Realfoodology - How to Fix Your Sleep and Learn Healthy Habits with Dr. Austin Perlmutter

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

131: Today I sat down with  Dr. Austin Perlmutter who is a board-certified internal medicine physician, a New York Times Bestselling Author, researcher and investor in the health and wellness space.  He is an allopathic doctor by training, but he realized during his career that society needs to be more focused on preventative care so now he focuses on helping people improve their health through better decisions, neuroscience and lifestyle interventions.  We explore brain health, the connection of our guts to our brains, sleep strategies and so much more. Topics Discussed: Importance of sleep Why people have a hard time getting and staying healthy  How to form new habits  How we are being brainwashed by food companies Psychology behind food and drug commercials  How does our gut health influence our brain? Psychology behind why we crave certain foods  Sugar and where it hides in the grocery store  Are there good and bad foods? Epigenetic’s and our health outcomes  Psychology behind social media and news Blue light blockers  Best sleep practices before bed  Alcohol and when to not drink it  Check Out Dr. AustinPerlmutter: Online Instagram https://bigboldhealth.com Sponsored By: KION Save 20% on monthly deliveries and 10% on one-time purchases by going to getkion.com/realfoodology BiOptimizers: Magnesium Breakthrough www.magbreakthrough.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 10% off any order. LMNT Get 8 FREE packs with any order at drinkLMNT.com/realfoodology Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% Off Check Out Courtney: **REALFOODOLOGY PODCAST IS NOW ON YOUTUBE!** Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Further Listening: What are Amino Acids & The Best Sources of Protein with Angelo Keely of KION

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. Doctors are doing the best they can with the tools they have available. And unfortunately, the tools that they have available are mostly things that don't address the root cause of the disease. We are living in a toxic soup for most people in America. They will develop at least one chronic and largely preventable disease. And it's not because they didn't get access to the medications early enough. It's because modern society has become an unhealthy place. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast.

I'm your host, Courtney Swan, and I'm so grateful that you're here today. Today's episode is fascinating. I sat down with Dr. Austin Perlmutter. He's an internal medicine doctor. So he's an allopathic doctor by training. As he got into his practice, he realized that we need to be focused more on preventative care. So now he focuses on helping people improve their health through better decisions, neuroscience, and lifestyle interventions. He recognizes that our current model of healthcare is unsustainable

and that it's a result of missing true causes of our major issues, poor decision-making, rewired neurochemistry, and bad mental health. We explore this pretty extensively today in the podcast, and we talk a lot about brain health, the connection of our guts to our brains, how our microbiome influences our brain and our food choices. He gives amazing sleep strategies and tips for how to get better sleep, to improve your sleep. We talk about the effects on the brain when you don't get great sleep, how this also drives your food choices as well. And we talk a lot about marketing and how we get completely brainwashed and duped by these large food corporations that do not have our best interest in mind, or rather I should say our best

health in mind. He also talks about a new study that he's working on right now regarding epigenetics, and it is so fascinating. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. So with that, let's get into the episode. Before we get into the episode, if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would mean so much to me. It barely takes you any time, and it really helps this show out. So I just want to take a moment and say thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate that you guys listen, and I hope you enjoy the episode. No matter what your health goals are, whether you are looking to lose weight or build muscle, protein is key. And sometimes a chocolate protein shake just sounds so much better than chicken breast. Many of us turn to protein powders, which unfortunately may not be as clean as you think.

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products, please go to bioptimizers.com slash realfoodology and you are going to save 10%. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology. Let's dive into, I want to talk about brain health and depression and just what we know about brain health and inflammation and all of that. And I know that you are a great resource for this. So before we dive into it, can you tell everyone a little bit about what your background is? Like so many people, I had ideas as to how the world worked when I was younger. And I have had to learn through a variety of channels that many of those were incorrect. And so, you know, I had this idea that I was going to be a healer, that I was going to work in healthcare, be a doctor, see patients and

cure people of diseases, heart disease, diabetes, all the things that have really become the top contributors to death and disability around the world and are the top expenses from a healthcare perspective today. So I did internal medicine. And for people who may not know internal medicine, that is the branch of medicine that tends to focus on things like chronic disease, really. So it's managing diabetes, managing heart failure, managing really a variety of heart diseases, looking after people after they have things like stroke and other illnesses. And what I recognized in my training, so it was four years med school and then three years residency, is as much as these were real problems, that the tools I was learning to treat these problems were not actually addressing the cause of the problem. Rather, they were just slowing the rate at which a person got worse. So people were still getting worse. And all I was

doing is just kind of making sure that the drop-off wasn't as precipitous, that it kind of slowed that slope of decline. And the realization here, which I'm sure you know as well, is that modern medicine is really good for managing acute problems. So if you break your arm, you definitely want to go to the ED to have that examined, have that set. If you need a surgery, yes, you want to go in and have a surgeon do that in a modern medical operating theater. So you don't get an infection. They know what they're doing. But as it relates to prevention of disease, modern medicine in the way it's conventionally practiced is terrible. Now, I want to make a really important point here because I know for listeners of this show, we might think, well, Western medicine isn't any good and therefore everything else is the alternative.

I am a Western medicine doctor, meaning I did that training and having come out the other side and step more into the integrative space, I think it's really key to understand that doctors are doing the best they can with the tools they have available. And unfortunately, the tools that they have available are mostly things that don't address the root cause of the disease. Because as I perceive it, the root causes of the diseases are that we are living in a toxic soup. And so the default is for most people in America, they will develop at least one chronic and largely preventable disease. And it's not because they didn't get access to the medications early enough. It's because life has become, modern society has become an unhealthy place. So with that as the background, my refocusing over the last five or so years has really been to try to understand and address

some of the upstream drivers of poor health. And to that end, an area that I perceive as a huge need is for people to understand how their brains work specifically around how they feel, how they make choices, and how that then gets them to be a healthier self. Because if you look at the problems we face today in the modern world as it relates to disease prevention, there's no doubt that eating healthier is good for us. There's no doubt that moving your body is important for your health, that getting good sleep is good for you, that being in community with people you care about,

being outside is important for your health. That's not necessarily the single most important variable anymore because conventional doctors, integrative doctors, everyone agree on that. What people seem to really struggle with is the follow through. It's not going through the takeout and the junk food and putting down the soda. There's no person

out there that I know of, and maybe Courtney, you know somebody, but who's arguing we should be drinking more soda besides the companies themselves. The companies, yeah. That are also funded by studies, but yeah. Well, we can talk about that. We can talk about, I think I know what you're referring to there. But the point being, unless you're hugely biased, unless you have huge industry ties, if you are a health person, you're probably not out there telling people to drink more soda. So that isn't necessarily the issue. The issue is how do we know how to follow through on the stuff

that matters so that we can actually get ourselves to do the things that are healthy, because that is a reflection of our brain state. And to kind of jump ahead a little bit here, what I think people need to understand is that your brain is being actively poisoned by your interactions with the modern world. And it is changing your brain so that you make worse decisions, so that you feel worse, so that you have lower quality of life. And until you appreciate that, and until you start making changes to reverse that damage, you are by probabilities most likely to wind up unhealthy and unhappy for the rest of your life. And that is the sad reality of the modern day. So that's why I'm so focused on it. I perceive this as a huge issue

