From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Optimizing Your Health: Dr. O'Mara On Visceral Fat & The Carnivore Diet

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

On this episode, Sean and Rachel are joined by Health & Performance Optimizing MD Researcher, Dr. Sean O'Mara as they discuss "visceral fat", a health problem that Dr. O'Mara believes is one of the greatest issues facing the nation. Dr. O'Mara details his health journey, being riddled with chronic disease in his late 40's, and how a switch to the paleo diet changed his life.   Later, Dr. O'Mara explains why he believes that pharmaceutical companies and food companies work hand in hand to keep Americans in bad health, and how cutting processed food out of your life can transform your health substantially.   Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, interrupting their playlist to talk about Defying Gravity, are we? That's right, Newton. With a Bronco in Bronco Sport, gravity has met its match. Huh. Maybe that apple hit me a little harder than I thought. Yeah, you should get that checked out. With standard 4x4 capability, Broncos keep going up and up. Now get up to $6,000 in rebates on eligible 2024 Bronco family models. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table.

I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host of the podcast, my partner in life, and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. Sean, it is so good to be back at our kitchen table. And today we're going to have a guest who's going to help settle a lot of debate that we've been having as a family. Not just between you and I, my sister, my dad, your family's way of eating. All of this is going to be challenged today because our guest has your namesake, Dr. Sean O'Mara. He's a doctor. He's also a lawyer, was a prosecutor just like you. He went to Penn State University, graduated Sumacun Loud, graduated from Villanova Law School, and then went to Temple University, where he got his MD. He specializes in emergency. Well, originally started in emergency medicine.

And then a series of things happened that caused him to start looking at the way we eat and our health and the way we just do life in general in America. And he's, I think, turning a lot of people on their heads. He's mind-breaking. He's mind-breaking us. So with no further ado, let's welcome Dr. Sean O'Mara. Doctor, thanks for joining us at the kitchen table. Yeah. Hey, Duffy. It's great to be with you guys. Super excited and big fans, long-term fans of you. My family, my wife, and I, we really enjoy what you guys are doing. So awesome. Thank you so much. So let's get started. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came from your background in emergency medicine to now helping people

live their best life ever. Sure. So I think this is worth discussing because a lot of people think, well, if you're kind of a health fanatic, you've always been a health fanatic, but I really wasn't. I wasn't somebody who was interested at all in preventing medical problems. I went to medicine, medical school to be an emergency medicine doctor. And I left medical school being an emergency medicine doctor, pursuing a residency medical school being an emergency medicine doctor pursuing a residency, trained formally in emergency medicine. And anytime a study would come up in a medical journal or while in medical school when I was training about how to get healthy or prevent disease, I wasn't interested. I was that physician who was really more attracted to

I was that physician who was really more attracted to the true emergency, like a gunshot, trauma, a stroke, aortic dissection, something that was a real emerging kind of a situation. So it really is a complete shift, a paradigm shift for me to go from being an emergency medicine doctor to now what I specialize in, which is health and performance optimization, which is really, I'm the only physician in the world doing this. So my story goes, how I got interested in it is as an ER physician, I was in the army, I was active duty, and I gradually was accumulating weight like most Americans do. And I gradually was accumulating weight like most Americans do. And I was heavy. I was walking around the hospital in the ER drinking a gallon of skim milk with chocolate Hershey syrup and thinking that I was being healthy. And a patient who came into the hospital and was in fantastic shape challenged me about

what I was drinking and said that I should cut out carbohydrates. And he talked to me about a diet back then. It was called the Paleo diet. Never heard of it. And I decided to give it a try because I had an enlarged prostate. I was waking up four to five times a night. I had restless leg syndrome, kicking my legs all night long, keeping my poor wife Julie awake. I had sleep apnea, so I would stop breathing and snore. And I had atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, clogged arteries. I had gastroesophageal reflux, really bad heartburn, so bad that I had precancerous lesions in my esophagus. So I had to be scoped every three months to get biopsies looking for cancer, which was really stressful. And I just was,

I was suffering immeasurably. I had erectile dysfunction too. So all of these problems were afflicting me at too young of an age. How old were you around that time? I was probably about 48 or so at that time when I had that conversation with that patient. And I started reading about it and I thought, well, I'm just going to give it a try and do this. So I immediately cut out processed foods. I started eating meats and vegetables in whole form. And nobody told me, this guy didn't tell me, I didn't read anything about this is, you know, about 11 years ago. Nobody told me anything would be beneficial other than maybe I would lose weight. So when all of a sudden about, it wasn't all of a sudden, but it was probably about 10, 10 months later, I'm standing in front of my,

in my bathroom, going to the bathroom peeing, and I'm peeing like a teenager now. And I noticed that now I'm forcefully peeing, it's no longer dribbling out of me. And I stopped and thought about it. And I realized I wasn't waking up anymore at night. And all my heartburn symptoms went away, all the noises I made went away, all the eczema that I had and skin conditions went away, and my restless syndrome, kicking my legs went away, my snoring and my sleep apnea. So you might think I would be happy about that. And please, but the truth is, I had this cognitive professional dissonance. I became furious that I had gone through medical school, trained as an emergency medicine physician, and all of these medical problems that I had couldn't be effectively eradicated.

The symptoms were partially abated by the medications that I was on, but I was suffering, I was miserable, and I was worsening. And then when I go on a dietary change, like cutting out processed foods and eating just meat and vegetables in whole form, all of these medical problems start going away substantially. And so I decided professionally, I had to investigate what happened. How could this be possible? How did I get so deluded by medical school into thinking that medications were the only answer and that prevention really didn't have a significant role? And so I joined a research practice in Minneapolis. I joined a colleague, Dr. Zhang, and I moved my family from Washington, D.C. to Minneapolis. And I learned under Dr. Zhang about this biomarker called visceral fat, which is this fat deep in the abdomen of people. And I did I had this vague awareness about deep belly fat, maybe that's kind of a bad thing. But when I joined that research practice, and he was researching it, I started to research it and look at look at its effects and studies that we found. And I was, I was amazed at how detrimental this human health and how little I knew about it as a physician. And I realized that it's not part of our training.

