Realfoodology - How To Be Healthier, Smarter with Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

103: Shawn Stevenson, podcast host of The Model Health Show and author of two best selling books, Eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter, joins me to talk about how to be healthier, smarter. We talk calories, inflammation of the brain, epigenetics, natural flavors, ultra processed foods and so much more.  Check Out Shawn: Shawn Stevenson on Instagram The Model Health Show  Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to A Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success https://themodelhealthshow.com Sponsored By: Cured Nutrition www.curednutrition.com/realfoodology REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% off Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% OFF Magic Mind http://www.magicmind.co Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% OFF Check Out Courtney: Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com Air Dr Air Purifier  AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Further Listening: Achieving True Health and Vitality with Dr. Tyler Jean

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. We're literally the sickest society in the history of humanity. We're the most chronically diseased society of humans in the history of humanity. And I'm talking about largely self-induced, lifestyle-driven, chronically diseased. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Swan. If you're new here, I am an integrative nutritionist with my master's of science in nutrition and integrative health.

I have been in the health space for about 17 years now. It started as a passion, and then I went back to school and I got my master's. And while I was getting my master's, I started a food blog. And in the beginning, it was just recipes and little tidbits of information that I was learning as I was going through my program. And it has since launched into my Instagram where I post education-based content. And of course, now this podcast. Today's guest is a really special one for me, guys. Ever since I started my podcast almost two years ago, I've had a list of dream guests that I was like, I'm going to get these people on. It's just a matter of time. And this guest has been on that list since day one. And I am so excited and proud to say that the day has come that we released an episode

together. And I am so excited. If you guys do not know who Shawn Stevenson is of the Model Health Show, are you living under a rock? He has an amazing podcast. It's called the Model Health Show. He also has a really great Instagram. He's also the author of the two best

selling books, eat smarter and sleep smarter. Definitely check them out. They are amazing resources for getting your health on track. And he shared that he is working on a third book. So get excited about that. And this man just knows his stuff. I love it. He and I are very similar in the messaging that we are trying to put out into the world when it comes to health and nutrition. We try to make it as simple as possible for you. And this man is incredible. I love that he is so science and data driven. He really takes the time to seek out the studies. He dives into these studies and dives into the research. And then he's able to break it down, make it super simple, easy, digestible for all of us to understand because

not everyone has the time or the energy to be deciphering through all of the data. So I'm so grateful for someone like Sean, who is very passionate about this, and he's so good at it. I'm also just endlessly impressed with how much of a brain capacity he has for remembering all of these studies. I mean, you guys will listen, he drops like, I don't even know, I lost count, like 20 different studies in this episode. And I just love it. Like, I'm so impressed that he remembers all of this stuff. We cover a lot of really great stuff in this episode. We talk about the paradigm of calories in versus calories out, and is a calorie really just a calorie or is there more to it?

We talk about inflammation of the brain and how it actually affects your health and the foods that you're eating, epigenetics, and how to cancel out all the noise and just find what works best for you. There is so much great information in this. I loved this episode. I really hope that you guys enjoy it as much as I did. Before we get into the episode, if I could just ask you for a really quick favor, if you're enjoying the podcast, if you could just leave a quick rating and review, it helps

me so much. And if you want to go a step further and you want to share about this episode on your Instagram, I would so appreciate it. I really appreciate your support. My Instagram is at real foodology. And with that, let's get into the episode with Sean Stevenson. Have you ever tried CBD and felt like this is not really working and you feel like, why is this working for everyone else? But for some reason it's not working for me. Well, the thing about CBD products is that they are not all created equal. Unfortunately,

when something gets really trendy, like in the case of CBD, a lot of companies take advantage of that. And there are a lot of companies that are claiming that their products have way more CBD in them than they actually do. This is why I am obsessed with Cured Nutrition. They are an industry leader when it comes to quality control. All their products are produced in certified GMP facilities and third party tested and all of their test results are shared with the public on their website. So you can go to their website and you can actually see how much CBD is in every single one of their products. Personally, I'm a huge fan of CBD because it helps me relax. I deal with a lot of stress and anxiety

and it really helps to calm down my nervous system. And it also really helps me sleep. So my favorite products are Zen and the nighttime CBN oil. And they gave me a little code to share with you guys. If you use code realfoodology, you're going to save 20% at checkout at curednutrition.com. That's C-U-R-E-D-N-U-T-R-I-T-I-O-N. I read a pretty shocking statistic the other day. Apparently 25% of students age 16 to 32 take Adderall one to seven times a week, and that's not even prescribed. And then there's another five to 10% that do the same thing with another amphetamine that I cannot pronounce. But the

point of this is that that brings us to 30 to 35% of students are on amphetamines right now. And it reminds me of my days in school of being on Ritalin and Adderall. I wish that when I was in school, I had access to Magic Mind. Magic Mind is a productivity drink that I drink every single morning alongside my morning coffee. It is a blend of matcha, nootropics, and adaptogens. And I call this my natural Adderall. It really helps with my cognitive function and my productivity. And you don't get all the side effects that you get from nasty prescription drugs. All the properties in Magic Mind are very health supporting. The nootropics, the adaptogens, and the matcha. You also get L-theanine in there. And then you get antioxidants from the matcha, which is really good for you as well. They have given me a code to share with you guys.

If you go to magicmind.co and use the code realfoodology, you're going to save 20%. That's magicmind, M-A-G-I-C-M-I-N-D.co and use code realfoodology. So we were just talking about how you have such a way with your words and a way with sharing things. Very data-driven and you have the science to back it up. I found you on Instagram a couple of years ago and I have just been blown away by everything that you have shared. And I'm so grateful for your voice in this space. That means a lot, you know, and it's just, for me today, it's so interesting because we all have access to the same information,

you know, which is a wonderful thing. You know, when I went to school, when I went to my first college, like we were just transitioning out of like the Dewey Decimal System and card catalogs. And, you know, there was a few computers there or whatever, but, you know, to really understand we have all of this access at our fingertips, that's a wonderful thing, but it's also part of the problem. You know, there's so much and we can be inundated. You know, I remember this book from Barry Swartz that I read maybe

like 15 years ago, it was about the paradox of choice and just having access to so many options. You oftentimes get kind of paralyzed in a sense, and you don't choose anything, or you just take the easiest accessible thing. Right? So today the rub is we have access to information, but you also have to have the wherewithal and the diligence to go and kind of dig through things, to think from multiple perspectives, to question your own biases, all these things that in our busy lives, a lot of times we're just like, phooey, you know, forget that stuff. I've never said phooey before either, by the way, that's the first time I said phooey. There's a time and a place for it.

