Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr. Andrew Weil: Eat These Foods Everyday to Reduce Inflammation, Heal Disease, and Extend Your Life

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

SHOCKING TRUTHS Conventional Medicine Doesn’t Want You to Know - Trailblazing Pioneer in integrative medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil, reveals why so many people are SICK & how we can all use FOOD as MEDICINE to REDUCE INFLAMMATION & HEAL DISEASE.   Dr. Andrew Weil (bestselling author, founder and director of Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine) exposes the hidden flaws of conventional healthcare.   From the TRUTH about nutrition and natural remedies to the DANGERS of pharmaceuticals, Dr. Weil is here to show you why the current system is on the brink of COLLAPSE.   Discover how our medical professionals are FAILING us by ignoring critical aspects of mind-body health and lifestyle changes, the shocking reasons why you should be wary of pharmaceuticals, and why letting your body heal itself whenever possible could be your best bet!    Learn the harsh reality about the government’s role in perpetuating our reliance on this broken system, and why the shaming of patients only makes things worse. Find out why women are suffering more from autoimmune disorders and the ALARMING effects of microplastics and forever chemicals in your body.   Is your gut microbiome secretly influencing your health? Dr. Weil reveals his verdicts on gluten sensitivity, soy, alcohol, coffee, seed oils and "The Carnivore Diet". His insights into aging, inflammation, and the truth about what we’ve been sold as “healthy” are game-changing, people!!   Dr. Weil also also breaks down: - How guilt can be an obstacle to healing - Benefits of framing aging as an inevitable aspect of life - How inflammation can significantly increase our risk for chronic illness & how to incorporate an anti-inflammatory diet - Connections between contentment & physical health - Importance of training medical professionals about nutrition, natural remedies, the mind-body realm, and lifestyle factors - Which cooking oils we should be using - Prevalence of gluten sensitivity in Western society - How much protein do we actually need? - Dangers of nicotine   Plus, get his take on energy medicine and 5 MUST-KNOW wellness tips to protect yourself from hidden health dangers.   Don’t miss out on these eye-opening revelations that could change the way you see your health forever!   The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine: https://weilcenter.arizona.edu/ BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You have worse health outcomes than any other developed country. The World Health Organization rates us 38th on a par with Serbia. And that's any way you look at it. It's infant mortality, longevity, rates of chronic disease. Something is very wrong with that picture. We're spending more and more and we have lessened us to show for it. And I hear so often Americans say we have the greatest health care system in the world. No, not true.

The incredible number of kids on psychiatric medication. I think we're doing an incredible experiment. with our nation's kids. We have no idea how these drugs affect the developing brain, either by themselves or in combination. One of the things I've always tried to do is to give people greater confidence in the body's ability to heal itself.

Most conditions end by themselves. There's a famous saying in medicine that the main job of the physician is to distract the patient while time heals the disease. The most common interventions that we use are medications. It's estimated that just the same, In the hospitalized population in our country, there are somewhere between two and four hundred

thousand deaths a year directly caused by medication. And this is not mistakes. It's the right dose of the right drug for the right patient, for the right indication, and hundreds of thousands of people die. That's just deaths. That's not looking at lesser consequences. That's just unacceptable. It's my ambiolyx breakdown.

She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows the thing. more two. So now she's going to break down. So breakdown. She's going to break it down. Hey, I just found out something astounding. Approximately 63% of those of you listening to

or watching Myambialx Breakdown are not subscribed. We know you're listening and we know you're watching because of all of the awesome comments you leave telling us how My Ambielics Breakdown is helping you lead a happier and healthier life. We love that. But the best way to support our show is to subscribe. It's also the only way to get latest updates and to know when new episodes drops. So anywhere that you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, please subscribe, hit the bell icon

so that you know when a new episode drops. Thank you so much and on to the episode. Hi, I'm I'm Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so that you don't have to. Why do women experience more autoimmune conditions than other people? Jonathan, what should I do about eating seed oils, chocolate, and caffeine? Does caffeine? Does caffeine? Fee increase inflammation? Is it good for us? Is it bad for us? Is alcohol good for us? We have the person who's going to answer all of these things and more. Dr. Andrew Weil is here. He's a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. He was educated at

Harvard for his medical degree, but he is the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. He's a clinical professor of medicine, a professor of public health, but he is educating an entire new generation of doctors to understand what spontaneous healing means, how the body can tap into its natural resources for healing, what dis-ease in the body is actually telling us about the body and how we can literally heal not only our guts, but our brains and our general health with really practical and not expensive things that we may not have even thought of before. If you've been diagnosed with GERD, if you've ever been put on

antibiotics, if you've been told to put your kid on antibiotics, if you've been told that your antidepressant isn't doing enough and that you need to add something to it, Dr. Weil is going to explain what the pitfalls are of the kind of thinking that we've been taught to have about our bodies and medicine in general. This is a huge episode. It really does cover a new approach to health. It points out the faults in the health care system, the risks of taking certain medications. Medications have consequences. They can be very helpful, but they can have unintended consequences that can put people on a path to continued health issues for many years, if they're not addressed. He starts to explain to us how to find the root cause of disease. He also talks

about protein, forever chemicals. Should we eat soy? Should we not eat soy? The meat debate, this is a must listen. Also, if you're watching this episode, you'll get to see Dr. Wiles' adorable dog napping in the background, and you'll also see that he gestures a lot with his hands and hits his microphone. But if you're only listening to this episode,

you might wonder what the thumping is intermittently. It's Dr. Wyle excitedly hitting his microphone. I can't contain my excitement. Without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Andrew Wyle to the breakdown. Break it down. Thank you. such an honor to get to talk to you in this format, you know, I first learned about you many,

many moons ago, as did many of us in, you know, in circles that were interested in different ways of viewing health and wellness. And in the 90s, this was considered close to sacrilege to even sort of wonder about. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, I don't want to start you off by calling you brave, but I wonder if you will talk a little bit about the bravery and courage it took to view health and wellness and medicine in a way that was so counter to the way everyone was taught to think. You know, I have been writing and speaking about medical education health, medicine, wellness, probably for almost 50 years. And at the start of that time, nobody paid much attention to me.

Then I got a larger and larger following in the general public as a result of my books and speaking, but none of my medical colleagues paid any attention to me at all. In the, I think it was in the 1980s, there was a holistic health movement that started around the country. And the people who were in that were psychologists, just social workers, but no medical doctors, you know, joined that at all. And that didn't really change. And the medical doctors who did read my works or listen to me really made fun of me.

You know, I was called a quack. I was on a featured prominently on a site called Quack Watch, for example. That didn't change until the early 1990s. And that was when the economics of healthcare began to go south. And the conclusion that I come to, is that no amount of ideological argument moves anything. It's only when the pocketbooks of institutions begin to be squeezed, that they open up to new ideas and pay attention to what consumers have been demanding. And since then, since the early 1990s, there had just been, you know, a growing acceptance of what I've been talking about.

Integrative medicine is now becoming a mainstream movement. And it's a real force that's gathering momentum. It's been very gratifying to me to watch that happen. Can you describe what integrative medicine is? Can you sort of define it for us, especially as it differs from alternative medicine or holistic medicine. Can you talk about what integrative means? Sure. You know, integrated means bringing things together.

So the short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional medicine with natural therapies and selected other treatments with an emphasis on prevention and health promotion. alternative medicine, that term suggests that you're trying to do things in place of conventional medicine, and that's never been my idea. You know, I think conventional medicine does some things very well. I often say that if I were in a serious car accident, I would not want to first go to a shaman or a chiropractor or an herbalist. You know, I'd want to go to a trauma center and get put back together, but as soon as I could, I might use other methods. I know about the speed up the healing process. I think it's very important for people to understand when and when not to use conventional

medicine. And if you do decide to use it, what else can you do to reduce its harmful effects and increase its efficacy? Why do you think people were so resistant to you, to this sort of concept? You know, we like to think of the, you know, post-60s era as one of openness. And, you know, What was different or what is different about the medical industry and the sort of factory of the way that doctors are trained? You know, what was so scary or threatening about you to the establishment? Well, not that long ago, medicine in this country and in many other countries was very authoritarian and paternalistic. When I was growing up, you never asked doctors questions, a question there, recommendations. They wrote prescriptions in Latin, which was designed to discourage you from knowing what was written on the prescription pad.

You took it to a pharmacy and handed it over a high counter that was designed to prevent you from seeing what went on there. You know, that's all changed now. The Internet has changed things greatly. It's given patients direct access to information. It's kind of leveled the playing field. The authoritarianism of the medical profession has begun to wane. But it's not that long ago. that medicine was really a protective guild

that saw any outside ideas as competition that had to be stifled. So that's changing now. I think the democratization of information has been essential. And the flip side of that is that now everyone is an expert and is totally overwhelmed with half bits of information struggling to make sense of it all

and are looking for experts. It's like, well, this is great for me one day, this is horrible for me one day. Everyone should be ice bathing. Wait a second. The acupunctures say that's too extreme. And I have like a list of things that I think a lot of people are confused about still. Yeah.

And it's not only there's misinformation, there's disinformation. I think people need guides through all of that. And what I've been trying to do is to train health professionals to be able to answer those questions. So the center that I founded at the University of Arizona, you know, we educate health professionals, mainly physicians, and we've graduated now almost 3,000 physicians from very intensive training, fellowship training, in which they learn all the things they didn't learn in medical school. And these are the people who ideally you can consult to try to help you make sense of all that confusion of information. This is actually extremely important. I had a friend recently

who is a pretty intense consumer of health information and tries to get to the best sources and long-form interviews and a lot of experts. And he's like, I get all this information. I need help going through it. But then I go to my doctor who's in my network, who doesn't consume any of this and is only equipped with the basic training from medical school. And they have no idea what I'm talking about. Can you explain a little bit about maybe the shortcomings of what an average doctor gets taught and then the gap that needs to be filled that you're filling? Sure. You know, there are First of all, glaring omissions of subject matter in the training of positions.

