The Rich Roll Podcast - Longevity, Epigenetics, Microbiome Health & The Difference Between Eating for Long-Term Wellness Versus Performance

Episode Date: January 18, 2016

This episode is a geeky deep dive into the hardcore science behind everything from telomeres and the mechanisms behind aging and longevity to the primacy of maintaining microbiome health; oxidative stress and the relationship between inflammation and chronic disease; epigenetics and genetic disposition versus expression; and of course nutrition – divining truth from myth, the impact of micronutrient inadequacies, focused supplementation and the difference between eating for optimal wellness versus performance. Today's guide through this byzantine labyrinth of crucial biological processes is my brilliant friend Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. A Ph.D in biomedical sciences, Dr. Patrick is an expert in nutrition, metabolism and aging. She has done considerable research in all of these fields, including research on cancer and the effects of mineral and vitamin supplementation on metabolism, inflammation and aging. She did her graduate research at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, where she focused on cancer, mitochondrial metabolism and apoptosis. In addition, she conducts clinical trials and has performed extensive aging research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Beyond the fact that Rhonda is whip smart (and totally amazing), through her Found My Fitness blog,podcast and YouTube channel, she expertly translates the complexities of clinical research and physiological processes in understandable terms, adeptly communicates their implications and provides actionable real life practices and applications aimed at maximizing overall health and longevity. It's time to put on the propellor hat and get out your pen and paper, because you're going to want to take notes for this one. We cover a ton of material in this conversation. Specific topics include: * identifying the biomarkers of aging * the biological impact of oxidative stressors * acute inflammation vs. chronic inflammation * why we should forget about protein and focus on fiber * the importance of cultivating a healthy microbiome * the leading causes of chronic inflammation * the benefits of exercise-induced inflammation * the benefits of curcumin * stress adaptation and immune system response * why Omega-3 is important & how to get it * circadian rhythm and bright light exposure * stress reduction techniques * the benefits of meditation * DNA damage and telomerase * the importance of Vitamin D * Rhonda's recommended supplements * gene polymorphisms * nutrition/lifestyle & athletic performance vs. long-term wellness/longevity Rhonda fascinates me and this conversation is an absolute mind-blower. I sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

Like you said, there's lots of complications and nuances that go along with anything related to health. Anything that has to do with human physiology in the body is extremely complicated. And I think something that's very, very popular right now is this ketogenic diet and high-fat diet, which I think has been taken and blown sort of out of proportion. And I don't think people really understand. They just think it's sort of like this thing that's great. And there's actually a lot of things to consider. That's Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey, everybody. It's your friendly neighborhood, Rich Roll, back at you with another edition of the RRP, the Rich Roll Podcast, the show that bears my name. Thanks so much for tuning in today, everybody. I really appreciate it. Mad love for everybody who has shared the show with your friends and on social media. And of course, massive respect to everybody who has made a habit of clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases.

It seems like such a small little thing. Just click this little thing before you buy something on Amazon. It doesn't cost you anything extra, but it really does put a tremendous amount of wind in our sales. It allows me to continue doing what I do and is helping me to improve upon the show so I can bring you the absolute best programming possible. What do we do here? Well, as you know, you guys know, right? Each week I sit down with somebody who inspires me, somebody who I think that I can learn a tremendous amount from,

the best and the brightest across all categories of everything from health and diet, nutrition, fitness, athleticism, entrepreneurship, creativity, spirituality, and consciousness. And why do I do this? Well, I do this to help all of us optimize our lifestyle, to provide the tools and the resources that we all need and can use to help us self-actualize, to unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves.

And I've got a great show for you guys today. I'm super excited to introduce the great Dr. Rhonda Patrick. We have an amazing amount of material that we cover in this podcast, so you're going to want to get out your pen and your paper, maybe put on your propeller hat. But before we get into the details of who she is and what we're going to talk about specifically, let's take care of a little business.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you

to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. Thank you. disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, today we're going to cover a lot of ground,

geeking out on the hardcore science behind everything from longevity and anti-aging to the microbiome to inflammation and its relationship to chronic disease to gene expression and epigenetics, to telomeres, what they are, why you need to know about them. And of course, nutrition, myths and truths, micronutrient inadequacies, supplementation, and the difference between eating for optimal wellness versus performance. And to explore all of this, I'm very, very excited to introduce my friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Rhonda is a PhD in biomedical sciences. She is an expert in nutrition, metabolism, and aging, having done extensive research on all of these, including research

on cancer and the effects of mineral and vitamin supplementation on metabolism, inflammation, and aging. She conducts clinical trials. She has performed aging research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and she did her graduate research at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, where she focused on cancer, mitochondrial metabolism, and apoptosis. Apoptosis? I think I said that right. In any event, she is super-duper smart, way smarter than me. And not only does she understand how to interpret research, she does it herself. And she's very, very effective at translating, at communicating its import, the import of all of this research by

distilling the complexities of scientific research down to what's important to know in understandable terms. In addition, she's very good at helping us how to understand how to apply all of this information into real life practices. Rhonda's super awesome and amazing. So get out your pen and paper, maybe put on your propeller hat because you're going to want to take notes for this one. So let's just jump in. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Hey, Rhonda. Hey, Rich.

How's it going? It's going pretty good. Thanks for hosting me in your beachside home to do the podcast. I'm really excited to be here and talk to you today. My pleasure. No, after the last conversation we had, I was super pumped to be able to chat with you again. Yeah, it's great. For the listeners, you came up to my house, I did your podcast. Now I'm, I'm doing the opposite coming down to you. So it's great. And the first question I have for you before we even get into anything, because I can't get it out of my mind. I parked

like a block away from here, like on the the bay side and I saw this big sign that said jetpack rentals is that true can you really rent a jetpack you can I have I have yet to rent one how could you live here and not immediately go rent a jetpack I told you I've actually only lived here for like two and a half weeks out of the three months that I've been paying so yeah I you know there's a lot of things that I want to try out, like the stand-up paddleboarding. I've never done that. You know, I've grown up surfing. Right.

You're from San Diego, right? I'm from San Diego. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you surf. I surf. I used to teach surfing when I was in college at UCSD. Oh, wow. I would teach at an all-girls school, surf school in La Jolla called Surf Diva.

Uh-huh. And so I used to give surf lessons. And then, you know, I'd do it like early in the morning before class or on weekends and then go to school and learn a bunch of biochemistry and chemistry stuff. Right. Well, that's interesting. I can't imagine there's that many PhDs in your discipline that are avid surfers. Not many.

And there weren't many surfers that were PhDs. So right. Well, you can navigate between both worlds. It's cool. Well, so many things that that we can talk about. My only fear with this podcast really is that we could just go down a dark alley and never return. So we're gonna have to choose our choose our topics of conversation, I think here today, and we kind of talked a little bit before the podcast about a couple things that that would We're going to have to choose our topics of conversation, I think, here today. And we kind of talked a little bit before the podcast about a couple things that would be good to focus on. But before we do that, why don't you kind of explain a little bit about your CV? We know your CV, but maybe kind of fill in the gaps on your background and your areas of expertise.

