The Bossticks - Dr. Darshan Shah On How To Live Longer & Feel Better, Key Lifestyle Shifts, & Becoming The CEO of Your Own Well-Being

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

#819: Join us as we sit down with Dr. Darshan Shah – Founder & CEO of Next Health, board-certified surgeon, health & wellness expert, published author, & entrepreneur. At 21 years old, Dr. Shah earned his medical degree, becoming one of the youngest doctors in the US. He went on to continue his training at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, achieve board certification, and establish Next Health – the world's first & largest Health Optimization & Longevity clinics – where he has helped thousands enhance their well-being & extend their lifespan. In this episode, Dr. Shah shares his journey into functional medicine, uncovering root causes of health issues, & the key lifestyle shifts everyone should be making today. He dives into the importance of prioritizing wellness, becoming the CEO of your own health, & monitoring critical health markers like high blood pressure. Plus, he reveals proactive, preventative health strategies that can transform your life starting today!   To Watch the Show click HERE   For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM   To connect with Dr. Darshan Shah click HERE   To connect with Next Health click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE   To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE   Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE   Get your burning questions featured on the show! Leave the Him & Her Show a voicemail at [phone].   This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential   Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE and LTK page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn's favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes.   Visit c1p.org to donate to the Community First Project, a mission to make communities safer by ensuring the quality & integrity of our nation's law enforcement agencies.   This episode is sponsored by Beam   Go to shopbeam.com/SKINNY and use code SKINNY at checkout for up to 40% off.   This episode is sponsored by AG1   Check out DrinkAG1.com/skinny to get this offer!   This episode is sponsored by YNAB   TSC Him & Her Show listeners can claim an exclusive three-month free trial, with no credit card required at YNAB.com/skinny.   This episode is sponsored by Skims   Check out SKIMS best intimates including the Fits Everybody Collection and more at skims.com/skinny #skimspartner   This episode is sponsored by Prolon   Just visit ProlonLife.com/SKINNY to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift.   Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Hello, once again, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential, Him and Her show. Today we're diving deep into the future of health, wellness, and longevity with a true expert, our friend Dr. Darshan Shah. He's not just a board certified surgeon and health optimization specialist, but he's also the founder of Next Health, I'm sure many of you have heard of, the world's first and largest longevity-focused clinic with over 20,000 surgeries under his belt, a background at the Mayo Clinic, and deep expertise in biohacking and health span expansion, Dr. Shaw is the ultimate resource for anyone looking to level up their well-being.

If you're curious about cutting-edge health tech, longevity secrets, practical ways to feel your absolute best and understanding what's really going on in the medical industry in their healthcare space. This episode is for anyone that wants to feel better, manage their health, get the most cutting edge information when it comes to taking care of ourselves. With that, Dr. Darshan Shaw, welcome to the Skinny Confidential, Him and Her show. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. What is the latest and greatest in longevity? What are we about to see that we haven't seen? Yeah, it's pretty incredible, actually, what's happening in the longevity space. And there's two or three things that I think people need to keep their eye on.

And, you know, like with anything in medicine, there's going to be a lot of misconceptions. There's going to be a lot of people selling things that don't really work. But I really believe there's three main themes in the longevity space that are going to make a massive difference in the next five to eight years. Number one, of course, is AI, right? And I think what we're seeing, Jason Hwang, the CEO of Nvidia, someone asked him a few weeks ago in San Francisco, a student asked him, like, what do you most? excited about with AI. And you think he'd say something about, you know, more chips and artificial gender intelligence. He's like, the number one thing is how we can replicate human biology on a computer to such a high degree of precision that we can test millions of molecules on a computer.

Break this down for someone like me who's a kindergartner when it comes to AI. Well, I don't understand what I mean. I've heard even like I saw somebody the other day. Well, you were planning your suits online on AI today. I saw he has this whole closet thing. The other, well, you could do so many things, but the other day somebody posted that they took their blood panels and they put it into AI and it said it caught things that the physicians may not just that they couldn't

make the connections that the AI was able to make just by looking at his blood panels. Is that what you mean? That's just V1. I mean, V1 is you have blood panels that you do all the time. You can just feed into chat GPT and it will find things and give you patterns that many doctors could possibly

not because they just don't have the time, they don't have the context and the vat. The vast degree of knowledge. But this is like five steps above that to where, you know, our human body's incredibly complex at a cellular level. There's millions of processes going on every second in every cell, DNA being transcribed, proteins being made. Imagine replicating all of that machine in a computer. So when you do that, if there is a new peptide you want to try, you want to see how it affects like a liver cell, for example, that can be done in a computer versus a 10-year time period and billions of dollars to make a pharmaceutical

and then test it and do randomized control trials and go through the FDA. And so I really believe, you know, Ray Kurzweil, he's a chief futurist at Google, he said that we're going to reach a point where we can figure out every year of human existence how to live a year longer. And when you do that, that's called longevity, escape velocity.

Now we have the potential to add many, many more productive years to our lives. And some people will get religious about that, You know, they're like, we have to all die. There's going to be societal implications. I feel like, you know, humanity always figures out a way. And this is coming during our lifetimes. What's the most amazing case and story that you've seen? Because you've truly seen it all.

What's something that, like, rocked your world where you were like, I'm on the right path? I mean, I can start with my story. Please, you know, I think it's relevant to tell your story. And first, for context with the audience, we had the pleasure of sitting down with you at a dinner with our mutual friend Brian Johnson. Hello, Brian. But don't die dinner. Don't die dinner.

Great group of people. Really hit it off. And we were familiar with you through Next Health, which I'm sure many people are. But I don't think people realize the extensive background that you have in medicine and how many early accolades you have. Is it true? True, you became a full-fledged doctor at the age of 21? Yeah.

Yeah. How common is that? Do we house their vibes. It's pretty uncommon. I was one of probably like at that time period, maybe five or six people in the country that became a doctor at 21. And yeah, I did my first surgical procedure at 21. I started off as a surgeon. And I learned surgery. I did trauma surgery and general surgery for 10 years. And then I went to the Mayo Clinic to train in reconstructive surgery. And so, you know, it was nice being young because I had time to have multiple careers in medicine, three, to be exact. my first one as a general and trauma surgeon, my second one as a reconstructive surgeon, and then my third in the health optimization and longevity space. And yeah, that's kind of where my story starts.

What is the workload that it takes to become a doctor at 21? What did your days and nights look like when you were doing that? I mean, it's just 24-7 learning, right? You're learning constantly. You're spending nights in the library. You are figuring out new ways to learn because you need to learn fast. a lot. I went to a really great medical school in Kansas City, Missouri, and all of us just kind of banded together and just studied our asses off, basically. Wait, I thought medical school

is six years. It's actually eight years, four years of college and four years in med school. But this program I went to was a combined med school and college program where you went all summer and during all vacations and took a ridiculous course load to get it done in six years. So how many, like, okay, the average person that has finished college that's a bachelor's, which is we're going, how many courses on average compared to what you were taking? I mean, we were taking by about double compared to what... When did you start doing this? Like, how old were you? I was 15 when I went to this.

So were you just like a gifted student? I mean, I don't know if I was gifted or just worked hard or a little bit of both, but I did very well in school. You were like the guy that was getting straight-age. I was cheating off your paper. Probably. I would have let you cheat. I had a lot of like a lot of little things I did.

I'd put it up my skirt, the answer. What's the old move when the teacher's like, when they look at you and you're good car, you didn't have that problem. I had that problem. Okay. No, no. I really, the reason I asked this is because like,

obviously, you know, we do our research for these things. And, you know, we've interviewed people in your field before. But I just think that it's such an accolade to highlight how much you did so early because it's, I mean, I can only imagine what that workload looked like. Yeah, it was a lot of work. But at the same time, you know, I didn't know any different back then. I think, you know, I was raised in a family where it was just, you just worked hard. He just worked hard and you worked a lot.

You worked all the time. And I just carried that through through med school. I saw the light later. I'm like, I'm killing myself here. And that was part of the problem. I got really sick after working really, really hard for 20 years. And, you know, I was coming close to like knocking on death's door. I decided I have to make a change, and that's where 10 years ago I changed my life, you know?