And obviously one is nutrition. In my four years at Harvard Medical School, I've got 30 minutes in nutrition, which was a lot of the dietitians in one hospital I worked at to tell us about special diets we could order for patients. Now, that hasn't changed a whole lot since I've been out of medical school. When nutrition is taught now, it's taught as biochemistry and it's forgotten as soon as the biochemistry exams are over. So that's just one example. Another one is the whole realm of mind-body interactions. To me, this is one of the most important aspects of human health, that the mind and body are not separate,

that all disease and all health involves both of them, and you can take advantage of that connection to modify disease and promote health. And there are many therapies, things like hypnosis and biofeedback and visualization that take advantage of that connection, but even though they are very cost-effective, time-effective, even fun for people, they are incredibly underutilized in medicine because this whole area of subject matter is not taught. Another big omission is the strengths and weaknesses of alternative medical systems,

for example, of osteopathic manipulation, or when you use Chinese medicine, both acupuncture and herbalism. You know, what else is out there? most physicians are really only taught to use pharmaceuticals as interventions. You know, and this is a real problem, and they're not really taught about how lifestyle modification can be very effective. You know, I think one of the mistakes we make, we test drugs against placebos, but we should be testing them against is lifestyle modification.

You know, that would be much more useful information. And in my experience, I have just seen so many. common health conditions respond to lifestyle changes, changes in how people eat, how they exercise, how they handle stress, before you even think about giving medication. And that's really been one of the major changes in approaches to health. Like it used to be that the body was like a car. You change the tires. You can deal with one system or another. And, you know, people would go to a doctor to be fixed. You know, first of all, one of the things I've always tried to do in my writing and speaking

is to give people greater confidence in the body's ability to heal itself. You know, most conditions end by themselves. There's a famous saying in medicine, it might have been Maimonides who said this hundreds of years ago, that the main job of the physician is to distract the patient while time heals the disease. And I think that is in fact a common result. But we feel we have to intervene. And the most common interventions that we use are medications. And I don't know whether you're aware of the extent of...

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problems caused by medication. Now, it's estimated that just in the hospitalized population in our country, there are somewhere between 2 and 400,000 deaths a year directly caused by medication. And this is not mistakes. It's the right dose of the right drug for the right patient, for the right indication, and hundreds of thousands of people die. And that's just deaths. That's not looking at, you know, lesser consequences. That's just unacceptable. And I must say a drug, drives me crazy when I see articles in both the medical press and the popular press about the dangers of botanicals or the dangers of vitamins and supplements. There's a handful of deaths every year from herbal medicine, and those are usually mistakes, something mislabeled. That doesn't compare

in any way to the problems caused by pharmaceuticals. So when I write an integrative treatment plan for a patient, almost always I begin with lifestyle change, usually with dietary change. And medication is the last thing that I think of. And when I'm not opposed to the use of medication, but when it's used, I think what I teach is that you start with the lowest dose of the least potent agent, and you can work up from there. But in so many cases, it's possible to change common disease conditions through these natural methods and lifestyle changes. I wonder if you can kind of, if we can sort of zoom in on this sort of notion because, I mean, look, so many of the things that ail us are, in my opinion, and possibly yours, the result of lifestyle behaviors that sort of lead us there. So, you know, autoimmune conditions, this is a great example, and especially for women, and especially for women,

you know, in sort of my age bracket. You know, I don't want to say it's too late, but I'm pretty certain I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune condition at 23, Graves disease, an overactive thyroid. And I was very, very, very sick. And, you know, if left to my own devices, my body presumably was not going to know how to heal itself.

There would have needed to be some intervention. So I just want to, like, have you clarify, you're not saying, like, if you get diagnosed to something, like, good luck. You're saying that the kinds of interventions that you talk about and the kind of changes are ways to tap into the body's ability to write itself. Is that correct? Yes. And when we do, you know, when our treatments work, they work by allowing the healing mechanisms of the body to come into play and do what they couldn't do. In the case of Graves disease,

that definitely requires medical intervention. Right, but the medical intervention was simply to shut down my thyroid. Right. And this was 1997, 98, something like that. There was never a conversation about diet. Right. There was never a conversation about the adrenal system,

about sleep, about any lifestyle changes. No one asked me, what was the house like that you grew up in, right? It was like, we're going to shut your thyroid, and go about your life. Right. So let me give you another example, which is, I think, even more common,

GER, gastroesophageal reflux disease. Oh, yeah. This did not exist when I was growing up. People had heartburn, and they treated it by taking tombs, which is a very safe preparation of calcium carbonate. And I think most people understood that heartburn was your body's way of telling,

or your stomach's way of telling you that you would be... That you're Jewish. Or had a Jewish mother or grandmother, but you had mistreated it in some way. So now that condition has been totally medicalized and the cause is seen as being too much stomach acid. So we give very powerful drugs that shut off production of acid in the stomach. Not a good idea. You know, one of the things people don't consider is when you treat the body that way,

there's a reaction against it. You know, the body reacts against an outside force. So if you give a drug that suppresses acid production, very shortly the body begins to try to produce more acid so that if you try to reduce the dose or stop it, everything gets worse. And also, it's not a good idea. So you can't get off these drugs once you start them. It's very, very difficult. And in addition, it is not a good idea to shut down acid production, the stomach that reduces absorption of key nutrients. Also, stomach acids, your main defense against infection, come and in by the oral root. People that have no stomach acid are very vulnerable to things like very serious diseases you can get from eating raw shellfish, which wouldn't happen if they, you know, had adequate stomach acid. So I cannot tell you how many patients I've seen in the past five, ten years who have gone to physicians complaining of stomach pain and they've been

started on these drugs without a dietary history being taken. I mean, nobody asked them what they were eating. You know, are they drinking coffee? Are they drinking alcohol? Do they smoke? How do they handle stress? Nothing. They're just put on one of these medications.

And then once they're on it, it is very, very hard to get off of. And they have a lot of serious consequences. I mean, this makes me really upset. Good. Good. That's... He's Canadian upset, though.

You can tell. Like, he still looks friendly. But, you know, it's that kind of upsetness that is going to change things because, you know, I think more and more people today realize that there have to be other ways of doing this. And this is beginning to impact, you know, how doctors think and how they're trained. When you go to the expert who's supposed to be the expert and they're so ill-equipped. But I'm going to say, do they know that they're ill-equipped? This is the problem. If they would just

admit that they're ill-equipped, that's one thing. But when they try to say that they know everything, they know better than you, and they pay no attention to information that you have read somewhere, that's unacceptable. You know, that has to change, and you want to look for a different kind of professional. Absolutely. And not only are they ill-equipped, they don't believe they're ill-equipped, but then what they do, what they recommend, has such potential consequence, where you start to throw the entire function of the body off course

and make it unbalanced and you remove the stomach acid to leave, yourself open to other risks or there's just a myriad of other examples where you start taking medicine for one thing and it becomes whackamol and then another system is off and then you're just down this rabbit hole without ever going to get to the actual issue and causing a lot of other damage like how do people then of course they don't trust institutions which is a risk in and of itself absolutely so you know this is to me integrative medicine is the answer and I've always said one day be able to drop the word integrative, it'll just be good medicine. So this is what I attempt to do is to make up for these deficiencies in medical education, to increase doctors' awareness of the

healing potential of the organism, which is tremendous, and to know how to use lifestyle modification and natural remedies and other sorts of treatments to facilitate the body's healing response. I mean, this is what has to happen. Now, the great obstacle to this, at the moment is priorities of reimbursement, you know, that we happily pay for interventions, for medication. We don't pay a doctor to sit with a patient and teach them a breathing exercise or to talk to them about how to eat. Now, that has to change. And that points up, this is the whole political dimension of this, which is that as dysfunctional as the health care system is, especially in the U.S., it's generating rivers of money. And that money is flowing into

very few pockets. It's the pockets of the big pharmaceutical companies, the manufacturers of medical devices, the big insurers, the for-profit healthcare companies, and they don't want anything to change. And they have total control of our elected representatives. So, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're Democrat, Republican, liberal conservative, you can't get elected to office in this country unless you've made deals with those vested interests. The only way I see this changing is if there is a grassroots social political movement in which enough people, you know, get upset the way you described, and we begin electing different kinds of representatives. And I don't see that happening yet.

I mean, I think it's got to happen because the current health care system is going to collapse. There's no question about that. When politicians brag about being able to see our health care facilities from space, that is not a benefit. That is actually, wait a second, we're incentivizing people to be so sick and mistreated that so many of us, our entire livelihood, a huge portion of it is being sucked into the health care costs. So many millions and millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of Americans

have chronic diseases. And then our entire economy, you know, it's like a third of the economy is oriented around health care. It's insane. We spend, I think at the moment, about 18% of our GDP on healthcare, and that's predicted to go up to 20%, which is completely unsustainable. And at the same time, we have worse health outcomes than any other developed country. The World Health Organization rates us 38th on a par with Serbia, and that's any way you look at it.

It's infant mortality, longevity, rates of chronic disease. Something is very wrong with that picture. And we're spending more and more, and we have less and less to show for it. And I hear so often Americans say we have the greatest health care system in the world. No, not true. I mean, if you need a new hip, which I got, you can get one very quickly. But if you want to prevent chronic disease, if you have diabetes, if you have hypertension, if you have a myriad of other conditions, autoimmune conditions, the system is wildly broken. Now, let me ask you, one of the complaints I hear about the Canadian system is that it takes a very long time to get a new hit.

and a lot of people come to America for that reason. 100%. Yeah, I think Canadians are much more satisfied with their health care than America. But it has the same issues. You're not dealing with an integrated approach. You're dealing with sick care, not health care. And if across the board, Canada or the U.S., if we began to actually treat people and taught them how to be healthy,

how to access the body's natural ability to heal, to remove the barriers to healing, to look at diet and exercise and the mind-body connection, we're going to save an enormous amount. I remember a few years ago I interviewed a woman who was a family doctor. She was a native of Germany. And she said that growing up in Germany, she never went to a doctor as a kid,

nor did her brothers and sisters or any of her friends, that you only went to a doctor when you were very, very sick, and that her parents had a whole repertory of home remedies that worked very well. And she was amazed when she came to the U.S. at how dependent people were on the health care system. So I think one of my jobs is to try to help people become more independent of practitioners of all kind

and to have greater confidence in their body's ability to take care of itself. Well, I think that's sort of where I'd like to kind of hear more because I don't mean to interrupt the railing against the healthcare system party that you two gentlemen are having. But, you know, I'm still stuck on GERD. And the reason I'm stuck on GERD is most everyone I've ever spoken to who has been diagnosed with GERD,

I'm just going to say it, gentlemen, they don't want to make dietary changes in their life. Okay, that is a very practical problem. Well, and so, but to me, this is, it's an extension. This problem extends out also because a lot of the people, like I grew up in Kaiser, you know, I grew up in a very, very large system where you often didn't get the same doctor and care was a little bit hard to come by. But that's what, you know, my father was a public school teacher and that was the present that we were given.