that we need to address. And there are very real solutions that each of us can take into account for our day-to-day to provide ourselves with the benefit of rewiring our brains for our own good, rather than allowing them to be kind of co-opted by whatever messaging we hear every day. Yeah, that was so beautifully put. And it's such a good reminder for people to hear that because I've touched on this before in the podcast, but I love that you have that conventional allopathic training under your belt because you can really speak to it from that place. And it's important for people to hear this and understand that we are not trying to villainize allopathic doctors, but we need people to

understand that there's a time and a place for them, but we need people to understand that there's a time and a place for them. And we need people to understand that if you're dealing with something more like a chronic disease or you're wanting to focus on longevity, those conventional allopathic doctors are not going to have the answers for you. And they're trying their best, but they are only skilled in a certain area, a certain bucket. And also what happened is that we have a society that all of a sudden got really sick, really fast. This all happened pretty fast. And we were not equipped to deal with this. I agree. And something I say to people is, if you're waiting to see your doctor before you're making health changes, you've lost your

best chance to be healthy. Doctors can't and aren't equipped to solve for that. What they are equipped for is to deal with something that happens that gets severe enough to put you into the algorithm to say, you now have this disease and there is a treatment. Some of those treatments are great. Some of them are not so good. And some of them are downright terrible in that they don't really work, but it's the best you can do. So I'm just putting out as an allopathic doctor, that if you really care about your health, do not wait until you see your doctor to get healthy. If you do, you've lost your best chance at a healthy life. Yeah, we need to be focusing on prevention because oftentimes if it gets to that place where you need an intervention like that, there's going to be side effects or it's going to require you have surgery. You're going to have to go on some pretty

intense medications. And again, not trying to villainize these doctors, but many of them are only trained to look for symptoms and then treat the symptoms with a medicine or a surgery. And we need to be more focused on prevention because we want to avoid that surgery and that pill. We want to avoid getting to that place of desperation in the first place. And that starts with personal accountability and taking accountability for our own health and really taking it into our own hands. I love that we're talking about this. You mentioned that there are real solutions that we can do to optimize our brain health and to get in better shape and to prevent the chronic diseases that we're seeing in our modern society,

what are some of those real solutions that are tangible? Yeah, there are many of them. You can dive into any of the buckets, right? You can talk about from a food perspective, what's the most practical stuff, something that I'm sure your listeners enjoy hearing you talk about. And you could talk about exercise.

You could talk about how to get better sleep. Where I tend to go first, if people say, I want to get my brain back on my team, because I think that is actually the first thing I would say. If you're looking at the long-term, you can't constantly be running up against the brain that doesn't want to participate in health. You say, I want to eat healthier foods. I want to avoid the processed foods. Great. Does your brain want to? Because otherwise you get into the New Year's resolution syndrome where it's, well, I said I wanted to do it and that's enough, right? I said it out loud. I told my friends I was going to go to the gym, so I'm done. It's not how it works. If your brain isn't on your team,

you're always going to run up against that barrier. And it's the reason why most New Year's resolutions fail. Well, you're also fighting something much bigger than you that's chemically driven. No, you're right. So, you know, taking this one step back, understand that you live in a society that is geared for you to be unhealthy, that is geared for your brain to be set up in a way that is unhealthy, that's really important. And I think that kind of offloads a little bit of people having that self-blame for, why am I unhealthy? Why is everybody else in such good shape? They aren't. Let me just tell you, if you look statistically, Americans and increasingly the entire planet are not healthy. Depends on the statistic you look at, because it's not always stuff that you can see superficially. Recent studies showed that almost 90% of Americans are metabolically

unhealthy in at least one way. So assume that most people are unhealthy because that is what the data would tell you. So if you start with this, you really have two options, right? You say, well, people's willpower has dropped off in the last decades. And the reason everyone's unhealthy is because they just eat more calories, right? It's people know they need to exercise more and eat less, and yet they don't do it. So the entire planet, especially United States, is unhealthy because they lost their willpower. I think that's the most ridiculous explanation possible, right? It's the most superficial version of our, every aspect of our life has

dramatically changed in the last hundred years. And even in the last couple of decades, the food, the sleep, the exercise that is understood to be true. So appreciating the deck is stacked against you. That's the starting point, but then you still have to care enough to say, no, my health is worth it. And I want to feel better. So if you do that, then you say, how can I do that? And from my perspective, that first step is to get your brain on your team. Now there are a ton of different strategies that you can use to reprogram your brain for the better. We can talk about specific foods.

We can talk about the gut brain connection and how even the microbiome health might be influencing your brain health. But I like to really focus on as a starting point, two areas. And those two things I'll just put out are improving your sleep quality and improving your habits. So to break this down for a second, sleep is, in my opinion, the most undervalued activity that enables us to become healthier people. And it isn't that everything else doesn't matter as it relates to improving our health. But the thing that I found that I did, I made this mistake so many times, is we overlooked a simple fact, which is our brain does things. We do things as a reflection of our brains that it enjoys. It's so straightforward. You do

things that you like to do. And when you do things repeatedly, they become habits. So let's think about the recommendations that I would constantly make to patients in my clinic. You need to eat healthier food. I want you to put down that bottle of soda. I want you to start going on a walk every day. Are those things that are enjoyable? They're largely not. There's a reason people drink soda, and it's usually because they enjoy drinking soda. There's a reason people watch TV on the couch and don't go for a walk. And it isn't because they love walking. It's because they would prefer to stay on the couch. So we usually recommend things that are not enjoyable rather than asking what

hits the two buckets of being both enjoyable and healthy. And so that gets us to sleep. There is often that feeling you get, well, every time for me, when I get a good night's sleep, I wake up, I feel so much better than had I skipped sleep. And that's pretty much universal. People feel better after they get a good night's sleep and it's healthy for your brain and it sets your brain up for better decisions the next day. So that's why first and foremost, I tell people you're trying to get your brain on your team, pay attention to your sleep. We can talk about sleep strategies if you like, but just generally speaking, as far as a bucket, I go there first because study after study shows

that our brain function improves after sleep, meaning we have better focus, better creativity. We have more empathy for other people. We're able to make generally better decisions, including better decisions about our food, which is really important. People eat on average a couple hundred calories more if they're sleep deprived and those are unhealthy calories. And so the other piece of this, and then I'll pause because I know I've been going on for a bit, is the habits. Okay. So when you're thinking about how to reprogram your brain and your body, you need to think about it the same way. Ideally, you're thinking about maybe income and specifically investing. And there are two big variables to consider there. Passive income is a great thing. Also, compounding interest is a great thing.

