Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Most Important Daily Habits That Could Add Decades to Your Life & Keep Your Brain Young with Dr Darshan Shah #573

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Did you know that your daily habits directly affect the speed at which your brain is ageing and your risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease in the future?   This week, I'm delighted to welcome Dr Darshan Shah to the podcast. Darshan is a medical doctor, a board-certified surgeon, an expert in preventive health and the founder of Next Health, the first health optimisation and longevity centre to offer life-extending and enhancing technology and treatments.   Whilst working as a surgeon, Darshan became seriously ill with type diabetes, hypertension, an autoimmune condition, and he was told he had a 50% chance of dying in the next 25 years. This wake-up call came just as his first son was born. Rather than accepting a life dependent on medications, he immersed himself in functional medicine and completely reversed his conditions in just eight months.    During our conversation, you'll discover:  The 5 things you could start doing today that would actually increase your chances of getting Alzheimer’s The 80/20 principle for health and how focusing on just 20% of interventions can deliver 80% of the results Why sitting for more than four hours increases your risk of death by 15% Why becoming the "boss of your own biology" through tracking key biomarkers could be life-saving How inflammation from your gut and mouth can directly impact your brain health decades later Darshan’s top supplement recommendations for longevity This conversation challenges the notion that we can simply live intuitively in today's environment and expect to stay healthy. Darshan argues that in our current toxic world, taking an active role in monitoring and optimising our health isn't just beneficial, it's essential.  Whether you're interested in detailed health tracking or just want to learn the basics of staying well, this conversation is packed with practical advice that could transform how you think about your health. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://join.whoop.com/livemore https://boncharge.com/livemore https://timeline.com/livemore https://thriva.co   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/573   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I really believe that even if you are genetically susceptible to Alzheimer's, the chance of you being able to prevent it completely is very, very high. So I think we need to move on from my mother had it, my family members had it, so I'm destined to have it. That is absolutely not the case. Hey guys, how are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

This will be the last episode in the current series of my podcast. If you are a long time listener of my show, you will know that every summer we stop releasing weekly episodes for around six weeks. Now, there are many reasons for this, but the main one is because the summer is the time of year where as a family we try to prioritise undistracted time together. My wife is the producer of this podcast and so very involved like me with the weekly production of each episode. So for us, it's really important to have some time each year when we stop. Now, I'm well aware that many of you really look forward to each week's episode and that this podcast has earned a place in your weekly schedule. And honestly, I am so, so grateful for that.

Do not forget that there are over 500 episodes now in the back catalog. And pretty much all of them are just as relevant today as they were when they were first released. So perhaps this summer, you can take our little break as an excuse to delve into the back catalogue and listen to some episodes that you may have missed first time around, or perhaps revisit some of your favourites.

Honestly, I think so many of these conversations are worth a second listen. If you do go back and listen to a conversation you have already heard, I pretty much guarantee that you will hear different things and that the ideas within the episode will land with you in a different way. Because of course, what we hear and pay attention to will depend on what else is going on in our life. After all, we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Our plan as always is to relaunch the next season at the start of September.

So on to the topic of this week's episode, our brains. Did you know that your daily habits and behaviours are directly affecting not only the health of your brain, but the age of your brain as well? Did you also know that they directly influence your chances of getting Alzheimer's disease in the future? Well, this week's guest is the wonderful Darshan Shah. Darshan is a medical doctor, a board certified surgeon, an expert in preventive health and the founder of Next Health, the first health optimisation and longevity centre to offer life extending and enhancing technology and treatments in a beautiful welcoming environment. Whilst working as a surgeon, Darshan became seriously ill with type 2 diabetes, hypertension and an autoimmune condition and he was told he

had a 50% chance of dying in the next 25 years. This wake-up call came just as his first son was born, and rather than accepting a life dependent on medications, he immersed himself in functional medicine and completely reversed his conditions in just eight months. During our conversation, you will discover the five things you could start doing today that would actually increase your chances of getting Alzheimer's. The 80-20 principle for health, basically how focusing on just 20% of your behaviours can deliver 80% of your results, why sitting for more than four hours in a row increases your risk of death by 15%? How inflammation in your mouth

and gut can directly impact your brain health? Darshan's top supplement recommendations for longevity and why eliminating ultra-processed foods might be more important than simply adding in more superfoods. Darshan is someone who has become a really good friend of mine. He is kind, knowledgeable and has a real passion to help people take control of their health. This conversation challenges the notion that we can simply live intuitively in today's environment and expect to stay healthy, Darshan argues that in our current toxic world, taking an active role in monitoring and optimising our health is not just beneficial, it's essential. I wanted to start off with a question I imagine you don't get commonly in your practice.

Most people are asking you how they can prevent getting sick in the future, but I wanted to start by asking you what would I need to do if I want to get Alzheimer's or shorten my life as quickly as possible? To get Alzheimer's or shorten my life as quickly as possible. To get Alzheimer's. Okay, you're right. No one's ever asked me that question, but I can give you a five step program to getting Alzheimer's.

Why don't we do that? Let's do it, yeah. And you'll be surprised to hear that your genetics actually not in my five steps, believe it or not. Okay, because I really believe that even if you are genetically susceptible to Alzheimer's, the chance of you being able to prevent it completely

is very, very high. So I think we need to move on from my mother had it, my family members had it, so I'm destined to have it. That is absolutely not the case, okay? So the five steps to getting Alzheimer's. Starts in childhood, believe it or not. Play football, American football or rugby. A sport that you're hitting your head over and over again

at high velocities, right? That constant trauma and not necessarily getting concussions. The trauma of hitting your head over and over again as a child and then into high school and beyond, definitely sets you up for a situation where your chance of having dementia later on in life is greatly increased, okay? Many people take that even into adulthood,

playing professional sports, even riding a motorcycle and falling off, riding mountain biking and falling off and hitting your head. The amount of trauma that builds up over multiple episodes of hitting your head sets your brain up to have not just Alzheimer's but also Parkinson's later on in life. And the longer you extend that

and the more you play these sports that your head is unprotected, the more damage builds up over time in your brain, okay? Then step two, moving on to like adolescence and early adulthood, eat a ton of ultra processed food, lots of sugar, don't start your meals with vegetables instead of have a very carby diet and throw your metabolism off.

And so step two is having poor metabolic health, right? We know in the Western world, 80% of adults have poor metabolic health and that sets you up in a situation where you have a much higher risk of getting dementia in the future. And what's beautiful about this conversation, Rangan, is like, we don't need to just talk about dementia. situation where you have a much higher risk of getting dementia in the future. And what's beautiful about this conversation Rangan is like, we don't need to just talk

about dementia. It's the same for heart disease, cancer, all sorts of longevity in general. Exactly. And of course, I know we're already two parts into the five step plan and of course it's a slightly ridiculous question in many ways, but the reason I was asking it was to really just showcase how many of these things so many of us are doing. So we don't directly ask ourselves the question, how can we speed up getting a brain disease? But it turns out that many of us are living lives, which are actually doing that. Exactly.

Exactly. And the damage builds up over time. And what's incredible about our human body is it's so incredibly resilient, especially up to the age of about 30 or so, right? And this resiliency tricks us into believing that we're incredibly healthy, that we can live through anything,

that nothing bad is gonna happen to us. But the damage builds up in childhood and adolescence as well, just as much as can build up later. Now what happens as we age, so step three of the program then is to create a massive amount of inflammation. And that is through having poor gut health, even poor oral health, being sedentary.

So this all happens when we get a job, right? We become more sedentary, We continue to have a poor diet. We're eating more ultra processed food and our gut health suffers. And 90% of our immune system lives in our gut, right? And so when our gut is not healthy, it's being attacked by thousands of toxins that are basically in our food

and our immune system is on overdrive, which creates a situation that we all know is another root cause of disease called inflammation. Yeah. Right? Then the next thing that you can do is just don't care about your level of exposure to toxins. Right? And so, you know, we know that we live in a society now

where we have 150,000 manmade toxins in our environment. And these have only been here for the last 60, 70 years. These were never here before. And we are constantly and consistently exposed to toxins in our air, our water, our food, and the skin products that we use. And you just don't even think about it, right? And so we live in this state of just ignorance of toxins,

but they do build up. They're almost the fourth leg of the stool of health. You have nutrition, you have exercise, you have sleep. I really believe that toxin buildup and detoxifying your lifestyle is incredibly important. And then lastly, you hit your 30s and your 40s, and many people are living a very stressed life. You have children, you have a job,

you're trying to make it financially and the amount of stress builds up, cortisol builds up, your hormones levels start going down, right, as we age. And all of that situation where you have hormonal dysfunction of that situation where you have hormonal dysfunction or dysregulation combined with high levels of stress also then start predisposing you to Alzheimer's disease and all the other diseases, right? And so I think those are the five steps you can take

to try to get Alzheimer's early. Yeah, okay, so that's super, super clear, okay? So head trauma, that's super, super clear. Okay. So head trauma, poor diet, inflammation, toxin exposure and chronic stress. Okay. If we supercharge those five things, we're going to start increasing our risk of getting sick in the future. We're going to start increasing the rates at which we age.

And I guess it's interesting that as I think about those five things, all of them are amenable to change. Absolutely. Okay. And I think that's the key thing that we're both very passionate about. Now I want to go through some of those things in detail. Okay. So I want this to be a really practical episode for people. So they, they truly understand what kind of things they can start doing immediately. Of course, we're living in a world now where there's more and more information out there. People are getting very, very confused.

And I know Darshan that you're very passionate about the 80-20 rule, aren't you? So can you explain what the 80-20 rule is? And then I think it'll be fun to start going through various things like sedentary behavior, food, et cetera, et cetera, and figure out how can we apply that rule to all of these different pillars of health. I love that.

And you know, you and I see patients all the time. I see patients almost every single day. And I find a lot of people have paralysis by over analysis of their Instagram feed, right? One, you scroll their Instagram feed, right? One, you scroll your Instagram feed and one person is shouting from the rooftops, you must focus on your VO2 max. Another person says, no, it's all about strength training.

Another person says, eat the carnivore diet, eat the vegan diet, and it gets so confusing. And in reality, there's really 20% of the information out there that we know moves the needle 80%. And if you don't get those right, it doesn't matter how much you go down the rabbit hole of supplements and biohacking, you're not going to get the effect that you need. And so we need to, we need to absolutely focus on the Pareto principle, which is the 20 80 principle.

