Digital Social Hour - The Hidden Dangers of Your Daily Diet: Doctor Explains All I Darshan Shah DSH #487

Starting point is 00:00:00 So you're saying it's actually cheaper to live healthy? These people are going out to restaurants five days a week, right? Okay. In a restaurant, when you go out to a restaurant, most people, you know, by the time you get dinner nowadays, it's 20 or 30 bucks plus a tip, right? You can literally spend that same amount for your entire day of food. Now you can get good, healthy, nutritious food for the same amount of money as going out to a restaurant every day.

Starting point is 00:00:22 Interesting. Absolutely. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys, we got our Darshan Shah here today. We're going to talk health. Thanks for coming, man. Good to be here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Thanks for having me. You're looking great, man. Thank you. I've been working on it for eight years now. Yeah. And you're opening up a bunch of centers, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:52 We're going to spread the word of health optimization, longevity all over the United States and the world. Love it. Yeah. You're changing the narrative to become more preventative, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That's, I think, you know, people think of medicine, we were talking about this a little

Starting point is 00:01:04 bit earlier, that it's supposed to help you throughout your whole life. But Western medicine is really meant to start helping you when you're in a diseased state. The 20 or 30 years before that, though, you're developing these problems. And that's what we focus on in Next Health. Right. And this is personal for you. You had a major health incident, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career. I'm a doctor. I started my career in Western medicine doing surgery. And what happened was I was operating 12, 14 hours a day and I was running the business of surgery, which is another, you know, five, six hours a day. So I wasn't sleeping. I was eating whatever, you know, stuff was just put out there in the nurse's lounge, like donuts and chips. I was stressed out of course. And so that combo is a deadly combo.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Same combo of problems that most Americans face now. And I got 50 pounds overweight. But worse than that was I was high blood pressure medications, three of them, and they couldn't get my blood pressure down. I was developing an autoimmune disease where it was actually eating away the skin of my scalp and my skull. Wow. And I was really sick and I couldn't sleep. I had sleep apnea. That was a disaster.

Starting point is 00:02:08 Holy crap. Were you able to fix all that? So what happened was, yes. I mean, the short answer is yes. But the long answer is being a Western medicine trained physician, all I knew was how to add more medicine to my big pile of medicine. Right. And none of that was working. And I was like, there has to be a better way.

Starting point is 00:02:24 So I quit my job basically. I took a year off to just learn how the science of health, which I didn't learn in medical school. And so that meant I'd become a nutrition expert. I got certified in nutrition, certified personal trainer. And I learned about root cause medicine, functional medicine, which basically tells you that all these diseases come from just a few root causes. And if you can fix those, everything will go away. And I did all that on myself. Like as I was learning, I did everything I was learning about on myself and I got healthy in like eight months. And so yeah, eight months, lost all the weight, got off all my medication. The doctors are like, my rheumatologist, like it's a miracle. We've never seen this autoimmune disease go away.

Starting point is 00:03:06 You're the first person that is undetectable in your blood. And I did that by focusing on the root causes of why this is happening in the first place. Let's talk about some of these causes because autoimmune disease are getting more and more common, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think autoimmune disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, they all come from the same place. And that's basically metabolic disease. Okay. And so what happens is metabolic disease, mitochondrial dysfunction, and gut disease and hormone dysregulation. These are all

Starting point is 00:03:40 things that we create by living the lifestyle that we lead. These are things that are just supposed to happen to us as we get older. A lot of people think, ah, this is going to happen as you get older. You might get diabetes. You're going to die of a heart attack. It just happens as you get older. But no, these things are created by our lifestyle. And so if you know what you're doing in your lifestyle that's causing you to have these problems in the first place at a root cause, you can just stop doing those things and you get healthy. And it's really pretty simple. And I did that to myself and it worked. Interesting. Is it true the stuff you do today can affect you getting Alzheimer's 30 years in the future? Absolutely. Alzheimer's develops, actually, it starts developing in your 20s and

Starting point is 00:04:17 your 30s. Wow. Yeah. Heart disease, your first heart attack is going to be maybe in your 50s, you know, 60s. it starts developing also in your 20s and your 30s, heart disease. If you look at the blood vessels of 20-year-old people that die in like car accidents, they already start having plaque or heart disease in them. So all this stuff actually starts in your 20s. So you got to start early. But the other key to this is, is never too late to start either, right? So even if you're 40, 50, 60 years old, you can turn things around pretty quickly because your body naturally wants to be in a state of health. It does not want to be sick. Speaking of turning it around, there's this new trend of reverse aging.

