Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 620: Chris Kresser on the Chronic Disease Equation, the Potato Hack for Fat Loss, the Disease Worse than Being Eaten by a Shark & MORE

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. What's up, mind pump listeners. So me, Adam and Justin, had the amazing opportunity to sit down and have a great conversation with Chris Cresser. Now, for me personally, I have a special connection to Chris. Back when I started having gut issues and health issues, his articles were the ones that really directed me,

Starting point is 00:00:37 or really helped me, I should say, find the right direction to help myself. In the wellness world, Chris Cresser, he's among the best. His information is incredible. He's got some phenomenal books. He's a functional medicine practitioner. He looks at the entire body as one organism. In this episode, we have some great conversation with him. We ask him a lot of good questions. We talk a lot about the state of health in this country. We talk about, you know, diets and why we crave certain foods and, you know, everything from leaky gut syndrome to HPA access dysfunction to adrenal fatigue. It's a

Starting point is 00:01:16 really, really good episode. He is one of the experts in this realm. So you're going to love this episode. Now you can find his information at chriscresser.com, that's chris, say, ch-r-i-s, chr-e-s-s-e-r.com. He also has a book that's about to come out. Now, we were lucky enough to get an advanced copy of it. I'm already halfway through it. Brilliant book, one of my favorite books.

Starting point is 00:01:44 The title of it is unconventional medicine. Join the Revolution to reinvent healthcare, reverse chronic disease, and create a practice you love. It should be available either by the time this airs or within a few days, so go check it out. He also has a podcast, Revolution Health Radio. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Chris Cresser. Chris, I think I first heard about you.

Starting point is 00:02:11 God, it's gotta have been at least six or seven years ago, maybe longer. I had a client that I was working with who had just some strange issues with fatigue, just chronic fatigue, had issues with food, she was developing more and more issues with different foods that you would eat, where she would get reactions like bloat or digestive issues or skin issues.

Starting point is 00:02:35 And she talked about you and I looked you up and then I read, I think I read an article that you wrote about leaky gut syndrome and what that is. We've talked a little bit about Leaky Gut Syndrome to our audience. Maybe if you wouldn't mind explaining that a little bit and what that is and how common that is, because I think since the learning about it, I feel like it's far more common than people realize.

Starting point is 00:03:02 Sure. Yeah, so our gut is basically, if you think about it, it's kind of interesting. Everything inside of our gut is technically outside of our body. Oh yeah. It's weird to think about it, because we think about it as we say it.

Starting point is 00:03:18 We'll explain it to you. All right, let's just throw it over here. Here's how I imagine it like this. Like you have a donut, and then there's a hole in the donut, right? Inside the donut would be in the donut. The hole is not in the donut because it's true. That's exactly right. And that's what your digestive system is.

Starting point is 00:03:33 It's like a hollow tube, you know, that connects your mouth to your anus basically. I got it. And so anything that's in that tube is not really in your body yet. Wow. Wow. So she's shettling through. Yeah. And that is helpful to think about it that way, because then you start to understand one of the main purposes

Starting point is 00:03:50 of the gut barrier, which is to keep things out of the body that shouldn't ever get in. You know, some things we put in our mouth, that we're not supposed to absorb. That's why they come out the other end, right? But some things we need like nutrients and food. And so the gut is this barrier system that decides what gets in and what stays out. And so it should normally be permeable, but only at the right time and

Starting point is 00:04:18 for the right things. And leaky gut is what happens when it becomes inappropriately permeable. So it starts letting things in that should not get into the body in the first place. So these could be big protein molecules that haven't been broken down. It could be toxins from bacteria in the gut if there's an imbalance of good and bad bacteria. And then when those things get into the bloodstream, they trigger an inflammatory response and all-hell breaks loose. So it can cause everything from digestive symptoms, clearly like you mentioned,

Starting point is 00:04:50 so but also skin breakouts and rashes because skins the biggest organ in the body and inflammation will almost always affect it. So you got kids with acne, adults with acne, exema psoriasis, all that stuff can be got related. It can also cause depression and anxiety because there's a profound connection between the gut and the brain. So, unfortunately, most doctors, most people in the general public don't really know about

Starting point is 00:05:13 this, the connection between the gut and all of the rest of the body. It used to be, people used to laugh at leaky gut syndrome, just the term, like that's bullshit, it doesn't exist. But it seems like more and more people are now starting to accept that that's something that can happen. How far along is Western medicine in this regard? Are they acknowledging it at all? Or is it just right now in the study phase? Oh, well, that's an interesting question,

Starting point is 00:05:43 because yeah, it's true. I mean, if you wanted to generate some serious eye rolling, you know, or like get yourself laughed out of a room 50 years ago, you go to a medical conference and start talking about leaky gut, you know, it was like the realm of alternative quacks. And now if you go to a PubMed, which is a big repository for scientific studies, and you search for intestinal permeability. So you have to use the very official sounding term. Then you'll see thousands of studies, literally thousands of studies connecting intestinal permeability with everything from autoimmune

Starting point is 00:06:17 disease to depression, the schizophrenia. So it's a legitimate condition that's being studied and peer-reviewed, you know, prestigious scientific journals. But whether that research is actually trickled down to the average primary care physician is a different question. And this is one of the biggest problems in medicine right now is there's at least a 20 to 30 year lag time it seems between like the cutting edge research and then what becomes the standard of practice. What are some of the main causes? Why are we having some issues with our guts? You know, today, what's causing this? Well, in a nutshell, the answer would be the modern diet and lifestyle. So, you know, we human beings, just like all other organisms and animals and nature, we evolved in a certain environment and we're adapted to survive and thrive in that environment.

Starting point is 00:07:11 And when you take us out of that environment and put us in a really different one, our genes can't change fast enough to adapt. And so we have things like processed and refined foods, you know, big goleps and cheese doodles and you know all the crap that we eat today, that stuff will cause intestinal permeability. What is it Chris in those that are causing that? What is it? What is it? Sugar, refined flour, all of these things cause what we call dysbiosis. So it feeds potentially harmful microbes in our gut and allows them to proliferate. And then the toxins that those bacteria produced

Starting point is 00:07:51 can cause that intestinal permeability. Is it because it's just like, it's an overwhelming amount for the gut to handle at one shot? Is that what it is? Because we've refined it so much and we've processed it so much and it's just like this.

Starting point is 00:08:02 I'm going off in our gut. Yeah, I mean, to put it simply, like if you think about what our ancestors ate, it was all real nutrient-dance, whole unrefined food. It was, it was meat and fish, wild fruits and vegetables, some nuts and seeds, and some starchy plants. And what these foods all share in common is, they don't have a lot of easily accessible sugar in in them. I mean they have the fruit has some sugar

Starting point is 00:08:26 But it's locked up with fiber and there's a lot of water and so When we eat these foods our body knows what to do with them when we eat the you know The top six foods now in the American diet are grain-based desserts bread pizza, pizza, sugar-sweetened beverages, like colas, alcohol, and chicken dishes, but mostly fried chicken, you know, like chicken nuggets and KFC. Those are, those six foods comprise the majority of what people eat. Wow. Yeah, I mean, the new food pyramid. The new food pyramid. Yeah, and you're saying that that?

Starting point is 00:09:04 You make me sick. That's weird. Isn't that crazy? I mean, who knew? So, I mean, it's kind of fun sometimes to think about the evolutionary adaptations we'd have to go through in order to thrive on those six foods being the part of our diet.

Starting point is 00:09:19 I mean, they're totally depleted of the nutrients that we need, like the micronutrients, the vitamins, minerals, trace minerals. That's like fuel for the car. If we don't have that, we can still function, but we're not gonna function very well. It's like putting diesel in a car that runs on gasoline. It'll still go, but it's not gonna work well.

Starting point is 00:09:38 And so yeah, those foods are, they have a lot of sugar that's readily available. And so that sugar feeds the microbes, bacteria love sugar just as much as we do. And in fact, we know that those bacteria can actually cause us to crave sugar. They're actually kind of running the show when it comes to our cravings. So if we have more of these bacteria, they can make us crave. Isn't that another controversial thing to say too? Because some people's the whole craving thing is, I remember when we had lane on the show

Starting point is 00:10:09 that was as big. I said, well, man, I get these cravings when I eat these foods and you all, we're careful with what you say when you say the word crave. Is that kind of like a gray area? Like what? Well, I mean, there's certainly plenty of research that shows that the gut microbiome affects our cravings because the chemicals that the bacteria produces affect our brain and our brain is what determines

Starting point is 00:10:34 our cravings for food. We have this system, the hypothalamus and other regions of the brain that basically determine what we seek out. And that's a survival mechanism that when we were living in, when we were 100 gathers, it was a survival advantage for us to seek out sweet and fatty foods because if we obtain those, we would survive. That's great.

Starting point is 00:11:03 But when there's a 7-11 on every corner, and we can just walk down to the end of the corner and get a big gulp and all kinds of other stuff, that's where that hardwired programming starts to work against us. There's also, you know, when we did seek those things out, at some point we have these natural systems where we'll actually get sick of a particular flavor. It's like a natural satiety signal. So like if I were eating something sweet in nature, I could eat so much of it, but there would be a certain point where I'd be like, I don't want to eat anymore.

Starting point is 00:11:36 We've all experienced that. But when I introduce a new flavor to it, I kind of hijacked that signal and I'll eat and I'll eat more and what happens a lot of times This is what I talk about a lot of magical science behind McDonald's fries and ketchup Exactly and this is what I like to talk about on the podcast a lot of times is how Food manufacturers of these process because process foods really what they are is just highly engineered foods Yeah, there's lots and lots of money and science that goes into figuring out the perfect texture, you know, crunch or whatever, the taste, the saltiness, the sweetness, the color, the smell, like all the factors that go into making a food desirable. And then also

Starting point is 00:12:20 overcoming your body's natural systems of satiety so that you eat more of them. It all goes into processed foods, whereas natural foods, you know, we evolve to kind of where our bodies will stop eating when they need to or crave them when they need to. Whereas with the processed food that doesn't really happen too much. Yeah, there are a couple good ways I like to talk about this that make it pretty clear for people. If you imagine two plates on one plate, you've got a big potato with no salt or butter, just steamed, plain, big potato,

Starting point is 00:12:52 it's pretty hard to overeat that, right? You'd probably eat it if you're hungry, but you're not just gonna keep eating once you're satiated. Then you imagine a plate with potato chips, and it's pretty easy to imagine over eating those, even once you're still full, you're still eating because it's hitting all of those reward signals

Starting point is 00:13:10 that you just mentioned. Another example is that Rob Wolf likes to talk about, I know you guys have talked to him before. The poor hamster. Well, he loves to go that direction, right? There is that. That's not the one I had in mind. But I know you guys have this book here on the table.

Starting point is 00:13:28 Maybe that's not mine. Yeah. So he was, there was a video he actually links to. It was this contest where it was like, who could eat the most ice cream? I don't know if you guys have seen this. But so this guy's eating this, like, just disgusting amount of ice cream,

Starting point is 00:13:46 it makes me sick. It was like, it was the kitchen sink bowl. It was very helpful. It was very helpful. It was very helpful. And he's getting to the end and you can see him start to flag. Like he's getting green

Starting point is 00:13:56 and it almost looks like he's gonna throw out. And how does he actually finish this? Orders a large order of fries. You got it. Salty, you know, crunchy, totally different reward circuits. He eats the fries and then he's able to go back and finish the ice cream. That's variety is one of the most powerful signals

Starting point is 00:14:16 for that food reward system. This is one of the reasons why, if not the reason why, I think the whole, watch your calories, watch you know, watch your calories, watch your proteins, watch your fats, watch your carbohydrates, model fails because it doesn't take these root systems into account at all. And so when you're sitting there trying to restrict yourself, but you're not, you don't understand how these natural

Starting point is 00:14:40 systems of satiety, hunger, reward systems work, then you're fighting it up hill battle. And then it's just your willpower versus your body's natural desires. And guess which one's gonna win eventually? Yeah, you know, it's not gonna be your willpower. No, I'll tell you, I mean, there's some phenomenal ways to put this in a practice for losing weight.

Starting point is 00:15:01 It's just that nobody will do them. So one is, we could just call the really boring diet. You know, it's not going to be a best sounder. I don't think so. The really boring diet that doesn't taste good, you know, you just, you eat like a few, you choose a few, simple foods, you don't eat a lot, you don't add a lot of seasonings, you don't add fats. So if you out, you know, steam broccoli, just have it alone without salt or fat on it.

