The Dr. Josh Axe Show - The Shocking Truth About Microplastics, EMFs, and Infrared Saunas | Dr. Stephen Cabral

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Do you struggle with autoimmune issues, thyroid disorders, or stubborn weight gain? You won't want to miss this fascinating episode with functional medicine expert Dr. Stephen Cabral. Did you know the average person is exposed to over 700,000 toxic compounds and radiation sources each day? These environmental exposures may be a driving factor behind rapidly rising rates of chronic illness. Dr. Stephen Cabral is a board-certified Naturopathic Doctor who overcame his own battle with severe autoimmune disease and hypothyroidism. On today's show, he reveals: The "rain barrel effect" that leads to chronic health conditions Shocking research on the toxic impacts of microplastics and EMFs Simple lifestyle strategies to reduce inflammation and support detox Who should avoid infrared saunas and cold plunging Surprising statistics on the increased prevalence of autism and ADHD Dr. Stephen Cabral takes a truly holistic approach, addressing the physical, mental/emotional, and spiritual aspects of optimal wellbeing. Whether you want to lose weight, overcome chronic illness, or just feel more energized, this information-packed episode will give you a roadmap to reclaim your health. Tune in now to learn Dr. Stephen Cabral's best tips for slowing aging, reducing toxin exposure, and achieving your vision of total vibrancy! #healing #autoimmunedisease #hypothyroidism #functionalmedicine #labtesting #omega3 #omega6 #foodsensitivity #hormones #autism #adhd #autoimmunediseases #mentalhealthdisorders #environmentaltoxins #geneticpredisposition #glutathione #detoxification #epigenetics #biologicalage #supplements #foods #microplastics #emfs #infraredsauna #stressmanagement Want more of The Dr. Josh Axe Show? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow Dr. Josh Axe Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Dr. Stephen Cabral Instagram Facebook Twitter YouTube Follow Leaders Instagram Twitter Facebook Email Newsletter ------  Links:  Get Stephen’s FREE BOOK The Rain Barrel Effect  → stephencabral.com  Check out Stephen’s podcast, The Cabral Concept  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe show. I am your host, Dr. Josh Axe. Each and every week, I dive into the principles and science behind how to grow in body, mind, spirit and take your health and life to the next level. I am super excited about today's guest. This has been a long time coming. We're having Stephen Cabral on the show. And Dr. Stephen is a friend.

He's also a naturopathic doctor. He's the host of a top 20 podcast on iTunes known as the. Cabral concept. And today we're going to be diving in answering so many questions that we get on a regular basis about how to reverse autoimmune disease and hypothyroidism. We're going to get into EMF. We're going to talk about some issues around and benefits of hyperbarrier chamber. We'll talk about infrared light therapy, cold plunging, microplastics, and how to heal numerous conditions on the show. Dr. Stephen, welcome the show. for having it's great to be here. Well, you've got a pretty amazing story about healing yourself

when you were 17 years old. I know that you saw over 50 doctors, had over 100 different treatments, and nothing seemed to work. And finally, you found something that did work for yourself. So that's really where I want to kick us off with, because I think it's so important when you're able to heal yourself in a way it's easier to help other people heal. And so I'd love for you to share with us about your incredible journey of healing that started at 17 years old. Yeah, and actually that was a great point that you brought up is that there's so many people in the natural health field that got into this field only because they were almost forced to. They had to figure out their own health issues. And because of that, they said, why doesn't conventional medicine share this with you? Why don't they ever talk about this in school or with family or a pediatrician? And so it's their mission now to share that with the world. And I think I'm really no different is that my story started at 17 years old, but you could say it was all through childhood. My entire childhood had allergies. I had borderline asthma. I just wasn't the healthiest kid. I had ear, nose and throat issues, swollen tonsils, tonsils taken out, adenoids taken out. It's like, well, if anything

was wrong, conventional medicine just basically cut it out of my body. And so at 17 years old, what happened was that my immune system literally began to shut down. So I had swollen glands in my neck, my armpits, my groin. And what happened was conventional medicine ran their typical battery of blood work, but they couldn't figure out what was going on inside of my body. So they then started to run cat scans and MRIs and x-rays and x-rays. And they still didn't see anything as to why my immune system was not functioning properly. And I was beginning to live body was beginning to atrophy and literally shut down. And so I lost 20, 30 pounds. I had tremendous brain fog and fatigue and it felt like I was a walking zombie with flu-like symptoms

all day long. So two years of going from doctor to doctor specialist to specialist only for them to say it's either all in my head or I'll get worse and they'll finally be able to see it on blood work. This is the mid-90s. We didn't really know. People weren't really talking about natural health and functional medicine, but I got a tip from a neighbor that you may want to check out this doctor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I lived right outside of Boston. And that began then my road into natural health in the mid-90s. And I could tell you that it wasn't straightforward. I'd didn't get well right away. There wasn't enough sharing of information like there is today with podcasts and books and all of that. So what I was forced to do, though, was spend 10 years

reading hundreds and then thousands of books and meeting with dozens of natural health practitioners as well, finally meeting my mentor, Dr. Pete, and by this time I had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune issue, Addison's disease, which is the inability to produce cortisol, so you feel like a walking zombie and have flu-like symptoms all the time. and I had type 2 diabetes, and that's on top of the mass cell activation syndrome and the insomnia and the allergies and all those other issues. Well, within six months of meeting my mentor, she combined functional medicine, at home lab testing, looking at my gut health, looking at food sensitivities, looking at my cortisol, looking at omega-6s, omega-3s, all these different

things, heavy metals, and within six months, no more Addison's disease, no more rheumatoly arthritis, no more type 2 diabetes, and I was healed. Now, I will still. say one thing, although I was better, I actually didn't know how well you could feel. It was only years later as I continued to get better and better as my health begin to compound that I finally now today, in my mid-40s, feel better than I ever have in my life. And so I try to share that with people that no matter how bad your prognosis is, that you can get well. You truly can. Yeah, it's a great piece of advice. You know, one of the other things I want to point out, and this is so many people today, people will go into the conventional medical system.

They'll get blood work done. And their doctor will tell them, hey, everything's in range. Everything's normal. You're just fine. And you and I both know that's not true. One of the other things that I really, you know, when I think about some of the people that are the best in the world at something, when I think about you, and obviously you're an expert at a lot of things, but analyzing blood work, being able to tell what's going on with somebody based on their, you know, their biochemistry and looking at labs.

is something that you are very, very proficient in, you're excellent in, you have a lot of experience there. Walk us through that a little bit because there are a lot of tests out there. What do you believe today are the most important tests? Maybe what are your top five in ranking order? The most important tests that somebody should get done in order to tell if they're healthy or not. Yeah, so even with functional medicine, which are basically at-home lab tests that don't diagnose disease, what they do is they look at the underlying root causes for why disease may manifest in the first place. So a disease is just, I have what, Hashimoto's, or you have low thyroid, whatever you want to call it.

