Digital Social Hour - The Sleep Secret Doctors Won’t Tell You! | Dr. Stephen Cabral DSH #663

Episode Date: August 24, 2024

Discover "The Sleep Secret Doctors Won’t Tell You!" 🤫 on the latest episode of Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🌟 Dive into the untold truths about sleep with expert Dr. Stephen Cabral. Ever wondered why you feel sluggish after a restless night? The answer might surprise you! 💤 Lack of deep sleep and REM sleep not only wrecks your energy levels but can also lead to Alzheimer's and dementia. Learn how to optimize your sleep, balance hormones, and boost your overall health with practical tips on blue light blockers, lifestyle changes, and effective supplements. Don't miss out—this episode is packed with valuable insights. Tune in now and join the conversation! 🎙️ Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀   #HealthySleepHabits #StressAndSleep #BlueLightBlocking #HowToImproveSleepQuality #SleepHealth   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Sleep Health Impact 00:32 - Introduction Dr. Stephen Cabral 00:51 - Effects of Fluorescent Lights 04:34 - Sleep Supplements for REM & Deep Sleep 09:42 - Selling Your Medical Practice 14:48 - Medicine and Healing Misconceptions 16:36 - Understanding High Cholesterol 16:56 - Genetics vs. Epigenetics 18:55 - AI in Health Predictions 22:16 - Common Gut Health Issues 24:10 - Gut Health Testing Methods 27:42 - Environmental Health Factors 31:11 - Importance of Showering 32:44 - Understanding Allergies 33:05 - Episode Conclusion 33:35 - Podcast Discussion   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Dr. Stephen Cabral https://stephencabral.com/podcasts/ https://www.instagram.com/stephencabral/   SPONSORS: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/social Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the main things that we look for is we actually track sleep to make sure people are getting enough of that deep sleep and REM sleep. And if not, it's one of the first things we work on. So that can lead to Alzheimer's and dementia? 100%. Lack of deep sleep? Lack of REM sleep. Deep sleep, you're not going to have the same get up and go the next day. You won't have the same energy, higher fasting glucose levels when you wake up.

But for the mind, we say, okay, well, I'm just going to have more caffeine. I'm going to have another energy drink. And over time, that's how Alzheimer's, it's just one of the many causes, begins to set in. All right, guys, we're talking health today. We got Dr. Stephen Cabral here today. Thanks for coming on, man. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Are those glasses EMF blockers? Blue light blocking. So they're good for in the studio because they don't block all of the blue light, but just enough to allow you not to have to deal with any of the dampening effects of fluorescence, et cetera. Okay. So how damaging actually are these lights? So our body likes to move with the natural rhythms of nature. So in the morning, especially, and maybe right before sunset, you get the red lights that can help with the skin, help with hair, help with anti-aging based benefits. But if you're getting fluorescence during the day,

it can actually lead to more feelings of anxiety, brain fog, low mood, depression. So this helps cut that edge just a bit. Interesting. So would it be better to work in the dark with a computer monitor rather than have the lights on? Well, you want to try to mimic the outdoors as much as you can.

So if you can get daylight even inside of your office during the day and then mimic that darkness at night, that's ideally what you're looking to do. Because if we look at it, light during the day is going to improve your cortisol levels, improve your thyroid, and then darkness as the sun's setting is actually going to switch off the stress hormones such as cortisol and norepinephrine and start to then allow for melatonin to rise. So if you mess with that in any way, it hurts your sleep. And if you hurt your sleep for long enough, you're gonna dysregulate your blood sugar levels, your testosterone, your cortisol levels for energy the next day, and so much more. So hugely beneficial to wear blue light blocking glasses, specifically as the sun begins to set.

Yeah, I feel like I used to be able to cheat on sleep when I was younger, but as I age, when I get a bad night's sleep now, it messes up my whole day. Without a doubt. And it's not just getting your eight hours. It's actually getting about 75 to 90 minutes of deep sleep and about two hours of REM.