Starting point is 00:15:31 And then you have a, you know, like a piece of meat or fish. It's just very simple. And then maybe even a starchy plant, you know, like a potato or sweet potato with, with, with not, you guys are salivating. I can see it, loving it over there. I know you're all getting so integrated. No, I mean, if people ate that way, it would be almost, it would be very difficult

Starting point is 00:15:52 to gain weight and it'd be easy to lose weight. And there's the potato hack, have you guys heard of this? No. Potato hack? No. It's actually one of the most successful strategies for rapid weight loss.

Starting point is 00:16:03 You eat nothing but potatoes for three to five people. People did. Days. Not by choice. Not by choice, exactly. And you don't put butter and olive oil and chives and sour cream and bacon bits on it. You just eat the potatoes.

Starting point is 00:16:18 And you cook the potatoes. People are like, wait, isn't that going to tweak my blood sugar? You know, I'm all eating all these simple carbohydrates. You generally, you cook the potatoes in advance, so you don't have to cook the potato every time you eat it. And when a potato is cooked and cooled, it forms resistance starch. So this is a type of starch that's not digested by humans. So it doesn't impact your blood sugar the same way that eating a potato would normally.

Starting point is 00:16:42 And it actually feeds your beneficial gut bacteria, which is one of the reasons it might be beneficial. But generally people can lose like a half a pound a day eating this. You just sold the hell out of that back. And the reason it works is for exactly the reason you're talking about. It's almost impossible to eat more plain potatoes than you're actually hungry for it. Totally short circuits that reward system. And you eat only what you're hungry for, and maybe not even that, because you're so tired of potatoes. And you don't have to do it forever.

Starting point is 00:17:14 You just do it, like there's different ways of doing it. Some people do three days a week, and then the other four days they eat normally, there's a variation called potatoes by day, where people eat potatoes in the morning and at lunch and then they have a normal dinner, you know, pay their interest in dinner. That's interesting. And I'll tell you, it's one of the most effective way for people who will do it in my practice.

Starting point is 00:17:34 These are the people who've tried everything else and it doesn't work. They're not usually just going to start with this. Is this easier for you to find than like having people fast as opposed to that? Uh, often, I mean, it depends on the person, but I would think so because you're getting something. Yeah, you're actually fasting, taking some discipline. You're getting something, you're eating,

Starting point is 00:17:53 it may not be exactly what you want to eat. It's super easy from a time perspective. You just, you know, bake 10 potatoes on Sunday, but you know, or whatever it's gonna be for the week. I'm kidding. Oh man. And then you just eat the potatoes. So I mean, like I said, I realized not everyone listening to this is gonna go out and rush to do this.

Starting point is 00:18:12 Not an ideal diet, but I think it's a good example. The point you're making very, very well made because I think the old paradigm of the hunter gatherer or how we used to eat was that we were constantly starving. And that's why nobody ever, you know, that's why now we have food in front of us when that we just overeat. And I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's the body not only did it evolve, surviving with not having food, but it also

Starting point is 00:18:39 had to evolve so that we didn't overeat when we did find food because every once in a while we would make a successful hunt or we would come upon a field of plants or whatever. And overeating would have been just as dangerous as under eating. We could become sick, we could damage our guts even then. We could cause problems which would then affect our survival. So these natural systems of satiety that we have,

Starting point is 00:19:02 we still have them, we've just hijacked the fuck out of them. Yeah, totally disconnected from ourself. Totally disconnected. And the point you made about the bacteria driving our behavior, it's funny when people laugh at that because really, if you, first off, we probably have more bacteria cells than human cells in our body. We've evolved, we've co-evolved.

Starting point is 00:19:25 It's a symbiotic relationship. We can't survive without each other for very long. So it only makes sense that our behavior is going to be influenced by our host, which outnumber our cells. But we've also got evidence of this. They've done functional MRI studies on people where they've mapped out their brain and how it's operating, then they'll give them probiotics, and then the way their brain operates will kind of change a little bit after taking a particular type of strains of bacteria.

Starting point is 00:19:55 We also know there's examples of, and I can't, there's a type of bacteria that rats and mice can pick up from, I believe from cat feces if I'm not mistaken. And what this bacteria does is it makes the mice and rats seek out cat urine and be less afraid of cats, almost as if it's like forcing the mouse or rat to get eaten by the cat to start the whole cycle over again. And so, and this is proven, this is proven.

Starting point is 00:20:25 So, to think that we're somehow immune from being influenced by our bacteria is absolutely ridiculous. I totally agree. I would point out though that even in nature, there are examples of people getting exposed to highly rewarding foods and over and not system being overrided or overridden diace and pottergoye

Starting point is 00:20:48 are like a hunter gatherer people there and they will go to extreme lengths to obtain honey. They'll climb trees which they fall from and die. They'll get stung by hundreds of bees. And then when they get the honey, they'll consume up to two liters at a time. Oh, shit. Leaders of honey. Are you sure you imagine that? That's a lot of honey. And then when they get the honey, they'll consume up to two liters at a time. Oh shit.

Starting point is 00:21:06 Leaders of honey. Stringy. Do you imagine that? That's a lot of honey. I mean, they don't have any conception of what's healthy or not healthy, like they're not on the low carb. Oh, there's honey there. I'm doing it. I'm in my cyclical keto phase.

Starting point is 00:21:19 I'm just going to skip that. I'm just going to get away till Tuesday. Yeah, no, they just eat it. You know, it's there and it's available, and they're gonna eat it while they can. So even in nature, that's how powerful these reward signals are. And the difference is in nature,

Starting point is 00:21:35 what do you have to do to get that honey? You gotta climb a 50 foot tree and risk falling and get stung by 100 bees. It's not like Amazon Prime, you know, a bee like a show up at your door in two days. I just came up with a new diet. This is what you do. If you have donuts or whatever your house,

Starting point is 00:21:51 set up some traps, put some bees in front of it, and go through an obstacle course. And then you have to find a mountain and poke you with needles to simulate the bee scene. It'll be right up. And then on the other end, it's just potatoes. Yeah. So I guess the potatoes at the end.

Starting point is 00:22:06 Oh, damn it. Guarantee weight loss. Right. Boring diet wins. So I'm reading a book called Sobliminal right now. And how much, Chris, do you think a lot of this stuff is driven from the hijacking and the processed foods and chemicals?

Starting point is 00:22:21 And how much of it do you think is driven from behavioral, like from when we were children, like your mom or dad hitting an ice cream because you did something and rewarding you with foods and stuff, how much do you think? Obviously, they both play a role. How much do you think each? I think that probably depends on the person.

Starting point is 00:22:38 It's really difficult to quantify an exact percentage in general. I mean, some people did learn in their childhood to use food as a way of suppressing difficult emotions by an exact percentage in general. I mean, some people did learn in their childhood to use food as a way of suppressing difficult emotions or as a reward system or whatever. But for other people, that's not really that big of an issue. And it's more just a question of these reward mechanisms

Starting point is 00:23:00 that we've been talking about, which everybody is susceptible to. I don't care who you are. Right, right. And this is what happens when you take a hundred, you know, a hundred-gather group of people and you expose them to modern diet. They're not like, oh, I'm sorry, that's not on my,

Starting point is 00:23:15 you know, my hundred-gather diet. They'll eat that stuff and they'll eat it liberally and they'll start to acquire all the diseases of civilization as they do that. So I tend to think these hardwire biological mechanisms are primary for most of us. And then you layer on top of that some of the stuff that you talked about, and it's a, it makes it even worse. So shitstorm. I felt like, I feel like all the years that we've,

Starting point is 00:23:38 thousands of clients that we've trained, the ones that really struggled with weight had the combination of both. Yeah. Like If you were 100 plus pounds overweight, it wasn't just you getting chemically hijacked. You also had some sort of attachment to food in a bad relationship and the combination in and up with this disaster. And jeans do play a role. I often say jeans load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. Well, keep in mind that you can pull the trigger a lot, but if it's not loaded, it's not gonna make a difference. So genes do play a role.

Starting point is 00:24:10 And I think it mostly determines, like, I mean, we all know the person who just eats like crap and doesn't exercise, and they're still lean, and they don't have a problem. And then we know the person who does everything right, and they're still overweight. And a lot of we know the person who does everything right and is still overweight. And a lot of that does come down to genetic predisposition. That doesn't mean that you don't have responsibility

Starting point is 00:24:32 or there's nothing that you can do about it, but it is worth pointing that out. I also think it's important to note that fat gain is one symptom of, it's one of many symptoms that can happen when it comes to, you know, poor nutrition or, you know, bad lifestyle in that sense because there's a big chunk of people who get diabetes or die from heart disease have, are not overweight. Many of them are of normal age.

Starting point is 00:25:00 Or have get autoimmune issues or like psoriasis like myself, but never once struggled with weight my entire life. Autoimmune issues, and it's kind of nobody really talks about, but that is an exploding epidemic in modern Western societies. And that is the one thing that we have such a tough time treating with our Western medicine strategies. Yeah, I mean, one way I think about this is I have a pretty simple heuristic for talking about

Starting point is 00:25:29 chronic disease. And it's just, if you think about like a math equation, you have genetic predisposition, plus modern lifestyle, equals chronic disease. No, I think it really is that simple. But the type of chronic disease you get is mediated by that genetic predisposition. So you take 100 people, 100 gatherers, let's say,

Starting point is 00:25:51 who've never been exposed to the modern lifestyle, you expose them to it. They're not all gonna develop the same problems. 10 people will get psoriasis and exema and skin problems, and other 10 people will get some different autoimmune disease, and other 10 people will develop Alzheimer's and dementia, another 20 people will develop cardiovascular disease, metabolic problems, and this is why we see this

Starting point is 00:26:14 pinopole of conditions in our society, but what we don't emphasize or get is that they all come back to that same equation of modern lifestyle plus just the triggers. Yeah, the triggers are all the same. The epigenetics. The epigenetics. But they manifest differently, and that's one of the biggest problems with conventional medicine.

Starting point is 00:26:33 We see all these diseases like separate things were locked up in doing research to find drugs that will address the ultimate manifestation. We'll fix the skin problem or we'll alleviate the depression or we'll lower the blood sugar or whatever. We're looking at it from the outside in and we should be looking at it from the inside out instead. That's more functional medicine you're talking about. Could you describe to our audience what really is functional medicine? How are you addressing like these problems with the Western way of doing it? Yeah. So, you know, our healthcare system, I like to say, it's not, it's not really healthcare.

Starting point is 00:27:13 It's better. We should probably call it sick care or disease management, because what we typically do, let's get better name. We wait for people to get sick and then we try to give them relief from the symptoms by primarily using drugs. Right? I mean, let's face it. The average visit with primary care practitioner now is 10 to 12 minutes. So, after you get done saying hello and with the pleasantries, that leads probably seven to eight minutes to, there's no way in that period of time you're going to be doing anything other than, you know, prescribing a drug based on the symptoms that the patient has. And that's what our healthcare system is. So you go into the doctor, you've got high blood pressure. What's going to happen? You're going to get blood pressure medication. You go in with high cholesterol. What's going to happen? cholesterol. And you say, doctor, how long am I gonna take these medications?

Starting point is 00:28:06 What are they gonna, what's the answer? Forever. Right, that's it in a nutshell. And, you know, don't get me wrong, the conventional medicine is amazing for acute emergency trauma situations. Like, you know, we were talking before I came. Like if I get hit by a bus, take me in the hospital right away. You don't want acupuncture? No. I don't want acupuncture me in the hospital right away. You don't want to actually puncture?

Starting point is 00:28:25 No. I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to actually, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to,

Starting point is 00:28:33 I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to,

Starting point is 00:28:41 I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to and things like modern sanitation and antibiotics, and these things have had incredible impacts on our quality of life and our lifespan, so I'm not denigrating that at all. But when it comes to chronic disease, which is by far the biggest challenge we face today, seven out of 10 deaths that happen are caused by chronic diseases, not accidents and trauma and emergency.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So functional medicine takes a different approach. We look at it and we say, okay, like I said before, you've got all these different chronic diseases, but what are the common mechanisms or pathologies they're leading to all of these symptoms? And so those could be things like disrupted gut microbiome, which we've been talking about or leaky gut. It could be things like blood sugar,

Starting point is 00:29:24 dysregulate, you know, high blood sugar, low blood sugar. They could be things like heavy metal toxicity. They could be things like stress, which, you know, some people call adrenal fatigue and we can talk more about that. Yeah, let's get into that because. So, you were the first person cause adrenal fatigue was as buzzword for a while

Starting point is 00:29:42 in the wellness world. It still is. And it still is. And I remember when, and I know, because adrenal fatigue was as buzzword for a while and the wellness wore off. It's still is. And it still is. And I remember when, and I know, maybe we can get into the symptoms of what that is, but I remember learning about the symptoms and seeing it in my clients and working with them

Starting point is 00:29:56 on that type of a model and helping them, but then I would have clients that were doctors and they'd say, what do you mean adrenal fatigue? If they got their hormones levels checked, their adrenals are functioning just fine. And then I read an article by you, where you were saying adrenal, that's the wrong thing to call it.