Yeah. I mean, you made a great point. And that's actually something I want to dive into because we have made it very hard and confusing to eat healthy in this country. That is one of the biggest questions I get from people is how do I decipher between all of the mixed messaging that we're getting? Because, you know, you can go online and find a doctor saying, veganism is the healthiest thing for you, and this is the best path for you and your health. And then you have another person on the opposite end of the spectrum saying, you should barely be eating vegetables,

and you should only be eating meat, basically. And it's really hard to decipher through all the madness and the noise. So what is your advice to someone that is trying to just eat healthy and be less confused about it? This is such a wonderful question. And if we could start there, then a lot of the kind of divisiveness can dissolve. This is part of the problem. And here's the interesting thing. I know the guys, like being in this field, I'm all, I'm about to cross my 20th year anniversary of working in health and wellness and, you know, 10 years, we're about to move to 10 years of my show and my friends and colleagues, these are all my friends, you know, so the top carnivore guy,

the top keto guy, the top vegan guy, you know, the top paleo guy. These are my friends. And I could tell you, because this is the thing about me too, full transparency, not because it's popular, just because why would you not just tell people the truth? Just tell them the things. Most of these guys do not adhere to their diet dogma themselves, right? The reason that it's been framed in such a way is that they have, in fact, whether it's a vegan protocol or a carnivore protocol, have seen success with their patients with those particular protocols. But oftentimes, here's what the missing point is, we're removing things that are problematic for the individual. It's about removing the cause, not because this diet framework is the end-all be-all. It's because oftentimes when we're shifting from the standard

American diet, which today, and I've been really pushing this into culture recently. So if you've heard this statement, it might've come from me. All right. And now, because for me, I'm going back and actually looking at the data and where the information actually came from. This was actually a few years ago when this report was published. And what they found was that almost 60% of the average American's diet is ultra processed foods. All right. Not just processed foods. We also need to talk about the distinction because processing, we can take a tomato a bunch of oats, potentially, all right, some quote whole grain oats, and then you expose it to extreme temperatures. You add artificial colors and artificial flavors and preservatives, and then you get a damn, uh, you know, fruit loop. No, like it goes from this, you know, some corn into something

that is so unidentifiable from its origin, right? That's an ultra processed food. Where the hell does a Twinkie come from? Like, you know what I mean? Like where, where? And so now again, almost 60%, this was years ago, almost 60% of the average American's diet is ultra processed foods. And the thing is, I have a resonance with this because that was me more so. That's on average. That means there are people who are eating 80, 90% ultra processed foods. That was my camp, right? That's all that I knew. I was completely immersed and inundated with fast food and processed food. Literally when I walk out my door, I was living in Ferguson, Missouri, when I kind of had this revelation with my health and started to improve my health. I was so, I was so really just sick and debilitated. You you know my story, quick snapshot, I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease at the age of 20. So this is an advanced arthritic condition of my spine as if I'm this elderly man. And my physician even told me that. He said you have the spine

of an 80-year-old. And I was just a kid. And by the way, even when I say that today, he's talking about an unhealthy 80-year- know, because just because you're 80 doesn't mean that you have to have severe degradation of your spine. Yes. You know, but that was just what he was used to dealing with. And my physician was obese, by the way. And, you know, he told me that there's nothing I can do about this. It was something that just happens. Abandoning laws of

causality. This is something that just happens. I'm sorry it happened to you. And wrote me some prescriptions and kind of sent me on my way. But this brings up all the way back to the beginning of your question, which is for me going from that place where I'm on the drive-thru diet, all right, if I'm not eating fast food like McDonald's, my jam, I get two double cheeseburgers and fries. All right. If I'm not eating that because I don't have $3 to get that, I would literally eat a box of macaroni and cheese for a meal. All right. This is true story. And I add a

little pepper, like, you know, I'm jazzing it up a little bit, you know, but this is, it was normal to me because this is what was normal in my environment. I didn't know that food mattered. And so I didn't know that it mattered as far as my chronic illness that I was experiencing, because even my physicians told me that it didn't matter. My diet didn't matter. So once you shift from that state to eating real food, whether it's in a keto protocol or a paleo protocol or a vegan protocol or a carnivore protocol, I'm eliminating the problem.

I'm eliminating the biggest driver of chronic disease in our world today. There was this massive meta-analysis looking at hundreds of cultures and countless countries. And so this was published in The Lancet, by the way. And what they determined was that 11 million people die annually due to poor diet. And the researchers affirm that poor diet is the number one cause of early death, of mortality in our world today. Poor diet. And nothing else is even close. All right? It's the biggest causative agent. And the biggest reason is it's not because of under consumption or malnutrition in the conventional sense, because there was a time when we were, you see these commercials fake foods than from the underconsumption of healthful foods. By far, it's not even close.

More people are dying from overconsumption than from starvation. To put the cherry on top here in answering the question, what's happening today is a lot of people are debating about the minutia. So this camp is debating with this camp over small dynamics of the diet and missing out on what unites everybody. And what brings everybody together, everybody literally at the same table, is we're advocating for people to eat real food that humans evolved eating, right? That's a consistent tenet if people are doing these diets with efficacy, number one. Number two, by doing so, we're avoiding fake ultra-processed foods that kill the majority of our citizens. Again, even the Journal of the American Medical Association, 2018, if you want to look this up did this huge analysis they concluded that the number one cause of our epidemics of chronic disease heart disease diabetes obesity alzheimer's you name it it's poor diet all right smoking's on the list poor diet is killing it lit literally literally literally i didn't even need to do that but you know so that's

the thing it's like we could take the tenants from whatever camp it is and understand that what's really working across the board with all of them, nutritious, real foods, making sure that people are meeting their nutrient needs, like micronutrient needs. We could talk a little bit about that potentially. And we're avoiding things that are causing, literally, obesogens, for example, found in certain foods and food products that are contributing to obesity or contributing to heart disease. So at the end of the day, that's what it's really about. If we could just find more places where we're all agreeing, which it's most of the stuff, and leave the debate on the minutia for the people who are at the highest levels. Because most people, the average person is just trying to feel better. Yeah. Yeah. We've made it really hard and

confusing, like I said. And I just, I love, I love so much your whole message and that you just said, because that is the basis of why I started doing what I'm doing. I mean, my podcast, my Instagram, everything is literally called Real Foodology, the science of real food. I just want everyone to get back to eating real food. I don't really care how you get there. If you want to be vegan or carnivore, whatever it is, if you are just focusing on eating whole real foods in their natural state and cutting out the processed foods, everyone will feel better doing that alone. And I love, I love that you talked about, um, everyone is fighting over the smallest little things. And I wanted to get your, I want to know your thoughts about this. So I don't know if you've seen, there's been a movement on social media of people

saying that there's chemicals in everything. And what they'll do is they'll take the chemical, uh, component ingredients of a banana and compare it to like a granola bar or Froot Loops cereal or something like that. And they say, see, look, you can't even pronounce all the chemicals in the banana. Well, yes, everything is made out of chemicals. We are completely gaslighting people out of the real experience. And really the issue is that we are trying to reduce our toxic load, which is like man-made chemicals that are not meant to be in our body. And I want to know what your thoughts are and what you would say to those people.