Those are names for diseases, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc. But they all have underlying root causes. Now, conventional medicine will play it off as, well, it's just genetic. And you can say, okay, well, if it was just genetic, I have rheumatoly arthritis. Like, I don't have great genes. and all four my grandparents had rheumatoid arthritis. It typically hit them in their either early 50s or 60s. And I got rheumatoid arthritis.

Yeah, it's in my genes at 17. Well, okay, why did it happen at 17? Oh, we'll just say, well, that's your genetics. All right. Well, I'll go along with that. So I didn't have it for 16 and a half years. Then I had it. And then 10 years later, I no longer have it again.

Well, if I have the same genes, why don't I have rheumatoid arthritis anymore? And so we have to understand is that, yes, we all have a certain genetic predisposition. But there are underlying root causes that then allow for the expression of certain genes. And so these at-home lab tests actually look at that. There are five main labs that we use. Now, we have over 40 labs in our practice, and I want to just share this, that they're not our labs. We use all third-party labs in testing to stay independent of that process. And so the two most important ones are called a starter kit.

They are a hair test, so you just take a couple snips of hair and a urine test. going to look at your mineral levels, your vitamin levels, your gut health, like yeast overgrowth or bacterial overgrowth, and it will look at things like your neurotransmitter metabolites, so your energy levels produced by the mitochondria, the neurotransmitters, and it will look at if I haven't already mentioned heavy metals. So it looks at vitamins and minerals, gut health, and heavy metals, and it does that because you're here is simply a protein that catches or the excretion from your body, such as things like your electrolytes, calcium, magnesium, sodium, sodium, calcium excreted in greater times of stress.

It's actually pulled from the bones. And then there's your zinc levels to copper levels. So everything in the body is in ratio, I'm happy to go in deeper if we want. But really at a high level, your body runs on the raw material, the vitamins, the minerals. Another lab test is the omega-3s to omega-6s. The typical diet is, for a healthy person, they're usually at a 6-7-1 we see in our practice. when you want to be a three-to-one. Typical American diet is an 18 or 20-to-1 of omega-6s to omega-3s.

So highly inflammatory, which then expresses, again, a lot of these negative genes that we don't want. Then we have our food sensitivity test, and then we have our hormones test that looks at cortisol throughout the day, not just in the morning. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHA, your thyroid, but not just T-SH, which is just a signal for producing thyroid. we have free T4, free T3, TPO antibodies, and then we look at vitamin D and hemoglobin A1C, which is essentially a measure for your blood sugar over the last 90 days. So it's a very comprehensive look at your health, not just sickness. And that's what we want to focus on in our practice is overall health. And just one more note is we've, nobody is great at this in the beginning.

And I wasn't either, like at all. We've now run a half a million plus labs over and on. over a quarter of a million people. And so we just have a lot of data and we can actually see now what works and what doesn't work. Let me ask, what are some of the biggest root cause issues

that you see in practice? What are the most common vitamin and mineral deficiencies? What are some of the most, the greatest imbalances that you're seeing that are causing chronic disease today? So the first one I would just jump to is the omega-6 is to omega-3s. Most people who eat a healthy diet believe they get plenty of omega-3s and not that many omega-6s.

But it's just not the case because you get omega-3s from so few places. That's the thing. So first of all, you have to be eating grass-fed meat, grass-finished beef, pastured eggs, and then I won't even talk about the fish quite yet. So if you're not doing that, then automatically the fats in those things are going to be so swayed to be like an 18 to 20-to-1 from omega-6s to omega-6s to omega-a. threes. And so that's a really important one because a good, healthy grass-fed meat, grass-finished meat, pastored eggs, there'll be about a three-to-one, anywhere between a three-to-five to one of

omega-6s to omega-3s. And people say, well, no, I have, we have meat that's a one-to-one. I've never seen that before my life. I don't know that that actually exists in nature. And we have to understand that the animals are what they eat. And so when they're fed things like flax seeds or like we're talking about chickens and all that, there's still a good amount of omega-6s in those. So really the way to you. Stephen, I want to mention here, too, because you're hitting on a good point. I just, I didn't want to want to miss it. We, Jordan Rubin and I own certified organic land. And it does make it different. And we, we, we raise a lot of livestock. And so, for instance, if cows are eating clover and those sort of things, actually they have the highest omega-3

ratios. If they're eating, you know, barley or rye grasses, it actually is more four to one. But it should be in that ratio. I think with us, even in our cows, it was probably like more of a two to one ratio. And the other thing I want to mention is, and how often do you see this? It's like somebody could be eating. There's probably a few people on here saying, well, I've only eaten 100% grass-fed meat, I eat pasture raised eggs. But if somebody has a single snack food that has sunflower or saff flour or any of those oils in it, how much are those throwing everyone's ratios off? You're exactly right, because you have to take the total amount of fat that you're getting from a grass-fed cow, let's just call it, instead of saying grass finished

every time. So it's grazed on grass and clover and all those great things that they should be getting from nature. But think about it. Like, that's already a lower fat animal because it's not as fattened with estrogen and recumbent bovine growth hormone. And then so you take an equal amount of fat, but now that's an 18 to 1 or 20 to 1 and it's completely oxidized. You just, you can skew the ratios so quickly. And so just like you're saying, even if you're doing a lot of the right things, it's the totality of your diet. And the nice thing is you don't need to be perfect. So what we typically say is you're trying to get a wild caught fish. And the smaller, typically, the better, because they're going to have less mercury, but a wild salmon, a wild trout, mackerel, sardines, anchovies. And if you can

get those four to five times a week, I know it might seem like a lot, but you could have them at lunch, you could have them at dinner. That's the only way, literally the only way we've ever seeing anybody outside of supplementation, get to a three to one ratio, which is ideal for the human body. And that really helps not just with like overall aches and pains and brain fog, but it helps with the major things. Like cardiovascular, and I'd love to talk about this, but cardiovascular risk is still really the number one cause of death around the world in the United States. And just fixing your omega-3s reduces sudden cardiac death by about 90%, which is like an absolutely remarkable. So much so that conventional medicine, who always makes fun of nutritional supplements, they have

prescription fish oil, right? They have prescription omega-3. So they know that this does work. Yeah, it's pretty astounding. And so for everybody out there, get more omega-3s. Dr. Stephen said a great prescription there for fish four to five days a week. Talk to me a little bit about. So the number one thing you're saying is omega-3, omega-6.