Starting point is 00:30:11 And you were calling it, you were talking about HPA access dysfunction. So first off, can we talk about what are the symptoms of what we used to call adrenal fatigue? And why is adrenal fatigue the wrong thing to call it? Yeah, I mean, so this is, is epidemic today and almost everybody I know has some love love it because we're just burning the candle at both ends, you know, and we can't get away with that without consequences. So, uh, that's a strong statement. So you believe that like most of

Starting point is 00:30:39 us are somewhat battling this. Yeah, I mean, how many, I don't know what do you think? I agree, we all agree. Yeah, I mean, almost everyone I I don't know what do you think? I agree, we all agree. Yeah, I mean, almost everyone I know has some issue, okay, so here the symptoms would be, fatigue could be waking up in the morning, feeling unrefresh, not getting quality restorative sleep, difficulty with exercise tolerance or recovery. So, you know, your improvement and your progress in the gym is starting to go back in the other direction.

Starting point is 00:31:13 Could be, you know, low energy, depression or anxiety. Lobito issues. Lobito cold hands and feet. For. It's often amen or you know lack of menstrual cycle completely or changes in their menstrual cycle. I'm sure you guys have seen this a lot women who are training who are training really intensely. They're not eating enough. They lose their periods well known in the in the training world. You know, there are there are many more but that's the basic constellation. And yeah, I mean I so, but that's the basic constellation. And yeah, I mean, I have so many people that I work with and just friends, family, people

Starting point is 00:31:50 I know in my life are dealing with it at some level. You know, it might not be severe, but they're dealing with it in some way. And look, I mean, adrenal fatigue is an okay term, I think, for the general public to use. It's certainly easier to remember and say than HBA access dysfunction. My point about this was mostly for practitioners and mostly around, like, look, if we want to build bridges with conventional practitioners and be you know, be taken seriously. We have to use terminology that is consistent with what we understand about the body today. And so adrenal fatigue, the sort of core idea is that what happens is, over time when

Starting point is 00:32:40 we burn the canel at both ends, these glands that sit on top of our kidneys, the adrenal glands get exhausted. They get tired and they can't produce cortisol. Cortisol is one of the main stress hormones. And so over time, the adrenals get tired, they can't produce cortisol, and that causes adrenal fatigue. And again, in terms of people just trying to get a handle on this and figuring out how

Starting point is 00:33:06 stress is contributing to their health problems, I think that's fine to talk about it that way. But the problem with it is that that's actually completely not what happens. Wow, it's fine. Well, because then people will get tested and they're like, well, your cortisol levels are normal. I guess I don't have a drill for that. Well, we talked about leaky gut being the main way to generate eye rolling amongst doctors.

Starting point is 00:33:29 But now I would say adrenal fatigue has taken that top spot. Candida might be number three. So we can talk about that. So yeah, I mean, it's true that stress has a big impact on this system called the HPA axis. Hypothelmus in our brain, pituitary, and then the adrenal glands. And this is a system that primarily governs our tolerance of stress and how we're impacted by it. The adrenals are just one part of that whole system.

Starting point is 00:33:59 Most of it is actually in the brain. So it's the brain that mostly determines our stress response. And the adrenal glands, in some cases, will be unable to produce cortisol, but that's actually pretty rare. I mean, there's an autoimmune disease called Adescent's disease, which leads to inability to produce cortisol. But in many cases, when we end up testing patients who have so-called adrenal fatigue, we see that they actually have high cortisol. Or maybe they're producing cortisol at the wrong, you know, not in the right amount at the right time of day. So it's

Starting point is 00:34:35 just that- It's like low in the morning when it's supposed to be high. Exactly. And high at night when it's supposed to be low and so that interferes with their sleep. They don't actually have a problem with production, they have a problem with regulation. And the reason I think this is important to understand is that, well, for one, a lot of times people go out and take supplements that raise their cortisol, which is obviously not a good idea

Starting point is 00:34:58 if their cortisol is high to begin with. Well, see, the problem is that when you're in this state of each PA access dysfunction or adrenal fatigue or whatever you want to call it, you feel tired and fatigued and it feels good to take things that raise cortisol like caffeine or stimulants or whatever. I would say, yeah, so it is drinking coffee. It doesn't mean it's the best long term solution. You get a temporary hit, but then that can further exacerbate this syndrome.

Starting point is 00:35:27 The other thing that's important to understand, I think, and I like to shift to HPA axis dysfunction. Maybe you guys can help me figure out a cooler name. I was thinking we can re-brand that somehow. HPAD, HPAD, HPAD. Yeah, we need a rebranding answer. Why can't it be more, explain to me why can't it be just like cortisol regulation or the failure of that or the why can't? Because there's other hormones and things.

Starting point is 00:35:52 Yeah, I mean that is actually true. When I teach practitioners I say you can name the specific dysfunction. So you do testing and you find if I have high cortisol you just call it high cortisol or you can call it hyper-cortisolism, which is a fancier scientific term. If it really is low cortisol, you can call it low cortisol, but you should find out, testing first, or you can call it cortisol dysregulation

Starting point is 00:36:19 or disrupted cortisol rhythm, because it's a diurnal hormone, it should be produced at high amounts in the morning and then dropped during the day. But the other point is that if you just look at it as a cortisol problem and this I think is what you were getting at, you're missing the bigger picture. And that's what I would often see with clinicians. It would be like, oh, adrenal fatigue, okay, take these adeptogenic herbs and you know, boost your, take some adrenal glandulars and you're done, you know, you're, but if we understand that it's a system that, you know, a whole disorder that involves the brain

Starting point is 00:36:55 and other parts of the body, then we look at it in a bigger picture setting, we know that there are four main triggers of this, of dysfunction. One, only one of them is perceived stress, which we all, that's what we think of when we think of stress, work stress, financial stress, relationship stress, et cetera. Another trigger is blood sugar issues. So, let me just name all of them.

Starting point is 00:37:19 The third trigger is inflammation, and the fourth trigger is circadian disruption. So getting exposed to too much artificial light at night, the wrong time, not enough during the day, sitting in a room like this all day, recording podcasts, not getting out in the sun, for example, explains why you're not sure if I'm just saying that. So what was wrong with me? So this is an example I like to use to my patients. Let's say someone's independently wealthy

Starting point is 00:37:47 land on a beach in Thailand. So they've got no perceived stressors as we would typically think of them. But they've got seabot intestinal bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in their body. Let's say they're eating a crappy diet and their blood sugar is high. And let's say they're staying up with their iPad and bed late at night, staring at the screen. That person could have a seriously disrupted

Starting point is 00:38:12 HPA axis, even though they don't have any stress as we classically call it. And the treatment for that person would not be to give them adapted drugs and some, you know, bit of lipid more pills or whatever. It would be to fix the blood sugar, you know, fix the inflammation and help them with circadian entrainment, you know, go outside. Well, he's on the beach in Thailand. So maybe this isn't the best example. Get off your iPad at night. Yeah, get off your iPad at night and make sure to go outside in the morning, get some bright light hitting your eyeballs And you know, so we we we expand it a lot more and we think about more things when we put it in this bigger context I think the other thing that I read about was how Because it's now well

Starting point is 00:38:59 Accepted and understood that we can have something like insulin resistance where Because we're constantly exposed to high levels of insulin that our body then becomes more and more resistant to it. And in this case, you could test someone for their insulin and be like, you have normal insulin levels, even though they display all the signs of low insulin, because the resistant to it does this happen

Starting point is 00:39:18 with other hormones. It happens with cortisol. This is actually one of the mechanisms that I teach people and practitioners in my training course is cortisol resistance. So when you have high levels of cortisol, the body's going to do what it can and protect itself from excess cortisol. And one of the mechanisms for that is making the cells resistant to it. Or decreasing the number of receptors on the cell for cortisol. So either way, you get

Starting point is 00:39:46 a decrease in the effects of cortisol, even though the circulating cortisol levels are still high. So you can get a kind of paradoxical situation where you have the effects of low cortisol with high or circulating cortisol levels. In that case, in a situation like that, how do you resensitize their body to cortisol? Well, the primary trigger for cortisol resistance is inflammation. So lower inflammation. Reduce inflammation. Which is likely coming from the gut.

Starting point is 00:40:14 All of the stuff we've been talking about come from poor diet, poor sleep, overtraining or under-training, stress, environmental toxins, which aren't unfortunately a growing problem that there's not very much awareness of. Well, could you, would you say that a body that's in balance with all of these things should be largely void of any chronic health issue? Is that the root, like, kind of message? Yeah, actually, I know people have a really hard time believing this, because now chronic

Starting point is 00:40:47 diseases is so common, we think it's normal. We think it's part of life, yeah. I always, there's a big difference between what's common and normal. And, you know, we, everyone knows someone with chronic disease, or maybe has one, one in two Americans now with chronic disease, and one in four have multiple chronic diseases. Now, over 25% of kids have chronic disease, and that's up from just 13% in 1994. So we're not talking about a lot, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:13 that's 25 years. And I'm a doubling of the incidence of chronic disease and kids. So, you know, it's easy for us to be like, oh, chronic disease is just normal. Everybody has it. But actually, that's not true. And if you look in hunter-gatherer, contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, they don't have chronic diseases, typically.

Starting point is 00:41:33 I mean, they suffer from, they have a lower lifespan on average. But those averages don't take into consideration the lack of emergency medical care and the high rates of infant mortality and deaths from trauma and warfare and what get eaten by a lot of exposure to the elements exactly. And the anthropologists who have studied this have found that if that's considered and if people in those cultures survive those threats and if they have access to even the most rudimentary forms of medical care like walking for half a day to get to a rural medical clinic, they live life spans equivalent to our own in the West. But the difference is they reach the ages that we reach without acquiring multiple chronic diseases. They don't have heart disease, they don't have diabetes, they don't have obesity,

Starting point is 00:42:20 they don't typically get Alzheimer's or dementia. They actually just live long healthy lives and typically die in their sleep. I had my own experience where my body seemed to just rebel on me when I was 30. And this was after years, I probably 15 years of abusing my body with supplements and diet and, you know, over training because I was always into, you know, trying to build more muscle whatever. And what happened to me was my, all of a sudden I just had, I thought I had severe, irritable bowel or even worse. I couldn't, you know, I was losing weight. It seemed like everything affected me. And I did some food intolerance testing. And at this time, this is when I first really got introduced to the topic of leaky gut syndrome.

Starting point is 00:43:12 And the person who did my test said, what you're probably going to find is that a lot of the foods that we're going to find that you're intolerant to, a lot of the foods that you eat a lot of now. And it didn't make sense to me then, because I remember thinking like, what do you tell him, I've always eaten these foods? These are things that I'd never had an issue with before. Why would I have an issue with them now? And the way they explained it to me

Starting point is 00:43:32 was because of the inflammatory response that I had caused through, you know, my lifestyle because my gut was, you know, permeable, but it shouldn't. It started recognizing these foods that I ate all the time as foreign invaders and it shouldn't. It started recognizing these foods that ate all the time as foreign invaders and it created antibodies. And this is what happened. This is literally what happened. I couldn't eat peanuts up until this point. I ate peanuts every single day.

Starting point is 00:43:54 Gluten was definitely an issue. Dairy was an issue, but before that it was lactose. So I knew I couldn't have lactose, but if something was lactose-free, I was fine. Well, now it was all milk proteins. I had developed antibodies against milk proteins egg whites because ate lots of egg whites. And it was just went down the list of all these foods that a spinach was my vegetable. That's what every time I had to have a vegetable, I'd have spinach. And I'd developed an intolerance to spinach. Now, through the years, after identifying

Starting point is 00:44:22 those things, changing my lifestyle and having it gradually really learned my lesson a few more times, I feel like I can have some of those foods again without having such a strong reaction. So my question to you is, can you reverse some of these things? Is that what I'm experiencing? What is a protocol for that? Yeah, so You made a couple of good points there that I want to highlight one is

Starting point is 00:44:50 You know and this sometimes happens where I get a patient come in and we'll do the testing I'll say your gluten time and be like what are you talking about eight? You know bread and pizza all the time I have a problem with it and This is a phenomenon that we call masking, and it's a more scientific term, but I like to call it the dirty windshield effect, because it's easier to understand.