I heard an interview you did a few weeks ago and in that conversation, I think you shared someone who came to see you in your clinic in LA, asking about the best sauna and cold plunge protocol. Yet when you looked under the hood, he was eating a lot of junk food, not moving his body and not doing the basics basically, but trying to see if sauna and cold plunge could hack his way to health. Right, exactly. I told them you could live in the sauna 24 hours a day if you want. It's

not going to negate the negative effects of the junk that you're putting inside of your body. Okay. So this, this 20 80 rule, maybe that can be a kind of underlying theme throughout this conversation today. So that in this world of increasing information, people can go, okay, well, there's a bit of debate on this, but a debate on that, but these things are going to move the needle. Okay. So, you know, when you went through your five step getting Alzheimer's plan, one of the things you mentioned was the inflammation caused by sedentary behavior. Because the inflammation caused by sedentary behavior. Okay, so talk to me about physical inactivity. Where do the real problems come and what can we start to do to start changing things?

Yeah, it's a great question. First of all, it's very important to define what is sedentary behavior, right? I think we have this intuition, like, you know, we wake up, we sit down for breakfast and we sit in our car, drive to work, and then we sit at work for four hours, and then we sit at lunch, and we're just sitting all day long, but in science, you can actually define where that stretch of sedentary behavior actually goes wrong,

and what we see is that for every hour you spend being sedentary after four hours, there's a 15% increased risk of all-cause mortality, okay? So really, the magic number is anything more than four hours is gonna be detrimental to your life. And what I tell people is, this is more important than exercising. A lot of people think that they can work eight hours

in front of a computer, go to the gym for an hour afterwards, and then that's fine. They've done everything they need to do to combat this negative aspect of being sedentary, and that's not true. The gym workout does not negate the sedentary behavior during the day, right? So what I tell people is we've also had a lot of research

into how do we counteract sedentary behavior, and the preto principle here is, it's just one easy thing. It's so easy, it's mind-blowing to people. Every 45 minutes, getting up and moving around. And that's it. It's called an exercise snack. We have lots of research out there on exercise snacks, completely negating the effect of being sedentary.

And it can be as simple as just like getting up and having a conversation with somebody or walking around the office for three to five minutes. What I tell people to do is once you start getting to that routine and habit, why not do some air squats? Why not have a pair of weights and just lift some weights for a few minutes, right? There's other things that you can do that actually can then build up into even,

not just negating sedentary behavior, but reversing the negative effects of it as well. And so 45 minutes is the key. Take an exercise snack. I actually buy some of my patients a little manual egg timer. You know those little timers you can twist and it's for cooking eggs, but you put it on your desk

and you set it to 45 and it gives off a really annoying buzz that just kind of stops everything. You're like, oh, okay, it gets you out of your state of just being in massive focus and you get up and move around and that combats the sedentary behavior. I will say one more thing on this too. I think it's so important to walk. Humans were meant to walk.

That's why we started off in a small area in Africa and we went all over the world. It was because we were walking. Our biology is meant to be constantly in motion. And so the more steps you can add to your day, the research is around 8,000 right now is the number of steps, the better. And just find little moments in the day where you can get up and move around.

Maybe do your meetings while you're walking instead of sitting there on the phone. Maybe you walk after every meal. Walking after every meal has massive effects on reducing blood glucose level as well. So getting those steps in is also important. Yeah, it's really interesting. As you talk about movement through the lens of this 80-20 principle, The two things that you brought up there are actually quite easy, cheap, if not free to do. Right now, yes, we can acknowledge that some people may feel that they don't

have time to walk because of their job or the pressures in their life. Let's just park that to the side just for the moment. But there is a feeling, isn't there, when people think about moving their body that has to be intense and severe and I've got to push myself to the max. The two things you just mentioned there don't require any of that. You're talking about walking. Yes, walking is a uniquely human movement, but this idea of getting up regularly, of course, the modern world makes it hard for people to do that. So you give them an egg timer or some of your patients. I think you also once said that

you've got an app on your computer that automatically shuts it down. Tell us about that. Yeah. There's quite a few apps now out there. The one I use called Flow app and it just makes your screen green and every 45 minutes and just puts a five minute timer on there. You can't do anything. The other hack there too is do you zoom a lot? Quite a lot, yeah. So if you don't pay for your zoom account, guess what? They kick you off in 45 minutes.

So that's a great excuse to just tell the people on the other side of the meeting like, I'm so sorry, like your zoom is kicking me off. And that gets you off the zoom and then you go do your exercise stack. Yeah, that's super interesting. And this flow app is that FLO, F-L-O-W? F-L-O-W.

FLOW. Flow app, yep. What I really like about that is that it's, you know, ultimately we can talk about the negatives of technology or the negatives of having to sit down and work in an office and on emails, whatever it might be, but that is the reality for huge amounts of people. So having some form of technology that just gives you that prompt every 45 minutes just to go, Hey, the screen's gone green again. This is my prompt to walk around the block or go to the toilet or do 10 squats, whatever it might be, is super helpful. And you know, the research on exercise stats just keeps on coming.

Even 10 years ago, there was a really good trial showing that people who moved regularly throughout the day actually had better blood sugar control than people who went to the gym after work. Exactly. I.e. what you're saying, you can't undo the negatives of eight hours continuous sitting by working out in the evening. Yes, you're going to get benefits from that working out for sure, but there are still negatives from that sedentary behavior, aren't there?

Right. Exactly. And it brings up a really good point because a lot of times I'll sit down with patients and the first thing they want me to do is program out a gym routine and they go into the nitty gritty of how many sets do I do, how many reps should I do. Then I ask them, before we talk about your gym routine, let's talk about what happens during your day. And I find they're spending eight, 10, 12 hours sedentary during the day. So I say, let's put the gym routine to the side. Obviously it's important, right?

But Pareto principle, let's focus on this one behavior that's going to improve your health 80%. And then we add the gym in after that, right? Yeah, and what's really interesting about that, what I've seen so many times with patients over the years is that if you go to the gym, which again, we're not saying is not a good thing, we're saying great, if you like the gym,

you can go ready, this is brilliant. But sometimes if we focus on that first, there's a belief, isn't there, that, oh, I'm doing my, you know, I don't need to worry about anything else. I went to the gym and did my 40 minute strength workout, which is good. But often people will go, yeah, so, you know, I don't need to worry about anything else. You know, I can just sit all day, every day, because I know I go to the gym. So it's kind of trying to just reframe movement. I mean, I don't know where you're at in life with this, Darshan. I'm 47 at the moment, OK?

And I've got to say that it is becoming so clear to me that I now, if I want to stay well, which I do, and look after my wellbeing and age well, I've just got to move my body every single day. So I'm, you know, I was sharing with you just before we started recording. I'm, I've just come off a pretty crazy six to eight months with tour and launching an international book and I'm really diving down. I'm sort of focusing in on my movement. I'm currently trying to see if I can walk 90 minutes a day. And I've done it for the last 10 days and it's sometimes it's three 30 minute walks. It'll be, you know, sometimes I'm

getting half five. I'm going for a 30 minute walk before the children get up. Then maybe at lunch time, then maybe after dinner, but it's, I feel incredible. And you know what's really interesting is that I can start to see elements of my physique changing. People don't think it's going to do that. Right. But I honestly believe that walking is, it's having a profound effects on my physique as well.

Walking is so profound in so many ways. I think not only does it help with, like you're mentioning your physique, but also as we know, it helps you to balance your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system as well. And so you'll see your HRV start improving over time. It is, and it is. Right?

And then also walking obviously gets you out in nature a lot of the times, right? If you're able to walk outside. And that's also very helpful in decreasing stress and cortisol levels. There's so many stacked benefits to walking. It's just mind blowing. Yeah. And we have very much undervalued walking, I think.

And it's free, it's successful, certainly for most people. As you say, there's all these benefits. There's creativity, problem solving, even things like constipation, right? A lot of people don't realize that actually one of the reasons that so many people struggle with constipation, of course, there's many reasons for it and there's all kinds of things that can help. But if you're not moving your body regularly and there's something about walking, there's a contralateral motion between, you know, upper and lower body as you walk, which does compress

the organs and it does have a compression effect on your bowel. Right? So again, talking about one thing that can have multiple benefits, walking is right out there. Yeah. And to your point on constipation, I could tell you, I see patients all the time with constipation and once we get them walking, it's a miracle. Like many of them don't have constipation anymore.

Yeah, they just have movement deficiency or walking deficiency. Exactly. Right? Yeah, another way to up-level walking, I'll tell you, I was trying to talk to you about this a little bit earlier, is getting a rucksack or a weighted vest.

And let me talk to you a little bit about that science too. So as we age, we know that we tend to lose balance and strength, particularly in our lower extremities, right? And what I love about the rucksack, which is basically a weighted backpack, is it adds 20, 30 pounds to your walk. And as you're hiking and you're managing this weight, and you're, especially if you're hiking through trails

with the weight, it can really help preserve your balance and your ability to move and not fall as we get older. Because as you and I both know, one of the main reasons people demise as they get older is they lose their balance and they fall, they break a bone, and then that's their, sometimes the last thing that ever happens to them, right?

And so I really like adding that. I'm 52 now, I added that into my routine when I was 50. And I really believe that's what's gonna help me stay mobile, number one, and also help me maintain balance, help me to be able to navigate terrain because I love to travel, right? I love traveling with my family. And as you know, when you travel, you walk a lot

and there's a lot of terrain. This is my attempt to maintain that well into my older years. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. So that's the 80-20 applied through the lens of movement. Right. Let's talk about food now.

Food, of course, is a very important pillar of health. In your five-step plan, point two was directly about food, but I guess point three, inflammation is also related to foods. Um, point four, you could even argue in this sort of toxin exposure, depending on what you're eating could also apply. So food is one of those key pillars. And I don't know what you're going to say here, but I think we share, I think, again, quite a similar viewpoint on foods, which I don't think enough people talk about.

So, okay, so let's come to that. Let's start off again. What is your 80-20 approach when it comes to food? Yeah. It's very similar to movement. So, I'll see a patient, they'll sit in front of me. Doctor, tell me what diet is perfect for me, right? That's always the first question. Program out my diet for me.

I'm eating vegetarian, should I be adding more protein? How many grams of protein? And I always take it back to look, I really almost don't care what diet you eat. You can have any diet that makes you feel good, as long as you eliminate ultra-processed food from your diet. So we know also through research, massive studies,

that for every 10% increase that you have over your daily caloric requirement in ultra-processed food, you also add 15% to your all-cause mortality rate. It's massive. Ultra-processed food is everything that comes in the center of the supermarket. You know, in the United States, 90% of the supermarket real estate is ultra-processed food, the entire center.