How about vitamins and minerals? What are the greatest deficiencies you tend to see there? And is there any difference between men and women that you test? that's a great question so that's actually a lot of the data that we're starting to run now so we built an entire platform to one be completely hippocompliant so trying to stay ahead of the curve even with functional medicine although it's not required it's something we wanted to do so we keep everything completely private so when you run an at-home lab test it doesn't get sent to your doctor it doesn't get sent to your insurance company it's between you the lab and your practitioner which i think

is really nice. And then on the back end, what we can do is everything's anonymized. So it just comes in basically as just numbers, ones and zeros. There's nothing attached to it. And you can start to look at trends over time. So my company, Equalife, what we're starting to do is actually look at heat maps in the United States and eventually around the world, because we provide labs around the world. But we're going to be able to show where the highest densities are of high glyphosate, or low testosterone and men, or forever chemicals. And then we hope as a general and free public service announcement to let people know, like, hey, we're getting a lot of labs here in Ohio that are people with really high levels of forever chemicals because they may not be testing it for it in your water. So we want to try to get those alerts out faster.

So that's a lot of what we're doing. I know I kind of went off on a tangent. But vitamin and mineral levels, what we often see, and this is too bad, is even if you're eating organic, the soil. just doesn't contain the micronutrients that it did before about the 1960s. And yes, there's definitely more nutrient-dense food that are organic, and I believe in organic, and I recommend organic. And if you can't, then the Clean 15, Dirty Dozen is a great place at least to start. But we see B vitamins being depleted in people.

And usually people think just right away, okay, B-12, yes. But now everything is kind of fortified with B-12. And so that's not always what we see. of course we want the methylated version methyl cabalamin but we see b vitamins like b2 b1 for the thyroid b5 for the adrenals b6 for the entire nervous system is depleted and one of the things about b6 that's so important is it's used for serotonin production happy feel good neurotransmitter that we all need more of and serotonin's needed for melatonin production and so if you're low on b6 low mood and then you're going to have what poor sleep and then you're going to have poor energy the next day so we're

really focusing on those. Another one is copper. And it's partially because one is you don't want high copper levels, that's for sure. But during the pandemic, people were taking very high levels of zinc and maybe continued on with it. Zinc is a great nutritional supplement. It's probably the most anabolic mineral out there to help build up the hair, the skin, the nails, the tissue of the body, regenerate, good for testosterone, all those things. But everything in nature works with a partner or an antagonist. And the more zinc you take, it pushes down copper further. And if you're not getting copper from a lot of the foods you eat, and typically we don't like oysters, we're not eating all these things all the time, then what we want to do is actually be

careful that when we're taking zinc, we also take it with copper. But not the same amount. It's usually a 15 to 1 ratio. So 15 milligrams of zinc, one milligram of copper. And what that helps with is in kids, learning disabilities, allergies, skin rashes, in adults, the thyroid, the mitochondrial function. So always looking at everything in ratios is what we try to do in our practice. And these are, again, these are easy samples that you can do right at home that have been validated through clinical science. These aren't, you know, made up lab tests that we're just, you know, doing for fun. Well, you know, it's so interesting, Dr. Stephen, because we, uh, nature knows best, you know, the way God made food, it just, it works

the best with our bodies. You know, when people started talking about vitamin D, you know, not that long ago, it was like, well, just take vitamin D. Well, now we're like, well, in order to absorb vitamin D, you can absorb it better if you take it internally with some fat. Okay, well, now we also see we should take it with magnesium. Oh, well, now you need it with some K2 as well. Well, now you, and so on and so forth. And so again, it's a similar story here with zinc. Well, for zinc to really, you really need to balance it with copper. The great thing is when you eat food, organ meats is a prime example of this. You're getting a lot of zinc and a lot of copper.

If you're eating the muscle meat with some of the organ meats, you're naturally getting that balance there. And this is why, for anyone listening, when you're taking supplements, supplements are for supplementing an already healthy diet. One, eat a really healthy diet, get all these foods. But also, when you take supplements, take food-based supplements because you're going to tend to get more of those sort of things in there, or at least you want to look for a balance, or typically something that's more multifaceted, as Stevens talking about here, is better.

And so anyways, great advice there. But yeah, it's absolutely true that so many people will, for instance, get on zinc and then they'll just stay on it. And if it doesn't have copper, it's going to create other issues. And by another thing copper is really important for, I know you know this, but it's like, you know, parasites, fighting off parasitic infections. It's really important for that.

So there are a lot of things there. And so I want to encourage everybody to, you know, get the right sort of lab work done, some of the things Dr. Stephen was talking about. And you don't have to do 100 lab tests. He mentioned five there. We walked through that top five because you'd mentioned a few. But what are the five, you know, the five that you typically recommend? So the first two we call either the starter kit or just the vitamin tox test.

And so that's the minerals and metals test for the hair. And so that looks at all your mineral levels and it looks at your heavy metals. So in functional medicine, we don't say blood is the best way to test everything. Blood is the best way to test a lot of things, like vitamin D and thyroid and iron. Like you need to test the blood that way. However, when you're looking at what the body is utilizing, we're going to look at excretion in the hair. We're going to look at excretion in the urine.

So urine then is how we measure your vitamin levels. And also, what has been processed? We look at that as your... So one lab is the minerals and metals test. That's your mineral levels and your heavy metals. The other one is called the Candida Metabolic and Vitamines Test. And it basically just does exactly what it looks at. It looks at Candida overgrowth as well as Clostridia, bacterial overgrowth in your gut.

It looks at your metabolism in terms of your neurotransmitters, your mitochondria, your fatty acid production, and it looks at your vitamin levels. The B vitamins that I was just speaking about plus CO-Q10, Nacetyl Sistine, glutathione, a lot of these sulfur-based amino acids that we need for detoxification from the 100-plus man-made chemicals that are in the environment. So those are the first two. We recommend starting there for children and adults. But if you want to do the full battery of labs that, again, I wish I had when I was younger, there's the food sensitivity test, and it's from an IGG perspective. And I think that this is important to note is that there's different types of food sensitivity testing. And the reason we do IGG,

which just stands for immunoglobulin G, is that it's a latent reaction of foods. And it's healthy foods too. So like, let's say that you're eating eggs and you don't get any bloating. You don't get any You don't get any hives after you eat them. But a day later, two days later, up to 72 hours, you might get joint pain or brain fog or skin rash or whatever it might be. So an IgG reaction is a latent response in the body. That's what we look at because people have shellfish, you know, food sensitivities and they eat muscles and they start to then get hives or they get, you know, mucus in the throat. We know that. We know that's eliminate those foods.