Starting point is 00:45:13 So imagine you have a dirty windshield and you get another speck of dirt on the windshield. You're not really gonna notice that additional speck of dirt, right? And that's like what's happening when someone's eating gluten on a daily basis. So when they eat, they feel crappy, which is why they've come to see me in the first place,

Starting point is 00:45:30 but they don't notice like a significant effect right after eating the gluten. So you clean the off-chilled them. Right, you clean the windshield, so you go, they go on, I put them on a gluten-free diet for 60 days, then they're like, I think this is probably phony and then they, you know, they, they go on and put them on a gluten-free diet for 60 days. Then they're like, I think this is probably phony and then they, you know, they,

Starting point is 00:45:47 they miss it, they go have bread and then they're just like sprinting to the bathroom and just shoot, pff, pff, here's explosion and then they come to me and they say, you caused me to have gluten intolerance, you gave me gluten intolerance, you know. And I have to explain the dirty windshield analogy because I think the body in its wisdom

Starting point is 00:46:08 has mechanisms for protecting against other things. Right, it's trying to save you. It's going to adapt. You keep shoveling that shit in your mouth. It's going to, it's going to do what it can. Right. And which, you know, is limited, but it's something.

Starting point is 00:46:19 But then you take those out and it's like the, kind of like the proverbial sigh of relief. The body lets down its defenses. And then you put it, yeah, and then you put it back in. It's like the kind of like the proverbial sigh of relief the body lets down its defenses and then you put it back in. It's like whoa. Really? Yeah, so that's an important phenomenon to point out. So often people will actually become more sensitive right away for that reason.

Starting point is 00:46:38 I did initially because this has been years now, and 30 years, this is eight years now of me doing this. Initially, I would just have like a breadcrumb, you know, or whatever, and I'd have an issue. Now, I can eight years later, now I can eat a bowl of pasta, and I don't do it very often because if I push it, then I'll have problems. But if I do once or twice, I notice a little bit, but I seem to be okay. So it's almost like I healed myself. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, what happens there is the inflammatory response subsides the antibody production if there what if it was mediated by that declines to zero or drops so low that you know, there's some controversy in this in the

Starting point is 00:47:23 world of immunology, but typically, once you start producing the antibodies to something, the idea is you have these memory cells that will remember, and that serves us very well. If we get exposed to a virus like chickenpox, when we're young, then we get exposed to that later. Even 20 or 30 years later, you have the cellular memory for those antibodies you can produce it and you won't get that virus again, right?

Starting point is 00:47:49 You're not affected by it. So with foods, it's less clear how that's actually happening, but I know from treating a lot of patients that generally after a period of time of avoiding the problematic foods and after the gut barrier heals, which that's probably what happened in your case Is that just that is that the reproduction of good healthy bacteria that's happening? reproduction of healthy bacteria the ceiling of the gut barrier so that it's not permeable and it's not letting these big food proteins in Into the bloodstream. It's a thin barrier. Yeah, it's not a very thin barrier. It's almost like you've got like this scab and you've stopped rubbing the scab

Starting point is 00:48:27 and you let it fully heal again. Exactly. When we're constantly eating this food that we have intolerance to, it's like you're seeing there's scratching at a scab which finally just let it be for a little while that it heals. That's right.

Starting point is 00:48:40 Exactly. And in that situation, I mean, those food proteins shouldn't be going into the bloodstream anyways that you were eating. The only reason they were getting in is because you had a leaky gut that allowed those to get in, and that's what triggers the immune response. But if you're gut barrier sealed, you know, and you should be much better at able to tolerate it like you you are. And, you know, as you said, if you push it too much, you start to go back in the other direction. If you push it too much, you start to go back in the other direction. Speaking of gluten, what is it with gluten?

Starting point is 00:49:06 Why is that a common intolerance? Why is it such a hot button? And if somebody's perfectly healthy, no inflammation, whatever. So many hippies have it. Is gluten a problem for everybody or just... AJ Spears. I've never had videos on that. He's hilarious.

Starting point is 00:49:23 Is gluten a problem for everybody or just some people. So I might differ a little bit from my colleagues in this. I don't think there's strong evidence that gluten is a problem for everybody. The most kind of liberal estimates I've seen for non-sealiac gluten intolerance, which means people who are affected by gluten but don't actually have celiac disease are one in ten. So I would still mean that nine in ten people could theoretically eat gluten without having an immune mediated response. Now does that mean that I think gluten should be part of everybody's healthy diet? No, because think about most of the foods that have gluten in them. There are usually a lot of other reasons

Starting point is 00:50:05 not to eat those foods. They're generally nutrient poor, pretty processed and refined like breads or cookies or crackers or things like that. They're generally not, when we think about diet, I think about it in terms of nutrient density. You wanna maximize the nutrient density

Starting point is 00:50:24 of everybody of food you put in your mouth, because that's what our bodies run on. So if you're eating a lot of foods that are really depleted in nutrients, that's not going to be good for you, no matter if you tolerate gluten or not. The other reason I think it's tricky is that all of us are kind of just, unfortunately, it's a constant battle to stay healthy in this world. I mean, there's so many threats, whether we're talking about diet or lifestyle or environmental toxins, et cetera, that who knows who's going to become one of those one in ten people that

Starting point is 00:51:01 starts reacting to gluten. And it's probably if you're concerned about that and you want to maximize your chances of staying healthy, it's probably safer. I feel like it's getting punched in the head. It's like some people get knocked out right away when you get punched in the head. And just because you didn't get knocked out, it doesn't mean it's probably a good idea

Starting point is 00:51:21 to keep getting punched in the head. It could be like that. I mean, I think of a good idea to keep getting punched in the head. Isn't it kind of like that? It could be like that. I mean, I think of things of like an aspectrum. You know, like it's just, there are a lot of people out there if they're eating a little bit of gluten in the context of diet that's overall healthy and nutrient-dense and they're taking care of their sleep,

Starting point is 00:51:40 you know, they're getting the right amount of exercise, the right amount of sun exposure, they're doing everything right, that person's probably going to be fine. But then you take someone who is eating processed and refined foods, including they've got a disrupted gut microbiome, they have intestinal permeability, they're not sleeping well, they're you know, all of those kinds of things, which really, it's a majority, a lot of, yeah, a lot of, a majority. And our culture, then I think the risks start to get high.

Starting point is 00:52:07 That something's gonna go wrong. I think it's also, we also have to consider that in Western societies, gluten is just an everything. And what I mean by that is if you go to like, for example, what country in the world do you think has some of the highest rates of rice intolerance, right? Countries that eat a lot of rice. Like you go to Japan and having an intolerance

Starting point is 00:52:27 to rice is much higher than you would find in other countries. That's a chronic exposure. I think we're just inflamed and gluten is in fucking everything. It's not only in food that contains flour, but it's added to foods that don't for, you know, it's for the texture or it's mouthfeel

Starting point is 00:52:42 or whatever. They add gluten to sport strength sometimes to make them taste a particular way, or marinades, and I found this all out the hard way when I was dealing with my gut issues, is where I said, you know, they told me don't eat gluten, so I said no problem, and I was buying these marinaded chicken breasts,

Starting point is 00:52:57 and I was eating them, and I was having horrible reactions, and finally someone said, dude, there's gluten in the marinade. It's fascinating, I didn't know that. It's in everything, and so this is why the common food, look at the common intolerances that, the most, dude, there's gluten in the merida. It's fascinating, I didn't know that. It's in everything. And so this is why the common food, look at the common intolerances that the most common ones,

Starting point is 00:53:09 dairy, nuts, egg whites, gluten. I mean, these are things that we just consume a lot of. And if you understand that when you get inflamed, when you, if these things pass through the gut barrier, your body creates antibodies against them, gluten's probably going to be one of them because it's just, it's literally an almost, everything- It's all about the game, it's all about the game.

Starting point is 00:53:31 Yeah, it's all about the game. It's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. It's all about the game. It's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's all about the game. Yeah, it's gluten in it too. So it's really tricky for patients who are super sensitive, like you were at one point because you don't, you know, I mean, I just tell those patients, just don't buy processed or find foods because you never really know, you know. And if they have a reaction that is clear, that's one way to know. But the bigger problem is what about people who

Starting point is 00:54:02 have a reaction that's not so viscerally clear? That's great. Let's go into that. Yeah, so there's something called, let's just stick with C. they act for the time being, but there's something called silent or atypical C. they act disease. And most people, and they think of C. they act, they think of gut problems, you know, diarrhea, gas, bloating, et cetera, because that's the typical presentation of celiac. But there are a lot of people who have celiac that don't have that.

Starting point is 00:54:32 And the way it might manifest for them is in the brain. So there might be a gluten related to taxia is a form of paralysis that's caused by gluten. So this is how serious that it can be. It typically happens in children, but it can happen in adults too. Gluten and celiac has been linked to all kinds of brain-related disorders like depression,

Starting point is 00:54:57 even schizophrenia, anxiety to neurological problems, like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's and other issues, it can also manifest in the skin. A topic dermatitis or exema is one of the most common what they call extra intestinal, meaning outside of the gut manifestations of celiac disease, but all of this skin condition, psoriasis, acne, acne rosacea can all be related to gluten intolerance. So this is problematic because imagine somebody who is having, you know, has neurological issues and anxiety.

Starting point is 00:55:36 That's the last thing they're going to test. They're not going to think about that. They go to the special doctor for that. You know, we have different doctors for all the different parts of the body. Then they go to the dermatologist. They go to that doctor and that doctor puts them on some medication for those symptoms. Then they go to the dermatologist and they say, I've got the skin rash, the steremititis, doctor gizm, some cream, steroid cream for that.

Starting point is 00:56:01 They may be to go to their primary care doctor for nobody's putting the pieces together and and and realizing that all of these symptoms in this patient are related to one single food protein that if they remove from their diet can resolve all of these problems. So that again like getting back to functional medicine that's the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine. The conventional medicine is often playing whack-a-mall with symptoms, you know, and functional medicine, we're asking the question, what is it the root of this problem? That's a huge, that's a huge paradigm shift. Although I think I have hope because I feel like we're heading in that direction, I just think we're probably another couple decades away from it.

Starting point is 00:56:46 But Chris deals with it on a regular basis. What do you think? How much are you fighting Western medicine, everyone? How many things do you need to rebrand? Yeah. Yeah, I'm a need your help for sure. I think it's both. I think there's both really promising signs that ultimately,

Starting point is 00:57:04 I think functional medicine is just how medicine will be practiced in the future. I don't think that at some point it will even be a separate thing. It's just going to, at some point, we're going to realize this is the way we have to approach chronic disease. Like, if you think about how our medical model evolved, it's easy to understand how we got to where we are. So in the year 1900, the top three causes of death were typhoid, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. So all acute infectious diseases, right? The main reasons other people went to the doctor

Starting point is 00:57:37 at that point were also acute. They were like a gallbladder attack or appendicitis or broken bone. So they would see one doctor, they would get one treatment, you know, it might be the doctor removing the appendix or the gallbladder or setting the bone or might be later after antibiotics were developed, there would be an antibiotic for the infection. And that was it, very straightforward, right? And our medical model frankly excels at that. It excels at that then and it excels at it now.

Starting point is 00:58:10 It's getting better and better at that kind of intervention. The chronic diseases are not at all straightforward in that way. So the average person now has one or more chronic diseases. They require multiple doctors. They are seeing a doctor for every different part, they might be taking multiple medications and they might be taking these treatments for the rest of their life. So we have a medical model that evolved in the context where acute problems were the biggest issue and it's been kind of applied to this to our current

Starting point is 00:58:47 and it's been kind of applied to this to our current challenge, which is chronic disease. By far, it's the biggest challenge and it doesn't work. It's using the raw, it's like using hammer to screw in a screw. It's just not, I mean, it kind of works. You just keep banging that thing. You know, it'll get in there, but it's not the right tool for the job. Yeah, and it needs to evolve because we're solving a lot of those problems, but now the chronic, in the main killers,

Starting point is 00:59:10 I just read a study, you know, heart disease is still number one, cancer's catching up to it, cancer's starting to kill. It's very close, and actually, you know what, is number three, little known fact here. It's a medical mess-ups. Yeah, I thought that was number one. Medical care, not even mess-ups. Yeah, I thought that was number one. Medical care. Not even mess ups. No, errors are one part of a subset of it. But even like, I knew a lot of

Starting point is 00:59:31 there. Medication that's prescribed appropriately. You know, it's crazy. It's not like the wrong medicine, like the doctor made the, you know, dosing error or something. It's the right medicine, but it just happens to have death as a side effects. Yeah, so there is a editorial published in BMJ, British Medical Journal, in 2016, that counted up the deaths from what they call e-atrogenic events. So these are events caused by medical intervention of some type. They could be errors, but they might also just be the right thing done with unfortunate outcome. Wow. And there was another analysis in 2000 that found the same thing. And that analysis actually, and this might be what you were thinking of, they said that

Starting point is 01:00:14 only 5 to 20% of the autrogenic events are actually reported. So that if all were reported, it would actually be the number one cause of death. Yeah. Wow. Our, yeah. Yeah. Or medicine is killing us. So, I mean, one of the best examples of this is Alzheimer's disease. So now, you know, it's growing on the list of top causes to death. It's making a run for number one. And I mean, I don't know about you guys, but that's terrifying.