So if you're thinking about how to get healthy, you want to think about what can I do that doesn't require me to spend all my energy, all my willpower to make it happen. So if you tell yourself, I'm going to run a marathon every day, you'll maybe get through a day or two if you're in incredibly great shape and then it'll drop off. You can't force yourself to continue to do that. On the other hand, if you want to tap into your brain's ability to form new habits, you can, in essence, harness this 40 plus percent of our decisions, which are unconscious each day, to put them on your team. And that is compounding in the background. so the difference here is trying to say i'm going to get healthy by forcing myself to be healthy every day versus

saying i'm going to get my unconscious my automatic programming of my brain on my team so that even when i'm not paying attention i'm doing things healthier so in that way you get the passive income stream of your brain making healthier decisions each day and you get the compounding interest, right? Because we're talking about an unconscious process that you don't have to actively invest in once those habits are set. And there's a lot to talk about

as it relates to how to form new habits. There's some wonderful books, some wonderful references we can discuss, but the main point there is to find things that you can do repeatedly that are enjoyable, that you can do in the same way every day. And to that end, it's the small things that add up rather than the decision that you're going to absolutely do this extreme thing every day. And somehow your brain and body are going to take over and make that automatic. It just doesn't work that way. So those are the two big things I would start with,

sleep and habits. Wow, that was really helpful, I think, for people listening. And I wanna dive a little bit more into that because what you spoke to is really important for people to understand, which is why I interjected that, that what people don't understand is that there is something else driving you. So if you are, for example, if your gut is inflamed

and you're not eating super healthy foods, as a are, for example, if your gut is inflamed and you're not eating super healthy foods, as a result, it's going to affect your brain as well because we have that direct connection between the vagus nerve and the brain. And then you mentioned also the microbiome and depending on our gut flora, that's also going to drive our food choices. It's going to drive cravings. So yes, there is absolutely a personal responsibility involved here, but there is also an understanding and knowing that all the odds are stacked against us. And there are things that we can do to skew it more to be in our favor, but I think it starts with even coming online and

understanding that the odds are stacked against us. I would say another example, I've started filming this whenever I go into a store and posting it online because I want people to be online to this, which I just find this crazy. You go to Ace Hardware. I went to Ace Hardware the other day. I needed a hammer or something. And I go in and the checkout line is just loaded with snacks, sugary snacks, high processed crap, and a bunch of sodas. And I started thinking about how every single store like this now, you go to Home Depot, you go to the gas station, you go to TJ Maxx, like we're just being infiltrated with junk. We're being sold junk food all the time.

And that, I mean, that's like a whole other thing, but I just wanted to point that out because I think when you start recognizing what's happening and how we can maybe rewire our brains to not even see that as an option for being food anymore, then you might be more aligned to making better choices around that. Yeah, well, let's jump in on that. And I'd love to go back to the gut piece because that's fascinating as well. So my dad and I wrote about this in our book, Brainwash, which is in essence, there's a number of ways to slice this. The planogram is kind of the way a store is set up in order to get people to purchase. The impulse buys are the things that people didn't go to the store to purchase, but because you're there and because it looks good, you just buy it. It's a chocolate bar. No one goes to the store that I know of to buy a Three Musketeers these days, unless it's Halloween. But you're waiting in checkout, you're stressed because if you're like

me, shopping tends to be a stressful experience. You're running late, whatever. You're also- You're bored. That's the other thing, you're bored. And so what is going to be appealing to you? It's going to be, look, this is going to taste good. It's in essence, this really important thing, which is we spend so much of our day mindless of what we're doing. And our phone time is a great example of that. You pick up your phone, you're scrolling, whatever.

You're not really conscious of what you're taking in. You're just doing it because it's a habit. And so in those mindless moments is when we are most vulnerable to being reprogrammed. And TV commercials, another example of that. But what really bothers me is that companies, corporate culture pushes back on us to say, you know, everything is healthy in moderation and we want people to be able to make their own decisions. We want to preserve that freedom of choice. Now that's all nice in practice, but when you think about how the neuroscience and the psychology works, they know darn well that it isn't so straightforward as saying people have free will and therefore can choose what is healthy.

We choose what is available. Sugar makes us preferentially choose certain foods, even if they're unhealthy for us. That's an evolutionary mechanism. And certainly they know that if they line those shelves at the checkout where we have nothing better to do than look around, we are far more enticed to purchase those foods. So it's not as straightforward as saying, well, the consumer should get all of the choices. If you push that forward, it's basically the idea, well, why not have cigarettes at the checkout aisle, right? There's a reason we've made those decisions. And I'll just take this one step further. So the United States is unique in that it allows drug companies to market to us

on TV. So the idea here, again, consumers should know about products. There's nothing objective about the way that is presented. It is designed to distract you with these beautiful actors. Key point. These are actors. These are not real patients who are there to portray a fictionalized version of how great you'll feel with this drug and downplay the side effects that get put in these tiny little letters at the bottom of the screen. We live in this illusory world where we're being told simultaneously that we have complete agency over our decisions, while simultaneously the highest levels of neuroscience and psychological manipulation are happening right in front of us. And we're being told that's not a thing. It doesn't count. And it's happening for... Last thing I'll just say here that really bothers me. I love this. This is great.

It's one thing to say, you are an adult. You're 35 years old. You should be able to make your own decisions as it relates to what food you want to eat. I can understand, I guess, the principled version of that, even though, as I just said, it's not as straightforward as that. But when you market to children, and you can define that however you want, the brain doesn't stop developing until your mid-20s. When you market to children in such a way that you hook them on these addictive foods and beverages so that decades from now, they still have the preference for the cereal with the tiger on it.

We won't say the brand. That's not fair. When you, I mean, so this is another thing. Schools have marketing contracts with soft drink manufacturers to get those machines in schools. We know that these drinks are bad for our health. They're linked to long-term weight issues, metabolic issues, and probably cognitive issues too.

So this isn't something where I don't think any sane person can argue. We're looking at this from the perspective of maximizing freedom, because here's the real terrible part of it. As our brains become more co-opted by the unhealthy stuff that we do to them, we become less able to see through and understand how we're being manipulated. As we age, our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain just behind the forehead, tends to decline in function. And this is especially the case

in conditions like dementia, Alzheimer's disease. It's why scammers tend to preferentially target the elderly. They're more susceptible, and maybe in part because their brains have changed. But if we understand that some of the key drivers of a condition like Alzheimer's, sure, but also worse decision-making and damage to the prefrontal cortex are the very things

that we are kind of co-opting our kids' brains to believe are good for them and that are healthy, you know, you get far enough along and you see how none of this is reasonable. None of this is fair. And if the goal of the government was to protect health, they are doing an absolutely terrible job in protecting our overall health, especially our brain health. Did you guys know that over 70% of sodium in the US diet is consumed from packaged and processed foods?

When you adopt a whole foods diet, you are eliminating or hopefully eliminating these processed foods and therefore sodium from your diet. Now, the solution is not to reintroduce processed foods in your diet, but by not replacing that sodium, you can actually negatively impact your health and performance. If you guys listened to my episode, The Salt Fix with Dr. James Dinek, we learned that sodium is actually a really imperative mineral for the body. Sodium helps maintain fluid balance. It's an electrolyte, so it helps keep us hydrated. It also aids in nerve

impulses. It regulates blood flow and blood pressure. It's incredibly important. And if you're eating a whole real food diet, chances are you're probably not getting enough sodium. Also, this is probably going to be a shock to hear, but if you are just drinking water without adding minerals back into your water, you're not actually hydrating. My personal favorite way to stay hydrated throughout the day is through drinking Element every day. That's L-M-N-T. It's a delicious tasting electrolyte drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don't. So that means lots of salt. There's no sugar in there. It's formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and is perfectly suited for people following keto, low carb and paleo diets. It has a science backed electrolyte ratio, a thousand milligrams of sodium,

200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I drink one of these every single morning. They have a ton of amazing, super delicious flavors. I know a lot of us listening are avoiding natural flavors. So they also have an unflavored one, which is my personal favorite. I love to put it with lemon, but if you want the flavored ones, they have a great variety of different flavors and they have given me an awesome offer to share with you guys. So you guys can claim a free element sample pack when you make a purchase through the link. The link is drinkelement.com slash realfoodology. And in the element sample pack, you're going to get one flavor, one packet of every flavor so that you can try all of them and see which one is your favorite. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do.