So, as I mentioned, I went to UCSD for my undergraduate education. I was a chemist, um, initially. So that means I was, um, synthesizing a lot of organic molecules and peptides and, and, you know, putting together things, which was fun for a while. Uh, got really bored with that. So I decided to, um, try biology out try biology out and um so i went to work at the salk institute for biological sciences in la jolla and that's like the place right it's such a place is overlooking black speech which is like one of the best surf spots ever and it's also you know where the the hang glider port is you can do like parasailing paragliding and the golf course is right toy pines golf course is right next door um fantastic

place just so many you know wonderful researchers that work there and so i was you know very young um recent college graduate and uh so i had joined a lab there that was working on aging of all things. And did you just fall into that or were you kind of directing yourself? Well, in a way I fell into it because while I was still a student at UCSD, I was doing some research internships that were paid, um, at a very, very successful biotech company called Illumina, which now is like the top company that makes these gene chip arrays where people are doing all these microarray analysis. But so I worked there for two years, my junior and senior year in college, and I learned a lot of chemistry. But, you know, like I said, I decided that I wanted to try biology out. And so someone

that I had worked under at Illumina had a connection in a lab that was hiring. And they're like, oh, well, you can, you know, this person, it's an aging lab. It's really cool. You know, we'll get you an interview. So I sort of just got my foot in the door by knowing someone who had worked with me and gave me a great recommendation. So that's how I got in. Right. And so you're working on aging. I mean, what does that mean specifically?

I know that's pretty big, right? Aging. I mean, first of all, as a young college graduate student, when I heard it was an aging research lab, I was really fascinated. I was like, well, yeah, I'm interested in aging. We're all aging. Every day well, yeah, I'm interested in aging. We're all aging. Every day I wake up, I'm older. So this specific lab was using a research model, C. elegans, which is a little nematode roundworm that has a lifespan of about 14 to 15 days.

And what's interesting about these worms is that they have many of the same genes that humans have. In fact, like over 90% of their genes in some way or another we have in humans. It's called conserved. So we have a lot of these genes that are conserved. So you can look at these genes in worms and manipulate them and sort of draw, you know, conclusions that may apply to humans since we have similar genes. And the worms are such a great research model because they only live 15 days. And so you can do a lot of manipulations and see the effects, whereas humans have an average lifespan depending on your male. Right. So if they live one day longer, that's like an extreme result, right?

Exactly. And what was really cool is that one of the big breakthroughs that was done by Cynthia Kenyon back when she was a postdoc, who now has her own laboratory at UCSF, she found that by manipulating just one gene, she can increase their lifespan by 100%, meaning they live 30 days. So go from 15 to 30 days. And that's just huge. And humans happen to have this gene. In fact, humans that have a certain gene polymorphism, which means it's just a variation in the sequence of DNA that changes the function, that makes that gene more active all the time. Those humans have an up to threefold chance of becoming a centenarian or learning to be 100. Super cool, right? Right 100 super cool right right right

right right needless to say i fell in love with biology i'm like this is great this is cool i was doing at the time i got i got to i was very fortunate to work with a postdoc on a project that was investigating the effects of increased insulin signaling too much insulin signaling on protein aggregation. And specifically, we were putting in a gene that is linked to the human form of Alzheimer's disease and looking at the effects of that. So I was able to co-author my first publication, which happens to be a really great publication. It was a science paper. And that was shortly after college.

Right after college. Wow, that's amazing to be published like that quickly. Yeah. No, it was a great experience for me um and then i decided to i became interested in pediatric cancer so st jude children's research hospital which is in the mid-south um it's in memphis tennessee quite a quite a culture difference from my beach life in San Diego. But phenomenal institute.

Yeah, it's an incredible institute. Absolutely incredible. I mean, the work they've been doing is, you know, children there that get acute lymphobastic leukemia, about 98% of the children treated there at St. Jude, and the treatment was developed there at St. Jude, about 98% of those children go into remission, which means the cancer goes away. And 90% of those children actually end up being cured, which being cured means you're in remission for at least 10 years. So it's just incredible. But aside from that, as a budding young scientist, what was so great about St. Jude

was that because there is a, they do a phenomenal amount of fundraising, and they get just, you know, a lot of donations. This, there is no shortage of funding to buy great scientific technologies, and all the cutting edge technologies are there. So I was able to really learn big, big science. And be at the forefront of where it's all heading. Exactly, exactly. And as a graduate student, it's kind of rare to have those opportunities. Usually you're sort of pinching pennies

and trying to do what you can with the money you have, where that was never an issue for me. And I just had access, literally at my fingertips, to just all the cutting-edge technologies. And I was trained on how to use them. And so it was just a really good learning experience. And I had a lot of hands on guidance from my graduate student advisor. So from, you know, while I was at St. Jude, I was looking at the effects of metabolism on cancer and, you know, mitochondrial metabolism specifically.

From there, I sort of became very interested in nutrition and preventative medicine. So I was kind of like combining my aging background with everything I'd learned with metabolism, um, and how that relates to cancer and aging and, um, decided that I wanted to work with, uh, Bruce Ames, who's a world renowned scientist. Yeah, the guy's like a legend. He is a legend. He is the greatest guy ever. He is like one of my favorite people on the planet.

And is he still alive? Yeah, he's pretty old though, right? He just turned 87. Not only is he still alive, he still runs a lab. Oh, wow. And he works five and a half days a week. So he's... So he's basically your mentor.

Yes, he was my postdoctoral mentor. So after I got my PhD in biomedical science, which took quite a long time, six years, I then went on to do postgraduate training with Bruce. And so the postgraduate training is often referred to as post-doc, post-doctoral training. And so he, it was a very different experience compared to graduate school where I was getting a lot of mentorship, a lot of hands-on training. Eventually, I became very independent. And then as I came to Bruce's lab, it was just everything.

I was completely autonomous. It was just me coming up with ideas and bouncing them off Bruce and just leading, charging the way. There, I've been doing a variety of different research projects. I've got clinical research that I've been doing. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to join Bruce's lab is because I went from chemistry synthesizing, you know, peptides to worms to then mice at St. Jude. I was working on mice and then I kind of wanted to work with humans. So I was able to be involved in clinical trials, ongoing clinical trials. That was, you know, Bruce Ames was leading in his lab. Right, because the actual affiliation with the hospital

allows you to work on practical solutions to these scientific, theoretical things that you're grappling with, right? Exactly, exactly. And that was what was so appealing to me. To be able to do that was something that I'd wanted to do for a long time. And so there I've been looking at the effects of certain micronutrients, which are micronutrients are about 30 to 40 essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids, and deficiencies in those and how those can affect biomarkers of aging. And I'm looking in people that are unhealthy, metabolically unhealthy, that are insulin

resistant, that are obese, people that are metabolically healthy and lean, young, old. So I've been looking at a variety of different parameters. And so that's ongoing research. And then I've also been involved in other trials there. So another trial that we just finished that I've been involved in is looking at aging-related biomarkers in blood cells. So I'm getting blood cells from people. And in this trial, it was actually, we were looking at the effects of freeze-dried blueberry powder on biomarkers of aging. And so we were looking at the effects of freeze dried blueberry powder, um, on biomarkers of aging. And so we were looking at, you know, what did you discover? Well, I can't really, um, say that I can't really tell you yet because it was a double blind placebo controlled trial.

Um, and what I'm looking at is a marker of aging called DNA damage which is you know damage to the DNA inside your blood cells and you know just normal metabolism you know every time we eat food we metabolize you know to make energy and that coupled in with the oxygen we breathe in can can lead to damage and that damage can damage your DNA well as we get older we have more damage to our DNA is this Is this what's called oxidative stress? Yes. Or is that something different? Oxidative stress is another way of...oxidative stress can happen before it damages the DNA. So oxidative stress happens and it can happen to your DNA or it can happen to proteins inside

of your cells or it can happen to the cell membrane, to proteins inside of your cells, or it can happen to the cell membrane, lipids inside of your cells. So oxidative stress is sort of like more of a general term for damage, yeah. And DNA damage is one of those things that can occur. Right. It seems that at the root, and this is me being a complete layperson, my perspective or my perspective is that is that it seems that so many of these degenerative diseases or lifestyle diseases and perhaps even the acceleration of aging are related to inflammation is that true and can we kind of camp out on this a little bit and explain exactly like

what inflammation is because i feel like that term gets thrown around like very casually but what does it actually mean you nailed it rich yes inflammation is uh the driver of the aging process itself in fact um very recently in the past six months or so a Japanese study published. They published a study that involved elderly individuals that were like 80 years or older, centenarians, which were 100 years old, semi-super centenarians, which are 105, and then super centenarians, which are 110. And so they had all these different age populations, and a variety of biomarkers were looked at, tons of different biomarkers. And they looked at telomere length, DNA damage, inflammatory markers, cellular senescence, which occurs when...

