Mark Bell's Power Project - The Modern Epidemic: Sleep, Sunlight & Vitamin D | Dr. Joel Gould

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Sleep apnea, fatigue, anxiety, cravings, and chronic illness might share a root cause most people ignore: sunlight and vitamin D. Dr. Joel Gould breaks down the “modern epidemic,” how D3/K2 and the environment affect your airway, gut, and mitochondria—and what you can actually do about it.Follow:🌐 Official Website🔗 drjoelgould.com – His personal / main hub online.📱 Instagram🔗 @drjoelgould – Personal account (dentistry + health insights).🔗 @modern_hunter_gatherers – Official Modern Hunter Gatherer page (health philosophy + clips).Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject

There's millions or more people around the world who are sick or dying from low vitamin D. Show me all the people who have too much. And it's basically a syndrome that's caused by this. It's caused by a separation of the human animal from the environment it evolved in. Humans are solar-powered animals. No one's ever been diagnosed with cancer with a high vitamin D level. I believe that. Sleep apnea is a catch-all expression for improper sleep.

Do you just give a ton of vitamin D to a kid that potentially might be a mouth breather? You can't fool Mother Nature. You can't fool your biology. For more time in the sun, technically is healthier as long as you're not burning yourself. From the ages of 14 to 48, I was sick. I'm sure there's some commonalities amongst people that have sleep apnea, and there's probably some commonalities of people that don't have sleep apnea. Like, what's the through line?

Like, is there, have you seen or noticed anything? Have you kind of noticed, like, man, these people that can breathe really hard and they can train really like they don't have an issue with this or these people that do you know mountain biking or rock climbing or something these people with high VO2 max they don't have that issue or anything like that or is it different than that so it's different than that so my book is called the modern epidemic and it's basically a syndrome that's caused by this it's caused by a separation of the human animal from the environment it evolved in and that means being outside the primary input is sunlight on your skin in your eyes. Other things, you know, breathing fresh air,

definitely getting rid of the artificial lights, these things. So the main syndrome is caused by low vitamin D and that changes the gut microbiome. You know, all these different things affect the gut microbiome, but the primary driver is vitamin D. So this is information that still isn't known or believed because there's a million different people who have to say. How's his audio? It's his audio. So a million people are talking about the gut microbiome, and it is affected profoundly by vitamin D. And so that's the setting. And this is an evolutionary setting because humans are solar-powered animals.

And the mitochondria itself is the descendant of a cyanobacteria, which is a light-sensing bacteria. So mitochondria sense light. They produce more energy in ATP when you go in the sun. So more time in the sun technically is healthier as long as you're not burning yourself. It's such an interesting thing to think about because the shift in the amount of time that we spend outside is great, right? It's huge. And obviously we kind of speculate about different cultures in the past, different times, you know, maybe, you know, people that lived in colder, colder areas, colder, colder environments, Maybe they weren't outside as much, but then they didn't have an environment to go inside to that was also a, you know, quote unquote, pollutant to the body or wasn't biologically identical to what the human body was evolved into being maybe.

Well, think of it this way. The different populations evolve different skin tones based on sun exposure, except it gets turned upside down when you look at the Inuit who are far north. north, they're getting their, not getting their vitamin D from sunlight, they're getting it from seafood. They're eating a lot of animal fat. But in most northern climates, even far north, there's still a hot, sunny summer and the population would spend time outside. And the further north you go, the lighter the skin that you see. And that's because populations, how profound the sun and vitamin D is as a driver is that when you, when your D levels go, when your D levels go, down, you lose your fertility. So people with darker skin didn't get pregnant. They didn't have

offspring. And the ones with the lighter skin, they're the ones who created the population. That's why people in Iceland have very thin, small bones, really pale skin, okay, versus somebody whose ancestors evolved in Central Africa, unlimited nutrition, unlimited sunlight. What do you mean by small bones? Because like if I think of Iceland, I automatically think of Hapthor Bjornson. I'm like, he doesn't have small. This bones is. Huge. I'm thinking of Bjork. So she's time.

I see. So think about the, the, the populations are, are, have a certain look based on the nutrient density, availability of sunlight. And we see this in, uh, uh, Europe, right, where there's a malaclusion. Am I, am I saying that correctly? Yeah. So, so the, um, if we think about, okay, vitamin D3 and vitamin K2, they regulate calcium coming into the body.

vitamin D is extremely more important because it also regulates your ability to breathe through your nose. So the crowded arches and the lack of room for all the teeth is really a simple D3K2 deficiency. And that's what Weston Price discovered. So he discovered that populations who are living a similar lifestyle to the Aboriginal people of the area, he recorded twins, one who ate processed foods, sugar, flour and all that stuff. and one who stuck to it stuck to an ancestral diet, and they saw a complete collapse of the teeth, jaws, and not getting enough fat, soluble vitamins.

So the diet of flour and it was still seed oils, but even in those days. So one of his rules is that you do not want to eat industrial seed oils because that was big in those days, and it's much worse now. So the lack of, with the reason that people in England have bad teeth is lack of sunlight, lack of K2. When it comes to chewing, I know that some people think that like chewing, there's a mechanical. Some people think it's like mechanical.

And I'm sure that there's probably connection. There's probably like maybe some of both, right? A little bit. But our diets over the last hundred years haven't changed drastically. And that's something that I have noticed because I've had many guests on the show keep talking about chewing, chewing, chewing. And I'm like, I'm like, I think that most cultures that I can think of when they had the opportunity to turn things into a soup or stew, they took it. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And made food soft and made food easier to consume. Right, but to think about, so it's, it's this idea that I think that maybe people were gnawing on bones and everything. No, since fire was discovered, men cooked food because it wouldn't be as tough. So the collapse of the arches that we see, the food hasn't changed that drastically. The ancestral diet isn't chewing, like, gnawing on bones. The missing piece of the puzzle is the D3K2. And I'm a perfect example of this because I was severely vitamin D deficient and apparently

vitamin K2 deficient because when you're in a wind, I grew up in central Canada, two and a half hours north of Fargo, North Dakota. And you told me it's insanely cold there. It is. It's insanely cold. So 50 below is normal, you know. And so if you just look at me and my profile from straight on, I look normal, okay? But from my profile, you're going to see I have my.

no chin. And not only do I have no chin, I don't have second molars and I never got wisdom teeth. And that's what happens to a human animal when you restrict vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. You cannot grow a jaw if calcium isn't coming into the body. So for my future wife and children, my comment is my weak chin isn't genetic. It's epigenetic. The reason... Environmental. Environmental. That's it. And this is the big... So West's A Price, he published his book in 1938, and he was completely accurate. If you read his book to even read the first 30 pages, you're like, wow, this guy really knew his stuff, right? And the result is that the information that he should have brought in that was completely,

it wasn't intentionally repressed, but in 1938, people were thinking about eugenics. Okay, Adolf Hitler was thinking about eugenics, bloodlines, white skin, blue eyes. This is a superior race. And here's Weston Price, a dentist. So he has the first issue. He's not a real doctor or a medical doctor. Now he's a dentist. So that's already one tier down from what people want to hear. And now he's saying it's the environment. And because it was 1938, he was exploring why people, why this was happening to people? Why do people have bad teeth? So he traveled around the world to find populations with good teeth. And that was his discovery as the lack of the fat soluble vitamins results in not enough room for your teeth. And a collapse, a collapse.

of the face. So he was a modern father of epigenetics and his time is just coming now, right? Because people are finally starting to understand that it's not our DNA, it's how we use it. Where can people find your WAP song? Because he did a WAP, W-W-A-P-Rice rap song. Yep, it's on my Instagram feed. I will revisit that. We'll bring that one back. What's compelling you to make some of these animated music videos? And you, and you You learned music because of out of your passion for all this to make these, I guess, in a more palatable form that kids can consume and kids can watch and learn about biology. So it's more about passive education infotainment. So it all came from the reason I did the Westinay Price Wap song was that one of my patients told me her 11 year old was repeating the lyrics to the WAP song.