So if you think about it, deep sleep is rejuvenating for the body. You want that in the first half of the night, typically is when you're gonna get the most deep sleep. And then REM sleep is rejuvenating for the mind. So if you start to get a deficit of deep sleep over time, your body's not going to recover from exercise, from work, for the all-nighters that you might pull. And then if you're not getting enough REM, you're going to be more prone to anxiety, forgetfulness, brain fog, and eventually

dementia and Alzheimer's. It's one of the main things that we look for is we actually track sleep to make sure people are getting enough of that deep sleep and REM sleep. And if not, it's one of the first things we work on. Dang. So that can lead to Alzheimer's and dementia? 100%. Lack of deep sleep? Lack of REM sleep. REM sleep. Yeah. So deep sleep, you're not going to have the same get up and go the next day. You won't

have the same energy, higher fasting glucose levels when you wake up. Typically, you start to get lower levels of cortisol. But the issue is that's for the body. We can kind of recognize that we need more sleep, whatever it might be. But for the mind, we say, okay, well, I'm just going to have more caffeine. I'm going to have another energy drink. And over time, that's how Alzheimer's, it's just one of the many causes, begins to set in. And we can actually, there are scans now that we use in our practice, we send people to, that can actually detect Alzheimer's 10 to 20 plus years in advance. So that's the nice thing with longevity now, and all the anti-aging-based modalities,

we can use the best of functional medicine, clinical medicine, with a lot of the ancient healing-based modalities. We can blend them together. So now people don't have to be worried about, even if they have a specific apo-genotype, which is the 4-4 allele, which you're 90% more prone to get Alzheimer's if you have that. 90%.

90% more. But that doesn't mean that you're going to get Alzheimer's. It just means you're more likely than nine out of 10 people. So what we do is we start those scans 20 years in advance. And if we start to see any of that plaque building up, well, we can reverse it. There are clinical protocols like the MEN protocol and others that you can begin to reverse Alzheimer's. I actually just had that one, I think, because I took 23andMe and it said I had something with Alzheimer's. I actually just had that one, I think, because I took 23andMe. Yes. And it said I had something with Alzheimer's and diabetes. So if you have a 3-4 or a 4-4 allele, which is a specific protein essentially in the blood, that just means that you're more prone to Alzheimer's. Now, keep in mind that 26% of the population has that. Wow. So it's not like you're all alone.

Only 4%—4 to 6% has a 4-4, but 26% have either a 3-4 or a 4-4, making them much more prone to inflammation in general, poor utilization of a lot of dietary fats, and just much more prone to amyloid beta plaque building up in the brain. Got it. So have you seen any studies on sleep supplements that can increase REM and deep sleep numbers? So we use a combination of lifestyle, nutrition, and supplementation. So we use, first of all, lifestyle, the 3-2-1 sleep formula. So we want to stop eating three hours before bed. It's one of the absolute best things you can do to raise heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is basically a measure for recovery. So heart rate variability is the milliseconds between beats of your heart rate. And it's- As a B2B marketer, you know how noisy the ad space can be. If your

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We'll give you a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash social to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash social terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be. It should be wild. Basically it should be all over the place. And that means, oh, your heart rate is not under stress. So one of the best things that you can absolutely look at. And so by stopping eating three hours or before bed, it can raise that recovery. The next thing is about two hours before bed, you want to start to limit your fluid intake. So you have to wake up to urinate. And then one hour before bed, no more blue light. So turn off the phone, turn off any bright LED lamps, TVs, et cetera, put on a pair of blue blocking glasses. These are about 90% blockout blue light. You can get 95%. You can

get 99%. They're more of the red colored lenses. That's going to be phenomenal. And then nutritional supplement wise, we use three main products. The first one is a liquid melatonin that you take 30 minutes before bed. So liquid melatonin is into your system faster and out faster. So you won't wake up with the grogginess that a lot of melatonin leaves you with because you can actually keep it under your tongue for the first two minutes you put in your mouth and then it absorbs through the capillaries. And then, so it's right in your bloodstream rather than going through your digestive system, passing through your liver, which just, it takes more time to process. That's all right. We use another product called the adrenal soothe. That's at

dinner time that contains a few key nutrients, ashwagandha, which amazing clinical studies. They just did a meta-analysis of about a dozen studies on ashwagandha. As long as it was used for at least six weeks, it decreased average cortisol, especially in the evening, by 27% to 33%. Wow. So it knocks down your stress hormone, which then allows melatonin to rise naturally. So we do a small amount of melatonin, only about 2.5 milligrams, sometimes a little higher depending on the individual. Then we'll use adrenal soothe. It's two to three capsules that contains ashwagandha, L-theanine, and phosphoserine. Phosphoserine actually reduces