Starting point is 01:00:41 Like, if you think of like the worst way to die, I think I'd rather get eaten by a shark for sure. I'm a surfer and I'm like, yeah, send me out there. You know, it's time for me to go, Gary the great white, just go to Epic. I would rather, yeah, I would rather go out that way and get Alzheimer's disease. And it's just devastating for not just the person that's around you, but the family members.

Starting point is 01:01:04 I mean, we talked about HPA access dysfunction before, when researchers wanna study that, guess who they study? Caregivers of people with Alzheimer's. Cause it's recognized that they're like the people that are under the greatest stress. Most stressful thing you could do.

Starting point is 01:01:19 Yeah. So if everybody, oh go ahead, Chris, are you? I was just gonna say, 25 years of drug development for Alzheimer's using this conventional medicine approach of like the silver bullet. What's the one thing, the one drug that we can develop that will reverse this syndrome and that because that's the conventional approach is symptom suppression. Like we'll figure out a mechanism will develop a drug to it, and then that's how we'll do it. Complete failure.

Starting point is 01:01:48 After 25 years, not a single drug can prevent the progression of Alzheimer's, much less reverse it. And, you know, there are researchers now, I talk about one in my book, Dr. Dale Bredison, who's been studying Alzheimer's his whole life as a bench scientist. He's an MD, but he's mostly, he was in a lab trying to find the silver bullet. And he eventually figured out that that's not going to work. Why? Because Alzheimer's, like every other chronic disease, is not caused by a deficiency of a drug.

Starting point is 01:02:23 You know, that hasn't been developed yet. Heart disease is not caused by statin deficiency. It's caused by all of these numerous factors we've been talking about in our modern diet and lifestyle that can cause inflammation and all the other mechanisms that lead to Alzheimer's. What he argues is we don't need a silver bullet, we need a silver buckshot, which is a good analogy. We need a multi-pronged approach to addressing chronic disease that looks at the patient's diet, looks at their lifestyle, looks at their behavior, and then starts looking at underlying

Starting point is 01:02:58 mechanisms or pathologies that lead to all of these different syndromes and diseases and symptoms. And that's how chronic disease has to be approached. So I really do believe that eventually that's just how we will approach chronic disease. We'll call it functional medicine. It will just be how we approach chronic disease. And I think we'll get there either the hard way or the easy way. And that's what I know. Knowing our history probably the hard way.

Starting point is 01:03:21 Yeah, I tend to believe that, to be honest. I will get there by just literally beating our heads into the wall one too many times where we finally realized that the approach that we're doing isn't working and that it's bankrupting our government. I mean, that some statistics I've seen suggest will be completely insolvent by the year 2035

Starting point is 01:03:41 because of rising healthcare expenditures. And I'm glad you brought up Alzheimer's because it wasn't that long ago that Alzheimer's was considered a psychiatric disorder. But now we consider a physical disease because we can see that what's actually happening to the brain, but the reason why I'm making this point is because we separate, we because we separate mental disorders from physical

Starting point is 01:04:07 as if they're not connected. The reason why I'm talking about this is we have recently we had a tragedy in Las Vegas. We had someone just a lunatic just kill all these people. I was thinking about it this weekend and how there's a distinct difference between people who do something like that and you're everyday crime, where it's either because of poverty, because they're stealing something or gang related or the black market for drugs.

Starting point is 01:04:33 Here you have someone actually losing their mind. So I went through and I actually did some research and I knew what I'd find, but I wanted to see it for myself. And we all know, and it's widely accepted now, the physical, what's happening to our physical health, and how bad it is, and how bad it's getting. You know, people will call it the obesity epidemic, or the diabetes epidemic,

Starting point is 01:04:56 or just the chronic health epidemic, but people are not talking about the mental health epidemic that is also right along with it. Right along with it, you have as our physical health is declining, so as our mental health to the point now where I forget, but there's an incredible statistic in terms of the amount of people that have prescribed anti-psychotics, antidepressants, ADHD medications,

Starting point is 01:05:21 anti-exhidemetications, all through the roof, and they're all connected. Can we talk about that for a second, the connection between our physical health and our mental health? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's true. The World Health Organization, I think, saw some recent statistics that depression is increasing by 20% year-over-year. Holy shit. What are you, asshole?

Starting point is 01:05:45 And then it's predicted to become one of the biggest health problems from a global perspective, not just in the developed world, but in the developing world as well. And I mean, depression and another mental health issues are really complex topics. So I don't want to be too reductionistic here because it's true. Certainly our circumstances affect our mental health. There's no doubt about that.

Starting point is 01:06:13 I think that's been firmly established. And depression can often be situational and related to those circumstances. We know that, so I'm not going to dwell on that. I want to introduce here something that's less well known, which is that let's just take depression. For many years, the prevailing thinking was, well, initially it was the depression

Starting point is 01:06:35 was caused by serotonin deficiency. That was never really believed by serious scientists. That was a made up thing that made it easier to sell and it presens. Yeah, because I think they discovered that these drugs increase circulating levels of serotonin and so then they came up with theory afterwards. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:06:54 Which is how they would stand in all other drugs. And they, you know, drug companies hire marketing, you know, advertising agencies. Yeah, first before the scientists. They get the marketing first. There we go, get our scientists. And, you know, advertising agencies, first before scientists. Yeah, come up with this first. There we go, get our scientists. And, you know, advertising agencies have come up with all kinds of new names for diseases. They create the disease to create the demand for the drug.

Starting point is 01:07:13 That's how we got bucking on real life. That's how we got viagra. Absolutely. They created a drug to erectile ED. Yeah, it was for heart, it was for blood pressure, and it kind of worked for blood pressure, but oh shit people are getting boners Same thing with the stuff you put on your what is it called? Monoxidil or yeah a lot of these were just marketing teams that came in and SSRIs like we have this drug that does this What can we do with it? Yeah, so yeah, so it was, okay, serotonin deficiency, you've got low serotonin, that's very easy to

Starting point is 01:07:47 communicate, you know, in advertisements, then people were walking around going, yeah, I've got low serotonin, I take this drug, it increases my serotonin. Great. So, only problem is, I was not accurate, and certainly depression can involve changes in brain chemistry, neurotransmitter levels, and things like that. But still, the question is why, right? Is it just because of situational factors or are there some other things that play? Well, there's a more current theory of what causes depression in many cases, and it's called the technical term is the immune cytokine model of depression.

Starting point is 01:08:19 But the, it's pretty easy to understand. It's inflammation that generally starts in the gut and inflammation these inflammatory cytokines, that's the, their chemical messengers get created in the gut. They cross into the bloodstream, they go up to the brain, cross the blood brain barrier, and they suppress the activity of the frontal cortex, and that produces the symptoms which we refer to as depression. So basically, in many cases, depression is a problem that starts in the gut and then affects the brain. And this has been, like, people have been writing about the gut brain access for a hundred years. There were these MD scientists at Duke University in the 1930s

Starting point is 01:09:08 that wrote a paper on the gut brain skin access. They actually talked about how changes in the gut can lead to skin problems, psoriasis, eczema, and also depression and anxiety. And they even talked about probiotics as a way of intervening to address these problems. That was even before the term probiotics had been invented, but they talked about our

Starting point is 01:09:31 fermented milk beverage, which is basically, you know, probiotic as a way for intervening here. So this has been known for a hundred years, but it's only recently that's been kind of rediscovered because I think the whole depression and mental health feel got so hijacked by the pharmaceutical feel that we stopped actually thinking about what are some of the underlying causes that contribute to these problems. ADHD autism spectrum disorder, they're now researchers in the U.S. and abroad who are

Starting point is 01:10:01 looking at, okay, certainly we know that genetic predisposition is a big factor, but the stratospheric rise in autism, the latest figures I think even from the CDC are now one in 45 kids have autism. So it used to be like one in like 4,000. Yeah, exactly. And we're talking about a short period of time. There's no way that genes can explain that.

Starting point is 01:10:24 It's impossible. Our genes cannot explain that. It's impossible. Our genes cannot change that quickly. We've never evolved and changed that fast. So there has to be environmental, environmentally driven. And so there are researchers who are now looking at this. And there's a framework called the three-hit paradigm. I'm not going to remember, I might not remember them exactly,

Starting point is 01:10:43 but it's basically genetic pre-disposition, microbiome disruption, and then environmental insults. So you have poor diet, environmental toxins, all these things, they affect the microbiome. Microbion changes in such a way that it alters neurochemistry that then results in ADHD, OCD, autism spectrum, anxiety, and all these problems that are so epidemic now. And I know there's got to be people right now that are going like, well wait a second, how does that happen to a child who's born with autism, so that now? And I know we have studies that are linking what the mother, the mother is passing down to the child and it most certainly could be coming from some of the habits that she

Starting point is 01:11:30 had for her entire life and that's what's happening. So we don't, yeah, that's a really key point. We see heritable traits as always being genetic, but that's not necessarily true. You inherit your initial imprint for your gut microbiome from your mom. You know, the babies microbiome or gut is relatively sterile. They used to be thought that they had no bacteria in their gut in utero, but now some recent research has suggested that actually bacteria can cross the placenta

Starting point is 01:12:01 and they may be some initial seeding that happens while the baby's still in the womb. But generally speaking, even with this new research, the primary kind of seeding of the microbiome, if you think about it as a garden analogy, the seeds are planted when the baby is coming through the birth canal and gets exposed to the bacteria. To the point where when a baby is born by C-section,

Starting point is 01:12:24 there's actually movement now for doctors to swab the vaginal area of the mother and apply it to the baby to give that exposure. This is not like woo woo stuff. This is actually, you know, there are papers that have been written about this. So what that means is you can, it's not genetic, but you're still inheriting that from your mother. And if the mother, we know that the mothers of autism have been studied and they have a lot of different characteristics. So it's a combination of these genetic and environmental factors.

Starting point is 01:12:58 Wow, that's fascinating. So here's some I'm going to throw you a curveball here. I've been reading about, so I have a family member with Crohn's. And so very close to them. And so I've done lots of my own reading and research on autoimmune disorders and diseases. And there's this fascinating kind of sect and field of study where people with autoimmune diseases

Starting point is 01:13:22 will self administer a Like a parasite and that'll cause their symptoms to many times disappear What's going on there? Do you know what's going on there? Yeah, okay. Yeah, oh, I mean as much as we know It's gone. I'm very familiar with the research and I actually did that myself So I have some personal experience. Oh wow. I don't know if you guys know anything about my history, but I got into this work because I got extremely sick with a digestive illness when I was surfing

Starting point is 01:13:56 in Indonesia in my early 20s. And I got exposed to multiple parasites, just totally wrecked my gut. And at one point I was diagnosed with IBD, Crohn's disease. I don't think it was accurate now in retrospect, but me being the geek that I am, I wasn't gonna do the steroids

Starting point is 01:14:15 in the typical treatment. And I was probably very early days in this, you're referring to home-inthic therapy. Yeah, there we go. So, home-ins are typically nematodes, they're worms, and they've been a part of mammalian evolution for something like 300 million years. So, in other words, all mammals harbor helmets.

Starting point is 01:14:37 They have worms, and typically it's not a problem. I mean, we think of worms, it's gross, first of all, and we don't wanna, especially if you go and look up pictures of some of these organisms. I do. Yeah. Yeah. I turn you off to this idea real quick in most cases, but generally, there's even a theory, and then there's research behind this that suggests that our immune systems evolved in response to these organisms. Like, this is so long ago in evolution

Starting point is 01:15:08 that we're talking about pre-immune system as we even understand the immune system. And there's some thinking that our immune system evolved in response to these organisms such that, in a way, our immune system can't function properly without them. And so what happens is in the industrialized world, we got sanitation.

Starting point is 01:15:34 And sanitation has saved, you know, immeasurable number of lives. Like it prevents so much acute infection. So I'm not saying we should go back to an unsanitized environment, but all things have consequences, and some of them are anticipated and hoped for, and others are unanticipated. And one of the unanticipated consequences of the increase in sanitation and the removal of these organisms from our guts.