Packaging, food dyes, preservatives, things that were never really meant to be food in the first place. And it's a tremendous amount of salt, tremendous amount of chemicals, and a tremendous amount of inflammatory, tremendous amount of chemicals, and a tremendous amount of inflammatory fractures in it as well. So just eliminating ultra-processed food

can completely change your health. This, not even talking about what type of diet, right? Because what's gonna happen is you're naturally, once you eliminate ultra-processed food, you're gonna eat more produce, you're gonna have more protein in your diet. It just happens naturally. And I think that's the one thing that I think makes the 80% difference.

That's it. I completely agree with you. Okay. I don't know when, maybe a year ago, I said in one of these podcasts that I think, contrary to, I think, popular opinion, it's more important in the modern food environment to focus on what you're not eating as opposed to what you are. Okay? And people push back and go, no, it's about, you know, just small changes, bring the right foods in.

And I get that thinking, but I've got to be honest and go in my entire clinical career, if you add a punnet of blueberries to your diet once a week, right? And you change nothing else. I haven't seen much of a change, right? You can look at the study about blueberries and cognitive health. There are great studies on that, OK? I don't dispute that, but what I've seen, I've seen move the needle is when people start eliminating

the modern ultra-process stuff. And of course, as you mentioned, when you eliminate that stuff, you've got to eat something, right? So you tend to eat that good stuff. Exactly. But I think through that 80-20 lens, I think if you just focus on cutting out

the ultra-process foods or reducing them compared to where they are now, you're going to start to feel better. And that feeling of more energy, more vitality, that's the motivation you then need to continue with it. Whereas if you just add in a bit of blueberries or some strawberries or some broccoli, sure, they've got benefits, but I'm not sure the benefits are enough to outweigh the negatives from the ultra processed foods. Do you see it like that as well? 1000%. If you, you know, a lot of people's, when I ask them, let's use blueberries as

an example. How do you, how do you get your fruits? Like, Oh, I, I get blueberries every morning in my, my little container of oats that I add hot water to and that's my blueberry. I'm like, that's not even real blueberries. It's like blueberry flavored junk in there. That's not a blueberry. And I think what's happened is in our modern day society is it's become very difficult to avoid ultra processed food.

It really has. Right, because a lot of the marketing is made to trick you into thinking that the foods are healthy, that they're providing us, right? No one's marketing broccoli to you on the TV, right? They're marketing to you all these foods that are trying to convince you are healthy, but they're not.

A lot of people consume, you know, these snack bars, for example, right? And these snack bars, even though they might fill you up, they're just candy bars. You know, they're not really healthy for you. Some of them could be healthy, but most of them I find are not. And so just getting to the point again

where we are more in touch with nature, we're eating foods that were grown, they're organic, hopefully, if you can get organic foods, and just selecting foods and bringing it home and cooking it, I think that's a game changer for people, you know? And it's hard to do that nowadays. If a patient comes up to you and says, hey, listen, Dr. Shah, I've heard about the negatives of having too many ultra processed foods, but they're everywhere, right?

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All you have to do is go to bondcharge.com forward slash live more and use coupon codes live more to save 20%. Yeah, that's a great question. So I tell people, let's make it as simple as possible to start. Pick three meals that you could easily make that have no more than two or three or four ingredients and let's plan out a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner for you that has those ingredients. So for example, breakfast can be three scrambled eggs and a piece of rye toast and some steamed vegetables,

for example, pick your vegetable. For lunch, it can be a salad with a piece of salmon on it or a piece of chicken. And then for dinner, it could be a vegetable, one piece of protein, and maybe some good carbs or slow carbs, right? And so just pick that and eat that consistently as many meals as possible, right? And then let's start stair stepping you

into a healthier diet. Then let's add another easy, simple meal and another one and another one to your menu of options. And so my patients actually have on their fridge, like here are my options, here's my list of things I need to buy from the supermarket on a weekly basis, and we add to it.

It's all, you're an expert in habit formation yourself. You gotta start simple and then add and stack on top of it. And that's how we kind of shifts people's diets completely. And look, it's not fun, it's kind of boring. The foods that you're eating are boring, they're very simple. But the amount of change I see in people's health in just two weeks, it's so massive,

people get addicted to this new way of eating. Yeah, it's really helpful that you say boring. And I think if people are used to having their taste buds constantly stimulated and tantalized with lots of different flavors. Well, relative to that, yeah, it can seem boring, at least initially, but you do this for long enough and it's not that long. There's something your taste buds do start to change. And again, look, we're all on our own journey. We've all got different levels of means. We all have a different capacity to make choices in our life.

I'm at the point now, Darshan, where I generally don't want to eat out anymore. Right. If I can help it, I just want to eat at home. A, I can control what I'm eating. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to go out sometimes with your friends. There's a social aspect. I don't dispute that. But again, as I get older, I realized that, hey, if you are not being really proactive about your health, the modern world is going to drag you down a certain path. It's not easy anymore for most people to be well and healthy. You

have to actively make choices often that are in conflict with the world around you. I mean, that's a harsh reality, isn't it, for people to accept? Because I think if you look at these mythical so-called blue zones, and I know there's some sort of debate as to all kinds of things that go on in these blue zones, right? I appreciate that. At the same time, what's really interesting to me is that these long living populations are not trying to live for a long time, right? Their environment is just naturally set up in a way where good health is the easy option, whereas where you live in America, where I live in the UK, that's certainly not the case, is it? So, again, going back to what you said before, once your taste buds re-acclimatize to what whole natural food tastes like, after a while, you will choose that over the ultra processed foods.

Is that what you found yourself? 1000%. What people need to understand is the ultra-processed food is made by giant corporations that have a lot of money. And they found the right chemical mixture. They have scientists paid hundreds of thousand dollars a year to make that food hyper-palatable, to make it addicting to your taste buds and your mouth. And you have to untrain that in your biology, in your brain, right?

And it's that way on purpose, right? That's why it doesn't seem as enticing to eat a salad, right? As it does maybe a TV dinner, right? But at the end of the day, your brain does want to rewire itself into choosing natural food for sure. You know, one thing I haven't seen any research of this and this is purely an N equals one or something within my own family.

I'm very happy having the same meal. Yeah. Day after day. Right. But I actually don't mind that. I feel it eliminates choice I have to make in terms of what are we going to eat. And I wonder, it's not only the ultra-processed food and what's problematic in it for our health and well-being. I wonder if one of the hidden consequences of UPFs, ultra-processed foods, is also that it's conditioned us

process foods is also that it's conditioned us to believe that we can have something new, delicious and tasty three times a day, seven days a week. Exactly, right? I mean, what ends up happening is you get decision fatigue as your day goes on, right? And especially when you're hungry, you're at your weakest point and you make the worst possible decision. You find what's easy and tasty and that's what you go for, right? And so I think the elimination of choice is actually one of the methodologies I use to get my patients' diet to shift

because we go, like I said, super simple, only three menu items for the day, right? And some people even eat the same menu item twice a day. They'll eat their eggs and vegetables in for lunch too, which is fine, you know, we just keep it super simple. Yeah, and for some patients, I've got people, you know, friends who do this, they have a meal plan for seven days

and that seven days just rotates 52 weeks a year, right? So you're getting variety, but you know, on a Monday, this is what we have for dinner. This is what we have on a Tuesday. This is what I have on a Wednesday. And although in the modern world we think, oh, that's a bit restricting, right? It's taken away my choice. I actually think that kind of discipline leads to the freedom.

It's like, oh, I don't need to think, you know, we're going to have a variety, seven different evening meals and we just repeat. So everyone knows on Monday what we're having. Everyone knows on Wednesday what we're having. Everyone knows on Wednesday what we're having. That's what we do in our house. Is it really? It's exactly what we do in our house. What's Friday in your house?

Friday is usually the only day of the week that my wife and I, we go out and have dinner together. Okay. But you know, even the choices that we make when you go out, you really have to be able to choose the right foods when you go out to restaurants, because restaurants hide a lot of ultra-processed foods in the foods that they cook. So in general, Friday is usually protein and salad,

whether we're at home or we're out in the restaurants. In your five-step Alzheimer's plan, in number three, where you mentioned inflammation, I think you also mentioned inflammation from the gut and inflammation from the mouth. So could you just briefly explain to people what inflammation is and then sort of talk to us about gut inflammation and oral inflammation and what we can actually do to improve those things? Yeah.

So inflammation is a state where your immune system, which is there to help us fight off bacteria, viruses, toxins, is there to eliminate cancer cells from inside of our body. Our immune system is incredibly important, and unfortunately, as we age, it does become weaker. It's a process called immunosenescence that happens as we age, but the healthier you are It's a process called immunosenescence that happens as we age. But the healthier you are,

the longer your immune system will stay healthy. And why is that important? Because obviously we needed to fight off infections and cancer, et cetera. Now, what happens when you get inflammation is that your immune system is active all the time. And it's not active fighting off cancer, it's not active fighting off infections,

it's fighting off all the toxins that are being accumulated in our body. Most of those toxins come in through our gut and our gut starts in our mouth and it goes all the way down to the other side, right? And so once again, ultra-processed food has a lot of toxins in it, a lot of inflammatory factors in it.

And if you constantly assault your gut with ultra- ultra processed food, it's gonna all be absorbed and keep your immune system overactive. And when you have a lot of inflammation, what's happening is your body is just in a state where it's fighting off these toxins, but it's also destroying normal cells

and it's also creating havoc throughout areas of your body that aren't necessarily injured. And so this is why we always check for inflammation in our patients. And then when we see high inflammatory markers, the first place we look is in the gut. Wow. Yeah. How do you check for inflammation in your patients? So we use a marker called HSCRP, highly sensitive C-reactive protein,

as one of the first markers we look for. This is a super simple blood test that anyone should be able to ask their doctor for. And I'm a huge believer in checking this marker once a quarter or once every six months. Just to make sure what's happening in your lifestyle over the last few months is not causing inflammation. One area where people get a lot of inflammation from

is from their oral cavity. What happens is they haven't seen a dentist in a while, they forget to floss, and they get inflammation in their gums. And people live with inflammation in their gums, in their oral cavity, sometimes for years and years and years. And you and I both know there's a association

between poor oral health and Alzheimer's disease and cancer and also heart disease. And so we know keeping your oral cavity healthy is critical. So go to see your dentist every six months at least. Yeah, it's interesting hearing you talk Darshan. It's interesting. We started talking off about the brain, right? And the various things that many of us are doing without realizing

that are assaulting our brain and increasing the risk that our brain is going to age prematurely and then potentially get things like age-related cognitive decline. Okay? But as we sort of unpick those five areas, it's very clear as as we both know very well, that everything's connected, right? It's not as if you need one lifestyle approach for your brain and one lifestyle approach for your heart and one lifestyle approach for your inflammation, right? It's the basic foundations of what it means to create health in the body. You just mentioned the oral cavity, right? Again, people may think, oh, I've, you know, I focus on my physical health, you know, what

the hell's my tooth or my teeth got to do with my physical health? But of course, there's ample research on the relationship between oral health and brain health and gut health and mood, you know, all kinds of different things. And I guess what's always interesting for me is to kind of figure out the journey medical doctors take to get to this point because we're not trained like this, are we? Now, because a lot of my audience may not have come across you before, I think it would be really insightful for them to understand how you got to this point.