cortisol, so it's an amazing product. And the last one is magnesium. Most people have heard of magnesium, but they all work in different ways. So adrenal soothe works directly on cortisol, melatonin raises your sleep hormone, and then what magnesium does is it balances stress on the nervous system so it starts to calm what's called the sympathetic nervous system fight or flight so magnesium phenomenal take at dinner and maybe even a little bit of calming magnesium before bed nice and do you have a brand you trust because there's so many supplement brands and i don't know how the quality levels are measured 100 so i i was in practice and I'm still in practice today, but we actually,

we saw a quarter of a million client appointments through about 2019. Wow. And then we started seeing more people online all over the world than just in my Boston practice. So I sold my practice to a great colleague of mine,

amazing individual that I knew would continue that on in Boston. And we started helping people around the world. The brand that I now formulate for is Equal Life. But we used dozens of great functional medicine brands. And you don't have to use Equal Life, but the way that you know it's a good brand is that you're looking for GMP certified, you're looking for independent third-party testing, and if you can, an FDA-regulated facility. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a drug company, but there's a certain level of manufacturing that they are strict on, like pharmaceuticals, where when a product leaves, it leaves with a label, it leaves with a sale, it leaves with two-quality testing.

That means all ingredients that come in are tested for bacteria, mold, heavy metals. And when it leaves, it's tested to make sure that what it says is in the product is actually the product. So functional medicine doctors like myself, I'm a doctor of naturopathy, look for products with that type of efficacy because they need to know that what they're giving their patients and their wellness clients is actually in that product. Because if not, then you don't know if what you're doing is actually working. So you don't typically switch from product to product. Yeah. Did you feel like you were kind of being held back with your in-person practice? I did to a degree. So my goal,

I was a sick kid and we don't need to get too much into it. But from 17 years old, when I ended up having what's called an idiopathic illness, that means you go from doctor to doctor and they have no idea what's wrong with you. Wow. So I ran all the blood work in the world. It was scary. 17, senior in high school, supposed to be the time of your Wow. So I ran all the blood work in the world. It was scary. I was 17, senior in high school. Supposed to be the time of your life. And I was going in my senior year, National Honor Society, playing three sports, varsity, all these things, all that taken away from me.

Damn. Yeah. So I left school, had to leave school for about almost three months, and almost didn't graduate. So what ended up being diagnosed years later was Addison's disease, which is the inability to produce cortisol. So you can't produce energy.

So basically, it's like walking around every day with flu-like symptoms. So your legs hurt, your joints hurt, you're exhausted, you have brain fog. I had type 2 diabetes as a result of the Addison's disease. So I couldn't regulate blood sugar. And I had an autoimmune issue, rheumatoid arthritis, all at 17. Holy crap. So besides all the other things like insomnia, allergies. So it took until 27 years old to get well. And I overcame all of those.

10 years? 10 years. And the reason was, this was during the 90s. So I didn't have the benefit of the online sharing of information that there is now. So I read thousands of books because I was obsessed with getting well. Because people who are sick understand this, but if you don't have your health, you have nothing else. So I was exhausted all day. Basically, it took me until noon to feel like I woke up. I would get a few good hours of

work, and then I couldn't sleep all night. So I had an upside down what's called diurnal rhythm. So my body wouldn't produce cortisol really during the day, but I couldn't shut off my mind at night. And so my mentor, Dr. Pete, helped me to use at-home lab testing and then specific nutrients to get my body back on track. And so obviously forever grateful for her. I now try to pass that on. So my goal was, I see 20,000 people a year in my practice. If I was able to reach 20,000 people a day, how amazing would that be? And so that's what I set out in 2016. I'd already been in practice for many years. I said, I'm going to start a podcast and I'm going to write my book. And so

that's what I did. And about two years later, the book became a bestseller and the podcast is a top health show. And so, yeah, thank you. Once we hit 20,000 people a day, which was the goal just to reach, I said, my goal isn't to open up a dozen different locations. It's great. But what I really want to do is open source this information. So I know you're into Web3 and a lot of things, which is amazing. My goal is to open source, which seems to be the way of technology and the way of kind of even a, not chat GPT, open AI is not doing this, but a lot of companies are. And so we open source online at Equal Life. This is what we do for lab testing.