Oh, right. This is, this is really important because this is part of the issue that this, this is not a new thing. Actually people have been kind of thinking in these terms for a long time. It's just kind of with even the advent of better living through chemistry, to really take processed food consumption to another level, a contraption, I'm going to call it a contraption, like a gas chromatograph. So this is a machine that's able to identify isolated chemical compounds. So for example, certain flavors. What we're experiencing is chemistry, right? Our bodies are made of chemistry. We're just this conglomeration of amazing chemistry interaction, right? Biochemistry.

But a gas chromatograph, right? We can identify a specific chemical makeup of, we'll just say the flavor of grape, right? So, okay, we've identified grape has this particular chemical makeup. Now we can take this chemical makeup, use synthetic things, because it's all the same, right? It's all the same. Stay with me. And just take that grape flavor and add it to other things. We could take that grape flavor and add it to Gatorade. We could take that grape flavor and add it to soda. We could take that grape flavor and add it to soda. We can take that grape flavor and add it to candy. We can add it to cakes. We can add it to ice cream. We can

add it to, add it to, add it to. Now that we've mastered, we've found a way to master nature. See, already it sounds a little ignorant. Found a way to master and dominate nature. Now we can take its chemical construct and just replicate it. All right. Now here's the issue. And I'm actually going to share something with you. Take vitamin E, for example. All right. Vitamin E is notable for it's, it's by the way, by the way, it's critical. It's a powerful antioxidant, critical for your cardiovascular system, cognitive effects, your skin. Vitamin E is super important for your skin, very powerful antioxidant. Now, this nutrient, and this was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and I just happened to be looking at this today. I didn't know you were going to ask me this

question. That's amazing. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition determined that natural vitamin E from food is nearly twice as bioavailable to human cells than synthetic vitamin E. Right. So the food version of it is far more bioavailable to human cells. Our cells associate with it better because there's a resonance there. We've evolved for countless centuries, thousands upon thousands of years with food. And then today we're just like, oh no, screw that. We can just artificially manufacture these things and it's the same. And it's not the same. As a matter of fact, when we actually look at the difference, when we look what happens with bioavailability, with assimilation, with the metabolism of fake things, I'll give you another study. This study was published in the journal Food and Nutrition

Research, and they wanted to find out what would happen to people's metabolism, their assimilation of calories, and their expenditure of those calories by eating a meal of processed foods versus a meal of whole foods. Like what actually happens to our metabolism when we're consuming these things, right? So they had test participants. And by the way, if you're just like, how are they measuring calorie expenditure? It's all chemistry, right? It's all chemistry. We're literally breathing out most of the calories that we expend from our bodies. Our lungs are also an eliminatory organ. We don't really think about that, but we're breathing it out. It's just chemistry. We tend to think about the expulsion of calories via our sweat. Like that's really when we're burning.

Most of it's actually through our lungs. This doesn't mean that if you breathe fast, you're going to burn more calories. That's just the end route for it to leave our bodies. So anyways, so they gave test participants a meal of what they consider to be whole foods, which was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. Now with whole grain bread, again, you can get into debate, processed food. Yes, it's processed. Ultra processed, maybe not, right?

Because you can still, if it's truly a whole grain bread, minimally processed, maybe a sprouted grain bread, you can still see the origins. Like this was some brown stuff growing somewhere in a field, right? Some seeds. So you got that and cheddar cheese. Okay. So cheddar cheese being, again, minimally processed. All right.

So it's maybe like four ingredients to get yourself some cheddar. All right. Versus they gave test subjects also a meal of processed foods, a processed food sandwich, which was white bread. Again, when you see white bread and you don't, if you're from another planet or from another culture and you don't make bread in your culture, you would have no reference point to where this white bread came from. How did you take something that was in nature, brownish, yellow, whatever, you know, these different hues and turn into something white? What bleaching ages did you do? What refining technology did you use to get this so separate from where it came from? And they used cheese product. All right. So this is like equivalent to Kraft cheese slices or singles.

I'm sorry, Kraft singles. Little not so fun fact. Legally, Kraft can't call them Kraft cheese singles because there's not enough cheese in the cheese. All right. This is a fact. Over 51 percent cheese. All right. So what else is in there? And by the way, recently they've changed the ingredients to look at to look more natural than what was there previously. And this is behind the work of people, food advocates, just like, hey, we don't want this in our food. We don't want this ingredient in our food. All right. So we got two sandwiches here, one more natural, right? More recognizable, whole food sandwich. And then we got the processed food sandwich. Here's what happened. So after consuming these two different sandwiches, when people consume the processed food sandwich that had the same amount of protein, same carbs, same fat, same amount of calories, on paper, if we're just looking at basic

nutritional science, basic chemistry, it should have the same effect on the body. It's the same. It's just calories. But here's what happened. When people ate the processed food sandwich, it created some type of hormonal clog to where their metabolism wasn't able to efficiently process that those, the chemical makeup of that food again on paper should be the same, but it was, it got stingy. The body became more stingy and hung on to those calories and did not allow that person's metabolism to expend that energy. So it could be, again, we can start to get into minutiae here of like, why, what happened? Was it, was the body confused? And it's just like these artificial chemicals that again, should be, if it's the same, there's this chemical makeup, this artificial form of

this chemistry, Did it create confusion cellularly, right? So where the body's just like, I don't know what to do with this. We're going to tuck this in a fat cell. We're going to send this to the liver. Our liver is incredible, by the way, with being able to figure stuff out and break stuff down. But maybe it's going to take time, right? And so maybe it's just like your body's just like, I'm just going to drip a little bit out into the system. We'll spend some time. These are all the things behind the scene that we think we're so arrogant about knowing. And the reality is we know next to nothing about how miraculous our bodies are and ourselves at figuring things out. Our body is constantly trying to protect us

from the insults of our world today, our modern life. Because even a disease, if you really think about what a disease is, and again, these are my friends, I get to talk to them. Top guy who really impressed upon culture, epigenetics, Dr. Bruce Lipton. He shared with me that, he was like, Sean, less than 1% of all diseases are actually caused by true genetic defects. Again, less than 1% of all diseases are caused by true genetic defects. And this is, you could look at different levels of science and see that same consistent thing brought forward.