Because you wouldn't say this about yourself, I'm going to say it for you. I think you were a bit of a child prodigy. Is that true? Well, you know, I did graduate from medical school very young. I was 21 years old when I graduated from medical school and I... Can I just pause you there, right? That would be massive in the UK, but in the US, I think it's even more impressive because we don't have to do a degree before we go to medical school here. So I went to medical school when I was 18, right? So we finish like 23, you

can walk out of medical school in this country as a doctor. In the US, I think it's normally 26, 27, right? Because you do a degree first. You qualified as a medical doctor at the age of 21. When did you start training? I actually went, I left my parents home at the age of 15 to go to school. And so I was very lucky. I was trained in a system that was emulated from the UK system in Kansas City, Missouri,

University of Missouri, Kansas City. And they took the UK system as one of five schools in the United States that had a six-year medical degree program. However, you still had to go through college. So they compressed all of college into two years. Plus, they put you right into the hospital. I remember the first day of college, I was in the hospital following a doctor around. How old were you?

I was 15 years old. Wow. Yeah, with a lab coat on, following a doctor in the hospital. And yeah, so I'm so lucky that I got to do this because it's afforded me multiple times in my life that I've had multiple careers in medicine now. Yeah, I've heard you say you're in your third career at the moment within medicine. Yeah, I had my third career in medicine, right.

So what were they? What was the first one? Yeah, so the first one, as soon as I graduated from medical school, I decided I wanted to do surgery. It was just enthralling to me how you could go to the operating room and literally open someone up

and fix something or save their life or change their life. And so I was a surgeon for 10 years. I did trauma surgery, general surgery. After doing that for 10 years, I got another challenge. So I went to the Mayo Clinic and I trained in reconstructive surgery. So this is doing incredibly complicated procedures, sometimes under a microscope,

where you're reconstructing people after cancer. And so I did that for another 10, 15 years. But then I got sick because I was a stressed out surgeon. I was operating 14 to 16 hours a day. I was not sleeping. I was eating a lot of junk, just whatever was in the hospital, because I basically lived in the hospital.

You were on the Alzheimer's plan. Yeah, I was on the Alzheimer's plan, exactly, exactly. And I decided on the birth of my first son, I remember this very vividly, my wife was in the hospital, she had just birthed our son, and I went to the doctor's lounge, because we birthed our son in the same hospital where I normally operate, right?

So I go down there, and at this point, I'm 50 pounds hospital where I normally operate, right? So I go down there and at this point I'm 50 pounds overweight. I have diabetes, full-blown diabetes, hypertensive. I'm on three different medications for my blood pressure. It's still out of control. I can't get under control. And I develop an autoimmune disease. And I happened to be in the doctor's lounge as a journal about the specific autoimmune disease that I had developed and the medications you should treat it. And it said I had a 50% chance of dying, a mortality rate of 50% because of my constellation

of diseases in the next 25 years. And remember my newborn son was just upstairs. So this was a very stark reality for me. How old were you at the time? Oh, I was 42 years old. 42 years old. You're pretty sick. You've just read that you have a 50% chance of dying in the next two, two and a half decades. And your first child has just been born.

So quite a pivotal moment for you. Yeah. Yeah. It was very, it was almost as though, you know, God was giving me a sign, because this is a medical journal that I would normally never read, and it was right there on the counter after the birth of my son. And so I decided I need to make a change. But as you know, in Western medicine, we are not taught the science of disease reversal. We are not taught the science of health, really. What we're taught is to seek out a specialist

that can help solve the various problems that you have. So I'm seeing a cardiologist for my high blood pressure. I'm seeing an endocrinologist for my diabetes. I'm seeing a rheumatologist for my autoimmune disease. And no one's talking to each other. And so even myself being in Western medicine, I was conditioned to this is how we think about our body. It's just multiple different silos.

And I went down a rabbit hole of trying to fix these things and all I got was more medications. I went from eight pills to 12 pills, you know? And I said, there has to be a better way. And right about then is when Jeffrey Bland and Mark Hyman started teaching functional or root cause medicine in the United States. And I was lucky enough to be one of their first students because I was, I went out there and said, I have to go learn how to get myself

healthy. And I applied the principles of root cause or functional medicine to my own health. And I got healthy in eight months, completely off most of my medications in eight months. In eight months. Okay. This is really interesting, isn't it? This idea that Western medicine is phenomenal at certain things, but it's not great at everything. Okay. And you were a trauma surgeon for years, right? Of course, you know, trauma surgery is phenomenal. What we, I say we, the collective, we can now do, right? Yet all of that training, the fact that you were this child prodigy who went to medical school so early, none of that allowed you to fix yourself because that model which you were taught is

good for some things, but not good for disease reversal or chronic disease management, is it? Right? Exactly. So, if you're open to sharing what was the autoimmune condition that you had, and then what was it that you did in those eight months that caused your health to improve so much? Yes, absolutely can share. So, I had this really rare condition actually called Coupe de Sabre. And this is a condition where your immune system basically starts eating away at the subcutaneous tissues of your scalp.

And so you can kind of still see the remnants of this. I have no muscle underneath half of my forehead. And if you look at my skull at a CAT scan, my skull is extremely thin because this autoimmune condition was eating away at the bone of my skull. And the treatment for this is methotrexate, right? Which is a very powerful immune suppressant. So now what I've done is my body is frantically

trying to fight off all the toxins that are building up in my system. And now I've suppressed the immune system, right? With methotrexate. With methotrexate, right, exactly. And so, you know, it was a, and methotrexate as you know, has a lot of side effects, right, and I started experiencing all those side effects too.

So I got even sicker because of these medications and that's, right, isn't that the problem with Western medicine is for every problem, you don't try to reverse it, you cover up the symptoms with a pill or with a surgery. The other thing that was recommended for me for my weight was a gastric bypass procedure, which we know is one of the most risky procedures

that you can do to bypass your stomach to help you lose weight, right? A lot of people end up very sick after a gastric bypass surgery. And no one talked to me about the food I was eating, the status of my gut health, the status of my hormones, none of it until I went to learn functional medicine. So what were the key things that you did over eight months that led you to believe, oh wow,

this is working. And actually this may be the approach that I take for myself and the approach I want to start teaching my patients about. Yeah. Because once I did this, I was like, this is the kind of approach I want to start teaching my patients about. Yeah. Because once I did this, I was like, this is the kind of medicine I want to practice. This is so inspiring to me to be able to turn my own health around and turn the health around in my patients and get them off the medication. I think that should be the goal of most physicians.

Let's use the medications to help for the moment, but the goal is to eventually get off of them, right? And I think that's a helpful construct. So some of the things that I did was the 80-20 principle. I went from not moving at all to moving my body constantly and getting 10,000 steps. And back then there weren't any wearables, so I bought a pedometer actually,

and I got my 10,000 steps and I stopped eating the ultra-processed food. I started really focusing on my sleep. I was brought up in this generation where, you know, sleep was considered a waste of time, and instead I started just making sure I slept eight hours a night. And then I did some of the principles

of functional medicine. I looked at my gut health, which was a disaster, right? I was eating ultra-processed food. I had a lot of pain from my autoimmune as well. So I was taking Advil and Motrin, which is like a nuclear bomb to your gut bacteria, right? And then I stopped the immune suppressant and I checked my hormone levels.

It turned out my testosterone level was in the toilet. It was so bad. It was even, you know, we look at the testosterone levels now and the numbers have been brought down because over the last 50 years, normal levels have become lower and lower. Mine was even lower than what is considered normal now. And so, you know, I just started then seeing a functional medicine practitioner that could really help me improve my hormone levels, get my gut fixed, And that made all the difference.

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One of the main causes of a subtype of Alzheimer's is lack of trophic factors. Trophic factors are the hormones that our body secretes to keep us in a state of growth and health, right? And testosterone is, for men, is the most important trophic factor. For women, they have estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone as well, very, very important. And unfortunately, we're genetically programmed to have these levels start going down

after the age of about 40 or so. Women go through menopause, men go through manopause or andropause. That happens genetically. But what happens now in modern society is that comes sooner and sooner and sooner. Sometimes even I see patients now in their 20s with hormone levels

that are in the toilet, right? And so, and that's because of our lifestyle, our sedentary lifestyle, our lack of good nutritious food and micronutrients in our food has caused this to happen. And so chronic stress, chronic stress. Yes, exactly. One for hormones. It was the fifth one of your five step plan. I think, yes, exactly. Big one for hormones, isn't it? It's a big one, right? I mean, it was the fifth one of your five-step plan. I think, yes, we've talked about chronic stress through the lens of brain health, but you can also look at our hormonal levels and the kind of hormonal havoc that many people are living through these days, men and women. I would say chronic stress is one of the key drivers.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so, you know, a lot of times the patients will come to me and I'll show them their hormone levels are a problem. And the immediate question is what hormones are going to put me on? Before we put you on hormones, what we do is we manage their stress levels primarily, and then also look at all the other things that we talked about. And I would say five times out of 10, we can make significant improvements just by doing those things. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, if you talk about a man and testosterone, a lot of people's

mind will jump to libido or sex drive. Okay. But what you just said there is again, not that libido and sex drive is not important, but you're talking about this on a completely different level. You're talking about these hormones and testosterone has been a trophic factor to signal growth to the brain. It's really expanding that, I think, very narrow view that many people have in society of hormones like testosterone. Exactly. Yeah. You know, it's a biological signal that works on almost every organ of your body. And we could argue the most important organ of your body is your brain, right? And

so testosterone, your thyroid hormones for women, estrogen, progesterone, extremely important. Yeah. It's really inspiring hearing your journey and hearing A, just how sick you got, but B, how quickly and successfully you were able to reverse a lot of these disease processes in your body. Yeah. I'm also interested though, Darshan, as I think about your medical career and the fact that you're now on your third stage of your medical career.