What does that mean? Cellular senescence occurs when... So here's like the temporal chain of events. Oxidative stress, DNA damage. DNA damage causes the telomeres to shorten because your telomeres take the hit. Your telomeres are what protect your DNA. And the reason they do that is because if your DNA gets damaged, it can potentially lead to cancer. Right.

So your telomeres take the hit. But before we go any further, and I don't want to take too much of a left turn, but I feel feel like we need to like telomeres is a big thing that i wanted to talk to you about today okay i thought we were going to talk about inflammation but maybe we can talk about telomeres at least in the in to the extent that we can like define it so um we know what we're talking about yeah so basically it's a biomarker for aging because um as we age they get shorter shorter. So it's a biomarker. But they're basically like the tail ends of your DNA strands. They're kind of like the caps on the end of your chromosomes, which contain your DNA. So yes, exactly.

So these Japanese people looked at all these different biomarkers, and what they found was that in every category of age, so elderly centenarians, semi-supercentenarians, and supercentenarians, the only thing that was positively associated with aging, was the driver of aging, was inflammation. That was the only thing. So inflammatory markers. So yes, you are right.

Inflammation is at the root of aging. And to answer your question, what is inflammation, which is, you know, I completely agree with you. It's just kind of thrown around. And I don't think a lot of people really do understand exactly what inflammation is. So what inflammation is referring to is it's a consequence of your immune system being activated. And once your immune system is activated, they start firing off all these chemical weapons that are called inflammatory cytokines.

And these inflammatory cytokines are damaged cells inside your body, damage DNA inside your body, damage pretty much everything inside of your cells. But what's confusing to me about this is that essentially inflammation is an immune system response to something wrong in your body, right? It's your body's way of saying, let's send the ambulance out to fix whatever's wrong, whether you cut your finger or you sprained your knee, your immune system gets activated and mobilized to then kind of visit that either localized area or in general, if it's stress related or something like that,

I suppose. But the idea behind it is to fix the problem, right? So on some level, doesn't it make sense that like some inflammation is good because it's your body reacting to a problem in order to fix it? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, that one of the, you know, major effects, downstream effects of having, you know, these inflammatory cytokines and molecules being produced is they recruit other repair factors it you know allows it increases genes in your body that then start to repair damage fix things so it's it's an essential part of repair and recovery system however there is a difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation acute inflammation would be something like your four-hour marathon run,

you know, or your two-hour training session when you're, you know, running and, you know, you're causing inflammation. There's, you know, inflammation, you know, it occurs after intense exercise. That's good because you, the inflammation signals to various genes in your body that turn on all these antioxidant genes. They turn on genes that repair muscle damage. They turn on all these good, so it's like a stress response sort of mechanism where you're turning on all the good stuff. But you need the bad stuff to turn them on. So it's kind of like, here's a little dose of this bad stuff to turn on the good stuff. Right. So there's sort of the exercise-induced oxidative stress that triggers the immune system response versus somebody who's just smoking cigarettes all day long,

and that's causing some kind of internal damage in a number of ways that's creating just a chronic immune system response that is literally just burning your engine out, right? Yeah, exactly. The chronic smoking or actually the major, major source of all inflammation in the body is actually the gut. So you're talking about people that are eating unhealthy, they're not getting enough fiber, and we can talk more about that in a little bit. They're doing damage in the gut, and that's causing a lot of immune cells to become active chronically every day. The food you're eating, people eat three times a day or even more.

So in your experience, what are the foods that create the worst inflammatory response? Well, I think it's actually more a lack of foods. Lack of the good foods. Than eating bad foods. Because, so, your gut hosts the largest number of immune cells in the body. So most of the immune cells in your body are found in your gut. You've got them in your spleen, your thymus, and you're obviously in your blood stream. But the largest number of them are found in your gut. You've got them in your spleen, your thymus, and you're obviously in your blood, you know, stream, but, uh, the largest number of them are actually in your gut. The reason for that is because, you know, your gut is exposed to the external environment,

you know, food you eat, your gut sees it. And that can be pretty lethal if you get some bad, nasty stuff. So your immune system has to be there and ready to react to that, right. To, to make sure that you stay alive along that you stay alive long enough to reproduce and pass on your genes. So in addition to immune cells being in your gut, you also have a lot of bacteria in your gut. Tons and tons of bacteria. And there's people that sort of debate how many bacteria, you know, there's 100 trillion I've seen references for. And I haven't dug into, like, is it accurate or not? I mean, it's a lot.

It's a lot of freaking bacteria. Okay. Ten times more microorganism than human. Right. Like, it's thrown around. And people, you know, that just can't, it irks them to hear people say that. And, you know, I don't know. It irks them to hear people say that.

And I don't know. I've seen references that show that there are 100 trillion bacteria cells in your colon, in the distal part of your gut. And those bacteria play a very, very important role in regulating your immune system. So you have to feed those bacteria the right types of foods in order for them... You can kind of think of them as little chemical producing factories, actually, because when you feed them the right type of food, which happens to be fiber, fiber gets digested by this bacteria in your gut, in your colon specifically, and it produces a bunch of different chemical products called short-chain fatty acids,

which are little signaling molecules that tell your immune cells in your gut to become a certain type of immune cell. So they'll tell them, okay, become this type of immune cell that is involved in preventing autoimmune diseases, making sure your immune system doesn't get so ramped up that it starts to just attack everything, including your own organs. That's very important. And the type of immune cell that does it is called T regulatory cells and T regulatory cells become T regulatory cells based on these bacteria in your gut that are producing these little products that tell it to do it. So, you know, it's very important that your gut gets fiber. And I actually, um, some, uh, a couple of

my acquaintances at Stanford university, Justin, Erica Sonnenberg, I recently interviewed them. Yeah. They are my list of people to go interview. Highly recommend. They're extremely, um, they run their own lab there, right? They do. They, Justin, Justin and Erica run their own lab at Stanford and they've been researching gut microbiome for several years now. And they're leaders in the field. They wrote a book called The Good Gut. And when I was speaking with them a few months ago, they had told me that if you look at hunter-gatherer societies like in Tanzania, they get around 200 grams of fiber a day. And compared to the typical American diet, which is like maybe 15 grams of fiber, that's a huge difference. Yeah, it's crazy.

And it's funny because in our culture, we're all obsessed with protein. We're all walking around thinking that we might be suffering from a protein deficiency. The truth is almost everyone is suffering from a fiber deficiency. And if we flip those words around, I think we'd all be better off. If people were like, did you get your fiber today? Did you get your fiber today? I mean, we would be in a different place. I am so with you on that as my new motto.