This is what we do for our protocols. These are the ingredients in our products. You can copy us if you want, but this is what we know works clinically. Wow. So we have a half a million labs worth of data, independent, meaning like our labs are all independent. So they are not shared with your medical doctor.

They're not shared with insurance. They're not shared with anybody. So they're private labs. So only a third party lab that runs all of our labs, our Equal Life team, and you get the results. But we know based on the results and the people in our practice, what works and what doesn't.

And so now a quarter million plus people, half a million plus labs, we actually can see what works. And we're trying to open source that now to the world. Incredible. You could have withheld that information, made tens of millions of dollars. And I feel like that is a problem with Western medicine, right?

That is, that is the problem. And that's why I think I wasn't, even though the people I saw in Boston, Massachusetts, when I was going, I went to over two dozen different specialists. These are the best of the best Harvard trained Boston university, Tufts, like you name it. They looked at one thing, which is my blood work. And the only thing off of my blood work was my white blood cells. So they knew something was wrong, but they had no idea. They either thought I had cancer, they thought I had AIDS, they thought I had anything that would throw up my white blood cells. Well, when I didn't have any of those things, they didn't know what else to do. So it was only when I began to look into, which was unheard of it then as like the mid-90s,

functional medicine, that we started to look at gut health. Now, these things, leaky gut, you'd be laughed at. We talked about that literally 20 years ago. But now it's on Harvard Health's website. Increased intestinal permeability, leaky gut. So I had candida overgrowth. I had bacterial overgrowth called SIBO. I had H. pylori infection, bacterial infection in my stomach, massive food sensitivities.

And so when I started to look at other labs beyond just blood work, which is great, you should run your blood work, but it's only there to diagnose disease. It does not look at the underlying root cause imbalances. Once I found those out, I knew what to work on. And what I've realized over the years is that a healthy body can't be sick. And so if you can rebalance the underlying root causes, which there are only two, there's toxicities, so too much of something in your body, or deficiencies, too little of something. I know it seems very basic, but you still have to find out what those toxicities are, what the deficiencies are. Bring up your deficiencies.

Remove your toxicities. Your body will heal. Your body knows how to heal. So no doctor can heal you. A doctor can put your body in position to heal itself. So that's what we're trying to do. That's a great way of looking at it because people think they need medicine to heal, but your body can heal. Well, medicine does not heal anything. Literally. So if we think, and I'm not putting you on the spot there, but that is what we're told,

that medicine heals. But let's think about this. So one of the number one most prescribed drugs in the world is a proton pump inhibitor, a PPI for acid reflux, right? So on the label for a PPI for acid reflux, it says, do not take this product for more than two weeks. It can become habit forming. Doctors don't know how to get rid of the acid reflux. They don't know the underlying root causes. They're not working on that pathophysiology. So they give you the PPI. Now it gets rid of your acid reflux, but it gives you the false sense of relief that you're healed. You're not, you come off that PPI, the acid reflux comes right back. The problem with not having any acid in your stomach though is you give parasites a free ride in your stomach. You get bacteria free ride in your stomach. You can't break down then and utilize calcium,

magnesium, zinc, and vitamin B12. So you become anemic. You can get weakened. The other thing though is you can get esophageal cancer because there's a muscle at the bottom of your esophagus called your LES, your lower esophageal sphincter it stays closed in the presence of acid stomach acid so your body still produces some or enzymes and those can come right up your esophagus so people can get barrett's esophageal based cancer or other things and they're like how did this happen right well it's it's this is not you're shutting off a normal part of your body. So the goal would say, well, why does someone have acid reflux? Okay, they might have an H. pylori infection like I had.