Why were you knocking on death store? So I had multiple medical diagnoses, metabolic syndrome, number one, and that's kind of a combination of five factors that are problematic. That's also a root cause of many other diseases, and so I was at high risk for a cardiac disease at a very young age. I was 40 years old and high risk of heart attack and stroke because I had really high uncontrolled blood pressure. And then the icing on top of the cake was I developed an autoimmune disease that started. You can kind of see like this side of my head, the skin is much thinner. This autoimmune disease was eating away at the skin of my scalp and also my skull bone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's called

Coup de Sabre, a very rare condition. No one knows what causes it, but it was, it was pretty bad. And it was progressing rapidly to where I might have needed like, you know, facial reconstruction. I have a question that I've never gotten to ask on this show. So I'm fascinated with doctors and nurses because it's so opposite of my personality that I like to read books about it. I'm just fascinated. I could never do it. She's deathly afraid of hospitals and surgery and needles. I will literally take my shoes off, throw them away and throw away my clothes after I go in a hospital. Like I have a problem. But I wonder about this all the time because when I read about it, it's that you guys are not getting any sleep, you're not getting any sunlight because you're underneath those fake artificial lights, you're constantly in cortisol. You're also around all different kinds of diseases and viruses and bacteria all day long, including staff. It feels to me like being a doctor and a nurse is, and correct me if I'm wrong, go off on me, unhealthy. It is the most unhealthy profession. And, you know, the,

rate of suicide amongst medical professionals is the highest out of many, most professions. And that's because it's also very unhealthy for your mental state, you know, to do doing this. I remember there were weeks I would go by that I would never see the sun. Like literally did not see sunlight for maybe a week or two in a row. And you work so hard for 48 hours in a row. And I would fall asleep driving on the way home in my car because I was just exhausted from that cortisol high being totally gone. And so that was part of the, that was the problem, right? Like I was working my butt off and super stressed all the time, not sleeping, eating garbage. And it's the unhealthiest professions. And you think, you know, doctors and nurses should know how to stay

healthy. In reality, we're not taught anything. This is the misconception that everyone has. The doctors and nurses are taught how to be healthy. Back when I went to medical school, we were taught zero about health. You're only taught about how to diagnose a disease and what pill or surgery can fix that disease. This is so fascinating to me, though, because the cafeterias that you guys are eating in and the vending machines and you guys are grabbing a stickers in between like a surgery, it seems like.

And then you have to do all this output and you're so tired. Like you said, you're falling asleep. What is the solve, though, because we need doctors and nurses, like is the solve to prescribe more things that are natural? Like, I read these books and I'm like, what do you do? So here's a solve. And by the way, that kind of resonates with me because our hospital that I trained in had a McDonald's in the cafeteria. It's like so crazy now that I think about it. You just brought back that memory.

Nature's Valley granola bar? My blood pressure is so high. I'll get a Big Mac. Yeah, exactly. With the whole side of basically salt with a little bit of fry added to it, you know. But okay, so here's a solve. The reason doctors are durses, in, frankly, the entire medical system is working so hard is because we have an incredible number of sick people. Almost everyone has some degree of illness that they seek out professional help from the Western medical system. And because of the massive prevalence of chronic disease, that system, our Western medical system, which is an incredible system, by the way, is totally overburdened,

right? And so all the professionals are working two or three times the amount that they should be working because there just aren't enough people to take care of all the people. And that's because of the burden of chronic disease. Remember, our Western medical system was formed to take care of you if you got a life-threatening infection or you got hit, you got a traumatic event, right? That's why you went to the doctor. But then what happened is that system started treating chronic disease. And when you have 50% of people who are chronic disease is just, there's just not enough bandwidth there. So the solve is to unburden that system with a new system that focuses on reversing chronic disease and maintaining optimal health, optimizing your health.

So you never get a chronic disease in the first place, right? That's what I would submit. You said you, you know, you obviously started your career as a surgeon. Yeah. And we're living in your words, maybe in not the most healthy way. you yourself were unhealthy. When did you have this epiphany and when did you kind of flip it? Because obviously we've talked since then and I think you're one of the most switched on MDs when it comes to this way of living that we all talk about and preach about. And when did that happen in your life?

Yeah. So, I mean, it was on December 2nd, 2013. And I know that date because that's my son's birthday. And my son was born in the same hospital that I practiced surgery. And it was at 10 o'clock PM and he was born, you know, we put him to bed, make sure everyone is okay. And I went down to the doctor's lounge where I normally sit in between surgeries, just take a little break, see if there's any food down there. I go down there and there's a medical journal and it has an article in it that says, basically it's an article about mortality rates. And it shows you like you have one disease at this level, this is your mortality rate, two, this three, this mortality rate. So if you took all of my biomarkers and the diseases that I had,

this article said that I would have a 50% chance of dying by the time in the next 20 years. And remember, my son was just born like a few hours ago. So I'm like, I have a 50% chance of dying before this kid gets married, maybe graduate from college. Like, that's unacceptable, right? And so that's when I had that flip in my mentality. But, you know, you can't just flip your mentality and all of a sudden everything is better.

So I knew I needed to get healthy. but I needed to find out how to get healthy. And I got a concierge medical doctor then because I was like, I'm just going to pay 20 grand and see if they can get me healthy. And even like the best doctor in Beverly Hills had no idea how to get me healthy. They just knew how to prescribe more medications for me.

So that's what I decided I got to get educated on the science of health. And I went out there on a journey to learn about the science of health. It's so crazy hearing you say this because we say we have these conversations on the show and some of the critics, there's only about one or two of them. You only have to.

The pushback is like, get a doctor on someone with a medical degree. And you as a doctor were saying you yourself did not have the answers on how to be healthy, not to live this way. And I think this is why people are so confused. It's like you can do all the research and get all the information and get all the degrees. But if you're not taught the root cause of some of these issues and how to live in a healthy way, you know, it's like a minefield trying to figure out what to do, what to eat, especially now. I just say this to point out that like if you, an MD who had the degree and the education were confused, like imagine the general person in the population.

We just, there's, it's also additional to what, additionally to what you say, like, it's irresponsible to put it all on the doctors. I think the individual has to take accountability into their own hands for their own health. Like, to just, just to say we need more doctors, like, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, individually be like, okay, I'm going to take this into my own hands. We're saying the same thing. My point is, is that sometimes people don't take agency and they say like, hey, don't have, so don't, don't have, like, we've had Callie on the show. We don't have Callie Means on the show. He's not MD or like, don't have this person on the show. And I'm like, well, if the MDs aren't taught about these things, you have to go to the people that are educating themselves and learning

and getting the information out there. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, what Callie's talking about is not, he's not telling you how to perform an appendectomy, right? I mean, obviously, that's like you're going to go to a doctor for that. He's talking about topics that even myself as a doctor with educated at the Mayo Clinic and, you know, medical degree from University of Kansas City, I did not have the knowledge in myself. I'm telling you, like, I did not know how to be healthy, right? And so why would someone come to me to get health advice? Like there's, there's really nothing there that I can really offer them.

But then when I went out there and I learned the science of nutrition, like I got my degree in nutrition, I learned the science of exercise and movement. I got a personal training certification. And then, this is about 10 years ago when Jeffrey Bland and Dr. Mark Hyman, we just started the Institute of Functional Medicine, a few practitioners were like, you got to go to the IFM, you'd really like it. And that's where I learned about root cause medicine, that every disease out there, like the thousands of diseases that we have names for, have like eight root causes.

And once I figured, once I learned that and I figured out to apply that to myself, I completely changed my health in like eight months. It was so fast, so rapid. It's like a key piece of knowledge that they don't teach you at all in medical school. What did you do and what are the steps that you did that made all the difference? Yeah. So, I mean, it was a few different things, but it was mainly along, of course, diet, right? I always talk about the Pareto principle because there's so much information out there that is so confusing.

And then you have people saying different things and then, you know, you get paralysis by overanalysis, right? And so the Pareto principle means it's just 20% of the information that makes 80% of the difference. This was 100% true for me. For diet, I cut out all ultra-processed food, all fast food, all ultra-processed food. I stopped eating at restaurants. And for me, it didn't matter what I ate. Once I did that, it changed my life, you know? And so then that was one thing.

