and organ meats in particular are really good sources of coline. Calcium is a really interesting one.

I want to talk a little bit about calcium and vitamin A. So calcium, as everyone knows, I think now is really important for bones and bone health in particular. It plays a number of other essential roles. One of the biggest issues with calcium is bioavailability. So you mentioned nutrition labels. If you go into Whole Foods and you get like a bag of spinach, you know, in one of the pre-washed bags, and you turn it around, you look at the label, it will say that it has a certain amount of calcium and a certain percentage of RDA,

what that label is not telling you is that you are going to absorb about 5% of the calcium that's listed there from that spinach, which is a big problem, right? Like, it should say that on the label. That's a whole other tangent. But that's because calcium contains oxalic acid or oxalid. Oxalit binds to and inhibits the absorption of calcium.

So even though there's a lot of calcium on paper and spinach, you're going to absorb very little of it. So I've seen studies that suggest you would have to eat about 16 cups of spinach to get the same amount of calcium that you get from one eight-ounce glass of milk because the calcium in milk is something like 30 or 40 percent bioavailable versus 5 percent. So that's a huge difference. And I think a lot of people are not aware of that. So even though the studies say 44% of people don't get enough calcium,

those numbers are not considering bioavailability. And if they did, I suspect that that would be more like 80 or 90% not getting enough bioavailable calcium that their bodies can actually use and absorb. Vitamin A is similar. The studies, the nurses' health data says 43% don't get enough vitamin A, but that groups together retinol, which is the active form of vitamin A that does most of what we want it to do and beta carotene or carotines in general, which are inactive precursor forms of vitamin A. So it's true that the body can convert beta carotines into vitamin A into active vitamin A,

but that conversion is really variable. It can be as low as 5% and as high as 40, 45%. So if you're someone who's on the very low end of that range, you can eat all the carrots and red peppers and beta-carotene-rich foods you want, very little of that is going to get converted into retinol, and you can still have a retinol deficiency. And I see that all the time. Caratosis Polaris, which are the bumps on the back of arm, typically in the upper arm, that's a sign of vitamin A deficiency.

It's a really easy way to see if you might be dealing with that. A lot of, just anecdotally, I'm just showing here, a lot of, because I grew up in the Indian background, Are you Vedic, everything like that, a huge percentage of people are vegetarian. A lot of my friends who are still vegetarian, anecdotally have a lot of those bumps. Not saying that it's only a vegetarian thing. There's other people to have it too, but it's just something that I remembered growing up. That's exactly right. And that's often a consequence of that poor conversion. And this is where nutrient synergy, to tie this all back together, the conversion of the less active forms of vitamins

to the more active forms, whether we're talking about beta carotene into vitamin A, or retinol or vitamin K1 can get converted into K2 or alpha linoletic acid, ALA gets converted into EPA and DHA, which are the long chain omega-3 fats. There are numerous steps in that conversion pathway. All of those steps require various nutrients, you know, vitamins and minerals to be completed. So if you're deficient in any of those nutrients, your conversion of the inactive to the active forms is going to be much worse. So this is where the synergy of nutrients plays a role once again. So this is, you know, coming back to your question about other nutrients, like vitamin A and calcium,

even though statistically we're seeing like, you know, only 40%, which is still nearly half the population are not getting enough. If we took those factors that I just discussed into account, I think those levels would be even higher and, you know, similar levels of vitamin D and, and and chlorine and potassium. I want to talk about vegans and vegetarians for a second because there are people that have chosen that they don't want to eat animal foods for a whole host of different reasons. I was in that camp for many years of my life until I got into the world periphery, not as a practitioner, but just being around so many incredible functional medicine

practitioners like yourself. And I started running a lot of the labs of myself. And not just because I was just curious because I always. also had felt like, hey, I used to feel great in my, you know, 18, 19, 20 when I was vegan, 21. I was, you know, I felt amazing. And then 22, I started to notice a shift. 23, like my brain power is not the same as it was previously. My digestive issues are a little bit more.

I haven't really changed my diet. If in fact, anything, I've kind of cleaned it up a little bit. Like, what is going on? And one of the first test for me that showed up that really sort of opened things up was I did, again, no affiliation. I did an omega-quant test. It's one of my top tests that I recommend for people, especially if they're vegan and vegetarian. It's an at-home test. You can go to this website. It's like a hundred bucks for the complete one. And you can look at your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. And there's so much data on the role of omega-3s in our diet and how they're connected to

cognition and reducing inflammation and reducing depression. I started developing these depressive-like symptoms. I wasn't eating any fish in my diet. And that kind of just opened my eyes. of like, whoa, okay, I need to look into this a little bit more. So I made a shift on my own and, you know, wasn't pushed into it anyway. So what I do know is that if I was talking to my older self and I was just trying to provide education, what education would I provide to them? So typically when people talk about vegan and vegetarian, the things that get the most attention are things like B12.