Again, it's drinkelement.com slash realfoodology. That's drinkelement.com slash realfoodology. You know, one of my missions with Real Foodology has always been to make eating healthier, more convenient and cost effective. I know eating healthy and getting the right nutrients in can be annoying. It can also be time-consuming and expensive. Organic veggies are pretty expensive sometimes and not always convenient to shop for. So one of the ways that I'm able to support my health is by drinking Organifi every day. I personally like to do their organic green juice and the organic red juice together. I combine them. It's so simple. There's no longer having to shop for vegetables and clean

out a juicer every day. You just put a scoop of each in water and mix them together. I love the taste together. They're organic. They're also glyphosate residue free, so you're not getting the carcinogenic herbicide in there. And it's just super convenient. It also, the reds really make them taste better when you put them together. Also, if you subscribe and save, you can get them as low as $1.98 per day per tub. So make sure you go to Organifi.com slash Real Foodology and use code Real Foodology and you're going to save 20%. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com. I'm like snaps all around. That was an awesome tangent. To go a little bit more into that or just something that you hadn't mentioned, it's all about strategy. And we have to remember that

these companies have massive marketing budgets behind them. And what makes me so mad about this is that all this money that they spend on marketing and branding and strategizing and how to brainwash us essentially how to buy their products, they could be using this to actually just create healthier products, which makes me so mad. They could just be using that money to create a healthier version of something. But again, too, there are studies that show that they use certain colors on packaging to entice us because there's certain colors that evoke certain emotions and cravings, et cetera. So there's also that happening as well. And then, like you said, with the kids, I mean, you make a customer out of them for life if you get them young enough because there are studies that show that foods that you ate when you were growing up, they become your comfort foods when you're an adult.

Those are the foods that you tend to go back to when you're in a state of stress or whatever it is. And so our brains are being hijacked. These foods are highly palatable, highly addictive. And so they are literally causing chemical reactions in our brain that are also making us addicted to those foods themselves. The philosophical piece of this, which is maybe a little bit hard to think through sometimes is we have this idea of ourselves, the identity that's me, right? So I'm Austin, you're Courtney. There's some layer at which you end and the rest of the world begins. And so there's this identity piece to it, which is I made a decision. I feel a certain way. And we take on the responsibility kind of,

if I'm feeling this way, so that's a me thing. But when you look at biology, it's in no way as straightforward as that, right? And you mentioned before, for example, the microbiome. I think we're learning that who we are as people is not different from, or at least is not separate from the health of the bacteria that live on and in us. Because these little microbes are creating chemicals that go to our brains and influence our

brain function. And we're not just talking about little things. We're talking about influencing how we think, how we feel. And so those microbes are being changed by the food we eat. And at a very basic level, our brains are made of the food that we eat. And so if you think about you're eating certain foods because marketers hit you when you're a kid that change your brain so that you feel and think in a different way, then the identity structure, the version of you that you call Courtney that you may or may not be happy with is actually a reflection of so many more inputs. So that's both scary and empowering, in my opinion, because it means you can actually act on the fabric of who you are through things like changing your diet. You're actually changing

the core you, the identity. It's a scary concept. We want to think that I am somehow a static thing, that the me that exists on Tuesday is the same me that exists on Wednesday. But your cells are turning over, right? You're billions of cells turning over in the course of a few days. So you physically are not who you were yesterday, and you chemically are not who you were yesterday. And the things that change who you are, that differentiate you today from you yesterday, are those very signals that you're taking in from the world you're interacting with. So if you're plugging in the signals that are coming from junk food, you're literally building a version of yourself that is perhaps going in the wrong direction.

On the same topic though, if you're pulling in better signals. So if you choose today, usually you would go to Starbucks and have any number of terrible, terrible sugary beverages that are marketed as somehow coffee. Instead, you decide you're going to have, I don't know, you're going to make some green tea. You're going to drink a water. You're going to have a black coffee. You have literally changed the stream of data that is changing who you are. So that's why every individual decision you make is an opportunity to remake yourself from the ground up as a better person. Or again, if you do what most people do and allow the modern world to decide what data you're taking in, you have to expect the version of you tomorrow will be a little bit less healthy, a little bit worse than the version of you today, which is, it's a really unfortunate reality. That's fascinating. I haven't

really thought about it like that before. How, can we go a little bit more into detail for people that are new to this subject? How does the microbiome and, you know, how does our gut flora influence and impact our brain health and our food choices. Yeah. The science here gets very quickly to... It's not scary, but it's mind-blowing because we like to think that... At some point, we thought we were sterile, right? We have the me and then there's the outside world. And then we started to understand that there's all these bugs that live on us. And kind of the idea is, well, kill all the bugs. We don't want bacteria. Kill the germs.

Germs are bad. And then it was more like, well, these bugs that live on us, maybe they're not causing any problems. So let's not worry about them so much. We'll think about other things. And now we're at the point where we know that, yes, there are some bugs that are dangerous. Yes, there are some bugs that may not be doing much, but a ton of them are actually doing good things and we need them to do good things. They're synthesizing

vitamins. They're keeping our gut wall intact. They're lowering levels of inflammation. So it gets a lot of nuance there. So how do these bugs, these trillions of bacteria that live on and in us, and just real quick, the microbiome is all the microbes, so that includes bacteria, but also viruses, protists, archaea, fungi. Really, when we're talking about research here, it's primarily focused on the bacteria that live in the large intestine because that is the largest concentration of bacteria. And we're talking about trillions of bugs, a bunch of different groupings, but trillions of bacteria. So we're talking about trillions of bugs, a bunch of different groupings, but trillions of bacteria. So how do these bacteria influence our health? And maybe more

specifically, how do they impact our brain health? We know, for example, that there's a reason that the majority of our immune system is located in the gut. We're talking 70, 80% of our immune cells and tissue located in the gut. And the reason 70, 80% of our immune cells and tissue located in the gut. And the reason is because these bacteria in our immune system are in constant bidirectional communication. Our immune system learns from our gut because that's how it learns what's going on in the outside world. It picks up data from our food. It also picks up data from the gut microbiome. And then our immune system shoots out signals into the gut, outside of the gut, really. So into the basically space in our intestinal tract

that modifies the gut microbiome, helping certain microbes to survive and kills off other bacteria. Similarly, certain bacteria kill off other bacteria and bacteria create products like short-chain fatty acids that keep our gut wall intact and healthy. So there is an incredible interaction that's happening just there at the gut. With that said, we're still a long ways from the brain. I guess we're about as far as we could be unless the gut was located in our feet. So how does that data get to and change our brains? Well, as you alluded to already, we have a number of nerves that kind of run down and live in our gut. And so there's a whole enteric nervous system, which is kind of nerves that are localized to the gut. So the vagus nerve, part of the autonomic nervous system. When I learned about the vagus nerve in med school and residency, uh, I was really thinking about it in terms of sympathetic parasympathetic. I was thinking about, oh, it innervates the heart. I was thinking about it as it relates to certainly some of the data that went down to the gut. But what I learned is that the majority of the fibers of the vagus nerve actually run from the gut to the brain, which means that it's