Okay. And I don't know what at that time I didn't, I saw the lyrics and I was like, this is not good. You don't want an 11 year old doing this, but kids will memorize anything. Right. And so if you present them with information that's memorizable, that's fun, they're going to memorize that. And if it's scientific, they're going to know it. And the whole story behind this is schoolhouse rock. When you sing something or dance something or put it into something fun, you're going to remember it. So kids are spending all these hours doing really meaningless things. If you look at what's available, for kids. Think about this. Aside from the Magic School Bus and Miss Frizzle, there are no

scientific oriented cartoon franchises or characters that really aren't. Bill Nye, the science guy, not very appealing to a four-year-old or a six-year-old. So this all came from my experience with Crohn's disease, autoimmune disease. So I lost my life to autoimmune disease. When I was 14, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And from the ages of 14 to 48, I was sick. And it ruined my life. And to anyone who either know somebody who has Crohn's disease, autoimmune disease, or it has to live with them, it's a very destructive disease.

It's not just the physical, it's not the pain, and it's not just the embarrassment and the constant time in the bathrooms. But the same things that are causing Crohn's disease cause anxiety, your thoughts are not the way they should be. It's a very distorted way to live. And the only reason I know this is because I live most of my life that way. And when I recover from my Crohn's... You can't really develop fully, right?

Like if you're not digesting everything. There's so much to it. There's a massive psychological component to this. No matter what I did, every waking moment was worried about the bathroom. Am I going to get there? I'm going to embarrass myself again in an important meeting. Where's the bathroom? and no matter, you know, even some of the best relationships of my life, I couldn't feel comfortable.

And it wasn't until I recovered from Crohn's disease. It wasn't until it completely disappeared in a space of three months that I finally start to understand just how sick I was. And it took me probably a couple of years to get over it because I had created a life around my disease to hide the symptoms. I didn't want people knowing I was sick. And I can't even explain no one really cared. but there's something about it that I just wanted to show that I was normal and I wasn't. I was very far from it. So when it left me, I was so shocked I had to really recreate my life.

And knowing what I went through and knowing the increase in Crohn's disease and the people who are suffering from it, mostly kids, and the medications they've come up with, they're there to destroy your immune system, not to bolster it. And so that's the wrong treatment. Now, medications do anything? Are they helpful at all? Oh, yeah. But so they suppress your immune system because pharmaceutical medication wants to have one issue,

one medication, you take this. This is the root cause. They say, well, autoimmune disease is your body attacking itself. So they stop your body from having that reaction. But the reason they give you all these warnings is because if you suppress your immune system because it's not working properly, you're going to increase your. your chance for cancer. So Crohn's disease leads to colon cancer. That's just the progression, right? So there's other ways to treat Crohn's disease, but you won't hear about them. I have

an e-book out there, and it's my experience. And there's only a couple of studies that show complete remission of Crohn's disease by raising your vitamin D level. Now, there's no money in that for anyone. The remuncate infusion that my doctor wanted to give me was $7,000, and I didn't want to take it, because I wasn't sick enough. You know, I'd only been hospitalized once, so that's not that bad, right? I'd never had surgery, so that's not that bad. People, you know, they really lose their life with this.

And so to me, the reason, you know, I have two areas of expertise that I really want people to understand is that when I first graduated from dental school, I was a pediatric dentist in the school system and I was a public health dentist. So that was my first experience with kids. And then when I started to see,

when I discovered the D3K2 connection, when I found Western Price's work, it blew my mind because had I seen that book, that book was probably in the library at my dental school, but before the internet, how would I have found it? Obviously, a Canadian dental school should have presented the book, this book that another Canadian dentist wrote about oral facial growth and development, but no one knew about it. And then so here we are all these years later. And I told you, that I contacted the dean in my dental school. And I've been out of school almost 40 years. And the guy was very nice.

And he was from my hometown. We had a great conversation. And I told him my story. And he didn't say, wow, Joel, that's really incredible. I'd love you to prepare a guest lecture. We'd love to, you know, maybe put a paper in or something. He just said, great, thanks. We can't do anything.

We can't change our protocol. We can't do anything. So I had been trying all these years to get either doctors, pediatricians or dentists to understand. how profound low vitamin D can be, especially in children, because it changes the shape of their face. And when the airway narrows, when the palate narrows, the airway narrows. So all these kids in the last 20 years or so, they have tiny airways. So they're doing braces twice on these kids, one, seven to eight to expand the palate, and then again at 11 or 12 to really make room for all the teeth.

That's Weston Price's work, is that you wouldn't need to do that if everyone had a sufficient amount of vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. So between the pediatric, you know, so here I am, you know, at age 48, already having been practiced for 30 years, I have the duty to my profession to say, hey, this is a factor. It's not the only factor, but it's the major factor. It's not, not chewing. And our professions are really great at doing certain things, but they're not really great at finding out why. Everything is an allopathic treatment. You grind your teeth. I'll ask my patients, do you grind your teeth and they'll say, oh, I wear a grinding guard. And I say, you know, I want to say, that's not what I asked you. I asked you if you grind your teeth. And everyone just wants to put a,

put a grinding guard in and say, okay, that's it. No one's thinking about the root cause. So orthodontists are great and they want to help kids and the kids need it, but they're not saying, why is this happening? And when you, and so you've been on those forums and they think it's because it's not chewing enough. And it's a component. I don't think it's a major component at all. Even junk food is chewy. Chips are chewy. If they're thinking about primitive kids chewing on bones, I think that's not really the right way to think. But, you know, there was a study on Southeast Asian population that moved to England.

And they noticed that their arches collapsed, same type of thing. And they were saying that they thought it was the British food that was in cans because it was really soft. And no one was thinking about a population coming from a tropical area that has tons of vitamin D3 naturally, and most likely the animals are eating grass, are not feeding them GMO corn, and they move these kids to a northern climate

and put them indoors. It's certainly not just, it's not the food. It was the absolute lack of sunlight and the lack of vitamin K2 that they can naturally get. And so if it's not being recognized and the only thing left that's out there is chewing, that's it. Vitamin D and vitamin K2 is complicated. I have a list of things called D's excuses, kind of a joke, but the things that people say.

So when I say to people, you know, ask them about the vitamin D level, there's a set of things people say just automatically, oh, my vitamin D level is great, I drink milk and juice. It's in there. And they're right, but it's placed artificially. There is no vitamin D in milk. It's a place in only a tiny amount, 100 international units. So there's so many misconceptions about it. People say, oh, I'm in the sun all the time.

I walk my dog twice a day. when you walk your dog, between 9 and 10, there's no vitamin D, and between four and five, there's no vitamin D, or people go outside and they're fully covered, just their face and their hands exposed and they're outside. Oh, I would spend a ton of time outside. That's not a meaningful exposure to make enough vitamin D. You can make a lot, and you can make it quickly, but this is not socially or culturally what people are thinking about.

And then medical doctors don't learn anything about vitamin D. And so they're really told that too much is toxic, and that's what everyone's worried about. There's millions or more people around the world who are sick or dying from low vitamin D. Show me all the people who have too much. So the overdose is completely overrated. And one of the most interesting things happened fairly recently. So when I got into vitamin D 10 years ago, I really learned from the experts. And you could get a vitamin D test.

It wasn't done almost on anyone at that point in time. And the level that you're supposed to have was a range between 30 and 100 nanograms per milliliter. Now, if you don't take supplements and you're in the sun all the time, you'll max out at around 100, right? Now, it makes sense that at the end of winter, you're at 30, and at the end of summer, you're at 100. That's a normal range. So I noticed that about five years ago, my patient started coming in saying, my doctor says my vitamin level is toxic. You told me to take too much.

And I say, what's your level? It's 60. And I said, that's great. That's what I want you to be. I want you to be 60 to 80. And so they would say, but look, My doctor says it's toxic and they show me the lab report because they changed it from 20 to 50. And the reason they changed is because everyone was low.

Now, there was never any study that said we should lower this. And what I found really interesting was so now your PPO doctor is getting this. Doctors are busy. They don't care about vitamin D. It's not interesting. No one's making money off of it. So they see that lab result. They circle all the ones that aren't in that range.

