The Dr. Hyman Show - 3 Ways To Start Your Day For Less Stress, Balanced Energy, And Better Health

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, Thrive Market, and Nordic Naturals. Our first actions of the day can have profound health benefits. Practices such as getting natural daylight first thing in the morning, eating a breakfast that does not spike blood sugar, and developing a morning routine can give us balanced energy and make us more stress resilient all day. In today’s episode, I talk with Drs. Andrew Huberman, Elizabeth Boham, Casey Means, and Rangan Chatterjee about simple ways to start your day for better health.  Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning.  Dr. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Casey Means is a Stanford-trained physician, the Chief Medical Officer and cofounder of metabolic health company Levels, an associate editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, and a guest lecturer at Stanford University.  Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK. Host of the number one Apple podcast Feel Better, Live More and presenter of BBC 1’s Doctor in the House, Dr. Chatterjee is the author of five Sunday Times bestselling books, and his TED Talk, “How to Make Diseases Disappear,” has now been viewed over 4.8 million times.  This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, Thrive Market, and Nordic Naturals. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Join Thrive Market today at thrivemarket.com/hyman to receive $80 off your first order. Shop Nordic Naturals today at nordic.com and save 20% using code FARMACY. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Andrew Huberman Dr. Elizabeth Boham Dr. Casey Means Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Hi, Doctors Pharmacy listeners, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me, you know that I'm obsessed with understanding the latest research on longevity and how we can apply it to our daily lives. So I wrote a book about it. Think of it as a roadmap to optimal aging. It's called Young Forever and it comes out February 21st, 2023. It's never too early or too late to take control of your health and this book will show you how. Visit youngforeverbook.com to learn more and pre-order now. Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. What we crave and what we seek really can change, not just because it's better for us,

but because our nervous system actually remodels itself where the good stimulus starts to evoke dopamine release. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now I know a lot of you out there are healthcare practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as the framework for getting the root cause of the issues. Now in my practice, this often means looking at lots of internal variables to find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up until now, that meant we were usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. Now, I'm sure many of you can

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Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of of the producers of The Doctors Pharmacy podcast. It's estimated that at least 80% of doctors visits are due to illnesses related to stress. Through implementing intentional behaviors, routines, and lifestyle choices, especially in the morning, we can become more stress resilient, enjoy more balanced energy, and create overall better health.

Our first actions of the day can make or break how we feel, and in today's episode, we feature four conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on how we can start our day for better health. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Andrew Huberman about how we can improve our sleep quality starting first thing in the morning and how to rewire our brains to crave the things that are good for us. He also speaks with Dr. Elizabeth Bohm about the importance of avoiding foods that stress our bodies, especially in the morning, with Dr. Casey Means about what to eat for breakfast to minimize blood sugar swings, and with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on developing a morning routine to help manage the effects of stress throughout the day. Let's jump in. Light exposure early in the day, getting bright light exposure, ideally from sunlight, within an hour, ideally within 30 minutes of waking

up is vitally important for getting sleep later that night. And the reason is, is it basically once every 24 hours, you're going to have a spike in cortisol. It's non-negotiable. It's built into your genome. It's going to happen. Nate Hagens So do people likezona sleep better than people in seattle well well they do actually and a lot of a lot of people in seattle need light light boxes because if you live in an area where you can't get sunlight first thing in the day feel free to flip on artificial lights but you want basically the rule is you want as much bright ideally natural but if you can't get natural, artificial light would be fine early in the day. And what that does is it basically times

this cortisol spike to wake you up. That spike in cortisol isn't to stress you out, it's to wake you up. And then it sets a timer on your melatonin release. So 14 to 16 hours after your bright light exposure, you're going to get a pulse of melatonin, which is the hormone, of course, that promotes sleepiness and puts you to sleep,

independent of any supplementation of melatonin. Light inhibits melatonin through a direct pathway, through the eyes to the brainstem, and then up to the pineal. It's a well-established pathway. So the number one thing is get bright light exposure to your eyes. So no sunglasses, eyeglasses or contacts are fine early in the day.

How long? Well, it depends on how bright. So anywhere from two minutes to 10 minutes. Ideally, you're not looking at your phone during that time. Ideally, it's sunlight. But if you wake up before, you know, flip on a bunch of artificial lights and then get outside once the sunlight is out. Who's outside taking a walk?

You're not looking at the sun, right? You're not looking directly into the sun. You don't want to burn your retinas out. Indirect exposure is out. Who's outside taking a walk? You're not looking at the sun, right? You're not looking directly into the sun. You don't want to burn your retinas out. Indirect exposure is fine, but there's a class of neurons called the melanopsin ganglion cells that reset your circadian clock and time things nicely.