And you can go to Dr. Google and find, you know, same thing with dementia and Alzheimer's. Less than 1% is actually caused, top people in the field, top neuroscientists, is caused by genetics. What's going on then? Why do we have epidemics of, I mean, everything. Everything. Everything is skyrocketing. And he shared with me, because I'm just like, okay, we know about epigenetics now. We have genes that kind of code for things we consider to be healthy, things that code for disease. But he's like, Sean, there are no genes for disease. There are no genes for disease. Of course, yes, again, there are minutiae, some genetic defects where we can have a genetic illness manifest where you have nothing to do about it. You're born with these shoddy genes,

right? There are, but it's less than 1%. He said that when you think about what a disease is, when your genes are altering themselves, altering their expression, it's really making an alteration for your body to operate under unideal circumstances, right? So that's what type 2 diabetes is, for example. It's an adjustment by the body to operate and keep you alive, to operate differently under unideal circumstances when your system is getting bombarded with a lot of, you know, glucose, processed sugar, you know, that whole category of things. It's making an adaptation to keep you alive. All right. So that's that lens, if we're looking at, okay, chemistry of a thing versus, you know, a natural versus synthetic,

it's not really even close. And if I could, I know I've said a lot, I'm going to provide one more example if that's cool. Oh, yeah. I love this. Keep going. This is great. All right. So this was published in the journal Cardiology, and they wanted to find out if a whole food source of vitamin C, right? And so in this particular study was camu camu berries, right? So this is the highest botanical source of vitamin C. If it could actually reduce oxidative stress when put under a significant stressor for these test subjects, In this case,

they were using smokers, male smokers versus a synthetic vitamin C supplement, right? Which you find out there on, you know, when you're checking out, right? So they wanted to see what would happen. Okay. So we got the, it's the same chemistry. It's vitamin C, right? It's vitamin C. Here's what happened. Over the course of the study, this was a one-week study, they found that the test subjects who were utilizing the camu camu berry, they gave them, they juiced it for them. They had significant reductions in oxidative stress and inflammatory biomarkers like C-reactive protein. All right, C-reactive protein, if that's high, you're going to die faster. All right. Infl going to die faster. Inflammation.

Inflammation. So that's number one. And what's more, there were no changes to those same biomarkers in the group who use the ordinary synthetic vitamin C packets or vitamin C tablets or supplements, whatever the case might be. Where is that shit coming from versus real food? And here's what the researchers concluded. They said that this essentially indicated the combination of other antioxidants that most of them we don't know about. We know a fraction of what's actually in food and in our bodies. A combination of other antioxidants in the camu camu berry appears to have a much more powerful antioxidant effect than synthetic vitamin C products alone.

All right. Just because the chemistry is there does not mean that the life is there, that the life force is there. This is what we tend to do is that we isolate things into parts and then we negate the whole, you know, and that's what this isolation. Nutritional science is, you know, it's nutritionalism, right? It's got this thing, that thing, that's cool that we know that. But the problem is, we open the door for companies to come along and start grabbing that isolated thing and saying, Hey, this, this is the shit here, this isolated thing is going to change your life. That's not how it

works. And we're still seeing the ramifications of that ignorance all the way back from when it started with better living through chemistry. All right. I'm on a roll recently talking about different Organifi products that I love because I feel like I've hammered in how much I love the red and the green juice. I drink the red and the greens every single morning just to flood my body with nutrients and antioxidants. But I wanna start talking about some of their other products, because they do have a lot of really amazing products.

And if the ones that I love and talk about aren't resonating with you, I wanna share other ones so that you can find something that you love on Organifi's website as well. I have been drinking their Pure for about six months now. This is their one that's for mental clarity and digestion. It has no caffeine, but I really have noticed a difference. It really does turn on my brain. It has a lot of really amazing properties like lion's mane mushroom, which really helps with cognitive function. There's a lot of studies

and science behind that. There's also coffee berry in there. There's aloe vera, digestive enzymes, which of course are going to help with digestion. And there's a couple of other things in there, but it's so good, you guys. It tastes like lemonade, but there's no sugar in there. And as of course, always with Organifi products, it is USDA organic and it's glyphosate residue free. If you guys want to try any of the Organifi products, you're going to get 20% off when you go to Organifi.com slash real food ology. That's O R G A N I F I.com slash real food ology. Oh, and make sure that you use code real food ology,

and you're going to get 20% off. I hope you guys love it. I love that you brought up the example of vitamin C because this is what I use as an example all the time for people. We've been so focused on isolating one vitamin. So for example, we have decided that vitamin C is it. That is what from the orange or from the citrus fruit or whatever it is, is that is boosting our immune system. But we forget how smart nature is. And I think about this all the time, we're not taking into account all the nutrients in that food that works synergistically together. And to your point, like you said, many of them that we probably have not even identified yet. And that's what's really tough about just the way that we approach nutrition and health. And, you know, I'm, I will say, like, over the years, I've been pretty like

supplement happy. But I still try to find this balance of like making sure that I focus on getting everything from real food, because I recognize that we could be totally wrong on the on these nutrients that we're isolating, you know, it could be just the orange itself or the citrus fruit itself, synergistically together that really provides the immunity that we that our bodies need. Because like you said, our bodies recognize it as real food. It's bioavailable. It's, you know, real food, the power of real food. Yeah, it's really cool. Because even with this tenet of better living through chemistry, this doesn't mean that we can't live better through chemistry. But when it becomes everything, when this like isolation of things begins to govern our decisions and our perspective much more than

understanding the whole as well, the same thing works with disease. You know, when we start to isolate ourselves into parts, even when the germ theory hit the scene, that was, that was really, the premise of it has largely been disproven because we've done the thing. We've done the thing. We've become so antimicrobial, antibiotic to the degree that antibiotic resistant infections, if people look at the numbers on this stuff, it really scare it can really scare the out of you something is going wrong here and also have we stopped the spread of infectious disease by any means of the imagination and what we've done is again we go from this discovery okay bacteria we