So my patients were upset with me and I'm like, I'm telling you right now that if you're a patient at Kaiser, Kaiser still has 30 to 100. And if you think about this, when you go to Kaiser, they lose money when you're sick. They do, right? But PPO doctors make money. And I'm not saying this was done intentionally for PPO doctors to make money because they don't really have enough vitamin D knowledge, but somewhere, somehow they change these values and they don't reflect our biology. This decision was not made by careful studying of vitamin D studies and all that. I don't know who made it, but it's dangerous. So I still wanted my patients to be in that 60 to 80 range.

That's where I want to keep myself as well. We talk a lot about vitamin D and there's vitamin D from the sun. There's some nutritional vitamin D, but it's kind of scarce. There's not a ton of vitamin D in our food. Our food nowadays is fairly compromised. I would say even our supplements are going to be fairly compromised too. If the food's compromised, if the vitamin D, sometimes vitamin D, is a seed oil, right? Sometimes it's, or sorry, it's in, suspended in a seed oil. And even if it's

suspended in something different than a seed oil, that oil could not potentially be so, so great for you. So like, what are some of the, what are some of the answers here? And if someone have, what have you seen from people that have low vitamin D and then you kind of set them straight? And now they have a higher vitamin D. What's been some of the outcomes? Well, so just, for example, when I went through this, it was accidental. So I raised my vitamin D level trying to treat my sleep apnea. And I didn't know that my Crohn's disease was going to disappear. But some of the things that happened were I didn't get a cold probably for two years.

The first time I got a cold after raising my vitamin D level, I sneezed a few times. I had a sort of a sore throat. Prior to that, when I would get sick, I'd have two weeks of blowing my nose, followed by a secondary lung infection I'd need antibiotics for. It's very classic. That's what people go through. So I noticed better skin quality. for me, Crohn's disease disappeared.

So that's massive. But I've had more energy. I felt better, better skin quality, better sense of smell. When you raise your vitamin D level, even your body other changes because vitamin D regulates the microbiomes of the body. And it's either your lungs,

your oral microbiome, your gut microbiome. It's most profound in your gut, but it's profound in your mouth as well. That's why people who get a lot of cavities and periodontal disease, they're low vitamin D. If you check with chat GPT or your AI, you're going to find that,

this is the root cause of periodontosis. A D3K2 deficiency, vitamin K2 figures very, very much into this in the oral cavity. But vitamin D regulates. So I learned that vitamin D makes over 200 antimicrobial proteins. What do these proteins do? They facilitate the regulation of the bacteria in your body on your skin, in your lungs, in your mouth, and in your gut. And when your D level is really low, you have a completely different.

different set of microbes there because vitamin D isn't available to shape what's supposed to be there. And what happens a lot of times in the gut is that fungus overgrows. And fungus sends a signal to your brain to crave carbs. So that's the other thing when you raise your vitamin D level. You're craving for sugar goes way down. When we're, you know, when we're thinking about these vitamin D levels, you know, and again, I want to ask, are you a fan of like supplementing, like a pretty good amount of vitamin D? I mean, it sounds like you're a proponent of the sun, like get out in the sun.

And it sounds like you're also suggesting supplementation with some vitamin D. So living in the modern world, it's really difficult to get your vitamin D naturally, especially if you're busy. Now, it's easier here in Southern California because it's sunny all the time. So I do a combination. I only supplement my vitamin D when the time change starts and I definitely stop when it's over. That's the time when I supplement. I do a combination. I don't supplement in the summer because I don't need to. A lot of people won't go in the sun. So thinking about Weston Price and the idea that the Weston Price Foundation, they weren't happy with me

because I recommend supplementation. They want people to get this naturally. And what I found is I first started supplementing vitamin D just from a pill not thinking about going in the sun. And the more I started to think about it, the more I realized, well, this is not very very very, natural and if I can get it naturally I'm going to do that I only supplement what I need to supplement right anything that I can get naturally I'm going to do that so I play beach volleyball I'm outside for hours I don't believe in sunscreen so I'm careful I have a good tan and there's certain things that I take I take axis anthein before I go in the sun it decreases the effects of the sun on you and um you know what what I paired it down to is that um I created my band called the foundation

four and they're foundational. They are vitamin D3, vitamin K2, magnesium and sulfur. These two vitamins, two minerals, this is the most essential thing to supplement because most modern chronic inflammatory disease follows from deficiency states of those four chemical elements. Okay. Now, can I get vitamin K2 in hard cheeses? Sure. Do I want to not have enough K2? I don't. K2 is one of these ones where you can start to look it up, oh, I had some Guta. much K2's in that. I don't want to track that. I'm just going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to take a vitamin K2 supplement. And in the winter, and, you know, I could still get the sun. I've got to be outside at noon. You've got to take your clothes off. Southern California is great,

but there is a line that goes from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Anything north of that, you can't make vitamin D for a couple months out of the year. We're just at that border. So in December, you could do it naturally, but it's kind of hard. So I don't want to walk around with a vitamin D level that's below 50 ever. I don't want to. So I recommend supplementing the things that we know that it's hard to get. One of my cartoon characters, sulfur. Sulfur, it's a big deal. Now, why do we not have sulfur? Well, first of all, there's very little volcanic soil in America where everything is grown. There's not a lot of sulfur. And even worse, we have our friend glyphosate. And glyphosate is a key later. It steals the minerals away. And one of the minerals that glyphosate steals out of the soil and out of us is sulfur.

Why sulfur important? It's required for a healthy glycopalix. Have you heard that that expression before? Yeah. So the glyco calyx needs to have enough sulfur in your body so that heparin sulfate and the different chemicals that you want to have to create a slick surface that coats your blood cells and the interior of your arteries, you want to have, you want to have that negative charge. that is provided by the glycopalix. What ruins the glycopalics? Lack of sulfur. If you don't have enough sulfur in you, what does that affect? Well, it affects your fascia. It affects your tendons and you literally start to dry out. And where can you get sulfur? Well, you can get it from cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. How much is in them? Where are

they grown? You know, if you're in Italy, do you have to supplement your sulfur? Probably not. Why? Italy is volcanic soil, very high in sulfur. If you live in Hawaii and you have your own garden, very rich in sulfur from the volcanic soil, so you don't need to supplement. But for the average person, I literally would say that not having enough of those four chemical elements is really responsible for 80% of the common illness that we see. And I've worked this through with AI quite a bit because when I say these things, you know, I say that cardiovascular disease isn't from eating too much cholesterol, you know, that doesn't work that way. What is cardiovascular cause by? Well, in nature, it's never just one thing. It's usually

a combination. So in nature, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, magnesium and sulfur deficiency can result in poor cardiovascular health. It's complex. And there's no drug that you can sell. So who's going to care about that? But I do. And I know that these days, I said that, you know, I was always over here in this direction. I had all this great information and everyone was way over there. And over time, everyone's coming over to my camp because I think that COVID was really an eye-opener for many people to say that maybe my doctor doesn't have the answers, maybe I need to take care of myself. And I think that's really, we're in a world of personalized medicine now. And I think that people really want to understand science.

And again, that's why I created my cartoon characters is to take this complex ideas of science and simplify them. And if kids are following my cartoon characters because they're fun, down the road, they're really going to understand the science. And putting a face on something, you know, so you've heard of your mitochondria. Everyone knows that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. What does that really mean? I wanted to create a character that was memorable. And that's my character. I'm a DJ, DJ Marty mitochondria. I'm a musician and I'm the powerhouse of the cell because mitochondrial health is the essence of who you are. If your mitochondria aren't healthy, you're not healthy. It doesn't matter what your

tissue is like if there's not enough energy, it's very hard to maintain health. And as we move forward, we're going to see that everything really comes down to that mitochondria and how do you understand it? Well, I have this complex science stuff that people don't necessarily want to hear, but you're already seeing part of what I do. This is a depiction of the inter mitochondrial membrane, and I made it like a lightning bolt because your mitochondria produces energy. Okay, it's got an electron flow. And what you see, these little things, these are the nanomotors that spin. that actually create the energy called ATP in your body. So I wanted to start to give this complex science something that would be memorable,

will be fun, because you can be deceived by doctors and whatever is trending. But if you understand your own biology, it's easier to stay healthy. You can't be fooled. You can't fool Mother Nature. You can't fool your biology. So people are doing certain things that are trendy. That's fine. Some of them are healthy.