They time the cortisol, they time the melatonin. So that's the number one thing for, I wouldn't just say for sleep, but also for optimizing levels of alertness throughout the day. The other thing is that you really want to avoid bright light between the hours of 11 PM to 4 AM. If you're on a standard schedule, shift workers is totally different. The reason is Samer's lab and a guy named David Burson at Brown university have shown

that bright artificial light of any color blue blockers or no, if there's bright artificial light of any color, blue blockers or no, if there's bright artificial light, it activates a pathway in the brain involving this brain structure called the habenula. When I was an undergraduate, actually someone asked in neuroanatomy, what's the habenula do? No one knew. The habenula is involved actually

in generating our feelings of disappointment. It suppresses dopamine release for several days afterward. Now, if you have to go to the bathroom or you have to pull an emergency trip to the supermarket or something in the middle of the night, you don't have to worry about crushing your dopamine long-term. It's a chronic thing, but you really want to dim the lights in the evening, starting at about 10 PM. And so you're saying those blue blocker things that doesn't work. Well, the blue blockers will work, but if the lights are bright enough it doesn't matter what wavelength they are and this i is because these melanopsin cells these neurons in the eye they do respond best to blue light but they're very broad spectrum

the wavelengths that they will respond to you can shine bright red light on one of these cells and it will signal to the brain time to wake up amazing so it's really key to just dim things down. And I always say blue blockers are terrific, but you don't want to wear them during the morning and early part of the day because blue light is the optimal stimulus for this wake up signal. So we took the blue blocker thing is great in principle, but people kind of took it too far. So bright light when you want to be awake and alert and dim light when you want to be asleep. So how many hours before that? Because people are up on their TVs and their screens and computers and phones.

Yeah. So the subtle things that people can do are to start dimming the lights in the evening right about the time the sun goes down is when you want to say, oh, the sun is going down outside. And if it's overcast, it's getting dark. Well, that's the time to dim the lights in your home. The other thing is because of where these neurons are situated in the eye, overhead lights will activate this wake-up signal much more readily than lights down low. So the Scandinavians have it right.

In the evening, you want desk lamps. Most people aren't gonna have floor lighting in their house. Desk lamps early in the day and throughout the day, that's when you would want overhead lights. So those two things are going to be very beneficial. A lot of bright light, overhead light throughout the day, ideally from sunlight. And then in the evening, avoid bright lights of any color, any kind between 11 PM and 4 AM. Don't get neurotic about it. But many people find that just making these changes you don't have to like be off from like six o'clock at night no no no no and there's there's actually

the third tool which is also grounded in really nice work a paper published in scientific report shows that if you get some sunlight in your eyes in the evening right about the time of sunset and if you can't get it from the actual sunset, just go outside. You don't have to see the sun setting. You just need the light, the ambient light, the outdoor light in the morning is sufficient. There's so many photons out there, even on a cloudy day, you'd be amazed. In the evening, if you see or get outside and get some sunlight or you get some light in your eyes, that has an effect of lowering the sensitivity of the retina, of the neural part of the eye, and provides you a kind of insurance. It offsets a little bit of the late night

bright light exposure. I call it sort of your Netflix inoculation. It kind of protects you against some of the ill effects. Now, if someone's schedule is really messed up, I mean, they're not sleeping. They're really screwed up. There mean, they're not sleeping. They're really screwed up. There's a study out of the university of Colorado that showed that this is a little extreme, but going camping for two days, reset these melatonin and cortisol

rhythms for two weeks. Dr. Justin Marchegiani It's pretty incredible. Dr. Tim Jackson It's really incredible. Dr. Justin Marchegiani I noticed when I go camping or I go out in the wilderness or far away from technology I just sleep way better yeah and we had a we had a storm my house last summer and we got power out for four or five days and we just had candles at night and it was unbelievable I loved it and it felt so good to not have all that bright light at night and to go to sleep and sleep better and deeper yeah

you really reset and you mentioned reset. And you mentioned, I'm glad you mentioned candlelight candlelight in the evening is fine. It actually not to turn people into geeky scientists, but there's a great app. I have no relationship to it. It's, but it's completely free. It's called a light meter and you can run this experiment. You can download the app. You go outside on a, on an overcast day in Boston in January and press the little button on light meter in the morning. And it'll show you that even though you don't see the sun, it looks like dense cloud cover. There'll be something like 5,000 Lux of light. You'll go inside, you'll point the thing at a

really bright artificial light and it'll say 300 Lux. Wow. Close the window to the outside and it reduces it by about 50 fold. So you don't want to do this through a window or a car window. And then you say, well, wait, you just said that there's very little light intensity coming from artificial lights. Why is it so bad at night? I should be able to turn on every light in the house and it won't reset.