So we look at the IGG perspective. That's 190 foods. we look at healthy ones, of course, because we want to know those. And then we're looking at the hormones test, which is called the stress, mood, and metabolism test. We look at estrogen progesterone. So many women in our practice have something called estrogen dominance, very infrequently talked about. I know that you chat about it. You talk about with people, but almost no one in conventional medicine talks about it. And that's because when you run their labs, they have totally normal estrogen. The problem is their

women's progesterone levels are getting lower and lower, especially. during the luteal phase, which is the second half of the cycle. Now, now, why is that, Stephen? Walk us through. What do you think some of the root causes today of women being so estrogen dominant, so low and progesterone? Why does that happen? The number one thing that we see is a stress on the body. And that is why on that same lab, we look at their cortisol levels. Now, with cortisol, it's the stress hormone. And you might say, well, then I should have lots of energy. The problem is, it's what's called an upside down or an imbalanced diurnal rhythm. It means that their cortisol is low in the morning when they should be waking up with energy, waking up with

an alarm clock between 6 and 8 a.m. But in the evening, their cortisol levels are elevated because of blue light, stress, can't turn the mind off, a million things to do, et cetera. So what happens now is we've got low cortisol in the morning, high cortisol in the evening leading to poor sleep, then poor thyroid function, and also then lower levels of progesterone. I can kind of go into why it affects progesterone, but that's what we see. Now, here's the issue. You go and run blood work with your PCP. Typical blood work, you want to run fasted between 8 and 10 in the morning.

All you look at is your cortisol in the morning, and they're like, yeah, it's just normal. It's low normal. It's not out of range because it's not going to be out of range because you don't have Addison's disease, right? And so the thing is they don't look at, we run cortisol four times during the day with a simple saliva tube. and then we can look at, oh, the pattern shows your cortisol rising in the evening when it should actually be falling so that you can start to produce melatonin and get a great night sleep at night. And so that's the number one reason we see low progesterone, which then ends up as though water retention, bloating, irritability, low mood, brain fog, adult acne, and then it starts to affect everything from there, metabolism. Yeah.

Yeah, wow. Wow. That's a huge thing we see right now, and it's easily correctable, but you do have to know that, okay, I have it. Let's do something about it. You know, it's really interesting in men and women because what women tend to start to have an issue with is this, you know, estrogen being high, progesterone too low, thyroid hormones, some of those getting too low. And in men, they're affected really different.

For men, it's like testosterone, boom. You know, it's just like, you know, that's what's just going to drop off the cliff. and they might even have estrogen. Well, they're going to have estrogen too high, too. Typically when that happens as well, what are some of the things that you would recommend clinically? If somebody comes into you, and of course, men, it's the same thing, right? You got to reduce stress.

There's a lot of that, that thing that, hey, everybody needs to do that. And by the way, I don't want to glaze over that because Dr. Stephen and I both know. It is one of the single, if not the single most important thing you can do is get the stress and get good sleep because it's when you, you're recharging your cells, your mitochondria, your entire body. So you have to do that. In addition, though, Stephen, for the women out there and the men, what are a few things that you'd recommend maybe from a nutritional standpoint?

It could be food. It could be a supplement for the women to help get that progesterone estrogen balance and support the thyroid health. And then for the men on that side to start to do that to help with the testes and the testosterone. Yeah, without a doubt. And it's like you said, people always ask if there's only, one thing I could do, you know, what would I do? And I can say, I haven't always been a board-certified doctor of naturopathy before that I worked as a nutritionist personal trainer. And then I ended up going

back to school once I got well because I said, this is something that I'm called to do. I felt that way. And actually, I didn't have the confidence to do it. It was my mentor who said, you need to go back to school and you need to get your degree. You need to be. And so I was like, all right, well, if she believes in me and maybe I can believe in myself. And so that was that. I'll tell you this, if I could only work on, I always say if I can only work on one thing I need to, though, it's stress and it's gut function. And the problem is that stress alone, high stress alone, can cause leaky gut or increase intestinal permeability. So I can't fix just the gut and not stress because I'll just keep relapsing with this inflamed intestinal path. And there's 26 feet of your digestive tract.

So really important we work on stress. So how we work in our practice, just taking one step back, is we work on something called the de-stress protocol. I write about this. My book is called Diet, Exercise, Stress Reduction, toxin removal, rest. That's your sleep program, right? And that it's emotional balance, scientifically backed supplement protocols, and a success mindset. And I know you share the same exact things. We just talk about it in different ways. And I think that's what most natural health practitioners do. But I want people to know, and I think you would agree that it's not all nutritional supplements. Nutritional supplements do work. And the reason is, is that they can move the

needle really quickly. And that it allows you then to have some of that energy and better sleep so that you can then do a lot of lifestyle things. So I'll tell you, I wouldn't have got better without nutritional supplements because my gut function was so poor. I had to get rid of the candide overgrowth, the h-piloring the C-bo. I mean, like that, I couldn't do that through food alone. So there's a time and place for everything. But the nice thing is if you're following a system, you don't have to get an A-plus and everything. You don't have to be perfect all the time. And so what we do is we actually look at this and say, there's a lot of women and a lot of men out there. Here's their life. They're either students or their young professionals and they're working 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day like I used to.

And then they're skimping on their sleep at night. They're going out. They're exercising. Everything is go, go, go. All right. So that's just a ton of energy coming out of your body. How are you taking energy back yet? So that's how we look at it. We look at always like this ying and this yang or this give and take in life. And so one of the things we'll say if a guy has low testosterone and a woman as estrogen dominance, you can't be doing CrossFit five times a week. I know that you probably love it, but it's just crushing your hormone levels and adding more stress and noraphenephrine. So that's one piece of it. If we move towards diet, you can't be chronically hypoloric because now your body's in a state of starvation. And it's saying,

you're asking me to put out more energy and you're not giving me enough fuel. And also, when you're not eating enough and you're not taking any supplements, then you're micro-neutral. nutrient deficient as well, which are your vitamins and minerals, and that's how your body functions. So my goal is to look at the nutrition, the exercise, the sleep, and the nutritional supplements. And what would I do for high levels of cortisol? There's three main things. One is a product we call used adrenal sooth. You probably have your own version of it. But here's what it is. The name doesn't matter. It's elthianine. It's ashwaganda. It is phospholcerine, which we know help to calm the nervous system or more shut down higher levels of cortisol. And then we use something called full-spectrum

magnesium. And again, why multiple versions of magnesium? Only because we don't know if you're going to be a great absorber of magnesium glycinate or citrate or licinate. So we just kind of put a few in there so that that are easily absorbed, won't cause loose stool. And magnesium then does what? Well, it helps to calm the sympathetic nervous system. That's what magnesium does. It's a sedative. It's a natural sedative. And the last one we use, is a liquid melatonin, which then helps to shut down cortisol and increase melatonin, and then be out of your system faster and not have to be processed by your liver, so there's not as much groginess in the morning.