And since becoming an expert now on visceral fat, it's not part of any curriculum in medical school, Rachel and Sean. It's just ignored in medical school. And moreover, it's even ignored by radiologists who read studies and see it, but never report it and warn patients about this significant disease. So while I was studying and researching visceral fat, we obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation to research how can we eradicate the largest problem facing humanity, which was facing our country at the time, which is chronic disease. And it's the largest problem facing our country and humanity because nothing costs us more money. Nothing do we spend more money trying to solve. Could that be why they don't want to solve it? Is that possible? I mean, I don't mean to be conspiratorial, but after the last two years

with COVID and all the misinformation that came out of our federal health bureaucrats and big pharma, I just, my head, the reason why I think Sean and I are both really open to what you're saying and is that we just don't believe the medical establishment anymore. And I'm starting to believe that profit is the motive. Yeah. No, I completely agree. Since I've looked, I've studied this biggest problem in humanity and come up with solutions to help eliminate that problem. I realized the forces aligned against it really are centered in a profit achieving

motive. So it's big pharma. It's big healthcare, it's big food, it's big medicine, it's big insurance. They're all aligned to profit. Insurance companies are especially, you think they're great because they cover your medical costs. But the truth is, if anybody's in the health industry in a senior executive level and calling you out, you know what you want? You want higher premiums. You want the cost of health insurance to be higher. And guess how they do that? By increasing the prevalence of disease and opposing the reversal of disease. If there wasn't a lot of chronic disease, you wouldn't have to pay much for health insurance.

But it's like the character of the automobile insurance industry, all state, you know, mayhem, everything's blowing up and he's always hurt. So they create this illusion of mayhem that you're falling apart, everything's really bad. So you pay more for automobile insurance. And you also pay more for health insurance. The truth is, you shouldn't. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening, you can get yourself healthy. You should not be paying for a lot of cost of health insurance. It's just really designed by the health industry, big pharma, big healthcare, big medicine, big food care. They're all aligned even big government is the line to uh to contribute to the uh the and sustain i should say the epidemic to chronic disease and by the way it's also the world's

biggest humanity's biggest problem because nothing kills more people and the sad thing is is completely preventable so so we so doc let's talk about that. So, talk about kind of your set of ideas on what is the healthiest inputs that we put into our body, food, right? Food. Robot, John. Inputs. Inputs that make you the healthiest, the strongest. And then I want to later come back to the science of visceral fat, which when I've heard you talk about this, it fascinates me. But talk about what, so what does a healthy diet look like from your studies? Sure. So what we found a healthy diet looks like are

the things I talked about, eating meat and eating vegetables. And so when we study in our grant from the National Science Foundation, we found the greatest resolution of reversal chronic disease in studying 6,000 people. We scanned their abdomens looking at visceral fat, and we followed what forms of chronic disease they had to measure the impact on the reversal and resolution of those chronic diseases. on the reversal and resolution of those chronic diseases. So the number one thing that we found that most influenced the reversal chronic disease was eating clean, the proverbial, you know, eating clean expression of meat and vegetables and whole form and not processed foods. So if people really could see what happens inside their body when they introduce processed foods and what happens

inside their body when they eliminate processed foods, it would jar them into motivation to eliminate processed foods from their diet. So tell us what your day looks like. What is a typical day of breakfast, lunch, dinner for you, doctor? Yeah. So I get up and if I'm eating that particular day, it's like, say, not a fasting day, I will eat maybe a large cheesy omelet with bacon and steak and eggs. That's delicious. And I like to garnish my food, not only for taste, but also for nutritional and especially microbial benefit with fermented foods. So traditionally, our ancestors would have eaten fermented foods. And today we see the healthiest populations of people have a tradition of eating fermented foods. So a little bit of fermented sauerkraut,

fermented vegetables, fermented kimchi, kefir, which is a fermented dairy product, kombucha, which is growing in popularity, and even organic apple cider vinegar that's probiotic. So these microbes really are an important part of our diet, part of our existence. And that's a big part of health today. The health of individuals are the microbes that we possess within our gastrointestinal tract and even in our body and our skin. So it's a bit of a report card of sorts that you can actually evaluate how healthy somebody is by the species, the microbes that they have on them. So one of the things we have been concentrating on in our studies is looking at these microbes

and the microbiome makeup of humans for the purposes of helping to drive health, the health of individuals to a healthier state. health, the health of individuals to a healthier state. And it's the more diseased people tend to have a more pathogenic and what's called obesogenic, obesity generating microbes. And people aren't taught this, they're not aware of it. But in the future, I think that's going to be a big part of effective healthcare is leveraging that microbiome. of effective healthcare is leveraging that microbiome. So I was going to, Doc, I was going to ask you that because I thought if this was a highly meat-based diet, we know we get the floral or the microbes. For gut health, it's really important. You don't get that from meat. So, but you're saying,

no, no, you can eat a high meat diet, but also if you include fermented foods, that actually gives you the necessary microbes for good gut health. Yeah, so just consider this, Sean. If you ever run into somebody with bad breath, if you went to lunch with them, you'd watch them put a piece of meat or bread in their mouth, and they would chew that meat and bread with these nasty microbes in their mouth that give them bad breath. Then they swallow that meat and bread down into the stomach. Now, what you should be doing is having some fermented, you know, kimchi or sauerkraut or a little bit of blue cheese, some healthy microbes in your mouth, chew it together with that meat. Then you masticate together this really healthy combination of food. And that's how our ancestors would have lived. They would have been leveraging the beneficial microbes that were available in

nature to chew them together and swallow it. So when you do that interesting study, if you're listening, is go to one of those church careers, all you can eat steakhouses, see how much you can eat, just straight meat. And then go back the next week, bring in some ferments with you, a little jar of kimchi. Try putting kimchi in your mouth, chewing it together. You'll probably double the amount of meat that you can eat because you feel so good when those microbes are part of your digestive practice immediately. So that's what I teach my patients to do now. So give us your lunch and dinner too. Yeah. So lunch and dinner, it's not too much different. I probably would do steak and burgers. I like red meat. I think our ancestors ate a lot of megafauna, would have been more red meat

and higher yield in terms of nutritional value. So oftentimes it's going to be steak and burgers, or maybe it will be liver. But I always include meat and then always include fermented foods. I really like fermented blue cheeses, deep fermented cheeses, old world cheese, artisan cheeses. And I always garnish too with some probiotic microbial rich kimchi and sauerkraut and kvass, which is Russian fermented beets and beet juice. Yes. That's that's it's, it's fascinating. Do you get bored eating that though? I mean, that's the, that's the one thing I worry about cause I'm, I grew up. So my background is not the same as Sean. So I grew up with a Spanish mom. So we had a very Mediterranean type diet. My dad is Mexican American, but my mom was the one

mainly cooking. So I would say it was a very Mediterranean, you know, olive oil and fish and a little bit of meat and salads and sort of. And I've always I'm a Libra, so I like balance. And to me, that feels very balanced. And so my sister is on carnivore. And I think it makes sense. By the way, I feel good when I eat meat. I've had like she is singing from the mountaintops how great she feels, Rachel's sister.