Secondly, was I started becoming more active. Like, I didn't really start going to the gym. I just walked around more. I just started walking. That helped. and then on the function, and then sleeping too, I made sleep a priority.

Now, that's the basics, right? Everyone has to get that right. But then... Yeah, but a lot of people don't get that right. And it's, you know, like, I say all the time on this show, like, I don't want to hear people talking about fluoride in the water and seed oils and EMFs if they're obese

and not going to the gym and not getting good sleep. It's like, let's do those things first, and then we can get to the fringe things to, you know what I mean? So true. Cutting out the little, like, seed oils or, or, like, turning off your Wi-Fi router or not if you're eating ice cream and cookies and not going to the gym, is not going to change your life.

It's so funny that you say that, because I remember very vividly a patient coming to me and saying, what's my sauna cryo protocol? And I told them, like, you know, what I think is optimal protocol. And then I started talking about his diet. And he's like, oh, yeah, I just, you know,

I just had some fast food and I smoke cigarettes. I'm like, there's no amount of sauna and cryo that's going to help. Reverts the damage you're doing from fast food and cigarettes. What were the other things that you, used in your toolbox. Yeah. So then the other things that made a big difference was getting my hormones measured. I was 42 at that time. I had the hormonal levels of an 80 year old. It was really bad. Wow. Yes. And I didn't realize it. It's from years and years of accumulated stress and the damage that did.

So I learned how to correct that. I also had massive leaky gut. And so my gut was basically massively causing inflammation throughout my entire body. So fixing my diet and then fixing my gut and reducing the amount of inflammation I had also made a huge and that's what made my autoimmune disease go away was fixing my gut, you know? And then I didn't realize this, but I was exposing myself to a massive amount of toxic burden as well.

Just, you know, number one, just being in a hospital. Believe it or not, a hospital is a very toxic environment. Oh, believe it. Our kid just got, he cut his, forehead, unfortunately, and we had to take him to the hospital, and we both got so sick after. He didn't take his pants off when he came in the house. He wore the same pants, and I said, do not touch my bed, get out of here. I don't. No, but I mean, it's good advice. It's good advice. We haven't been that. Did you hear what he said? I heard it. I heard, Lauren. We haven't been that sick in

years. I, we got so, I have not, I don't think I've ever been that sick, how sick we got, because he didn't take off his pants. Or maybe because you were in the hospital, breathing whatever's in the hospital. But also, this is so weird, but someone told me when the doors open to the hospital, there's like a fan, like a breeze. All of those particles are just going in your nose and mouth. So they said, hold your breath when you're walking through. This hot tips. Yeah, that's a hot tip. Hold your breath.

As you're walking to, because it's true. You know, when you open those doors, there's that massive rush of air. Okay. You were living basically in toxic soup. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, getting out of that, I basically stopped operating in the hospital. I said, I'm not going to go to the hospital anymore. I started doing surgery in surgical centers instead, which is less of a toxic environment.

And, you know, there's just adding up little steps in my life, making little changes over the course of a year that you just do one or two things better every single day. You know, atomic habits by James Clear, 1% change every day adds up to a third. 3600% improvement over the course of year. That's what I did. What happened to your body, your psyche, and your wellness with all this? Did you lose weight? Did you feel better? Tell us how you felt.

So I was massively overweight by about 50 pounds. I lost about 40 of those pounds. And completely, I was on eight different medications. I went down to two. And now I'm down to one for my blood pressure. and then I also lost my visceral fat. I lost, I was able to move better. I lost my joint pains I was having.

I had severe back pain too, so I couldn't really move around. Back pain went away completely. So I just felt like a brand new human. And what was incredible is my patients that I was seeing for surgery consultations and getting them ready for surgery, they would ask me like, what are you doing, Dr. Shah? I'd be like, oh, let me give you a list of like five or six things. I write them down. And they would come back to me in three months to be re-evaluated for surgery, and they didn't

need surgery anymore because they started following some of those things, you know? And so, I mean, this stuff works. It works incredibly well. And if anyone out there is suffering, they should really first try to see someone who can help them with their nutrition, sleep, hormones, exercise program, and their gut health and detoxifying their life. I feel like it's critical. Even just getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning and walking while the sun goes down makes such a big difference,

especially to someone that's in a hospital all day long with the light, it's rough. Isn't it like the worst light in the hospital? It's like you feel the damage is doing your circadian rhythm when you're in the hospital, right? Listen, even coming in the studio when I come in here and there's like, I'm like, I know. The worst lights the DMV. I know, I know. The worst lights the DMV, then the hospital. You're right.

If the hospital wants an aesthetic makeover, I'm available. Let's get into some particulars here. One thing I want to start with you on, which we don't talk about on this show a lot, but since you've dealt with it yourself personally, is blood pressure. Yeah. High blood pressure. I assume the majority of people that have high blood pressure are living a stressful life. They don't know to manage a stress.

Some people are maybe just born with this. What did you do specifically to get your blood pressure under control? I'm so glad you asked me this question because very few podcasts talk about blood pressure. It's important, though. It's an incredibly important topic because in medicine we actually call the silent killer. And the reason is people go years and years and years without ever addressing high blood pressure. Why does that happen? Well, number one, you know, you get your blood pressure measured once a year of the doctor.

90% of the time is the last person that was employed at the doctor's office that is doing your blood pressure, who barely knows how to do a blood pressure correctly in the first place. So that blood pressure is either wrong or it's thrown out. And they're like, ah, let's see you again next year and let's see how it is next year. So people go an average of eight years before being diagnosed with high blood pressure from when the blood pressure elevation first starts. And this is key. For every 10 points that your blood pressure is abnormal, meaning 130 over 80, every 10 points higher than that,

you add 15% to your mortality. Why do some people say 120 over? 120 over 70 is normal. And then as soon as you get to 130 over 80, you've added 15% to your mortality, right? And then for every 10 points after that, you continue to add to your mortality. So it's so important to get your blood pressure as close to 120 over 70 as possible. Instead, most of the time, patients don't get treated until they're about 150 systolic. And that's a problem.

And so people leave years and years and years with hypertension. And so I think it's a foundational biomarker. I'm a big believer of becoming the CEO of your own health and knowing what are some of the biomarkers that you need to be, keep control of yourself. Don't outsource them to your doctor. Like you said, take agency over your own health. Blood pressure is definitely one of them. When do you, okay, when would you consider like a statin or a medication versus all natural interventions? Yeah. And what are those natural interventions if somebody wants to? I'm assuming weight management. What I would say is that you always want to do natural interventions first. So, okay,

most high blood pressure is caused by stress, but second is actually caused by metabolic disease. So the inability of our body to regulate our sugar levels, which has a lot to do with our diets and our exercise and our sleep. High blood pressure can also be directly related to a condition called sleep apnea. There's a lot of reasons people get high blood pressure, okay? So you always want to do, you also want to figure out what the reasons are, start working on those and mitigating those reasons, and then adding other natural forms of therapy that we know work, things like sauna therapy, believe it or not. High intensity and training can actually help reduce blood pressure over the long term, getting your sleep right, all that stuff you're going to do over time. But it takes

sometimes a year, two, or three, or even longer to get your blood pressure down. So if somebody gets it measured and then like, and then come back in a month or two, they're not going to see enough movement, even if they do the natural interventions. Exactly. They're not. I just want to clarify because I think, you know, again, even with anything with health and fitness and wellness, some people say, I did it for a month or two and it didn't work, but. No, it takes a long time. But all of these interventions are ones that will not just help your blood pressure. They help you in your overall life, you know. So I would recommend getting on a medication if you need it and work towards getting off of it like I did. Okay. Now, statins are for high cholesterol,

but for blood pressure, there are new medications like acinibers, ARBs that are very safe that you protect your brain, your kidney, your heart from the damaging effects of high blood pressure while you're on them. So look, I hate, you know, pushing medications on anybody, but I do believe there's a role for pharmaceuticals while you're getting a lifestyle in order. What about if you have low blood pressure? Is it the same prescription for wellnessy things? Totally. Okay, so low blood pressure is completely different than high blood pressure. But in general, people with low blood pressure should get worked up for why do they have low blood pressure. Are they anemic? Are there iron levels or ferretin levels low? Do they have chronic dehydration?