Some are not. but I really wanted to elucidate health and wellness at a completely different level so that people would know, oh, this is baloney or whatever. And I want people to understand that the basis for this is that our biology as human animals were hunter-gatherers. 20,000 years ago, we weren't living in cities. Certainly weren't living indoors and we weren't eating bread or growing wheat or all that stuff. So our biology over all of our evolutionary existence was lived outdoors. And so my goal is to make people understand that they need to show their bodies different signals than what this room gives us, this artificial light gives us.

And the electricity, this disrupts our biology. So I want people to understand that we're all hunter-datherers and that they should join their tribe. And the information I'm providing is from tribal elders that I have met who are the experts. And I wanted to put their information together in a way where it would stay. and it would actually be incorporated into popular culture. So the biggest issue that we have is that vitamin D deficiency has been discovered many times. You know, people don't know this or people may not remember this, but there's tuberculosis. It's a skin and lung bacterial infection.

And before antibiotics, the way that we cured it was for people to go to a sanatorium and lie in the sun. And in my book, I have pictures of people lying in hospital beds. I've seen the outdoor hospitals stuff before. Yeah. So sunlight can reverse a bad thing. bacterial and skin infection sounds pretty important. Now, once antibiotics were discovered, that idea just completely disappeared. So vitamin D will come, it came in during rickets in the Industrial Revolution when there was so little calcium in these kids' bodies that their bones

were bending. So that's when we discovered vitamin D. Okay. So now if all the children, I believe all the children are walking around vitamin D deficient except for some, you know, what I say, it doesn't apply 100%, but at least 80%, all of life follows a bell curve. So here's this information and the way it's put out there, vitamin D, oh yeah, it's kind of, it's important. But if you look through the science, when I started getting into this and looking at cancer, I would find that the sicker the person, the bigger the tumor, the lower the vitamin D level. That's the correlation. And so when I say things like no one's ever been diagnosed with cancer with a high vitamin D level,

I believe that because I believe that vitamin D is critical for your body's surveillance of cancer. and when the surveillance system is gone, the immune system is not being directed, that's when cancer develops. So low vitamin D doesn't cause cancer, it allows it to develop. Do you think you could have potentially like a false high vitamin D level via, you know, getting it through supplements? Well, it's not false if you can measure in the blood, but there's a couple of factors. Number one is there's the idea that glyphosate and it's really in kids food because it's in all the processed foods. So kids who have a high vitamin D level, they can't activate it. And the reason they can't activate is the enzymes that take vitamin D from its inactive form to its active form, they're destroyed by glyphosate.

And this is a factor. So this is why people in India can be living in a tropical climate and have low vitamin D because they're drinking tea with glyphosate. So your body can't convert it. So there's a lot of different factors, but the basic idea is that this is, this is, a chemical hormone that was never taught in medical school. Doctors didn't learn anything about it. Vitamin D biology is massive. It controls a huge portion of your own DNA and your genes. This information needs to be put out into the public and it needs to stay. People need to understand that there's no movement forward with health if we don't say, our doctors miss this.

This is not good. And I've been in this battle for 10 years. When I started out, it was really bad because the neighboring doctors would yell at me saying, stop telling our patients, take toxic levels of vitamin D, and they're not toxic. They're not. Can you get some vitamin D via like cold exposure? No. So it's from the sun, and it's from supplementation, and it's from some version of food. You can eat it or you can make it on your skin.

Yeah. And, you know, so there was this whole conversation about vitamin D sulfate, and that just gets us into what is sulfur, really. So sulfur is a transporter. So when something gets sulfated, it makes it be able to go in blood. So hormones get sulfated. A lot of things get sulfated so they can be transported. And this is a big deal. Again, if you have a sulfur deficiency. So vitamin D is a chemical. It's a hormone. I think it's best made naturally because you don't just make vitamin D. You get all kinds of other benefits from being in the sun. Your mitochondria love it.

So yeah. And the other thing is that if you understand what we look like and how we evolved to be standing upright with our faces and eyes to the sun, if the sun was dangerous, we wouldn't look like this. evolution sculpted us like this with our evolutionary partners the ruminants so human animals chased and hunted ruminants those are our evolutionary partners if you have a goat that goat can eat anything and then if you get really hungry you can get the goat's milk and then if you get really hungry you can kill the goat and you can eat it so not necessarily domesticating animals we are in a partnership with ruminants this these are our animals because this is the healthy food they

transform useless grass into beautiful meat and cheese and dairy products. We don't eat the grass. We'll eat the grass if there's nothing else to eat, but our food source is ruminants. That's how we got big brains. That's how we became the dominant species on the planet is because we utilize this union between ruminants and us. They're great animals. And that's the solution to everything you see going wrong on this planet is all these GMO farms with the dead soils. They all need to change out to the grasslands that they were. In North America, it was buffaloes or buffalo. And in Africa, it was a cow-like wildebeest, a specific animal that we domesticated into a cow. But this is our natural food source. We should eat them. We should eat all the parts of them.

It's incredible. An animal can have a life. And it can complete the cycle of life by eating the grass and then fertilizing it. And we get to enjoy those animals, but they're healthiest for us when they're eating their natural food, which is grass. And that's why I'm kind of disappointed. The whole grass-fed thing kind of peaked and went down. I think it's a big deal. And it's back in certain places. Even living in L.A., it's hard to find places that have specifically grass-fed,

grass-finished meat. Yeah, you know, anytime there's opportunity for there to be industry or for there to be money-made, then you're going to have people that are kind of skirting around the thing. And so I think, you know, grass-fed, grass-finished wasn't really a thing. Even just going back a couple years, you didn't really hear people emphasize grass-finished because sometimes these animals were grain finished, right? It's correct. You want that regenerative agriculture type thing.

When it comes to the vitamin D, you know, some things that are popping up in my head are, I guess the study of this would be sort of hard to work. out but has there been studies done on kids having high vitamin D and then not having these smaller airways and developing having their face develop better or is it more like we're gonna we're pulling information from other countries where there's more sunlight and things like that nature like more observational so we start to get into some really tricky territory we start to get into if you have these two populations of kids one you're gonna give

vitamin D 2 and 1 you're not. This is the the science is there. This is a profound thing. But do you just give you know a ton of vitamin D to a kid that potentially might be a mouth breather? Well so those studies technically can't really be done and that's what's so difficult about vitamin D but there are things that people can do. So one of the things that I always like to talk about is that if you have young kids and they grind their tea. So Brexism, that really loud clenching and grinding that's coming from kids' bedrooms often it comes with with snoring and these are the same kids that suck their thumb or wet the bed, okay?

When you hear that grinding noise coming from your child's bedroom, that's low vitamin D. And if you take that child and you start to supplement their vitamin D, you will see them stop that grinding within as little as three days or three weeks. And if you take away the vitamin D, they'll start to grind their teeth again.

So that's just one way that you can measure this. You think vitamin D almost has like a, in some roundabout way, like a sedative effect? No, it's a profound effect. So number one, when you give it to get, so the older you get, the hardest, harder is to recover

from chronic low vitamin D. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they wanna do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just wanna look good, feel good.

And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these very, various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that.

And there's a few aspects, too, where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient, care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that boom you could be at the right levels including working with your testosterone and there's so many people that I know that are looking for they're like hey should I do that they're very curious and they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the hole but that's not really what happens it can be something that can be really

great for your health because uh you can just basically live your life a little stronger just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys. When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms

per deciliter of test, you're good, bro. Even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're gonna try to figure out what's like things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work.

It's not like you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation. Sometimes it's TRT. And sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional health from people who are gonna be able to get you towards your best levels.