Starting point is 01:16:02 And one way I like to explain it to people is if you're standing up and you have your hands out and you're facing someone and they have their hands out and you're leaning into them, if you apply a kind of a similar amount of weight, you're going to balance. You're not going to, neither one's going to fall down, you're balancing each other out. And this is how our immune systems were tuned in the presence of these organisms. So these organisms exerted like a kind of tuning effect where our immune system would push back a little bit

Starting point is 01:16:33 and they're pushing back a little bit. So we're in that state of dynamic balance. What happens if you take away those organisms? This fall over. Yeah, the immune system, that energy that was being directed at that low level pathogen that starts getting directed at something else. What does it get directed at? Our own tissue. Exactly. Or environmental antigens like dust, pollen,

Starting point is 01:17:00 beastings. It can show up as allergies. It's just a hyperactive, hypervigilant immune response because it doesn't have those internal things that we had for so long. And this is called the old friends hypothesis. It's sometimes called the hygiene hypothesis as well because the hygiene and sanitation being related to it, but old friends refers to these worms, which were our old friends in the sense that they tuned and regulated our immune system. And so once you know this theory began to be developed, then the obvious question was,

Starting point is 01:17:38 can we reintroduce these organisms and will that have the same impact? And lots of research and clinical experience suggests that they can and people will talk. There's clinical experience. So what happened with you? So I've done it twice. There's two ways that it's typically done. One is with trichurus, sweet, which is pig, whipworm. So it's a whipworm, and it's one that typically colonizes

Starting point is 01:18:04 pigs. And the reason that they used, they first selected this is that it can't colonize humans long term, which means that, you know, when you swallow the whipworm, it will stay in you for about a week and it will have its immune-regulating effects, but then you poop it out and it's gone. It can never, you know long-term. The thinking was that was safer to do that. The problem was it doesn't have the same impact because it's not really a human adapted organism. Then they also start using human hookworm, necotor Americanus. This can colonize the human host and it will stay in human. But, you know, hookworm can be problematic, but only with uncontrolled exposure.

Starting point is 01:18:52 So like, let's say some, you know, a person living in a rural village in Africa is walking barefoot in through latrine kind of area, and they're continually getting more and more hookworms, and they can start developing anemia and other problems with parasites. But if you have only a small population of hookworms, maybe 25 hookworms, then you can get the immune-regulating benefits. They don't multiply and just grow inside of you. You just have that same 25. And they stay with you? Like they don't. They stay with you in theory. If you take antibiotics or certainly anti-parasidics,

Starting point is 01:19:29 like mebendazole, you can get rid of them. So I did the trichurus swiss first. Didn't really have much impact on me one way or another. And then a little while later I did the hookworm. I didn't really have much impact on me either. Other than being kind of weirded out by the wholeworm. It didn't really have much impact on me either other than being kind of weirded out by the whole thing. And having to go to Tijuana to do it because it's not legal. And there are some legitimate ways to do it in Tijuana. So you probably know there's like medical

Starting point is 01:20:01 tourism that happens there. They have good doctors and down there. I don't recommend this to people without being under the supervision of someone who really knows what they're doing. But in my case, it didn't work simply because I don't think I ever had Crohn's disease. And I had inflammation in the terminal Ili, there was probably caused by the parasite infections that I had. And it was misdiagnosed as Crohn's disease. However, I've had lots of patients, not lots. I mean, this is a pretty out there therapy, but I can think of over 10 over the years that have done it.

Starting point is 01:20:38 And in some cases, it's been absolutely miraculous. We're talking about people who were facing removal of their colon because their inflammatory bowel disease was so bad who basically within three month period became almost symptom free without making any other changes. Wow. What's the other ones? What's the other ones, how that everyone's leaving the country to go do the stem cell stuff? There's, there's another procedure right now, people are that you can't do in the States that's... Are you trying to play?

Starting point is 01:21:09 You think in a fee-go-transplant? I don't think it's fee-go-stuff. There's another one that we're not, what we don't do here. You know who did it was a Dan Bilzerian, he left, he goes to, he fought. I don't know. I think that's legal here in the States, isn't it?

Starting point is 01:21:21 Yeah, there is stem cell here in the States. It's not really that regulated at this point and there's a lot of controversy about what you can and should use it for. But it is legal. It's about 10 grand a pop. Maybe that's what it is. What do you know about it? I don't have a lot of expertise in stem cell treatment, but I know there are some indications

Starting point is 01:21:46 that it actually has been studied for in peer-reviewed journals published, particularly related to musculoskeletal complaints, tissue regeneration and repair, etc. But it's being used in a much broader way, in some clinics, for just health optimization and life extension. That's where I hear people. Yeah, looking younger. I know a couple of people who have done it and actually do look five or 10 years younger than they did before.

Starting point is 01:22:19 But I think there's some unanswered questions still about that. So your experience with the parasites after you went surfing, is that what got you to do what you're doing now, or were you already? Yeah, no, I was not really contemplating a career in healthcare. I was on a different track, but I got so sick. And really, when I came back, that was my first experience

Starting point is 01:22:44 with the conventional healthcare system. I was a pretty healthy kid and teenager athlete, you know, you know, I'm maybe gone to the doctor a handful of times and just for the usual stuff. And then I came after that and I got sick. I, you know, went to the doctor and doctor prescribed some antibiotics and said, oh, it's probably just parasites. So get better.

Starting point is 01:23:04 And then, you know, it took about 10 years for me to fully recover my health. And that was, it was a brutal journey. And along the way, I'd learned just how poorly equipped the conventional medical system is for dealing with the kind of problems that I had that didn't fit into like a nice clean straightforward box and weren't amenable to just some drugs or medication. And so I, as I started to get better, people around me started asking, what are you doing? Because they'd seen how sick I was. I mean, I was taken to the curb. I was completely down and out, unable to work. You know, I was in my mid-twenties. I had no idea if I was even able and out, unable to work. You know, I was in my mid-20s.

Starting point is 01:23:45 I had no idea if I was even able to support myself and live a normal life. And so it was pretty scary. And then people around me, as I started to get better, were like, wow, how did this work? What did you do? And I started to share with them. And then just over time realized that there was a lot that I had learned in that process that could be helpful to other people and

Starting point is 01:24:09 Decided go back to school and formalize that and then you know here. I am well. That's excellent. Yeah. I'm glad that happened for you Well, I'm sad that I have You're glad you got I was sick for a decade, but it's helped me out You helped us with your sickness gifts coming in many, many different ways. Of course. And that's the way you got to look at it. So that's definitely the way I look at it.

Starting point is 01:24:31 I mean, I wouldn't be here if I, you know, in this chair, if I weren't the case. What would you say is the single greatest, I guess, threat to our health in modern times right now? What would you say is the one thing that we could, if someone were to look at just one thing, what would you say that would be? Well, I would say chronic disease, but I think you're asking as a cause, right?

Starting point is 01:24:52 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, diet is the kind of, it's still up there at the top, but there's more awareness about that. I would say actually sleep deprivation is probably, when I look at the research on just about every condition, and let's just talk about obesity. So most people think of obesity, they think of diet and

Starting point is 01:25:15 exercise, right, as being the big triggers. And certainly diet, I think still is the primary trigger, but exercise actually, although it's important, it's not sleep is probably number two, ahead of exercise in terms of the obesity epidemic. And this is, I think, not really even that controversial now in the scientific world at least. There are studies have shown that, I think, eight nights of sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in calorie intake of over 500 calories a day Which is equivalent to fit gaining 52 pounds in a year. Wow That's crazy. Yeah, and you know that's significant sleep deprivation that they're doing in an experimental setting So it wouldn't be likely that someone would have that every night in their life

Starting point is 01:26:03 But if you take just even a lower level of that, where someone is like, we now know that 35% of Americans sleep less than six hours a night. And that's up from just 2% in 1960. So that's a 15-fold increase in the number of people that are getting less than six hours a night asleep in just the past, you know, 60, 50, 60 years. 15 years ago, I would have laughed if someone talked about sleep and walking. Sleep to burn.

Starting point is 01:26:29 Sleep, and then the two things I talk to more than anything else now, is addressing sleep and then just moving. Because I feel like those two are probably the simplest things that people can address and look at in their life, and start to make improvements. Yes, it totally had to change your tune with that too. I bet. Yeah, in your profession.

Starting point is 01:26:47 Right, yeah. If you look at, this is where the ancestral perspective comes in, so it's so helpful. We, it's not that we need to return to the lifestyle of our ancestors, but we can use differences in our modern lifestyle with our historical lifestyle to generate hypotheses about what might be screwing us up. So we look at our ancestors and say, oh, they and contemporary hunter-gatherers.

Starting point is 01:27:15 Most of them slept at least seven, eight hours a night. Like in the Cimane people in Bolivia who have been recently studied, we can talk more about that. It's really interesting. There's not even a word for insomnia in their language. The researchers were trying to ask them about insomnia. There was no word because they sleep and they sleep restfully. And they sleep for 78 hours. And so then we can start asking, like, okay, well, that's not happening now and does that make a big difference and then we can with movement We look at our ancestors and we say and contemporary outer gathers and we say, okay They walked an average of 10 12,000 steps a day. They didn't sit for long periods and

Starting point is 01:28:02 Yeah, so those those lower- level activities were punctuated by more intense activity, chasing prey or lifting something up when they're building something. SPRATICALLY. Exactly. So now we're in a situation where you could meet the government recommended guidelines for exercise. You can be completely sedentary, but go to the gym for three to five days a week and exercise for 30 minutes a day. You're meeting the government guidelines for exercise, you can be completely sedentary, but go to the gym for three to five days a week and exercise for 30 minutes a day You're meeting the government guidelines for exercise You're still at a much higher risk of death and disease Then if you are gardening

Starting point is 01:28:36 Walking or bicycling to work, you know taking the stairs instead of the escalator and just doing what is called non-exercise physical activity. Neat. Yeah, so we make the case that when you look at the problems with modern lifestyle and what forms of exercise directly combat some of these modern problems, one of the best forms of exercise is resistance training. And the reason why I say that is because resistance training directly improves how your body responds to cortisol, insulin, and it also has an adaptive effect in the body where it causes you to, your body wants to burn more calories, which isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but in the context of modern lifestyle,

Starting point is 01:29:20 it is because you want to be able to have a metabolism that burns more calories with modern lifestyle, which usually results in more calorie intake. Most people are in a cleric surplus, so it's not a bad thing to do that. The other benefit of resistance training is just maintaining bone health as we age. You probably heard the phrase break, break your hip, die of pneumonia. Like fractures are a big deal in elderly population because they result in immobility and that immobility can cause pneumonia and other things that can kill you. So it's no joke to maintain healthy bones

Starting point is 01:29:57 as you get old and resistance training is one of the best ways to do that. Absolutely. Chris, where did, where did the motivation for all this come? I know we talked about what happened in your 20s, but go all the way back to like high school. What kind of kid were you like in high school? Were you a nerd? Were you always reading and studying? I mean, I was, I did well in school, but I was, you know, identified as an athlete, you know, I played basketball in high school. I was a surfer all my life, but I played basketball

Starting point is 01:30:22 in high school. And then what's going to play in college? UC Davis or Santa Clara, actually, not too far from here, where I got recruited. And then at the last minute, I decided to... I wouldn't have chosen either of those schools where it not for basketball. And I didn't really want to go to either of those schools. So at the last minute, I decided to go to UC Berkeley, which I did, I was interested in. And I was gonna try to walk on there,

Starting point is 01:30:52 but unfortunately Jason Kidd, I was just gonna say, I was just kidding. You were out of your mind. You were so, I think we are on the same generation. All right, yeah, I was a guard. I was a guard. So, Jay Kidd was playing my position. I was like, generation. Yeah, I was a guard. I was a guard. So, J.K.K.D. was playing my position.

Starting point is 01:31:06 I was like, oh, what a loss of interest for trying. Yeah, maybe you'll get hurt. I guess I'll give up basketball now. And no, I did play Inter-Mier also, which is pretty competitive at Berkeley, but I just kind of left that behind. So I've always been driven by athletics and performance. Did you watch him play a lot?

Starting point is 01:31:24 Oh, yeah. I'm a die-hard, J.S.K. fan. I played basketball through high school. been driven by athletics and performance. Did you watch him play a lot? Oh, yeah. I'm a die-striker fan. I played basketball through high school. I actually played against him. There's a lead called slamming jam. Yeah, yeah. Remember that?