Like, thank you for educating America. Here's your health care for your children, which was, you know, rough. And Kaiser can be great in some places and in some ways and that's wonderful for people. But I grew up in a real bureaucratic system where you couldn't even like speak to someone on the phone. And that's still what it's like. My mother's still a part of Kaiser. So what I know from a lot of people that use those kinds of, you know, healthcare systems, it's all that you can afford, meaning that's what you're given, right? And the fact is, I know because I've lived in this integrative world and I've had to, a lot of the things that we're talking about to a lot of

people, they cost a lot of money, they take a lot of time, my body's going to take time to heal, I can't take time off work, I don't have, like I'm crying, I don't have time, you know, to like, to heal the way nature wants me to, isn't that what these drugs are for? And I'm playing devil's advocate here because, you know, but, but I think it's something worth talking about. Okay, first of all, I don't think the interventions I'm talking about necessarily cost a lot of money. You know, a breathing exercise is free. Dietary change is free. I hear people say, well, to eat healthy, you have to shop at whole foods. Not so. I mean, deans are an incredibly healthy food. They're very cheap. But one reason that some of these things seem more expensive than the drugs is

that the drugs are covered by insurance and other things aren't. And that's the priorities of reimbursement problem. But I think a more practical issue is that lifestyle change, It takes effort and it takes time, as you said, to produce results. And people want quick fixes. So when you try to talk to people about making dietary changes, starting an exercise routine, they would much rather take a pill. So I think it is important to try to educate people about why it is not a good idea to rely on the pill long term. And a major reason is that it may make things worse and often does.

And this is the problem, again, with like suppressing stomach acid. Over time, the condition gets worse because the body is going to keep trying to increase production of stomach acid. And the problem is perpetuated. Whereas if you get to the lifestyle causes of the problem and change those, that's a permanent solution. But that's a matter of education, that people have to understand why the quick fix is not a good idea in the long run.

And also, you know, to say that that... you know, changes in diet are not, it's not necessarily that it's more expensive, but this is a larger issue of the government subsidizes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Corn is our favorite thing. You know, corn and the fact is, you know, once you, you know,

I always quote Bob Dylan, it costs more to store the food than it do to give it, you know? And it does. It's, you know, farmers have been incentivized to grow things that then we put into filler in everything, and we keep getting sick from the food that the government tells us is cheap, and then we have to sign up for the medicine that the government gets paid to give us because they made us sick.

So this is the great nodded political issue that I referred to earlier. You know, people eat what's cheap and what's available. We've made the unhealthiest food cheapest and most available. And wherever you look at trying to change things, you run up against the same problem of the control of the vested interest. I'll give you one example. A few years ago, I got a letter from a first few years ago. a letter from a first-year student at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School,

who had started a campaign to get a McDonald's restaurant out of the university hospital. Last night, at last night checked, something like 48% of U.S. hospitals had fast food restaurants on their premises. So he got a petition going among his fellow students. They got publicity in the Philadelphia Papers, and he was called in by the dean of students who told him that if he persisted in this, he would jeopardize his medical degree. I mean, that's the problem. The hospital had made a deal with the devil, you know, it was money and this threatened the bottom line.

And this is, you know, almost anywhere you look, you run up against this kind of stuff. And that's why I say the only way I see that changing is if we can really get a, you know, a grassroots movement going in which enough people get angry enough about the situation that we try to change things. You know, we subsidize the commodity crops to make them cheap. That's why everybody's eating high-futose corn syrup and refined stores. We don't subsidize fruits and vegetables, which are out of the reach of many poor people. That all has to change.

There's a baseline of understanding of what is normal. People think it's normal to get sick four times, five times a year with really bad flus and colds or how many children under the age of 15 have been on many, many cycles of antibiotics, ear infection, throat infections. We just have accepted that that's normal. And if we can change that understanding, like not to brag, but both Mime and I have children, Mime's children are 18 and 15. I have a 16 year old. They've never had antibiotics. Great. As you know, the problem is not only does that weaken people's own immunity, but it also damages everybody else because while they're taking the antibiotics, their bodies are little factories generating resistant

organisms that go out and the environment and threaten all of us. Yeah. Right. Look at the, you know, the obesity epidemic among kids. You know, it is, it is normal now for people to see overweight people, you know, and it's no longer, you know, an exception that people pay attention to. Not only that, but actually you're not allowed to comment or even indicate that people may be healthier if they have less weight on them. It's healthy at any size, doesn't matter, and we have totally rejected any scientific or medical understanding of what contributes to disease. There's a very large pharmaceutical company that has these commercials now that are talking about shame has no place in medicine. And I have to say, those commercials bring a tear to my eye because

they're beautifully shot. They're cinematic. They're gorgeous. And it's like, and it's not, they're not just, you know, tackling weight. It's, you know, there's people with crutches and there's people with, you know, a tube for oxygen and, you know, a young woman clearly getting treatment for leukemia or cancer. So I understand that sort of notion because also the fact is that there's a kind of judgment and a kind of, you know, lack of empathy that even well-meaning doctors used to use shame as a way to try and get people to, like, cut it out, but they used it when people were alcoholic. They used it when people were being abused, right? Just leave him, snap out of it, smile more, you know?

So I think that there's a component, Jonathan, I don't want us to, you know, bring back shame. But I think also that's another aspect of medicine that is lacking is the, there's a lack of humanity to it. Yeah. How about another example of what has become the new normal is the number? number, incredible number of kids on psychiatric medication. Wow. I mean, this is like we need a new, we need a new podcast just to talk about this with you. Exactly. I mean, unbelievable. I think we're doing an incredible experiment with our nation's kids.

We have no idea how these drugs affect the developing brain, either by themselves or in combination. We have no idea. And I could not believe a few years ago when there started to be ads on television saying, you know, your antidepressant doesn't work. ask your doctor to provide an antipsychotic drugs. Yes. Unbelievable. They said, I just saw this one because I've been watching a lot of family feud with my son. What it says is, is your SSRI not doing the trick? Are you still depressed?

Yes. Let's add a neurolytic, which is a drug that was supposed to be for major mental illness. And the reason your SSRI doesn't work so well is that those drugs don't work very well. You can't distinguish them from placebo. And again, it's the same problem. Over time, they probably make depression worse, just like, you know, the poor stomach with that drug is trying to constantly make more stomach acid. Before we, before we leave this topic, you know, besides, you know, young people on psychiatric medicine, which, you know, look, a lot of people feel like I don't know what to do. They're suicidal. What am I supposed to do?

Can you talk a little bit? I want to focus on women for a second, because the, the, the, the, the mass prescription of birth control pills, which is hormone replacement for teenage girls, right? This starts a pattern, which, you know, I've rallied against. And, you know, I was one of those teenagers where it was like, oh, you're having, you're having feelings, you're having moods, which definitely felt unmanageable and scary for a lot of reasons. But I, I wonder if you can talk about sort of that beginning for women. And is that linked to, the tremendous set of autoimmune conditions

that women disproportionately are diagnosed with. And in addition, what's up with menopause? Well, that's a lot of questions there, mine. First of all, I used to collect, this was when I was in probably in 1970s,

ads in medical journals that targeted women. And there's some wonderful ones. There was a whole period when Ritalin, when an amphetamine-like drug, was strongly pushed on women. And the ads in the medical journals, they were a whole series of them of two-page spread.

On the left-hand page in black and white was a woman drooping over a sink full of dirty dishes or a disheveled living room. And on the right side, in color, she was bright and the dishes were clean and that said, what can doctor, what can you do for this patient write riddle in on your prescription pad?

And, you know, the subliminal message is, what can you do with these pain the neck women, you know, who probably have nothing wrong with them, you know, get rid of them by giving them this stimulant. And there was a whole bunch of drugs like that. The feminist movement solved it by saying, don't get married, then you don't have to do someone's dishes. And any woman, any young woman who came through a doctor complaining of being tired or lack of energy was automatically put on thyroid hormones without really checking to see if there was real hypothyroidism. And the same thing happens there. If you put somebody on that hormone for a while, it suppresses their own thyroid function. And they're dependent on it long term. So the autoimmune stuff is really interesting. I think we've been very oblivious to environmental causation of autoimmune disease, which I think is very significant. And I think that, you know, that's certainly something to be looked at.

I think there are dietary influences on immunity that we haven't paid attention to. I think there's a whole lot of things. There's a very strong mind-body connection and autoimmunity. The good thing about autoimmune conditions is they tend to go into remission. And this is, again, this is the body's own healing response. You want to do everything you can to encourage a condition like that to go into remission. And giving strong suppressive drugs probably lowers that possibility. Okay, we have this theory that if you look at what kind of

products are marketed to men versus women in our culture. Statistically speaking, mass amounts of chemicals are put onto women's scalps, onto their faces, onto their legs, manicures, eyelash extensions, all of these things which have become ubiquitous with the female experience is a tremendous amount of chemicals, makeup. And yes, there are men who wear makeup. We're talking statistically speaking, decades and decades and decades of chemicals that we are encouraging as part of the female experience, which are actually toxins to many bodies. And when accumulated, can literally lead to some very, very scary results. That is a very interesting possibility. I think, you know, it makes great sense to me. And I think we've been very nonchalant about the chemicals in our environment.

you know, I always advise people to really try to keep as many chemicals and potentially toxic things out of the home as possible. I mean, there are obvious things like pesticides and herbicides, but it's also solvents, dies, you know, there's a whole range of stuff. Plastics now, which I think are becoming more and more of a concern. I think you want to, that's something where you need to raise awareness of. But that's a very interesting possibility, I agree with you. Jonathan's favorite thing to talk about is microplastics and his testicles. Let's talk about that. Not only my testicles, but testicles in general, you know, there have been studies now that are showing that microplastics are everywhere, that they're being found in men's testicles because we're wearing synthetic underwear, that are bed sheets, if you don't pay attention, are plastic.