That's AmeriHealth.com and use code Power Project for 10% off any panel of your choice. When you're a kid, so it's the mechanism is the same. Vitamin D regulates the gut microbiome. And what happens in kids right away is they have a very quick regeneration. And what's missing is the B vitamins. So there's eight B vitamins.

We make them in our gut. And if we don't have enough vitamin D, we don't make enough of those B vitamins. And so it's the B vitamins that are really important in almost every chemical reaction, especially how the mitochondria operates. So part of this whole journey for me has been understanding vitamin B5 pantathenic acid. It's just one of the B vitamins. That's a requirement to make acetylcholine.

Acetylcholine is the chemical that takes you from fight or flight to neurotransmitter, right? Rest and digest, that's correct. And it has to be made inside the neuron. You can't take it. So if you don't have that vitamin B5, you can't make acetylcholine, but there's an added feature. If your vitamin D level is too low, you can't make the enzyme that makes acetylcholine. So it's a double whammy. So the reason I want my patients to have levels of vitamin D of 60 to 80, because it's at those levels that enough of the enzyme, chlorine acetyl transfraise, one of my cartoon characters,

chat, that's when that enzyme can be made because you need two things. You need enough vitamin D to make the enzyme, and then you need enough of vitamin B5 to make acetylcholine. And they're both related. So when we give kids who grind their teeth, these are also kids with ADHD, they sleep poorly, they have dental decay, they have all kinds of issues. These are the developmentally delayed kids like I was. When we give them that vitamin D and they recover that quickly, it's because the gut microbiome starts to get that regulation and the kids are making their B vitamins right away. And in kids where it's a little slow, sometimes if we give B vitamins, we'll see eczema

disappear and we'll definitely hear the grinding disappear. And that's the other thing is that eczema is very. really results of a vitamin D deficiency and a secondary B vitamin deficiency. And if you, if anyone's listening to this and you have eczema and you don't know your vitamin D level, you're not alone. But if you have a vitamin D level in the 60 to 80 range and you still have eczema, then you need to supplement some extra B vitamins and your exma can literally disappear in days. And it's tragic because eczema is horrible. Exema psoriasis, this is horrible. People are suffering and I had never had it. I don't know if I told you the story before, but as I started

to progress, you know, raising my vitamin D level. Things were good. I went on a cycling trip to Croatia. Very sunny. I'm cycling over mountains and there's great wine. So I'm drinking alcohol. I'm in the sun and I'm exercising and I get really itchy and I don't know what it is. I can't figure it out. I kind of forget it until the next year I go on another cycling trip, bigger mountains, more sun, more wine. And by the third day, I break out in rashes all over my hands. I don't know, I've never had eczema. I don't even know what it is. So I go to a pharmacy to get a cream and the pharmacist says, oh, you have eczema. And I was like, I don't have eczema. And it was classic eczema. And so, you know, he gave me a cream. And I went to my doctor. They gave me a cream. Exima comes from

the inside out. It doesn't, you don't put anything on it. It's not going to fix it. And it took me a year and a half. I had eczema and psoriasis. And slowly over time, by raising my B vitamin supplementation, completely resolved. I've had many patients that but exactly the same thing. So I don't treat eczema, but I treat dental disease. And when I tell somebody to raise their vitamin D, often their eczem will go away completely. I've seen it so many times. With your own, so you were able to get your Crohn's disease squared away, is that, are you completely in remission to that?

Like is that completely gone? Completely gone. And then were you able to, because I think your goal originally was to get rid of your sleep apnea. Yes. Were you able to get rid of that? Yeah, to a certain degree, yeah. So if we're looking at apnea as an overarching term for a measurement, how many times you stop breathing is measured by your AHA, your apnea,

poppapney index. So when I started out, I had an AHA, probably between 25 to 30. When I was at the end of my journey, I wore an oral device and I created this protocol to try and decrease it. The last time I tested my AHA, it was about seven. So is that apnea? Not really. Not really. So yeah. What's the fall off point or whatever? What's the? So anything below five is not considered apnea. Anything over 30, H.I starts to be severe and you want to think about wearing a CPAP and that. And it's like, it's like same thing with the grinding guard. People who wear a CPAP, it doesn't reverse the apnea. It just pushes air down your airway.

It's anyone wearing a CPAP. If you can do it, it's one of the healthiest things you can do because it's going to keep you alive. Do any of these mouthpieces and stuff like that, these see advertised on social media or the mouthpieces that you might see on like Amazon that are, you know, talking about sleep apnea? Do these things do anything? Are they helpful? They can help you or they can hurt you, right? So anything that you order online and you put into your body can mess with your entire face.

And I see a lot of people who end up really messing with how their teeth come together, their occlusion by wearing these. These devices are designed to bring your jaw down and forward. And they should be done by a professional. It should be custom made. And you need to have instruction because if you have your jaw open all night, you got to put it right back up into the position. Otherwise, it's going to change everything.

And I see a lot of people who have damaged themselves. So I don't you fitted me for one years ago and I still have it and yeah it really is interesting. It pulls your your lower jaw forward slightly. Nothing hurts or anything like that. You know, you put this mouthpiece in and it fits perfectly. It's real snug. And then for some weird reason, there's like this suction on your tongue and your tongue just sticks to the roof of your mouth. It feels like a perfect, I don't know how to explain it because I've never had that.

happen naturally, I don't think. Right, right. And so it's, I don't know, it's just interesting to me, but I wear that. And then in addition, I'll also put on mouth tape. But I don't wear it all the time just because it does seem to help my sleep, but I have tracked it in the past. And it made a difference, but it's just sometimes annoying to have the, you know, have the extra, I guess, size of the mouthpiece, you know, in your mouth the whole time. Yeah, it took a long time, but there's some really more comfortable ones. The one I only use now, it's a nylon 3D printed one. The issue is that if anything changes in your mouth,

you've got to get a new one and they're expensive. But with digital technology, in the old days I was afraid to do these because I would do a crown in someone's mouth and then this device they paid a lot of money for would no longer fit. But now we can pre-scan them. We can make sure that their new dense work fits that device.

How does somebody find out about this? Like, where do they go? Because I was lucky to find you. You know, I don't even remember who. recommended me to you or stuff like that, but a lot of people don't have someone like you in their back pockets. How do they like find out? Well, so that's a great question. It leads me to my story of the journey of the insomniac. There really isn't a good sleep doctor. People probably already know that say if you have an issue sleeping, you go to your MD. They give you maybe some medication.

Ambrient or something. Exactly. And you know, it doesn't work. And then they refer you to a sleep doctor. And you've got this great feel like I'm going to go to this sleep clinic and come in. There's going to be clouds hanging from sheep and then they're going to talk to me and you walk into this office and or not even know they send you a sleep study you do the sleep study and they see here's your CPAP and shove you out the door because that's what they get paid for and seepaps work but no one's really paying attention to the person that can't sleep that's the issue so most dentists now are aware of sleep apnea some dentists can take you know you can take all kinds of different courses so I recommend you know wherever you're at

if there's a local dentist who is knowledgeable in sleep, that that's a good starting point. And these days, you know, 10 years ago, it was not that common. Most dentists have heard about it these days. It's just that I don't know what any of the protocols are great. Dentists have done a really good job of making it a system. And they're not wrong. It's just they're maybe not 100% right. A mandibular advancement device, if it's fit right and it's proper and everything,

can really change your life. And especially for somebody who can't do a CPAP or who won't do a CPAP, there's a lot of different reasons. They can be very powerful and they can work, but there's a lot to them. You got to make sure that it's in the right place. Once they're comfortably fit and then you can verify, most people, when I give it to them, I say, let's come back, let's do a sleep study. And they go, I'm not coming back. I feel great. My wife is happy or my husband's happy. I'm not snoring anymore. And they're done. Once in a while, I get to do a sleep study. But there are some systems just tough because you want to get the positioning right. And I always go by what the patient

wants, but if someone isn't having any results, then we want to try with a sleep study. How many people do you think have sleep apnea? Everyone. It's all varying degrees. So, and this is in my opinion, and maybe a lot of people don't agree with me, but sleep apnea is a catch-all expression for improper sleep, for the body's inability to have the coordinated effort of the diaphragm going down, air coming in through the nose because you always want to be nasal breathing. And this all goes awry. So we have lots of kids who have terrible apnea. We have lots of young adults. And we're just not getting at the point where we're like just down regulating enough or we're in a state of because of what you were

mentioning earlier about the environment and the blue light and all the other things that are going on. Yeah. The toxicity of the environment is pretty high and it depletes your vitamin D. So if you're, if you're sitting in the basement working on your computer all the time, that's stress. coming at you in many different ways. And our biology is not used to having stress. You know, humans, they're out in the daytime hunting and gathering when they're stressing their bodies, they're getting that vitamin D and sunlight.