Starting point is 00:04:57 So people like Brian Johnson and Dave Asprey are aging 0.7 for every one now. What do you think about that? I think they have a great message to spread that you can affect your health. These kind of aging calculators, they're good kind of scorecards in my mind of how much all of the sum total of all your habits around diet, sleep, exercise, gut health, all that's kind of coming together to really slow your cellular aging. So I think there's some good value there. But remember, Dave Asprey is one person. Brian Johnson is one person.

Starting point is 00:05:28 You, for your one person, you need to figure out what's going to work for you. So just because they're going kind of and doing everything doesn't mean everything's going to work for you. You just got to find the things that are going to work for you. The other key here is a Pareto principle. You know what that is? No.

Starting point is 00:05:42 All right, it's a really important principle to live your life by. There's 20% of the information that's going to move the needle 80% in every aspect of life. It's so true for your health. There's 20% of the information out there that'll make all the difference. If you don't do that 20% first, I don't care what supplements you're taking or gene therapies or stem cells you're doing. If you don't have that 20% right, none of that other stuff is going to work. You got to get that part right for yourself first. And to know that 20%, that's through tests, right? Yes, exactly. So we do a lot of biomarker testing, blood testing. We do genetic testing. We do tests like full body MRIs. And we really get a really good feeling of what's going on

Starting point is 00:06:19 under the hood of your biology. And then we could tell you, okay, here are the top five, six things that you need to do in your diet, in your sleep, in then we could tell you, okay, here are the top five, six things that you need to do in your diet, in your sleep, in your exercise, in your gut health to really move the needle. Do those things first, and then we can go down the rabbit hole of all this longevity stuff. Do you think you need a lot of money to live a really healthy life these days? You need zero extra dollars compared to the general population. In fact, it's cheaper to live a healthier life these days than it is to not.

Starting point is 00:06:46 Really? Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. But people think about fast food and how cheap it is. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below

Starting point is 00:06:56 in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys. So you're saying it's actually cheaper to live healthy? Okay, so most people, most of my patients, I ask them, like, what's your diet consist of when they're sick?

Starting point is 00:07:13 These people are going out to restaurants five days a week, right? Okay, in a restaurant, when you go out to a restaurant, most people, you know, by the time you get dinner nowadays, it's $20 or $30 plus a tip, right? You can literally spend that same amount for your entire day of food. Now you can get good, healthy, nutritious food for the same amount of money as going out to a restaurant every day. Interesting. Absolutely. You just got to know what to look for and you got to know where your food is coming from. So it's really just shopping in the right places. Now, look, there are certain food deserts

Starting point is 00:07:42 in the country where unfortunately just, you know, are certain food deserts in the country where, unfortunately, just all you can get is a supermarket, cheap supermarket food, and that needs to be fixed. But I could tell you that for most people in this country, you can actually find nutritious food at a lower cost than going to restaurants. Interesting. What spots do you trust for your food? I usually try to go to local farmer's markets as much as possible. The closer your food is grown to you, like by distance, the better it is. Okay. So the problem with food that's grown, right, that's in the supermarket now is a lot of time it's being shipped in from like Mexico or from even outside of this country, right? And spending a lot of time in shipping containers and in storage facilities.

Starting point is 00:08:22 What that does is it takes away all the nutrient density from it. So if you don't have nutrients in your food, you have to eat more of that food for your body to get the nutrition it needs, and that's what leads to all the calories being consumed. So the closer the food is grown to you, the better it is, and then trying to eat organic as much as possible is going to be extremely helpful. And what happens is when you get good nutritious food, you're actually less hungry. better it is, and then trying to eat organic as much as possible is going to be extremely helpful. And what happens is when you get good nutritious food, you're actually less hungry. Like you ever eat fast food and you're like, man, I want another thing of fries. I want another taco.