Occasionally, I will have a burger for breakfast, you know, no bread. And I feel good eating it. But I also feel like not just fermented vegetables, I feel like a good salad, you know, sometimes is good for me. And so I guess I think this is the mind-breaking that Sean and I are talking about

because neither of us are opposed to the protein part of this, but it is the elimination of fresh vegetables. And you could add the fermented stuff, but the elimination of fresh vegetables seems counterintuitive and counterintuitive to me. So tell me why I can't have a salad. And counterintuitive to me. So tell me why I can't have a salad. Yeah, so it did to me too. So I went carnivore almost five years ago. To a purist, I'm really not carnivore because I include fermented vegetables. But the opposition to vegetables, why carnivores don't eat vegetables are the growing awareness and body of knowledge and science about about these what I would call micro toxins okay they think they are plant defenses amounting to lectins and oxalates and these these other

substances that are within the plant that over a slow period of time a long period of time cause you to have of time, caused you to have inflammation. So when I first heard about the carnivore diet, a friend talked me in, tried to talk me into it. I said, that's crazy, man. I'm a physician. I was very healthy. I'd done so great, you know, cutting out carbohydrates, processed foods, eating vegetables and meat. But I ran into him six months later, and he was so profoundly different, better looking that I thought, oh my God, I'm going to try this and see what happens. He kept insisting to give it a try. You don't have anything to lose except for eating vegetables

for a few months. It's not going to kill you. And I, like your sister, started singing from the mountaintops. I got so much better. The little bit of joint pain that I was having went completely away, Rachel, completely away. And six times, six times in almost five years, I have introduced vegetables back in slowly to see what would happen. Joint pain came back. I got more achiness. I got more stiff, cut the vegetables out again. Only went to fermented vegetables. It all resolved and I feel great. So I think the happy median for me and what I advocate for my patients who come to me for specialization in health and performance optimization, I recommend that they do a trial

of the ultimate elimination diet, which is carnivore, and maintain some regular daily practice of always co-ingesting meat with fermented vegetables and only fermented vegetables, not vegetables in raw form. So to answer your question about variety and don't you need to have variety, I tell my wife every time I eat a burger or steak, to me, this is the strangest thing, but I'm not kidding you. It is the best tasting steak or burger I've ever had. It's crazy. I don't ever remember that with or happening with that degree of familiarity, like every

single time when I was eating vegetables or spaghetti or something like that. But literally, that's what's happened to me. And I used to always forget what I had for dinner before when I wasn't carnivore. Now I remember without any clarity what I had for dinner the night before. So these events are more meaningful. They're far more sustaining and far more even enjoyable for me. But you have to be careful as a researcher and a practitioner now of health and performance optimization about trying to enjoy, you know, eating your food because next thing you know, you'll be eating gobs of ice cream and candy and pastries and strudels and not eating meat and the important things. So, yeah, I get that some people are afraid about, you know, eliminating vegetables that they're not going to have variety.

But in my experience, my patients don't complain about it. They don't miss the variety. They as long as they continue to eat a variety of meat, because I think ancestrally, that's what we did. I think we ate a lot of very, very healthy meat and fermented foods to help sustain us. So I'm still going to get back to the visceral fat because that fascinates me. But quickly, on the meat that you eat, it's important that you're not, I mean, we're not going to get meat at Walmart.

Are you very specific about grass-, no hormone fed meat? Which is expensive by the way right now, doctor. I mean, so let's talk about that aspect too. What kind of meat should we eat if we go here? Yeah. So healthy meat is usually is more expensive because it costs more money to raise an animal on grass really because the animal doesn't weigh as much. Most of the animals that are conventionally raised on grain and antibiotics, even give them antibiotics to make them more fat, which is ironic. And that's what leads to obesity in humans. The earlier you get started antibiotics, the more likely you get obese and you get diabetic, you become diabetic, super sad. So it happens to these farm animals. And so what I like to tell my patients is, you know,

we used to be these precise hunters that would go out. We're the only species that look for the healthiest, the best animal to hunt. Other animals look for the old heifer dragging its leg, the injured animal, the young calf. But we use our brains to hunt, to figure out which one has the healthiest nutritional appearance. And so we would have selected that one. And that's what you need to do. If you're listening today, be that kind of discerning hunter when you go into a grocery store and look for the healthiest food to eat. It shouldn't be suspended because it's packaged in some kind of a styrofoam container as meat or whatever. You still want to be selective about that meat and you want the healthiest animal.

So 100% grass fed, 100% grass finished. And what I tell people is you should look for not a lot of streaks of fat in the meat. That's something people aren't talking about. But if you look at my website, you'll see it's human marbling. It's called myoseatosis. And that fatty infiltrate within the skeletal muscle is associated with visceral fat and associated with visceral fat and associated with chronic disease. So you want to look for lean meat that doesn't have a lot of fatty streaks

as fat around the edges that is golden yellow as opposed to the white from grains. And you want to really be selective about those grades of meat and look for it and uh and be and be the healthiest as you you can possibly be so sean and i sean i found a we were driving near our house and saw a farm nearby that said they're selling lamb and we stopped in we bought we bought a lamb i'll tell you what it was hard for me because i felt bad that I was sending a lamb to the butcher myself. You know, it was tough, but I did. And then when we went to pick it up, we found out they were selling pigs. So I bought a half of a pig that I'm going to be getting in a few months. But, you know, they're grass fed.

And by the way, they used everything. I took the I took the bones for bones so I can make stock. And they even allowed me to take the hide and they're going to treat that and make me a little rug. So I used every bit of it. But those opportunities are around you and it's not as expensive as I thought it would be, frankly. And I know what I'm getting. Yeah, yeah. There's a website, eatwild.com, eatwild.com, that lists a lot of farmers and purveyors of food that have more of a natural bent. Some of them are very, very natural. I found some really good sources.