Did you get your fiber today? Because it is so incredibly important. And what a good way to think about it for, for some people that don't really have a, you know, grasp on why fiber is so important. When you eat protein, when you eat, you know, fat, when you're when you're eating these other sources of energy, even carbohydrates that are not fired, that, you know, like refined carbohydrates that don't have fiber, those things all get metabolized in the upper part of your intestine. They don't make it to the colon where all your bacteria are, probiotic bacteria, good bacteria, the commensal bacteria that are regulated in the immune system, like I just

mentioned. So what happens is because you're getting protein and fat and refined carbs, those bacteria start to get hungry. Oh, what am I going to eat? I don't get the protein. I don't get the fat. So they actually start to eat what's called mucin, which is what it's essentially the gut barrier. The gut barrier is made up of something called mucin and it's mucin because it's kind of mucusy, kind of slippery. And it separates the immune cells from the bacteria in your gut, separates the food from the internal part of your gut.

So the gut barrier starts to get broken down by your own probiotic bacteria that are good for you because they're hungry because you've been starving them of fiber. Right. They're so far down the conveyor belt that they have, they're forced to basically cannibalize themselves. Exactly. And is that what causes leaky gut and all these sorts of issues where people are having all these, you know, digestive disorders? Yes. It causes a plethora of disorders, you know, leaky gut, it affects your immune system because now your immune system's all out of whack. Your gut barrier starts to break down. The immune cells start to see the bacteria. What do immune cells do when they see

bacteria? They fire away. They're going to fire all that chemical warfare I was talking about. It creates more inflammation. You start to release these things into your bloodstream, causes activation of immune cells in your bloodstream that can affect your cholesterol and all sorts of damage. It's just bad. And these disorders have really become like an epidemic. You know, I feel like I meet people all the time who deal with problems in this area. And it didn't seem like it used to be that way, right?

So obviously there's something going on and it has to do with, it must have to do with the food that we're eating. Yeah. You know, I haven't done antibiotics, of course. I mean, antibiotics are also a really big one in this. They wipe out, you know, all the bacteria in your gut, but you know, the, the lack of fiber, it's, it's kind of like, I think it's like this insidious kind of damage that people just, they don't realize that it's like oh they may notice they may be constipated a little or you know it's just but they don't realize to what magnitude this sort of effect can have when it starts to compound over the years

because it's really changing your immune system it's causing causing inflammation. It's aging you. It's going to accelerate the way you age on every level. And, you know, it can lead to these diseases, these autoimmune related diseases, these diseases of aging, you know, all sorts of problems start to happen. And I really think that you nailed it when there's a simple solution. That simple solution is you need to focus on getting fiber. I actually, that is my main obsession. It's fiber, and then I supplement some protein and fat and all that with fiber. Right, fiber is at the top of the food pyramid for you. It is the top. That's so interesting.

And it's all different types of fiber because you've got seeds, legumes, you have oats, vegetables, fruits. They all have different types of fiber. And what we're learning by we, I mean, I say I'm learning this. I am a scientist, but I'm actually not doing microbiome research experimentally. But I read about it. The royal we as being part of the scientific community. Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

Royal we as being part of the scientific community. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. What we are learning is that there are different types of fiber that are having different effects. You know, so they're feeding different types of bacteria and they're producing those bacteria are producing different types of chemical byproducts, which then do X, Y or Z. You know, so I mentioned the T regulatory cells, which are important for preventing autoimmune disease. They also make something called natural T killer cells, which are the most important type of immune cell that kills cancer cells in your body. And we're constantly getting little cancer cells that

arise and our immune system takes care of it. It's sort of like a levels number. When we get more cancer cells than our immune system can handle, A, because our immune system's weak, because we're not making enough natural T-killer cells or something like that, then it starts to get to the point where the cancer cells start to survive. They make it. Interesting. Yeah. I interviewed this doctor, Dr. Robin Shuttkan, who is an expert in the microbiome. She wrote a book called The Microbiome Solution, and she was just full were talking about, you know, how to kind of maintain a healthy gut. And we were talking about probiotics and her perspective was, you know, probiotics are great, but most of them aren't as effective as you think. And you actually need so much, even though it says billions and billions of cultures or whatever, you actually need so much more of that. And instead of focusing on, um, taking in probiotics, you should be focusing on prebiotics, which are essentially

the types of foods that the healthy gut flora feed on, which is essentially fiber, right? So fiber being like the ultimate prebiotic, which then seeds your gut with the type of kind of gut flora that is desirable for optimizing your health. I agree with the fact that fiber is first and foremost, the most important thing for growing healthy flora, you know, growing healthy gut bacteria. You, you know,

you'd be amazed with, with even if you have just a few hundred of a certain type of probiotic in your gut, which you would never be able to see on a, for example, a fecal sample test where they measure different types of bacteria, you know, based on your feces. But if you continue to feed those bacteria the right types of fiber, you know, over the next year or so, you'll start to see those bacteria cropping up because they'll flourish, they'll grow and flourish. Now, with that said, I will say that you obviously need to have a population, even if it's a very small, small population of bacteria, you need it to be present. You have to create the

colony. You have to like create the colony. And as you mentioned, antibiotics are so widespread. I mean, we're actually on the verge of serious antibiotic resistance cropping up, and that is scary. It's actually terrifying. I don't want to get into that

post-apocalyptic world. We can go there if you want, but that might be a different podcast. It totally would be a different podcast. So a lot of the probiotics out there are most, most, the biggest problem is that they're not a large enough quantity. Um, and sometimes they don't, they perish by the time you drink them. Like there's, there's a big issue with that with kombucha, right? Like I never know, like are these probiotic cultures actually is there is this is this true like i don't know is it live yeah is it marketing or is it real yes so i have

um done a lot of reading and i were when i was at children's hospital in oakland one of my colleagues is a gut expert and he's just brilliant guy and does a lot of research on the gut gut bacteria gut health and so i was talking with him one day and he turned me on to a certain type of probiotic called bsl number three i've probably mentioned it to you before because i talk about it a lot and the reason i talk about it a lot is because um i read i've read over 25 published studies that have used bsl number three both clinically bsl number v as in victor sl number three is that like the clinical word for it i'll show you some i actually buy that so no you can buy it so it comes um you can buy it in a sachet form which is like a little packet and it has 450 billion like in a man pouch that you can

well it actually it's it's it's shipped to you on ice because they have to stay cold oh wow so they ship it to you and on this with all these ice packs and it's like two day shipping um it has 450 billion probiotics in each packet which is over 90 times what anything else out there has. So, and even that is a drop in the pool when it gets to your colon. So even that, but it's still, it has been shown to, you know, there's so many studies that have shown you just recently, a new study came out where people were fed a really high sugar and high fat diet, and they were given either BSL number three or placebo and the BSL number three prevented weight gain again, because it had to do with the inflammation, um, making sure you're getting the right types of bacteria. But, um, I've used it and I've done some self experimentation where

I measured the different types of bacteria using a company called you biome, where you can look and measure, um, different types of bacteria in your colon. And then I took BSL number three for 30 days. And it was pretty interesting how I was able to increase. In fact, new strains were cropping up that aren't even in. So this type of probiotic only has about six strains in it. But I was getting, I was having strains crop up that were like not there before I did the test and that are not in the probiotic itself. So again, you're just... That's super interesting.

Yeah, it's super interesting. Did it change how you... Were there any outward manifestations of it? Did it change your emotions or how you felt or how you look? You know what I mean? Because it's so influential on so many things. Yeah, I didn't notice any change. There have been studies with VSL number three

where it did affect people's mood. Right, cravings and things like that. Yeah, I personally... changed there have been studies with vsl number three where it did affect people's mood i personally yeah i personally because i i eat pretty healthy and i'm very fiber obsessed i mean i eat tons and tons of vegetables and i i'm not like scared of oats so i eat oats and um muesli it's called which has like seeds and raisins i love that stuff and um beans so i eat a lot of fiber but i did i i there was a point that i was having an inflammatory gut issue uh kind of like an inflammatory bowel problem and um i had taken care i just through diet i mostly had it managed you know it was managed manageable but after the bsl know, it was managed, manageable. But after the BSL number three, it was completely gone, 100% gone. And I've gotten tons of emails from people that have

heard me talk about it and had colitis and just said that it changed their life. That's amazing. So is it like an eyedropper? You put it in like a liquid solution or how does it work? No, it's, um, it's a little packet. And if only I could take this mic with me to the fridge, I could show it to you. We'll do it after the podcast. Yeah, it comes in a little packet, and it's a little powder. And I put it in my yogurt. I put it in water. My husband, Dan, will put it on his tongue and just take a shot of it just to do it quickly.