Like it's like, oh, it's fine, just supplement with B12. but it actually might be a little bit more robust than that. And I'd love to get your take on the situation. Yeah. So this is an issue that has come up a lot in my professional career and also in my personal life. Like you, I was a vegetarian vegan. I was actually a macrobotic vegan and a macrobotic vegan chef apprentice for some

period of time when I first went to school. And did any of that come from more like you interested in like Buddhism or Zen or anything like that because I kind of always felt like those two things kind of went along with each other. I have had a Zen Buddhist practice for many, many years, but for me it actually came out of health challenge that in my early 20s I got really sick and I was looking for ways to recover and improve my health. And of course, along the way, you know, the idea of vegetarian, raw food diet, you know, macrobatic, vegan. So I went through that whole spectrum of choices. had a very similar experience to you where initially felt better and then, you know, in my case

pretty quickly, started to feel a lot worse. And, you know, I want to at least to begin with, tie this to all the themes we've been discussing in the show because I don't come to this with a dogmatic approach. I'm only really interested in what can I do to help people feel better and perform better and live longer. And, you know, it's pretty clear if you look around that there are people who are doing vegan and vegetarian diets who are absolutely thriving, right? You know, Rich Roll is a good example. He's like a longtime vegan is running like centuries and, you know, competing at a very high level.

I think it's clear that that's possible. So I want to start the discussion there because I think anyone who doesn't acknowledge that isn't being fully truthful and at least isn't seeing the whole picture. Right. And the flip side of that is that there's not. the flip side, but a joint, like the right next to it, the parallel path is that there's plenty of people that eat everything and are not thriving. So it's not a question of vegan or vegetarian, but there are some things to pay attention to. But I want to, I have a theory about why it is

that some people can adopt a vegan or vegetarian diet and do well indefinitely, you know, for the rest of their life. And other people can do that and do well for maybe five or 10 years. and then it's a slow, gradual decline. And then still other people adopt that diet approach. And within six months, they're a wreck. And I've seen every part of that spectrum in my clinical practice. I think that the explanation for that is what we've been talking about in terms of conversion of inactive forms of nutrients to active forms of nutrients.

So a vegetarian or exclusively plant-based vegan diet will be very rich in the precursor forms of nutrients, the inactive forms, like really rich in beta carotines, you know, lots of brightly colored fruits and vegetables will be high in beta carotene, but there's almost zero retinol or active vitamin A in a completely plant-based diet. You mentioned your history with omega-3 fats. Well, DHA and EPA are exclusively found in animal foods. And it is true that some alpha-linolinic acid, ALA, which is found in in foods like flax or walnuts can be converted into EPA and DHA, that conversion is also highly variable and in some people is lower than than one half of one percent. So you'd have to be like guzzling flax soil if you're in that camp to get enough EPA and

DHA for your body to function well. And some scientists have as a side note even argued that we should consider EPA and DHA to be essential for that reason, meaning like we have to get that preformed in the diet or supplement with it. Vitamin K is another example. There's so many examples. And I think that's what probably explains why some people can adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet and do pretty well.

They're pretty efficient converters of those inactive forms to the active forms. And they're probably doing it really well. like they're paying attention to what nutrients they're getting. They know that they need to get B12 from a supplement. So they are supplementing with B12 and they're doing all the right stuff. My experience has shown me as a clinician and through my research that for the average person, that dietary approach makes it harder to achieve optimal nutrient status. Is it possible?

Yes, especially if you're a good converter. is it as easy to do as it is with an omnivorous nutrient-dense diet? No, no way. And there are certain nutrients, as you pointed out, B-12 being probably the best example that you pretty much have to supplement with because there are no sources of true B-12 in a purely plant-based diet. There are, you know, some advocates of plant-based diets have argued that things like spirulina contain B12, they don't. They contain cobamides, which are analogs of B12 and are not actually, they can actually block the uptake and utilization of true B12. So most of the people that I know who are seriously pursuing a, you know, a plant-based diet are supplementing with methylcobalmen,

which is a very active form of B12, and they're making up for the shortfall that way. But there's just a lot of misinformation out there about these topics. And unfortunately, As you know, it's very polarized, right? It's almost like having a religious discussion in some cases. And so I think the average person is a victim of that because they just want the facts or the information, but instead they get vitriol and, you know, really heated debates on both sides. Yeah. And even people who have the facts now, well intention, things are switching so quickly with the research that comes. But with that being said, there are foundational things that we understand.