You know, the shirt that I'm wearing is part polyester because it's just so freaking soft. we're also finding forever chemicals in yoga pants. So add that to the list of things that women are exposed to in their bras, in major fashion brands. It's being publicized. Should we be concerned about this? Should we go back to hemp underwear? How concerning is this?

And is it impacting also, you know, hormone regulation for both men and women? I think it probably is. and I think we should make every effort we can to get as many obviously dangerous things out of our immediate space as possible. You know, I think plastic in general is something we want to try to phase out. You don't use plastic food storage containers. You know, I prefer to use wax paper rather than plastic wrap. You know, it's a constant process of trying to eliminate that.

I don't know. I guess you could become obsessive and crazy about it. Who, Jonathan, obsessive and crazy? So we do what we can, but I think this is a real issue, and I think the medical profession has been largely oblivious to it until recently. And also another problem is that, you know, here again, you run up against the political stuff, that the influence of industry on government regulations has been very powerful. And in general, because the medical doctors are uneducated in this area, they've been unable to stand up and counteract that.

pressure from industry over the government agencies. I was just going to make a suggestion that the three of us, with the doctor's endorsement, start a line of natural underwear for everyone, free ourselves from the chemicals, I'll work on the branding, but back to the regular scheduled programming. We have to come up with a good brand name for it. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, I'm a Louise Hay person. Like I like this notion and, you know, a lot of people have a lot of things to say about, about Louise.

But there is a certain line of thinking, typically in more alternative circles, that diseases are talking to us, that disease is the body's way or dis-ease, right? Which includes, you know, pains and, you know, even aches, that that is the body's way of speaking to us. And that thousands of years ago and tens of thousands of thousands of. of years ago, we had different ways of listening and we had different ways of tending to it. When people are diagnosed with things, like I sometimes am, I always go to, you know, either it integrative or a holistic or alternative practitioner. And they always tell me, oh, it's your body saying this. Like, I've had vocal cord surgery. I've had vocal issues twice. You know, and it's like, what do you need to say? Like, that's the chakra that needs you, you know. And it's

almost always true. But I also wonder how much is that sort of like my wishful thinking. Can you talk a little bit about, is there scientific and medical, logical reason to this notion of when we get sick, it's the body trying to tell us something? You know, I don't know that there's a solid body of evidence for that. But when I sit with a patient, I always ask them, why do you think you got this condition? And I listen to what they say. I don't necessarily buy into it. I'm just curious. God hates me and I'm supposed to die. Do you know the work of Gabor Motton, Yes, we've had him on. We love him. So his book, when the body says no, that's, I think, very important. I think you have to be careful with this somewhat, and I'll give you one example. When I was in medical school, I saw a lot of women with breast cancer, and they were women of my grandmother's generation. And when I asked them, why do you think you got this? They always answered with things like, well, 20 years ago, I fell against the kitchen table and hit my left breast. Or I was in a car accident and my breast got injured. There is no evidence that injury has anything to do with breast cancer,

but that's how women of that generation interpreted it. Starting about in the 1980s, 1990s, as these notions became popular, when I'd ask them and why they thought they got breast cancer, the answers are always things like, well, for all those years I bottled up my feelings about my husband, or I never expressed my guilt about this. So there's a big difference here. If you think you got breast cancer because of an accident, it wasn't your fault. it was an act of God. If you think you got it because you bottled up your feelings, you did it to yourself.

You know, you're responsible. And I think that can be an obstacle to healing, that kind of feeling of, you know, guilt. So I just think you have to be careful with some of those interpretations and explanations. But what Gabor talks about is there often is a specific profile to certain conditions like this. And, you know, in the myth of normal,

he talks about that, you know, women who typically put others first are always looking out for other people. That seems to be, you know, and it could be correlation, not cause it. Like, I don't know. But his assessment is there's a significant connection between people who are harboring feelings that are not being expressed and the expression of those kinds of, you know, cancers. So I think that's definitely something to be looked at. And that's a, you know, it's a point of view.

to be taken into account. I'd love to tackle some other things that are controversial and complicated, but I wonder if I can go through a handful of these and you can just kind of give me like, okay, ready? This is like a strange rapid fire with like my favorite doctor on the planet. What's the verdict on alcohol? So confusing. You know, I think alcohol is definitely a relaxant. and many people use it to relieve stress,

and that's probably a good thing. Alcohol is also directly toxic to the liver and the brain. So that's very clear. So I think it has to be balanced out. You know, the view that was dominant recently was that moderate drinking was beneficial. And now that's swinging the other way. I think my general advice to people is,

if you use alcohol, don't use it every day. You know, give yourself two or three alcohol, three days a week. And it may be that women are more sensitive to the harmful effects and that some women, you know, ones who have a strong history, a family history of breast cancer, shouldn't use it at all. So that's my best guess. I used to be a moderate drinker, you know, maybe if three days a week, I'd have a glass of wine or sake. And I, for some reason or other, I've just cut that out. You know, I find that as I've gotten older, alcohol interferes with my sleep, which it never used to do. So I think there's still division of opinion there.

And moderation is the key, not every day. Okay, next. What's up with oils? Well, that's very clear. That's clear. You've given Jonathan your oil disease, and I'd like both of you to not have this disease anymore. What's up with oils?

Cooking edible oils, cooking oils. Olive oil is the best. No question about that. And you want to make sure you're getting pure olive oil of good quality. You know, olive oil has an anti-inflammatory effect. It's got everything to recommend it. If you want a neutral oil, I mean, one that doesn't have a specific taste, I use avocado oil. Now, the problem with both avocado and olive is that now there's a lot of adulterated products around.

I am an advisor to a group called the Seed Oil Free Alliance, which is establishing a certification program to make sure that oils are not adulterated. and that restaurants and products are not made with seed oils, which are dangerous. I sometimes use things like toasted sesame oil and small amounts for flavoring, nut oils, coal occasionally in salad. And I am very enthusiastic about these new algae oils that have come on the market recently. I think they have a very low environmental impact. They have a high smoke point and mutual taste. good fatty acid profile. So that's another option.

Tell us about why seed oils are impactful. Seed oils are very high in omega-6 fatty acids, which we get too many of, and they promote inflammation. And also, a lot of them are extracted with heat or high with chemicals that damage the oils. Seed oils are very vulnerable to oxidation and the products of oxidation. are pro-inflammatory, carcinogenic, not things you want in your diet. And we're heavily overloaded in them. So I think it's good to try to phase them out of your diet. And one complication in phasing them out of your diet,

which does go back to my own's earlier point about the challenge of eating in a healthy way, is that if you go out to a restaurant, 98% of all the oil they're using because they're trying to control costs are these seed oils, they're cooking everything in them? So this is what this seed oil free alliance is trying to do is to provide certification to restaurants that they're not using any of these. So that should help consumers. I'll tell you one horrifying story.

This is a while ago. I was lecturing at the University of Massachusetts. The most popular undergraduate course was called the biology of cancer. And I was talking about the dangers of these oils and heating them to their smoke point, know when they oxidize. And the woman came up to me afterwards and said she felt very bad listening to me to talk because she was the dorm manager of a big undergraduate dorm. And she said in the kitchens they had these big units called fryulators,

which had a huge volume of oil. She said they changed the oil once a semester. So, you know, you don't want to eat anything deep fried in a fast food restaurant, probably in any restaurant, because the economics of oil dictate that they're not going to be changed very frequently. until these toxic products build up. Another practical point about oils that many people don't realize.

You don't want to heat any oil near its smoke point. It is very unhealthy to breathe the smoke of oils heated to high temperature. It's amazing when I watch television cooking shows, often the wok is heated and you pour the oil and you just see the smoke coming up. It's very, very unhealthy. Okay, back to our rapid fire.

Yes. What's up with gluten? Why is everyone gluten sensitive and gluten avoidant. What is happening with gluten? Okay, when I'm with gluten avoiding people at restaurants, I like to order extra gluten in my food to annoy them. Anyway, you know, there is gluten celiac disease is a very real thing.

Gluten allergy is something that we've been tested for, but gluten sensitivity is a subjective condition. We have no objective way of testing for it. I've been in China a number of times. In China, gluten is eaten as a protein. You know, in any restaurant in China, you can order sweet and sour gluten with black bean sauce. And I've asked many Chinese about gluten-sensitive and I get blank stairs.

Same thing in Japan. You know, it doesn't exist. So why is this suddenly happening here? You know, and we're, by the way, we're exporting it to other countries. So it starts here and then, you know, people start getting gluten-sensitive in England and so forth. I can think of several possibilities. You know, one is that we've changed.

changed wheat in the varieties of wheat being grown or different. Another is that this has something to do with the use of chemicals that we use on crops like glyphosate. But I would bet money, if I had to bet money on this, I think it has to do with changes in the gut microbiome. Because, you know, we're seeing more and more that your gut microbiome really influences your interactions with the environment in all sorts of ways, allergy, autoimmunity, mental conditions. And I think it is very clear that the gut microbiome in our population has changed drastically in the past 50 years as a result of four factors. And I like to ask people, can you name what these four factors are?

You know, obvious use of antibiotics. Secondly, the increasing consumption of refined and processed food. Third is the decline in breastfeeding because, you know, breastfeeding establishes a healthy microbiome and an infant. And the fourth is the incredible rise in cesarean delivery. When a baby is born vaginally, the organisms that colonize the gut come from the birth canal. When a baby is born by C-section, they come from the mother's skin. It's a totally different population. And that's set for life. So I think that that is the most likely reason why we're seeing a rise in gluten sensitivity and probably a whole bunch of other conditions.