And how do they create it? What is it made from? Is it in a petri dish culture? No, actually, how it's made, I don't know how they make it. It's called a medical food, and on the box it says, take it under medical supervision. You know, which, so, you know, if you're out there and you have, you know, some sort of clinical condition,

talk to your doctor. But you can order it, Amazon has it, or you can order it from the company directly, which is what I do. Sigma Tau, I think they're called as a company. Well, I'll find out.

I'll make sure there's a link in the show. It's you know, and, and to get it, you can don't, you can buy the pills, but the pills, you have to take eight of them to get the equivalent of one pouch.

So, you know, it's kind of. Gotcha. All right, good. So let's get back to inflammation in general. So we kind of, it's kind of gotcha. All right, good. So let's get back to inflammation in general. So we kind of have a working understanding of inflammation now. And,

and what, in your opinion, are the leading kind of causes of inflammation? And what are the ways that we can, you know, avoid these? Like, what are some daily habits that we can kind of undercut this chronic immune response that is making us sick? So as I mentioned, I think one of the major drivers of inflammation is gut health and lack of fiber. That's really one of the major things. So making sure you're eating enough vegetables, you know, getting enough, you know, nuts, seeds, plants, legumes. Like, I think that's very, very important for controlling inflammation. And it's been shown that the gut is the major regulator of inflammation. So that's number one. That's easy, you know, increase your intake of vegetables.

The other easy, actionable for controlling inflammation is, believe it or not, actually causing acute inflammation through exercise. Because it is a hormetic, it's called a hormetic type of stress where you're inducing stress. You're then activating all these anti-inflammatory genes. And this has been shown like about an hour after exercise um you have a really high uh elevation of these pro-inflammatory mediators and then immediately after that like a couple hours later is a very strong anti-inflammatory response so exercise is a really good way to boost the anti-inflammatory processes, the natural ones in your body. Right. So it's like pushups for your immune system as

well as for your muscles. Exactly. It really is. It really is. And the other one that I've really been obsessed with recently is curcumin. And curcumin is one of the curcuminoids that is found in turmeric. Right. It's a root. It's a root. What is the difference between that and turmeric? Well, turmeric has many different curcuminoids in them, including curcumin. I like to get, now I mentioned the curcumin specifically because the curcumin is a very, very potent anti-inflammatory. But it doesn't work the way people may be thinking NSAIDs or anti-inflammatory drugs.

It works very differently because it's actually kind of like exercise. It's a hormetic stress. It's actually slightly toxic to us. stress, it's actually slightly toxic to us. And because it's slightly toxic to us, it turns on all these really potent anti-inflammatory genes and it inhibits the pro-inflammatory ones as well. So curcumin is really, really good at doing that. And how do you take that? So I just, so that's a really good question, but before I get to that, I wanted to say, differentiate the difference between curcumin and turmeric. Turmeric is also very good because it's the source of curcumin. Curcumin's

not as concentrated if you're taking the full turmeric, um, which you can buy, you know, you can buy the root and have it fresh, or you can buy powder and cook with it, you know, You can buy the root and have it fresh, or you can buy powder and cook with it. Curries and stuff often have turmeric in it. Or you can make tea. You can do lots of things with it. But what's really cool about turmeric is that in addition to curcumin, it has something in it called aromatic tumerone, which is another curcuminoid that has a completely different function than curcumin. The aromatic turmeric has been shown in studies to actually, in the brain, increase neural stem cells. So stem cells in the brain to make more neurons.

So it actually increases neural stem cells to what's called differentiate, which just means these stem cells become neurons. cells to what's called differentiate which just means these stem cells become neurons so it increased dramatically increased the number of neurons in in little mice brains is that with like massive quantities or over how long of a period of time or yeah really good questions um so with the aromatic tamarone study i it was i think it was like 100 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which would be a lot of, it would be like 8 grams a day for a 180-pound male. Right. That's a lot.

Yeah, that would be a lot. And we don't really know if there are any long-term effects of taking such a high dose of turmeric. So these curcuminoids are actually fat-soluble, and other studies have shown that if they are in like a liposome or like if they're with a lipid sort of phospholipid type of thing like phosphatidylcholine it can increase the bio availability dramatically and so and there have been studies you know recently showing that in fact you can people that are given this this formulation of the curcumin, for example, with the phosphatidylcholine,

people taking two grams of that a day, which is about 400 milligrams of it would actually be the curcumin. So it's like 20% curcumin and 40% of the phosphatidylcholine complex. They experience pain relief equivalent to taking an entire gram of acetaminophen or 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. So this is like the champion of all antioxidants. It really is because it works very differently than supplemental antioxidants do because if you take a supplemental antioxidant like vitamin e for example the way it is an antioxidant is it binds and it sequesters this oxidative stress that you

were talking about it it binds these little you can think of them as like little radicals little free radicals like bumping around doing damage well it binds and sequesters them so it can't do them now that can have good that that has them, so it can't do them. Now, that has good effects, but it can also have bad effects. The bad effects can be if you take your vitamin E and you're exercising, well, those little free radicals that are produced acutely, like we mentioned, actually serve as signaling molecules to activate all the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant genes. Right, right, right. Interesting. So you don't get that. And that's not really a good thing. Yeah. That brings up kind of an interesting subject that, that I've read a little bit about

and I've heard, and I don't know that much about, but this idea of, you know, look as an athlete, it's all about like, how do you recover more quickly? Like the more quickly you can recover in between workouts, the harder you can train. So you want to take in all kinds of antioxidants and, you know, make sure that you're repairing your body as quickly as possible. But there's this sort of counter argument or, you know, counterintuitive theory that if you dispense with all that and actually forget about the antioxidants and allow your body to kind of you know suffer through that recovery process that that actually strengthens the body's ability to recover because you're not you're not like giving it this crutch to do that it actually has to perform it itself is that

yeah that's partly true than that yeah there is truth in that there's truth in that. There's truth in that. It's a little more complicated. So it has been shown that if you are exercising, it really depends on the dose of exercise in some regards. But if you exercise and you're taking a supplemental antioxidant, it can actually negate some of the benefits. some of the the benefits um for example if you're if you're doing like resistance training and this has been shown if you take supplemental vitamin e then it can actually negate some of the hypertrophy hypertrophy that is um that you get from you know resistance training because the the oxidative stress that you're generating while you're, you know, lifting weights or doing leg presses, excuse me, that usually, sir, it actually, that oxidative stress will cause your mitochondria, which are the little energy-producing organelles inside of your cells, to make more of them. So, and that's a very important thing to gain more muscle mass. And if you get rid of those, that oxidative stress that you generate when you're exercising, that doesn't happen.