There's foundational things that we understand that play. a pivotal role in understanding that food is very important, you know, conversions don't happen at the same levels. And we have to make sure because of the three things that you started off at the beginning of the interview, toxins in our, you know, soil toxins are soil quality, chronic disease, other stuff that we make an effort. You know, I just think about like sometimes people say that it's crazy. You have to like think about food so much these days and you have to do all these things. I'm like, well, back in the day, our entire lives revolved around. foods. Back in the day, our entire lives and seasons and entire cultures would have their calendar

year around the harvest. And so much was way more attention and energy because that was our survival. There was no supermarket to fall back on. We're lucky in this world that at least we don't have to be making the food and going out and hunting it. And so yes, there's more information and it's confusing, but we definitely spend less of our day sort of working towards providing food for ourselves that's actually going to enrich us and help us stay healthy. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, I think that cuts both ways, right? When you have that level of intimacy with food production, I think it's easier to understand the benefits of eating whole nutrient-dense food. It's right there in front of you. You know where it comes from. You know where it comes from.

you know what it took to grow it and where those nutrients are sourced from. Whereas like when you just walk into a grocery store, even now, people don't tend to even do that, right? It's like this ship to the door, you know, it shows up on your doorstep because you place an order in the app. When we're that removed from the production and even distribution of food, I think we have far less of an understanding of its value in our life. on the other hand I agree with you where like look our ancestors were not binging Netflix at night

like they were you know anyone who's been close to a farming lifestyle knows what what incredible amount of work that is gone until bedtime basically it's one of the hardest jobs you can have and and we're blessed that you know we can benefit from the work of farmers who are still doing that hard work and not be doing it ourselves we can be sit here and record a podcast, you know, instead of doing that. So yeah, I think it is somewhat a question of expectations. And I don't think it's a bad thing to set the expectation that we should pay attention, more attention to what we're eating all the way down to growing. Even if you only have a little, you live in New York City and you only have a little window, you can still put a

little herb box there and grow a little bit of fresh herbs. And a lot of people are surprised by how much that enriches their life, just to be able to walk a few steps over to that herb box, pick some fresh basal or rosemary or something like that before the meal. And it can just help us kind of remember who we are and stay grounded and connected to this planet. That is the, as far as we know, the only home that we've got, at least until Elon Musk gets us to Mars. That's a whole other discussion. Let's switch topics and talk about phytonutrients. Help people understand why they're either not paying enough attention to it and then also

any kind of navigation that we have to think when it comes to phytonutrients. So why are they important? So phytonutrients are nutrients, phyto is plant. And so they're basically plant nutrients. And I have always advocated that the optimal human diet is something. combination of both animal and plant nutrients. Now, that could be a huge difference. If you look at traditional cultures around the world, you see some cultures that consumed almost all animal foods, but they would go out of their way to get that small amount of plant food that they ate.

Conversely, you would see the opposite, where, you know, some cultures would eat almost all of their calories from plant foods, but they would go to great lengths to get the highly prized animal foods because they knew, not through, you know, scientific analysis, but through hard one experience that those animal foods were essential to their health. They contained, you know, something about them. They didn't know what was really important for their health and well-being. And likewise, I think most human beings that are alive today do best with some combination of plant and animal foods. The reason for that is that there are different nutrients in animal foods and plant foods.

And there are some nutrients that are exclusively found in plant foods, flavanoids, carotines, beta-glucin, et cetera, you know, fiber, different types of fibers that we know nourish and feed our gut bacteria. Those are primarily or exclusively found in plant foods. And then you have foods like or nutrients like, or nutrients like, B-12 that we just talked about, heem iron, bio-available forms of zinc, EPA and DHA, the long-chain omega-3 fats, coline. I mean, coline is found in other plant foods, but, you know, highest sources in certain animal foods. Those nutrients we can either exclusively get from animal foods or

preferentially get them because they're much more bioavailable and absorbable. For that reason, I think a combination of animal and plant foods is best. Now, throughout the podcast, we've been talking about essential nutrients. Those are vitamins and minerals. And the term essential has a specific meaning here, which is that it's not just really important, although they are really important. It's that the body cannot manufacture them on its own, and we need to obtain them from the diet, and we can't live without them.