found the little thing we keep looking and looking and looking we found a little thing that's actually making us sick let's just try and eliminate that thing, right? That's been here long, long, long before us, that intelligence, right? Millions. Yeah, millions. Millions a year. And so if we zoom in and look at that, like, oh, we figured it out. Now we just need to have antibiotics. We need to sanitize everything. Then we're going to stop this. We're going to stop the spread of infectious diseases, bacterial specifically. But then we get a strong enough microscope and we zoom in and we find, oh, what are these things? They're smaller than the bacteria. We could fit thousands of these inside of a bacteria, right? Bacteriophages

or viruses that infect a bacteria, right? So we can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in. And now there's even debate today about the realness of certain things like this, right? There's this campus like viruses aren't real, right? You know, the air isn't real. Okay. Regardless of what you believe in, right? Birds are not, have you ever seen a baby bird? Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? They just, they're robots. All right. Now I know some people, there are going to be a few people like, no, for real. There's something with the pigeons. Okay. No disrespect to that. And no disrespect to if you believe viruses aren't real. OK, and now other people can be like, that's absolutely ludicrous. You know, there is entire, entire industries, entire fields of science, virologists who dedicate their lives to this field and understanding viruses. But what I want you to understand, and this is a fact, the top virologist in the world knows less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent about all the viruses that exist and what they do, how they work. They don't know shit, but then we act like we know everything about it. Each of us, if we're looking through the lens of virology, then it would tell us we all have upwards of 400 trillion virus particles in and on our bodies right now.

It would tell us when the human genome was mapped out, somewhere in the ballpark, about 8% of the human genome itself is viral, meaning viruses are baked in to what makes us human, right? So again, we start to expand the view a little bit and not get so isolated, viruses are killing us. Let's have some balance and perspective here. Because as we're zooming in, trying to find that thing, because here's what's going to happen. I'll just tell you. I'll just tell you.

Eventually, there's going to be a strong enough microscope and they're going to find that the viruses have viruses. And they're going to name them some, I don't know. I don't know what they're going to name them. But you know, you could just make it up in your head. It's going to be something, you know, ominous and scary. And you know, then you're going to be like, we finally found out what is making us sick. It was the virus. It was the STDs on the viruses, right? The viruses were out here being promiscuous. They got viruses or something else. We'll call it something else. That's what's causing the problem.

Now we just got to get some drugs in that stuff and we're going to be straight. We're going, we're going at it from the wrong angle. And what I have found to be true, especially when it comes to our health and nutrition and all of this that we're just talking about, every time you go to one extreme, it's we've gone too far. The answer is always somewhere in the middle, right? Where it's like, okay, we have to learn to live with viruses, because like we said, they've been around for a really long time. But we also like we have to learn to live with them. And we need to learn how to be resilient and how to be healthy enough that those viruses don't take us over. But then we also have to be

smart enough to, you know, have some sort of attack defense against them. But we can't just say, you know, all viruses are killing us. We have to eradicate them because they will eradicate us before we eradicate them. We got to learn to live with them. Just look at the results.

Yeah. How has our attack on microbes worked out for us as a species? Terrible. We're destroying our microflora. We're literally the sickest society in the history of humanity. We're the most chronically diseased society of humans in the history of humanity.

And I'm talking about largely self-induced, lifestyle-driven, chronically diseased, all right? There's something, and as advanced as we propose ourselves to be and as intelligent as we are, what can happen is we can use our intelligence to normalize or to justify our ignorant behavior or our ignorant beliefs, right? We're very good at whataboutism, making excuses, missing the point. If there's anything that I've seen over the last couple of years, it's just the biggest epidemic is people missing the point, right? They're just so attached to a dogma, a certain belief, a mind virus that is very difficult to perspective take. And what can really make you great in this field, I'm talking about a level of excellence. Number one is understanding that you know next to nothing. The little bit that you do know,

that's wonderful. We can celebrate that. but really get more at peace with the fact that we don't really know much. And we're all just here on this spinning blue planet in the middle of the galaxy. We're just trying to figure it out and we're using our rationality to try to make us feel more comfortable. But we very much lack control and lack bigness in this situation. It's not to say that we're not significant, but we have to check ourselves. And the other part is, and this is the toughest part, and I'm just going to keep it 1,000 with everybody, is to question your own beliefs. It's to question your own biases. Because again, I know all the people.

I've done the things. I've been in this field for 20 years. And I had my phase, which a lot of people don't, don't grow out of that phase. I had my phase of being dogmatic with the patients I was working with when it was just like, if this is working for me, this is what you're going to do. If I'm vegan, you're going to be vegan because that's what's right. If I'm paleo, you're going to be paleo because that's what's right. But eventually I did again, keep checking in with myself, questioning myself, like, what am I not seeing here?

How does this not suit myself or this person in front of me? And start asking higher quality questions. You know, again, like what are the things that unite us? What are the big movers across the board? And also what's appropriate for this person right now? And how can I equip them with the tools that they're going to be able to adapt and change as they adapt and change? Because here's another little fun fact too about these different dive frameworks is that they all work. To some degree, they all work. All right. Now that's something

that a lot of camps will argue about. Like that shit doesn't work. Yeah. There are people, that's why it's, that's why there's so much debate is because people have seen wonderful results on doing all the different things. How on, this is the problem. Like I literally just in the past couple of years, I've, this is not a joke. I've read thousands of peer review studies, thousands. Most people are not doing that. And to give you another little insight into this, this is absolutely true. I have people come into my studio, Harvard trained physicians, Stanford, Cornell, US, whatever it is, and NYU, in NYU. And they're telling me, Sean,

huge fan. Thank you so much for doing this research because they're not doing it. They're getting the cliff notes a lot of times and they're not doing what I'm doing, which is going and digging through. I'm not just looking at the abstract. That's cool. But actually look at what were the methods used? What was the, that's their conclusion in the abstract, but what did the data actually show? Because sometimes that can be different, you know? And so just being able to find, but it's a language, right? So now I'm saying that, that's what I do. I'm about that life. But what I'm really growing to understand more and more, I don't talk about it much, but it's kind of like baked into who I am and how I'm communicating.