But the clock and your eye get more sensitive as the day progresses. So you have to control it at both ends. And candlelight is fine. Dim light in the evening is fine. But throughout the day, you really want to try and get some bright light exposure. And for many people whose schedules are just really screwed up, anchoring to these two or three things of bright light exposure

and avoiding bright light in the evening hours between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. often not always can really reset people's ability and once you're sleeping well everything else gets better so that was kind of the the first question you had the other one is that um i'd be remiss if i didn't mention there are things that people can take i'm sure you're familiar with with several of these as well obviously well we have a doctor right here so talk to a doctor obviously Obviously, I'm not a physician. I'm a professor, so I don't prescribe anything. But the three things that have made a tremendous difference- You just profess, you don't prescribe. I profess, I don't prescribe. That's right. That's what I usually say. Profess lots of things.

The three things that I've certainly benefited from, and I know a number of other people have, and for which there's really good research, are apigenin, A--i-g-e-n-i-n which is um it's very inexpensive it's chamomile extract um and it basically turns on a chloride channel mechanism in the brain it turns off thinking it's kind of the equivalent of an alcoholic drink it just turns off thinking you could still drive on the stuff but it makes people drowsy you drink chamomile tea or you have to take a concentrated um some people get that benefit from chamomile tea other people like the apigen and the other ones are the magnesium the magnesium and magnesium threonate and by glycinate in particular threonate spelled t-h-r-e-o-n-a-t-e and by glycinate i won't spell it's sort of just as it sounds.

Those cross the blood brain barrier more readily because you're ingesting this obviously into the gut and then that magnesium needs to get into the brain. And basically the magnesium seems to act as a precursor to GABA, the inhibitory neurotransmitter. And so for people who have a hard time turning off their thoughts,

that can be very beneficial. So there's the kind of light, which is a kind of ancient mechanism about regulating alertness and getting into sleep. And then there's the modern thing, which is supplements. And there's something sort of in between worth mentioning, which is there's a great tool that was developed by my colleague who's our associate chair of psychiatry at stanford his name is david spiegel he's actually a clinical hypnotist um he's done a lot of work on pain management and even breast cancer outcomes from hypnosis and he's developed a free app that's on apple and on android called reverie r-e-v-eR-I. It's a 15 minute hypnosis that you do in waking, which trains the brain to sleep better.

And I think that a lot of people hear hypnosis and get a little bit freaked out, but there are a lot of clinical data showing that this can help people to learn to turn off their thoughts and to relax and go to sleep. And there's some other nice hypnosis scripts in there as well. It's David's voice and he kind of walks you through it.

So those are, aside from the supplements, the light and the hypnosis are free resources that I think most everyone could benefit from. If I wake up in the middle of the night, oftentimes I will do one of these hypnosis scripts. And just one other thing about sleep. A lot of people wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. and can't fall back asleep. Okay. I never understood why that was. And then I talked to the folks in the sleep lab at Stanford

and I talked to the chronic... Here's probably the reason. There's an asymmetry in this seesaw that we're all equipped with internally, which is that we can all push on and stay awake more easily than we can just force ourselves to sleep, right? That's true, right. At some point we fall asleep.

But if you're waking up at three or four a.m., unless you're drinking too many fluids, and that's the reason why, chances are you are running out of melatonin at that point. The levels of melatonin in your blood are dropping. And what it means is you stayed up too late, and you probably are one of these people that should be going to bed at 8 30 and waking up about three 30 or

4am. And people don't like that answer because they think, no, but I want to be the person that goes to bed at 11 and you know, there are ways to shift your circadian rhythm that we could talk about, but try and go to bed one hour earlier and chances are you will wake up feeling better at three or 4am. Now it's not exactly a solution, but if you're in an argument with your spouse or something about going to bed

at, you know, at one hour or the next, you know, you can leverage biology or cite this discussion. So, wow. So we really have this sleep epidemic problem and people are struggling with figuring out how to deal with it and your lab and you've worked really a lot on how do we navigate the landscape of sleep because as we're having this conversation whatever i ask you keep coming back to sleep which is fascinating to me as a foundation and we always think diet's the foundation exercise foundation meditation but sleep is sort of that neglected fourth leg of the of the table well and

it's the thing that we've been encouraged to push through and i mean there are some elements i mean that we could get down into the the uh fine science of it you know we sleep in 90 minute cycles ultradian cycles better to wake up after six hours than seven right you know for most people for sake of alertness so waking up at the end of one of these 90 minute cycles, you're going to feel more alert than you would say if you slept into seven hours would mean you were about, you know, you weren't complete through your last ultradian cycle, but sleeping at seven 30 would be even better if you can, you know, so getting the right amount of sleep is it, it's a process that you want to master on average, right?