I'm a little bit speechless because, you know, two of those four things. things, that's 50% for those of you keeping track at home and people who like math. You know, two of those things, you know, have become two of the most hotbed topics among parents. You know, I wrote a book about the way my family chose to parent, the way I chose to parent, you know, and people ask for my head on a platter on the daily, you know, I'm a lactation, yeah, I'm a education educator counselor, so I'm considered a lactivist, you know. I'm a, I'm a home birth person, you know, and these things have become a, you know, somewhat of a political battleground for moms. So I'm just really like kind of floored by the fact that two of those

things are things that, you know, are part of a conversation that, you know, have become over-politicized in that if you advocate for the way mammals, let's say, typically feed their children or give birth, that that's considered an assault, you know, on a woman's body or a woman's rights. I think it's just so sad that we have to fight over this conversation and that people who choose to do things differently attack, if you bring up the health benefits of, for example, extended breastfeeding as, oh, you're infringing on my choice to stop breastfeeding and go back to work because there are real pressures in people's lives that require them to make certain decisions.

However, that shouldn't negate the fact that medical experts can say, wait a second, doing this has real health, long-term health benefits. Having vaginal births has real health benefits. And, oh, yeah, it may be more convenient to put it on the calendar for this particular day to have your C-section. But there is a trade-off here. And the fact that we cannot talk about the trade-offs is so warped to me that I don't understand it. What's the rate of C-section now? can't believe the statistics. You know, if anybody had told me 30 years ago that we're going to see this percentage of births as C-sections, I wouldn't have believed it. And as you say, most of that,

most of them or a lot of them are for the convenience of doctors or patients or both. Yeah, it's 30%. I was going to say, it usually hovers around 30. I think above 32% right now. And that's, that's an, it's an astounding number. I want to go back to a couple more rapid fires and then we can dig in a little bit deeper. What's with soy? Because as a vegan person and a person who's been vegetarian since, you know, the year one and then a vegan since the year two, you know, I mean, I was actually weaned on soy milk. My mother was not encouraged to breastfeed in 1975. And she was not a vegan, but she thought, why would I give a baby cow milk? That's weird. So she weaned me on soy milk, which, you know, is obviously not something I'm recommending and it's, you know, has a definitely

complexity. But as a vegetarian in the, you know, 80s, 90s, like, all I ate was soy. I have eaten so much, so, like, I'm made of soy. I used to be made of cottage cheese because I was raised as an Eastern European, you know, bread child. I was made of cottage cheese, and now I think I'm made of soy. What's up with soy? You seem to like unprocessed soy. So many people are terrified of soy. Okay, so I think the fear of. of soy and the reactions against it, I think, first of all, rooted in xenophobia, you know, fear of foreign things, because soy is something that was introduced from other cultures, and neophobia, fear of new things, new foods. Now, soy was really unknown in this culture,

you know, not that long ago. Populations that eat soy foods regularly have better health than we do. Japanese men get prostate cancer at the same rates as American men, but the prostate cancers behave much less aggressively. Japanese women on traditional diets have breast cancer much less rates than American women. I think this is due to the hormonal effects of soy. I think that a lot of the reaction, recent reactions against soy, and I see so much paranoia about it on the Internet, I think some of this is coming from the meat and dairy industries, which are really threatened by the increasing consumption.

of soy. Some of it is from misunderstanding. You know, soy contains four compounds that are called isoflavones that have estrogen-like effects. If you isolate these and put them in test tubes with breast cancer cells, two of them increase cell proliferation and two of them inhibited. So the fact that there are things there that can increase cell proliferation lead some people to think that this promotes breast cancer. But the question is, what happens when you put this mixture of things with opposite effects into the body. I think the body chooses how it responds to them. And the overwhelming evidence is that soy is protective against hormonally driven cancers. I think the earlier in life that whole soy foods are introduced, the lower the risk of breast

cancer in women and the lower the risk of prostate cancer in men. So, you know, I think that there is a difference between whole soy foods, things like anatomy, soy nuts, soy milk, tofu, Tempe and soy supplements or fractionated soy foods. I don't think we have the same evidence for those, but I think the evidence for whole soy foods, consuming them regularly, the earlier in life of better is highly protected. I want to clarify whole soy because I understand automoma, I understand the nuts. I don't understand sort of the blocks that come in the packages, you know, because of water and then you peel them open and chop them up. That has always seemed like a highly processed food. and the notion that like that is better than a chicken breast

that is more, my understanding is more natural. I agree. I said I'm talking about tofu, tempe, soy milk. Hold on a second. He's saying that for him, the notion of like tofu, to him feels highly processed. And what I would say as a vegan, if you knew how that block was made,

you would not consider it highly processed. Yeah, I agree. Because it is literally soaked, pressed beans that they make into. a queue. It's just like making cheese from milk. You know, you're curdling the milk and then pressing the water out of it. I think there's some, you know, there's questions about whether Asian people handle soy processed it differently from Westerners. There's some people that feel that fermented soy foods are more beneficial, more digestible. Tofu is not fermented, Tempe is.

but I still think that those foods that I mentioned are quite safe and I think that they're eating on a regular basis, they're beneficial. And I think that if Americans could substitute some soy protein for some of the animal protein, they now eat, that would be a big step up. What do you think about the meat alternatives that are mostly pea protein? Well, I think those are processed foods. You know, and when you look at the labels of these things, you know, the impossible. burgers and beyond burgers and stuff like that. I'm a little nervous about the list of ingredients there. What about the ones that are like really,

there's one, for example, that I have experimented with. It's like ground beef, but it's like the ingredients are pea protein. Is that similarly? Well, I think you want to look at the list of ingredients and how that's made. I think they are more in the direction of processed foods. so I would be a little more cautious about them. Okay, one more question from our sort of rapid fire section and then I want to get into some more about inflammation.

What's up with meat? Because I look at your pyramid. I like your pyramid a lot. I feel like I try and, you know, like that for me is like my ideal pyramid. But there's been a real kind of rebellion to a lot of the health trends that, you know, I think as you just talked about, a lot of the sort of health trends that were associated with veganism, with vegetarianism, were essentially highly processed foods that are so much fun.

And it was like, I didn't know. I raised my kids vegan and no one thought to not do that. Anyway, trying to correct that to the best of my ability now. But a lot of people sort of in, you know, sort of an arrogant rebellion to all those crazy vegans and vegetarians have increased, meat consumption to the point that we had things like the Atkins diet. There's no way you can convince me that eating mass amounts of meat and cheese is healthy for the human body. It's never going to make sense to me.

But there is this sort of uber protein movement that Jonathan is part of, which to me, it just sounds like a disgusting amount of carcass of animal that you are ingesting that is full of all sorts of hormones, stress hormones, if nothing else. and fat and weirdness, what is up with the meat movement? I have a caveat, but doctor, you go first. Well, in the extreme form, or there's this carnivore diet stuff, which to me is ridiculous. You know, it clearly is unhealthy. And some of them are claiming that vegetables are toxic.

I'm sure you've read. Oh, yeah. And no starches, like really just meat. And also that I've even seen people say that growing vegetables is more damaging to the environment than raising meat. Clearly not the case. So I think, you know, I don't tell people not to eat meat

or not to eat animal foods, but I think that reducing the amount of it in the diet is very helpful. Personally, I'm a pescatarian, so I eat fish and vegetables. I know there are problems with fish as well, but I think that reducing animal foods in the diet is a good idea.

I do eat cheese. I like natural, but I think there's cheese and there's cheese. You know, that what the cheese that comes from Wisconsin and is not alive, it's not good, you know, that I like good quality. I can't imagine life without Parmesan. But I think good quality natural cheeses that have living cultures in them,

especially from cows at graze and high altitude meadows, I think that's probably a good thing. But I think just reducing meat in general is a good idea. If you're going to eat meat, I think beef is probably the most problematical. That's the one that's worse for the environment than the fatty acids in it are probably worse than other forms. So that's all I can say. I'm alarmed. I also find when I go out to eat in various places in the country, I'm astonished at how heavy menus are in meat today,

which is really a change from what I've seen in the past. What do you think about the longevity approach now that has increased the recommendation for protein from 0.8 grams per pound of body weight up to 1.5 to 2 grams per body weight? And there's a lot of Peter Atia and Huberman and other many longevity specialists who are suggesting that the maintaining and building of muscle mass, especially as we get older, is crucial in the need for this amount of protein. You know, in general, I think people eat too much protein. And if you're eating more protein than the body needs to maintain and repair tissues, it's going to burn it as a fuel. And it's not an efficient fuel. First of all, it doesn't yield as much energy as carbohydrate and fat. And it also doesn't burn clean.

It leaves residues in the body in the form of amino acids that put a workload on the kidneys and liver. So for that reason, I think it's good to keep protein intake moderate. And also, people are obsessed with protein. And, you know, when I became a vegetarian long ago, and the question I was always asked is, where are you getting your protein? Nobody ever asked you where you're getting your fat, you know, or where are you getting starch. You know, we have this obsession with protein.

And I think that harks back to the era in which protein foods were luxuries, they were expensive, and it was rich, could afford them, poor couldn't. If you could put meat on the table, that was a sign that you'd made it. And that may part back even back to really primitive times when the person that came home from the hunt successfully had the highest status in the tribe. So I think there's a whole lot of stuff about that that feeds into our obsession with protein. So I hear those arguments. I just think most people are eating more than they need.

I'd like to go from our obsession with protein into our obsession with longevity. because I will say, you know, I've known you for a minute and I've looked at your pictures for a minute. You know, there was definitely a little less white in your mustache and beard, you know, in the 90s. If anyone's holding the classic, you know, spontaneous healing cover or any of your books. I will say, and I'm sure you've heard this,

you do not seem your age. And I know that's not fair to say because you are your age and we are all our age. And I don't mean to compare you to Joe Biden or anyone else of that, that era. But I will say that there is a quickness to your thinking, your speech, your articulation, and your processing that, I'll be honest, does not seem like what we've been grown accustomed to for a man of your age. And, you know, the kind of fixation that, that, you know, I think Jonathan and I talk about and hear about in a lot of the podcasts that we are kind of, you know, ranked near and about

or that we are, you know, often kind of grouped with conceptually, there's this tremendous emphasis on longevity and like how old is your spleen and how old is this and can you live forever? And, you know, I think for men, it's geared towards a lot of the muscle mass. They're really into like, I want to look hot forever and I understand why that is. For women, or just not fall down. Or not fall down. And I think for women, a lot of the longevity conversation has, shifted to hormone replacement therapy because, you know, I'm 48. I'm already done with menopause,

which is another, you know, like I'm an early bloomer, which I like to talk about here. But, you know, I grew up in an era when you don't do a hormone replacement therapy. And now all women are being told is, do you want your vagina to be 30 forever? Then don't ever go through even perimenopause, right? Stay young forever. And to me, both of those are so sexually charged, right, this notion of like, got to be hot forever. Like my body can't change. I have to look. My skin, my face needs to look young forever.