Starting point is 01:31:35 So I was on the Southern California All Stars, and he was on the Northern California All Stars. And my big claim to fame was that he only scored 40 on me. Because in high school, you scored like 80. And my big claim to fame was that he only scored 40 on me Because in high school you scored like 80 He was like 64 point guard who could like jump through the roof. I mean that in high school that that was just bizarre You know super And then I got really into martial arts when I was in high school. I actually started with Muay Thai really into martial arts when I was in high school, I actually started with Muay Thai,

Starting point is 01:32:05 study with Richard Bastillo and Dan Inosanto, who is Bruce Lee's student at IMB Academy. So I did that while I was in high school and then got into Bhagwan and some of the Chinese internal arts as I got older, mellowed out a little bit. You definitely are, okay, so now I'm gonna ask this, if you for sure are an athlete, where do you see that athlete mentality

Starting point is 01:32:30 of yours transfer over into the work that you do now? Yeah, I mean, are you competitive with what you do and what you put out there? I mean, I'm super disciplined. I mean, my wife jokes a lot with me. Like, I'm really like when I, I'm like a dog with a bone. You know, when I set my mind to something,

Starting point is 01:32:50 it's hard to get me off that track. And I'm very disciplined and segmented with my time. I schedule everything out. I have no trouble sticking to a routine. And I'm definitely performance oriented. So I've studied a lot of, you know, productivity, enhancement, time management, like I'm always trying to up my game, basically, and perform at the highest level that I can. I don't feel competitive in the sense of like, oh, this

Starting point is 01:33:21 guy's got two million, you know, blog visits, and I want to get three million. I don't really approach it in that way. So I think it's more just disciplined. Do you think that stems from a coach, a father figure? I mean, did somebody implement that in you early on? I mean, my dad was a really high achiever and he was off in my coach. He coached a lot of our kid, before we got to a higher level basketball teams and stuff like that and I always really appreciated

Starting point is 01:33:54 his work ethic and the integrity with which he approached things. But yeah, I think, I mean, I think of my parents had a lot to do with it. They really set high expectations for us and we always had those for ourselves. I have two brothers and they've been similar in there. Can you see now as an adult

Starting point is 01:34:18 where some of those things have been a huge asset for you and then where they've also potentially hindered you as an adult? Absolutely, in both cases. I mean, as I said, I think I've been able to accomplish a lot because of my focus on performance and in all of the areas of my professional life where that's important. But in some ways, I mean, just going back a little bit into my early 20s and what happened there, I was working in film and television actually in business and just working, you know, a lot. A lot of hours I was driven and my life basically fell apart.

Starting point is 01:35:06 Like I was young, I was in my early 20s, I had already bought a house, you know, I was on the fast track. But I was just pushing myself relentlessly. And I got to the point where things just kind of fell apart. And you know, looking back, it was a total blessing. But at the time time it didn't really feel like a blessing and but I knew intuitively that the path that I was on was not the best path and that it was going to end in destruction. Where did you make that connection? Was it the

Starting point is 01:35:39 the major thing? So no so a bunch of things happened to me all at once, which were kind of like a, that I took as a sign. So, I had bought a video camera, where I was gonna start to make my own movies. That was kind of one of my, my things. And, and so that camera got stolen. My computer with that had the, all the videos I had made crash. And then my hard drive that I had back up crash and lost all of that.

Starting point is 01:36:08 It's a sign. My relationship, I had a girlfriend at the time, we broke up and kind of disintegrated. I quit my job. Like everything just kind of fell apart and I was like, wow, I have nothing. I was like no attachments and I'm just gonna sell everything I own and go travel around the world for a year. So I did that. I got rid of everything.

Starting point is 01:36:31 I ran it out my house and then just took off. And I went to Thailand first and I did a 30 day meditation retreat in the jungle above Chiang Mai, which was like my way of like, what's going on? What's going on? It's a strange way that I can like just sit there and stare at the ground for like 30 days and try to figure this out. And so I was like,

Starting point is 01:36:56 Which had to have been a hard transition from a guy who's like, like you said, like a dog and a bone. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I bet. No question. Like, there's nothing that even comes remotely close to that. Wow. So that first 30-day retreat.

Starting point is 01:37:08 And then I stayed in Thailand for another few months and was continuing to study meditation and time massage, which was also a total departure of what I'd been doing before. And then I went to Indonesia and I was there for three months and that's when I got sick the first time but I continued to Indonesia and I was there for three months and that's when I got sick the first time but I continued to travel because I got better at first from the I took some antibiotics that I had in my medical kit. And then from there I went to the Maldives which are these islands off the coast of India. I went to South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, reunion island,

Starting point is 01:37:42 and then back to Australia and then back home. And by the time I got back, I was a different person. I bet. You know, it was just everything that I had planned for my life before, and I think my parents had planned for me was just completely obliterated. And that began this 10 year journey that I talked about before, which was not just about recovering my health. It was also about figuring out what I was going to do with my life.

Starting point is 01:38:05 And how I was going to apply my internal resources in a way that served me better and served other people and kind of like get off of this treadmill of this life that I feel like I was expected to live in some way or I expected it myself. And looking back on that, it almost seems like the only way that I could have gotten off of that because of how much I said I'm like a dog with a bone was to be completely kind of destroyed, you know, to where I built. Yeah, and then re-bought. That sounds like an awesome movie.

Starting point is 01:38:45 That's a better than point break. Yeah. As a wise, well-traveled man now, what do you seek? I always say that your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. What do you still have to like catch yourself? Like you catch yourself going back to old habits or things kind of resurfacing where you have to be,

Starting point is 01:39:01 ah, I know that behavior, I know that pattern. Do you have to be, ah, I know that behavior, I know that pattern, you have those. Yeah. For me, it's definitely a tendency to lose sight or just get to intense, you know, and work too much. I'm pretty good about maintaining work life balance, but I've come to realize that I'm like a sprinter more than a marathon runner. So I can produce like really a lot in a short period of time, but then I need a lot of time to just rest and integrate and recuperate. And my tendency over the past several years has been to sort of measure my own time spent against other people. You know, like, hey, there's a 40-hour work week, right? That's just what everybody does.

Starting point is 01:39:55 So I should therefore be working, you know, 30 to 40 hours or 50 or 60 hours a week. But what I've come to recognize is that that's not my rhythm. And that's not the way that that I function best. And if I do that, I suffer. You know, my health. My health is now like it's like my I'm the canary in the in the coal mine, you know, it's like is I start I can recognize them off track by physical symptoms starting to talk about that's a little bit what do you what do you start to notice when you because I you know I could so relate to what you're saying right now and it's taken me years and 36 years old finally piecing this together now I have an incredible and a lot of that's having an incredible partner I've been with for over six years

Starting point is 01:40:37 and she knows to just kind of let me do me and I know that I'm a little out of balance and out of whack and going full speed for maybe a week or two. But then she also knows like, okay, I'm going to set book a trip for us to get away. Fones go off, computer gets shut down, we're by water up in the tree, somewhere like that and helps me get reconnected and it's become extremely healthy for myself, for my relationship with her and others. What are some of the strategies or things that you do? Yeah, I definitely do that.

Starting point is 01:41:06 I do regular digital detoxes. You wanna call them that, like you said. Surfing is a big thing for me. So, like, go to Nicaragua, just post up on the beach somewhere and turn everything off and just surf all day. At my daughter's six now and she's getting into surfing. So, last time when we were down in Nicaragua, she and my wife were surfing, you know,

Starting point is 01:41:31 taking some lessons, I was getting them out there, which was amazing. I have, I try to do that throughout the week too. Sundays are like a Sabbath. I don't check, you know, I turn off phones and computers. Don't do that at all. I'm pretty disciplined about that in general, even during the evenings. I still meditate regularly.

Starting point is 01:41:52 I've been doing that now for 25 years and it feels like an absolute lifeline to me. I think I would completely self-destruct if I didn't do that. And, you know, 45 minutes is my target. And most days I get there, but some, you know, if I'm traveling or something, it's hard to do. I'll just do what I can. You know, it could be five minutes or 25 minutes.

Starting point is 01:42:17 But that's been a bedrock for me. And my wife also is really a good powerful advocate for me. And that way she can recognize the early signs often before I do. Especially if I've got my head down and really focused on something. Spending time with my daughter is huge for me. I've made that a priority and we have every Friday afternoon. I take the afternoon off and we have what I call adventures. We call it ventures.

Starting point is 01:42:51 Oh, that's adorable. She's six and so a couple of weekends ago we went out to Stinson Beach and just hung out and went surfing. Last weekend we went to a pottery studio and did some paint in some pottery and she had fun with that and we'll go sometimes to parks. We just do, we went to the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco, which is a great place for kids. And I just spending time with her is if I apply the rocking chair test,

Starting point is 01:43:27 you guys know what this is. No. So, when I, if I ever have any question about what, whether to commit to something or what it's relative level of importance is, I do the rocking chair test where I imagine that I'm 100 years old sitting in my rocking chair, looking back on my life. And I think how will I look back on this question at that time? And if I think, for example, will I regret,

Starting point is 01:43:55 what will I regret more, not taking on this new work project or spending the time with your daughter on this weekend or so? Friday, giving up my Friday adventures with Sylvie. There's never been anything yet that has trumped that. Trumped that and led me to think that I would look back from my rocking chair and not say that, gee, I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time with my daughter. You know, it was me the giving tree.

Starting point is 01:44:21 That was me, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so, and being with her, it's like, you know, just being fully present, turning off my phone, not responding anything, just being totally present with her is the best thing that I can do for her. But it's also, you know, just for me. Yeah, the irony too of all of this is doing these things and understanding these things, you actually perform better also. And I like to say that because we do have a lot of entrepreneurs

Starting point is 01:44:49 that listen to our show and a lot of young kids. You just want to grind it out and go crazy. And you can do that, but also recognize that balance, your body imbalance will perform, your body and mind imbalance will perform far better than when they're out. So understanding that and tweaking those things, you're going to do better anyway. It's like trading dime supporters.

Starting point is 01:45:08 I feel so passionate about that. I'm glad you brought that up because during the last three years, I've tripled the size of my clinic, more than triple the size of my staff. I'm running a training program for clinicians. We've trained hundreds of clinicians. I have blog podcasts, I've written two books. No, I'm not slowing down. Like things are growing and building. And yet, you probably have more rest days. I work fewer hours. That's awesome. I work fewer hours over that period of time. So I really challenged that idea. Like I read an article in the New York Times

Starting point is 01:45:46 the other couple of weeks ago, maybe you guys saw it. I just wanted to throw something against the wall and I wrote an email to my, to my people about this because it just drove me nuts. It was about work culture in Silicon Valley and about how you're looked at as like a loser if you don't work, you know, 70 to 80 hour work weeks. So the point where Soilent is making its way,

Starting point is 01:46:08 but we're like shit like that. And there was a quote from an entrepreneur, I won't say his name, but you know, some people know him, where he said something like, you know, yeah, I don't have any time for my kids. I don't hardly ever see them, but that's just the cost of being successful. And I just absolutely think, you know,

Starting point is 01:46:33 that makes me so angry, gets hard for me to even express it. And what is this guy doing? He's making software that helps people visualize furniture in their home So that's the important I wanted to send him the rocking chair test You know, so imagine yourself in your rocking chair and you're gonna look back and be like wow that That software that help people visualize that coffee table on their living room

Starting point is 01:47:03 That was a game changer. I just didn't, my kids hate me. I don't know them at all, but I'm so glad I did that. I also think it's just the false paradigm. It is when people approach us to what's made of gold. Well, it's like when people approach us with fitness, you know, and they say, you know, I know, you know, you guys talk about being healthy all the time, but I just want to look really good.

Starting point is 01:47:22 I just want to look aesthetic. And it's almost as if health and aesthetics are separate when in fact, they're both one and the same, and this is one of those things where if you're in balance with yourself, and that means sometimes you get a busher ass too, because you can also be out of balance in the other direction, but being in balance

Starting point is 01:47:38 both body and mind, you're gonna perform better and be able to produce more. Well Chris will appreciate what motivated us to do what we're doing here, which was what we saw. There is a huge problem within the fitness community with programming and all the information that we're giving out there, the beast mode, the no days off and that mentality of like kill it, you know, you don't leave until you feel like you're going to die in a workout. And that could not be further from the truth of what's really gonna give you long-term results. Sure, that type of that type of mentality might get you a faster along in two weeks time, but when you look at it like a year or two years, ten years of your life, if you want overall health long-term longevity, that's not the approach at all. And so when we first came out with our programs,

Starting point is 01:48:25 people just thought, oh, this is too simple, it's too basic, I don't understand. There's only three days you're saying I have to be in the gym, like, yeah, no shit, you ain't got to be in there seven days a week. It's crazy where the, it's very similar, the message that, and two and a half years later now, we're getting emails from people,

Starting point is 01:48:40 like, oh my God, my body's responding like crazy. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I don't know, it's, I think there's some deep cultural roots with the whole periodanical work ethic thing and they're just hard on. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with working, it's the whole suffering. Right.