So those are the three that we use to help sleep and then to turn off. Really what we're looking to do is turn off the machine at night. So you can go, go, go from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. But from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., I need that recovery time. So that's our place to start. Yeah, let me show their start. This was a realization for me. When I first opened up my functional medicine practice, I was working so many hours. And about a couple years in a practice, I started getting leaky gut. And I thought, well, this is weird. I'm eating perfectly. I'm exercising. And I went and met with an acupuncture. This is brilliant Chinese medicine doc. And he basically said, he had this conversation with he said, Josh, here's the thing. You're expending more, giving more than you're getting. Like you need to be. able to receive, you need to be able to rest, whatever. And here's all that I did. When I got home

from work, I would then after I ate dinner, I would be on my laptop and continue to work. Yes. And all I did was, hey, after 6 o'clock, after dinner, I stopped working. And then my gut healed, period. I mean, that was the thing. And so, but that problem is, is most people are just their on all the time. And here's the thing. I used to think, I'm not stressed, because I'm a very, like, our house could burn down and as long as my family's safe, I'm okay. Like, I could live with nothing. Like, and I'm okay. But I was on all the time. And so most people are never, ever not on. You know, and you turn it off by reading a novel, going on a walk, doing lunch with the best friend, just doing things where you're, you know, not trying to get ahead or strive in life. And so

anyways, this is such a good message for everybody. You know, one of the things that I've done as I followed you over the past year or so, as you put out so much great content. And one of the things I really appreciate that you address is, again, getting to more of the root cause of a lot of these issues. And there are certain conditions that have really continued to climb over the past 30, 40, 50 years. But specifically, I want to hit over the last maybe 10 years. Autism is one.

ADHD is another. Autoimmune disease and mental health disorders. all of these have a neurological component oftentimes many of them have an immune component why do you think those conditions in particular are growing so rapidly yeah and this is interesting because i can't think of the exact date but it was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 i was actually studying with dr natasha mcbride and um she created something called the the gaps protocol and I don't study it and use it exactly before. But we were looking at it back then, and I was a novice, you know, really in the, you know,

understanding the space and the neurological component and toxicity, especially a big one. But it's something that I've just kept up with over the years because, like yourself, if you have a functional medicine practice, you're going to start seeing children with autism. And we just started to see the numbers continue to grow. And it was, I mean, it's alarming to say the least. So the typical pushback is there's just more diagnosis today. And I think we can safely say that's not true. It is true to a degree.

There is more diagnosis. No doubt about that. And maybe some people are being labeled certain things more than they have in the past. I don't disagree with that. But the chart is up and to the right. And so when we look at why the prevalence, we actually now have scientific data to show us, I don't, well, I'm going to step back and say, there's no one thing I don't believe that causes autism. or ADD or ADHD or anything like that.

Yeah, I think it's a multifaceted-based issue, and to use the analogy I usually use is the rain barrel effect. So I think some kids, people, have poor detox-based genetics like myself, more prone to inflammation, and then they're exposed to certain in-utero toxins or as a child. And I'll give you two scientific research studies, just done over the last couple years to back this up. University of Texas, anybody can look this up,

the more mercury that is dumped in the environment, the greater diagnosis of autism in that community and state. Upwards of 63% greater causes of autism, the more mercury is in the environment. So that's a pretty high correlation. The other one is women that use acetaminophen while pregnant have a far greater likelihood of ADD, ADHD, or ASD-based diagnosis for their children. And these aren't small studies. These are legitimate pub med, big studies. The last one I just noted was out of JAMA

Journal of, well, the JAMA Psychiatry Journal. And what they found was that it was actually dosage dependent. The more acetaminifiner, Tylenol taken, the greater. The greater, the greatest. The greater the likelihood of the ADHD or ASD diagnosis, meaning that they could literally see the higher the acetaminifin found in fetal cord blood, the more likelihood were for these particular diagnosis, which means we know that there is a correlation with that. Now, does it mean that every woman who takes acetaminifin is going to have a child with ASD? No. But there's something there that for whatever reason, these children are not able to deal with it. And they can go into, well, it has to do with the neurons and the chemistry and the brain, the nervous system.

I'll tell you, one of my theories is this, and I'm saying it's a theory right now, it has not been proven. When you take things like acetaminophen and you're exposed to a lot of toxins as a child, it begins to shut down glutathione production. Glutothion is our mass or antioxidant, helps with oxidative stress, and it helps detoxify these toxins from the environment. And if you get that shut down, it builds up in the body, the brain, and the nervous system. And so it's something that we should look at, and it's also dangerous, and I don't want to take this too far, because we'll be banned on YouTube, but then your body can't deal with the onslaught of other toxins that might be coming in from a conventional medicine-based protocol. So acetaminopin

and additional toxins, really bad idea. Yeah, yeah, and we know this whole field of epigenetics is that, you know, it really is astounding. I mean, what the mother and the father, both, you know, before pregnancy, during pregnancy, and soon after birth, I mean, obviously, really affects the kids in just a massive way. I was doing another podcast, and I was, I was, we were having a conversation with somebody who's more of a, she was a, she's in Harvard, Harvard MD, works a, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, neurological disorders. And we were talking about this very same thing in terms of

the mother getting probiotics and the, the health of their gut, microbeautics. microbiome and that being passed on to the children. I mean, it's just, you know, it's, it's, it's something we all need to be aware of. And this is why, I mean, it's crazy to think that what you do in the way that you take care of your own body when you're in your teens and 20s is affecting not only your health, but the health of your kids. Ain't it wild to think about you're a teenager? You're out hanging.

I mean, whatever. And literally what you're eating, your mental health, your emotional health, all of those things, it's affecting your kids and their kids. I mean, the Bible talks about to the third and fourth generation. So like what you're doing, it affects generations. I mean, it's, it really is astounding. And so it really, I think it put into perspective just the incredible responsibility we have. And really in our way, give our lives meaning to know that everything you do has a long term, even if you're talking spiritual realm, maternal impact. I mean, these things are, they are significant. And this is also one reason why it's a

excited to be a doctor, be someone like yourself that's helping pass on this information because you're not only affecting your patients, you're affecting generations of people down the road. You know, one of the other things I've heard you discuss that I love to hear you talk about is our biological age. You know, looking at how old are we really? Stanford came out with a really interesting study here recently that said, it's not only that our whole body ages. is that certain individual organs or systems age faster than other organs or systems.

And so talk to me a little bit about how would you test for, or how is it done today, testing for one's biological age versus chronological age? And also, is there any testing that you're excited about in or recommend for individual systems to see maybe what their, you know, ages? And I know it's not age exactly, but you understand what I'm saying. Yeah, absolutely. And so this is a field that I'm fascinated in and I said I wasn't going to dive head over heels into it until I kind of check the boxes on what I wanted to help people with first because this to me is more the icing on the cake. So I teach something called high performance health, which is taking everything the next level, talking about full body MRIs, talking about biological age testing, looking at there's 18 known factors for aging. All of the different, right now there are theories on aging. One of them we're talking about, right? now is the triage theory basically is that as we're younger, we can almost do no wrong. We can consume alcohol. We can consume poor foods. We can eat the safflower oil, all of these different things.