actually carrying a whole lot of data from the gut to the brain and telling the brain in real time, here is what's happening in the outside world. So let me just go on a little quick tangent here, because I think it's really important. If you think about how you learn about the world around you, we tend to focus on, well, you see things, you hear things, you might feel things, and that educates us and tells us, is it cold now? What is that person saying? We don't think about the fact that a huge chunk of the external data

that we get in real time as far as what's happening in our environment is actually through the gut. So yeah, you need food for calories. That's the very surface of an incredibly complex story where your body is learning about what's going on in the seasons from the food that I'm eating. Is this food toxic? How should this food influence my GI tract? Does it produce certain hormones that make me full, that make me more hungry? And so there's all these components of food. So we can talk about that in a moment, but they speak to the gut microbiome. They speak to the gut. They speak to the immune system. And the immune system is going to communicate with the brain. So alterations in the gut immune

system speak to the brain immune system, which influences brain function. Alterations in our hormones and our metabolic system, which happens as a result of what happens in our gut through the microbiome, is going to influence our brain function. And the vagus nerve is kind of the most direct version of what happens in the gut gets to the brain because data from the gut has this direct conduit that goes in essence right from the gut straight up to the brain. And based on the rate of firing of this vagus nerve, it seems to change how the brain functions. So the concept of the gut is down and obviously the gut and the brain is up here in the skull and separate has really been destroyed. And what we have in its place is these incredible pathways, these highways by which our

brain and our gut communicate. And so when you eat, yes, you are speaking to your brain. So yes, your brain is driving how you eat. And then the food, these nutrients that we can't even, many of them we don't even know about yet are changing our brain state. So here again, I would just kind of expand the idea of who you are to include the health of the microbiome, to include the food that we eat. All of these things change your identity. If you're trying to get healthy, if you're trying to be a better person, I think you have to take these things into account. Yeah, absolutely. And the way that you put that was really fascinating. So you had mentioned at the beginning of the

episode that we are hardwired to chase things that we love, that we enjoy. And so we need to find things in our life that we need to kind of meet in the middle, right? Where we're doing things that are good for our bodies, but also things that we were actually motivated to do because we love it. And I had shared that, or I actually don't even know if I shared this yet,

but I thought of an example, and this is a bit of a tangent and then I have a question I wanna ask you, but I used to be really, really into cardio because I thought it was really good for me. And then I got to a point where I was really dreading it. And then I just was like, I'm not going to do this anymore because I'm absolutely dreading it. And even though I'm telling myself that it's good for me, I'm forcing myself to do it. And I started to realize that if I was trying to create lifelong practices for my exercise every day

that this was not gonna be long-term sustaining for me. So I started hiking and now I just hike every day and I go for long walks and that's my way of getting exercise in. And that's kind of where I found that balance of meeting in the middle where I was like, this is really good for me, but it's actually also something I really enjoy

because I get outside, I get vitamin D, I get bonding time with my dog. And I was gonna ask you, I have an idea of what I would say about this, but I wanna hear what you have to say for someone who's listening that's like, okay, wow, I'm hearing you say that food is information for our brain and for our guts,

but I really love my Cheetos or whatever it is, or how do I find this balance of what I love, but also what is actually good for me and it's going to be better for my brain and for my overall health? It's such a good question. And I'll just echo what you said because at one point I was running every day and at the time I was kind of enjoying it. But when I moved up to the Seattle area, it's rainy, it's cold. I'm not super motivated to go out there and jog in the wet, cold. So for a while, I just said, well, I'll do what you do. Just I'll find other activities. Maybe it's a walk. But then I was forcing myself to go on the treadmill and I really don't like,

I feel like running on a treadmill is literally the hamster wheel, but I'll do it. I totally feel that too. So long story short there, I've kind of allowed or been excited about getting back into weight training. And the point I make for a lot of people is there's very few things where you have to do it the way people say you have to do it. And I think exercise is one of the best examples where you have to go and run for a 5K every day. When you're telling somebody that and their alternative is no movement, you are doing them a disservice. If you're looking to optimize wellness over the lifespan,

it's area under the curve we need to care about. It's not what happens on a given day. It's how many of all of those days in your life are you getting out and doing something so that you can build that stored value to let you live longer and better? So I'm right there with you as far as the specifics of the exercise piece, but your question is, it's a really interesting one. And I wish there was an easy answer. I can give kind of one of the things that I've been working with, which is, if you think about soda, which is, I would say arguably the best consensus for something that is bad for our health, meaning integrative, complimentary, as well as conventional doctors are all on the same page.

Added sugars are really no good for anyone. So everyone recommends drinking less soda, but people drink it for a reason. And that reason might be caffeine. That reason might be the comfort of having something to drink. That reason might be the sugar. That reason might be that they drink that thing they had as a kid. Everyone in the family had Pepsi. And so Pepsi is associated with good times. Or maybe the Coca-Cola advertisement caught up with them and they just couldn't resist. The point being though, there's good reasons for it. And as you look at how to deconstruct that, you can't just assume that you can replace soda with water and people will be equally satisfied. So I think if you can start to parse out what is

it you're getting from the experience. One example would be when people get home from work, they often reach for something unhealthy because they're coping with the stress of the commute, the workday. And so there you might want to think about, well, what am I really trying to solve for? I'm trying to solve for the stress of the workday and then trying to find something that's maybe healthier. But in the case, going back to the soda, if it's the caffeine piece, you might be able to address a good amount of that with a cup of coffee. I drink black coffee. That's probably not something everyone's going to get on board with, but you can still benefit from finding something that replaces that element that you care about. With the sugar part, it's a little

bit harder. And you probably have a lot of thoughts on the value of looking at your stevias and your monk fruits and the like, but there are solutions that even if they're maybe not quite as good as not having anything, they're probably better than the conventional sugar. And then I would say the effervescence, right? You can break it down that way. Do you just want a fizzy drink? There are a ton of fizzy drinks out there that don't have sugar. You can get Olipop or Spindrift or something that's basically just a flavorful sparkling water. And I find personally, when I'm feeling really thirsty,

those drinks make up that deficit for me. So I don't need the soda. So the point I'm making here is there are a number of reasons why we choose the foods that we choose. And it's not always as straightforward as saying, oh, it tastes good. Sometimes that's the case, but often it's the psychological pressure. It's the stress. It's the, I didn't get good sleep last night. And so now I'm just trying to grab something because I feel bad and I'm tired and I'm hungry. And so to deconstruct that, you go a long way. What I will say is we know that, as I said before, people who are sleep deprived tend to make worse food decisions and eat more food. So as many of those core factors that you can look for ahead of time, the better.

And the one other thing I'll say, which is just kind of a general tip, is when I was younger, there was this whole concept of pre-gaming. And I won't go into the details here, but the idea here being, you want to kind of consume less expensive alcohol, I guess, before you go out and have to consume the more expensive alcohol.

But I think we need to be pre-gaming for food too. So if you're going into a scenario where you know you're going to be tempted to eat unhealthy food, that is an opportunity to eat something that is filling beforehand, and it will dramatically lower your chances of feeling tempted on the back end. So I think as people say, I'm going to go to this party at this friend's house, and they're going to have all these snacks and stuff out, have your meal beforehand. You'll be so much less likely to go and have to indulge in all the chips and the snacks and the other stuff that are out there. So there's kind of the preventive strategies so that before you get to the instance

in which you would be making the unhealthy choice, you are less likely to actually make that unhealthy choice. Those were such helpful, tangible tips for people. I want to add a little bit onto what you were saying and just share a little bit about my experience. So when I first started getting into health, I was absolutely addicted to sugar, like hardcore. And as I started reading more about the way that our food affected our bodies, and I really was on a journey of trying to get healthier, I really struggled with having a sugar addiction.