So that's a resource. And just if you care about your body as your most important physical asset, to Sean's point, you know, inputs into your body, you're going to only input what's good for it. And if you input garbage in, you get garbage out. You destroy that body. So your body really is your most important physical asset. But I do want to circle back on chronic disease and share a quick story your sister, Leah, wanted me to share with you. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Governor Mike Huckabee

and all the candidates were asked, what kind of legacy would you leave for your presidency? And all the candidates for the presidential election had different answers, and I don't remember, but I remember Governor Mike Huckabees. His response was, I would go, Kennedy, yes, just like Kennedy declared a race to the moon, I would declare a war against chronic disease and unite our country to help stamp out chronic disease. So he recognized it as humanity's and our nation's biggest problem. And that's really interesting. So this man thought the most important thing for him to achieve in the most important office in the world was to eradicate chronic disease. I thought that was profound insight. And that's exactly how I think

I could barely breathe. But unfortunately, the majority of people listening in the audience and probably the TV didn't appreciate that. But if you realize that how healthy you are defines how healthy your body is going to define how much you're going to enjoy your life and how much you're going to suffer. Then you begin to form an understanding about chronic disease and the value of your body. And then you can be more selective about the meat you eat, the vegetables you eat, how you live, how you exercise, how you sleep. All these things make contributions to your health and define the quality of your life. So it's really an important discussion. I'm glad you guys are really interested in it. interested in it. And visceral fat is, if you're listening, is probably the, not probably, it is the single most important metric for you to follow to optimize your health. It's not-

So how do you measure that? How do we know our visceral fat? Because you can be really thin, right? And still have a lot of visceral fat inside. Talk to us about visceral fat and what it means for health and how we figure out what our visceral fat load is. Yeah. So you can be thin and filled with it. It's called invisible obesity or another term I call is radioactive fat or it's the fat that kills you. Got all these clever names for it. And it's invisible inside your body.

You don't know unless you get a scan to take a look at it. So there's various different ways to scan it. You can scan through a DEXA scan, which gives you a numeric value of what your visceral fat is, pretty accurate. You can do a bioimpedance scale, which gives you a less accurate but reasonably good approximation of how much visceral fat you have. you know, reasonably good approximation how much visceral fat you have. But the very best standards scans do are CTs, CTs of your abdomen, which uses a little bit of radiation, some radiation, and my preferred is MRI, which gives you the highest resolution, and no radiation. Now, why that's important is you need to look at the enemy inside you. You need

to stare at this evil enemy, I like to call it an alien, inside that's pumping out inflammatory substances, ruining your health, ruining your appearance, ruining your performance and your quality of life. So if you stare at it and see it, it's just a lot more motivating than if you stare at a number. A number won't mean much to you. But I've had clients literally, Sean and Rachel, pass out, go unconscious once they see that enemy inside of them. So that would never happen in a lab report. It would never happen from a cholesterol number. It would never happen from a DEXA scan that tells you a value of visceral fat. You have to see it. And the difference is you engage your senses. It's something about your sensory input and analysis that's very different

than cortical analysis, where you're just looking at numbers and interpreting them. And for millions of years, we were around, we didn't even have math. So all these laboratory studies, you know, with using numbers don't really resonate as well with us because part of our makeup was we used, we were guided by our senses. So alphas, the most optimizing humans today are people that use their senses to get better. Everybody else uses their senses to pursue pleasure and comfort. So think about that. Pleasure and comfort is what most people use their senses for. But if you switch and use your senses to improve yourself, to optimize, then you can really make a difference. Sean, teach your children that you'll create a legacy that would be much more enduring

and lasting in this planet than if you don't and you just allow them to pursue what tastes good what feels good and uh that's funny it's funny you say that doctor because we actually had um on my show on the weekend on fox and friends weekend we had markberg on. And one of the things that Mark Wahlberg, he was on to talk about a Lenten Catholic app that he's, you know, put out there to help people with their spiritual life. But he quoted Pope Benedict, who said, we were not made as humans for comfort, we were made for greatness. And it sort of is the same thing you're saying here in the physical sense that we do pursue. I mean, listen, it's hard for me. Again, here's the mind break for me on you. I love food and I and I I think the pleasure of food is is is one of the great things in life. And so I do feel pleasure when I eat a steak or have a great burger. But I love dessert. This is a little bit hard for me to wrap my head around. But I believe

what you're saying is true. And I think, again, this idea of visceral fat is something that no one else is talking enough about. And just on that point, Rachel says I can live as a prisoner. Yeah, I always think Sean doesn't need a lot of variety. Just a quick note. In December, I got some blood work done. And that wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. And the day I got the results back, doctor, that day I cut out coffee. I cut out all meat. I went all whole grain, all fruits and vegetables, because that's all I knew.

Right? That's all. But I started to feel better. But I also, I think that your point on inflammation is a, is a really big, um, point that I think a lot of us don't think about inflammation is disease causing in the end, right. Or an indicator of disease. And I think I, I have to, this is why I wanted to talk to you today. Cause I think I have to reshift what I'm doing. I'm again, you didn't say anything about grains, oats, um, rice, which I think you probably will say, don't eat that, cut it out.

No, don't eat them. That's what I was going to say. So if there's one indicator that someone could have about the health of their body, is it this scan that you do and the visceral fat they have inside their body? Is that the one indicator on your health? I think that's an incredibly important one. But listen, your audience, the majority of people are not going to go out and be able to get an MRI or do it. Does insurance not cover it? No, insurance won't cover it. You can pay out of pocket about $500 to get the scan, pay cash. That's the way to do it. But to Sean's question, it's really important. Here's what you do. Go get your pictures of what you looked like 10 years

ago. Get your pictures of what you look like today. You don't look better. You're living wrong and it's time to change your diet and you need to get rid of visceral fat. 99.999% of the people listening are going to look worse. And the single reason is visceral fat makes you appear worse. We wear our health on our faces because our faces communicate to our audiences that we talk to either to pay attention to this person or dismiss them. If you are healthy in your appearance, it says to everybody standing in front of you, listening to you, I know I live well and pay attention to me because I can help you live better. But if it's the opposite and you're declining your appearance because of declining health, you tell them basically, I don't know

how to live, I'm living wrong, and they won't listen to you as well. And leaderships of companies and organizations, their employees and members will be more inclined to follow their guidance. We'll have more of this conversation after this. The faster money and data move, the further your business can go to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In life, interact. It projects strength.