So you're negating some of that. It's like a signal. It's like you did this training for nothing. Yeah, essentially. And that's also been shown with the benefits of exercise on insulin sensitivity, that if supplemental antioxidants are taken. mental antioxidants are taking and i focus more on vitamin e than vitamin c because vitamin c is a unique antioxidant in that it also becomes a pro-oxidant when you're taking it and it goes between these two states of antioxidant pro-oxidant depending on the dose so i don't even want to go there it's gonna get too confusing yeah i'm trying to keep this as relatable as possible

because i know you could like we can propellerhead it all the way, you know, into the stratosphere. We could. We could. Try to keep it grounded. And so the reason I said it's kind of complicated is because then you have these professional types of athletes or, you know, these, like yourself, where you're endurance athletes that you're running marathons and you're doing triathlons and all these just competitive type of athletes that really push their workout to the next level it's not your average go to the gym do leg presses do some squats and you know olympic lifts kind of workout and i'm not saying that's not a good great workout i'm just saying it's not the same as being a

competitive athlete where you're training to compete or you're a professional athlete, which are also competitive athletes. Competitive athletes, because the dose of exercise is so incredibly robust and potent, they are very subject to very hyperactive immune response where their immune system there is so activated it sort of can spiral out of control and start to break down muscle and cause uh you know muscle damage because their workout their training was so intense is that is that like indicia of overtraining or are you talking about like just a particular workout of just pushing so hard or just the day in day out grind yeah i don't know if it's i guess it all depends on what you define as overtraining yeah i guess so i mean i think you know because i'm thinking like if you're a tour de france cyclist you can go out and ride your bike fairly hard for five or six hours with nothing but a bottle of water and feel

like you went for a walk, you know what I mean? Because you're so adapted, you become so efficient at that exercise. Whereas, you know, for the average lay person, that would be, you know, a very, very difficult thing to do, right? So there's an adaptation that takes place there. there's an adaptation that takes place there. So how does that relate to kind of stress adaptation and the kind of immune system response and the free radical damage and all of that? I mean, because if someone can go out and do that and it doesn't feel like they did anything,

then I would presume that there really isn't that kind of free radical damage because they've adjusted to it. Yeah, and that's absolutely true. Athletes that are, you know, adapted many of the, the, you know, adaptive responses that occur are happening because their body, for example, is they're elevating their core body temperature. They're increasing the production of something called heat shock proteins, which activate all these genes that help you deal with stress. And so you're right. Um, the, the damage does get negated to a certain

extent when they're, they're adapted because their, their body's already doing all this counter stuff. Um, so yeah, I guess it probably does have to do more with the overtraining than the people that aren't adapted. And that's probably, that's probably a really good distinction to make so back to inflammation so here we have increase your fiber we have uh exercise we have curcumin yes what else should we be doing fish oil fish oil or eat your food i'm a vegan i know you are a vegan um yeah lots of vegan listeners too so is that because of the DHA or the DHEA or the omega-3s? Like what is it? The EPA. Well, the anti-inflammatory. Environmental Protection Agency. Eicosapentaenoic acid. How else can I get that? So the two marine omega-3 fatty acids are eicosapentaenoic acid, also known as EPA, or docosahexaenoic acid,

also known as DHA, which are found really in fatty fish, microalgae, you know, phytoplankton. I don't know if vegetarians do the phytoplankton. Yeah, I mean, basically, for these kinds of things, there's always some kind of algal, you know, varietal of that, because essentially, the fish just store this in their fat tissue, right? So they're like sieves for all of this stuff. So it's really just a matter of kind of going to the source of it. Yes, exactly. So microalgae oil would be the source for the, of the EPA and DHA. And then the third omega-3 is alpha-linolenic acid, ALA, which is found in nuts, flax seeds. So that's more of the plant. But that type of omega-3 is not as anti-inflammatory as the EPA

and the DHA as well to some extent. But the EPA is really, really robust at anti-inflammatory. It's very important for reducing something called E2 series prostaglandins, which are like all these signaling molecules that cause inflammation. They cross over to the blood-brain barrier, get into the brain, wreak havoc. They also can deplete serotonin and lead to depression. This has all been shown. In fact, it's been shown if you inject people with an inflammatory cytokine, it can cause depressive symptoms. with an inflammatory cytokine, it can cause depressive symptoms. But if you inject them with the inflammatory cytokine and they take fish oil,

it negates the depressive symptoms. So, you know, microalgae is a good source. Fish oil, eating fish for the non-vegans and vegetarians. How dare you? Like myself, I eat a lot of fish. It's very important. Fish is very important. Or microalgae is very important.

Right, right, right. Getting the microalgae. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, and then beyond that, let's talk about sleep and other stress reduction techniques like meditation and the impact of that on reducing chronic inflammation. Yes, I was just going there. Oh, you were? Okay, sorry about that. Well, I've become sort of obsessed recently with circadian rhythm or your biological clock, which is related to sleep.

Humans are on a 24-hour light or day, night, dark cycle, where we're in the day when it's light out we're active you know we're working we're exercising we're thinking we're you know metabolically active and at night when it's dark typically we're you know resting sleeping it's when we're repairing a lot of damage things like that um but what is so interesting is that bright light exposure, early bright light exposure is so incredibly important for setting your biological clock. It's like an anchor to set it so that it knows, okay, this is day, this is when day starts. And so, you know, this whole, this internal clock that you have regulates 20, like 20%, no, 15, 20% of your entire genome.

Many of those genes are involved in metabolism, inflammation. Wow, that's a trip. Tons. I mean, it's completely regulated on just when, you know, the amount of light you're exposed to, when you're exposed to it, and when it's dark. It's like this clock. And so recently I came across a study that showed when humans were exposed to really, really bright light, it was 10,000 lux, which is like the sun. reduce cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone cortisol, by up to 25% during the next day, during its peak phase. Wow. 25%. So cortisol... So translation, you need to be outside and exposed to the sun? You need to be exposed to light. As opposed to sitting in your cubicle? Yes,

that's the translation., it causes massive inflammation. It's one of those stress hormones that activates almost every gene in the body that increases your immune cells to go fire, fire, fire. Cortisol does that. I mean, there's a reason it does that. It's a stress response. to bright light because you live somewhere and it's dark in your house or your apartment or you work a job where you're just not able to be exposed to the light, it really can have detrimental effects on health. And we're talking about inflammation here, at the molecular level, that's what's going

on but it has a lot of effects on your ability to lose weight, to gain muscle mass, your mood, brain function, memory, learning, all these things. I mean, tons and tons of studies have shown cortisol decreases muscle mass. It actually causes your muscles to atrophy, causes your brain to atrophy. And this has all been shown experimentally. Wow, that's amazing. So for the average person, though, most people are not able to be out in direct sunlight for seven hours a day, right? So is there like a manageable solution for the average person? Well, I do know that in terms of just setting the biological clock, being exposed to seven hours a a day that specifically was referring to the 25 reduction in cortisol i got you um but but just being exposed to bright light for like one to two

hours uh is is enough to set your biological clock correctly so that you know your your metabolizing your metabolism is going the way it's supposed to your inflammation is going the way it's supposed to, your inflammation is going the way it's designed, you're able to break down fat, you're able to build muscle mass, you're able to repair damage. All these things are being regulated by that biological clock. So that one to two hours is key for that, which is sort of like the minimal effect of dose. Right, right. It's such a crazy thing that the circadian rhythm even exists even exists i mean we walk around thinking that we've mastered nature you know and we forget

that we're just primal creatures you know living in this basically in the wild and that we're still you know we still have to you know uh fall prey to these things beyond our control. And it's so well conserved, right? It's like they find that little freaking diatoms in the ocean have a circadian rhythm. Right. I mean, it's so insane. And one thing I've noticed since I've moved, I previously lived in a place that was blocked by like buildings on like every window had a building blocking the light so like if i was inside i really just literally it was like being in a coffin