Starting point is 00:08:55 If you're eating nutritious food, you're not going to feel that way. You're going to feel full. And so you actually spend less overall on food. That makes sense. So outside we were talking about what role genetics play. And you were saying it's only 10% to 20%. 10% to 20%. Which is pretty low, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's all about your environment, okay?

Starting point is 00:09:13 Now, there are some genes that definitely do increase your risk of certain diseases. Like the ApoE4 gene is a gene that if you have a risk of Alzheimer's or your family has Alzheimer's, you should definitely get this gene checked, APOE4. But for example, that increases your risk of Alzheimer's 16 times. But if you get your lifestyle right, I have a ton of people that have this gene that have zero risk of Alzheimer's now,

Starting point is 00:09:36 or almost zero. And it's just about getting your lifestyle right, and then you can counteract the negative effects of your genetics. So you can't blame your genetics for everything. So you really think we can prevent Alzheimer's even with genes? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Even if you have a positive gene, you can prevent Alzheimer's. That's exciting news because my family had that. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So there's a great book. My good buddy, Dr. Dale Bredesen, wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's. And this book tells you the 16 things you need to do to almost make your risk of Alzheimer's

Starting point is 00:10:06 as close to zero as possible. Wow, I need to get that book. Yeah, we also had the diabetes gene too. Yeah. On my 23andMe. Right, right. And so remember, it's just an increased risk, but I can guarantee you that if you're doing things

Starting point is 00:10:18 like managing your sugar intake, your carbohydrate intake, you're wearing a continuous glucose monitor, really personalize your food intake to know what it does to your glucose levels. If you do that, you can make your risk of diabetes zero as well. So you spent your whole 20, 30 years learning about Western medicine. Yeah. Switching from that, was that a really mentally taxing event for you? You know, it wasn't mentally taxing. I just felt kind of stupid. You know, it's like, I had learned so much about disease and how to, I did surgery. I was like treating people with severe disease that had surgical issues. And obviously like, you know, that takes a lot of education to make that happen. But I thought that the thought that my mind that I felt stupid about

Starting point is 00:11:00 was I thought I knew how to be healthy and I had absolutely no idea. Treating disease has nothing to do with how to maintain health and prevent disease. And so it is really a whole separate and different education. Were your peers upset you left the space? I wouldn't say they were upset. They just didn't understand what I was doing for a long time. Yeah. They're like, well, what do you mean? And they're like, how are you going to bill insurance for that? Because insurance doesn't pay for health. They pay for disease diagnosis and disease care. I'm like, it's not about getting paid by insurance. It's just about like, as I was talking to all my patients about what I was doing and they were getting healthy, they were avoiding

Starting point is 00:11:38 surgery themselves. So it's actually like, it wasn't really good for the business that people did not need surgery anymore, but it's so fulfilling. Surgery scares me, man. That's like a last resort for me. It should be a last resort. And for anyone that's undergoing surgery, they should look into seeing a functional medicine doctor if you're scheduled for surgery and seeing if there's an alternative option before you undergo the knife. Absolutely. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:01 There's definitely movement, man. It's exciting. It is. Yeah. Do you do anything with brain health? We do a lot for brain health. Absolutely. Yeah. There's definitely a movement, man. It's exciting. It is. Yeah. Do you do anything with brain health? We do a lot for brain health. Absolutely. So, you know, brain health, there's two sides of brain health, right? There's preventing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and neurodegenerative disease, but there's also how do you maintain your optimal brain right now? Right. Because, you know, we all want to think clearly. We don't want brain fog.

Starting point is 00:12:23 We want to be able to like do as well as we can in our jobs and with our family. So both sides of those we work on. And believe it or not, a lot of maintaining optimal brain health has nothing to do with the brain itself, like doing things for your brain itself. I think a lot of people think, oh, if I do Sudoku puzzles, I'll have really good brain power. And that's not true. A lot of it comes from your gut health. A lot of it comes from how you sleep and what you're eating. Yeah. So I do a lot of chess and I feel like it sharpens the brain.