I mean, health is strength. This is an interesting topic because, you know, I remember a very famous interview with Chris Christie and Oprah Winfrey, where they were both discussing like look i mean it's just to give you a little pushback doctor because listen i i want to she pushes back in the middle of time docs but both oprah and chris christie are highly successful people and both of them said they felt like people and they're disciplined in all kinds of areas in their life they both admitted in in their interview that they struggled with, with weight and food.

Right. But they, they felt like there was a discrimination against them because people assumed that because they were overweight that they were not, you know, capable of, you know, managing her company and the way,

you know, in the case of case of Oprah Winfrey, which clearly she is, or in the case of Chris Christie. But maybe if they may be disciplined in all kinds of ways, but maybe I've heard you say we go back thousands of years where the indicators that we have when we look at them would say that's not disciplined, even though they are disciplined. We can't help but our disciplined. Our sensors and our brain go off and go, they're not disciplined. They're imperfect. They're just not quite there. It doesn't mean that their value and skills and talent are less, but I would say to Chris Christie and Oprah, if you optimize your health, get rid of your visceral fat, if they could become client patients of mine, I would love them. I believe I thought about both of them. Chris Christie, you're listening.

Oprah, I don't know if she's listening to us. Well, if Chris Christie listens, that's fantastic. I would be delighted to work with him. He would simply optimize and improve his talents even more. We never saw a single person who eliminated visceral fat that did not start performing better. That's really, really interesting because I've never heard that in medicine. All of the training I've ever had, I've never seen that human performance across the board improves as health improves. So Chris, if you're listening,

target visceral fat, give me a call, get on me. I will work with you to help you become an awesome, even better, you're an awesome politician, but everybody can get better. There are always ways to improve. And targeting a visceral fat would be the most important target for you. And you'll see the change in terms of how you perform, how you appear, and the quality of your life. So yeah, I think it's a point to start. Is it eating meat and eliminating carbs and processed food? Is that pretty much it? It's real fast.

It's number one, I would say that. But it's not just it. You know, it's like a prism, Rachel. If you take sunshine, which is pure, pure light, right, and run it through a prism, you'll see it's the components of many things. Roy G. Biv, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. All those components come together to create optimal, pure white light. Same thing with health. What you eat, when you eat, how much you eat, how when you don't eat, how you exercise,

how much sunshine you get, how you sleep. All these things are contributions to health. The problem is we don't look at them together collectively. to help. The problem is we don't look at them together collectively. It's usually your doctor telling you one thing, eat this or stop smoking. And you can't get results that way. You got to do many things. And it actually, when you do it correctly, you save time. Like my exercise, if you look at my photographs, I exercise for the past 10 years about five minutes once every three days. Five minutes once every three days. It's actually been very easy.

It's not been hard at all. In fact, it's way easier than when I was unhealthy and going to the gym and working out an hour and a half and struggling with eating and not sleeping and trying to do all these crazy things. This is the easiest thing. You know, it's just living art. If you look at the animals, do they look like they're struggling? You know, they really don't. They barely exercise. They exercise in a certain way. It's just choices that you make, how you live your life. And when you bring it together, it amplifies the results and it manifests in this. What are you doing for exercise? What's your five minutes of exercise?

You have this elite genome that comes from our great Irish heritage, too. That is unsurpassed by any other. What's your exercise look like? Because I see Sean. I mean, he's he, so Sean used to work out for like an hour and a half. Then he started talking with damp on, you know,

put them on another thing. So now he works out about three days a week for about how long? 45 minutes, three days, three days a week. I'll have Dan at two. So my favorite form of exercise is sprinting because in, as a health researcher,

I looked at a lot of anthropology and studies of our ancestors, and I realized probably nothing contributed more to keeping us in the gene pool and allowing us to enjoy a better quality of life during our entire existence, which generally people, most scientists think it's around 4 million years, however you want to define years. scientists think it's around 4 million years, however you want to define years. And so nothing was more contributory towards our existence than sprinting, how fast you could run. So sprinting is a big part of my workout. I do very, very maximum intensive sprinting exercises, and then do maximum intensive exercise. So my next one that I love to do is push-ups. So I'll do 100 push-ups straight in a row, nonstop, and about 83 seconds, 83 to maybe 90 seconds. So those are good quality military push-ups. I'm still active duty Minnesota Army National Guard. And I do high quality, you know, very, very maximally intense exercise. So yeah, it's brief, but it's high yield. So I'm not going out. I used to jog

90 minutes a day, 75 minutes a day. I no longer do that. I actually found in studies that the distance runner hold on to visceral fat more than people who give up distance running and substitute in sprinting. So that's another mind break, right? Because they look so skinny. And yet they're strong. We don't have something about long distance. They don't look as healthy. No, you're exactly right.

But, you know, we're fooled into believing that running is a great thing. But if you look at the end result of marathoners and ultra marathoners, they're emaciated in this terrible condition called sarcophenia. So what I found is sarcophenia is loss of muscle mass and strength as you age. But you shouldn't. You should really be getting better. You should be optimizing, getting stronger and bigger. So my pictures in the past five years from 55 to 59, I've got more muscle, and I've got more strength, and I've got more intelligence, and I perform better across the board in every function that I do the past five years, since I've really centered in on eating healthy meat and healthy vegetables, healthy ferments, and doing these other things that I do,

getting sunshine, doing sauna, doing cold plunges, basically the kind of things that our ancestors would have been exposed to. So, Doc, let's talk about your practice and kind of someone comes in to see you and says, all right, I want to be healthy. What do you do? Are you doing blood work? Are you doing, you know, you're doing this, the, the, the body scan, do you, is that one plan or do you tailor a plan towards everyone's individual body? How does it work when someone comes to go, Hey, I want to get healthy doctor. Yeah. So that first starts with that. They, they really have to respect that their body is their most important physical asset. If they're not that, if they can't see that, they're not worth me working with. There's so many people who want to work with me.