And so initially what I started doing, and on top of everything else, just being in love with the foods that I loved that I didn't want to give up initially. So what I started doing was what you mentioned was just trying to find healthier, healthier alternatives. So for example, if, you know, if I was looking for an alternative to a Coke, I would get an Olipop or I would get a Zevia, which is a Stevia sweetened soda. And, or like, let's say I was craving, I don't know. I used to eat Taco Bell in college and I'm embarrassed to admit that, but I was 19 and I didn't know the connection between the food that I was eating and, you know, the health of my body. And as I started getting healthier, I was like, okay, well, how can I like make my favorite

Taco Bell items at home with organic ingredients, clean, whole, real foods. I know exactly what's going into it. Now I've found that as I use that as a stepping stone to get myself away from those highly processed foods, I don't really even crave those kinds of things anymore. And I'm not sitting here saying that I'm the perfect picture of health, that I don't ever eat sugar or anything like that. That's not at all what I'm saying. But as you start turning towards those

healthier alternatives, you start consuming less sugar over time. You start eating the whole real food ingredients and it's not the highly palatable food-like products that are meant to be addictive, that are changing the chemistry of your brain. You just start craving healthier foods and you start to realize that you're not even wanting those foods anymore. Yep. That's accurate. And I will say something that people will find and maybe that you found, I know I have, is sugar is added to almost every food and beverage you'll find in the world. And depending on how you use these words, I see it as kind of a metabolic toxin. And so you are being poisoned a little bit every time you consume something with

sugar. And let me break that down for a second. You can define poison however you want. I look at it as something that is going to kill you earlier, decrease your quality of life. If those are the terms, then sure. And so once you go off sugar, what you will find is that your taste buds will adapt in such a way that you will be able to detect sugar in products where it never tasted sweet before. Maybe the best example is sweetened tea. It is incredible how much sugar goes into sweetened tea. So when I grew up in Florida, getting the sweetened tea was a thing. You'd go to, Florida's weird, right?

Because it's South, but it's not exactly South, but sweet tea was was a thing. You'd go to, Florida's weird, right? Because it's South, but it's not exactly South, but sweet tea was still a thing. But when you stop drinking products with sugar in them and you taste this, you'll say, this is syrup. And so I think once you can change your brain state to saying, when I'm tasting sugar, that is a signal, this is bad for me. It's a lot harder to say, oh, I feel good about consuming this despite that. And you can be as intense about this as you want. I think I tend to be on the extreme end where I tend to ask too many questions about the foods I eat. And I tend to get a little bit upset about what I see on the nutrition facts, but start paying attention to where sugar is added to your foods. And if you just do that,

make it your mini campaign to say, I'm going to reduce my intake of foods with added sugar as much as I can. You're doing already an incredible service for your health. And maybe what's most important, you are getting a direct visible portal into how much the food system has dumped in these terrible, unnecessary, I should say, molecules, simple sugars in order to keep us consuming those foods. Yeah. And I always tell people that there's a really easy way to start this. Just start taking out all the products that have sugar in them, that if you didn't buy those products anymore and you bought alternatives that didn't have sugar, you wouldn't really notice it. For example, you're going to notice if you didn't buy those products anymore and you bought alternatives that didn't have sugar, you wouldn't really notice it. Like, for example, you're gonna notice if you're eating a cookie that doesn't have sugar.

Like that's the whole premise of the cookie. But if you're having like, let's say a salad dressing that should not have sugar in it or a pasta sauce or soup. I mean, everything I'm naming, by the way, guys, I've gone to the grocery store and found sugar in it. I actually did a couple of videos on my Instagram where I was just showing foods that you would never normally think had sugar. I found a container of feta crumbles that had white cane sugar in it. I was

blown away by that. So my point is, it's like, buy the feta that doesn't have the sugar. Buy the ketchup that doesn't have the sugar. But just when you start making those conscious choices, you already, without even really recognizing what's going on, you're cutting out so much sugar already. And then you can start addressing the other things like the, you know, I'm craving the gummy bears and the cookies or whatever. But like, just start there first. Nut milks, peanut butter. I mean, everything has sugar now.

At least know when you're being bamboozled, right? Yes. So if you're going, I love that. Because if you're going to eat a cookie, I have tried to make cookies without sugar now. At least know when you're being bamboozled, right? So if you're going, I love that because if you're going to eat a cookie, I have tried to make cookies without sugar. They're awful. You need sweetener. And I guess sugar and sweetener are not necessarily the same thing. And I'm sure you have content on the different types of sugars and there's probably some that are better than others. So maybe don't dump all the aspartame into your sugar mix. Maybe go with something like stevia. Please don't do that.

Yeah, or monk fruit is great too. Right, exactly. But the point being here, don't let people sneak it into the foods that you're really not benefiting from it anyway. As you said, you buy that pre-made salad dressing. Does it need 10 grams of sugar per serving? Absolutely not.

And they put it in there because they know, first of all, it's super cheap. And second of all, it'll keep you coming back for more. So don't give food manufacturers the ability to warp your thinking like that. So I really like what you're saying. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it's an easy way to start,

because I think a lot of people are confused. Also, it's overwhelming. I mean, all of this, if you're just starting out, it can be super overwhelming at first, but it gets easier the more you get into a rhythm and a routine with it all. I want to talk a little bit more about, well, just in general. So we've been talking all about brain health and we've talked obviously a lot about how our palates have been hijacked or brains have been hijacked. You mentioned a little

bit about sleep and if you want to dive a little bit more into that, or is there something else that we haven't mentioned yet that's important and would be a solution as to how people can help better their health? So basically, you know, they're listening to this whole episode and then they're going, oh my God, well, what do I do now? Like, how do I, what's the first couple steps, you know? Yeah. Nothing, nothing can be done. This is it. This is how it ends. Yeah, of course. Thanks for listening, guys. Yeah. It's a good point. So maybe we could touch on two more things. I wanted to go one level deeper into the microbiome because I think there's just some really cool research I'm involved with. So big picture wise, we know that food influences our health. I imagine if somebody is listening to this podcast,

they probably believe that food influences our health. And so you think, okay, how then? And then you start to get a little bit more into camps. So some people say, well, it's the calories. Calories in versus calories out. People who eat too many calories are unhealthy. People who don't eat enough calories are unhealthy. It's just about hitting the calorie sweet spot. Again, I'm going to make an assumption that if you're listening to this, you're probably not quite there. But if you are quite there,

I highly advise that you continue to learn more. So if you say it's more than just calories, then is it the building blocks of the food? Is it the macronutrients? Is it the fats, the carbs, the proteins? Or if you go one step further, is it the micronutrients, the vitamins and the minerals? And so is it saying that certain macronutrients are bad for you and other macronutrients are good

for you? Same with the micronutrients. Where we have had an idea for a while, and when I say we, researchers and I guess scientists in general, is that there are additional nutrients in food beyond macros and micronutrients, and specifically in plant foods called phytonutrients or phytochemicals, that these have some sort of an impact on our health. And so there's a big group of molecules. Polyphenol is probably the best known of these. And so researchers and papers will say, well, they are antioxidants. And so you want to get your antioxidants. There's almost no research showing that supplementation with antioxidants is good for our health, by the way. That it influences in a positive way human health parameters.