We negate so quickly people's personal experience and it is not OK. It's not OK. You know, this term gaslighting, if we really look at the ultimate, like what is, what's really happening in our culture, it's telling people that their experience doesn't matter. Like, so we can't say it's gaslighting for this little thing and this little thing over here. It's a, it is a society-wide gaslighting that has taken place in recent years, in recent decades, really. It's been kind of working up to it, to where your experience doesn't matter. What's the data say? What's the data say? I know the data, and it still doesn't say what you want it to say. And here's the thing, again, your personal experience is anecdotal information. It matters. Your personal experience, what works

for you matters. We don't need, what we're doing really is using science to justify what feels right instead of honoring what feels right. And I think sometimes we take this a little bit too far with the data. And if you feel differently, obviously, please tell me. I'm a huge proponent for really finding a balance in following the data, really knowing the research, and also listening into your intuition and tuning in to what your body is telling you. Because I think sometimes with science, we don't take this into account that our body, we have this built innately in us since we were birthed on this planet that we know how to feed ourselves if we tune in. But the problem is, is that we have been our palates have been hijacked with highly palatable

foods, food like products. You can't even call them foods. So now we're craving things that are that were genetically engineered to be craveable instead of things that our body actually really needs. But I think so. Yeah, we're but we're not taking enough in account for intuition and all that. So like, I'm a huge proponent for first of all, you have to clear out all of the junk, get back on real food, and then learn how to be really honest with yourself and listen to your body. I like you, I've been in the space for 17 years now. I have gone, I've gone down every single

diet path you can possibly imagine. I was vegan. I was vegetarian. I was pescatarian. I went keto for a while. And my biggest problem was that for the longest time, I wasn't truly honest with myself about how I was really doing. I was vegetarian for five years. And by the end of it, I was so sick. I was hormonally imbalanced. I was 20 pounds overweight. I was absolutely starving all the time. But I kept hearing all this noise from all these different experts. This is the healthiest thing for you. You're just not vegan enough. You got to be more vegan. You're doing it wrong. You just got to do it this way. And then you're going to be fine. So I think it really takes someone to be super honest with themselves. Try all the things. I'm

like, try all the things. I'm like, try all the things, see what works best for you. There are people that thrive on vegan diets. And, but you have to figure that out for yourself and you have to be honest with yourself. And I think a lot of people, um, either just get trapped in this dogma experience of the diet, or they don't want to admit that it's no longer working for them anymore. Yeah. I mean, you said it perfectly. You know, I think that if, if there's one thing to walk away with today for everybody is to really, I, here's something you said, I'm just, this is going to actually give the takeaway, which is it's, it's one thing to think that we're listening to our bodies. And it's another thing to hear the, you know, the terrifying scream of a ding dong.

Or, you know, it's like there's some residual artificial food that's in your body. And the reason I hesitated, I just watched Thor 4, you know, Love and Thunder, and there's these screaming goats. And so that's what I was really picturing with the scream from within for you to go and dive face first into, you know, a box of hostess cupcakes. There's a difference. And so clearing the static off the line of that communication from our bodies. But ultimately the big takeaway is if we're going to find solutions for our own health, number one, because our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. If we're going to help others, healer heal thyself, you know? So if we're going to do that, we have to go within. We can't just keep on looking and sourcing, even if it's well-intentioned from the best

people, the best researchers, big hearts, even if it's for me, I cannot tell you what's best for you, you know? And so tuning in, listening to our bodies, and it's so much more difficult. This is the rub. It's so much more difficult today when so much of our attention is being siphoned and pulled away. And it's leaving little reserve for us to actually listen to our bodies because our bodies, our bodies give very clear feedback, very, very clear, very specific. And over time, and I, even today I can have this happen to me where if I'm working on a book, for example, and it's pulling a lot of resources and I'm enjoying the processes, but it's still pulling resources from me.

I'm not as att listen to my body. Because if I'm listening to my body, doing what's best for me, I can do everything else better. Yeah. So I want to ask you, this is such a simple question, but I think a lot of people are still very, very confused about this. What do you think about a calorie is just a calorie? And do you think counting calories for weight loss works at all? Or do we just totally throw that out the window? I gave an example earlier of that study that was published in Food and Nutrition Research on,

again, those two sandwiches, they were the same amount of calories. They both on paper, calories in, calories out, but calories not out. All right. They came in, but the body did not expend that energy as it did with the more whole food, right? So 50% reduction, 50% less of the calories they consumed were expended when eating that artificial food. Right there, that's just one example of an epicaloric controller. What I'm talking about with epicaloric controllers, these are factors that are above caloric control. They control what calories do in your body, much like an epigenetic controller that control what genes are actually doing. Calories have their place.

But I took nutritional science in an expensive private university my first year of college. And I was literally the first day, the professor was talking about if you can control calories, you can control your weight. He just started letting in on how important calories are. Calories are like the king in nutritional science. When in reality, again, there are several factors. I've identified seven of them that control what calories actually do in your body. So we mentioned the type of food itself. So this has been popularized as term.

People have been saying for years now, it's not just the calories, it's the quality of the calories. No, like I just literally gave you science, peer reviewed study on, no, this is a fact, like this is how it works. It's creating abnormalities in how your cells work and how your metabolism works. It's not just calories in, calories out. It doesn't work like that. That's ignorant. And unfortunately, there are really well-intentioned people. Usually it's people who are just getting started. Most of the time, there's young people, they're managing their calories, they lost some weight, they could see

some abs, whatever. Then like, no, calories. people are posting, they're like, oh my God, like, you know, I've been struggling to lose, you know, this weight I picked up since, you know, having my son. And, you know, the gym bro is like, have you tried calorie deficit? But then you could take that out and stretch that out to, you know, very prestigious university professors, you know, people with PhDs, all the things who've seen it work in their own life. But then they they tend to extrapolate that. They tend to spread that. They tend to create a mind virus for the people that they work with and their communities, instead of asking, just asking like, hey, I know that I am this propagator of calories in, calories out, end of story. But is there anybody out there that's

put themselves in a calorie deficit for filling the blank out? You followed all my rules and it didn't work for you. Oh man, that would open the door for so much conversation because there's going to be just say, you know, maybe they have an audience of 10,000 people. There's going to be thousands of people, probably the majority, probably the majority who say, you know, I did that and it worked for a while or it didn't work. But usually it's going to be like it worked for a while, but then it's always something. And then what we do as health professionals, and again, I did this, is why I know that this is what we do. We blame the person. Again, you didn't do it right. Well, you know, your calories, you shouldn't have cut that much. You should have cut a little less, or maybe you should have cut more, right? It's all about the cutting. You just got to keep,

you just got to find where to cut instead of addressing what controls or calories do in their body. Because here's the thing. They can be in a calorie deficit if their thyroid is not functioning properly. Their thyroid doesn't give a shit if they're in a calorie deficit. Yep. An abnormal function with your thyroid can reduce your calorie expenditure by hundreds, upwards of 900, 1,000 calories a day. This is from the work of Dr. Andrew Christensen, by the way. Really one of the top folks in metabolism and specifically fat loss kind of related organs, you know, the HPA axis, the thyroid, all that stuff, right?