I was on a handful of medications, all these things. They might have a hydral hernia, which is affecting that muscle at the bottom. So they can look at that. They may have histamine-based issues. They might have food sensitivities. They could have lots of different issues that are causing the acid reflux. So the goal is to say, okay,

if you need to be on a proton pump inhibitor, that's up to you. But while you're on it, let's look for the underlying root cause so that we can heal that so that you can come off these medications. Same would be a statin drug, right? So you have high cholesterol. Well, I agree that your cholesterol shouldn't be too elevated, but the thing is, why? Why do you have high cholesterol? You didn't have it at eight years old, so why do you have it at 38 years old? Or 48 years old? What happened? You have the same genetics that you did 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So the goal is to always look at what

caused it, rebalance that, and then you don't have to be on the medications. How much emphasis do you place on the genetic side of things? Because people like to use that as an excuse sometimes, but is it actually valid like that? Well, genetics are real. There's no doubt about that. So we have our basically exterior genetics. Those are challenging to change, right? But we have our endogenous genetics, which are basically

how our genes express themselves. And that's called epigenetics. You probably talked about that maybe on the show before. So what happens though is it's the environment we put those genes in. We now know that no more than 5% to 10% of all disease can be attributed to genetics. They did something called the Dutch Twin Study. What they looked at were identical twins, so same genes. What they found was there's two things. There's your genotype and there's your phenotype. In Ayurvedic medicine 6,000 years ago, they had your Prakriti and your Vakriti. In Ayurvedic medicine, 6,000 years ago, they had your Prakriti and your Vakriti.

Same thing. They knew these things 6,000 years ago. Wow. And what they said is this. You're born with a certain set of genes, tens of thousands, but it's the millions of what are called single nucleotide polymorphism, SNPs, that actually use that gene expression.

So it's why we don't have these diseases of our genes when we're younger. Like I didn't have rheumatoid arthritis when I was eight years old. Why did I get it at 17 years old? But also, now I'm in my mid-40s. I don't have rheumatoid arthritis anymore, but I have the same genes. So it was off, turned on, turned off again. And so our genes are not our destiny. That's the biggest thing to let people know. The thing is, by the time you get into your 30s, you have miles on your 30s, you have miles on your body and you have inflammation building up, which is not the root cause of any disease,

but it's certainly a precursor to many diseases. So the goal is always to find out what are those toxicities? What are the deficiencies? Replace the deficiencies, remove the toxicities, anybody can heal. There's one disease right now. That's it. There's only one that we don't know how to heal fully. And that is late-stage cancer. Really? Yes. Huh. Every other disease can be cured.

So early-stage cancer can be cured? Early-stage cancer for most, without a doubt. And the treatments now, I'm big in the field of what we call high-performance health, but it's really longevity, anti-aging, healthy biohacking. So the thing is, within probably, people like to say the next three to five years, always these things take longer, 15 to 20 years maximum. So if you can keep yourself healthy for another 10 to 15 years, we will have a lot of these answers. And most of it is based on now input in, and then I call it ethical AI, using AI ethically to be able to...

So the thing is, I have a half a million labs in my practice, and I've been doing this for a long time. However, I can't recall all half a million of those labs, right? But I can use machine learning and AI from an anonymized standpoint to be able to say, Sean, based on these markers right now, you have with your functional medicine labs, you might expect to see this in the future on blood work. If you start to see any of these numbers move, we need to make sure we're paying special attention to this. And then what we're going to do is we're going to be able to find people

actually with disease-based states and say, yes, those blood-based markers of, let's say, rheumatoid arthritis correlate back to these specific gut imbalances and heavy metals in 83% of the cases. And then we're going to be able to then prove that, show that, remove the heavy metals, fix the gut, and then watch those blood markers reverse as well. So that's our goal in the future is to be able to do that type of work. So you're able to predict someone's health journey almost with that much data? We believe we'll be able to, for sure. Yeah, we believe that we'll be able to do that type of work. So you're able to predict someone's health journey almost with that much data. We believe we'll be able to, for sure. Yeah, we believe that we'll be able to predict

a person's health within the next three to five years to be able to catch things before they actually transpire. So cool. And with all this advancement technology, the average lifespan is dropping. What do you think the main factors for that are? It's still lifestyle. It really is.

We're trying to get, for the vast majority of the population, although I love things like sauna and red light and PMF mats and all these things, the majority of the population still needs to just improve their overall eating, use some type of intermittent fasting so that there's some time to be able to process all this food and eliminate. That's a big part of it. Get 10,000 steps per day, work on their stress and sleep. That's just the basis point.