You're a surgeon for those first two stages, okay? Trauma surgeon, then a reconstructive surgeon. Even though you no longer operate, that's true, right? Isn't it? Yeah. Even though you no longer operate and your focus now is on reversing disease, improving longevity, creating health in your patients, I'm interested as to what did surgery teach you? Okay, because being a surgeon is quite incredible really to be able to open up a human body, see what's under the

skin and do things that have a massive outcome for your patients, right? So I'm interested, what did you learn from surgery about the human experience, about the human body that you now apply with your patients even though you're no longer operating? Yeah, this is a fantastic question. So I would say surgery teaches you or taught me a tremendous respect for this, for a human biology. It is incredible what evolution or God, whatever your views are, has built.

It's absolutely incredible how resilient it is. The people that we brought back from death, basically, using surgery, it's mind-blowing, right? The resilience of our human body is more than anyone could ever really imagine until you've actually done some of these trauma surgeries or cancer surgeries and see how we can respect massive portions of a cancerous esophagus, for example,

and replace it with intestine. And it just blew my mind. But then the flip side is also true. The human body is also extremely fragile and susceptible to constant micro traumas, okay? And micro traumas is the exposure to toxins in our food, ultra processed food, sugar, sedentary behavior, because what you're doing at a cellular level cannot be turned around with surgery, right?

And so it just gave me a tremendous respect that we have to take care of every cell in our body from a very, very young age and moving forward by having all these good habits. And look, thank God we have surgery, right? Thank God we have the entire Western medical system. If you get hit by a truck or if you get diagnosed with cancer or you have a heart attack, that

system is incredibly advanced to take care of those disaster situations. But hopefully, if anything, you learn to take care of that system in the first place so you don't need advanced medical therapies. It's fascinating hearing that, hearing your reflections that I guess heightened appreciation for the miracle that is the human body. You had a look under the hood in a way that most of us never get to see. It's quite interesting to reflect on that. I guess for me, it also ties into one of the things you're passionate about today. You talk a lot about that we should all be the CEO of our own health, right? So we need to be in charge of our health and

empowered by measuring things, tracking things, seeing our biomarkers. We'll talk about all of those things in just a moment. But it's interesting to me to sort of tie that back to, you know, your days as a surgeon where you look under the hood, you see the fragility and the magic of the human body, yet most of us can't see that. And it's not dissimilar with our biomarkers, right? We can't see that. We it's not dissimilar with our biomarkers, right? We can't see that. We can't see what our blood sugar is doing. We can't see what our liver enzymes are doing, right? We can't see what our VO2 max is, right?

So do you think that also plays in to why you're so passionate about measuring things and tracking them. Yes, I mean exactly. Now we have the science, and we've had the science for decades, but now it's actually allowed to be distributed to where people can actually see their own biomarker results. And now everyone has the ability to look under the hood. Everyone can see what's going on in their biology by just learning a few simple numbers and taking control of those.

I talk about becoming the CEO of your own health or the boss of our own biology because what does a CEO do? He or she runs a company and they look at numbers every single day, sometimes every hour. They look at quarterly reports, they look at yearly filings and they're managing their business based on what do those numbers show? Everyone now has ability to do that.

And so once you gain the understanding of how to do that, how to get these numbers and what they mean, and there's not a lot of them. There's probably like 10 numbers that I have my patients follow. It's massively empowering because remember I talked about the resilience of the human body? Your numbers change 20 to 30 years before you start feeling symptoms of disease, right? By the time

you feel symptoms, usually there's a lot of damage done, right? And what's also magical about these numbers is they're not just on-off numbers, not just zero and one, we have levels. So you can aim for optimal levels. You can follow and track your progress, just like a CEO would look at their profitability number over time and they continue to try to optimize and optimize to get it to a good number. We can do that now. What would you say to someone who's listening

and says to you, hey, Darshan, listen, I get what you're saying. At the same time, I don't think that's what being a human is about. Being a human is about experiencing life, not obsessing over what's under the hood, not giving myself health anxiety when I see numbers going up or numbers going down.

I don't want to live like that. What would you say to that individual? Yeah, I would say that might have been a good model 60 years ago, but unfortunately, it's not a model that you can realistically live under right now. And so, look, I totally realize health anxiety is a real thing and I have patients with health anxiety

and so we don't throw a lot at them, but this is the era of medicine that needs you to participate in it. Because if you're not participating in your own health and you're outsourcing your health to your primary care doctor, who has 15 minutes with you once a year, maybe checks two or three things if you're lucky,

you will head down a path of early disease, Alzheimer's potentially, cancer, heart disease. The incidence of all of these is increasing rapidly. You know, in the Western world, 33% of people over the age of 85 have dementia, one out of every three. Who wants to live to 85 if you have a one in three chance of having dementia and not recognizing your friends and family, and that's a long drawn out course that eventually leads to death, right?

No one wants to do that. You don't have to be in that category at all if you can take some personal responsibility of your health and it's not that hard. You know, everyone, almost everyone has a car, right? And you're constantly looking at your dashboard of your car, you know, making sure that the check engine light is not on.

You know, a lot of people do their own oil changes. They're doing maintenance all the time. We spend more time and energy on our motor vehicles than we do on our own biology, right? So I think it's necessary now because unfortunately, the medical system is not built to handle the volume of chronic disease right now. And your only chance is to be able to detect it early and reverse the trend before it becomes a problem. It's a really interesting point. You just, this idea that, hey, that more intuitive way

of living, not looking under the hood, just experiencing life and enjoying life, that approach may well have worked for the bulk of human evolution. But as you started off this conversation with that five step Alzheimer's plan, that was a question that I asked slightly tongue in cheek, but what was interesting is you went through that five step plan. I was thinking, wow, this is a plan that many people are unintentionally following. Exactly. Right?

And so it was interesting to say or to think and reflect and go in this modern world where it's hard to make the healthy choice, if you're not tracking or taking ownership or I like what you said, being the boss of your own biology, who's going to do it for you? Like no one is and that's, you know, people don't really get that these, the US healthcare system, the UK healthcare system, these things are built and structured around disease management. Once you've got sick or something's wrong, these things come in to help, right? Their whole DNA is not about health creation, prevention. Do you know what I mean? It just isn't. And so if you don't take ownership of your health,

and there's so much info out there today to help people do that, I think you're sort of rolling the dice. Exactly. You may get away with it. You might be one of the lucky ones who can be healthy in this environment, but you may not. Right, exactly.

I always give this example to my patient in the United States about health insurance, right? I always say, do you have house insurance, like fire insurance for your house? And they say, yeah, for sure. And do you expect your fire insurance to pay for cleaning your house, vacuuming your carpets? Of course not.

Insurance, and even the health system, was never built to maintain your house or your body. It was there to handle disaster scenarios, right? Now chronic disease has become a disaster scenario. People have massive amounts of chronic disease and end stages of chronic disease, right? But that's because we've let it get there by not maintaining our house.

It's like having a home for 30 years and not putting a coat of paint on it, not doing anything to it to keep it viable, right? It's the same analogy. Yeah. I keep thinking about to you as a surgeon and I don't know, looking under the skin and seeing someone's liver or seeing someone's bowel and seeing the health, you know, does it look healthy and rosy? Possibly not if you're operating on them or does it look necrotic or so the blood flow is lacking, whatever it might be. Okay. And it just makes me think how many of us don't take action,

right? So they want to take action and they don't. And there's many reasons for that. One of the reasons I believe is because we don't have a direct relationship or we think we don't have a direct way of seeing what we're doing and how it's impacting us. So just as a thought experiment, if you were drinking alcohol and you could also look at your liver, like a surgeon. And you could see when I have three glasses of wine with my meal or half a bottle of wine with my meal, because I'm celebrating something. And if you could see that your liver suddenly started to change shape or contracts it, it

might actually change your behavior, right? But obviously we can't do that, but we can do that with some things, can't we? it might actually change your behavior, right? But obviously we can't do that, but we can do that with some things, can't we? Yes, we can. Do you know what I mean? It's quite interesting, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah.

It's such a great example of the liver, by the way, because I've seen the liver over a thousand times, maybe over 10,000 times doing surgery. And it's incredible how many people you look at their liver and it's infiltrated with fat, has a million fatty cysts in it from alcohol, from eating lots of sugar and having metabolic disease. And the liver, as we both know,

is an extremely resilient organ. You're not gonna feel this until you need a liver transplant, right? And so the liver is a perfect example of how your body can mask the damage that you're doing to it for decades. But I will tell you now that we have blood tests, as you and I both know, AST, ALT, these are some of the basic blood tests that I think everyone should follow.

They're your liver enzymes, and they do go up years and years and years before you start developing severe liver damage. And if you were following your AST and ALT, and say you were a half a bottle of wine with dinner drinker, and you started seeing it tick up to 60, 70, 80, that's an indicator in your brain, like wait a minute, my drinking

is really doing something to my liver, I need to do something, right? Yeah, that's interesting on so many different levels. Okay, before you said that our normal ranges of hormones like testosterone have changed, not because what human biology needs to function has changed because the modern world and modern humans are so unhealthy relative to how we were that

in a first common normal range has had to change to reflect normality. Exactly. Normality though is probably not what we're looking for when you say 80 to 90 percent of the Western world, depending on which country you're in, has some degree of metabolic dysfunction. But a lot of people don't realize that our liver tests like AST and ALT have also shifted their normal ranges to reflect an unhealthy population. And there's another point I wanted to just bring up there because a lot of the kind of modern fancy therapies that hopefully we'll talk about later on are not available to everyone. Okay. There is a cost element to them. And I know you, you recommend that people track

various biomarkers. There's actually a really good free PDF on your website for people. I downloaded it last night when I was preparing for this conversation and it's, it's great that you provide that resource for free. Just tell people how they get that. Cause I think it will be super useful for people. Yeah, just go to my website, drshaw.com forward slash biomarker. And I have a PDF that I created of all the biomarkers that everyone should follow. There's not a lot of them.

I think it was 10 and normal ranges and why. I did it last night, but it's really good. So maybe we won't get time to go through all of them, but let's just break it down into super accessible and cheap ones that are readily available to people all over the world. And then we could talk about the more fancy and newer ones that maybe not everyone has access to. ALT and AST, these liver enzyme tests are basic, cheap bog standard tests that you can probably get in any country around the world.

Absolutely. All the biomarkers that I have my patients follow are in that category. Every single doctor in every country, I don't care what country you are, can check these. So what are some of the, okay, so the liver function tests we've just mentioned, what else? Okay. Let me divide it up into a few categories if you don't mind. Okay. So metabolic health we talked about, right? So metabolic health has to do with how your body's handling sugar.

We know that if your blood sugar level is too high for too long, your insulin levels go high and then you get insulin resistant with them becomes diabetes. So in the metabolic health bucket, I'm always looking at hemoglobin A1C and AST, ALT, and triglyceride levels. Those are the four markers there.