And so understanding that just abnormality with a certain organ in our body can suppress our expenditure of calories. I'm gonna use another example since we're talking about organ and organ system function. What I believe to be the biggest issue today, as far as the inability to lose weight, especially when we're talking about, you know, on paper calorie deficit is an epidemic that most people have no idea about. And it is, it is a huge,

huge issue. And we're talking, I'm talking about, I said, we're talking about neuroinflammation. Yeah love it. We are. Neuroinflammation. Yeah. Neuroinflammation. All right. We got some research coming out of Yale, but also one of the studies, and this was in my latest book, Eat Smarter. I kind of detailed this, really kind of breaking down why this is such an issue. And so these particular researchers, and this was in the

annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. And what they found was that, and this is very simple, they found that inflammation in the brain, specifically hypothalamic inflammation, all right, so that's the kind of, it's often dubbed the master gland of the body. Inflammation in the brain is a causative agent, not could be, it's a causative agent in obesity. And obesity is a causative agent for neuroinflammation. Okay. So our growing waistline, our growing accumulation of body fat is creating inflammation in our brain and inflammation in our brain creates more body fat. So guess what? We're in it. We're, we're really in a problem, right? We're in this vicious circle, right? And then you're trying to cut calories or use a point system or whatever the case might be.

And you're frustrated and you're hurting and you're reaching out and you're telling whoever is telling you to do this shit that it's not working or that I'm suffering. And they're just like, nah, you're just not doing it right. And here's the issue. People out here, you know, with these different diet protocols or whatever, and they're, they, again, well-intended most of the time. They're not telling you you need to address the inflammation in your brain in order for you to get healthier, to lose weight. Why is it such a big issue? And again, you can have a field day just looking at neuroinflammation.

Some of my best friends, I just did a guest lecture for the NYU Neuroscience Department. I'm that guy. All right. I'm not just saying this stuff. So, you know, Lisa Moscone, Dr. Lisa Moscone, Dr. Daniel Amen is one of my good friends. I just did another quote. He's on the front of my book. I did another quote for his recent book. He has the largest database of SPECT imaging of brain scans in the world. I'm not just saying this stuff. All right. And so to actually understand the brain is so protective. It is the most protective organ in the body by far. We have this internal and external protection, right? It's the only organ fully encased in hard bone. It's very protective. And your brain does not have pain receptors. So it was just like, if I got neuroinflammation, why does my brain hurt?

If you have a headache or migraine, your brain doesn't hurt. Your brain doesn't have pain receptors. It's just the nerves and the muscles and all this stuff around your head and your neck. But your brain does, your brain cannot tell you because your brain is responsible for notifying you about pain everywhere else. This is why it doesn't, for my, this is my belief. This is why it doesn't express pain itself, because you would go insane. Alright, so it's very protective. And so when we get to this place, we're having neuro degeneration or neuro inflammation, and it's getting to a place of severity. Oftentimes, we don't know until

it's too late, because the brain is so protective. But we can do is start to tune into the things that we know can protect our brains, can heal our brains, can help it to avoid this inflammation and degeneration. I'm just going to throw one thing out here real quick because it shocked me. And I don't have any dog in the fight. I could care less. But it was on olive oil. And this was researchers at Auburn University.

They found that oleocanthal- rich extra virgin olive oil is one of the few substances that they studied and tested that can help to reduce neuroinflammation, that can help to reduce inflammation in the brain and actually help to repair the blood brain barrier. That part of that damage is the protective. And there's even a debate today is like, have you ever seen the blood brain barrier? Is that real? Oh, man. Pigeon's real. Again, just again, talk to people who are actually just actually looking at the brain. We can have different words for this stuff.

And also the nuance, the expression of what we call these things. Right. So the blood brain barrier can be very different from one neuroscientist to another, right? But there is something that is protecting your brain that the rest of your body does not have, all right? This does not mean you have a glowing shield around your dome. It doesn't work like that, all right? However, part of the issue with neuroinflammation is that our diet and lifestyle is just tearing down that access, that blood-brain barrier that's protecting our brain from environmental insults, internal and external. And so if we can do something to repair that, I had no idea. I was shocked. I was just like, I didn't know olive oil was that remarkable. There's something really special about it.

And that's okay. If you think olive oil is terrible, cool. But man, yeah, it's been around thousands of years. And it's so delicious. I love olive oil. I recently just traded my avocado oil back for I'm just fully doing olive oil again. I think it's so good. But I just I love that tangent you just went off because it goes back to what you were saying is that we know so little. I mean, we just learned in the last, what, like 15 years that there is a direct connection from our gut to our brain through the vagus nerve. So of course, when our brains are inflamed, our digestion is going to be messed up. Our health is going to be messed up. We have that direct connection. Oh, I love it. Are you pulling out your book right now?

Yes, I am. You just reminded me of something. So this, we can actually zoom in and look at this because this is another epicaloric controller, right? So this is from my book, Eat Smarter. But I was kind of breaking down this study. This was published in the journal Cell. And it revealed that the presence of a specific type of gut bacteria in mice, let's keep this clear first, had actually blocked their intestines from absorbing as many calories from the food that they ate. Okay. Wow. Specific microbes can block your body from absorbing the calories that you consume. And also when I talked earlier about the neuroinflammation, so that the research coming out of Yale found that there's this direct connection with your brain and your gut and your brain based on its assessment of your calories,

what you have stored away, your nutritional needs, it can literally down-regulate the absorption of the calories from the meal that you're eating, or it can increase the absorption of calories from the meal that you're eating based on your body's assessment of what you need. Okay. So again, have you ever tried a calorie deficit for people that are doing that shit? Like just peacefully say namaste, namaste away from you. All right. For now, like it's, it's bigger than that. It matters. Yes. Calorie deficit. Yes. Got it. But there are things that control what calories do in your body. We have to address these days, these things and empower people because the calorie deficit becomes exponentially easier when these other things are addressed. And so, again, that was published in Cell and coupling that with human studies, these are conducted by researchers at the Wiseman Institute of Science, and they're doing some of the best work in microbial health

and nutrition-related microbiome stuff, fascinating stuff. And they confirmed that there are specific gut bacteria that are more prevalent in people who are overweight. And the big kicker is that transplanting these, quote, fat bacteria into mice on the same diet cause the mice to gain weight, become insulin resistant, and increase their levels of belly fat just by changing their microbes on the same diet versus implanting, quote, lean bacteria from humans into mice and these mice getting and staying lean based on the bacteria, even on the same diet. All right. And I'll share one more.