And our body keeps buffering all of these different stresses and oxidative stress. And then somewhere around our mid-30s to mid-40s, depending on the individual and also how full their rain barrel is, we start to then see the signs of aging. But it's always been there. It's just we're not able to triage those as well as when we were younger. So what biological age testing looks at is, okay, let's say that you're 46 years old. You could be 46 aging one year for every chronological year, or you could be 32 years old. And that means what?

It means that your body is only aging for seven months or eight months out of those 12 months or so per year if you were to look at it. Then, of course, you can age faster. I'll give you an interesting story. And I'm always very big on wellness client confidentiality, so I'll just share my own, is that when I had my crazy, busy practice, probably like yourself. I wasn't at peak health necessarily. I felt good. I think I was keeping up with it exercise wise and all that. But my biological age was like nine years higher. Like it was not good. And that was, I was just, I was on all the time. I had a one and a half year old. It was just like I was just in it. And so what I learned is that just because your biometrics,

you can keep those in alignment. There's another layer to this. That's why I said I like to help people get to their ideal weight because it helps so much with wellness and then work on anti-aging. Because remember, you're going to age faster if you're not well, right? And you're going to age faster if you're 50, 100 pounds over your ideal weight. I'm not saying there's one weight for every person, but just the ideal weight for you and your body. That's all, right? Your uniqueness. And so then we can work on anti-aging, which is super fascinating because right now the average age is 74 for men, 77 for women. It's really not getting that much better. We're keeping people alive longer. But the truth is, we only die from five main things. Like, that's the truth. Cardiovascular issues, stroke and blood pressure, type two diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. Well, all five of these, we can find early detection. The only one that we can't reverse right now is late stage cancer.

I'll be honest with you, I can't reverse late stage cancer. I can help support cancer therapies, and sometimes it could go really well, but I can't make any of those claims. All the others, yeah, we have scientific data on how to reverse high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular, and Alzheimer's. Like, you can literally reverse these things. So, if a person does not die from one of those five main things, it's things like COPD, which is mainly smoking, kidney disease, accidents, falls. So for us, it's staying healthy. And then we get an extra 10 years to 15 years of life. You know, now we don't have to think about dying our 70s. It's 90s.

And now I believe we can take that beyond. We look at two things. We look at the biological age, which I just said if you're 46, you could be 32, you could be 52. But we also look at the rate of aging. And the rate of aging is more important than your biological age, because that will change faster. And so the rate of aging is, ideally, every human is a 0.95 or less. That means you're aging less than one, a one-for-one with your chronological age. And so I look forward in my practice to help people get into the 0.8s. that's my goal and ideally below i've been able to take mine so mine was deplorable it was above a one

when i was at my worst and now there are certain genetic factors for that but i never like to let genetics be an excuse because there's methylation there's your apoecino type if you're a three four or four four you're going to have more inflammation you're going to age faster but you can again you can fix all of these things so i've been able to get mine down now to between a point six seven and a point 69. So my rate of aging has slowed tremendously and my biological age now is 13 years younger than my chronological age. So those are the two main measurements. Now, the last thing I will say is this, is testing system, organ systems is not as easy and it's not as accurate yet. We're getting there, but it's mainly based on blood work, MRIs, inflammation in those organs, etc. If you are for right now,

let's say you're trying to keep your biological age low, okay, in terms of how fast you're aging. What are some of the top foods or supplements you're personally taking in order to help with that? And supplements do work. Like, that's the thing. These things are helpful, but inside of high performance health, I have four tiers of supplements. So I have the tier one, which are foundational. People typically skip to the resveratrol or phycinetin or whatever it is too quickly without doing the foundation. based products. And then tier two would be right below that as you really need to get to these.

And then tier three are your ones that we know work, that we should know, that we can take them on a daily basis and they're still safe. So those would be, well, let me go through them step by step and not give all of them, but give the main ones that are the most important. So the tier one are these are what we call safeguarding your healthy diets. These are the ones we recommend for almost all humans. It's a good daily activated multi, or we use something, a daily nutritional support. It's basically all your vitamins, your minerals, your electrolytes, your co-factors that you might miss them on a daily basis. They're not mega doses. They're enough to get into your system. The next one we're typically recommending is a, I call a rainbow powder, but it's a daily fruit

and vegetable blend. It's veggies, it's fruits, it's superfoods that you typically wouldn't eat. So I'll give you an example. I try to get my seven and nine servings of fruits. and veggies every day, mainly vegetables. But I'm eating broccoli every day, cauliflower, carrots. I'm not eating 22 different variety. So this just allows for more of a variety, which I think is great for most of us. And it helps with natural detox factors, sulfur-based amino acids, et cetera. A good daily omega-3 support. So I try to eat fish multiple times per week. But I won't eat fish if I'm out at typically at a restaurant. And the reason is, is that microplastics, mercury, etc. I'm most likely not going to choose that. And then a good daily probiotic you mentioned before,

I think that's a great idea for most people. Now, if you have SIBO, if you have something else going on, okay, you fix that first. And then the last one, we're usually recommending a daily digestive enzyme, especially as you get older to break down your food a little bit better. It could be an activated be complex. There's a lot of great nutrients that your body needs, a magnesium we spoke about before, an adrenal sooth for the adrenals. And then the specialty products, I'll start to talk about those. So as we get, let's say above the age of 50 or so, maybe 60 would be the maximum. We usually need to add a little bit more COQ10 back into the body. And this could be in the form of ubiquinol, ubiquitone, co-cuin to ubiquinone to ubiquinol. It helps with the conversion. There are other more fancy ones,

and I'll name some of the herbs that I'm a big fan of. One is astragalus. A stragglis is. A stragglis is great for the telomeres. It's great for the immune system. Aschaganda can be a really great one for testosterone production as we get older for, of course, you know, blunting the effects of cortisol. A few others that I really like are PQQ for the mitochondria. The NMN or NMR, nicotidemine mononucleotide or nicotinamine monoribazide. I don't like to do megadoses, though. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little different than a lot of the other longevity experts. They like to do megadoses. I don't believe anything

in found in nature is a mega dose. I think that that can cause its own issues over time. So I'm more of a little each day. Agreed. Oh, good.