There's a lot of different reasons people can have low blood pressure as well that are different from high blood pressure. I am all about better sleep. My mouth tape, my red light, my chimes, and also a little dream powder before I go to bed. That's why I'm so excited to share something that's made a real difference in my life. Beams Dream Powder. Beam is a hell. healthy nighttime blend packed with science-backed ingredients shown to improve sleep. So you can wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day. Whether that's tackling a full day of meetings or planning out your next big idea. So if you are someone who wakes up feeling groggy, I would recommend mouth taping. I would recommend getting red light in your room, removing your phone from your room,

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it was it Lauren? What was the thing? Well, I mean, you guys are high performers. So anything that you're doing, I'm usually all bought in. I put fresh berries. I use chocolate protein and then I use a big scoop of AG1. It's super efficient because it's all just in one smoothie right after I get home from the gym. And any specific benefits you've noticed since making it part of your routine? For sure. I have definitely more energy in the morning and I don't have to go back for a second cup of coffee, which is normally my go-to. And I'm definitely less bloated when I go to eat like a breakfast after I have my morning protein shake. It's the best. Thank you, Katie. All right, guys, so if you're ready to level up your health with something simple and effective, check out

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required at www. www. YNAB.com slash skinny. Again, that's YNAB.com slash skinny. Someone who has something with their thyroid and they want to get off the medication. Who did we? Oh, Gary Breka. Yeah.

Came on. You, I'm sure you guys run in the same circles. You have very much similarities. Yeah. What is your, what is your ways to do it in a natural way to come off thyroid medicine? So same thing.

You know, a lot of people have thyroid disease due to inflammation and metabolic disease, right? And so you want to get down to the root cause of why is my thyroid unhealthy, right? And it depends, once again, like blood pressure, if you have high thyroid or low thyroid, right? A hypofunctioning or hyperfunctioning thyroid. So while you're getting treated by your endocrinologist or your primary care of your thyroid disease, start looking at what is the reason of that thyroid problem. Most of these diseases that we're talking about, they're diseases because you can diagnose them and prescribe a medication for them. But they all have their root and inflammation and metabolic disease for the most part.

And so for a lot of the things that we're talking about, we use continuous glucose monitors on almost all of our patients. We love them. I think they're a game changer for almost everybody. You know, 85% of Americans have metabolic, some level of metabolic disease. And that's what leads to all of these other problems. and also inflammation. Inflammation is usually in your starts in your gut, and having your gut addressed to see,

do you have inflammation going on in your gut? Because 90% of our immune system lives in our gut. So that's where I would start for both of those. The glucose monitor is, how do you apply this? She's scared of them. Oh, you are? Scared of them. I'm petrified.

What makes you scared of them? I think that having a needle on the outside of your body, feels really weird. Yeah, no, totally get it. And that's a misconception that people have that it's a needle. It's actually a filament. It's a tiny, tiny filament that is just like a basically size of a hair. And it goes into your arm. You don't even feel it. And it's a little patch, a little round patch that sits there for two weeks. And it's continually every five minutes feeding your blood glucose, your glucose level in your tissues to your iPhone through Bluetooth tooth and is telling you what the curve looks like.

And so what can you do with that information? Yeah. If you do that, I'll divorce you. Oh, it's a filament. No, no, no, no, no. Do not try to have sex with me for at least a month. Maybe two months if you do that. I don't know I could go that long.

That might hurt my stress levels. Go down the street to a happy ending massage because it ain't. Joe, what is that? So what that does for you is that, you know, like I mentioned, 85% plus of people have some level of metabolic disease. And that's because their body cannot handle. amount of glucose that's in our bloodstream. It helps you change your habits around your diet to where it keeps your glucose more regulated. So you don't have these glucose spikes. And when I say

habits, I mean certain habits like snacking, right? What are the right snacks that don't cause a glucose spike? What if you start your meal with a fibrous vegetable rather than with bread or chips at the beginning? All of those things can help your glucose level stay more normalized so you don't develop insulin resistance, which then leads to diabetes, et cetera, and all the other diseases we're talking about. Can you invent something at Next Health that does the saliva test or the pee test? But how are you going to get the constant information? Because maybe every time you pee in the toilet, the toilet deals with it. I'm sure that's coming, for sure. I'm sure that's coming. But no, but the CGM has been a game changer for patients. So it's something to really think about.

I don't know if you've interviewed Callie's sister Casey. No, but open invite, Casey. Yeah, she wrote an incredible book on Continuous Glucos Monitor as a Metabolic Disease. And I think, yeah, she's really driven the point home. It's called Good Energy. One of my favorite books, I recommend it to a lot of my patients as well. It really gets your head wrapped around the Continuous Glucos Monitor, why it's necessary, and how metabolic disease really is the foundation of most other diseases and how if we were addressed that as a country, metabolic disease,

it would completely unburden our Western medical system. you know like we were talking about why do doctors and nurses work so hard most of the work is created by metabolic disease wow yeah so if you just prevented that it would it would really help with their schedule and their craziness exactly yeah less people would be sick can we do a pee test I will Casey I would love to have you come on to discuss more I think I'm just scared of having a foreign object outside of I get it outside of the basics which we've covered and I'm sure you've covered

like, you know, being metabolically, feeding right, the gym. What are some practices or things that people could consider incorporating into their daily lives and routines that have made a big difference or impact on your life? You know, like we can go as far as cold hot therapies, peptides, you know, whatever, whatever's out there. I think people are interested, like, what are you doing? What are you working with your patients on? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So when I see a patient, we normally sit down and the number one, thing that we do first is before we put any new health practices into place, we actually make them an expert in building routines. And so when you said routines, I was like, it doesn't matter what's in the routine. The key is to first be able to make a routine in your life, right? Most people live their life without any type of routine at all. And so if you can create even a 30-minute routine that focuses on your physical and your mental health every day, for me it's a morning routine. It doesn't have to be a morning routine. Then you can build off of that over time. And so what I work on with my patients is figuring out what's going to work the best for them to address their needs and putting

that into a routine for them. So you mentioned, you know, first thing in the morning, getting up and going outside and looking at the sun doing a little walk. That's part of almost all of my suggestions is getting outside and setting your circadian rhythm first thing in the morning by going outside and seeing that low-level light sun. then we add to that a practice of strength training. So I try to get people to do like a five to eight minute strength workout every morning. Building muscle is key to your longevity and your health. And after that, we add to their practice something to help them with their mental health. Maybe it's a visualization exercise, a gratitude exercise, some level of journaling.

And so what I'm talking about here is doing was called habit stacking. You do one thing and then you add another one to it and then another one to it. And you start small. maybe you start out with a three-minute strength training workout and then you build up to eight you're naturally going to build up and you try to fit in like i said 45 minutes of this self-care every day that is a true game changer a true game changer i think it's a non-negotiable i mean people get mad at how i don't know if i'm anal i'm fluid with it but like to not be able to go outside in the morning it makes 20% of a difference.

Even with my kids, I'm like, come on, we're going outside. Like, I don't want them waking up and staring at a screen. I just don't. Right. That's key. And it's a great practice for all kids to get into. You mentioned your sauna cold plunge protocol. Yes.

What is your sauna cold plunge protocol? There's really good research that shows after doing a strength workout. If you do sauna, it increases the efficacy of the workout by 15 to 20%. Wow. Yeah. So after I go to the gym, I try to, go straight into the sauna. I'll do a 20 to 30 minute sauna session. You know, there's some controversy about whether cold therapy blunts the effects of strength training. But hopefully the sauna is

unblunting it. So then I do, I'll do a 20 to 30 minutes sauna session followed by three minutes in the cold plunge. And I have them both in my house. I'm pretty lucky. If you don't have them both in your house, I think, you know, doing like a cold morning shower is a really good form of cold therapy. And- You did those for years before we had a cold therapy. or a cold plunger more. Yeah. It was cold showers. When we lived in L.A., it was just like cold shower. Right, exactly.

The point is, it's like you can do it. Yeah, absolutely. I think the sauna actually is more important than cold therapy for most people because there's a ton of research behind it, lowering your risk of cardiac disease, lowering your risk of neurodegenerative disease, and even treating high blood pressure. So I think of sauna as kind of a foundational health practice.