Hemoglobin A1C is a really good example of one of these biomarkers that everyone, like if I see you walking down the street, I should be able to say, Dr. Chatterjee, what's your hemoglobin A1C? And you should be able to tell me what it is. You should know this number. I agree.

I probably try mine every three months. Yeah, so do I. Yeah. Because it changes. As you know, like as you travel a lot, it can shoot up because you lost certain control of your diet, right? Well, it's that motivating tool, right? It's the idea that, oh, because it's a range and it changes in real time, right? So it's a two to three month average of your blood sugar. one of the most, arguably one of the most important metrics to look at. If you see it creeping up, you can take action, right? Instead of waiting a year or two years, you can see it after three, oh wow, what was I doing over the last three months? Oh, maybe

I'll make some changes and recheck it in three months. So I find it very empowering. Okay, so HbA1c, cheap test available to everyone in most countries. Okay. Exactly. Also triglycerides are available to everybody. AST, ALT, super cheap, easily available. On the inflammation side, really there's two markers, but the one I focus everyone is HSCRP that we talked about earlier. C-reactive protein.

This is a marker that should be as close to zero as possible, because that means that your inflammation is under control in your body. Once it starts going over one or two, the problem is your immune system is becoming overactive, and we talked about the negative consequences of that. The other group of biomarkers I look at are cardiac biomarkers, okay?

And so these are heart disease markers that we know are tied to your risk of potentially developing a heart attack, which is the number one killer of men and women throughout the world. The marker I like to look at there is APO-B. APO-B, you know, everyone's so used to talking about LDL and VLDL and HDL, but the reality of the situation is

APO-B now is the newer biomarker that is also available everywhere now. And it's a collection of all of the bad forms of cholesterol that could potentially cause heart disease. And so we look at that marker as well. Now, I want to be very clear. Having a high cholesterol number, a high APO-B number, doesn't automatically mean you're gonna get heart disease.

Heart disease is a combination of multiple factors, including inflammation, poor metabolic health, cholesterol, and damage to your blood vessel wall, which happens with high levels of stress and high blood pressure. So this is something that everyone should also track. And then lastly, after the age of about 35, start tracking your hormone levels. Men and women should look at their

hormone levels and they can drop very quickly in people without even knowing it. And so this is something that also should be looked at. Yeah. Go back to A1C for a minute. HPA1C, this average blood sugar marker. What level do you like to see in your patients? We aim for 5.2 or lower. 5.7 in the United States diagnosis you with prediabetes, 6.5 with diabetes. And I don't know if you know this or not, but in the UK, the levels are slightly different. It's you have to hit six in the UK

to be diagnosed with prediabetes. And so you have to hit six in the UK to be diagnosed with pre-diabetes. And so you have the crazy situation where people still today, there will be people in the UK today who come back with an A1C of 5.9 and it's been reported as normal. Yeah. This is the fallacy of the whole system, right? Yeah. Because you can't unlock the medical therapies until you cross that threshold. Yeah. Right?

But the reality is you need to be doing so much if you're at 5.9. It's a problem. And how did you decide on 5.2? I decided on 5.2 because what I saw in my patients is that's when they felt the best, they were at their healthiest. There's also a lot of research showing that if you look at people that have the best metabolic health, it's at 5.2, another marker, serum insulin level,

that's the first thing that changes if you're developing diabetes. Most people with a 5.2 hemoglobin A1C will have a fasting serum insulin under 10, which is extremely good as well. So it just correlates well with good metabolic health. Yeah. A lot of the tests that you mentioned there are readily available to most people. I will say in the UK, depending on where you live, HSCRP unfortunately is still not a standard test for many people, unfortunately, nor is ApoB, although I hope that's starting

to change. In terms of newer, more fancier blood tests, should we say, that maybe people don't have access to... You've got a pretty phenomenal clinic called Next Health, which I had the privilege of attending when I was in LA in November. You show me around and I'll tell you, if I'm completely honest, one of the things that I reflected on after going to your clinic was, wow, this is what the future of healthcare looks like to me. Okay?

Yes, the testing and the therapies that were available, but it wasn't just that actually. It was also the fact that it was a really desirable space to be in. It's a beautiful building, smiling reception staff, a bit like, I don't know, a bit like an Apple store in some ways. Now, was that intentional? Did you think about when you were creating Next Health, the whole experience of health, or were you just thinking about the therapies? You know, when I wanted to practice this type of medicine, I sat down, I wrote down everything wrong

with the current healthcare system, and one of them was exactly that. No one wants to go to the doctor. You wait forever, they don't have enough time for you. It's in the 10th floor of some building with furniture from the 70s, a glass wall between you and the receptionist who's mad that you're even there.

It's like a horrible experience, you know? And so, yes, absolutely. I wanted to create something where people were inspired to take control of their health, right? And so the other thing that was wrong with medicine too, in my view, is I think patients are kept totally in the dark about what's being checked, what their diagnosis is, all of it.

It's like we're the doctors, we'll give you the information that we think you're allowed to have. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's the we're the doctors, we'll give you the information that we think you're allowed to have. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's the same ridiculous philosophy that doesn't allow patients to even check their own blood tests, right?

I mean, now this is changing in that it states where you can go to any lab and get your own blood tests. So you finally have your own data, but it's crazy. And so- Well, one of the arguments there, and I'm just going to put it to you to see your perspective. One of the arguments that some doctors would make is that, well, patients aren't qualified to interpret that data, right? So if patients start ordering their own tests, they're going to create unnecessary anxiety

and they're going to start doing things that perhaps aren't going to help them, right? So do you recognize that as a valid case or do you totally rebut that? I mean, to be honest, I totally rebut it. I think, I think we need to know that we live in a very different society now where people have incredible access to information, right? And people are able to take their blood tests and now even upload them to ChatGPT and get really good information.

I mean, obviously don't do things that are medical that ChatGPT recommends without consulting with a doctor just to make sure, but no one had that access to information and podcasts like our podcasts and the internet, people are smart enough to figure out what's going on. It's almost like saying, you know, don't give people information about their,

about what's going on in their home because they won't understand it. So then like, obviously like, you know, if something's broken in your house, you can look up a YouTube video, not a fix it now. And then you decide, are you able to do these things or not? Or should you call a plumber or get a consultation? Yeah, and of course, look, can there be some downsides?

Of course. But that's the same with most things in life. There are upsides and downsides, right? We can't withhold information for people in this era of information to try and keep things the way that they were in the past. I mean, things have moved on and, you know, I run training courses for doctors with my colleague A.M. Panja.

We have a course called prescribing lifestyle medicine. We've trained thousands of healthcare professionals around the world now. And one of the things I say in that course is, guys, you've got to recognize that we're living in an era now where your patient may come in knowing more about their condition than you do. Right? Instead of pretending that's not the case,

you've got to embrace that. 100%. Because actually, you know what? If you're suffering with something and you're not getting answers from your doctor, you are incentivized to spend hours and hours reading, researching, listening to podcasts. So it is entirely plausible

that sometimes a patient is going to go in knowing more than their doctor. And when I'm training a doctor, I say, guys, it's okay to say in knowing more than their daughter. And when I'm training a daughter, I say, guys, it's okay to say, I don't know, right? If you don't know something that your patient's read about, be honest, say, hey, you know what? I've not come across that, but let me look into that. Why don't I give you an appointment in two weeks? I'll do some research and we can have a conversation about it rather rather than going, oh, that's a load of rubbish. Which is often what happens.

So, I agree. I think whilst I recognize there could be some downsides in some cases, I think people are going to do it, right? It's like doctors saying, oh, you know, you shouldn't Google your symptoms. How realistic is that? We Google everything in our lives. Why would you not Google? It seems to show it can cause problems, but people are gonna do it.

And this whole point about testing and empowerment, I think is really interesting. So when I went to your clinic in November in LA, one of the things we checked for was my BPA levels. Yes. Okay. So I appreciate this is probably for most people, not a test that they commonly get,

but on a personal level, Darshan, and I think I shared this with you a few months ago. I know about the research on microplastics. Okay. I'm familiar with it cognitively. Okay. And I do my bit, you know, but you guys drew my BPA level and when you sent me the results, it was in the red. Right.

So by, I know the science, I know the research in my rational mind, but it wasn't enough to force me to take drastic action. I'm telling you, since I saw my BPA levels in the reds, I have not had a single hot drink from a takeaway cup. I've rarely drunk out a plastic bottle. I think I did it once on a flight and it was a small bottle, right? Even on the train this morning down to London, I was thirsty.

I thought, no, no, I'm waiting. I'm not having it, right? So the point I'm trying to make is that testing and understanding, not what's happening in general science, but what's happening in your own body is one of the most powerful motivators for change. Yeah, because now it ties back to you.

It's not just like a concept in the stratosphere. It's actually, you know, I think a lot of people have heard about microplastics now, and it can be overwhelming for people. I get that. But at the same time, until you, you're not gonna feel the effects of microplastics. So it's until you do a blood test

and you see it's in the red, now you know it's causing a problem. And just five days ago, a paper was published showing microplastic accumulation inside of arteries that go to the brain and the heart as well. And so these microplastics are actually making their way into our circulation and into the walls of our arteries causing a higher risk of strokes and heart attacks. So we have to do something about this. There's some researchers who are saying, you know, because you mentioned, look,

cholesterol is one market that we tend to look at as a risk factor for heart disease. But, and while there's a bit of controversy on cholesterol, it's not the only thing. There are other things, inflammation, how much damage has been to your blood vessels, how much plastic is going, your blood vessels, how much plastic is being accumulated inside your body. So, can you just, I mean, explain a little bit about microplastics and VPA and what these things are and why people might want to consider reducing their exposure to them? Right. So microplastics is the amount of plastics that our body is actually absorbing into our bloodstream.