Starting point is 00:12:54 Chess does. I would say chess does sharpen the brain because it's this part of your brain circuitry called neuronal. It's called neuronal growth and it increases your BDNF levels, okay? It's called neuroplasticity. So chess is one of those games, actually, that actually increases BDNF levels, and BDNF is a hormone in your brain that causes new neurons to form and for neurons to connect more.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Neuroplasticity is what it's called. Wow. So you're doing a good job playing chess. That's exciting, yeah. You burn a lot of calories playing, too, I just found out. Crazy. Your brain uses a lot of energy. Yeah. That's exciting, man. So how'd you cut the weight though? Was it mainly diet? It was fixing my gut health is what happened. So, you know, I was eating a lot of ultra processed food. I was drinking a lot of sugary drinks. I wasn't drinking a lot of water. Zero fiber in my diet. So my gut was really

Starting point is 00:13:45 unhealthy. I had this condition called leaky gut. That's where basically all the toxins in the food I was eating was coming into my body and my immune system was going nuts trying to fight all these toxins. And when it does that, not only does it kill the toxins, but it kills normal cells in your brain, in your lungs, in your heart, everywhere in your body. It's a condition called inflammation. And most inflammation comes from an unhealthy gut in our body. Inflammation is a root cause of every other disease. So I went after my gut health. I totally changed my diet and I was able to fix basically my gut health, which then led to fixing everything else. Amazing. Did you do a parasite cleanse? No, I didn't have parasites. I didn't need to do that. But what I did do was stop eating

Starting point is 00:14:30 ultra-processed food. I did a diet high in fiber, good protein. And also I took vitamin D, which vitamin D, if your vitamin D level's not normal, you're never going to be able to fix your gut. You got to get your vitamin D levels normal. Wow. That makes sense though, because mine was low when I did my health, my blood work. Yeah. And when I fixed that, I felt so much better.

Starting point is 00:14:51 I used to have constipation. Yeah. So it was probably linked to the vitamin D deficiency. Probably. Yeah. You probably also had a leaky gut. I probably did. And once you fixed your vitamin D, it got fixed.

Starting point is 00:14:59 I got so used to just feeling like that way, you know? Yeah. I didn't even know. You feel like it's normal, right? Yeah. But it's not. Like when you feel better, you're like, oh, this is the way i'm supposed to feel right it's crazy and a lot of people say they have brain fog i've never had that to be honest is that something you

Starting point is 00:15:12 had i had horrible brain fog really like i was basically like i woke up in the morning and i would have like the feeling of being awake for an hour and then i was just like half asleep all day long wow oh so i have had it if that's what brain fog is. Okay. But it lasts like a minute for me. No, mine was lasting like the rest of the day. Holy crap. It was really bad just because of all the inflammation. Wow. And I also had another condition that everyone needs to know about called sleep apnea. You know what that is? Yes, I do. Yeah. So a lot of people live with sleep apnea where they're not getting oxygen into their brain at night because they're snoring really, really hard and their throat is closing up. And I had that.

Starting point is 00:15:47 And basically for six, seven seconds at a time, multiple minutes overnight, I was getting no oxygen to my brain at all. And about 30% of people have this and they don't get it treated. And that leads to increasing rates of Alzheimer's, dementia, but also heart attacks and cancer. Jeez, that's a lot.

Starting point is 00:16:04 So I had Michael Bruce on, the sleep expert, and he was saying some people with severe sleep apnea are taking years off their life. Years and years. Yeah, absolutely. Years off your longevity, but also years off your brain health. So those people have a much higher risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. Wow. How common is Alzheimer's right now?

Starting point is 00:16:21 It's getting way too common right now. I mean, one out of every three people will have some diagnosis of cognitive impairment after the age of 50 and it's going up. One out of three. Oh my God. One out of three. That is scary, man. It's getting scarier and scarier. So that's why it's so important that we start talking about this. And like in your podcast, like you're spreading the message, like people need to address it early. Like don't wait till you have cognitive impairment. Don't wait till you have cognitive impairment. Don't wait till you start forgetting things. You got to start thinking about it now in your 20s, 30s, 40s. Yeah. It seems like almost every disease across the board, their numbers are going up,

Starting point is 00:16:53 right? Absolutely. Do you think we'll be able to reverse that in our generation? Absolutely. I think right now there's a revolution. Everything in life is a pendulum, right? And so for the last 50 years, a pendulum kind of swung all the way towards people not taking personal responsibility for their health. Most people just ate whatever they could eat. Yeah, they'd go to the gym every once in a while, but that's about it. And people got sicker and sicker over the last 50 years. Their life expectancy has gone down, right?