I have so little time. I'm training other doctors to step in because the market is such a demand to really optimize instead of just treat. But what I do is I scan people and I show them their problem. I get visualization of the enemy inside of them. problem. Okay, I get visualization of the enemy inside of them until they until they can really assess that. It's like looking at satellite imagery, you know, it's really that high yield to take a look at it. And it's not numbers. So blood work, you know, when I served active duty before I was in the National Guard, I was big army, I took care of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, President Clinton, Secretary of State Pauline Power, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. So I had the privilege

of doing senior executive service, medical care for the senior executive service as active duty army physician. Then I set up a concierge medical practice for managing directors of hedge funds, billionaires and world families. I did millions of dollars with the blood work, but nothing changed these people. The numbers don't change people. They really don't. But when you show them an MRI of what's inside of them, then they really change. Then they're passing out. Then their wives are crying when they see their husbands filled with this stuff, a big chunk of fat around their heart, clogged arteries. I mean, this is, you don't have to go to medical school to see it. Do you see the functionality of the arteries as well in the scan?

Oh yeah. Yeah. So you, you, you, you can, if it's functional MRI, you can assess functionality, but basically you can also infer the functionality because you see those clogged arteries. You know, coronary artery calcification, CAC scoring scans are kind of an interesting thing that are going on. And I like them because they lead to increased discussion. But really, what you want to be looking at is the stuff that's going to kill you, the soft plaques, not the calcified ones. And so MRI allows you to assess soft plaques. And we saw these clogged arteries in the brain when we were getting rid of visceral fat, as people in our National Science Foundation study kept saying,

why am I more intelligent? Why is my memory improving? It was really driving me nuts, because all I was scanning was visceral fat. But why does it, you know, when I get rid of visceral fat, I get more intelligent. So the last 30 patients out of 6,000, we started scanning brains and we saw it was their arteries were clogged, Sean. Their arteries have these big plaques, you know, blocked in them. And then we would put them on this protocol that we developed from the National Science Foundation I further amplified and developed as well, then these artery, these blockages were opening up. Here's the interesting thing. When they opened up, people developed visible pulsations to their arteries. So I'm an emergency medicine

doctor, ACLS training, you know, to save lives and CPR, they tell you to feel for a pulse. Wrong answer. Look for a pulse. That's what we should be doing, looking for a pulse. But today, nobody has pulses, almost nobody has pulse unless you really have soft arteries, where you don't have atherosclerotic, you know, hardening of your arteries prevents your pulses from moving. So yeah, if I ever meet you, you won't be able to see it through the camera. But yeah, you come up to me, you see my pulses are bounding all over my body. So circulation improves with this as well? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how my appearances improve so much and how my client patient's appearance improves so much and

their performance improves so much you cannot look better you cannot perform better without getting better blood flow and blood flow is completely dependent upon visceral fat and probably we have to study the mechanisms probably the things that are responsible for causing visceral fat are responsible for causing the deposition of fat within skeletal muscle and the smooth muscle of arteries, veins, and capillaries. So that's where they become diseased. They don't flow as well. So the things that help you to eliminate visceral fat help you to eliminate the chronic processes. So the best way to think, think about visceral fat, it's the furthest upstream finding of chronic disease that we became aware of. You can see beginning in children, and then depending

upon how much processed foods they have, you can see it increasing in their teenage years. And then eventually, in their 20s, it begins manifesting an appearance that they have an inflamed looking face. And in my clients, their inflamed looking faces reverses and they get this lean, attractive, more healthy appearing look to their face and their bodies. And that's really what it is. It's getting rid of that visceral fat and the inflammation that is literally being pumped out by that visceral fat 24 hours a day. It's like this evil pumping machine that is just spewing toxins and inflammatory cytokines, adipokines, and molecules that travel throughout our body to all our cells and causing disease. Can you talk about adjacent subjects? Two of my favorite things to have on occasion is a cup of coffee.

And once in a while, I used to, I would like a glass of wine, but I stopped drinking wine. I'll have a drink every now and again. Yeah, wine is a reaction to wine. Yeah, or beer.

So what do you say about an alcoholic drink once in a while and coffee once in a while? What are those? How do those come in? I drink coffee almost every day. I actually recommend about four to five cups of coffee a day. Part of the process of coffee is actually fermentation, which improves the quality of

the coffee. It doesn't have any microbial benefits because if they end up roasting, it kills off the microbes. But yeah, I still advocate the consumption of coffee. And so I think it's beneficial. And then, and actually a good dose of it, four to five cups is associated with the lowest incidence of mortality without the sporadic cardiovascular disease. So four to five cups of coffee a day is actually the recommendation. And that's what I try to get in. I drink it without any sugar because sugar would be detrimental. I do not add any sugar to it. I will drink it either black or I'll have really rich golden yellow, full fat

cream and look for that real golden. Yeah, raw milk is something that I drink to, but I prefer to take it and I ferment it. I let my kids drink the raw milk, but I ferment the milk because of the carbohydrates associated with it. And it's all media by the microbiome. If we had our kids microbiome,, we could consume those lactose and those carbohydrates without the detrimental rise in glucose and the inflammatory effects of insulin being spiked. And so it's all the microbiome. And that's what a lot of people are missing out who promote eating carbohydrates and eat whatever you want, calories in, calories out, never takes into consideration that it's your microbiome and the type of microbes that you have in you.

And the healthier you are as parents, the healthier your children, just walk around the wall of America the next time you come visit your sister. You'll see, if you see chubby kids, go answer their parents and you'll see those big inflamed faces of their parents staring back at you.

It's microbes shared within a family and their diet that's causing this. Went right there. We'll have more of this conversation next. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet,

thousands of high intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. So I have one fast question. I just want you to answer this one quick because I don't want to get to the next part.

Do you ever cheat? Do you go, you know what? It's my birthday. I'm going to have cake or pie or something. I am the only human in the world that I'm aware of that has started this and has never cheated one time. Is that an Irish thing too?

I don't know. I've never found another man or woman like me, but I've got a medical twin brother and our biggest arguments were monopsychotic twins. He cheats and I don't. I'm guessing the only reason is the microbes that I have within me give me the capacity to be that resolute and disciplined but i just see with absolute clarity that if i cheat i'm harming myself and even a single what about your clients you have clients obviously not everyone is as disciplined as you set herself up do what you're doing but i know myself and i know that i just I love, you know, I love I love dark chocolate. I love show you the scan of your innards first.

Yeah. But it is a legit question because, like I said, I do believe in some balance and I'm not I'm not nearly as disciplined as my husband. I said he's on the Dan Bongino workout. And boy, he has seen and I've switched my diet. He's seen great results. I can, he's on the Dan Bongino workout. And boy, he has seen great results. I don't have that kind of discipline. So can somebody still be on this plan? And it doesn't have to be super strict, but they'll still get those benefits. Absolutely.