So maybe instead of the computer in the basement, you hop on your laptop and just go outside for a little bit. But it's antithetical. Computers are antithetical to sunlight. I don't know if you ever tried to do that. I have a whole setup because I try and get as much sun as possible and I want to get some work done. So I have to cover my computer.

It's a bit of a pain, but yeah, I'd much rather be outside. for that. And they're starting to make some computers that a daylight computer, I think is one of the companies. It's pretty cool because it doesn't have the blue light behind it and so on. That's great, but you know, it's the understanding because people are afraid of the sun, they stay out of the sun. Everyone's wearing sunglasses thinking that that sunlight causes cancer. And I never wear sunglasses unless I'm in my car on a mountaintop somewhere unnatural. You take a tram up a couple of thousand feet. You better protect your eyes. You walk up that same elevation. You're body can adapt slowly. So sunlight in your eyes tells your body everything and wearing sunglasses

really inhibits your body's ability to even take in the sun naturally because blocking that prevents you from making the chemicals to tell your melanocytes, hey, we're in the sun. You're wearing dark glasses and your body's not getting the signal. You're going to be more likely to burn. You know a lot about deuterium. So I think it would be great to discuss some of that. How does deuterium and deuterium depletion, how does that kind of play into a lot of the things you've been learning? Well, so my initial goal was to update Western Price's information. I wanted to put this very simple information about D3K2 magnesium, the nutritional component. But as I looked at what he had done, I wanted to say to myself, I'm a modern-day Western

Price. What else is out there? And I came across two different topics. The first one was the sulfur issue, sulfation. Salvation pathways in our body. Very impressive. That's Dr. Stephanie Seneff. And I became in contact with Laslo Boros.

And that was actually through Ron's or initial company, Quest Nutrition. And that was where I met Laslo Boros. And Gabor Somlia. So these are the two Hungarian guys that are really into the Deuterum stuff. And I want to really make it clear that there's the division. There's Deuterium depleted water. That's a product. And then there's the understanding of the science of Deuterium.

And this brings us into a completely different realm of science. Most of what your people that you talk to or your guests are we're talking about molecules. We're talking about molecular chemistry. These are enzymes. These are hormones. These are the chemicals that work in your body. Deuterium takes place at the quantum level and that is below the level of molecules into subatomic particles. And there's only three electrons, protons and neutrons.

And everything that you see, this table, you were only made up of those three subatomic particles. Now, your mitochondria produces your energy, and it's paying very close attention to those subatomic particles. And deuterium is a version of hydrogen. It's totally natural. It's not radioactive or anything. It's in everything, especially water. And it's in our bodies. And your body doesn't want it.

It's very destructive to our biology, specifically the most important thing that does, it does slow down your enzymes through the kinetic isotope effect. So the more deuterium you have in your body, the slower things work. but our biology evolved at a very specific level that hydrogen can tunnel. And what that means in English is, the hydrogen is so small, it's only got an atomic weight of one, that it behaves very differently when we go down to that level inside the mitochondria. And you'll see right here at the nanomotos,

these are spinning 7, 9,000 RPM. And the spin is caused by hydrogen passing through a protein complex. when hydrogen's brother, twin brother, but twice as heavy called deuterium, gets into that little rotor, it's a delicate protein, it slows the rotation, can break it, there's a stutter. So the more deuterium that comes into your mitochondria, the worse your mitochondrial health is, but specifically the less energy you produce. Now you're a bodybuilder, you want to have that ATP access unlimited because you want to have the ability when you're lifting. You don't want to be, you know, people are all taking their creatine, that's a huge help. But if you don't have enough ATP,

you can't get the muscles to contract the way that you want. So the more deuterium that you have coming into your mitochondria, the less energy you produce, the more reactive oxygen species you produce, deuterium causes mayhem in our bodies if there's too much. There's a certain amount that's normal. And that amount is that's normal is what we used to have when we were hunter-gatherers. So now, you know, sugar's bad for you. Why is it bad? Well, that's a great question. Why is it full of deuterium? So why would I say, I don't know that fruit is healthy? Certainly fruit juice is not healthy. Are there nutrients in it? Sure. But what is it? It's full of deuterium. And when you eat fruit without the fiber goes into your system, yes, causes all kinds of insulin problems. But at a deeper level, that deuterium is overloading the mitochondria. And that's where we get into things like intermittent fasting. Your mitochondria wasn't designed to have stuff coming at it all day long. It's got to regenerate. It gets destroyed by too much deuterium. And here we have this pineapple that you're going to eat in January living in Alaska full of deuterium. And all of our fruit for the last

10,000 years has been cross-bred to grow quickly and to be sweet. And that's just increasing the deuterium. So if you ate the fruit of our ancestors, they weren't just a big, juicy, and sweet. So this deuterium overload is coming primarily from processed foods, surprise, surprise, sugar, carbohydrates, and it overwhelms the mitochondria. So understanding how do you get rid of deuterium is important, and it's living that more organic lifestyle, spending time outside, spending time in the sun. But most critically, so I said that deuterium depleted water is very different than deuterium biology. So can you drink deuterine depleter water?

You can. Do you need to know? If you have a lot of money and you have cancer, I'd be drinking it. because it can affect cancer profoundly, and that's really one of the biggest discoveries about Deuterium and why it's important, right? But you can control your Deuterium by thinking about what you eat, and that's where the ruminants come in.

Ruminants are cows, goats, sheeps, any animal with a rumen, and that's a multiple gut stomach chamber where the microbes filter out and make sure that the actual tissue that goes on, the meat and the milk is extremely low in deuterium, and that's why I want to only eat grass-fed, grass-finished ruminants meat. It's my primary food source. I'm not interested in chicken.

And I'm not interested in pork. If you have a pig that's from Tuscany that eats acorns, I will eat that pig. Okay. I'm not a big pork fan, but I'm definitely not a big chicken fan. Everyone thinks that a boneless, skinless, well, this is a bodybuilder's missed, bone-lis skinless chicken breast and some steam broccoli and brown rice. Brown rice has arsenic in it. Chicken is monogastric, whatever it eats, you eat.

and it eats a ton of linoleic acid, omega-6, PUFA, polyunsaturated fat, you don't want that. It's already in everything anyway. It's in your almond flour. It's in your almond milk and all that stuff. So you know this that you don't want too much linoleic acid in your body, and chicken is extremely high in that. It causes oxidative stress, right? Yeah. So the Pufa science is there.