So the more people that can get used to, you know, finding a sauna close to them and getting in it at least three times a week, I think the healthier will be. Do you like barrel or infrared? Either one is fine. I prefer like a real sauna, like a barrel sauna. I have an infrared at home from sunlight in which they make amazing infrared sonnas. And it works really well.

And you also have the benefit of that added red light therapy at the same time. What are the difference between, and my dad always asked me this. What's the difference between the barrel and the infrared benefits-wise? So the barrel sauna is going to get hotter. Okay, the infrared sauna creates what's called internal heat by the infrared wavelength of light stimulating mitochondrial energy production, all right? And so the idea with infrared is you also have light therapy combined with sauna therapy, the heat.

Barrel, you're just going to get a hotter sauna. Now, all the studies that were done in sauna, preventing cardiac disease and being a health benefit, we're all done with just pure heat sonnas, not infrared. So we have really good research around that. But, you know, I think they're both very useful. Are you into red light therapy? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

What are the benefits of that? So red light therapy is a mitochondrial activator. It also helps you release what's called nitric oxide from your cells. And nitric oxide is kind of a miracle compound that increases blood flow throughout your body. And also the other benefit is increases your collagen production as well. So you have better. Increases blood flow. You lay on that butt naked every morning.

I lay on one of those for a long time. That's good. And we just did a whole episode on Red Light Therapy, if you guys haven't checked out recently. You've spoken personally about reversing Alzheimer's. I had a grandmother who passed from this, and this touches many people's lives. And everybody at least knows somebody who knows somebody that is a big issue. Can you talk to us about that? Right.

So first of all, you know, I will say that sadly the rate of people getting Alzheimer's is going up. and it really shouldn't be that way. I think a lot of people feel that Alzheimer's is something that genetically predisposed to, and if they're going to get it, they're going to get it. And nothing can be further from the truth. There's a very few people that have the gene that 100% of the time leads to Alzheimer's. So even if you have what's called the APOE4 gene, which you've talked about in the podcast before, even if you have two copies of that, you can prevent getting Alzheimer's.

And so that's good for people to know. Absolutely. So I'm going to go back to metabolic disease again. metabolic disease once again having that leads to an increased rate of having Alzheimer's disease inflammation does as well also just not using your brain you know i hate to say like a lot of people retire and that's when you see a steep decline right my grandmother in her case she retired typical 65 and then you know probably around the time she was 70 she was diagnosed and then literally like the dip the worst thing about that situation was she lived to like 93

three, four, five. She lived a long time with it. But it was, it was like a fourth of her life as just not being the person who she was. It's brutal. I'm so sorry to hear that. Yeah, it shouldn't be that way. You know, I think, I think, I mean, it shouldn't be that way moving forward. And I think if people knew some of the newer technologies that are out there right now, so there's actually a blood test now that can tell us if you're headed towards Alzheimer's, okay? It's called a Tao 217 blood test. and if you have a risk of Alzheimer's or you feel like you're just cognitively impaired and maybe something's not right, I would highly suggest, you know, looking at this. This blood test just came out six months ago.

Dr. Dale Bredesen wrote the book, End of Alzheimer's, which, by the way, if anyone's concerned about Alzheimer's, read the end of Alzheimer's by Dr. Dale Bredison, it will completely change your mind about it. You can truly reverse Alzheimer's. And now there's therapies that we know work much better than any medication. like plasm exchange therapy is what we're using to slow the rate of progression of Alzheimer's as well. Well, I think, you know, that's all extremely fascinating. And I think a lot of people are scared about this, especially if it touches their family. But the reason I think it's so important

that you mentioned keeping your mind active and doing something is in my grandmother's case, she just stopped. It was like doing nothing every day but the same thing over and over. And my dad, who's her son is like in his 80s and he still works and runs around and he's sharpest attack. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like still lifting weights and doing all the things and calling me every day and bugging me about whatever's going on. I love that. But the point is, is like in his particular case, he's super active. He still works. He never retired. He's doing anything. And then her case of, you know, and so I just think it's important to like, especially if you have elderly parents or grandparents, like keep them active and keep them doing things.

So true. So your brain needs three things. Your brain needs to rest at moments. By rest, I mean, give your brain a break from constant stress by techniques like meditation, breath work. Then your brain also needs to then run. So it needs to stay active, right? So, you know, and activity beyond just doing like crossword puzzles, even though crossword puzzles, even though cross reports are helpful, but like learning new things and then talking about them and teaching them to someone else. That's called mental reprocessing. And that cycle is what really keeps a brain healthy, whether you're risk of Alzheimer's or not. There's a study on nuns that was that it's called the nuns study. Nuns that continually teach the Bible, they have the lowest risk of Alzheimer's because they're

teaching constantly. Yeah. And then the last thing is to stay positive. Positivity in all of its many forms, whether there's a gratitude practice or having good social interactions and friends. All of that also keeps your brain healthy. This is all proven. My dad is doing all these things, but he needs to sleep more, but he is the most positive person I've ever met. So if he's listening, which I know he is. He listened to my solo pregnancy episode, so you know he's listening to this one. I'm like, Daddy, you're not pregnant.

I have some questions on some cutting edge topics. OZempec. Give us the doctor's point of view. How do you see this drug developing over the next few years? So I just got off stage 24 hours ago talking about this at the Integrative Health Symposium. So big picture, I think people should know

that OZempec is not a true drug and how we're traditionally taught to think about drugs. OZemic is a peptide. A peptide is a compound that our body makes naturally when it's highest state of health. Okay? So our gut is making GLP1 peptide all the time to tell our brain that it's not hungry anymore

and that we can stop eating. The problem that's occurred is we have this chronic like countrywide or Western worldwide deficiency of that signaling because of ultra-processed food, because of inflammation, because of pharmaceuticals have wiped out our guts ability to make GLP-1. So unlike a drug, which is like a chemical made by a pharmaceutical company, GL-1s are basically peptides that our body makes naturally that the pharmaceutical companies, well, and scientists have figured out how to make. Okay. So with that caveat, and the reason I say this is because I feel that the next generation of what's going to save humanity are peptides.

I think as we discover more and more peptides and we show the benefit and we replicate our natural body signal for health, we'll be able to reverse many chronic disease and keep people healthier for longer without side effects of drugs. I think GLP-1s we're going to find more and more that they have many more uses. There are GOP-1 receptors on your immune system cells and your brain cells. Almost many of the cells in your body have GLP-1 receptors. and we're finding that the activity of activating these receptors is beneficial in many ways, treating sleep apnea, slowing cognitive impairment with Alzheimer's disease. So it's going to be a treatment for Alzheimer's as well in the near future.

You're going to hear a lot about it. That all being said, as you can tell, I'm optimistic about this category of medications. I think they're being completely overprescribed and being used in the wrong way. And by that I mean that people are slinging GLP-1s at every, everyone that asked for it without appropriate monitoring, without appropriate recommendations on how to mitigate the negative effects of GLP-1s, and that's what's giving them a bad reputation. What are the ways to mitigate the negative effects? That's a great question.

So the, I would say, the number two or three top negative effects of GLP-1 is, number one, when you eat less, you not only lose fat, you lose muscle, right? Because you're not taking in enough protein. And so when you are on a GLP1, you have to have a protein-focused diet. You have to get enough protein and you have to add strength training to your daily or every other day routine. So you can not lose muscle. My patients actually gain muscle while they're on GLP1. I buy everyone a bioimpetent scale, by the way.