I'm glad to hear you say that because that's not the popular answer right now. I think we'll find it to be the truth in about three to five years, but that's that. So we use a product

called Cell Boost. It has all of these things in there. Other great products, though, are Lions Main. Rishi for mushroom-based products help to modulate

TH1, TH2 immune system. It's all the things that start to falter as we get older. So if we can keep these in check at a younger age, they never fall out of balance in the first place because it's harder to get it back than it is to keep it in check, the better. And so those are mainly the nutritional supplements we use. If you're looking at spermene, if you're looking at fysitin, we don't use those right now. It looks like those are better used pulsed once a week, twice a month, while fasting to help remove what to call senescent cells. Senescent cells are normal cells that don't get the

signal essentially to die after 90, 120 days or so, so they float around creating more inflammation your body. Those two particular products can begin to break down those cells to a greater degree. If you use them every day, it could lead to issues. How can you get a little benefit every day? Things like corsetin. Corsetin's an amazing herb nutrient that's used in the human body to help with histamine levels, immune system. We saw during the pandemic, it helps to get zinc into the cells kill viruses to a greater degree. So again, I like to use nature on a daily basis and then sprinkle in some of these additional extracts that can help with biological age. That's great. I think you made a good point in terms of you have food and then you have

sort of foundational things that really are food. Greens, powders, food, probiotics in a way are very similar to food. And so. Omega-3s and yeah, they're all from food, essentially. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that's that that's what we're going to. Yeah, these mega doses of vitamins, you know, I don't, I don't think it's going to help most. I don't think people are absorbing a lot of it, you know, for one. And I think long term, it's probably, we're going to find out later, maybe not the best versus again, trying to do things as close to nature as possible. You know, one of the things that's very far from nature is a lot of these microplastics and just EMF, these things were exposed to on a regular basis. How, how, how? How damaging do you believe microplastics are to our endocrine system and our overall health? Yeah, some of the big issues with heavy metals or microplastics is that you just don't see them. And so you don't think they're there, so you don't worry about them. And then we start to, but the problem is they still affect us. And that's why I try to share with people.

Like, my goal is not to create fear in the world, but it is to let people know that these things are affecting us, whether we like it or not. And our children as well. I have two daughters. They're now nine and 11 years old, and I've been trying to be cognizant without creating fear that we need to stay away from the artificial colors, the artificial dyes, the artificial flavors. We can enjoy ourselves, but there are just some things we're not going to do. But microplastics, we really have to be careful of. There was a new study, and this is probably the strongest study for really how it does affect us, is that they started to look at the plaque when they would do a bypass surgery.

And in 58% of those individuals in the plaque, they found microplastics. And not just a little bit, a large amount of polyethylene. And then they also found, in a smaller percentage, but still enough, polyvinyl chloride. Basically, they found chlorine molecules and plastics from pipes that our water comes through

in the blood and in the plaque. Now, we can step back. and say, okay, well, what does that mean? Twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke with that much microplastics in your blood. So now we're like, oh, well, here's one more reason why the two leading causes of death are growing as well. And, you know, well, what do we do? Well, what we do is we have to first try to eliminate our sources of these microplastics, use a good water filter. these are all different steps that we can take. I always like to say clean water, clean air, clean food.

Like that's where we start. If you're worried about all the other fancy stuff, like, you know, buying goji berries, like all of those things I get it, but put your money towards the things that you consume the most. Food, water, air. And so like we just, we want to look at those first as being clean. And then I can think that can be really helpful because microplastics do exist. They're not going to get any better.

It's polluting our seas. it's polluting the fish. And so we want to be cognizant of the amount that we take in and then try to detox these things from our body in as natural way as possible. Functional medicine detoxes, sauna, sweating, keeping the immune system boosted, keeping the liver strong, consuming enough water just to hydrate and flush the body. All of these are essential. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about EMFs. What are your thoughts on how damaging those might be? They are damaging. And the problem is that we can't eliminate them, right? So that's the hard thing. So it's more, we need to mitigate the effects then. And the two most damaging things is proximity. So the closer

you are to your wireless router, your baby monitor, your cell phone in your ear, like, I'm wearing wired headphones right now. I know everybody's not watching this on video, but I don't wear wireless headphones. And you might say, well, the EMFs can be blocked partially to a degree. But there's also the radiation because one headphone beams through your head to the other headphone to work. That's how wireless headphones work. And so what I try to do is I love technology. I really do. Like if you look at me right now, I've got an ordering on, I've got an Apple Watch on, but they're both on airplane mode. Bluetooth is off. My phone is beside me on my desk. It has a safe sleeve, an EMF blocker, but it's also on airplane mode. I'm not using it right now. So my goal is to limit my

EMF exposure when I don't need to be surrounded by EMFs. And also, I use an EMF meter and make sure that I'm for eight hours a night when you're like the most important thing you can do is really EMF proof your bedroom. You can't have EMFs for eight hours when you're sleeping because that's a third of your day. If you can eliminate it from a third of the day, you're doing phenomenal. Same with your kids' rooms. The most horrifying thing I found was when I had my newborn daughter, I had my EMF meter, the baby

monitor produced more EMFs than almost anything in our house. Wow, really. So we moved that then six feet away. And now you just, because if you get a foot or two away from these things, almost, there is very, very low EMF against the body.

So EMF meter, the tri-field one is the one that I use. You know, I'm sure you have recommendations. as well. Just get to know. Just kind of educate yourself. Don't become overly worried. This is the soup that we live in, but begin to lower your exposure over time. That's so good. There are so many different therapies right now. We see the regenerative medicine space continuing to grow at a really rapid rate. More people now are using infrared saunas. More people are cold plunging. A couple of questions there. Do you like and approve of?

and cold plunging. If you had to pick just one of the two for most of your patients, which one of those two would you recommend? It's a great question. And I feel like I lived in a vacuum. I was the only one saying this for the longest time. Now I start to see on social media,

people are saying it, which is great. So I studied, my background is in functional medicine. There's no doubt about that. I'm a doctor from naturopathy. I love that. I love the work. But my love is Ayurvedic medicine. And so my lens is Ayurveda,

which is 6,000 years old. It's the basis for all other forms of medicine, including traditional Chinese medicine, which is amazing as well. And so when people are saying, oh, everybody should be doing cold plunging, and I'm saying, you know, not so fast. Like, have you seen these people's labs? Yes, exactly. They have elevated cortisol. They've got estrogen dominance. They have low testosterone.

And so what is the main response from a cold plunge? It's a spike in noropenephrine. Noropenephrine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It starts the fighter flight and sympathetic nervous system response. So is that what I want for my burnt out estrogen dominant patients? No, that's not what I want. And so I will use cold plunge, but it's so imperative that people learn that you don't just hop into a cold plunge and just fight it. The goal is actually to breathe out the stress and relax.

And if you can induce the parasympathetic nervous system, you've now trained your body how to better deal with stress. but there's no manual that comes with a cold plunge. And so I think it's very detrimental. With the other issue, Steve, people are doing the seven days a week. And when you study Hormesis like you and I have, it's like, well, you're probably better off doing one day a week or two rather than seven and just allowing your body to adapt. And the other thing, in my lens, is very Chinese medicine. And so it's like getting your body that cold that many times a week is a recipe for somebody

that's sick, like hypothyroid or a number of things, is a total. disaster. I completely agree. I mean, it's another stress on the body. So hard workouts, low calorie, low carb, cold plunge, not enough sleep, work stress. I mean, if you're not already burnt out, you will be within the next 12 to 18 months. And so it's not a deal. You basically just described. I had somebody come to me about a year ago with infertility. And this is what they were doing. All the things you mentioned, CrossFit, cold plunge, time restricted eating, pale, like, you know, No grain, no none of this. And we just pretty much changed to all of those things that this other functional bed doc was recommending.