You know, the one occasional all-nighter, you'll be okay. You drink coffee too late, you'll be fine. But on average, you want to be sleeping. Most people, it's going to be anywhere from five to eight hours a night. Naps in the afternoon seem to be okay. The hypnosis script and the other things will really help people get centered around this. I think that the idea of breaking up one's sleep there were these crazy sleep cycles that were promoted the not to be confused with huberman they called it the uberman schedule i just want to be very clear

not huberman schedule um there there was a study that came out recently that showed that it's incredibly detrimental to all sorts of inflammatory cytokine markers. You mean take a nap in them? Oh no, to try and sleep two hours, wake up, sleep two hours, wake up, sleep around the clock. There are people that they found they could compress their total sleep time. This was kind of a Silicon Valley thing,

like trying to master one, you know, you just can't conquer. You do have these human bodies, you gotta actually. Yeah, you can't conquer that. But I think sleep is vitally important. Then I, I think, um, I do think that foundational diet and supplementation and, and from the literature I've seen, I'd love your thoughts on this, that the literature that impresses me the most in terms of diet and the brain and brain states are the studies that look at EPA, essential fatty acids and the gut microbiome those are the

two things that to me it's like it's undeniable i don't understand how anyone nowadays could even question the idea that getting proper lipid intake you know essentially brain is fat yeah these omega-3s are so important i I mean, in a double, several double blind placebo controlled studies that I've read, it appears that getting a thousand milligrams or more per day of EPA. So not just taking a thousand milligrams of fish oil, but making sure that you're getting above that threshold of a thousand milligrams of EPA from quality sources compares just with similar effect as ssris antidepressant prescription antidepressants but without the side effects right which is incredible and that if you are taking ssris it allows you to take a much lower dose yeah to still be effective to me like incredible data

and then the other one is that um getting ferment ingesting fermented foods one or two servings a day sauerkraut for the brain yeah sauerkraut for the brain or whatever given culture because that what i learned and and this is very new and emerging data there's a guy at duke he's incredible he was a nutritionist but then he has phd nutrition excuse me and now he's a neuroscientist um his name is Diego Borges, not to be confused with the Argentine writer Borges. He's Ecuadorian, and he found that there are neurons in our gut of the vagus nerve.

So these are neurons that live in the gut endothelium, and they sense three things. They fire electrical signals to the dopamine centers of the brain in response to fatty acids right there that when fats are you know meats and things are broken down in the fatty acids amino acids of other kinds so from protein and sugar sure and what and so these neurons can easily be tricked into signaling the brain to release more dopamine and because dopamine is really the molecule of craving

into craving more of whatever activated those neurons. And so if you give these neurons enough EPA or enough amino acids, so protein and essential fatty acids, the dopamine centers of the brain are just firing like clockwork, which is going to enhance mood, motivation, energy. I mean, dopamine in proper amounts is a beautiful thing.

Too high, obviously you don't want, but you're not gonna get it too high. People don't get addicted to chicken mood, motivation, energy. I mean, dopamine in proper amounts is a beautiful thing. Too high, obviously you don't want, but you're not going to get it too high. People don't get addicted to chicken breasts, but they get addicted to sugar. Right. And I think that's, I actually think that's because they're, they are, these neurons seem to be responding best to particular amino acids. They seem to want glutamine of all things. They seem to want the omega-3s and what's interesting is that even if they numb the taste so that people can't taste sugar if people ingest sugar these neurons receptors in your gut and they crave more sugar even if they can't taste the sugar so I always thought that the dopamine release

to sweet things was because it tastes so good but the Borges lab results and some other work on dopamine more generally from my colleague anna lemke at stanford shows that dopamine isn't so much about pleasure we all including myself were taught it's about pleasure dopamine is about craving more of whatever it is triggered dopamine release yeah whether it's heroin or cocaine or sugar or sex. And so these neurons that, that trigger dopamine release, they are powerfully affected by, uh, by these quality omega threes and by amino acids. And then what's really interesting is that they trigger the release of dopamine, but then you say, well, okay, that should be pretty simple. We should, like you said,

people don't get addicted to chicken breasts. And I wonder whether or not that's either because omega-3s are too low. So these neurons are not, the full concert of these neurons is inactive. Or it could be that for some reason that the other things that people are ingesting has messed up these neurons. And so the whole brain-body relationship is disrupted. And it's, I guess, Robert Lustig is his name at UCSF. And others are now showing that some of the emulsifiers

in foods and other things like that, what they do to the gut endothelium, I never really understood how the gut brain thing worked. But what I realized is, is that these microbiota, they don't care about us. What they do is they're trying to find conditions in the gut where the mucus is, pH of the mucus is, pH of the mucus

is just right. And that if people ingest emulsifiers and sugars, what happens is these neurons, and Borges lab has shown this, that these neurons that are in the gut endothelium and can sense amino acids and can sense essential fatty acids, they actually start to retract their processes into the deeper layers of the gut. In other words, if you ingest the wrong things, pretty soon the neurons in the gut remodel the bad kind of neuroplasticity and you lose your gut brain sensing system. And so it's not just a matter of giving it the right things. It's really about, for many people, it's going to be about repairing this system and allowing this

portion of our nervous system to grow back. Now, the nice thing about peripheral neurons is that they grow back. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark. Now, time and again, I've had my patients tell me they're too busy to eat as healthy as they'd like. And that's when I ask them how much time they spend on email or social media. I like to tell them if they have time to scroll, they have time to shop online for healthy foods. With Thrive Market, you can order all your favorite healthy pantry staples, snacks, household and body care goods, and so much more and have it delivered right to your door. Thrive Market is an online membership-based grocery store that makes eating well convenient and more affordable. They've got everything from ethically sourced cabinet