A lot of these phytonutrients, we can live without them. You could go your whole lifetime without eating a phytonutrient, and you could still be a lot, you know, you could live. You might not live. I don't think you'll live as long and as healthy of a life. There's some controversy about this. The carnivore advocates would argue vehemently with me on this. But I think most of the data suggests that, you know, phytonutrients tremendously benefit our health.

And if we only just talk about fiber, that's a good starting place because fiber doesn't nourish us in any way. Like, we don't even digest or absorb fiber. It doesn't do anything for human nutrition. What it does is it feeds the beneficial bacteria and microbes in our gut. And we know that they then have tremendous benefits for human health. And so all different types of fiber, resistant starch, non-starch polysaccharides, soluble fiber, beta glucin, which is a fiber that is highly prevalent in mushrooms is just like a hot, hot topic in the scientific literature, because it's been shown that beta glucain, which is a unique type of soluble fiber, has profound immune benefits.

Anti-cancer fighting properties helps us to fight off infections, viral, bacterial, fungal infections. It stimulates the growth of good bacteria and inhibits the growth of bad bacteria. it's almost kind of like this miraculous substance, and we hardly even knew about it until, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. And now you've got like hundreds or thousands of studies on turkey tail and rashi and lions mane mushrooms, which are all, you know, almost, you know, between like 40 and 60 percent beta glucon by weight. So it's exciting to see the new research showing how these phytonutrients, while they may not be essential in the sense,

that we literally can't survive without them. They are, I think, extremely important to our health and well-being. Yeah, it's great to see so much attention being placed on them and how a lot of people are arguing that actually if we're thinking, like you mentioned, if we're thinking optimally, they are essential. Yeah. They are essential for our lives. What are some of the phyton nutrients that, in addition to beta-glucin,

that, you know, from the literature that's out there, remember many years ago talking to Deanna Minick, who's a PhD in the world of functional medicine and nutrition and everything like that. And she was saying that a lot of the research that she was coming across was talking about how diversity of phytonutrients is an important part of, I don't know if she was referencing to gut microbiome. She probably was. But anything else that you've seen that you know, you want to add in with phytonutrients when people think about regularly including it on our diet? Yeah. So I think, you know, flavonoids, crotenoids, lignans are important.

if we just talk about it in terms of foods, which is what most people are thinking about. Catechans, would that be in that category as well? Yeah, catechins would be in there. All the different types of fiber that we talked about. You've got a whole range of polysaccharides that are in things like seaweed. These foods, I think, I mean, there is some of the tried and true dietary advice that's still very good, which is like eating the rainbow. I think I grew up hearing that phrase maybe in my late teens or 20s or something like. But the reason that that's good advice is all of these phytonutrients are they produce pigments that are different colors.

And so if you eat things that are bright green and bright yellow and orange and red and, you know, all of the different colors that you're going to see in plant foods, you're going to actually end up getting a pretty broad range of these different types of phytonutrients. you can even see it with eggs. Like if you buy pasture raise eggs, you might see that the color of the egg yolk changes over time. It could be really yellow at certain times a year. It could be dark orange at certain types of year. That's because the chickens are eating different types of plant foods at different types of year.

And those different nutrients actually affect the color of the yolk. So that's like a really good example of how this plays out in real life. So, you know, just eating dark leafy greens, like we mentioned, fruits and vegetables, sea vegetables have some unique nutrients that are harder to find and other types of plant foods. Fermented and pickled, naturally pickled fermented vegetables are really important because the fermentation process actually releases a lot of the nutrients and makes them more bioavailable in addition to producing probiotic compounds that are going to benefit our gut. I think we don't, you know, I don't like people to have to overthink that side of things.

I think with the plant foods in particular, just eating the broadest kind of variety that you can and including fermented foods in there is will get you most of the way there. Are there any foods that are out there that have, you know, good documentation or evidence for being helpful for something? or helpful properties, but that it, for whatever reason, does not work for you personally, like Chris Cressor as a human being, an individual. Are there foods that don't work for you, but that they work for a lot of people that are out there? And this kind of leads into this whole area of just briefly that we could touch on of personalization

and experimentation. Yeah, I don't do very well with beans and legumes. And I don't think that they're super nutrient dense for humans. As I mentioned, you know, on the nutrient density scale, they're pretty far down there in terms of the amount of vitamins and minerals, essential compounds that you would absorb. But they're very high in fiber and insoluble fiber, which can benefit our gut. And for that reason, I think as long as someone does tolerate them, including them in moderate amounts in the diet is perfectly fine. I'm not a purist, you know, a paleo purist that says you should never eat beans or legumes. I think

they can be, you know, very beneficial addition to the diet. But I just don't. don't tolerate them very well. I don't digest them well. I don't feel good when I eat them. And so I don't, you know, other than occasionally lentils and Mengdaal, actually, you know, I've spent some time in meditation retreats where, in fact, one, I did a 30-day sit in Thailand where all we ate was Mengdaal and rice. So I have kind of a, you know, a good memory and association with that somehow from that experience. And I can tolerate those just fine. Let's see. What else?