That's a scale that sends an electrical signal. We had a woman come on the show, JJ Virgin, talking about how important those are to use. I was with JJ yesterday as well. Yeah, they're so important. I don't care what your weight is. I want to know what your skeletal muscle mass is, and those scales will tell you what direction you're headed in. Secondly, I would say with GLP-1s is people are being taught

that they're going to probably be on them forever or they'll gain their weight back. That also is not true. If you have an off-boarding program, which means a plan to get off-G-L-P-1s by reintroducing your body into how to make GLP-1s, you can get them and get off of them, and you can also be off of them for a very, very long time without getting the way back. Do you need to work with someone like yourself to be able to figure that out? Yeah, I mean, I think it's always good to work with a very skilled practitioner

when you're on any type of peptide therapy. You shouldn't be just buying you off the internet and just, you know, injecting yourself with no plan. And so all of our patients have like a very, a very rigid plan on what they're going to do while they're on GLP ones and how they're going to get off GLP ones. I will say another great benefit of GLP ones is it reduces people's cravings not just for food but also for alcohol

and so we're seeing GOP1s work really well to get people to stop drinking you know makes sense because if your insulin levels are out of whack you're going to be craving alcohol more if you like it what is the best brand out of all of them in your opinion because there's tons of brands

yeah I mean there's actually not There's actually just two kind of chemical compounds where they have different names to them. But the chemical compound itself is the same. So you have semi-glutide and you have trezepatide right now. Okay. Okay. And then all the brands are just different, you know, they just put a different name to them. I like using terseptide because it works on two different receptors and not just the

gLP receptor. But I will tell you that, you know, we switch back and forth all the time based on what the patient's working for the patient and what they can afford, basically. It sounds like if you're on these drugs, you have. have to work out and lift weights. Absolutely. You have to eat protein and you can't just eat like shit and that like even if it's a little shit.

What I tell every single one of my patients, if I prescribe this for you, we're going to use this as an opportunity to change your life. Right. And you want to change your life, don't you? Or do you just want to keep eating crap and never working out and just use this as a quick fix? And if they say quick fix, you're not my patient. I gave you the, we gave you the easy one.

And we can, you know, we talk about OZMPIC and GLP1s on the show. Now, I'm kind of bored with the topic. I'm going to be honest. It's a bit. A lot of people are, I know. I know you're bored with the topic, but a lot of people want to know. But we've covered it. And I think that that was one of the-

I like hearing everyone's perspective on it, though, because it's funny. Everyone has different vibes on it. So I buttered you up with the easier one to give you a harder one now. Lay it mommy. Okay. Long COVID. Yeah. There's a debate going online.

I'm sure you've seen it. Is it long COVID? Is long COVID real or is it potentially a vaccine injury? Look, I mean, I suffered with this myself for a long time after I got vaccinated, you know? And so I think whether it's a vaccine injury or the COVID itself, it's the same mechanism. It's a spike protein, which we were giving people the MRI to make the spike protein, right? So it's that same mechanism. The spike protein is in our biology now, whether we like it or not, either through the vaccine or through. actually having COVID. For me personally, it caused my HRV to plummet and my heart rate to be constantly and consistently

elevated for two years. Yeah, it was terrible. Do you regret getting the vaccine? I mean, I would say personally, like for me, yes. I think there's some people that should have got the vaccine, people that are high risk for getting COVID and dying from it, but that wasn't as many people as we gave the vaccine too. So let me ask you this. You're the perfect person to ask this. Say another pandemic happens and they're like, you have to get this vaccine right away, get it right now. What would you do now knowing what you know? I would definitely question that. I don't think anyone should say you have to do anything and it should be your choice whether you get the vaccine or not. And I think our government learned

that this time around. I hope they learned that. But did they? Well, I mean, here's the thing. The public learned it. The public's not going to do it. There would be a revolt the next time we get a vaccine shoved on our throat. But I mean, if people are dying and, you know, people will definitely, the next pandemic, if people are dying at a very high rate and people you know that are super healthy and then you see other people getting the vaccine and not dying, you're going to make your own decision based on that. So it's situational. It's situational, but we didn't see that with COVID, right?

We saw a bunch of people get the vaccine and they were not sick to begin with and they were not sick after until they got the vaccine. Wild. And the reason I ask this again is like, you know, this is not my field of expertise, but I watch what's going on and I, you know, pay attention to what's in the world. and, you know, personally, I've had COVID. And, you know, what we say now is like, whatever's going on the last four or five years, every time I get sick, it's like nothing else that I've ever had.

I mean, this last one, it was, to me, when we got sick, I felt like it was one where if you pushed it a little too hard, like, even me who's in good health, like, we could, we talked. This was something that, like, if you're not careful, you could end up in the hospital. I told him when we got this, this virus for. from the hospital. I had it first. It was probably from the fecal matter pieces that were coming out of the door. But I told him, I was like, do not get what I have. This is different. This is something else. This is a different strain. And when you got it, you agree. So I guess what I'm asking are these effects from quote unquote long COVID? Is this because of the spike protein? Is this immune

suppression? Like, why now do we have these kind of flus and sicknesses that we were able to deal with, maybe more effectively in the past, just like wreaking havoc on people? I think it's all three of those. And so, you know, I think, you know, at this conference, I was just at the Integrative Health Symposium to some extremely smart doctors there. And it's the general consensus is that there's a combination of all of those. There's, there's something is definitely different. People are getting sicker. They're getting sicker more easily. and they're staying sicker for longer, right? And it's not explainable.

And so we don't know. We don't know what the answer is. Don't you think it's because they kept everyone inside, which made our immune system weak? So then when we get outside and we're exposed to all these things, we get sicker, faster, and quicker and harder. Well, I mean, definitely we know that protecting yourself from normal daily exposure that humans have been doing for millennia is not a good. idea. You know, this is why the whole peanut allergy thing happened, right? Like, you take peanuts away from kids at a young age, there's a much higher chance they're going to get an allergy to it, right? It's the same thing. And so, yes, I mean, I think the more we keep ourselves

in sterile environments and not having our normal interactions, it will definitely lead to more sickness in the future. I don't think that's the only thing that's going on, though. I definitely think there's other factors that occurred with the, you know, with COVID and also the vaccination. that play into this. Is it weird that I eat a spoonful of peanut butter when my baby's like three weeks old and give him a kiss? No, not at all.

On purpose? You're supposed to be doing that. That's what Michael, Michael, like, thought I was crazy to do that, but I ate peanut butter and then I was like... Well, I used to think, but again, it's because you're people, myself included, you're just uninformed and you see peanut allergies exploding.

I did this with honey too. I ate raw honey and I would kiss my kids right after I ate it. It's a little, it's a little strain. It's a little, what'd you call the thing in the arm? Well, anyways. So what's it called? No, but what's the little thing that's in it? Oh, the CGM.

No, but you called it a name, the little thin thing. A filament. A filament. It's a filament of honey. You know, why I like doing this show and why we've done it for so long is I think part of the problem when it came to information around just COVID in general was it was delivered from a few large platforms in a uniform way in small sound bites. and without a lot of information.

So what it did was it created this situation where people felt pressure and stress and fear and you weren't able to question and have conversations. And I remember doing the show at that period of time. And if you even talked about this kind of thing, people were calling for your head. But I think now, like, you know, this show in particular

is an exploration with people like yourself to try to decipher the information and get as much information out there to people so they can make informed decisions. Right. You know what I mean? Because I think that's, the biggest thing is like, is it long COVID? Is it vaccine injury? We don't know, but the discussion

needs to take place and the people that can figure it out, need to figure it out so that people can at least know what to do, which brings me to my next point, if you are worried that you have a vaccine injury or you're worried that you have long COVID, or you're having immune suppression and you're sick. What are things that you're telling your patients to do now? Yeah, so, you know, it's, we have to get down to the root cause of why, why what is happening is happening. And for what I see is for all my patients, there's different reasons. You know, some people have tons of inflammation happening. Some people, like I mentioned, have gut dysbiosis. Some people have mold, believe it or not, leading to these types of symptoms. And so we do a deep

biomarker valuation. And we're measuring over a thousand different biomarkers in our patients, including levels of different toxins, inflammation, et cetera. And we're trying to figure out, like, where we should aim our therapies, if someone is not. Not feeling good. What is your opinion on stem cells? I'm hearing a lot of behind the scene talk about people going to Mexico. I'm hearing one of my friends is injecting it in his penis. You knew what I was talking about?

I know. I know. Edit that part out. Edit his name out. Edit his name out. But you can keep in edit his name out. Yeah. People can detect.

Edit his name out. You can beep it, Carson. Do we need to be injecting stem cells in our penis? Look, stem cells will eventually be, I think, a mainstay of treatment for humans. But we don't know where it can be potentially very useful, where it's not useful at all, and what the dose is, and how do we individualize therapy for individuals. So there's still a lot of research that needs to be done. I'm a fan of stem cells.