And boom, she was able to get pregnant. But it's just, you know, example. It's such a huge part of our practice. We work on gut health and hormones essentially. Like those are the major things. And yes, heavy metals and all that comes along. But like, just like you said, I'm recommending the opposite of all those. I'm recommending naps, good hold, food, warm food.

Like, I'm recommending all the comfort things. So a woman could tell her body, I'm in a safe spot. And then hormone levels can return to normal thyroid and progesterol, like you just mentioned, and that she can get pregnant. We're not working miracles. We're literally working to rebalance the body. What are your thoughts in infrared sauna? So I'm a huge fan of infrared sauna. I'm a huge advocate, Ayurvedic medicine. It was part of Pontchic comma.

When I was over in India and Sri Lanka doing internships, we sweat it out of people. But like you said, for someone like my mom, she did five minutes for her first infrared. ferret sauna. That's it. That's what that's Hermesis just like you said. There's if I start running, am I going to start with a marathon? No, but that's what most people do. So like going back to cold plunge, 56 degrees on PubMed, it would get people the clinical benefit. But what are people showing online? 37 degrees, 33 degrees. Why? Because the colder, the more manly or stronger you are, right? You're proving to the world. I have to break the ice before I get in this cold plunge. And again, don't get me wrong, I have the same tilt towards that, that ego as well, then I'm like,

oh, I want to show people that. I'm like, but I'm like, what are you doing here? Like, is that for you or is that the benefit of the world? Of course, that's the benefit to me. And so we have to understand is that more is not always better. And cold plunge is a really good example of that. But sauna, though, can induce parasympathetic nervous system, if not overdone. It helps with microplastics, mold, heavy metals to sweat it out of the body. It also acts as zone two cardio, which I would love to chat about just for a minute. Because one of the things, so I love to wait train. I know you love to wait train. That doesn't necessarily lead to a longer life. Cardio in Zone 2 does. Very strange. And I didn't want to admit that at all in my 20s and

definitely not my 30s. But what happens is there is a definitive effect on telomere length. Now, Tielomere is not the only thing that helps with aging, but the short of the Tiller meers, typically the less proper replication of DNA you're able to do. And so as you, as you're you replicate DNA over and over and over, there can be improper replication. Messups basically in that replication, which means then you have greater chance for disease. And so, believe it or not, getting your heart rate above a brisk walk for 30 minutes, five days a week, can actually have a tremendous benefit on anti-aging and overall health. The nice thing is not everybody loves to go for a run or whatever it is. If you get in a hot sauna, you can get your heart rate to 110, 120 beats per minute,

and it actually mimics zone two. So I wonder is some of the benefit of sauna because we know it decreases all-cause mortality by over 40% and it decreases risk of cardiovascular disease and death by over 60% is some of that because it's acting as actual cardiovascular work. I don't know.

It's an interesting theory. That is interesting. You know what? As I've seen the benefits of, as you mentioned, cardio for longevity, but especially walking, that's been mind-blowing to me because at first I thought,

well, walking is just a mode of transportation, but in reality, it is also just so critically important for our longevity. I mean, just getting out there moving, getting your heart rate up just a little bit as you're talking about. And I'm with you on this too, like the infrared sun. I think there are loads of benefits for mitochondrial health, for detoxification, for longevity.

So I want to encourage everybody to do that. Last question here for you, Stephen. There are a million things that people can do to take care of their health. What is your best piece of advice for everybody in terms of what they can do to take their health to to the next level. There are. There are a million things that you can literally do. And if it's not foundational, it's not the answer.

So I just, you know, want to state that for people. So if it doesn't have to do with cleanup nutrition, getting your walking in first, I think it's an important one that you stated. If you're not walking 7,500 to 10,000 steps per day, you don't need to worry about the fancy workouts and all that. You need to get that body moving each day. but if I could pick one, this might seem like a strange one, but it's a systematic way to decrease stress because we need to work on stress.

So we can kind of, because we could talk about the best diets and all that. But I use something called three anchors per day. So when I wake up, I take 30 minutes to myself. Now, it means I need to wake up 30 minutes earlier than the rest of my family, but it's quiet time. It's something for myself before I try to then be of service to my family in the world. Like we all need that. And then at lunch, I try to take back another 20 to 30 minutes, typically going for a walk,

listening to non-work-related things, comedy, podcasts, something I enjoy. Why? Brings down that sympathetic nervous system. And then I do one thing at the end of the day. Actually, I do it before I meet with my family again for dinner at the end of my workday. And the reason is, is to then be present. And so it's just, I call it switching modes from, let's say, doctor to dad. That's always what I did in my practice.

I lived about 10, 15 minutes away. I would always walk home. And during that time, no slack, no email, no text messaging, mainly, and if I can give one more tip, focused on my breath. When all of us are stressed, we hold our bodies tight, we breathe through our chest, we're not relaxed. We need to relax the nervous system. If you can begin to understand how the nervous system regulates your health, then you can,

I think truly have the power to age gracefully and live a long healthy life. Yeah, it's so good. Well, Dr. Stephen, this whole conversation has been awesome. You are a brilliant doctor who, again, I think we share a lot of philosophies in terms of whether it be Ayurvedic or Chinese medicine or the functional medicine approach of getting to the root cause. And I want to encourage Dr. Stevens got a great book out. It's called The Rain Barrel Effect.

He alluded to that in terms of finding the root cause of why these diseases are growing. so much today. Also, he's got a great show called the Cabral Concept. You can check out as well. And he's got some great, great posts on social media. Follow him on Instagram and all the social platforms at Stephen Cabral. Dr. Stephen Cabral, you can find him on there as well. And again, just brilliant practice. Dr. Stephen, thanks so much for sharing so much wisdom. Today, we covered a lot of topics. And I hope everybody is, just loved this conversation as much as I did. And I just want to say, thanks to everybody for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Jack show. Remember each and every week, we're doing these deep dives into science, into principles

of how to heal and take your body, mind, and spirit to the next level, and especially your health. And hey, if you're not subscribed, make sure to subscribe to the podcast, like, and share this. If there was something that you took away from this podcast episode with Dr. Stephen that really added value to your life, hey, make a comment, leave a review, or share this with somebody, We all want to pass on that blessing of health and healing to others. Thanks everybody again, thanks Dr. Steven. I'll see you on the next episode.