But right now we have people eating, it's not just sugar. Sugar absolutely should get its blame, but it's really the fats that we have in our diet. The vast majority of foods have all these hydrogenated oils and they have high omega-6 base oils. That's such a big part of it. And so what happens is we have trillions of cells in our body and those omega-6 oils actually, for lack of a better term, gum up the membrane of

our cells. So each cell that you have has what's called a bilipid membrane or a lipid bilayer. It's just two layers of fat. And it's essentially omega-6s and omega-3s are part of it. Well, the American diet is all omega-6s. There's almost no omega-3s. And so if we have too many omega-6s, we increase what's called arachidonic acid and these things called prostaglandins. And the prostaglandins are inflammatory-based markers.

So now the inflammatory markers do what? They change the environment in your body called the milieu, which then changes the DNA. Wow. And the DNA can then express all of those different genetic-based issues. So I had to fix my nutrition. I had to fix my gut.

That was a big part of it. And then we were, then of course, in our practice, we're able to turn these things off. Yeah, I feel like the gut thing, I see it all over the place now. A lot of people having gut issues. Absolutely. And if you think about it,

when people are trying to eat really healthy foods and they're not working and so they keep eliminating foods, eliminating foods and the last thing they're left with is I'm just going to eat only meat or only this thing. And so it's like, well, you know,

you should be able to eat a vast myriad of foods. Like you should be able to eat most foods and not react to them. You really should. Everybody always has their own nuances. There's no doubt about that. That's part of life's journey, kind of figuring out what foods are best for your body. But if you can only eat a half a dozen foods, it's a gut-based issue. The nice thing is there's really only four to five issues with the gut to look for. Candida or yeast overgrowth, same thing. Bacterial overgrowth,

H. pylori, parasites. The other thing is food sensitivities that can cause inflammation when you eat them that then inflame the gut. And then all of those things cause the permeability. Permeability is important. If I had my little mannequin hair, I'd show you. The gut's about 26 feet long, all the way from your esophagus down to your stomach. Your small intestine's about 20, 21 feet. Large intestine's about five to six feet. Okay. So we have all of that gut. That's meant to be the outside of your body. It's basically one tube running all the way from your mouth to your anus.

That's basically what it is. And it's only supposed to let the good stuff in. Yeah. The problem is when it's permeable, it has extra permeability, leakiness. It lets proteins, bacteria, other pathogens in your bloodstream, which turns on the immune system, which then increases inflammation. Got it. And now we're back to kind of square one. Okay, everything you eat now causes inflammation. Well, you have literally in your bloodstream,

you have too many white blood cells. You have too many cytokines, too many histamines, too many prostaglandins. Now you have joint pain. You've got headaches. You've got migraines. You have skin rashes. You've got low mood, low libido, low energy, and you have no idea why. So it really does start looking at the gut. That's such a big part. And what are some tests to identify if you have gut issues? It's three main tests. The first one's called the Candida metabolic and vitamins test. It's a urine test and it looks for yeast, bacterial overgrowth, neurotransmitter metabolites for energy, all those different things. The second one is a IgG food sensitivity test, different than a regular food sensitivity test. So let's just say we're recording here on a Thursday. If I asked you, hey, what did you eat

on Monday into Tuesday morning? You may not remember all the foods you ate at that meal. Well, IgG, those are immune cells that react one to three days after you eat a food. So that's what we test for because those are the latent response immune cells that create inflammation, which then leads to the headaches, the skin rashes, the joint pain, the low mood, et cetera. The IgA or the IgE, more immediate ones, we don't need to test for because if you go and you have shrimp or lobster or whatever it might be, and you get hives, a headache, you don't feel well, you know that that's a food that you're sensitive to. You'll be able to figure that out.

So we test for the IgG. And the last one is a bacterium parasite stool test. That's for people that have symptoms of loose stool. They've got poor sleep, sweating when they sleep, more yellowy tint to maybe the skin, the eyes, anal itching, any of those things, teeth grinding that might show more parasites. So people don't run that lab test as much

because it's obviously a stool test. Yeah. But those three would look for everything. Wow, I used to grind my teeth as a kid. I didn't know that was related to parasites. It can be. Yeah, stress is another one, of course. Well, I wasn't stressed as a kid,

so it probably wasn't that. It's actually really common for kids to have pinworms and other parasites. Yeah. Really common because they're playing around and their hands are in the dirt and all these things and parasites are part of nature. Did you see the recent Lunchables news? I didn't see that, no.