Starting point is 00:17:19 And so now you see the pendulum swinging back where people are actually learning about their own health. They're learning to become in charge of their health. They're not like seeing the doctor once a year and that's all they do, you know? So I think the pendulum is swinging back and I think about the reverse this. And I think, I think now's the time, like we got to do something. Absolutely. I just found out dogs, one in two dogs are going to have cancer now. Yeah. I believe that. And the guy was saying, if we continue this, every dog will have cancer in the next 20 years.

Starting point is 00:17:44 That's horrible. The reason for that is because we live in the most toxic society we've ever lived in in human history. Wow. There's toxins in the air. There's toxins in our food. There's toxins in our water.

Starting point is 00:17:55 The bottles that we drink it out of, of course, the microplastics. Yeah. The cosmetics we put on our skin. Everything has such a high level of toxins. Babies are born with 50 to 60 toxins in their blood, in their umbilical blood after they're born. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Because the wife is eating. Yeah. Yeah. The mom, the mom is exposed to so many toxins that is going through the

Starting point is 00:18:17 placenta to the umbilical cord to the baby. So we got to do something about this and then you got to detoxify your life. Yeah. It's almost like we should go back to our primitive ways, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a balance. I mean, they weren't living as long as us, but yeah, we're definitely taking a step back. Yeah. You know, they weren't living as long as us because they had infections and injuries that would take them out. Got it. Because there was no antibiotics. So infections usually kill you or, you know, you'd get injured and there's no surgery or no ability to deal with trauma the way it is now. Yeah. But those two things, we fixed that. And that's what led to like a massive increase in life expectancy. But what happened was they were actually living in the way we're genetically

Starting point is 00:18:54 programmed to live, right? They went to sleep when it was dark. They woke up when the light came out. They ate organic, natural food. They didn't have ultra-processed food. If you do all those things, you're living in sync with your genetics and you're going to live as long as possible. And what's more important is living healthy as long as possible. That's called your health span. You want your health span and your lifespan to be almost equal in number. And so living like cavemen did, basically our ancestors did, is beneficial in making that happen. Right. Yeah, because some people are working until the day they die, and then you see the opposite, where they're in a wheelchair the last 20 years.

Starting point is 00:19:31 Right. I'd rather be the first one. Right. Healthspan. Yeah, I like that. What are some ways to get the healthspan closer to the lifespan, you think? So it all starts with the Pareto principle in nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress management. And I would add to that gut

Starting point is 00:19:45 health and hormone health as well. And so like for nutrition, I always say, you know, first thing you could do, the most important thing you could do is eliminate ultra processed food. And people don't know what ultra processed food really means. They think it's, oh yeah, you know, it's a cheeseburger or it's something in a box, the list of ingredients. But it's also all the seed oils. It's also all the processed oils that are in all the food that comes in restaurants for the most part. I think some restaurants are super healthy, but restaurants have profits that they need to make.

Starting point is 00:20:15 Well, how do you make profits? Well, you decrease your costs. How do you decrease your costs? You buy the least expensive food as possible, right? And so you've got to really ask what the restaurants are cooking with, especially if a lot of your diet consists of restaurant food. I think also things like detoxifying your life, like making sure you drink only filtered water out of glass bottles

Starting point is 00:20:36 or metal that you know is safe is super important. Plastic bottles and microplastics are really causing a lot of damage in our biology as well. With sleep, making sureplastics are really causing a lot of damage in our biology as well. With sleep, making sure you're getting seven to nine hours of sleep and is good sleep. That's important. And you got to move. You can't be sedentary all day long. Sedentary behavior is just as bad as processed food as far as adding to your mortality. Wow. See, that's a change I need to make because I only walk 3,300 steps a day right now, which is terrible. You'd recommend 10, right? I try to get over 8,000 because close to 10,000 is possible.