And estrogen's going to like make me, you know, this like a horrible man person when I'm, you know, 40. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you see longevity and sort of what the plan is also for those of us who are in our 40s and maybe haven't been doing what you've been doing, you know, since you're in your 20s. Sure. I am 82 and I feel my age. You know, I think cognitively I'm the same as I always was, but I have aches and pains.

I have less energy. I can't do things that I used to do with my 30s, you know, when I did a lot of backpacking and hiking. So I think letting those things go is part of accepting aging. You know, I think rather than be obsessed with longevity and life extension, what we should be paying attention to is. is healthy aging. How do we stay healthy as we age? And I have a book called Healthy Aging, in which I wrote about this. And, you know, I think the goals of being assessed with life extension distracts you from what I think is really important, which is how to reduce the time at the end of life in which you are suffering. You know, how to reduce the inevitable period

of disability and decline to a short a period as possible. There's a technical term for that. It's compression of morbidity, where morbidity has the technique meaning of sickness. So, you know, the goal is to live long and well and have a rapid drop off at the end. I think that's what we'd all like to do. How do you do that? I think, you know, by attending to all the factors under your control that we've talked about, you know, starting with the eating, maintaining physical activity, handling stress,

getting good rest and sleep, having good relationships, and all of that stuff. You know, I think we're living at a time. You can see that the appearance of aging has changed dramatically from what it was for our grandparents. And many of our parents, you know, we commonly hear 70 is in 60 and 80 is in 70. So what's changed? Genes haven't changed in that time. It's that people have better access to better preventive medical care, to better information, to better products.

So I think, you know, things have changed. And we now have a lot of very old people around the study. You know, centenarians used to be very rare. And now they're quite common. So we have a lot of them to look at. Most of them are not. People who were 100 and over are not in good health. Almost most of them tremendously disproportionate are women.

And we don't know why women live longer. men. There are various explanations for that. We don't know. There's one area of the world where that's not true. It's in Sardinia, where the population is set in there is equally men and women. We have no idea why. The, you know, I think focusing on keeping your health as you go through life, accepting the changes that aging brings, all of that is a good way to approach the subject. There's a lot of things about aging that are difficult, and I think we just have to accept those. And I also want you to sort of frame this notion of, oh, people might say like, oh, people are living longer, and like, that's amazing. What are you complaining about? But I think can you also refine a little bit

what aging and sort of what medication and sort of what health care is looking? looking like. First of all, aging is inevitable. Everything in the universe ages. You know, animals age, plants age, mountains age, stars age, everything ages. If you make your goal anti-aging, you are setting yourself in the wrong relationship with nature and that's not a good place to be. So I think accepting the fact of aging is a good beginning. The, you know, the one part of the world that I'm familiar with, which has a high concentration of healthy old people's Okinawa. I made a number of trips there when I was writing my book. And I saw a lot of people in their upper 90s, over 100. There's so many things different there. You know, it's a tropical Pacific paradise, fantastic diet,

clean air, clean water. People were active. I saw a 102-year-old woman hoeing the ground in front of her house to plant stuff. But I have to say that what struck me as most different from our culture was the different value placed on aging. In Okinawa, the old people, the very old people are considered living treasures and the whole community makes an effort to include them in everything. One of the stories I got over there was that a common cause of sibling fighting in traditional Okinawa and society is over who is going to get to take care of the aging parents. That's a little different from what we see here.

And I think that is, you know, the old people, if I saw there, they looked wrinkled. Some of them were stoop. They didn't use Botox. They weren't working out with trainers. But they had a glow about them that I don't commonly see among old people here. And I think it was because they were so appreciated and included.

Yeah, I think if parents behaved nicer here, people would want to take care of them. But, you know, we want old people out of the way. You know, all of our media, all of our marketing efforts go to a young demographic. We isolate old people with other old people. I think that's something we have to work against. I think that's very unhelpful. After we perfect the oil organization that you start,

we'll start at one for the respect and cherishment of the elderly. How about the underwear? Don't forget that. Multiple projects simultaneously. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about inflammation. This was something that I literally hadn't thought much about. I only thought of inflammation in terms of when there's an injury, you know, you get swelling and that's inflammation, right?

But the conversation is so different now. Gut inflammation in particular, the gut brain connection, that if your gut is unhappy, your brain is likely also unhappy. And the significant impact of that, in addition, you know, the conversation about inflammation expands out our notion of, oh, if your tummy's hurting, let's treat the tummy. Or, oh, if you're depressed, let's give you a medication. The notion is now, we need a global body understanding of inflammation. I used to laugh at the nightshades people, the people who didn't eat nightshades. I mocked them, and I thought it was crazy. And the first set of foods that I was told to stop eating when I was diagnosed with my second autoimmune condition was nightshades. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to stop fighting this conversation.

Can you explain inflammation and explain what an anti-inflammatory diet is and how it can actually help us? So we all know inflammation on the surface of the body. It's local redness, swelling, pain and warmth at an area that's under attack or has been injured. Inflammation is actually the cornerstone of the body's healing response. It's how it gets more nourishment and more. immune activity to an area that needs it. But inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive that it's very important that it stays where it's supposed to stay and ends when it's

supposed to end. If it doesn't, it becomes productive of disease. So the body has evolved very complex mechanisms to make sure you can produce enough inflammation because if you can't, you're vulnerable to infection, but not too much because then you're vulnerable to allergy and autoimmunity. But very interestingly, and I think I'm one of the first people to call attention to this, that persistent chronic low-level inflammation appears to be the root cause of the most serious diseases that kill and disable people prematurely. So it's cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and cancer, because anything that increases inflammation also stimulate cells to divide more frequently. So whenever inflammation is upregulated, so is cell

proliferation, which increases the risk of malignant transformation. So I began, you know, I began seeing this idea in the medical literature quite long ago, I think it was in the 1980s. And I became concerned with how do you teach people what they can do to reduce the risk of persistent, chronic, purposeless inflammation? There's many influences on inflammation, genetic influences, environmental, things like secondhand tobacco smoke is a very strong pro-inflammatory agent. Stress has an influence on inflammation, but diet has a huge influence, and that's one that's potentially under our control.

I think there's no question that the standard American diet, which is now abbreviated the sad diet, is pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong fats, the wrong kinds of carbohydrates. and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly found in fruits, vegetables, or spices. When you also think of the foods that are most commonly marketed to children and for children, if you look at any children's menu on pretty much any restaurant,

what are we telling our kids to eat? Fried food, high saturated fats, highly processed food. And if I have one more person tell me how much their kid loves cheese, it's fat and it's salt, and they'll package it any way to make your kid eat it. But those are the foods, so that we're starting children on as toddlers. It's also quick-degesting carbohydrates

because whenever insulin, whenever sugar levels get raised in the bloodstream from quick-degesting carbs, which is almost everything made with flour, mild grains, and sugar, there are abnormal reactions between sugar and proteins that result in pro-inflammatory compounds. So trying to minimize this, I devised an anti-inflammatory, I shouldn't have called it a diet because diets are things you go off of.

It's an eating plant for life. And I based it on the Mediterranean diet because we have so much scientific evidence that that is really the healthiest way to eat for most people. But I tweaked it by adding Asian influences to it because my familiarity with Asian cuisines, things like mushrooms and turmeric and green tea. So I put all that in there. So the bottom layer, you know, there is some fish in it. There's not meat. There's olive oil as a main cooking fat. Lots of fruits and vegetables.

And I put dark chocolate at the top of the anti-inflammatory period because I think that's a healthy. So, you know, in no way does this sacrifice pleasure. I'm a great believer in that, you know, eating is one of the great pleasures of life. and the practical problem I run into and talking to people about good nutrition is people think that eating healthy means giving up everything in life. And that's just absolutely not true.

It's possible to make food that is delicious and attractive that conforms to what we know about the nutritional principles. And you have a cookbook to prove it. Tell us about coffee in terms of it's anti-flammatory. Is it anti-inflammatory?

Is it inflammatory? No, I think it has some anti-inflammatory effects and some antioxidant effects. I personally am a great fan of tea. And as you know, especially macha tea, I have a company that sells a very good matcha from Japan. And I think there's more evidence for the health benefits of tea than there is for coffee. I have some concerns. I have concerns about how addictive coffee is for many people and how powerful it is.

There's a huge spectrum. When Jonathan drinks coffee, he drinks like solid black coffee with nothing in it. But the culture of coffee that has taken over, which began in the Pacific Northwest, all respects to, you know, Seattle. The culture, especially for young people of coffee, is also addictive because you fill it full of sugar and dairy. And that's not what we're talking about when we necessarily talk about coffee, correct? Coffee itself, for many people, is highly addictive. Of course. Any regular coffee drinkers will have a withdrawal syndrome if they stop.

Yes. You know, it starts as fatigue, headaches, a throbbing. They're very cranky on Yom Kippur. Very cranky. Right. So, but as I said, there's a great variability of sensitivity to coffee and caffeine in general. I meet people that have no idea that the one cup of coffee they have in the morning is the reason they can't sleep at night.