So we know that too much omega-6 is very harmful. These fats get into your cell membranes and into your mitochondrial. and they cause, they're fragile, they break, they become rancid, and that's why we want to have more omega-3 than omega-6. But this other component really is the deuterium part. This is really instrumental in how you produce energy. And if you overwhelm your mitochondria with too much deuterium, you get metabolic disease. So the food that you want to put into yourself is going to be a low deuterium substrate. That's ruminance meat. Why a cow eating grass, grass is very low in Deuterium, a cow that's eating corn, especially a GMO corn, is going to have a whole different

host of problems. So that grass-fed grass-finish thing, it does cut a lot of that out. It cuts a lot of those that make a six out profoundly, and you get a lot more steric acid, which is much healthier for us. So that's why I'm back on the ruminants meat. And what happens in the mitochondria is that the water that happens that your body wants to use further reactions, your body wants to use Deuterium depleted water, but it makes it in the mitochondria. And that's the safe zone. The water actually oozes out of the mitochondria. So the reactions that are happening in that area, they're in Deuterium depleted water, which is what we want. How do we deplete deuterium? What are a couple ways? I know that the sun is one way. Yep. Sun. Grounding? Yeah, so grounding. If you do a deep

dive into grounding, I like it, but, you know, I have this idea that, you know, I think you probably saw the Rulot slide where they show red blood cells all clumped up and then someone puts their foot onto conductive ground and they scatter. I don't know how real that is. Maybe it's slower. So grounding, I'm not aware that it depletes deuterium. I'm not sure that process, but being in the sun for sure. Sona, exercise, and then your diet. And you know, exercise will deplete deterioration? Sure. Oh, sure. There you go. Yeah. So all the things that people want to be, have a healthy lifestyle about those, those are the deuteris. depletion phases. So basically the deuterium is tied to your location and where you are in the food that's there. So that's why eating the local food is going to be a good match for your deuterum levels.

And then intermittent fasting is a really good method to keep your deuterum low because think about this human as hunter-gatherers, they feasted and fasted. So they found an animal, they killed it. They ate really well for a while and then maybe they were two, three weeks without food. And that's how our biology actually evolved. We didn't evolve. Later on, we dried fish and meat, and then we can have our snacks with us. But initially, our biology was formed around this feasting and fasting. And that's why I'm so interested in fasting

and intermittent fasting, but also longer fasting periods for autophagy. With everything you discovered and this protocol that you have for vitamin D with sulfur, magnesium, what are the amounts that you usually recommend and what types of vitamin D, what types of vitamin D, what types of magnesium and so on. Sure. So the jury is still out on a lot of this stuff.

So keeping in mind that magnesium is usually put with something, okay, and there's all the different varieties. Magnesium citrate is known to be the cheapest one. I like a combination, you know, mixes a few, magnesium glycinate, magnesium malate. I don't really know that there's any definitive studies, but I think that supplementing magnesium is extremely important because it's required for. to activate ATP itself, ATP is not functional unless it has magnesium attached to it. So it's extremely critical. So I'm not that fussy about that type of stuff. A great way to get magnesium

and sulfur is Epsom salts bath, magnesium sulfate. So you can actually, your skin can absorb it. And there's a different magnesium sprays. And you can really feel the difference when you spray it on your skin, especially if you're deficient. So like I said, I want to get anything I can get natural. I want to get that. But there are certain things that I really am going to supplement. That is D3K2 magnesium and sulfur. And sulfur, the format is MSM. So when it comes to dosing, just there's, you know, certain rule of thumbs. I advise my patients that I like them to take about 400 milligrams of magnesium. I like it best before bed. I think it's the most useful. When it comes to vitamin D, this is the tricky part. The rule of thumb is 1,000 international units per 25 pounds. Now,

that's a holding dose. If you're low on vitamin D, it's not going to restore your stores. It's not going to be enough for you. If you want to raise your level, you can take a higher dose. So when I have patients who are severely vitamin D deficient, I usually recommend that they take 10 to 20,000 IU. And the reason I like that amount is that you can make 20,000 IU in the sun in the right setting in one session. So I still think it's kind of physiologic to do that. So I've taken more, I've been on camera, taken 100,000 IU, it's not toxic. There is no one-time toxic dose of vitamin D. Vitamin D is a hormone in your body that you need to measure to know. And it's highly variable what you can take. And the cool thing about vitamin D is if I tell somebody to take 5,000, I generally say take 5,000 IU a day,

international units, take it with K2 and magnesium. Please take these three things together. And I say to them, if I have a petite woman, I don't want to say take 1,000 or 2,000. And I'll say, 5,000, if you took it every day for two years, your level might go too high. When you take vitamin D, it's not, I've got to take it. Magnesium is different. You take magnesium, and then you run out, you've got to take it again. Vitamin D you want to build up your store so that's everywhere in your body. So the dose of vitamin D that you take really depends on a lot of things.

And so I will tell, like a petite woman, take a 5,000 IU with K2. And I would say that, you know, because if they're low, I'll say take it for two months straight every single day. and then go down to a couple of days a week. Or if you forget, don't worry about it. Or if you want to be taking it every day and all of a sudden you forgot you haven't taken three days, you can take three times as much. It's not harmful.

There is no one-time toxic dose of vitamin D. But if you take it, you want to make sure you support yourself with that magnesium and with vitamin K2. So dosing for kids, 1,000 IU per 25 pounds, you're not going to overdose your kids. And keep in mind that you can only tell the blood level,

you can only tell vitamin D from the blood level and no one takes blood on kids unless they're sick. because you don't you know there's no need to but people don't have to worry about overdosing their kids if they keep that rule of thumb in mind have you ever have you ever eaten cod livers I have not I have not they are very interesting they it sounds gross because like liver stuff can be gross yeah but they're extremely high in vitamin D they're one of the few foods that are high in vitamin D and I know people usually use the oil that's right but the but yeah but yeah

cod liver just eating it straight up. It kind of tastes like it tastes like chunks of butter, but it definitely has some, you know, some fish element into it. Are you a fan of eating like fish and are you fan of trying to get some of it supplemented into your diet or do you just not worry about it because you take the supplement and you get the sun?

So I don't think about getting vitamin D from foods. It's not because it's just not worth it. What I do think about, so I try to only eat wild cod. seafood, okay, for the fats, your DHA. Also, I love shellfish. They're extremely healthy. They're very low in deuterium, crabs low in deuterium.

So I try to mix it up and I, the variety of food, I like to get, you know, I'll vary between wild caught seafood and grass-fed ruminous meat and dairy products. Just so people know a convenient way to get wild-caught stuff is in any. they can. Yes. Which might have its own other issues, but yeah, there's some there's some good ones out there in the United States. They're all supposed to be wild caught supposedly. Who knows? Well, and that's the second issue is, you know, saying grass fed, grass finished, you know, the controversy about eggs. I'm very careful about my eggs because same thing, the reason I don't eat chicken, chicken's monogastric. Whatever they're feeding the chicken to make the eggs, you're eating that.

And they're feeding them GMO corn grain and soy. That's what chicken they're eating. So what are you doing for exercise? So me personally I play beach volleyball. It's great high intensity interval training other than that I walk I used to run I used to love it but I walk I play beach volleyball I cycle a bit and I do wait try to do weight training I do only you meant I like this 20 minutes four days a week that's my ideal that's a lot that's a good amount um did you find that running was starting to like impede your volleyball and stuff like that no it's it's just a natural running on concrete yeah you know, it's kind of hard. The older you get,

the more you realize that you wanted to be doing these certain things. So beach volleyball is my ideal sport because I play twos. It's two people on a court, not too many, not six people. The sand is soft when I dive. I won't hurt myself. And I love it. It's a tough sport. That's hard.

You got to have really good reaction time. You got to be quick. You got to be explosive. And then it's hard to be explosive when you're in that kind of thick sand. It's hard to get moving. Think about this. It's a great. I think it's the ideal sport because it's social.

You need four people. Number one, number two, beach volleyball, you're outside. You're getting that sun. Number three, it's putting together mental coordination, physical coordination, planning, strategy, and all that. I love it. And it's completely addictive. So I used to love running.

I would get a runner's high. Too hard to chase. But beach volleyball, my friends, they're all addicted. And I will never be the one that leaves the court. It's hard sometimes because I'm like, I've been here four hours to say, one more game. I'm like, okay, fine. I'm getting better.

I told you that my sleep restoration program with my program called Fast Club, the fasting mimicking diet has improved my volleyball game substantially. Don't fast alone. That's the first rule of the fast club. Don't fast alone. I read the rules. You sent them to me. Yep.

And it's true, right? Because fasting is so weird. First time someone told me about fasting, I was like, nah, I'm good. I like food. No, thank you. But the more I dug into the science, I don't know if I told the story about how skin cancer on my nose. And it was a really weird, so I had a squamous cell, carcinoma, or basal cell on my nose. I went to the dermatologist.