and my circadian rhythm was completely out of whack i mean i i've always sort of been gravitate towards staying up later and sleeping in since i've moved you know here and I get so much light um bright light exposure like early in the morning my clock completely reset where I'm now waking up at 7 38 in the morning that was not me okay that was not me and it was purely and my husband down in the same way and he is even worse than me and so now we're both you know no alarms no trying none of that it just happened it just happened people make fun of like seasonal affect disorder but i know that i'm super sensitive to that and i i really struggle in december and january and early february when there's when there isn't as much light like honestly like i really like i keep

thinking like i just want to go to Australia or South America for the winter like I just want summer I just need that light like it it has a profound effect on my mood and overall disposition and my level of attention and my efficiency and my energy levels and my cognitive ability like everything is impacted by it like it's December like I just want to hide you know like it really affects my my mood it's December. Like I just want to hide, you know, like it really affects my, my mood. It absolutely. I mean, I feel the same way and we're both in California, so I know we're lucky. It's like, I'm not complaining. Actually the sun's shining. I'm going to have to move in a second. Cause the sun, my cortisol levels, I can feel them going down because the

sun is shining right on my face. Yeah. I mean, we're so lucky it's the middle of January and it's like 70 degrees out right now. Yeah. No, but everything you just said has been shown. I mean, seasonal effective order exists. It's been shown to be ameliorated to some degree

with bright light exposure. You know, you can buy those lights to 10,000 lux lights that people can actually buy and just like expose themselves to it. You know, to me, that sounds a little depressing, but it apparently works, you know, and to me that sounds a little depressing,

but it apparently works, you know, and that's, that's been published in multiple studies. And I've actually spoken to people that live in like the UK and do that where it's like dark a lot during the winter, you know, I could never do it. Yeah.

So, so the bright light exposure, I mentioned that because it really is the key for setting your sleep cycle. And I am going to move. Sorry about that. Go ahead. Keep going. I mentioned that because it really is the key for setting your sleep cycle. I am going to move. Sorry about that. No, go ahead. Keep going.

Sleeping is also very important for repairing damage. It's critical to get enough sleep. But really, the key to setting your whole circadian rhythm, your whole clock is it's bright light exposure. I am becoming increasingly convinced the more I've experienced it myself. You're just a crazy, like, beach-dwelling Southern Californian now, right? But it's really important. I mean, when I was reading that study about, you know, the cortisol reduction, like, and this is just, it really, it reduced the cortisol reduction, cortisol was reduced up to 25% in the what's called rising phase, which is your cortisol is highest. So cortisol is regulated by the clock, internal clock.

And it's highest when you're sleeping and right when you're waking until about an hour after you wake up peaks. And then throughout the day, cortisol levels just gradually decline. That's called the decreasing phase. That was also decreased by 15%, up to 15%. So full stop, cortisol was reduced. And if you think about it, it's kind of cool if your cortisol, you're still, you know, these people were still making cortisol during their rising phase.

It just wasn't as robust. So you think about your resting heart rate when you first wake up. That's when it's really going. Lots of heart attacks occur in the early hours in the morning when cortisol is highest because it regulates your heart rate. So that's kind of the association my brain is making. It's like, oh, wow, that would be really cool to like not wake up you know with a quick you know fast heart rate i've woken up in the middle of the night before my heart has been

racing really scared me oh yeah yeah it's definitely happened to me on a few occasions um where it's just racing like like i'm running from a freaking lion or something you know like like my body is responding that way right Right. It's a stress. It's cortisol. Interesting. Yeah. Wow. So, all right. So sunlight, sunlight exposure, and that's linked to sleep. So these are, these go hand in hand. They really do. Um, very important for, uh, reducing inflammation. And then you mentioned meditation. And I think that is, it's a really good way to negate a lot of the negative effects of stress, which when you do, when you're stressed out about something, you know, there's good stress and there's bad stress. Like, you know, if you're like me and you're someone who's constantly pushing yourself or like you, I mean, you're an endurance athlete. I mean, that's pretty hardcore.

You're always, you know, you're thinking about your next project you have to do. I mean, you're running a top health podcast and you're constantly having to have new guests on and think about what you're going to discuss. I mean, that's, you know, that's a stress. It's a type of stress. Super stressful. And it becomes unhealthy.

To a certain degree, it's healthy. It's good to have that proactive kind of stress where you're motivated, where you're pushing yourself to learn new things and go beyond your boundaries, go beyond what's comfortable. But when you start to ruminate about it, and rumination meaning you're just constantly thinking about it before it happens or after it happened, it's just on your mind all the time. That's when it begins to become unhealthy, the rumination. that's been shown to lead to increased cortisol, increased corticotropin-releasing hormone, which is another stress hormone, which pokes holes in the gut, essentially activates the immune system,

leads to inflammation, and all these little mechanisms that are happening, but ultimately inflammation. So that all occurs. And it has been shown that one of the best ways to negate rumination and bad stress is meditation. So now I think everyone has their own type of meditation. I was recently, I interviewed someone that I met in Amsterdam. He's a professor emeritus where he used to do work on the immune system and decided after

he was going to retire that he was just going to go into meditation. He's super into meditation and the effects of meditation on the brain, on the body. He was telling me about some of the really profound effects that over 100 genes can change within minutes of meditating, starting meditation. And that it, that's crazy. It totally is great. A hundred different genes are changing. The genes are actually changing or the expression of them is getting turned on and off. Exactly. The expression. So some of them are becoming more active and the ones that are becoming more active are the anti-inflammatory genes. And this has been shown in blood cells from humans. Meditation can increase the expression of anti-inflammatory genes. And this has been shown in blood cells from humans.

Meditation can increase the expression of anti-inflammatory genes, at least in blood cells. And it decreases the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. So it's like just the right profile that you want to counter stress. Right. So it makes sense on the molecular level, why meditation does that. Is there a good meditator in order to have that happen?

I mean, you know, and this is the thing I was talking... Do you get points for the trying? I was talking to Pierre about this because I was like, you know, I've never been the kind of person that like, because I'm just so go, go, go. I'm really, that's something that I personally battle is that sort of, I guess people call it high strung where you're just constantly, you always have to be doing something just all the time.

And so it's been hard for me to like sit down and just quiet. Terrifying. Yeah. But I can do things like go out, paddle on my board and sit on my surfboard and chill out looking at the horizon on a day when the waves aren't too big. And that's pretty quiet out there. Or when I'm, you know, sometimes I can do like a ballet exercise or yoga exercise where I'm really just enjoying that moment. I can do that. And I feel calm. But you can't sit still. It's moment. I can do that. And I feel calm.

But you can't sit still. It's not that I can't. It's just that I can't. Yeah, I get it. It's interesting. I mean, this is something that I've struggled with as well. And I go through phases. Like right now, I'm very committed to my meditation practice.