I said, I mentioned organ, I'm well aware of the beneficial properties of organ meats and I do my best to incorporate them into my diet, but I'm not always successful. So those are probably the two examples that come to mine most. Yeah. Yeah.

For me, it's still, I have an issue with nightshades. I still have an issue with night shades. When I have a lot of, like if I have a tomato, soup or if I have like we go out to a Mediterranean restaurant there's a bunch that are here in LA great ones and they'll do like a Baba Ginoosh right like I can eat the meat of the eggplant but like eating the skin and other things like that I get like this redness that starts up on my

cheeks one time I had a whole bowl of soup and I hadn't had one in a while tomato soup and my sister looked at me and she's like your whole face is just like red and I was like yeah so that's still one of those things, even with all the gut repair, other stuff, not that I miss them a ton, but a tomato here or there doesn't make a huge difference. It's just that if I eat them on a regular basis, I get a little bit stuffy, redness in my face. For anybody who's listening, is like, wait, what? Like, how could that happen to somebody? What's going on do you think in the body? Yeah, I, you know, I think that in a lot of cases, we develop a sensitivity, some kind of, sometimes it could be autoimmune or just immune related. I won't say autoimmune in the sense

that it's necessarily attacking tissue, but we develop a sensitivity to something, and the body remembers that over time. So the immune system is amazing in that it has a very long memory. And this benefits us tremendously when we talk about infection. So if we are exposed to some kind of pathogen as a child, we develop immunity or resistance to it, we might not be exposed to that for 30 or 40 years. And then we get exposed to it again. The cellular memory of the body kicks in and we still have immunity to that infection. That's phenomenal. It's an incredible aspect of our human immune system.

The downside of that is I think it can work in reverse. If we develop a sensitivity to something that's really benign, you know, on the surface, doesn't, it's not, you know, threatening to us in any way like eggplant or tomatoes or nuts or seeds or something like that, then in some cases, even after we do all the things, to heal, you know, improve our gut health, you know, clean up our diet, et cetera, that a lingering sensitivity can remain. And I, you know, frankly, I don't think we fully understand why that is. And I've seen that in hundreds of cases now of patients that I've worked with. People like yourself who are very healthy and well in every aspect, except this one sensitivity

or a few sensitivities just doesn't fully resolve. And personally, I, my approach at this point is to not worry about that too much. You know, you can really beat your head against a wall trying to, you know, having this idea that I shouldn't have any sensitivities. And if I do, it really means there's still something wrong. And I've got to like pull out all the stops and like spent all of my waking moments focusing on getting rid of those last few sensitivities. Okay, if that's really what makes you happy, maybe. But for most people, it's a law of diminishing returns. And if you're well and you're living a good life and you're able to do all the activities that you want to do and your brain is firing on all cylinders and you can't eat

nightshades and tomatoes, my advice to you would be enjoy the rest of the foods that you can eat. A hundred percent because there's so many people that have not just that, I mean, but really that is a big part of it. There's so many people that have so many more issues that actually prevent them from even functioning. And they don't even know what it is and not even that it's something that they're eating. The food can play a role, but there's chronic infections, there's ticks, lime, all this stuff like that that people are dealing with in this day and age. And so, yeah, I'm definitely in that camp.

I don't think about it too much, but it's just one of those things that's there. I would just want one more thing to add on that. Yeah, please. We've never lived, human beings have never been in a situation where we can eat all kinds of foods from everywhere. Generally, like, if you grew up in a village in India, you would just be eating the foods that were native and local to your region. You wouldn't be eating, you know, Brazilian food or Chinese food or African, you know, cuisine. And so I think there might just be something to that, like where human bodies are sort of naturally wired for a certain range of foods.

and to expect even that we can eat every possible food on the planet and just tolerate it perfectly. I'm not sure that that's a safe assumption to even make. In fact, sometimes you think about that. You're wondering why there aren't even more sick people. It just shows you the testament of how strong the human body is that can handle all this shit, all the toxins we throw in, all the negative news that's out there in the world too. And yet still we're functioning. Sometimes you turn on the news and you feel barely.

but you know that's a whole other conversation. I want to talk about supplementation in a second and I remember a few years ago I thinking like whenever I've shared this story in the podcast before, whenever I would want to look up a subject and see okay, what's the deal with it? What's like the layers and stuff?