So they found heavy toxic metals in Lunchables. It's horrible. Yeah. And all those lunches are feeding them Lunchables. Well, if we look at it, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. These are so common in the environment. We don't usually see lead, fortunately, but the most prominent ones we see are mercury and aluminum from the environment all the time. And that's a simple hair test. That's what I recommend to everybody because it's non-invasive. It's used for the FBI. It's used for NASA.

They use it in a pregnancy-based lab test because it's non-invasive. A couple of snips of hair from the back of your head that you won't see missing. It looks at your mineral levels, electrolytes for stress, zinc to copper levels. It looks at those five metals that I just spoke about, which is lead, mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic. Because if you do have elevated metals, that is a very common reason for the headaches, migraines, joint pain, skin rashes, et cetera. What about eye twitching? What causes that? Eye twitching oftentimes is stress related. So you can say, oh, it's from a lack of sleep. It's from this, that, you know, studying for exams, all these things, which are all stress related, right?

So the less sleep you get, the less recovered you are, the more stress. And it's usually an imbalance between calcium and magnesium or sodium to potassium. So what we do is we typically increase magnesium. We use something called full-spectrum magnesium, which are multiple blends of magnesium. So because we don't know exactly what type

that you're going to be, work great for you. We wouldn't be able to look for that. So we use a full spectrum. And then we'll increase potassium. Not too high, not potassium. We don't use in supplementation. We use magnesium through supplementation. Potassium we'll use with foods,

which would just be green foods and like green leafies for the most part we're using. Could be coconut water. That's an easy one to get a lot of potassium in as needed. And both calcium, magnesium calm one part of the autonomic nervous system, which is called the sympathetic nervous system. That's fight or flight.

Got it. So it helps to calm that down. Nice. Other than light, what other environmental factors are you keeping an eye on? Other than meaning light for overall energy, mood, health, all of that. So the biggest one is, I believe, when I wrote my book, there were 77,000 man-made toxins in the environment. That was in the US. There were 8,000 in Europe. So the US, they allow far more toxins in. And now, five years or so

later, it's over 140,000, which is wild. And Europe's only up to 12. And so when we look at that, we can't be scared of everything in our environment. We just can't do that. So what do we need to do? The three main things are clean water that we drink, clean air that we breathe, and clean food. So starting from the back first, clean food is going to be following the dirty dozen and clean 15. So if you can't afford to buy all organic, then shop for the clean 15. Those are ones that you can buy non-organic. And the dirty dozen, either don't eat or purchase them organic. Because those are the ones that you can't wash off the herbicides. Really? Yeah, the chemicals. What are some examples on that list?

They go directly into the skin. So some of the biggest offenders are always strawberries, spinach, other berries, leafy greens that you just can't wash. Got it. Apples are typically another one. Those are important. Whereas if you think about it, a banana, if you don't want to, I believe that you should purchase organic if you're able to

because there's also better soil quality. So if there's better soil quality, the micronutrients, not just the macronutrients, but the micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals, et cetera, will be higher. The soil would be better. But if you can't afford all organic, if you can peel it off like a banana, then you're going to peel off any pesticides, herbicides

that might be there. So that's the food. The clean air, a good air filter, is imperative for your house, your studio, wherever you might be. So I'm a big advocate of an air filter. We need one in here. 100%. Any brands you trust? So we use the Air Doctor. There are other great brands, but all mine, and you can obviously keep it or not, but stephencabral.com slash resources. There's over a hundred different companies that I recommend. They're just great

companies. I don't necessarily work with any of them, but great, great companies. And then water filters. So there are so many good water filters, but you need one for your bath if you have kids, because if not, you're putting chlorine, basically the chlorine you're bathing in. I can talk about that in a moment. Fluoride you're drinking and consuming along with the chlorine

and along with any other metals that are in there. So I do my own independent water testing. There's a, I think the company's called SimpleTap or something like that, SimpleTest, SimpleTap. You can just test your water. So what I do is I test my own independent water testing. There's a, I think the company's called SimpleTap or something like that, SimpleTest, SimpleTap. You can just test your water. So what I do is I test my tap water and then I test the water coming out of the filter to make sure it actually removes the impurities.