This was published in the Journal, the International Journal of Obesity revealed that a higher diversity of gut bacteria is directly correlated. There's that word correlated, all right, correlation causation, but directly correlated. And a lot of the studies that I put in here, I went and vetted them, like which factors did they actually look at and put that into their kind of, you know, they're these confounding factors, right? So really addressing those things. And these studies are really remarkable. But anyways, they found that a higher diversity of gut bacteria is directly correlated with less weight gain and improved energy metabolism. So that means expending more energy or processing energy more efficiently, independent, this was their words, independent of calorie intake.

There's also that study where they took two twins. The twins, yeah. I talked about that in the book, yeah. Yeah. So I'm from St. Louis and it was from researchers in St. Louis. Oh, really? They had this big database of twins and just looking at, again, they're in the same household, right? And there's no two people to look at that can be more telling of certain changes than twins, right? And so we know that epigenetics is the big

controller here. It's not the genetics. They got the same genetics, right? But they found that if one twin had a higher ratio of these, quote, fat bacteria, you know, we can get into like classes of Firmicutes or Bacteriodetes. So higher ratio of F firmicutes, they had a much higher propensity towards becoming obese and having higher levels of body fat than their lean twin, just simply based on the bacteria cascade that they had in their gut. All right. So same diet, same household, same lifestyle, but one twin becomes obese based on the bacteria makeup and one does not. Well, and didn't they also do an actual fecal transplant from, I can't remember which direction it went, but I believe it was from the one that was obese.

They put it in the twin that was at a healthy weight and that twin actually gained a bunch of weight. I'm not familiar with that, but that's happened with people from the study that I know about very similar to that was, um, you know, fecal transplants are actually very, very popular today. They're growing in popularity for healing all kinds of issues. But there was a, a woman in this particular study who got a fecal transplant from somebody who was obese and this woman had been fit her whole life. You know, she's one one of the she was that fit friend like no matter what she does she just couldn't gain weight and after the fecal transplant her gastrointestinal issue resolved

but she just started gaining weight and became insulin resistant and had a hard time getting the weight off that she had never experienced before in her life. And so yeah, but also I think I think I am familiar with with what you shared is kind of ringing a bell right now. But yeah, we've seen this in in people who aren't twins. Yeah. That's so wild. I find this subject so fascinating. It's so interesting. Well, I want I want to be mindful of your time because I know you're working on a book right now. I want to ask you one more question that I ask all of my guests, and this is a personal one to you. What are your health non-negotiables?

These are things that no matter what, no matter how busy you are in your day with writing your book, these are things, either lifestyle, diet, all the above, things that you prioritize for your health. Oh, man. I mean. The list can go on. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big, I'm big, big, big on sleep and my, you know, just, just optimizing my, my sleep and my sleep wellness related things. But also the thing is, even when I say that

a great night of sleep starts when you wake up in the morning. So just doing a few good things for yourself during the day helps you to sleep better in the evening. So, but yeah, that's one that's non-negotiable for sure. And, um, outside of that, you see, you know, even during the interview, I have my water right here. You can't drink what you don't have. So I always have water around, making sure that I'm hydrated. And, um, outside of that, yeah, every day I do something I do something physical um you know whether it's yesterday was our day off but we still we we just hung out you know it's my one day off from writing during the week we hung out vegged out watched some shows but we first went on a family hike you know we went on a hike it's like a 90 minute uh deal and we came back and then we just hung

out but still we got that in, you know, and just we got a time to hang out together, to talk. You know, my family, you know, they talk a lot of shit to each other. So we got to like mess around with each other. Because my oldest son, he decided to wear a hoodie and it was like 90 degrees, a black hoodie. And he sweat through the hoodie. It was amazing. My wife took pictures and And he was like, Oh, it's actually gonna keep me cool. I was like, Is that how science works? But I'm open to it. I'm open to it. Right? You're like, the data says. But you know, so yeah, but my sleep wellness, do something

physical every day, and making sure I'm hydrated. Those three definitely non negotiable. I love that. Getting movement in every day is a non-negotiable for me as well. So I relate with you on that. I do a lot of hikes. We're very fortunate to live in California. You live in California too, right? Recently, yes. So even hiking, that's not a part of my lexicon until a couple of years ago. I didn't know what that was. We're very fortunate that we have access to that so easily. Well, please let everyone know where they can find you and share where they can find your book and all that.

Sure, yeah. And by the way, like when I say that I didn't know what a hike was, like I had these visions of, you know, like an image of what people meant. I kind of would picture like Mount Everest, like, I don't know, it's just, I'm from, I'm from the neighborhood. All right. So, you know, we were in concrete circumstances. And so to be able to like,

just see, you know, there's so many great trails here and, you know, the, you know, the fresh air and the sunlight, the sunlight, nature, all that stuff. Like it's a really cool access. And the thing is, I want to create a culture to where more people have access to these things, right? Community wellness programs, community gardens, you know, CSAs. Right before I moved from Ferguson, there was a farmer's market now that was going on and doing pretty well. Right. So, you know, it's really powerful and it's so enriching to grow up and have access to that. So people could find my books.

My latest book is Eat Smarter. It's a USA Today national bestseller and very, very proud of it. It's a very, very powerful book. We're diving in talking about metabolism and how specific aspects of nutrition control our metabolic process. It's the first time really in book form in a way that makes sense where I'm taking people through and teaching them how metabolism actually works. Like, you know, how does a fat cell

gain fat or lose fat? Where does fat go when you lose it? You know, like we go through the entire process. And also we talk about specific foods and nutrients for cognitive performance and also how food affects our relationships and our emotional agility and our ability to connect with other people, which is a big conversation today that needs to be had. Food plays a big part in that. And so that's even the pivot into the new book that I'm working on. So it's a cookbook and it's really looking at the family dynamic of nutrition even more so, and just getting more into, you know, deliciousness and food. And because I was most

surprised, there's a few recipes in Eat Smarter at the end of the book. I was just shocked on social media, how many people were making those recipes and posting pictures. I was like, what the? And then I really got it when it boils down to it, even though this is a big idea book and it can galvanize people and make people take action. When it boils down to it, it's still just, it's about eating food and sharing food with people that we love. It's one of the most powerful and connective things in our reality. So yeah, I'm doubling down on that. And in my first book, Sleep Smarter is available as well. It's an international bestseller. I'm very proud of that too. So those are available anywhere books are sold. And my show is called The Model Health

Show. You can find me wherever you're listening to this amazing podcast. And yeah, that's it. Sean, thank you so much. This was such a great episode. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie, spelled with a J. Love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute

a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.