It's a journey. Look, not everybody's perfected. Not everybody's going to have that level of discipline. So some of my clients cheat and fall, and they recover. It's just lengthening that time of correction and being disciplined and not eating those bad foods is important. I have one client, Cameron, he was the number one rated pilot in American Airlines. He doesn't cheat at all, I don't think. He is incredibly disciplined. He brought that, you know, when he came to me, that kind of level of discipline.

But here's what happens if you take a single lick of ice cream. You just provided a football field or a hockey arena full of food for the bad microbes down inside your gut that need that sugar and need that processed food. So you're feeding them. So if you can get this insight that what you put in, not just feeds you, but feeds those microbes, then you have a better understanding of what's going on. So you got to eat for your microbiome. You want to eat in a direction that feeds good ones and eat in a direction that doesn't feed the bad ones. So tasty, you know, processed foods that you know are bad for you are just going to generate more. And generations, you know, we reproduce, you know, generations like every 30 years. These guys are reproducing in minutes. So they can literally out evolve us, you know,

so when you when you eat a single lick, you just created generations of these bad microbes inside your gut. So that's what I do. I eat in a healthy way. It's a good explanation. Doc, a number of years ago, I was like, again, when I was in Congress, I got I got fat. Listen, Congress is like the worst. It's like everybody who goes to Congress gets fat and then they leave Congress and they look great.

It happened to Sean. In Congress, I'm like, you know what? I'm getting too fat and I went on the keto. Basically, I cut out all the carbs is what I did. I'm cutting all carbs. I wish I would have talked to you and known you before because I would have done is what I did. I just like, I'm cutting all carbs. And I wish I would have talked to you and known you before because I would have done it the right way. I don't think I was doing it the right, healthiest way to do it.

But I did it. And I'm telling you what, like, I got into ketosis, like, after, I think, like, eight days. And, like, I dropped, I dropped, like, 18 pounds in, like, a month. It just fell off. But then what I found was I was craving, it was, I, I, I craved sugar and the cravings went down when, you know, after I got into it for a little while, I'm like, you, you, what you, you recognize what a drug sugar is and how, what impact it has in our life until you get rid of it. And, but what happened to Rachel's point, I would cheat once in a while when i when i was doing it

and then it was like ferocious the desire i had to have sugar and it's a yeah it's a really powerful drug you just created just orgy and orgy for those microbes they went down and reproduced like crazy but that's exactly what happened so if you never, Sean, you don't get those those cravings and masks coming back at you. So, yeah, it just it just shows what's what's going on. The obesity epidemic really is an epidemic of infection. We're simply infected with obesogenic obesity generating microbes. We're spreading it in the Western world through airlines to all the formerly very thin countries in Africa. And they're now developing rapid rates of obesity. It's just microbes. And conventional medicine isn't waking up to this. They don't have an answer to this.

And furthermore, they love it. Why would they stop it? They want more disease. Obesity generates profits. And so you've got to love your health, love your body to oppose this. You've got to eat more healthy and have insights. And, yeah, any new congressmen out there listening, they're on their way to Congress, come talk to me. I'd love to help you stay healthy. We need you healthy in Congress. I wish you were the doctor in Congress when Sean was there. I'm going to tell Kevin McCarthy to have you come and speak to his conference about –

Actually, that's a great idea. You're all going to get fat, especially you freshmen. Honestly, Sean, that's the best idea you've ever had. One of the best ideas I've ever had. It's one of the best ideas. I think it's your best one, Sean. Omar agrees. So you know why?

Because here's it. I don't want to know. Congress is very specific, but you're away from home. There's traveling. They're going to events where there's, you know, they're going for long periods of time without eating. And then they're at an event where there's, you know, really crappy hors d'oeuvres and they're starving and they got to eat and then they got to go to the next event. It's a very, very busy lifestyle. But you can have a steak,

but then it's like these fat desserts come out with ice cream. And then you can have a glass of wine if you want. It's like all of a sudden you do a couple of those events and all of a sudden you're like, I ate like three steaks tonight. Yeah. No, it's bad.

And then they're traveling and then they're away from home. What's better than that though, Rachel? But you're right. If this Republican team was going to be optimal they need to be and you offered the democrats as well but you're bipartisan because our bodies are bipartisan but i think what's important is if we had our government outside of the the the the big the big pharma big food complex but actually members of congress were able to go, Hey, something's going on here.

These are some thoughts that you should, you should have run through your brain about what you're doing legislatively to make America healthier, which by the way, if you have a debt problem at $31.5 trillion in debt, if you make America healthy, you can balance your budget. It's a fiscal issue, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's a it's a fiscal issue, right? It is. Yeah. Four trillion dollars. A third of our GDP is being wasted on treating chronic disease. It's a third. It's the largest part of our economy. Think what you could have done, Sean, and what Congress could do, our government could do with that kind of savings. If we spend it, you know, on the military and education, on jobs, on things that were really much more productive instead of, you know, wasting it down the toilet.

And our military is getting fat, too, by the way. Oh, they are. It's super discouraging. Yeah, I need I need some help to get to the right people. There are a lot of people running interference with me. I'm sure they are. I'd love to talk to Kevin. I'll talk to you after the podcast and I'm going to, I'm going to hook that up. Okay.

We were, if I was well prepared and we were on video, I'd put up a picture of Bill Gates right next to you. And I'd go, you eat meat. And Bill Gates wants the world to eat crickets and bugs. What do you say to Bill Gates? Who thinks the premier humanickets and bugs. What do you say to Bill Gates, who thinks the premier human diet

is bugs? Or is not meat? I mean, listen, there is a whole agenda coming from the WHO and Bill Gates, this whole agenda to go vegan, to go bugs, to get meat out, because of course, cows impact the climate and they say that's what they care about. Talk to us about that really quick. Yeah. So my answer is that you've got to follow the basics. What our ancestors did is how you look and how you perform. That is who led the tribe, who led the clan, who led the fight to go out in battle, who led the clan to hunt and get the best food, the highest performers, and they always

look good. So today we've lost sight of that. We're paying attention. It's all distraction. You know, all these other numbers and figures, what Bill Gates comes up with, it's the hard facts. How you look and how you perform really should be defining who we should be paying attention to and following as leadership. So we just got to oppose the nonsense with real sound science. Fundamentally, what we follow, it's appearance and performance. I'm very different. That's how I define health than other physicians. Others want to look at your labs, your cholesterol.