Whatever subject I was typing in, I just type in that subject and I put Chris Cressor at the end of it because I always know that you have these deep and rich blogs where you're going to walk me through and you're going to share things that even are a little bit different than what a lot of people

maybe in the functional medicine space. have because you're going to support it with data. I mentioned two instances of that. One was vitamin D. There was a little bit of approach. I would say it's turning. The tides have turned in the last couple of years. But about 10 years ago, the sort of tone was more is better, right? More is better with vitamin D. And people were having a lot of high vitamin D numbers. Another one was dairy. You wrote some very pivotal articles that were very early in the conversation of dairy and saying how a lot of the stats that people use to debunk dairy, not that commercial dairy is a health food for people, but a lot of the stats that people use to debunk dairy may not have the total

merit that they're placing on them. And it could be a little bit more of a nuanced conversation and that things like fermented dairy and cleaner sources of dairy or like some of these hard cheeses like goats and sheep cheese could actually be part of a healthy diet and actually help us with some of the things in our goals in our life. So I always appreciated that. I remember thinking like if the more I could like outsource to Chris to just sort of like, okay, I am in this field. I do a podcast.

If I could like turn to Chris say like, like, okay, look, I know you know this stuff. Like help me, you know, show me the evidence. I always want to see the homework that's there. But just kind of like figure it out for me. And you've done that in the category of supplementation. We're going to chat about that in a second. But before we go into that, I want to bring up one more topic, which is, you know, we talked a lot about nutrients.

We talked a lot about food. We're going to talk about supplementation. We talked a little about supplementation. But there's a lot of different forms of nutrients in our life that are not just things that we put into our body. For Chris Cressor, as a balanced human being, as a father, as a husband, other things, what are some of the key things that you think of as nutrients, even though most people don't think of them, that make you who you are today, a grounded, loving, caring,

person. So yeah, what are those top couple things? Just give me a couple that you really see as nutrients and you're going to get that dose on a regular basis. And it's like in your calendar or you've really organized your life around making sure that you get it. Yeah. First would be nature and outdoor activity. So I moved to Utah for primarily that reason. And now I spend a good chunk of time, you know, every day outside in the winter. I'm typically skiing, downhill skiing or backcountry skiing in the spring, summer, and fall. I might be mountain biking or hiking, backpacking, camping, kayaking, stand-up paddleboarding, wake surfing, just as much time as I can get outside, but particularly for me moving my body outside. So movement has always been important.

important to me. And if I don't have access to the outdoors, yes, I will go to the gym reluctantly. But if I can, I like to be outside, in the sunshine, moving, and doing something fun. So I feel like that's ticking a lot of different boxes and maybe cheating a little bit and combining, because I would consider all of those to be nutrients separately. But doing outdoor fun activities is just a staple in my life. It's a big part of who I am. It's every time we travel, that's involved. You know, some of the peak experiences of my life have involved, you know, have all involved being outside and in nature and moving.

So that's a big one. The second one is joy. I think joy and pleasure and fun are really underrated in our culture. and I think a lot of people are dealing with joy and pleasure deficiency. And that might seem weird to say, like when I say that to some people, they say, what are you talking about? Our culture is like totally just hedonistically devoted to joy and pleasure. I don't think that's true.

I think our culture is devoted to distraction. That's a very different experience than true joy and pleasure. Joy and pleasure are embodied experiences where we're fully present, we're fully in our bodies. We're experiencing the pleasure of being in our bodies. And oftentimes it's in connection, not always, but it's in connection with another human being or with nature. You know, for me, it might be with my wife, with our daughter, you know, whereas distraction

is like, and there's nothing wrong with just, I'm not saying distraction doesn't play a role, doesn't have a place, but, you know, if I'm scrolling through a feed on my phone or I'm I'm binging Netflix or I'm doing something like that, that can often be a form of distraction and not so much like real pleasure and joy. And so I have come to develop an appreciation just from my own experience and also from research that I've done over the past couple decades of just how important joy and pleasure are to our health. I really think they're part of our human birthright. And we know like endorphins, for example, get released when we experience. It means joy and pleasure.

And I only recently learned this in the last five years, I think. Almost every white blood cell in the body has receptors for endorphins. So if we wonder why things like about the research that shows that music and, you know, watching funny movies like Patch Adam, you know, the whole story of Patch Adams and laughter, all of these things benefit the immune system. Now we know why. Immune system has receptors for these compounds. And so that, to me, tells us that we are hardwired.

to experience pleasure and joy. And if we really want to be healthy and optimize our health, we have to actually integrate that, incorporate that into our lives. And I think it's hard now for people to do that in this really busy, fast-paced world we live in. I love all three of those. Those are beautiful.