So that's, I just try to do my own independent testing before I make these recommendations. So bath filter, shower head filter, or you can do a whole house filter and then everything's filtered. So what I do is a reverse osmosis under my sink, and then I actually run it through a hydrogen water purifier. Wow, double filter.

Yeah, yeah, it does. And then it adds hydrogen, which I'm really playing with right now. And again, like I said, I use all the research. I use an ORP meter. And an ORP meter, you could use it like if you did pools. Pools, you'd want the opposite. So a pool, you want a high ORP, which is just oxidation reduction potential.

And so you want chlorine in your pool or salt water if you want to get rid of the bacteria and the impurities. But for your drinking water, you actually want a negative ORP. And that means there's antioxidants in your water, that your water's not oxidized. And so the research that I've been doing

the last couple of years on that is, it's pretty fantastic for everything from, well, the bottom line is this. If you have more antioxidants in your water, you're able to reduce free radical damage in your body. So helpful for aging. Yeah, I just bought all these filters last week because I had Dr. Pompa on. He said when you take a 10-minute warm shower, you're inhaling about nine cups,

or you're drinking nine cups of tap water, like the equivalent. Well, and I don't have the data and science on that. I'm sure that he's correct on that. But what I look at is the vapor. So a showering without a shower filter can be worse than drinking the water that has the chlorine in it. Wow.

And the reason is that if it's a hot shower, there's steam that's created. And then the steam is a vapor that you breathe in. So now, remember we talked about the melatonin, absorb it through the capillaries, a vapor that you breathe in. So now, remember we talked about the melatonin, absorb it through the capillaries, right? Right.

When you breathe in a vapor, a gas, goes into your lungs and goes right into your bloodstream. Damn. If you were to consume chlorine,

it goes through your stomach, it passes the liver, the liver has to break it down, phase one, phase two detoxification, and then it can hopefully get most of it out of your body,

but not when you breathe it in. So a gas is far worse. No more hot showers. Well, simple shower filter, you'll be able to get most of it out of your body, but not when you breathe it in. So a gas is far worse. No more hot showers. Well, simple shower filter, you'll be able to get rid of that. Yeah, that is crazy because we went through 20 years of our lives or however many years taking showers and baths,

not thinking about the dangers of it. That's right. So this is what I call, my book is The Rain Barrel Effect. All these things just add up over time. That's all that it is. So it's like, well, why don't, we usually get sick as kids?

Well, sometimes we do. We have allergies and asthma and skin rashes and all these types of things. But it's just as you accumulate them over time, that's when it's an issue. No one shower, no one non-organic food is going to be a big deal. But when you start to consume these over time, especially in conjunction with all the others, that's when they start to wear on the body. Yeah, and I feel like growing up, kids had allergies,

but now as I got older, almost all my friends have some sort of allergy. It's actually crazy. It's unbelievable. Yeah, allergies are so pervasive. I have two young daughters. You go to their school, kids are allergic now to all sorts of different foods

where before it used to be peanuts, right? And now it's strawberries and gluten and everything else. Crazy. And it's tough because not only are they taking more antibiotics, which is destroying their gut because antibiotics typically kill off the bad bacteria, but the good bacteria as well, but it allows for yeast to overgrow and it creates an intestinal permeability. You have that, you're much more likely to get allergies as well. So we look at that, it's too bad. We work with a lot of kids in our practice, but

we need to help them because it's not their fault. They don't even get to make the decisions. Yeah. I can't imagine life without strawberries, man. I love strawberries. That's right. Strawberries are the ones that you have to choose organic. That's an important one. Anything else you want to promote or close off with, man? That was fun. Yeah, that was a great time. So just my podcast, the Cabral concept, I try to give just tips like this on a daily basis every single day and we're 3,000 shows deep so people can just search for their topic

that they're interested in and are always happy to help. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Michael. Appreciate you. All right. Thanks for watching, guys. See you tomorrow.