I use stem cells personally. I think you have to be extraordinarily careful of how these are sourced, okay? Because remember, when you're getting stem cells at any stem cell clinic, they're either coming from your own body. It's called autologous or they're coming from someone else's body. Just like anything that's coming from someone else's body, you have to, number one, make sure it's compatible with you. Number two, make sure that it's tissue. It's not, there's not in a, you know, there's nothing else living in there, right? Any viruses or bacteria or anything in this tissue.

getting their energy. That's, that's, who. And that's also true as well. I don't know about that. That doesn't, that doesn't sit right with me. When you do them, do you do your own? I don't do my own, no, because I have old stem cells, right? Got it, got it. I'm over 50, and my stem cells are now considered in the old category, so they're probably not very effective. So I like to use what's called umbilical mesinkable cells. So these are stem cells that are derived from umbilical cords, okay, that are donated. And they're very thoroughly tested, made in the United States of America under very strict manufacturing conditions. going to Mexico, what they're doing is they're taking stem cells, they're putting them into

petri dishes and growing. There are some clinics that do it right. There are some clinics that aren't just careful. And so you have to be extremely careful where you're getting... Where are you injecting the stem cells when you get it? Right now, you can, stem cells are being injected into joints. Some people are doing them intravenously. So that that's the only places right now, not penises or not a back or anything like that for me. I don't do this. I personally don't do those type of therapies. Okay. But there are. But there are. That disclaimer. It wasn't him we were talking about. Yeah, no, you can just be about the name.

You cannot mess around with pregnancy and a bra. Like, I have to have a real comfortable bra. And the bra that I wear is from skims. Okay, they have a fits everybody's scoop brawlett. So this is so amazing for every day. I have big boobs and I can't go brawless, especially being pregnant. Like, it's just a lot.

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They also have a brief that goes with it. So if you're looking for something really comfortable, they have it in every color. This one is nice and I've been wearing this one during pregnancy too. I go on the skim site and before you know it, I've bought bathing suits. I've bought like a foldover pant. The other day I even bought some t-shirts from them. Everything is just flattering. It holds you in and it's also comfortable, which is really important to me. I have been raving about skims on my Instagram stories. And during pregnancy, they have been the best. From the leggings to the shirts to the long sleeve shirts to even the body suits, if you cannot find a bra that's comfortable, you've got to try that fits everybody's scoop braulette. Shop Skims' Best Intimants, including the fits everybody collection and more at skims.com and skim stores. After you place the order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop-down menu that follows. Check out Skim's Best Intimance, including.

including the fits everybody collection and more at skims.com slash skinny. If you've been following along on the show, you know we just had an expert come on and talk about the benefits of a fasting mimicking diet. It's truly revolutionary. I was blown away by the information that he was telling us about fasting. And I think when you're going to do a fast, you want to do it right, which is why I really like pro long. I've done it a couple times and I've had the best experience. Obviously, I have to wait until after I'm pregnant. But afterwards, I definitely want to explore this because I could not believe how Prolong can help support healthy blood sugar, enhance skin appearance, fat loss, and improve your energy. Post-fast, it's wild. So it's a five-day program. It starts with snacks, soups and beverages, and they're all designed to keep your body in a fasting state. There's no guesswork or planning, so you don't have to be stressed that you're not doing it right. Prolongs, Fasting, mimicking diet is revolutionary. It's plant-based nutrition that nourishes your body while

making cells believe they're fasting. It's really interesting all the information that's coming out about fasting. You guys definitely have to check it out. If you want something with a clear plan with specific daily needs, look up Prolong. You will not be sorry. To help kickstart a health plan that truly works, Prolon is offering the skinny confidential listeners 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day nutrition program. Just visit Prolon Life com slash skinny. That's P-R-O-L-O-L-I-E dot com slash skinny to claim your 15% off discount and your bonus gift, prolonlife.com slash skinny. And definitely check out that fasting episode so you can get the whole 401 one on all things fasting. That's prolonlife.com slash skinny. So I want to do rapid fire

questions for you. All right. Let's do you. You're the perfect person. Okay, ready? your go-to longevity boosting supplement. I can I answer two or three? I really love urolithinae. There's a company called Timeline. I've been taking that. I've been taking it for 60 days now. Mark Hyman likes this too.

Yeah, uralithine is a game changer, I think. This is a compound that increases the number of mitochondria you have and how efficacious they are. We all need mitochondria to make energy for every cell in our body. So I'm a big believer in uralithinae. The next one is we all know about NAD, but a specific form called nicotinamide riboside NR. There's a company called Truniogen that makes NR. Excellent, because NR is more readily absorbed into the cell, and you can make a good amount of NAD from it.

Then there's also a supplement that I'm looking into right now. I haven't started taking it yet, but I think I'm for sure going to. It's called stem regent. This is a supplement that uses plant compounds to increase the number of stem cells of your body is producing. and I really like kind of what they're doing. You would like this brand that we just had the founder on called Fatty 15. Oh, I love Fatty 15. It's a good one, right?

I've been taking, I really like it. It's even better than Omega 3, which I love. For the, your Roth, how do you say it? Erolithinae. Erylithinae. For that one, I've just started taking them on like days. I've done two bottles of it. And I was reading that it says they want you to take it for like three months to,

what effects have you notice and do you think people will notice. I mean, all the research shows that you will increase a number of mitochondria and you'll increase your ATP production and also the efficacy of your mitochondria. But just more energy function. Yeah, more energy. But more energy manifests itself in different ways. Like you feel more energetic. But also when your liver has more energy, it can detox better. When your muscles have more energy, they can gain more strength. When your eyes have more energy, you can see better. So energy, you know, for every cell in our body is being used to perform different function. So you just upgrade yourself completely, all of your biology. You know what's so funny about

that brand. I think we work with them for a minute, but it was before I was personally like able to like, it was like when they were first coming out. And so I want to get them back on the show because I want them to come talk about what they're doing. Yeah. So because I think it's really interesting because there's a lot of people talking about that product now. I can definitely help you make that connection because I, you know, I know the founders. Yeah, I just, I just think it's interesting because there's a lot of people that we talk to on the show and after I, like, what do the things you're doing? And a lot of people are starting to say

that they really like that stuff. Yeah. What about for pregnancy? What supplement would you recommend? You know, I think for pregnancy, I'm a big believer of when you're, when during your pregnancy,

even before you get pregnant, you want to be as careful as possible with everything you put in your body. So, you know, there's a lot of great supplement. There's a supplement called renatal out there that is specifically made for a pregnancy, for men and women to take during pregnancy? Yeah, I've got to call the men out.

All you men that are sitting in the corner, not talking about your fertility. What do I do? When she's already pregnant or before she's pregnant? No, he's saying before. For your semen. Your white chromosome. You have to make sure it's super healthy.

I was like, what do you do? I was like, right now I should be doing something. Get your semen strong. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so, you know, really just coming down to the bare essentials, but I would look in the wee-natal supplement. Okay. Biggest mistake people make

when trying to optimize their health? I think people go down the long tail of devices and they buy things and they sign up for things when they haven't addressed the root causes. You know, and so if you are unfamiliar with the root causes, like we talked about a couple of them today, get really, really familiar with them. So you know, number one, what they are,

number two, how to measure them, and number three are to affect them. And so once you know those three things, that's what's going to make all the difference in your health. You don't have to buy anything to do that. You know, you don't spend a lot of money. One book, everyone should read on longevity. There's not just one. There's so many. Give us a couple. You do like three to five. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I would say, let me start with food by Dr. Mark Hyman. I feel people have become very disconnected from food and how to cook it and what's good food and what's

good for your body and what's not. Second, I would recommend, I mentioned Casey Means book, right? I think that's an incredible book on metabolic health and why it's important. Third, I would recommend a book around optimizing your sleep. So Dr. Michael Bruce has written some great books on sleep. I would say if you're going to do a continuous glucose monitor, there's a book by Jesse in Supe. It's called Glucose Revolution, awesome book. To change your perspective on the health care system, which I think everyone needs to

read a little bit about that because I think we have a big misconception about what our healthcare system is built for and why it is where it is. So there's a book by Marty McCarrie called Blindspots that's awesome read on the healthcare system as well. Can we pause on that for a second and double click on that? Sure. I like to use the word double click. I have been outspoken about being excited when it comes to this administration because of RFK and namely because I think for the first time in a long time, there's an opportunity to move away from sick care and get to the root cause of a lot of these issues.