And I meet other people who can drink a pot of coffee in the evening and have no problem falling in sleep. So you want to know where you are on that spectrum. I used to say when I was actively seeing patients that I produced one miracle cure a week by getting people to stop drinking coffee. And it was everything from dirr to urinary problems to rapid heart baits, to anxiety, to insomnia. I don't see that kind of stuff with tea. I don't drink coffee I never have, but when people offer me coffee, I like to say I don't touch hard drugs. I think many people have. I think many people have no awareness of how powerful coffee can be as a drug for some people. But I think, you know, having said that, that there are health benefits of coffee that have been

documented. So I'm not going to tell people not to drink it. But I think you should find out where you are on that spectrum and also to pay attention whether it's causing you any, you know, any problems in these various systems of the body. I've heard that excessive coffee also creates a more acidic environment in the body and that cancer grows more in that. And so someone was, you know, positing that the amount of coffee where it's on every corner and people are drinking it all day long versus having a cup or two cups a day has increased risk. Any truth to that?

I don't think so. But I'm alarmed at the growth of the Starbucks culture, you know, and everything that goes on is mine said, you know, the things that people are drinking. there are not necessarily healthy for other reasons. I wonder if you can tell us, what are the foods that people think are healthy but actually aren't? What have we been sold as a lie about certain foods? Well, a big one. If I ask people to name a whole grain food,

the commonest answer I get is whole wheat bread. You know, whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food. Where's the grains? You know, it doesn't matter whether you make flour out of a grain that has the brand removed or not, you're still milling the starch into this very fine powder with an infinite surface area

that makes it a snap to convert to sugar, which causes all the problems that I referred to earlier. And the FDA doesn't get this because they let bread that's basically colored white bread have a seal on it's saying this is a healthy whole grain food. So that's one of the big ones that I see out there.

Can I eat any bread? Yes, I think, you know, very, dense. You know, when I remember growing up, where you got packaged white bread delivered to the house, and I remember, you know, it was very fun to pull off the cross and then to see how tiny a marble you can compress it into.

So if you can compress bread into a tiny marble, that's quick digesting, not good for promoting inflammation. But, you know, a very dense European bread that you can't suppress. Children don't like that, Dr. Weil. My children won't, they don't like it. You know what, we've, the compromise in our home,

Home is an organic sourdough. That's the best we can do. Good. Because everything else, they're like, this is a rock that you're slicing. I hear you. But I think, you know, American fluff bread is one of the worst foods that we've released to the world.

So, you know, there is good bread. I think there have been, there have been happily good changes in American eating habits. You know, when I was growing up, there was no good cheese produced in America. There was no good beer produced in America. There was no good bread produced in America. You know, so that's changed.

You know, there are in many parts of the country you can get real foods that are of much better quality. Dave Aspery has a opinion on oatmeal. He believes that it's not a health food, that it's filled with glyphrates, that it leeches vitamins from your body. What's your opinion on oatmeal? I don't have one. I'm not a consumer of oatmeal, so I can't really say. But I did a podcast with Dave Asprey a few years ago.

He came and did it in person. And he was constantly rubbing a tobacco paste on his gums. So I think anybody who's doing that shouldn't really be telling us about the dangers of oatmeal. I love it. I'm interested in the tobacco paste. I hadn't heard this, but he's very big on nicotine as a neuroprotective. mechanism. I don't know if there's any... Is nicotine the secret health food that we don't know about Dr. Weil?

You know, nicotine is one of the most toxic substances known, and I used to use it as an insecticide in my garden. You know, you soak a cigar in a jar of water until the liquid's very brown and spray it and kills a lot of insects. So I wouldn't consider that neuroprotective. That's an expensive insecticide. Yeah. Well, cheap cigars.

What about oxalates and lectins? There's a lot of people talking about that. Nothing that most people need to worry about. If you're producing oxalate kidney stones, yes, you may be concerned about oxalates. People should not be eating raw Swiss chard or beet greens, which have a lot of oxalates in them. If you cook them, it neutralizes them. And lectins, I think, are nothing to even be concerned about. They're just, you know, nothing to even bother with.

I eat Swiss chard raw sometimes because I like the stems and I did not know that there may be any concern them. Much better to cook them. They're high in oxalic acid. Okay. Very good to know. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about spontaneous happiness and the role of mood, the role of kind of our emotional environment on our health. Like we're all being told, of course, like meditate and, do this, but, you know, I'll be honest, I've noticed that a lot of my meditation practice that I had taken on, a lot of my yoga practice, I was approaching it the way I approached everything else that

runs my life in a way that actually is not healthy. So there's different kinds of, you know, kind of mental wellness. Can you talk a little bit about what we should be aiming for? Yeah. We are not, we're, yeah, we're, we're, yeah, We're not supposed to be happy all the time, first of all. You know, our moods fluctuate. And I think, you know, what you want to seek is some kind of relative emotional balance. You know, you don't want to eliminate the highs and lows. You don't want to get stuck at the bottom, nor do you want to get stuck at the top.

I think we've been sold a bill of goods about, you know, that we're supposed to be happy all the time. It's possible also that, you know, ordinary depressions, I mean, not ones that are paralyzing, may serve some purpose. You know, they create inward focus. They may promote creativity. And they're not necessarily a matter of imbalances of the brain. I think what we should be striving for more than happiness is contentment. You know, I think contentment is an inner source of feeling fulfilled that's relatively independent of external circumstances. You know, many people think they'll be happy if they get something from outside, you know, a new car, a new lover, something like that.

I think a feeling of contentment is something that you get from within you that's independent of external circumstances. There have been many studies and observations of the degree of emotional well-being in societies that are quite deprived by our standards. and I don't think there's any necessary correlation between affluence and what people have and contentment. In fact, it may work just the other way around. There's laws of diminishing return that have been shown. At a certain baseline, the financial security helps and gives more opportunity, and then there's a law of diminishing returns where it actually doesn't help at all. What are some of the connections between contentment and are.

physical health. Jonathan and I are very interested in the intersection between kind of spiritual connection and the brain. In a parallel way, can you talk a little bit about how our physical health is impacted by our mental well-being? We certainly know that stress impacts our physical well-being. I think there's many studies on that, and I think it's important to learn and practice methods of neutralizing the harmful effects of stress. I think it's also, I find it very interesting, that moods are contagious. You can track the movement of moods in a group just the way you can track infectious disease. There's studies that show that if you live within a half mile of a happy friend, you are likely to be happier.

And the effect falls off with distance. You mean, you can just track this stuff. So, you know, one of the pieces of advice that I give people is, you know, if you're sad, don't spend time around. sad people. You know, don't listen to sad music. You keep eliminating me from everyone's life. Every sentence you say. So I think, you know, these are simple things. Many people don't think about that in ways that you can affect your emotional well-being. And I'm not so sure we can say, you know, that emotional states correlate directly with physical health. But the assumption, I think it is assumption, as I saw in those people in Okinawa, that being socially connected or having a

supportive community definitely supports health and healthy aging. What do you think about energy medicine or better understanding the, you know, not just the acupuncture points of our body, but you know. So this is actually a curriculum subject that we teach in our fellowship at our center at the University of Arizona. It has been a very taboo subject in conventional medicine. You know, scientifically minded doctors don't believe in subtle energies. You know, they don't believe that acupuncture needles are moving chi around the body, for example. And they don't believe that there's such things as energy healers who can, you know, hold their hand out, either touching

you or not and transmit energy to you. I personally believe in all this, and I think it is possible to research it and study it. I find it, you know, very interesting. I've met some, I think, very powerful energy healers. What I felt coming from their hands was not subtle. You know, it was a very obvious thing that could be felt. And it may be something that can be learned and you can train in. I think this is, you know, our medicine has been entirely matter medicine.

You know, we give physical substances, as drugs, as treatments. And it may be that, you know, maybe, energy medicine is going to become more prominent in the future. I think so. This is a tough subject because we balance a lot of very scientifically minded people. And we also have a lot of really curious and open people who have had experiences of feeling energy, have experienced the fact that maybe their body doesn't stop at the outer limits of their skin and that they have an energy field around them.

Can you help us start to like explain energy medicine? You know, you talked about a healer, but why should someone who maybe hasn't had the experience yet, how do they begin to understand what this is and why it may impact their health and well-being? Well, I think the basic idea is that we have an energetic field around us. I mean, we know that we can measure electrical activity in the brain. We can measure magnetic field.

in the brain with instruments. This is done in conventional medicine. So I think that's not incompatible with what we know scientifically. I think all cells have electrical and magnetic fields. And I think it's possible both to measure these and influence them. So I don't see a conflict there. I consider myself an open-minded skeptic. You know, I'm willing to believe in things that there's not proof for, but then I want to see proof. But I think unless you're willing to believe and see the possibility, you're never going to find the evidence for it. And when you're, I fully agree with you.

I have practiced energy medicine. I got into different forms of hands-on body work when I was 17 in the wake of a family tragedy, when nothing made sense. And I found that outlet and was highly impactful for me and actually has guided a lot of my life. And I've also lived very much in the business rational world where there's sort of a trying to merge those two has not always fit. But when I'm able to see the world through a sense of there's more than just our physical body. There's intuition. We do have energy fields around us.

Life makes a lot of sense. And so I share that just so that you know where I'm coming from as I probe and try to, you know, dig a little deeper into this. Because we do get a lot of questions. Someone just recently asked, you know, well, I have this autoimmune disease. What does it mean to me? So when you talk about an energy healer, putting their hands out, for example, or influencing cell, can you talk a little bit more about that? And I can also share a little bit as well. I'll tell you a story.