But still, it's the conversation of antioxidants are good. So that's why the grapefruit is great for you because it's got the antioxidants. It's not so much about the carbs, the fats, and the proteins. It's not so much about maybe some of the other things. Maybe there's some vitamins or antioxidants, but also it has these plant nutrients. So anyway, with all that said, I've been involved with some research over the last really year and a half, and we're just wrapping it up now. And the idea behind it is we believe, or I believe, that certain foods are better than other foods. I don't know if that's something you

agree with, but I think it's kind of a basic premise that certain foods seem to be better for our health. But the question is kind of why? Is it the absence of the bad stuff? Is it more of the good stuff? Is there more to the story than just it's high in zinc, it's high in magnesium, it's got a lot of omega-3 fats. And so there's the idea that these phytochemicals like polyphenols, like quercetin, luteolin might have some sort of an impact on our health beyond just the antioxidant properties. So what we have done in this study is we had a group of 50 people and we had them take nutrients from this plant called Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is, it's a plant that is kind of has been grown for thousands of years, but people stopped growing it because I guess they decided

that wheat and corn and soy were a far better use of the vast majority of our agricultural resources. So in case people don't know, that's literally all we grow today. But this used to be a plant that we grew in America, very high in these phytochemical, phytonutrient, polyphenols. And we've kind of phased it out except for in a couple of specific spots. So we had access to this plant. We kind of reviewed the nutrients and then we gave people the nutrients from this plant to see what it would do to their health.

And we looked at something beyond the antioxidants. We looked at what's called epigenetics. Epigenetics, I know we're covering a lot of ground here, but epigenetics is the antioxidants. We looked at what's called epigenetics. Epigenetics, I know we're covering a lot of ground here, but epigenetics is the idea that it's not just about your DNA and how it's used. It is the layer on top of your DNA that decides how the DNA is used that matters. So we used to think it was nature versus nurture, that you had your genes and there was the environment. It turns out those lines are incredibly blurry. And the reason they're blurry is because what you do in your life changes the way your DNA is used. That is epigenetics. So we're just wrapping up this study now, but the goal was to see can a plant by way of the epigenetic changes influence our

health outcomes? About 50 people, like I said, and we're starting to see this signal that for people who are aging quicker, that some of these nutrients are associated with a decrease in the rate of aging. So we can maybe talk about this at some point when the study is complete. But the point being, I think we're finally at the point where we can start to say, how does food change our health? Well, yes, it's the macronutrients. Yes, it's the micronutrients. But beyond that, are there signals contained in our foods that are speaking to our DNA and changing the way that these fundamental building blocks of humans are being used? So if you start to talk about how identity is kind of a construct in the way it's usually portrayed, and you start to expand who you are to the environment around

you, to the microbiome, to the plants you eat, to their microbiome, which changes their levels of these phytochemicals, you get yourself to a point of saying, well, there's a little bit more depth to all of this stuff than what I've been told. And once you get there, I think it's so hard to walk back and say, food is simple. It's calories in versus calories out. It's making sure I hit my macros. It is such a much more beautiful story. And to understand that plants can change the way that our DNA is expressed means that there is no fundamental me in this. This is a system. It's a large ecosystem. We're all influencing each other. The food you eat is influencing you. You're influencing the food you eat. And I think, you know, just to kind of skip ahead here, where this will go is it will

give us the ability to kind of get to food as medicine in a way that we've never heard about before, because now you're targeting specific areas of our genes as far as their activation. So if it's a person with inflammatory disease, we're talking about what plant might be best for you, not because it's an antioxidant, but because we know this plant contains nutrients, a group of nutrients. We're not talking about just super doses of vitamin C or quercetin, whatever. We're talking about this plant contains wisdom that we know can interact with our wisdom and bring things back to balance. So it's really, really cool stuff. We'll be updating the trial soon. Yeah. I would love to have you come back out on the podcast, talk about that when you have

the results. So just so I understand what you're saying, just to give a more granular example or like palatable example. So since we know the way that epigenetics works, let's say that someone has a BRCA gene, for example, does not necessarily mean that that person is going to get breast cancer. It's more having to do with if something in the environment is going to pull the trigger that then leads to the breast cancer. So what you're saying is that

we may be able to pinpoint certain foods that may be able to support the gene in the way that it is not turned on and can keep you from getting breast cancer? With genes, some people will have a gene, whether it's the ApoE3 or BRCA gene, and don't develop the disease. So we think about certain diseases as being genetically driven. And there are some where it's basically binary. You have a double copy of the gene, you're going to develop it. And there's some therapeutics that might be helpful now,

but for the most part, it's established. You're born with this, you know, from the moment you come out of the womb and even beforehand, you are predestined to getting that disease. But that is not the majority of diseases that are related to genes. What the majority is, is that these things are, you know, to use the analogy, they're dimmer switches. They're not on and off switches. And so then the question is what controls the dimmer switch? And so that is the science of epigenetics. What we're talking about is there are things that we can do that influence the way that those genes are expressed. So if you are at a higher risk, I mean, let's talk about a future scenario, which is, first of all, we sequence your genome. So we know you have all these different things that are considered as risk factors for different diseases. Those now become, and this is kind of in the words of Jeff

Bland, those are opportunities, right? Those are not eventualities. Those are opportunities for us to do things differently in a way that optimizes for our health outcomes. So it may be the case that at some point in the future, once your DNA is kind of examined and we know what genes you have, we say, based on this, we recommend a diet that contains the following. We recommend this much exercise. We really recommend that you get this many hours of sleep. We maybe recommend certain supplements, maybe even recommend certain pharmaceutical drugs. But the point being that epigenetics kind of promises that we get access to what has been seen as this glass box of machinery that we weren't allowed to touch. It was our DNA

and it was outside the bounds of what we could act on. We could only act on what happened after the DNA was used. And that just does not seem to be the case anymore. Wow, that's so fascinating. Okay, I would love to talk to you again about this when you have more updates. You've said this a couple times now, but if we have a poor night of sleep, it's going to drive our food choices. And for people to understand that more, the reason being is because if you don't have enough sleep, then your body is looking for a quick fix of energy. And so you're going to reach for those high sugary snacks to get a really quick fix of glucose to get energy, to really simplify it. Yeah. So let's just do a couple of quick sleep tips because this is really high value in my

opinion for most people. So first of all, assume that you don't sleep well. And why do I say that? It's because there are so many people who have either a real bonafide sleep disorder, like obstructive sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or who are just not getting high quality sleep. Signals you're not sleeping well. Are you sleepy during the day? Are you finding yourself needing to take naps? Are you nodding off at work? Do you feel like your energy levels are low? Do people tell you that you snore? Do you wake up during the night? Do people tell you toss and turn? All of these things are data that should tell you, I really need to see if my sleep is good.

Now, there's a number of ways you can actually analyze your sleep. You can do a whoop, an aura, you can do a sleep study. I'm not necessarily gonna advocate for any of those until maybe at the end of this, but I would start with, what are the things that all of us can do that are linked to more optimal sleep?