All right, let's talk about adapt naturals. Tell us about what it is and why you created it. Yeah, so, you know, my, Drew, I think you know this about me. Like early in my career, my idea, realism was that we should be able to meet all our nutrient needs through food. That was where I started. And I knew even early on that like, okay, with vitamin D, magnesium, a couple others, we probably, that probably wasn't realistic. But I just, I feel like we're adapted to get nutrients from food.

And that's the best way to get them. And I still feel that way. Like, I still feel like the foundation of any nutrient strategy needs to be a whole food's nutrient. and dense diet because you can and you absolutely cannot supplement yourself out of a bad diet. I'm not one of these people who believes we can have like soy and green and we should just be able to drink our food out of a tube and not worry about eating food. No, I think food is like joy and pleasure like I mentioned is integral to our experience as human beings. But what changed for me is 15 years of treating patients and testing every patient that walked through the door for nutrient levels and finding maybe 10 people in that entire 15-year career that had fully adequate

levels of all nutrients. I'm not exaggerating. And just for a quick question, what test, so if people are going to go see a doctor or they're looking at it up themselves, what tests were you typically using when you're looking at nutrient levels? Yeah, that's probably another two-hour podcast. I wish it wasn't. I wish there was one test I could have ordered for all patients. But as I think I mentioned this earlier, but different nutrients show up in different tissues. So for some nutrients, you need to do hair to get the long-term status. For other nutrients, a 24-hour urine analysis is better option. For some, you need to measure the blood.

For some, you can get it in bucle swabs like magnesium. The best way to actually measure intracellular magnesium is to take a little bit of tissue from inside the cheek and send that off to a lab. So it's complicated. We're going to bring you back for a part two to. I mean, I did test, like this, you know, as you pointed out, I was often working with people who were really sick and we really wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on. And these people were highly motivated. We're not talking about the average person off the street who came to see me in the practice.

These folks were paying a lot of attention to their nutrient levels and they were still low. So that was like clue number one for me was, uh-oh, even people who are really paying a lot of attention to this are not getting and eating really good diets are not getting enough nutrients. Clue number two was the, you know, nearly two decades of research that I've done on all of these topics that we've been talking about in the show and adding, putting together all of the dots where like, oh, the RDA was never actually developed for health. And oh, wait, the RDA was not, has not been updated for 25 or 30 years, even though body weight has increased by 30 pounds during that period. Oh, wait, RDA doesn't consider nutrient

synergy. RDA doesn't consider health status and the fact that people have health conditions that increase demand for nutrients and, you know, all of these factors and I'm just like, like all the lights starting to go off. Like we are dealing with this epidemic of nutrient deficiency and as much in my heart of hearts as I would like to be able to solve that 100% with food, I just no longer think that's possible. So Adapt naturals was the natural evolution or result of all of those realizations, and I wanted to create a way that people could close the nutrient gap, not replace nutrients from food, but build on a solid approach, you know, nutrient dense whole foods diet and add the nutrients back in that the modern world has crowded out so that people can

feel and perform their best. And that's why I created adapt naturals and our first line of supplements, which is called the Core Plus bundle. It's a daily stack of five products. not surprisingly contains all the nutrients that we've been talking about here in the most bioavailable, highly absorbable forms in just a super easy way to take them so that people can not have to worry about it and think about it and just set it and forget it. I love it. And one of the things that I often see is that people want to, again, on top of a base of a good diet, they want to take the right supplementation. And they're piecemealing a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of little bit here and there. And you just kind of forget. You forget to include this one. You end up with

a lot of bottles. So the fact that you've kind of put them all together is very exciting for me because I'm excited to dive into myself and just say, great, these are the ones that are here. In addition to maybe some other ones that I might take for me specifically. And it's like, cool, here's your go-to. Here's your five that are there. What are your hopes in terms of how you want people to be interacting with this? Is this something that they take every month? And do they ever take breaks from these, like sometimes in the past, people would say, like, okay, great, every so often take a break from supplementation, you know, even if it's a good thing. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it will depend on the person. I mean, I design these to be something

that could be taken long term and think about it as just providing the nutrient foundation that we need for optimal health. As you pointed out, some people will need to take additional thing. Like maybe somebody is dealing with gut issues, and so they need to take a very gut-specific you know, supplement or they're dealing with, you know, another particular health issue that requires a specific approach. I purposely designed these to be helpful no matter where people are starting from. So if somebody is doing pretty well, like you mentioned this hypothetical person before who doesn't have like a serious chronic illness or anything like that, but they just aren't, their energy is lower, they're not sleeping as well. You know, maybe their blood sugar starts.