Starting point is 00:21:09 But really what really moves the needle more is even more than the amount of steps you're taking a day is the amount of time you spend sitting. Okay? So what you really want to do is every 30 to 45 minutes is get up and walk around. That counteracts the negative effect of being sedentary. So even if you're like sitting for four, eight hours in a row and then you go walk 10,000 steps, you're still not counteracting all that sedentary time. So you got to take what's called an exercise snack,

Starting point is 00:21:38 which is every 30 to 45 minutes, get up and just walk around and do something. I need to do that after every episode. After every episode, get up and walk around, Exactly. Yeah, that's smart. You mentioned hormones earlier. How do you measure your hormone levels and see if there's issues there? Yeah. So we're all genetically programmed to start declining in our hormones after the age of about 35 or so. And so everyone, men and women, start decreasing in testosterone levels, estrogen levels, et cetera. And of course,

Starting point is 00:22:05 women go through menopause as well, which is a massive decrease in their estrogen levels. So the way you measure it is you go to your doctor and ask them to measure it, right? Many doctors will tell you, you don't need to do that. Don't worry about it. It's normal to have lower hormones as you age. Even though it is normal for hormones to decline, the hormonal decline is what makes you unhealthy as you age. It leads to a lot of the age-related diseases. So I would say, ask your doctor to measure them. If they won't, go to a hormone specialist and they will measure them and they will tell you how to increase your hormone levels. Got it. How do you feel about a

Starting point is 00:22:40 lot of guys injecting TRT right now? So I think TRT is helpful if you're doing it under a doctor's supervision that really knows what they're doing. If you're using it for counteracting the age-related decline of TRT, of testosterone, okay? I think using TRT to get super normal results in the gym is probably not the right way to use TRT. I use TRT a lot. I prescribe TRT to get super normal results in the gym is probably not the right way to use TRT. I use TRT a lot. I prescribe TRT to a lot of my patients that have really, really low levels, and they're getting more visceral fat from it. They have a higher rate of heart disease, higher rate of Alzheimer's.

Starting point is 00:23:18 All of that happens with having low testosterone levels. Oh, wow. The testosterone is super important. It's a super important hormone for men and women. Oh, and women? And women, yeah. So it should be high in women too? It should be normal in women.

Starting point is 00:23:30 Yeah, exactly. So when I see a woman for hormone replacement therapy consultations, we try to manage their estrogen and their testosterone levels, not just focus on the estrogen. Oh, I didn't know that. So what are some good levels for women?

Starting point is 00:23:41 Because for men, it should be higher, right? Well, okay. So the normal level for each person is individual to that person is what that person was when they were in their 20s and 30s okay so your level right now might be different than another guy your age um at this point in time so we don't really know because most people haven't measured their hormones at that age hopefully you have so i just did last year yeah okay So that's your good level. So when you're at your healthiest, you're functioning your best and you feel like you're, you're doing really good. You want to know that testosterone level. Okay. So we don't really know what that is for most, for most men

Starting point is 00:24:16 and women, but I would say that for most men is going to be somewhere North of three to 400. Okay. And for most women, somewhere North of 30 to 50 in that range. And if you're not in that range, you should have a hormone specialist look at it. Nice. Any biohacking things that you're super interested in right now? I'm not a big fan of the term biohacking. I think it like sets up the wrong expectation. You know, you can't hack your way to health. There's just no way. You got to get the big rocks in place. You know that story about the jar and filling it with the big rocks and the pebbles? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So most people don't have the big rocks in place, and then I consider biohacking the pebbles. The pebbles. Yeah, exactly. But once you do have the big rocks in place, I'm a big believer in things like

Starting point is 00:24:59 exposing yourself to extremes of environment, all right. So I like exposure to things like heat in the, in a infrared sauna. I like exposure to cold. Um, even though I feel that, you know, there's a lot of controversy about whether you see direct benefits or not. I do see a lot of mitochondrial health benefits from those types of activities. Yeah. Ben Greenfield. Sorry, man. Oh, Ben Greenfield. Ben Greenfield and I are good buddies. He and I believe in the same kind of – he's the one who actually taught me all about hormesis. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So he's the expert in hormesis, and he'll tell you the same thing.