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Shop today at nordic.com and save 20% using the code pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure or prevent any disease. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. By the way, I just got to unpack that because what you said was just so profound right there. Basically, you're talking about uncoupling the natural ability of our body

to sense its environment and to self-regulate in the right way to create health when we eat processed food that contains ingredients that screw up the gut microbiome or the lining. And all of a contains ingredients that screw up the gut microbiome or the lining, and all of a sudden the brain in the gut, or whatever you want to call it, the neurons in the gut, start to change as a result of the crappy food we're eating and make us less able to seek out and want the foods that are good for us and tend to make us seek out and

want the foods that are bad for us. Exactly. good for us and tend to make us seek out and want the foods that are bad for us exactly that is a massive like brain state shift for me because i never really understood you know the mechanics of how that happens but it's clearly true when people are eating bad foods they want more bad foods they keep eating more and more of them and there are many reasons for that but the gut story is just fascinating yeah these neurons uh and really uh you know i tip my hat to the borges slab it it's it's cool you know science as you know can get really entrenched and that someone comes from a completely different perspective of you know his background in nutrition and he described um

it actually is a it's a relevant story here he had a friend who was she was very overweight and she ended up having a gastric bypass surgery and she lost a lot of weight and her diabetes went away and but she also started craving runny eggs you know easy over you know runny eggs but previously just the thought of runny eggs made her nauseous, made her want to vomit. And he heard that story and he realized that cravings themselves are modified by the conditions of the gut. How could this be? So he started exploring, what are these neurons in the gut? Who are they?

What brain areas are they talking to? It's very clear that these neurons, they innervate the gut. They're part of the vagus nerve, connect to the brain areas that release dopamine and create craving. And so the health of these neurons in your gut is strongly going to impact what you want. And so what I love about the literature, and I haven't had anything to do with the research I'm describing, but I've spent a lot of time with that work. What I love about the work that he's doing and others are doing is that it really points to a, the brain body connection is mediated by neurons. B that what we crave and what we seek really can change. I think that a lot of people that are having a hard time shifting towards a healthier eating or healthier relationship to light. So we talked about a few moments ago, it starts becoming reflexive because not just because it's better for us, but because our nervous system actually remodels itself in ways where the good stimulus starts to evoke dopamine release.

Yeah, I find that so true. If I go off track, I just want more of the bad stuff. If I stay on track, I want more of the good stuff. Like I naturally will crave the things that are good for me. But I think what's happened through our radical dietary changes is we've gotten so far away from our natural sort of ability to seek out things that nourish us, and we've lost that. Animals have that. They're not going to be running around eating things that are going to make them sick and gain weight and cause damage to their gut microbiome or whatever. But they're not thinking about it. Their body naturally will seek out, oh,

I want this plant because it's got this nutrition in it, or this one has this phytochemical. They're not thinking that, but their body is telling them where to go and where to look and what to eat. We've sort of really decoupled our ability to be in touch with our natural healthy cravings and it been hijacked by the food industry to desire all these foods that are driving us into worse and worse states of dysfunction poor health and poor brain states and poor brain function yeah it's it's interesting because the discussion about light and discussion about food are remarkably similar from the perspective of these neurons in our eye, they don't think they'll

respond to light at 1am when you're watching Netflix, just as well as they'll respond to sunlight because of their sensitivity at that time of night, they don't care. They don't, they don't, they'll work for you or they'll work against you. They don't have a mind of their own. They're just cells. These cells in your gut are the same. And so I think that what's exciting as more and more of the neuroscience and emerges in these other fields, like nutrition, start to really infiltrate neuroscience and in a positive way, we're starting to realize that giving the brain and the body the proper stimulus. And there is a proper stimulus. There is a right time of day to get sunlight and light in your eyes. And there's a wrong time of day. There's a right time of, there's a right time of day to get sunlight and light in your eyes. And there's a wrong time of day.