And these tend to be very straightforward. So what I like to do is kind of work backwards from the time of sleep. One of the most consistent things that improves sleep quality is consistency. So trying to get into bed and out of bed at the same time for five to six days of the week is an awesome way to start prioritizing your sleep.

Your body's very smart and has these internal clocks. And when you throw it off by going to sleep at 11 o'clock one night, 2 a.m. the next night, it really messes with your whole circadian rhythm. So try to set a continuous bedtime and even consider setting an alarm for 30 minutes ahead of time. You set an alarm to get up in the morning. Why not set an alarm to go to sleep? It's that important. So that's first. Then say, what can you do to prepare your brain and body for going to sleep? So I would recommend in at least the hour before bed to try to reduce your exposure to activating content. And I would say that applies to any sort of media you take in. Instagram. Instagram is bad for its own reasons.

I think Instagram is bad for the social comparison piece. I feel like Twitter is bad because people see other people bragging and they feel bad about themselves there. So to some extent, that's the case with LinkedIn. But what I really would advocate for is don't watch the news. Don't read the news before bed.

News is designed to be sensationalized, to be negative, to activate your stress response. So if you're going to read the news, that is not something to do before bed. If you're going to watch the news on TV, that's even worse because that gets us to the other part of this, which is blue light is activating. It suppresses melatonin. So trying to reduce exposure to blue light in the hours before bed. Some data on blue light blockers, the tinted glasses and all.

I think maybe what I would say is probably the most important thing to do is to try to actually not watch TV and be on your phone in the hour before bed. If you are going to be on your devices, try to use the night shift if you can, but try to minimize that. And coming back to the activating content, the one that I'm constantly reminded about is try not to engage in super stressful conversations right before bed. So for people who have a partner, who you get in bed with your partner, I have this habit of let's just dissect some sort of a topic that I find interesting that can throw everything off. So don't do that.

Just try to make the conversations less stressful before bed if you can. The other things I'll mention very briefly. So we talked about light, we talked about stressful content, is to try to minimize your noise exposure at night if you can. So for people who can help it, try to make sure that doors are sealed, all that type of stuff. Sound machine can be helpful for some people. And then working backwards even before that, I would say, be aware that caffeine has a six hour half-life. So if you're drinking coffee at 2 p.m., half of that coffee is still around at 8 p.m. So for me, I cut off caffeine at 2 p.m. Some people will find it might be noon or later that, or earlier, I should say that they need to cut off that coffee to sleep well.

And alcohol is, you know, you're going to have a lot of people talking about this this year. It's, I don't, I don't know what we were telling ourselves. I feel like you want to see bias in action. It's, oh, alcohol is good for you in small amounts. Okay. Okay. In any case, alcohol damages your sleep cycle. And so not to say that I'm a fan of

the morning martini in the airport or whatever, but if you're drinking right before bed, I always thought about those people. It's literally 6 a.m. and you're in the airport and they're in the bar drinking. What is this plan? I wonder the same thing. I'm like, where are you going? Aren't you going to be confused and possibly miss your flight trying to get on the plane? I don't, yeah. I actually witnessed a woman get kicked off sitting next to me on the plane because she was so drunk. And it was crazy because we were flying overseas and she got kicked off the plane. And then we found out later that she left her phone on the plane. Oh, it was bad. Anyways, that's yeah. So two things. One is we need to figure out better. What are the reasons people drink at those hours in the morning? Because that's just an interesting

thing. And second is if you're going to consume alcohol, I think with dinner is one thing, with lunch is another thing, but don't have a nightcap. You really don't want to do that. And especially don't do one of these combo drinks with sugar and alcohol. You're literally just doing everything you can to throw off your metabolism. So try to minimize alcohol before bed. The last thing I'll say, and again, we're just working backwards from the time you actually go to sleep all the way back to the next or to the previous morning. Andrew Huberman's really big on this right now. He's, you know, you probably know what I'm gonna say next is getting the morning sunlight. So I live in the Pacific Northwest,

and I know he says that there's still a benefit, even if it's cloudy, but it's, it's pitch black until about 8am. So I actually have a full spectrum light that I use in the morning, but trying to get some natural light in your eyes in the morning, I think is a great thing for a number of reasons. And it does seem like at least in some research, it's backed by helping people with their sleep. So that was, that was a number of tips. If you pick one or two of those coming back to the earlier stuff, pick a simple thing that you can stick to. You're going to do great, but those are, Oh, one more I wanted to bring up. So this is one, uh, I heard Matthew Walker speak not too long ago and people ask him, what's your top tip. And he's talking

about temperature regulation. It turns out that if you set your thermostat a little bit lower, that might help with your sleep. So mid sixties is kind of the range that most research would suggest. I did a podcast in the UK yesterday and I could not do the conversion, but I guess now I know it's about 14 degrees Celsius. But being at a slightly lower temperature seems to be associated with falling and staying asleep. So that's another thing

you can do in your night. That's great. Those are all really good tangible tips that people can take away from this episode. So I want to ask you before we go a personal question that I ask all my guests.

I'm really curious to know what your health non-negotiables are. So these are things that no matter how crazy your day is, that you prioritize for your own health. Yeah. So let me start by saying that everyone has their ratio. Let's say 80% healthy, 20% unhealthy. Mine is a little more restrictive than most. And so I'm not trying to tell other people that they should do what I do, but sleep is first. So getting seven hours of sleep, if that doesn't

happen, something has gone wrong. It's either unavoidable because of travel or there's somebody really important that I want to spend time with or it's a wedding or something, but for the vast majority of nights, it's the seven hours of sleep. And then trying to prioritize the quality of that sleep. I eat healthier, I believe, than most people who are healthy people. And you can define healthy however you want. I tend to be pretty consistent about eating things that... I had something I said a while back, which is trying to think about is everything that goes into a food, something I can vouch for. And so the elements that I eat, I would say the vast majority of the time are things that I can explicitly say, these are individual foods as opposed to, you know, it's a process, whatever. So I would say I'm very consistent

about avoiding added sugar, unless again, there's some sort of a event or something else happening. I would say at least for the last, I don't know, year or two, I have not done breakfast. And I'm not necessarily saying that that's something that everyone has to do, but I find that waiting a little bit longer before kicking off my meal is something pretty consistent that I've done. And then exercise. Yeah. I mean, at least every other day, I would say this isn't an absolute everyday kind of thing. Those are the main ones. I do meditate for 10 minutes, the majority of mornings, but if I miss a day for travel or something else, I don't get on my case about that.

That's what I got. Those are great. Those are all great. I would absolutely love to have you back on. I had so many questions that I wanted to ask you, but I just love the way that our conversation went today. So I'm very grateful to have you on and thank you so much for giving me your time to come on the podcast. We'd love to have you back.

And can you please tell people where they can find you? Yeah. Well, I really appreciate the conversation too. We had on some good topics, I thought. And yeah, so you can find me a couple of places. My website is austinperlmutter.com or on Instagram at Dr. Austin Perlmutter. And the research I'm doing is with a group called Big Bold Health. And so that's bigboldhealth.com. And so we'll be putting out that information once it's available. Those are the main places you can find me right now. I'm trying to set up like a coffee and camera walk where I live, but that won't be applicable for most people. I love that. We'll keep you updated on that too. So thank you so much for coming on today. Fantastic. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. a resonant media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com. I 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 nutrition 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. Looking to build a more robust foundation in your health and well-being?

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