Starting point is 01:48:57 They can equate to work. Well, it's also not understanding the things that you're talking about here, like periodicity. And, and, you know, me also understanding different work styles. Like, for me, I've figured out that I can accomplish a lot in a short period of time, you know, relative to maybe some other people, not better or worse, just the different, you know, tortoise versus the hair type of thing. But in order to maintain that level of productivity, I need more rest and integration. I'm the same way. I used to think I went through periods of hypomania, but I mean, really,

Starting point is 01:49:30 it's just, I get super passionate about something. Very passionate, very inspired, and I'll put out incredible amounts of content, a very short period of time, and ideas, and whatever. And then it's like, I need time now to recharge and let that. So Chris, moving forward, what's... You have a book that's about to come out. Let's talk about that for a second. What's your book going to be about? So the book is called Unconventional Medicine. And the premise of the book is chronic disease

Starting point is 01:49:59 is the biggest challenge we face. Excuse me, but our current system is hopeless at addressing it. As we've talked about before, it evolved during a time where acute problems were the biggest issue and now we're trying to apply those same solutions to chronic disease, which just isn't working. We have a system that's based on band aids, basically. If you use an analogy, you have a rock in your shoe and it's causing your foot to hurt, you go into the conventional system, you're gonna get some ibuprofen

Starting point is 01:50:32 and a diagnosis of such a great analogy. Of foot pain. Actually, you'll have to have more scientific term for it. It'll sound more official than just foot pain. But of course, it makes a lot more sense to just take your shoe off and dump out the rock, right? And that's, you know, I propose a solution in the book that is focused around this approach of functional medicine getting to the root cause of the problem is one component, has three components. The second one, though, is the ancestral diet and lifestyle. We have to recognize that environment is the primary driver of chronic disease.

Starting point is 01:51:15 This is not just me making this up. There are studies that show that 85% of disease risk comes down to environmental and behavioral factors. So, genes, yes, they play some role, but it's really people making the wrong choices about their diet and lifestyle on a daily basis that's driving this. And then the third thing is what I call a collaborative practice model. So we need doctors. We need doctors who are specialists who can do a colonoscopy, who can do these specialized

Starting point is 01:51:44 procedures, who can do doctorate type of stuff. Absolutely, we need that. But what we need arguably even more now is an army of what I call allied providers. So these are health coaches, nutritionists, trainers, all kinds of people who can work intensively with folks on behavior and lifestyle changes. Because, you know, to use, we talked about this before,

Starting point is 01:52:07 the average appointment time is 10 minutes with a primary care doctor. There's no way, if someone goes into the doctor and they've got multiple chronic problems going on, they're presenting with new symptoms, there's no way the doctor is even going to be able to figure that out, much less to spend time with that person giving them the support

Starting point is 01:52:25 they need to make meaningful changes that are going to last for a whole lifetime. They might give them like as they're going out the door, you know, oh, remember, you need a healthy diet. Patients like on their way out. And you know, first of all, the doctor often doesn't even know what that is because they've taken one nutrition class in college or in medical school, if that. And second of all, if the patient just hears it as they're going out the door to go up to the front counter, they're not going to take that seriously.

Starting point is 01:52:55 If 10 of the 10 minutes was spent talking about medication and then the last 10 seconds are spent on diet and lifestyle change, they're not going to make a difference. Plus it's behavioral change. I mean, I work with clients for, and sometimes it takes a year before. Absolutely. Things start to happen. The behavior change is hard. Okay, I mean, if it was easy, we wouldn't have the problems that we have.

Starting point is 01:53:14 And yet, I wasn't trained in behavior change as a practitioner. I don't know. No doctors are trained in it. And but yet, there's tons evidence that that supports all of these principles of behavior change to make it successful. It's out there. We know how to apply it, but we just need to train people who can do that with folks like yourself and a whole bunch of other people who can be in that capacity and work intensively with people to make these changes. Because that's going gonna have a far bigger impact

Starting point is 01:53:46 in terms of preventing and reversing chronic disease than just more research to find new drugs. That's awesome, it's funny because I trained a lot of doctors and I would tell them this, like, oh, we gotta look at new trends and they say, yeah, of course, but I have patients who wouldn't even take the fucking pills. They don't want to answer right now.

Starting point is 01:54:02 They would take the pills I give them, like they'll forget to take the medications and you want me to tell them to fix their diet. Yeah, it's a systemic problem. It's not the doctor's fault. And more, I mean, it's, it's their victims of the system more than anybody else. Well, they're taught that way.

Starting point is 01:54:16 They're educated that way, right? They're taught that way. They're, if they're practicing within an HMO type of framework, they're often rewarded for seeing more patients and spending less time with patients. You know, that's efficiency and medical speak. And many doctors know this and they want to do something about it, but they don't know how within the current framework and system.

Starting point is 01:54:38 So there are actually some really interesting things happen. This goes back to your question about, you know, are you seeing positive changes or are we going in the wrong direction? There's a group called Iora Health in the Rocky Mountain area, it's a primary care group. And they basically approached some HMO, some insurance companies and said, give us your patients with diabetes or pre-dibedies. We have this new approach that's really effective. And we're going to, you know, reverse, we'll take your type 2

Starting point is 01:55:10 diabetics back to pre-dibedies or we'll take your pre-diabetic back to normal blood sugar. And if we achieve our goals, you pay us so much. If we don't achieve our goals, you don't pay us at all. Or you pay us less. This is called capitated payments. It's actually aligning incentives with performance, which of course like happens in gyms and offices

Starting point is 01:55:32 everywhere else other than healthcare, right? Where you're rewarded for not performing, that's right. That's a different topic. But and then if they exceed their goals, they get more money. So what these, what they do, their approach, which is really amazing and smart. They just hire a huge number of health coaches, all from the communities in which the people that they're serving. They don't hire them based on expertise and nutrition. This is a really interesting part.

Starting point is 01:56:00 They hire them based on their ability to form a connection. Communication. Right. If you had asked me, I would have said, as coaches, as people who manage trainers, you'll know. That's the most important thing. Yeah, number one. So they don't care anything about their background

Starting point is 01:56:12 and nutrition. They're like, we can teach them not to do anything. We can teach them not in like two weekends, you know? So what they do is they have like a speed dating hiring process where they sit them down and they have conversation with them and they have like undercover observers in the room apparently they're like watching how they interact with each other and You know in a way so they make sure they're hiring people who can relate because that's what it comes down to the coaching relationship is about trust and

Starting point is 01:56:42 The ability to to empathize and connect with your client. And so then they train them, give them the nutritional information they need, and then these people work really intensively with the clients. They go to their house, they do pantry clean outs, they go shopping with them. They basically hold their hand through every step of the process. They still see the doctor occasionally, they get the blood tests and if they need medication, they get medication. But this has dramatic impact.

Starting point is 01:57:09 They're taking people, as I said, back from type two diabetes, not only back to pre-diabetes, but sometimes all the way back. And they're just killing it. And I think those kinds of models are gonna be what we need more of. How cost-efficient is it?

Starting point is 01:57:23 I mean, do you get it? Very efficient. Yeah. The cost of treating a patient with type 2 diabetes is $14,000 a year. So imagine, and now, per patient. So now people are getting diagnosed earlier and earlier. Kids now are getting diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Starting point is 01:57:38 So imagine someone who's diagnosed at even 30. And because of our modern technology, we can keep people alive for a really long time, even if they're living a low quality of life. So imagine that person spends 50, lives another 50 years until age 80. They're spending, I mean, that's well over half million dollars, right, to treat this one single patient.

Starting point is 01:58:01 Right, man. So you wanna talk about cost effectiveness. You could spend $5,000 on coaching and functional medicine testing and still have some left over. And if you prevent diabetes in that patient from progressing, you've just saved the healthcare system. $9 million.

Starting point is 01:58:19 $9 million for that one patient. Wow. That's cool. That's what I talk about in the book, because one of the common criticisms is like, oh, this is just functional medicine is expensive. The diet and lifestyle, it's all expensive. And that's only because everything is subsidized

Starting point is 01:58:38 in the insurance care. If you go to the doctor and they give you, this is what the conversation really should look like. You'd be like, okay, you've got high cholesterol, so you've got two options. I can give you, you know, I can make diet and lifestyle recommendations, but you're on your own when it comes to implementing that. We have no support for you. You're going to pay all those costs out of pocket and good luck. Or I can give you this drug. And good news is that's totally subsidized by the healthcare. You'll pay your $10 or co-pay,

Starting point is 01:59:08 and your numbers will come down. And the idea in that conversation is that those changes are equivalent. You know, they might lead to the same number on the paper in terms of the cholesterol level, but they're not equivalent. Not at all. And they're not equal.

Starting point is 01:59:24 If the patient was paying true cost of the cholesterol level, but they're not equivalent. Not at all. And they're not equal. If the patient was paying true cost of the drug, and those costs were actually made clear, it would be so much cheaper to do the diet and lifestyle intervention, hire a coach to help them, and even do some additional testing up front to see what other mechanisms might be contributing to the high cholesterol and address those, and then save decades of subsidizing that person's medication.

Starting point is 01:59:50 It's just so ridiculous to me that we look at our healthcare system and we're like, oh, we gotta fix our healthcare system. It's the insurance programs or it's we need a single pair. Because it's so expensive and it's like nobody's talking about the elephant in the room, which is we're getting sicker and this shit's gonna keep getting more expensive. And you can package it however you want,

Starting point is 02:00:08 some maybe a little better than others, but at some point, it's gonna fucking bankrupt us. We have to have our health. That's exactly the point I make in the book. I mean, I could just, you tick the words right out of my mouth. It's like the debate on ACA versus ACHA that we just went through. Yeah, it matters.

Starting point is 02:00:24 It's important, it affects people in real ways. So I'm not saying that that's not important, but I am saying that the problems that we have go much deeper than that. And there is no scenario that anyone can come, this is why it's so hard. There's no scenario in which we can use insurance to pay for the growing burden of chronic disease.

Starting point is 02:00:46 As chronic disease increases, it will bankrupt us. I don't care if you have the Obamacare plan or the Trump plan or any other plan. There's no scenario in which we can be spending as much as we're spending, you know, to cover each or we're spending $3.2 trillion a year. That comes down to 10,000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in the US. And there's no scenario in which we will be able to do that as the rates of chronic disease continue to increase.

Starting point is 02:01:16 So just think about diabetes again, $14,000 a year. Just think of the impact of the average age of diagnosis going from 40 to 30. At 10 years. That's it. That's it. Game over. Right.

Starting point is 02:01:29 For the whole healthcare system, if you do the math on that, you will quickly see how that takes the 3 trillion to 10 trillion more. And that's it. Bankrupt. Game over. So, it's really clear, if you start thinking about this in a systematic way, it's absolutely clear that the problem is chronic disease. We have to figure out how to prevent

Starting point is 02:01:48 and reverse chronic disease. Otherwise, our whole society is gonna fall apart. It's not even just about healthcare. It's about the effects of how to survive. Yeah, our society survive. I mean, how about having a government that functions or isn't completely bankrupt? Oh my God.

Starting point is 02:02:03 So this is the motivation for this book for me. Like I think in the whole healthcare debate, it was so frustrating not to see that mentioned, even once in popular media. It's not in the conversation, not at all. Well, I appreciate you writing this book. I know people can pre-order it right now. Yeah, I'm not sure when this is happening,

Starting point is 02:02:23 but October 16th is pre-order. It's unconventionalmedicinbook.com. And then it comes out on November 7th, and that will be on Amazon. Beautiful. We'll definitely have a link in the show notes and everything to drive everyone over there for sure. We, I really appreciate you coming on our show, Chris.

Starting point is 02:02:41 Your information online is a lot of what you wrote, a lot of stuff that I found that you wrote in your videos, or the things that kind of pointed me in the direction that I am today. So I want to thank you again for coming down. It's great to finally meet you. I'm pleasure, guys. Thanks very much. I talk with you and keep up with great work. I really believe that people like, you know, the work that you're doing, as I said, is arguably the most important work we need to do because you're on the front lines working with people in an intensive way to get their diet and lifestyle in order. And that's going to have a bigger impact on anything else. Excellent. Thank you very much. Check it out. Go to YouTube, subscribe to mind

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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 620: Chris Kresser on the Chronic Disease Equation, the Potato Hack for Fat Loss, the Disease Worse than Being Eaten by a Shark & MORE

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