There's a right time of, there's a right set of nutrients. Amino acids and fatty acids are what your body really craves, but we've been giving it decoys, right? Sugar is a decoy. It really is a decoy. These neurons, unfortunately respond to sugar, connect to the dopamine centers of the brain. And as I mentioned before, even if we don't taste the sugars, they're triggering these, these mechanisms. So I think that neurons are, are both beautiful and, and remarkable, but they're also dumb. They'll, they'll send these signals to your brain, to a variety of

things that you give it. So you want to know what is the proper input? Like, what do I need to give these neurons? When do I want, need to give it sunlight or, or amino acids, essential fatty acids. Cause that's really what we crave. There's no essential carbohydrate and I'm not an anti-carbohydrate person. I eat starches. I actually find them very useful for falling asleep at night. They really help. Well, it's not only what to eat is what to eat. When, right. Right. We, we are, we're totally flipped in this country. We eat all of our sugar and starch and carbs in the morning, not so much at night. Yeah, I tend to do the opposite. I'll fast in the early part of the day, and then I eat meat and vegetables throughout

the day, and then starches at night. There are certain foods that actually cause stress in the body, independent of your thoughts. And there are certain foods that reduce stress in the body, independent of what you're thinking, right? So it's actually food can be a stressor or a relaxer depending on what you're eating can you talk about the foods that tend to cause more cortisol adrenaline and stress in the body and then some of the foods that we would be thinking about that might help reduce that that's such a great point you know you know if we if

we eat a donut and with coffee and sugar. I'm going to an extreme here for breakfast, right? It's not that extreme. It's probably the breakfast of most Americans. Dunkin' Donuts or coffee. That is really stressful on the body, right? Why? Because it causes this spike in our blood sugar

because it gets digested and absorbed really quickly. Our blood sugar goes up quickly and the body goes, oh no, right? It gets stressful for the body. The body produces a bunch of insulin to help lower it. And then what happens is the blood sugar drops afterwards. And so those ups and downs in blood sugar like that are really stressful for the body. And when the blood-

If your blood sugar is dropping, it's a life-threatening emergency. You've got to go get food. Right, right. So those, you know, if you're eating a lot of foods that cause your blood sugar to go up and then drop with, you know, those easily to digest and absorb, you know, you have a can of soda. I mean, we're, you know, those things really are stressful for the body. They create this stress.

They create the cortisol response. It's one of the reasons we get a lot of weight gain around the belly when we eat those kind of foods, because they are stressful for the body. And so instead, we wanna be really balancing our blood sugar. And- Before you get into how to fix it,

I just wanna point out this study that was just so mind blowing when I read it years ago by a friend of ours, Dr. David Ludwig from Harvard. And he took he took kids that were overweight and fed him three different breakfasts right oatmeal steel cutouts and an omelet same calories okay same calories but different carbohydrate protein different fat what he found was that the kids who had the regular oatmeal like the quickly absorbed oatmeal we think oatmeal is healthy, right?

It's not like having a donut. Their insulin went up, obviously their blood sugar went up, but their cortisol went up, their adrenaline went up. So the body perceived it as a stress. Yes. Whereas the kids who ate the omelet didn't happen. Yes. And then the kids who ate the oatmeal were hungrier,

wanted more food. So we know that starch and sugar create a biological stress response in the body. And that's bad. In addition to the fact that the sugar causes a problem, your brain chemistry and your neurotransmitters are talking to your fat cells. And they're telling them when they're under stress to store more fat. So literally stress makes you gain weight independent of what you're eating. So it's really, it's fascinating when you look at weight and other issues.

It's so connected. It's so connected. It's fascinating. So really balancing blood sugar is so powerful. People sometimes we say these things again and again, like balance your blood sugar, have a good source of protein, healthy fat and fiber at each meal. And sometimes we say it so much that I wonder people just, Oh yeah, it's the same thing. They're just saying eat healthy, but it's really critical to have a good source of protein, healthy fat, and great source of fiber at every meal because it's, it's, it, it is not allowing for

that stress response to happen in the body. It's, it's nourishing the body and that's exactly what the body needs. So. Yeah. And so I think, you know, using food and having the right quality fats, low glycemic diet, lots of fiber, phytochemicals. These are all messenger molecules that help reduce the stress in the body. Yes. So, you know, so we always start with food first, and this is a great place to start in this area, you know, really working to balance the blood sugar, preventing those spikes in blood sugar, preventing that stress. I remember when I was filming the movie Fed Up, and one of the scenes was where the mother was like trying to get her kids to lose weight and her family to lose weight. And she's like, well, what I really focused on is healthy

breakfast cereals. And she pulls out these cereals that are marketed as quote health foods. I mean, Kellogg, who invented breakfast cereal as a breakfast food, which wasn't a thing, right? These are basically dessert for breakfast. It's 75% sugar and that is having a soda with breakfast. So I think people need to get that cereal and starch for breakfast is a huge no-no. If you can do one thing to change your biology quickly, it's get rid of any starch or sugar for breakfast. Yes. Yes.

You said that it's like eating sugar for breakfast. I will up the ante here. It's much worse than eating dessert for breakfast. Peach pie has an average glucose spike of 46 milligrams per deciliter. Cinnamon toast crunch is 59. And they both have, of course, the refined seed oils and the flour. It's worse. Okay. Give me the peach pie. I love peach pie. I know. Exactly. Exactly. So you mentioned getting rid of the breakfast foods that have the refined starches. This has been one of the most fascinating things we've seen because all the common American breakfast foods are in the worst hundred foods that score. And these,

just to run through them really quick, we're talking about, this is in our worst hundred foods that score. And these, just to run through them really quick, we're talking about, this is in our worst 50 foods, Egg McMuffin, Bagel with Cream Cheese, French Toast, Pop Tarts, Cereal, English Muffin, Blueberry Scones, Cinnamon Roll, Cheerios, Croissant, Toast with Jam. Those are all above a 40 milligram per deciliter spike. So that's a big spike.