And for people that are worried and thinking this is controversial, what we're doing right now is clearly not working. To your point, our systems are overrun, we're overloaded. There's more metabolic conditions and issues that we're facing daily as a country. And so I've been outspoken and excited about this because I think there's an opportunity to really look at our health care system and see what we're doing right and do more of it and see what we're doing wrong and do less of it. Can you talk about your perspective on how people view the current healthcare system and how you think it should work? I'm so glad you asked me that because this is what I'm dedicated my life to now. So, you know, our current health care system was built to treat disasters and emergencies, right?

So getting cancer, that's a disaster. Getting hit by a bus, that's an emergency. Having a heart attack, that's an emergency. Our system is fantastic for that. Thank God for that system, the science, the ambulances, the hospitals, the procedures. think how do we have that system? That system was never built to address chronic disease. It just somehow became the place where you get chronic disease address,

mainly because of the pharmaceutical companies having medications that they built or made for chronic disease management. In reality, we need to reverse chronic disease and prevent ourselves from ever getting there in the first place. So what I've dedicated my life to is creating a new system, a new system that's built on reversal of chronic disease and optimizing your health so you never get chronic disease in the first place. Also is built on getting the basics right, nutrition, movement, sleep, of course, and finally, being extremely preventative. What I mean by extremely preventative is right now

we use what we call preventative medicine or blood tests almost when it's too late, and we only use them to diagnose a disease. I believe that every human should be getting blood tests and other biomarkers measured at the age of 21 onwards and every four to six months measuring your blood test and catching the first signs of disease development. And then you can start making changes so you never get the disease in the first place. And so that's a new system. And that's what Next Health is. My clinic system is we focus on how to keep you healthy. So you never get chronic disease in the first place. And if you don't get chronic disease, guess what? A very low chance you're going to get cancer. Very little chance you're going to have a heart attack. It's a very

low chance you get Alzheimer's disease, and that will unburden our Western medical system to do what it does best. Can you make a next health urine test, though? He keeps saying blood test, and I feel like I'm going to faint every single time. We do urine tests, so we measure 150 different toxins in your urine. Okay. It's an extremely valuable test. Can I do that one? She doesn't like the blood. Yeah, I get it. Can I do the urine test? The blood's valuable, though. Yeah. I mean, you need, I'm to be honest, you need blood, you need a blood pressure cough, you need a bi-impetence scale. Do you need a wearable device? Stool sample?

Yeah, all of these. When you were just stool sample too. When you told me about the stool sample test, you took, I was like, this is a lot of information that I don't need. Some of this stuff freaks people out, but if you get the information, you know, it's like if somebody's trying to get their finances in order and they never look at their credit card bill and they never look at their bank account. And they're like, oh, just like manifest my way and I'll figure it out. It's like, no, no, you need the information. I will do any test besides blood. Okay, quick question.

There's still a lot of tests available for you. Before we jump off of this health care issue, you're a doctor that seems to be bought into, obviously, this way of life that we're all bought into. Why are some doctors so resistant to the change? I don't think they're necessarily resistant to the change. I think they are resistant to finding interventions that work that don't have a ton of randomized clinical trials behind them. them, you know? And so when a lot of times when I talk to a physician about what we're doing, the first thing they say to me in retort is show me the evidence that keto works, right?

And obviously there's a lot of evidence on keto working for certain conditions. Like, you know, I use it as an intervention. It's not my main dietary program, but I use it for some people. And then I show them the research on that and they're like, this is not enough research. We need more research. on this diet, like, what else do you need except, like, the 150 people that, you know, their depression is now gone from doing keto or, you know, they've lowered the symptoms of schizophrenia. Like, there's, that's enough evidence because changing your dietary pattern doesn't cause for most people, you know, an immediate complication, right? And so I think there's this mentality that we are taught in medical school. And this stems back to the Flexner report that was

funded by the Rockefellers to basically blow up the pharmaceutical industry back in the 40s, the Flexner report is this report that was commissioned that made it so that the only medicine that doctors could learn was that, which was based on scientific evidence, basically randomized controlled trials. And so when you do these trials, you can only study one medication at a time. So that's why we have this giant pharmaceutical industry. Well, guess what, doctors are still being taught that. They're still being taught that unless there's a randomized control trial, that shows that this is efficacious, I don't want to believe it.

I think there has to be some kind of intuitive aspect to it, though, too, which is so crazy. I can imagine, though, being a doctor and being 26 years old and having to go to medical school for, you said, eight years, and getting there, and then having someone come and poke holes in what you're doing. That's very frustrating to have worked so hard. I got news for you. You know, it's also frustrating when you run a business for years and years and years and then the market changes and you have to.

It's just like doctors can cry about this. I'm just having empathy. No, but I know, but here's the thing. But you're lucky that you did it when you were, you're so lucky that you did it when you were 15 years old. You're a unique case. We were talking about some of these legacy media companies and how they weren't able to pivot. And guess what? Those reporters and those journalists and those anchors on those platforms were angry about the change that started to take place.

And so they resisted it and they demonized it and they attacked it. And now they're going out of business. And the point is, like, the correlation to doctors is like, yes, new information presents itself, new ways of life present themselves. You have to pivot. You can't just be like, I went to school and I studied this and I was taught this. And so I don't change. You know what I'm saying? Like every business, every individual needs to pivot and adapt with the times.

And, you know, to me, like when they would say things like trust the science, I'm like, science is ever evolving. That's the whole point in the definition of science. Exactly. But do you get what I'm saying? is like I understand that people can feel personally attacked or feel like their work being diminished. What's the other one they said about home? They were like,

what's the home quote about COVID? Like stay home? It's the same thing with journalists that are mad that platforms have changed. We were just talking about this. It's like you could be mad all you want, but it's changed. You have to evolve with the times. Exactly. You got to evolve with the times.

And I think, you know, as a doctor myself, I can say that getting new health information, I never really felt attacked. I just felt like, look, I'm a surgeon. I should be doing surgery, right? And so let me just go to the operating room and do what I do. You know, I think cancer doctor, same thing. Like, you know, let me treat the cancer. I think when you challenge a doctor with health advice,

something that you've never really been taught in medical school, something that you're never really been, you know, taught to talk about with patients. I think you kind of get a little unsteady because now you're asking me an expert in something that you're not an expert in, right? But you're expected for some reason because you have the MD degree to be an expert in it. Well, that's why I think it's so important what we talked about earlier is I don't think it's fair to doctors who don't have that form of education to be put in a position.

But I also think more doctors could also be forthright and saying, I actually don't know about the nutrition or I don't know about that. You know what I mean? Like if somebody comes to me about an area of business that I have no clue on, I don't just be like, well, I did a business one time, so I know everything. You know what I mean? like there's certain things where I have to be like, I just don't know. Absolutely. And just like you said, like if you run one type of business, that doesn't mean that you know all about all the other businesses, right?

So just because you're, you know, a cancer doctor doesn't mean you know about nutrition. I can't jump into NextHealth and run your business right. There's no way. I would know I wouldn't know the first thing to do. If people want to come to Next Health, where can they find you and seek you out your Instagram? Give us all the things. Next-health.com is where you can find our clinics.

If you want to learn about biomarkers, I actually have a page on my website called Dr. Shaw.com is my website slash biomarkers. Then you can learn about some of the biomarkers we talked about today. You can download a guide to your own biomarkers. And then I'm on social media at Darshan Shah, MD. That episode was packed with value. Thank you so much for coming on. Come back anytime.

Thank you. We could have gone on with you over on and on and on. Yeah, there's so much to talk about, right? I love it. I love your questions. Like we hit on every time. everything. Him and her. Yeah, him and her. Thanks for coming on. Let's talk about a Zemika again. Thank you. All of my favorite products, mouth tape, brow peptide to grow my brows and lashes,

the ice roller, and even the caffeinated sunscreen can be found on shop, skinny confidential.com. You guys, if you have not tried mouth taping, you have to try it. And while you're on the site, that brow peptide has changed and transformed my brows. Go to shop, Skinnycom. confidential.com to check out all my favorite goodies. Thanks for listening and see you next time.