This was probably in the 1980s. I had a discussion group of first and second year medical students at the University of Arizona. There were probably about 40 people we would meet once a week in someone's home. There was a nurse. She was a graduate student who was going for her. her PhD at the University of Arizona College of Nursing. And she did her thesis as she set up a controlled experiment of modification of pain with transmitting energy without physically touching people. And it was compared to a placebo treatment in which the people were told to hold their

hands out and count backwards in sevens rather than thinking they were transmitting energy. And she got very reproducible results showing that there was a difference. So I had her come in and talk to this group of medical students. And she had us do a few exercises. I mean, the first one was rubbing your hands together like this and then holding them apart with your eyes closed and at different distances and see if you get a sense of energy. But then what was most striking, she had people pair up sitting facing each other. And one person held their hands out like this and they were the receiver. And the other person facing them held their hands over those hands. They were the transmitter, not touching. And the person transmitting was told to try to send energy through one

hand only. And when the receiver felt which hand it was, they were to tap that hand. I would say within 10 minutes, there was a 90% accuracy rate in that sort of all. I mean, that was very impressive to me. So, you know, I think these are things that you can learn to experience, but you have to be open to the possibility. You know, one of the things I was just revisiting spontaneous healing. and you have an eight-week program for optimal healing power, which involves like things to do mentally, diet things, supplements, exercise, you know, for each of these weeks. A lot of people kind of want a quick fix, and I know there isn't one,

but if we were to think of you as sort of our January 1st, New Year's Resolution podcast guest, what would you say to people if they wanted to, make, let's say, three to five changes this week or in the coming weeks? What are the three to five things we should tell people about? First, try to reduce consumption of or preferably eliminate refined process to manufactured foods. I mean, that's what's doing us in nutritionally. A good place to start also is with sweetened beverages, you know, and I don't just mean sodas. It's energy drinks and fruit juice all that. Secondly, I would say learn how to breathe, properly. I think that's key to good mental and physical health. You can practice that

478 breath that I teach that's in all of my writings. I would say third, really attend to your rest and sleep. You know, make sure you're getting adequate sleep and sleep in good quality. Fourth is to move. I know that can be as simple as walking, but, you know, just doing some kind of physical activity. And I guess I would say also to spend more time in the company of people who have habits that you want. You know, if you want to learn to eat better, hang around people who eat well. If you want to be more physically active, hang around people that are physically active. So those are just some simple bits of advice. Thank you so much. It's really, we're so honored to have you here. You've been such a pioneer and a champion, you know, for a way of thinking and a way of

living that really has changed the course of not only medicine, but just so many of our lives. So thank you so much for being here. Sure. I enjoy talking with you. We're glad the world is catching up to what you've known for a long time. And very gratifying to watch. Jonathan, I kind of feel like we had like the godfather of integrative health on. He was so ahead of his time. I just like, could you imagine, a little bit like Peter Levine to me, sort of similar

story where they had this idea of how things. work, what actually contributes to health, and they were talking to a system that just thought they were absolutely crazy for a really, really long time. And yet they had to have the belief in themselves that, wait a second, there's something here. And to see the world, you know, take a couple decades to accept and not only accept, but embrace all the things that they're talking about and really it become the way to understand health and well-being. I'm feeling sad that there's still so much about what he says that I know a lot of people are resistant to. And, you know, I think that also, you know, I live in Los Angeles.

So it's kind of like everything that he talks about, some way gets like packaged in a really expensive way. And like, so I know that that's not true. But I think that that's how a lot of people see it. That's how a lot of people think about it. Like the things in an Erawan smoothie, right, which is this place in L.A. that has these like 20, smoothies. The ingredients are exactly the kind of things he's talking about. They don't need to be that expensive, but because it's L.A., they package it in this, you know, container, and then it's like, I can't eat that. I can't be healthy. Dr. Weil is talking about a different way of looking at, you know, not only what we eat, but sort of how the system supports us. And the fact that, you know,

he didn't just sort of think this in isolation. He's created this institute. He's, you know, educating generations of doctors here. I mean, that's his kind of goal is to influence doctors to have more information and to understand things in such a different way. And that's where I have to feel like the hope is. And I like that he's echoing what we've heard multiple times, remove processed food and ultra-processed food from your diet.

The time is now. The time is literally now. I mean, I think that for a lot of us, there's always like a reason or an exception. And I think what's important is, you know, he said this isn't about being absolutist. You know, Jonathan has a lot of discipline in this arena. I have very little discipline in this arena. But just the notion that we can start introducing, you know, I started just basic things, just like stocking more things in my house that I'm going to offer my children instead of the

things that I used to stock my house with. So there's always like one container of crackers in case the occasion arises. But I've started just like slicing up a cucumber and seeing what happens. And they eat it. I've started like I experimented with every color of bell pepper. And like now that's the go-to snack where it used to be like the chips that were in the cupboard or whatever. I'm just not having those in the house.

And instead like we're learning to like what an apple tastes like. You know, things like that. I mean, those are kind of smaller changes that don't have to be huge financial investments either. You have to have the alternatives and you have to get in a rhythm of reaching because we have hunger cues that are associated with types of food that we normally go to. And as we start to make different associations, then the hunger cues change. The cue is always chocolate. The answer to the cue is always chocolate for me.

Well, this is the patterning and we don't realize how conditioned we are. When I'm eating a lot of sugar, when I fall off the... wagon and I start eating the cookies. I feel hunger and my first thought is, oh, where is that sweet thing? When I'm not doing that and I've made a soup or I've made a stew, I get hungry and I'm like, oh, that will be the thing that I think about. A stew? Put in a pot, you heat it up. It's a delicious meal. No, Jonathan. The people don't want to make a stew and heat it up. No. Instapot, half an hour, DM me on Instagram. Tell me your stew recipes. No, you've become that guy.

No, ladies, gentlemen, whoever's listening to this, this is not about a stew. I like a good stew as much as the next person. What about a lentil soup? I only make that if I'm having six people over, five of whom love lentil soup. That is not flying in my house. But what is flying is fruits, vegetables,

things that are easy to cut up. I put them in a bowl and see what happens. The other thing I loved that he spoke about which it still may be as early in this conversation as he was when he started talking about integrative health in the 80s. You can talk about your testicles again. You keep bringing them up. I want to have the most plastic-free testicles in North America.

I'm sure there are people with less plastic in their testicles. I haven't tested mine. But actually, what I really want to talk about is energy medicine. And I think we may be as early in this conversation as he was in the 80s when he started talking about holistic and integrative health. But I was, I really appreciated that he was speaking about this and speaking about it in a way that, as he said, is what did he call it, a cautious skeptic or a skeptic, curious skeptic? I've thought about myself in a similar way. Yeah, he's an open-minded skeptic, yeah. Even as much as I have experimented and explored, and I've seen different forms of healers,

and some of them have been profound, and some of them have been a little too out there for me, and they haven't resonated. I've seen a modern shaman to do soul retrieval work, and I can talk more about that on a different episode, and you and I can talk about it. But what I appreciate is that he's talking about we all have energy in ourselves. We can track that. We can monitor that with modern scientific tools. We know that the system of the body is fueled by electricity.

We know there's electricity in the brain. And that doesn't stop simply at the boundaries of our physical body at the end of our skin. It moves beyond that. And to be able to think about how to transfer that energy, can we identify places where there is a blockage, whether that be physical, emotional, what are the connection between those two? You know, trained, people who are trained with their hands to be very sensitive

can literally scan someone's body and have a sense of what are they holding in that spot? You know, are they holding tension? Are they holding stress? Or is it manifesting as an organ dysfunction? Now, I would never say to forego regular testing or medical treatment to evaluate if something is wrong. but how we can better understand the holistic function of the body by looking to energy medicine, I do think is the next frontier of well-being. That is starting to become popularized.

There are a lot of people who are popularizing it, but it's still in the, you know, really look down on by the super scientists and, you know, not really understood. Well, I mean, I think part of it, and that's sort of the worlds that, Dr. Weil, you know, kind of is able to bridge is that when things are not easily reproducible and when things are not reproducible in a way that you can quantify them, that's a real challenge to Western medicine. It's a real challenge to Western thinking. So, you know, for me, I still, like when you say the word energy, you use it very freely, but you kind of use it like the word stuff. Like there's stuff around us. Like, I don't really know. Like, it's still, it's very like

Fluffy-Wuffy, meaning it hasn't been really pinned down for me yet. What I will say, I'll give one example of my experience with, you know, energy work, which is coupled. It's, you know, traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. And it's someone who is a practitioner and a very skilled practitioner of energy, of, meaning energy work, traditional Chinese, she's a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, and she also does acupuncture. And she puts lots of needles all over my body. Like I've seen her, you know, many, many, many, many, many dozens of times. And needles go all sorts of places. But once in a while, she'll put a needle in and I'll say like, ow, like, oh, and it like turns my stomach and I get really nauseous, nauseated. And I

will say that, you know, pretty much every time when I say, what is that, she will name the point in the meridian, the point in the body that does relate, you know, organ-wise, to what happening in my body or what physiologically I know is happening because of blood work, because of, you know, other assessments. So she's not, quote, making it up because I can look on a chart. Like she can literally, you can pull up a traditional Chinese medicine chart, you know, that has history of thousands of years. It's not just that she's telling me a thing and I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, oh, it's my thyroid. She's like, there is activation in my body in ways that translates to pain, discomfort, and also in many cases, it feels disorienting, not just that the pain is so

distracting, but that the sensations in my body are very distracting, and it usually makes me need to close my eyes, right? So to me, that's an example of something is going on in these meridians and the ways that they connect to our organ systems and are, you know, all of the, both the conceptual systems that, you know, Chinese medicine also operates on, and the literal, you know, organ that it operates on. So that's one of my favorite, that's one of my sort of, you know, favorite examples of, okay, something is going on that has wisdom outside of what we know. The other aspect of that type of medicine that I find fascinating is that there are mirrored systems of the body. So, for example, I've seen the same practitioner you've talked about and I'm like,

oh, I have this really intense pain or muscle tightness in my upper right thigh, which happens after my surgery and she'll like find a spot on my arm that or or on my lower leg or even in my ear. And she's like, oh, yes, there's the whole body is represented in your ear and the whole body or this system. And you can feel it, you can feel it release. It's not just that she's telling you. You can feel it release. She literally will release the point on my leg through finding the representative channel in

another part of my body. And then if we think about that, our emotional systems, our digestive system. are relational systems, how we operate in the world. Like there are so many mirrored patterns and systems that we are not normally aware of because they're not obvious to us that actually finding out about these things can give us another way to access an opportunity for healing or ease or expansion. And the language of energy work, the language of these kinds of practices is very different. but anytime that I've had breathing problems, lung problems, or asthma problems,

any point on my body that is, quote, a grief point is painful when my lungs are acting up. And in Chinese medicine, the lungs represent grief. So there's a wisdom to other kinds of understandings. And I think that's what Dr. Weil is trying to sort of help us be open to. There's a wisdom to being open to understanding different ways of health care, different ways of thinking about our overall wellness. and, you know, the hope would be, of course, stimulating the body, as he said,

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