Starting point is 00:25:33 Exposing your body to certain degrees of stress helps your mitochondrial health. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, because some biohackers are a little extreme. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Well, I mean, you know what? I think they bring attention to some therapeutics that might be coming down the line and something to keep your eye on. But just because, like I said, just because they're doing it doesn't mean you should do it. And definitely, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:54 if you believe in research, some of this stuff just does not have all the research yet. So you got to be real careful. Makes sense. What are the most common problems you see your patients coming into the wellness center? What do they have usually? Most people come in, honestly, when they, number one, they either just don't feel good and don't know what it is. So they have brain fog. They can't lose weight.

Starting point is 00:26:14 They're moving slowly. They have low energy throughout the day. So that's one group of people. They just don't feel great and they don't know what to do about it. Another big group of people is people that are feeling pretty good, but they know what to do about it. Another big group of people is people that are feeling pretty good, but they know there's more out there. They just don't know what to do, right? And so a lot of people are like, look, I go to the gym three, four times a week. I eat organic for the most part. I'm sleeping good, but what else can I do? And then we look under the hood of their health by doing the biomarker testing. And we're like, oh, wait, you have a gut health issue or you have a hormone issue. And we catch it super early.

Starting point is 00:26:49 And when you catch these things super early, you feel incredible. You feel like not only do you prevent disease, but you feel great. You feel vibrant. You have like the most amount of energy. You sleep incredible. And that's what we like to bring people. I'm excited to get my measure because I've never done a biomarker test. Yeah, we should do it. What does that look like? Is it a blood test?

Starting point is 00:27:11 It's a simple just blood draw. We take about four tubes of blood. We get about a hundred different biomarkers from that. And we test everything like your micronutrient levels, your risk of heart disease. We test your inflammation levels. So we get so much data on you and then we can really synthesize a plan for you. And what's important too, is not just measuring it one time and you're done. I would say at least measure it quarterly if you're over the age of 40 or, or if you're trying to change something earlier than that. Right. So most of my patients that are in their twenties and the thirties will measure at least once every six months. So we can find things early, find problems early, but also track it. Got it.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Because it's really about knowing what direction things are going in. Yeah. So things are changing that quickly within a six-month period? Things can change in three months. Oh, wow. Yeah, absolutely. I didn't know that.

Starting point is 00:27:56 Yeah, yeah. Dang. Yeah, and that's the thing. Most people, their biomarkers, they diagnose disease, right? And so those change. It takes 30 years to get to a disease point, but they've been changing for 30 years before that. Wow.

Starting point is 00:28:11 Okay? So they're going in the wrong direction for 30 years before you actually get to a disease state. You want to catch it early. You want to see what direction things are going in. Absolutely. Where are your centers at right now? I know you're expanding.

Starting point is 00:28:23 Yeah. Right now we're at three centers in Los Angeles, one in New York, and one in Maui, actually the Four Seasons of Maui. Nice. But we're expanding to Miami, Austin, Chicago, Vegas, actually. So we're going to be in a lot of places in the next three years. Vegas needs it. There's a lot of people drinking and partying out here.

Starting point is 00:28:39 Yeah. There's a lot of partying out here. I love that. Anything else you're working on, man? Yeah. So the other couple of things I'm working on is I'm launching a podcast here pretty soon. I think I know a lot of experts like Ben Greenfield, Dr. Bruce are all good buddies of mine. I want to give them another

Starting point is 00:28:53 place that they can spread their message. Nice. And so we'll be doing a podcast launching in September and I'm also writing a book which should be coming out towards the end of the year as well. Oh, cool. Can't wait to read it, man. I can't wait to send you one hell yeah thanks for coming on dude that was fun hey this was fun man thank you so much for having me absolutely can't wait to do it again sometime for sure we'll do a part two we'll see you next time guys thanks for watching

Digital Social Hour - The Hidden Dangers of Your Daily Diet: Doctor Explains All I Darshan Shah DSH #487

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