Which is a lot. It's a lot. If you look at then the best foods in our data set, like very little glucose spike, you also see a handful of breakfast foods. And so these are the ones we want to eat. Like what? We see frittata. We see avocado and egg, avocado and greens, chia pudding, Greek yogurt and berries. And we actually see this, a lot of people log this, I think because Kelly Levesque is sort of close in our network, but we get a lot of logs for the Fab Four smoothie, which is a smoothie that she has popularized, which is really balanced. It has very minimal fruit, a lot of protein, fiber, fat, and greens. And all of those

that I just mentioned all score below 20 milligrams per deciliter. So you want to get it. I mean, it's basically, Mark, it's the Pagan diet. People can read your book. But it's the beautiful nutrient-dense foods that none of those have refined carbs. And I think people sometimes assume that, oh, if I'm going to have a keto breakfast or a low-carb breakfast, I need to eat the animal products. That's not true. Half of those things I just mentioned don't have animal products, the fab four smoothie, the chia pudding, you could do non-dairy yogurt with some berries, uh, some avocado, uh, with, you know, and so, so that's just something important to remember that breakfast is this one's straightforward. Don't eat those

first things, eat those things. So fat and protein for breakfast, get rid of the starch and sugar. You talked about the importance of a morning routine because yes, we know the harm of stress and we can go into that more, but I think people get it. What are the three M's you talk about that you can practice every morning to start your day and actually kind of get ahead of the stress? Yeah, so I call these the three M's of a morning routine. The first M is mindfulness, the second M is movement, and the third M is mindset. So I say, look, I'm a huge fan of morning routines because they give you a period of calm in the morning that's just going to make you a bit more resilient to cope with those stresses that will come up in your day. It's not if they're going to come you a bit more resilient to cope with those stresses that will come up in

your day. It's not if they're going to come up, they will come up. But I think the 3Ms provides a very valuable structure to help you think about what are you going to put into your morning routine. And it works if you have an hour in the morning, it works beautifully well. If you only have five minutes, like some of my patients, it can still work really well. So the first time mindfulness can be, it can be meditation. It can be breathing. You know, it can be a practice of mindfulness. Whatever you want can go under that umbrella of mindfulness. I personally, currently I'm doing the calm meditation app. So first thing, when I get up in the morning, I'm plugging into the calm meditation app. I put my phone on airplane mode so I can't see

any of the incoming noise that might be on there. And I do 10 or 15 minutes meditation. Some days, Mark, I hit the zone and I feel really, really calm. Other days, I just go through my to-do list. But what I've learned to do is not beat myself up about it on those days where I'm going through my to-do list. I'm accepting that, hey, you know what, my mind's a little bit busy today, that's okay. Whereas even 18 months ago, I would get slightly frustrated, oh, I can't switch my mind off, I can't clear my mind. So I think that's a great practice for people to do. Then I move on to movement. Again, movement can be anything depending on what you like. I do a lot of hip stretches, maybe some yoga moves, maybe some workouts on a step, maybe some press-ups,

whatever I feel like for five or 10 minutes. That is all I do. And then I'll move on to mindset. So mindset can be anything to put you in a positive frame of mind. So it could be reading a book that you find very uplifting for a few minutes with a cup of tea in the morning. It could be doing affirmations.

And actually, you know, like many people listening, I've got young kids, right? So my daughter, who's currently six, has a sixth sense when daddy is up, right? So I try and get up before them and get my morning routine done. But she can sense when I'm downstairs doing it. And often she'll creep down in. Often it's in my second M, in my movement, which is fine because she just does the movement with me. But if she's there with me for the third M, which is mindset, I'll do affirmations with her. So we'll sit there together. I'll hold her

hand. She'll hold my hands. And we will say for about two minutes, I'm happy. I'm calm. I'm stress-free. I'm happy. I'm calm. I'm stress-free. And happy I'm calm I'm stress-free and we'll just repeat that for two minutes and at the end of those two minutes she's got the most beautiful smile on her face I feel totally relaxed and calm and that calm continues throughout the day that's the beauty of it it's not just in the moment I'm more resilient to the stressors in my life now for people who are thinking I don't have time for that because I've got a lot of patients who are single moms, who might be working two jobs. I managed to persuade them to give it a go even for five minutes. And one of my patients simply does this. She does her morning routine with those three M's in just five minutes.