Okay. And so these are plastics that either come in a micro or a nano scale, which means that they can actually be absorbed through our gut, through our skin, et cetera. In the plastics industry, they also add chemicals to these plastics to make them more stiff or to make them more pliable. And these chemicals, like BPA is one of them, they leach out from the plastic

into whatever it is that you're consuming, especially when it's being heated. Heat is a major culprit, okay? So unfortunately, we live in a plastic society now, there's plastic all around us. The trick here is to number one, try not to consume your food through plastic. So Tupperware should go away, like you said,

you know, plastic water bottles. All of this stuff needs to be replaced with glass or some other type of container like a ceramic containers. But the number one thing that you should really not do is paper cups are lined with plastics. Having hot coffee in a paper cup is a massive problem. And so a lot of people do this, right? Okay. So we're talking about these microplastics, but again, without going into a deep dive on them, what are some of the health consequences of people potentially from having high levels of BPA in their blood

or having high levels of microplastics in their body? Why should people go, you know, because someone's probably thinking this, someone's probably listening to this right now whilst drinking a coffee from a take away cup. They've got it, they're in the sun, they're walking to work, and they're enjoying the podcast so far. And now they're like, wait a minute,

what are they talking about? So just at least some top line of why people might want to reconsider that. Absolutely. So number one is that we don't really know all the effects yet. But I will say that it's fairly convincing when you see studies showing

microplastic accumulation in blood vessels, right? Because we know that one of the other root causes of all disease is our blood vessels not being able to work very well or to get clogged, right? And so just in a macro level and also a microvascular level, which we're going all the way back to Alzheimer's, they did a study on brains of people who had expired, right? So people with Alzheimer's and strokes,

people that were at risk for Alzheimer's and strokes, and then people just completely normal. The people that had strokes and Alzheimer's disease, they had 50 times the amount of plastic as the ones that had no risk, okay? And so there's definitely a lot of correlation between this plastic accumulation in our brains and also in every organ in our body and disease.

The other chemicals also have, we have studies showing hormone disruption, more inflammation, et cetera. So, you know, I think it's important that we, the Pareto principle applies here really, really well. There's 20% of the actions that you can do to detoxify 80% of your life. And if you just do a few simple actions like you did,

you can stay healthier a lot longer by avoiding these toxins. Yeah. It's interesting, you said there's a lot of correlations and some people will then go, oh, there's no proof. So why would I change? But you could flip it and go, well, wait a minute. Um, where's the proof that this stuff is safe? We don't have that yet. So why not adopt the precautionary principle whilst the research has been done? And you know, when you start looking at this, we know that there's microplastics now in amniotic fluids. So new fetuses are literally bathing in microplastics.

In men's testicles, we're seeing microplastic accumulation. I mean, it's pretty stark. And on one level, it's like, I don't think this is a good thing, right? There's some sort of links with insulin resistance as well that I've seen. So for me, on a personal level, all I needed to see was my level in the reds. And when I'm next at your clinic later on this year, I will be planning to do a recheck.

Because then if I recheck and it's gone out the red through the yellow and into the green, which I'm touched what I'm hoping it is, that is then added motivation. Right. Right, because of course it's tempting. You don't have your metal cup with you and you a bit tired. You fancy a coffee in a nice coffee shop. And do you know what I mean? You're constantly being tempted.

Right. But that is one thing I haven't done yet. I'd rather not have coffee than drink it in a plastic cup. Me too. Because of that blood test, right? So that's super interesting. What's your take on wearables? I see you, I think you have an aura ring on.

Yes, I do. I've been wearing a Woot band now since, I think July last year. So, maybe nine months now. I'll share my experiences with in just a moment, but what is your take on wearables? Are you a fan or are you against them? So part of my talk track with patients about becoming the CEO of their own health or the boss of their own biology is not just blood tests. There's a few other simple things that you can empower yourself with on a day-to-day basis that can completely change the course

of your health. And those are, number one is a wearable, right? Number two is a special kind of scale called a bioimpedance scale. You can buy these for 25 US dollars. And it sends a little electrical signal to your body every time you step on the scale and gives you your skeletal muscle mass and your fat mass. I always tell people, I don't care what your weight is,

but I want to know what your skeletal muscle mass is week after week after week. And lastly is the blood pressure cuff, because you and I both know that blood pressure elevation is usually ignored for sometimes up to a decade before anything is done about it, right? So I know I give you a longer answer to your question about wearables, but let me tell you why I love wearables.

You can get them for less and less money now. In fact, you can start, there's some Fitbits now that are less than $50 that people can buy. And this gives you a few really important numbers. One of them is your amount of movement you've had throughout the day. So we had a lot of discussion about number of steps. Another one is the HRV, which I think is a biomarker

that you know in medicine, we don't even look at that, right, but which I think is a biomarker that you know in medicine, we don't even look at that, but it's such an important biomarker of health. And lastly is a sleep score. And so another marker we rarely talk about in medicine, in Western medicine, but something that people can really improve on. And what I love about all of these markers is there's something that you can do

almost every single day that can make it a tiny bit better. And just doing a 1% improvement day after day adds up to a 3800% change over the course of a year. It's massive. So just getting a few more steps in, just trying to optimize your sleep so you get better deep sleep, doing some breath work once a day

for even just two minutes can help improve your HRV. This is all data that you can now get on yourself that once again, no one's gonna care about this more than you do, right? And so I think it's important. Let's just go on blood pressure for a moment. In terms of home monitoring, of course there's been blood pressure cuffs

that we've been able to buy from pharmacies for decades now. Are there any more modern, less intrusive ways to measure our blood pressure that you're using with your patients? I mean, I wish I could use this because it's available in the UK and it's not available yet in the US. I'm hoping it will be soon.

But there's a company called Actia that now has a continuous blood pressure monitoring device. Just a little wristband, little light, and it gives you your blood pressure every, I think it's 15 minutes throughout the day. And that is an incredible device. And I have personal experience because it's what finally allowed me

to get my blood pressure under control. So I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, I'm looking into that. Actually, I haven't got one yet, but I'd love to try that. I have been looking at that for a while. Okay, so that was blood pressure. One thing on the blood pressure I will say too,

I think it's really important for people to know. Younger and younger ages now are having high blood pressure. I've seen people in my clinic, even in adolescence, have high blood pressure. So I think that even after the age of 30, it's important for people to get a blood pressure cuff and measure it at home on themselves once every one to three months.

If you're doing it once a month and it's coming out normal, normal, normal, you can kind of expand that. But in Western medicine, especially in the United States, this happens all the time. People only get their blood pressure measured once a year at their doctor's office. And we know the research is stoned in massive trials

that for every year that you spend, that your blood pressure is over 130 over 80, you're adding one to 2% mortality to the end of your life. And so you gotta keep your blood pressure under 130, over 80, for as long of your life as you can. And if you ignore it for 10, 15, 20 years, you don't have the opportunity to do that. And blood pressure is also another way

that you can cause yourself Alzheimer's disease. As we know, it's a massive contributed Alzheimer's disease. What's really interesting is that what we're looking for is trends, right? So our blood pressure is variable throughout the day, isn't it? So a patient could check once every three months, but it could of course be that they're really anxious and their last measurement was up and they're scared of getting a heart stack or a stroke. So that fear is playing in when they're checking it, right? Which of course can artificially elevate your blood pressure. A lot of people are familiar with the term white coat hypertension,

the idea that when you go and see your doctor for your blood pressure check, it is artificially higher because of the rush in getting there, the stress, the waiting, that oh my God, he's going to measure it. Maybe you put him in a medicare, whatever it might be. This is where these more modern wearables potentially play an important role. So you're not really thinking about it. You're just going on about your daily life. And it's just in the background checking what your real blood pressure actually is. Exactly.

You know, having access to this continuous blood pressure measurement, it's completely changed the way you think about blood pressure because now it's not just a static measurement. It's looking at the area under the curve of how high was the blood pressure, because now it's not just a static measurement, it's looking at the area under the curve of how high was the blood pressure, when was it high, and how much of the day was actually spent in that blood pressure range. But presumably then we're gonna need new guidelines, right? Because the guidelines at the moment are based upon,

I guess, one-off readings, right? If we're measuring it every 15 minutes, we're gonna have to have new guidelines saying, on average, what we wanna see is 80% of the time we wanna under that, do you know what I mean? So again, our guidelines are gonna have to evolve to reflect the newer technology. Right, but here's the beauty of this too though.

Just like I see you're wearing continuous glucose monitor, another one of my favorite devices on the planet, you're gonna be able to see your own blood pressure, just like you're seeing your own glucose, and make behavior change, right? And so you'll know, what are the moments throughout the day that your blood pressure is high? Why did that happen?

Was it when you forgot to take your exercise snack while working, right? And then it'll be further reinforcement for you to make those behavior changes. Just say the continuous glucose monitor helps you make behavior change on your eating. It's interesting, when I went on your podcast, I think last November, Darshan,

one of the things I said to you, one of the things I wrote about in my latest book is this idea of reliances. And through the lens of health wearables, what I said and what I still stand by is that I believe wearables are a fantastic tool. At the same time, I acknowledge that for some people they seem to really stress them out, right? And we mentioned health anxiety, right? So I've got people within my family who get really stressed out with the thought of any reading, right? And so one of the things I've got people within my family who get really stressed out with the thought of any reading, right? And so, one of the things I've said many times is that, if you are overly reliant on that

device, if you can't live without it, if the data starts to really stress you out, so you're not getting empowered, it perhaps isn't the right tool for you at this moment in time. But I'm thinking more and more about that. And through the lens of root causes, right? Because we're all about getting to the root cause of a patient's problems. I would also encourage people to think about the roots cause of their health anxiety, right? Why is it that a reading of your blood sugar is causing you anxiety? I would encourage people to go, there is an opportunity for growth there. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely.

Yeah. Because that's a reason why it's causing anxiety. Did your dad die of a heart attack? And you're, do you know what I mean? But there's something to explore there. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And sometimes it takes a mindset shift. And I think Net Net, giving it a try

and trying to make that mindset shift, if you are one of these people that have health anxiety, I think Net Net is a positive. At least you gave it a shot, right? And no one's saying you have to wear this all the time. I take mine off when I'm traveling sometimes because I just don't want to know. Like I know I'm not going to sleep, right?

So I personally, you know, what I used to do with my CGM for a while is I just wear it because they last for two weeks. This continuous glucose monitor. And I probably wear it four times a year, once a season, right? I'm, as I said before, I'm on the back of quite a busy time. And so for me, I wore it for the last two weeks. I just put this on the back of quite a busy time. And so for me, I work for the last two weeks, I just put this one on the last night. I'm at the moment really focusing on my health and wellbeing. And I personally find that this really helps me make really dialed in choices.

I'm now getting back on track, nailing my routines, my rhythms, my structures. So again, it's about knowing yourself, isn't it? Why are you such a fan of these continuous glucose monitors? I've seen them completely change people's health because metabolic health is an extremely important root cause of a lot of other things that are going wrong in people's symptomatology. And I'll say, we already talked about as root cause of a lot of other things that are going wrong in people's symptomatology.