to creep up a little bit or their mental clarity isn't as great. So, you know, a lot of those issues are nutrient issues, as we've talked about. So it's designed for that person. At the same time, I wanted it to be something that people who do have chronic health conditions can safely take. So we designed the level, the doses and the interaction between all of the nutrients in a way that would be, you know, tolerable for most people with most conditions. Now, of course, if someone has a specific issue. They should always talk to their doctor. But we wanted these to be really versatile in that way. And in terms of breaks, for me, mostly I think about breaks with botanical products. So like herbs and, you know, specific form, not even all herbs, but some herbs that I think over time we can

develop tolerance to or we, you know, it's just better to kind of pulse them. them. Most of the, these products are are mostly nutrients. You know, we don't have a lot of botanicals or things in there that need a break from, that you need a break from. So I really did design these to be kind of the daily stack that you just set and forget. Do you take them all in the morning or do you sort of space them out throughout the day? It's best to space them out. We have a guide for how to take them. But there are certain nutrients that we want to kind of maintain consistent blood levels of throughout the day. Full 8 is a good example of that. B12 is an example of that. And then, you know, most people just tend to feel better when they get that more steady level

throughout the day. So that's twice a day. Twice a day. Morning, you know, if you eat breakfast, take them with breakfast, and then dinner, take them with dinner. Pretty simple. Amazing. Well, I'm excited that by the time this podcast will be out there, the company have been launched. And the website is again, adapt naturals. I love it. We'll link to it in the show notes and definitely please everyone check it out if you're looking for that solution in your life, which I know a lot of people are. Chris, just end us off with just some concluding thoughts to kind of package all this stuff

together. You know, sometimes when we are in this space of health and the more we investigate, we are always walking a fine line of being enough education and enough awareness to help people understand and not sugarcoat the fact that there's a problem out there and constantly pulling back from people, pulling people back from like, hey, look, don't go into fear mongering. Like, there's solvable solutions. And by the way, if you make these changes, you know, your life can significantly improve, right? That's one way I see it. Add a little bit more to that or take it any direction that you want to as you can include us out. Yeah, I think that's really

important. I would say that over time, I've become, through the course of my career, you know, I started out just treating patients. That's all I did. And then I started training doctors and other practitioners in functional medicine because I saw the need to, you know, expand the number of people who were able to do that or such a high demand and need for it. Then I started training health coaches. And through that whole, I mean, I'm really proud of what we were able to accomplish in all of those areas. And the reason that I'm returning my focus now here is that I'm from the beginning, the reason I got into this is just to help people to live their best life. And I I, it's remarkable to me that in all my medical training, everything that I've done,

I never came across a definition of health. There's all kinds of definitions of disease and drugs you've prescribed for diseases and other, you know, ways of thinking about disease, but I never actually saw a definition of health. And the one that comes closest for me was from Moshe Feldencrice, who is the founder of the Felden Christ method, which is a kind of somatic education. method, he said true health is the ability to live your dreams. And that just like really, really resonates with me. And I want, that's my wish for these supplements is that they

will do that, that they can be a way for people to improve their health to a level, not to where they don't have to think about it, but where it's not the consuming thing in their lives. Like, I've had a lot of patients over the years who understandably, because they were so sick, just spend almost every waking minute thinking about their health in some way. And it actually distracts from the things that they really want to do in their life. And so like you said, I want to help people to just like thrive and flourish in this crazy modern world that we're living in now. And the reality is that we need support to do that, that we didn't need 50 years ago or 100 years ago or especially 2,000 years ago. And that's where these supplements come in for me.

Beautiful. Well, thank you for being part of that support for everybody. You're a high integrity dude. Everything you put out is always fantastic. Can't wait to jump into Adapt naturals myself. And I appreciate you coming back on the podcast. Just your website and a few other places where people can keep in touch with you. Yeah, Chris Cresser.com is my main website.

And my podcast is Revolution Health Radio. I think I'm one of the OG podcasters, been doing it since 2008. So it's one of the funnest things that I do, as you know. And then Cressorinstitute.com is for the practitioner training program for medical professionals. Awesome. We'll have all those links in the show notes and more. Chris, thank you for dropping into L.A. and coming on the podcast.

Really appreciate it. Drew, it's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show, and I love our conversations.