They said, yeah, you're going to have a mose procedure. To anyone listen to this, it's a very common when you get older. So I went to Beverly Hills to this dermatologist and he cut a piece off my nose. Then you go sit in a waiting room and they check to see if they got all the cancer. So here I'm sitting around this table with all these people and they're all 10 years older than me. I'm not very happy that I'm the youngest one in that room. But I know why I have skin cancer. I lived a life of vitamin D deficiency.

I wore sunscreen. and I went out in the sun thinking I was protected, all the wrong stuff. So at that appointment, you know, everyone's sitting quietly with these little gauze on their nose with blood and no one wants to say anything and I'm, I'm chatty. So I'm like, hey, everyone, you know, I start to do a comedy routine and then people start to speak up and then one one goes, I've been here five times. This is my 20th time. And I'm thinking, I'm not doing this.

I was probably, it was probably about five years ago. And I'm like, I'm not going to come in every year or every two years to have pieces of my face cut off. There must be a better way. and that's when I really got into the FMD, the fasting mimicking diet, because it technically, in theory, I'm not saying it reverses all cancer, but it can regenerate you. And that's, I think, the most profound discovery that I have in everything. Even maybe including vitamin D is that FMD. That fasting mimicking diet is an incredible way to get rid of your zombie cells to kill off your

mitochondria that are damaged, right? Your mitochondria has its own DNA. And when they're burning all of sugar, that DNA gets really messed up. Your mitochondria start to get sick. And in my opinion, and according to Thomas Seyfried, cancer is a metabolic disease. I'm having him on the show soon. I interviewed him quite a few years ago. And I love the interview because he's very specific. And to me it's obvious when the mitochondria in a cell gets sick, that's when cancer is a factor. So what do I want to do? I want to kill off those cells. And why would I want to do that? Well, that's what feasting and fasting is about. Hunter gatherers didn't have to worry about this. because if there was no food, there was no food, and they fasted naturally.

Animals that are sick will not eat because you can regenerate. So your body gets into autophagy, autophagy self-eating. And that's when your body, especially if you've got good vitamin D level, is surveilling all your cells and saying, this is a weak cell, let's kill it off. And that fast, the protein restricted fast, remember it shuts down mTOR because you don't want to be growing all the time. and this is a profound metabolic reset, and I just really got into it. And there's one that you can order a line called Prolon, great program.

But I think the Deuterium level and that one's pretty high, you know, and he's got a ton of Omega-6 stuff in there. But this is a commercial fasting kit that's available for the general public with five boxes. I recommend you do the fast Monday to Friday, last meal on Sunday, break your fast on Friday. And I just wanted to create my own low deuterium. because fasting is terrifying, especially if you don't know what you're doing and it's painful, right? But the recipes that I created make it easy to go through this week fasting. It's much more of a psychological thing.

So I think it's the most profound thing that a human can do in that it's going to kill off the cells that are going to drag you down. And in my case, I hypothesized that if I did cycles of the FMD, that I would be killing off the various skin cells, skin cancer. And what was really interesting is that my scar is completely disappearing. Every time I do a cycle, my scar gets taken away. The body has the ability to get rid of all the parts it doesn't want. You just have to know how to do this. And the other thing that you may have noticed is that I started out my journey in life at 250 pounds.

I'm just about 197 now. And I tried every diet and exercise in the world. It wasn't until I raised my vitamin D level that I started to have some results because when you're in low vitamin D, your body is holding on to fat. It's hibernating. but I was sick and I was on prednisone as a kid. So I had just the worst fat deposits in the weirdest places. And it's embarrassing just because, you know,

here I am in this industry with the biohackers and I'm still not fit. That's not cool. The only thing that moved the needle for me, the only thing is repeated cycles of the FMD because the fat that I accumulated from being on prednisone for many years just wouldn't go away. It looked way different than you did years ago. And when you walked in, I was like, It kind of looks like Dr. Gould, but not early.

Yeah. I'm blown away by it. The thing that I think is the most profound, just that you notice doing the cycles of the FMD is my coordination of volleyball, but also just the quality of my skin because it kills off fibroblasts that aren't working right, and it arms your new fibroblasts,

the actual cells that make the skin, with healthy mitochondria. And so things come from inside out. You can put all the kind of face creams you want, on, it's not going to really make the same kind of change as if you change the mitochondria in your fibroblasts. It's really profound. So, you know, I think that the more toxic the soup that we live in is, and as time progresses, things are worse and worse, that people who don't do this, they're just going to be more in line for the things that come along are normal aging. It's not normal,

cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia. These are the things that happen to a human body that isn't getting the nutrients that it needs, isn't living the right lifestyle. And I think that when we live in a situation like this, very powerful to be able to have such a reset, your insulin resistance. It resets everything in your body. It's very profound. And what's really fascinating about it is that I'll do that FMD. Won't lose a single pound. But in the week and two weeks after, that's when things will really shift. So your body's tagging all this stuff that's broken down that wants to get rid of. But you can't take the track. out unless you go on extended fast and just think of how many people when I say five days

no food would be like ah you know I could not go 24 hours without food prior to me understanding what a ketogenic diet is understanding the mitochondria prefers to run on fat and being keto adapted is really critical for your health but people are sugar burners they get that that Starbucks it's every four hours not with me you know where's my next carbs gonna go because your mitochondria is not ready to burn fat so it's a it's a really a a profound thing to be able to reset everything like that. And I haven't convinced a lot of people, but I do have a program called Fast Club and I wanted to spoof Fight Club because that movie is about somebody fighting with themselves. And you can know this is the right thing to do. But like by day three,

you're like, oh my God, I'm going to die. I got to eat something. And I want to have rescue foods. And there's really great products that can help you do a five day fast. And I think that we kind of have to get used to it. Now, I was sick my whole life. I'm going to keep doing the dose fast until I have my six-pack. I don't want anybody watching this to go, oh, you know, I don't take health advice from someone who's fat. But it's not because I want a six-pack, I do, but that's the health. When your body is in the right homeostasis, as long as you're eating the right food, you can eat as much red meat as you want, you're not going to gain weight if you're properly adapted. Your mitochondria is going to let off steam. It's not going to make you store fat.

But you have to be on the right type of diet. You have to be living in the right circadian rhythm. You have to be doing a lot of different things. But I say to anyone, once you hit 50 and over, you should be doing one of these fasts per quarter, I think. I do it every fourth week and I'll stop. I'll do it less frequently when everything in my body is relatively fixed. And my goal wasn't, you know, once I saw the science was kind of irrefutable, I just said, well, how can I make this more palatable?

How can I make this easier for people to do not be such a big deal? Well, let's make it fun. Let's do a group fast. Let's, that's why I say, don't fast alone because you want to talk to somebody, say, how do you feel? Oh, I'm starving. I have a headache or whatever, right? So the first rule of Fast Club is never fast though. The second rule is if you feel sick, eat, don't be, you know, don't be an idiot. And the third rule is that any length of fast is a success, you don't go to the gym and bench press 300 pounds on your first day there. Fasting is like a muscle

that you need to build up slowly over time. So it's not that, you know, people, you mean like, oh, I can't fast. It's because it's torture, really torture, but you don't have to. There are a million things that you can do. I think it's one of the most interesting things and one of the most sort of all-encompassing health and wellness hack. You know, if people are interested, they can go and check out some of the work from Walter Longo. I think he's the one that put the fasting, mimicking diet, and it's not that you're not eating any food at all. It's just you're eating very low calorie and some of the foods that are suggested might be like pickles and- It's protein-restricted. Protein restricted, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. Where can people,

learn more about you. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. You can find me on my website called MHGMHGnerNHGatherers. Modern Huntergatherers. ModernHuntergatherers.com. You can look me up as Dr. Joel Gould. I have my record label, Deuterium Records. Kind of harder to remember. But you know, you can find me. Even if you type in vitamin D dentist, sometimes you can find me because of all the information I've put out about that. I appreciate it. Strength is never a week. This week, this never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.