And I'll say, you know, we already talked about as root cause of disease, but way before that, I've seen people have brain fog, inability to lose weight, joint pains, inability to sleep, all of it due to having metabolic health disturbances. And once they put that continuous glucose monitor on, and they use it as a catalyst to make some behavior changes

and a catalyst for learning, they perform the actions that not just make the numbers and the continuous glucose monitor better, but their symptoms go away. And now they're able to lose weight, they're able to think clearer, they're able to sleep better. It's just been such a miraculous device, I think, in the modern world that we now have access to,

that people can once again take personal agency over their own health and their choices. How often do you wear yours? Same exact as you. So I like the two week time period. A lot of times when I get back from travel, like after this trip to London, I'll put it on for a couple of weeks

just to kind of dial myself back in because I've been gone for a week. Have you ever worn one on a flight? Yes. Oh, yes. It's not good. Well, in terms of invisible stressors, I don't think people realize how much of a stressor travel and plane travel can be on their bodies.

And I think it was on that trip when I went to LA last November, when I first met you, I had a CGM on the flights and I was shocked by how high my sugars went. I was actually eating really well, but I think, you know, again, I need to test this again, but I think the flights from what I understand, there's all kinds of fluid changes in your body. I think it's pro-inflammatory. It's a stressor on the body. And of course, stress increases cortisol, which increases blood glucose. And so for me, it was like, wow, this is quite interesting. Okay. Even the flight alone is a stressor on my physiology that I'm picking up with my CGM. So I found it really, really interesting.

Right, I've had the same experience when I travel and what I changed because of that is I noticed that if I eat the meal that they gave me in the flight, not only my glucose shoot up, but it would stay up for hours. And I was like, I'm gonna to fast on every plane trip now. It's just not worth eating the plane food. I mostly do that or I'll take some stuff myself,

but I will, in fact, on that flight, you know, I'm a very chatty person. So I was getting up when I was chatting to the cabin service director. And he basically said, the stuff that needs to be added to plain food so that you find it tasty at altitudes, if you knew you wouldn't touch anything on him. And he doesn't, he brings his own food.

He's been flying for like 25 years. He also doesn't drink sparkling water or any fizzy drinks because he said, we all know as air hosts and air hostesses that that bloats you. He said, you know what happens to those crisp packets where they all puff out? That's what's happening inside our guts as well. It was quite interesting that conversation. I already wasn't eating plain food anyway, but that made me even more convinced. That makes total sense because it just feels like the food has a tremendous amount of additives to it.

And that makes complete sense. Yeah. Okay. We've covered quite a lot in terms of this 20 80 principle. And we could dive a lot deeper into wearables for sure. But I would encourage people to check out that biomarker PDF on your website. I think it's very helpful, free, accessible. People can empower themselves and be the CEO

of their own health. Supplements is a topic that many people are interested in and a lot of people will say it should always be lifestyle first and supplements are exactly that. They're a supplement. At the same time, I just want to, and again, I want your perspective on this. I think that is one way to look at it. And I'm very much a nutrition and lifestyle first guy, but I've also had many patients over the years who really didn't feel good.

Low energy, brain fog, and actually certain supplements allowed them in the short term to feel good so that they could then engage with the nutrition and lifestyle changes. So, well, like all these things, I think we love the black and whites, you know, you can never use supplements until you've dialed in your nutrition and lifestyle. I'm like, look, I get the principle behind that. I just don't think it works in every case. What's your take on supplements and do you have a few favorites? Yes, so one of the things I always am very empathetic

about is that even myself, I can't maintain the same level of diet every single day, day after day after day after day, right? And so there are some days that I take in probably very little nutrients. Maybe I'm fasting on a plane and I get off the plane and it's late at night and I just eat something quickly, maybe a quick salad.

And obviously I didn't get my nutrition for the day, right? And so that's where supplements come in helpful. And the nice thing is too, is that we can actually measure in blood tests whether you're low on vitamin D3, B12, et cetera. What I find is most people are low, they are nutrient deficient. And like you said, they most people are low. They are nutrient deficient. And like you said, they're not feeling good

because they have nutrient deficiencies. And one of the things that worked really well for me and is so powerful was seeing my vitamin D level be 20, which is extremely low. And I just started taking a vitamin D3K2 supplement. We know 60, 70% of people are deficient in vitamin D. That really helped me turn around my health as well.

And so I'm a believer in supplementation. I think there's some core supplements that most people should consider. And if they're one of these people that are skeptical supplements, you can get blood tests to see if you really need it or not. Then I think there are some more advanced supplements that I like, and then there's other people

that are biohackers, right? They wanna take every supplement that they hear three biohackers are taking and they have little baggies that they carry around all day. And I think sometimes that can also be detrimental. I think sometimes we have to take people off of supplements they don't necessarily need or probably have very little benefit. So I see all sorts of people and I try to just meet people where they are and try to

get them to a place where they're supplementing smart. Yeah. It's interesting this idea that many doctors are skeptical of supplements. If you have used supplements with patients in a targeted way, you will know that they can be extremely powerful for the right person. Right. Exactly. Okay. Again, it's obvious if your D3 is low and you're getting symptoms related to that, sure, correcting it could have a benefit. If your B12 is low, which is for many, many

people. And here's the other point with supplements supplements when people like to say what's all about good nutrition. Well, hold on a minute to absorb certain things like B12. Okay. You need adequate amounts of stomach acid, right? We're living these chronically stressed out lies. What does chronic stress do? It, it changes how much stomach acid you've got. So even people who eat meat can often be low in B12. They're putting it into their mouth. They're not absorbing it. Exactly. Do you know what I mean? So this kind of nuance, I just think it's not good or bad. It's for who? On a personal level, you're someone who's very pro-actor about your health. I don't

know if you'd put yourself in the biohacker category or not. Are there any kind of newer fancy type supplements that you think actually there's pretty good evidence for this and I'm going to take it so that I can live and age well? Yes. Yeah. There's a three or four of them that I really like. So my core supplements are vitamin D3K2. We talked about that one, a good omega-3 supplement as well, and then creatine. Creatine is one of the most researched supplements in history right now, and we know that taking 10 grams of creatine a day can also help prevent cognitive decline.

So very safe, very, in my view, very effective, massive research around this, this is my core. Then my kind of new darlings that I like, if you wanna call it that, is two supplements that I really believe, and I've seen the research on them, help improve mitochondrial health. Those are Urolithin-A, which helps,

it's a really interesting supplement. It's made from gut bacteria, actually, that helps increase the number of mitochondria that you have in your cell. Company called Timeline makes that one. And then there's another one that I really like, which is called nicotinamide riboside. So I think a lot of people heard of NAD, NMN.

Nicotinamide riboside is a very well absorbed form of NAD and a company called True Niagen makes that one. So mitochondrial health, we are now seeing massive correlation with all disease as well. So there's a lot of things you can do naturally to improve your mitochondrial health, but these two supplements have good research showing that they can also improve your mitochondrial health.

Yeah, I love that. I've been following the research on timeline nutrition for a little while now. I've started taking it about three weeks ago. I think it does look good. Like you said though, I always start with the things that are going to move the needle the most for your health are the things that are actually free. It's just behavior change that really makes most of the difference. But then say you've done all

those things. Like a lot of people go through a health journey for a year, like I did eight months, I did all those things, I felt better and I want more. I want to know what else is there that I can do. And so now I'm doing things like taking some additional supplements, I'm looking, you know, doing sauna therapy. These added little things I think they can even boost your health even more. Yeah, I love that. Dostrad, I was hoping to go into a lot of these newer treatments that exist in your clinic and that are proving game changing for many people like plasmapheresis, hyperbaric oxygen,

all that kind of stuff. I think we'll save that for a part two, if you'll come back on for a part two. I think today was just full of practical advice of people that's going to massively help them. For someone who feels inspired, who's like, right, you know what? I was happy living in the dark, but Darshan, you've convinced me. I now want to be the CEO of my own health. I want to be the boss of my biology, but I don't know where to start. What do you say to them? Number one, like you said, go to my website, download the biomarker sheet and just read through it. You don't have to do it, just read through it

and understand kind of the philosophy behind it and just start with one thing, right? Just maybe one biomarker. Maybe it's your blood pressure. Get into the habit of checking these things on yourself. Secondly, I would say is, you know, your podcast, my podcast, extend. I really am committed to getting this information

to people in an easily understandable, digestible format like you do. And I also do these solo shows to just be like little mini courses in things like blood pressure or Alzheimer's, et cetera, et cetera. They're just 15 minute solo so's. I think a lot of people are pressed for time and I really wanna give them little bits

of digestible information that they can take and have something actionable to do. And then just understand it takes time, right? And so give yourself a year to go through a health journey perhaps. But keep doing something on a day-to-day basis, week-to-week basis, whether it's tracking a biomarker or getting one of those egg timers, do something, one thing a week, and it will add up over time.

I think that's the model. I use that model with all my patients and it seems to work. It works really, really well. Yeah, I think that's the model. I use that model with all my patients and it seems to work. Works really, really well. Yeah. I love that. Thank you for sharing so much, Darshan. For people who don't know you, which will be most of the people listening, what they won't know is that you're probably one of the kindest and most generous people that I've had the privilege of meeting. Thank you. You really are a wonderful human being. Your patients are very, very lucky to have you, I'm sure.

And I really appreciate you making time to come on the show. A feeling is very, very mutual. Thank you for, you know, I feel like you're my brother from another mother. Like we're sitting across talking the same language. And I think both of us have this incredible commitment just on a personal level to see people succeed with their health. And I love that about you. So thank you for coming on my podcast too.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. But also have a think about one thing that you can teach to somebody else. This will not only help them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now as this is the last episode of the season, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you who listen each week and if I may, ask you two quick favours. If you have ever received value from this podcast and have never got round to leaving a review for the show on Apple podcasts or Spotify I would really appreciate it if you could take a moment right now to do so. It

will only take you about one minute and it makes a massive difference for the show. Secondly, if there is anyone in your life who you feel would benefit from listening to this episode or this podcast in general, please do spread the word. My team and I work really hard each week to make this show in order to help people improve their lives. And of course, the more people who listen, the more people who can experience the benefits. So my request is this, over the summer, can you, would you share this show

with five people in your life who do not currently listen? If all of you were to do this, I honestly feel we can create a powerful, positive ripple effect where we help more people feel happier and healthier. No pressure of course, if you don't want to share for whatever reason, that is completely fine as well. Now before I sign off, if you have not yet picked up my latest book, the number one Sunday Times bestseller, Make Change That Lasts,

nine simple ways to break free from the habits that hold you back. Might I suggest that you pick it up as a summer read? I do believe it to be the most important book of my career and if you take a look at the reviews on Amazon, it is clear that many readers also feel the same way and have found the book to be life-changing and I think that because of its reflective nature the summer is a perfect time to read it. It is available as a paperback, ebook but also as an audiobook that I am narrating. Thank you so much for listening each week. I hope you manage to have a relaxing and nourishing summer and I will see you back here in September for the new season and as a little teaser, I have some phenomenal guests lined up already.

Always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making Lysandre change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.