And when you look at it from a research standpoint, using metrics, using metrics called signal to noise signal, what really matters. Noise is distraction. Everything that like Bill Gates and the collective side there that's promoting veganism and and and trying to get you to accept obesity. They're they're promoting noise. Signal is really how you look and how you perform when it comes down to it what's more important when it comes to your health than how you look and how you're performing i mean if you follow the other side you won't be able to get out of chair you'll be in a hospital bed wearing diapers because you won't be able to control your muscles to be so weak you won't be able to even control your stool content and your urine content anymore. So that's the end result for people that pursue comfort and pleasure and how they live and how they eat. And if you make informed choices following others that model

good health, model a good appearance and performance, you end up looking a lot better and your quality of life is better. And I think we could turn our country around. No other country's doing this, but I would love to get our leadership on board with being the best, healthiest men and women possible to increase their capability to serve the people and to model that in the same kind of spirit that Governor Huckabee wanted to be able to get our country united. I love that you brought up Huckabee because, honestly, Sean and I love that guy. We absolutely love him. And he gave that answer, you know, comes from both his, you know, he's an intelligent guy, but he has a real heart for people.

And he obviously knows he fought his own. I would love to talk to him. I just want to thank him for, yeah. We'll hook you up with him as well. Okay. Well, that'd be great. Cause he's, he's a hero of mine just from that one scene. He's the guy I most wanted would like to talk just to thank him for, for he's the one that resonated the most with me. Well, I think talking to you today i'm both excited by the things you have to say and i said i i've incorporated some of it i'm i'm partially carnivore um but i'm i'm gonna really start thinking and and perhaps implementing this

fermented vegetable thing i think i'm gonna do that see how that goes from for me um i want to get an mri as well we're We're going to come back every summer. We might come by and see you, Doc. I'd love to see both of you. I'd love to do that. I think it's been both positive, but it also makes me sad about our public health because you see that so much of the way,

even like our poorest and most vulnerable people, the way our government feeds them through, you know, the, the, the food stamps and the, and the, and the welfare, the kind of foods that are being offered to them versus, and the kind of information, I mean, you saw the pyramid, the food pyramid that came out that said, you know, lucky charms was healthier than meat. I mean, this is the kind of crap that's coming out of our public health system. meat. I mean, this is the kind of crap that's coming out of our public health system. As you said, it's totally influenced by big food, by these big companies, General Mills and Kraft and all this and big pharma. And there is a system that is profiting off of making Americans unhealthy.

You're somebody who's offering a different way. I really hope people listen and pay attention because we could all be, we could be a better, stronger nation. We have a lot of things up against us right now, but being stronger and healthier is definitely part of our own national security. Doc, what's your website? Where do people find you? You can find me at www.d-r-s-e-a-n-o-m-a-romara.com.

So drseanomara.com. It's the right spelling. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. That's like Sean. It's great. God, it's been so awesome talking to you. Thank you for all the work you're doing

and trying to bring health to America and challenging the powers that be and these ideas that they put out that have made us sick and unhealthy um and less happy and challenging that and by the way going from the the the medical school doctor emergency room doc and being a thinker to go something else is going on here that i have to explore and find out because I can help more people. And I appreciate that you did that. So we can heal ourselves with good eating and a healthy lifestyle. I mean, that's a revolutionary idea. And I think people are,

you know, in some ways, the silver lining of the last few years of COVID is that people have lost trust in these institutions and maybe they're primed to hear something different. I hope so. I'd like to leverage any openness that might be available to, to exploit, to help people understand that they really can improve and they don't have to worsen. So,

yeah, I'd like to disrupt, you know, slay the, you know, slay the giant of chronic disease and actually get our generations to emerging to increasingly become more healthy. And it's going to take, it's a top-down approach. That's why I look for alpha. So in Congress and our government leadership and the military, corporate leadership at the top CEOs, if we can get them all more healthy to understand

the value of this, it's a wonderful thing. And I want to thank you both for your show and what you guys do, your own careers, what you've done. My wife loved the Mark Wahlberg show, by the way. And I'm a fan of Mark Wahlberg too. He's awesome because he's really trying to promote health. And I have some tips. Mark's on a really great start. In fact, he's well into it, really good. But I'd love to help him out, too, because he's doing some fantastic things. The only complaint I've gotten on that interview is that all the women wish that I had conducted the interview with Mark Wahlberg with his shirt off.

That's been the consensus. That was the one complaint. Anyway, Dr. Merritt, listen, thank you so much for joining us and giving us your time and being such a champion for health. And we'll do a podcast later down the road to talk about this more in terms of policy so here's when we do the follow-up doc i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to your website because i'm in new jersey i'm a wisconsin guy we live out here because of because of fox but i'm gonna actually i'm gonna do this i'm gonna start i'm gonna start to implement what you talked about before i actually come and see you in the summer um and we'll do a follow-up and rachel will treat

a little bit i'll try not to cheat and we'll see a follow-up. And Rachel will treat a little bit. I'll try not to cheat and we'll see how we do. I'm going to try and get an MRI before and get it sent to you, doctor. How about that? Yeah, that would be great. You know, it's nice. I like to get baseline MRIs on my client patients to show where they're at. I was talking to your sister, Leah, about it. She wanted to get healthy first and do the scan.

I said, no, you want to see that disease inside because it's a lot more motivating to see that disease. And that's when you're going to make a difference. And then you repeat the scan down the road and you can pat yourself on the back while you do and it just sustains you. So yeah, however you want to do it, but I would love to see both your scans. Awesome. You're the best. We really appreciate it. I've seen a lot of your other podcasts that you've been on and things that you have up on YouTube. I encourage people who are interested in more because there's a lot more on this discussion

to do that. And then we'll follow up on some public policy. Let's make this a campaign to get America healthy. I would love that, Rachel. I'd be honored to come back anytime to your podcast. Awesome. Dr. Merritt, thank you for joining us. And I appreciate it.

Kitchen table. Maybe we'll hang at the kitchen table. Actually, not virtually, but in person one day. One of these days, we'd love to do that. Yeah, we'll have three or four cups of coffee, too. We'll have coffee and steak. Coffee and steak. Dr. Merritt, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for joining us. for joining us bye bye if you like our podcast you can rate, review, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts thank you for joining us around the kitchen table see you guys next time bye everybody listen ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple podcast and

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