She gets up and for one minute, she will do deep breathing. She does a breath that I taught her called the three, four, five breath. When you breathe in for three, hold for four and breathe out for five. Okay, she does that for one minute. Then she does two minutes of some yoga moves that she learned on YouTube, right? So this is super accessible. She didn't have to go to a class,

even though I recommend yoga classes. She learned some moves on YouTube, which she likes. And then for the final two minutes, she's got about three or four books that make her feel good. She literally, final two minutes, she's got about three or four books that make her feel good. And she literally, for two minutes, she reads three or four pages from that book. And she has reported back that actually that has really, really helped her. In fact, she thinks it's helped her eczema get better, which is remarkable because there are many things that can cause eczema.

Eczema, we know, ultimately is a slight dysfunction of the immune system. Stress impacts the immune system. Of course. So for her, doing that morning routine, she feels is helping her with her skin. For somebody else, it may not do that, right? But I just want to really get across how powerful these small intentional moments of calm are.

So again, I hope people listening think, you know, maybe I'll try that 3M morning routine for about seven days or so and see how you feel yeah no it's so powerful it's just it's just building the structure of that into your day and i think you know when i do it it makes a huge difference and like yesterday again i was preparing for my show and i'm like oh i got you know 300 emails i don't know this to do and that to do and i'm like no no i'm just gonna stop i'm gonna do a little meditation in the morning i went to work out a little bit i went to the beach and just sat on the on the on the beach went in the ocean for a little bit and i just my mind was clear i felt calm it was like and it set me up for an amazing day which you know often don't give

myself that i mean i i usually meditate in the morning for 20 minutes and, uh, we'll exercise when I can. Can I ask you a question Mark? Do you ever feel, you know, how important meditation is for you in the morning, but do you, like many of us, sometimes feel, Oh, I'm too busy today. I don't have that 20 minutes. I just want to get ahead with my emails. And if you do that, I mean mean i think it'll be interesting for people to hear that is do you fall prey to the same pressures that we fall absolutely i absolutely and i've got the stuff i gotta prepare for i don't have time i've got to finish this i gotta do that and yeah but i'll usually fit it in somewhere else yeah and i think you know it's probably a false notion probably not even true that if i did it i'd feel better and when i do it especially when i do it regularly like twice a day i don't feel stressed about anything like

i'm resilient i'm calm i'm more productive i'm more focused and it's and it's like well how do you have that much time every day to meditate well turns out i don't have the time not to because of the impact it has on the quality of my life the quality of my happiness the quality of my experience the quality of my relationships yeah uh and and my overall well-being and in my productivity so i think it's it's i've learned that it's it's something that's essential and it's not just an add-on it's as important as eating well and exercising yeah now thank you for that i mean i find that when i don't do my morning routine when i think that i'm too busy i feel it later yeah you know i get stressed at things i things take me longer than

they would have done and i've i you know i'm not perfect but i've certainly trained myself to actually do it and i find you know the more you can do it at the same time every day the easier it is to create that new habit yeah And if, again, if people are listening to this, I'd say over the last few months, I've been really delving into behavior science in terms of what does all the best science and behavior change say about how we create a new behavior. And, you know, research from Duke University suggests that over 50%, I think it was 56% of what we do in any given day is habit. It's not conscious thought, it's habit. So the way to create new behavior is to stick it on to an existing habit that you are already doing without

thinking. So for example, in the UK, I don't know if it's the same here, but a lot of people like to put the kettle on in the morning and make themselves a hot drink, whether it's a coffee or a cup of tea. So with many of my patients, I start simply that. I say, look, how about when the kettle's on, what do you do? Oh, I normally flick emails or go on social media. I say, okay, why not when the kettle's boiling, why not for that one minute, do some deep breathing? And it's amazing how powerful that is because they don't need to find time in their day. Because many people say they don't have time. They're already going to be boiling that kettle. So they're using that time productively to get that one minute of deep breathing in. And again, breathing is one of the simplest and fastest ways to switch off your

stress response. Breathing is information for your brain. It's information for your body. It's true. You know, we were talking earlier about BJ Fogg, who's a behavioral scientist, and he talks about behavior change having to be broken down into something that's, you have an intention to do, you have a desire to do, you have the ability to do, and you have a trigger to do it. Exactly. And so, for example, I really wanted to do more push-ups because I'm getting older, I don't want to lose muscle, it's important. And I'm like, oh, I'm so busy, but I know it takes like 30 seconds or a minute for my shower to heat up

in the morning. So I basically have a trigger, which is I turn the shower on and I drop down on the bathroom floor and I do my 30, 50 push-ups and then I'm good. And it's so simple. And at that time, I don't know what else I would be doing there. They're just sitting and waiting, but I looked at my phone, but it's a simple, so simple behavior change habits that you can integrate in your life that make the biggest difference. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review

below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. If you like this conversation, I know you'll love my new book, Young Forever. If you pre-order this book now, you'll get access to my discount bundle with deals from all my favorite health and wellness brands. Visit youngforeverbook.com to order my book and get access to these deals. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love

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