And I've been really good lately. I'm doing it every morning. And like a good student. And, you know, I feel different, you know, it's definitely, um, had an, you know, a positive impact on me. Um, and I also like to make that argument. Like if I'm out on an easy trail run, that's like my mindfulness, uh, exercise, or if I just go for, you know, there are other things that are quote unquote meditative, but I think there is a qualitative difference between, um, a meditative act and the formal act of meditation where you really are like, you know, just whatever technique you're pursuing, but you are in that like seated position and just doing that one dedicated thing. Um,

I think there's a, there is a distinction there. Yeah, and I would really like to begin, I say yeah, that's not a great way to start a sentence, but what I meant was I tend to agree with you based on the couple of times that I have put music on and just sort of try to sit and chill out. And this has been shown, you know, there are neuroscientists that have been looking at Buddhist monks that are meditating and the changes in their brain activity. I mean, that's all been shown. I mean, there are, there are definitely changes immediately occurring and not only in your blood cells,

but in your brain. Right. So it's just so funny that the hardest thing to do is to do nothing. It is really funny. You know, at least for me, it's one of the hardest things to do. And I think you and I, last time we were chatting, you mentioned, um, headspace, which I have now, I have it on my phone and I'll, or my laptop. I have it somewhere. I downloaded it, but I haven't used it yet come on all right well i'm gonna call you next week you need a little accountability if you text me and remind me that would be great i will i can make a commitment to that they should actually do they have that feature they really should i don't know maybe they do i think they do have a way to like you have buddies or whatever so you know when someone else has done it or i think so i don't

know but i'm happy to text you and hold your hand to the fire yeah i should probably just go walk out to the beach and just sit there and listen to the waves just like yeah every morning when you're up so early now right with the sun yep it's a funny thing though when you were talking about kind of stress and being go, go, go, and the cortisol levels and all of that, because when you're somebody who is kind of acclimated to that kind of lifestyle, you don't realize that you're in this state of chronic stress all the time because it's your baseline. Yeah. all the time because it's your baseline. So it's not until you actually stop and weather the discomfort that comes with sitting still and not being used to that

that you start to get perspective on that. Yeah, and Dan always gives me a... He points it out because there's times when he's just just even wanting to cuddle and I'm like, I've got to do something, I've got to do something. I'm not being productive, right? I need to be more productive than cuddling right now don't you understand that's so funny it's it's i think it's a there's got to be some kind of genetic basis well here i can i can i can sell you on this line which is there's a weird there's a weird kind of like

bizarre universal spiritual equation that takes place when you invest the time in the meditation you actually save time later like you become much more efficient and proficient in how you navigate through your day and i find myself not procrastinating or being able to kind of switch from one discipline to the next without kind of whatever dithering that i usually do like it just seems a little bit more effortless. So I ended up being like the time invested in that pays off like five to tenfold throughout the course of the day. So you actually do not check Twitter as much and all, I mean,

cause that would be great. Definitely not as much. So how, how long is your morning meditation? 20 minutes. It's really not that long. But with Headspace, you can start off with 5 minutes or 10 minutes. It's no big deal. Go sit down on the beach.

I'm just going to go out on the beach. I know. Think about all the inflammation reduction. So you really feel like you're... That's your productivity assignment. I'm reducing my inflammation. But I need more than that because I feel like so many other things I'm doing are reducing my inflammation. I would like what you just mentioned, that you're more efficient.

Like, to me, that's like. Yeah, I mean, it's like anything else. You're not going to realize it day one. But, like, if you start to develop some consistency with it, I just find that I'm able to kind of go through the day and do that. And then I take care of that. And I don't get, like, tired and have to take a break and then waste time and then go on my phone. Like I'm, I actually am much more kind of like on point and focused. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's very interesting to me. And that's something I've wondered because there are studies showing that you can take a person that's never

meditated before and subject them to some meditation program where they're meditating for like eight weeks and their their hippocampal part of their brain which is involved in learning memory it changes becomes more active the amygdala which is the part of the brain that's the emotional center fear that sort of primal reptilian brain that's like uh that becomes less active and a bunch of other parts of the brain change change after eight weeks of meditating and people have never meditated before yeah well just imagine being in a stressful situation where you have to make a decision or somebody you're in a conflict with somebody and the ability to just kind of like dispassionately um respond in a way that's

going to place you in the position that you want to be in, as opposed to reacting and getting kind of like, you know, all your emotions out of whack, and then saying something you wish you didn't say, or sending the email that you regret, you know, all the think how much time gets wasted on that, right? You're so right. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's, and I know, you know, I know meditation is one of those, it's just, it, it should be my 2016 goal. It's like one of those, I even did a podcast on it where I like started talking about it to motivate myself. I'm like, I gotta do this, you know, because I really, really want to incorporate it in my lifestyle. I mean, I know that it's going to,

it's going to help me live longer. Right. So, and perform better, apparently. There is no want. There is only do or do not. Right? All right. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk, bring it back to telomeres, because I think this is super fascinating. And I feel like, I kind of feel like this field is where microbiome research was maybe

five or eight years ago, where there was a lot of interesting things happening in it, but it hadn't quite caught on in terms of mainstream kind of fascination and awareness. Like now it's all about the microbiome. You know what I mean? Like everyone's talking about it. And, you know, just average people on the street are like, you know, how's your gut health? You know, it's like this is not things we were talking about that many years ago. And I feel like research and kind of the things that are going on with telomerase, right, and anti-aging is going to be kind of the next thing. Yeah.

What do you think? Well, I agree with you that telomerase,, in fact, since we were just talking about meditation, there was a fantastic study done in collaboration with Elizabeth Blackburn, who is the scientist who was involved in discovering the enzyme telomerase, which telomerase is able to take a telomere and add DNA nucleotides onto it so that it becomes longer. So it can, it can actually build and replenish and replace and repair a damaged telomere. Right. All right. So let's just like put a pin in this for a second and just back up and let's just like kind of define what we're talking about. So telomeres are these caps on the end of

chromosomes, right? And what is their relationship to aging? As they shorten, that leads to what? Okay, so telomeres are tiny caps on the end of your chromosomes. And we have 46 chromosomes in every cell in our body. And those chromosomes contain all of our DNA. So know, so we've got, you know, each gene we have is in a certain place in a certain position on a chromosome. And so that, you know, DNA is doing a very important thing because it's making a gene that's going to make a protein that's going to do all the function, whether that function is allowing your liver cells to, you know, make cholesterol, or it's allowing your heart to

pump blood to get to your brain or your neurons to function, whatever it is, it's important because it's keeping you alive. And so you want to make sure your DNA is protected. And so telomeres are a system that is conserved. Many animals have telomeres on their chromosomes to to protect that dna from getting damaged so every time there's an inflammatory burst from an immune cell busting out some hydrogen peroxide because it's trying to kill a piece of bacteria hydrogen peroxide can damage the dna well your telomere instead takes the hit and gets that hydrogen peroxide. So it protects the DNA. So it's like,

no, I don't want that DNA to get damaged. That's, you know, that's bad. It's like a first line of defense, like a shield. It's like a shield.

Exactly. And so your telomere will take that. But when that telomere gets damaged, um, it becomes shorter. And the thing with telomeres are, is that even if there was no damage occurring every, okay.

So we're, we talked about all the chromosomes 46 chromosomes inside of your cell and the chromosomes have the telomeres caps on them every time your cell divides so you have a cell in your liver and the liver cells done its thing for a while well now it's time to make a new liver cell to replace that old liver cell. So you have to replicate all the DNA and all 46 of those chromosomes so that you can make a new cell that has all the same DNA. Well, your telomere DNA has to get replicated also. And there's a defect in the telomere structure. So you kind of can think of it as the structure, the very end, the little tiny end of the telomere DNA, it has a little overhang that makes it so that the machinery that usually comes in and

copies it to make the exact replica can't get there. It can't access it. And so this little tiny, tiny little end of telomere DNA at the very tip of the telomere never gets replicated. very tip of the telomere never get replicated so the next cell generation that is now there the liver cell for example now has a telomere that's just a little bit shorter because it couldn't get copied and that goes on and on and on for decades. Right it's like xerox against xerox yeah exactly until it's illegible. Exactly and And so eventually... And then at that point, it just can't replicate and it dies. At the point when it becomes so critically short, a couple of things happen. One thing that happens is that the cell will die. And in the case of if this is a stem cell, that's bad because you're going to deplete your stem cell pools, which leads to aging.

It's a good thing if the cell was damaged and it could lead to cancer if it dies. The other thing that happens is that the cell will, when the telomere becomes critically short, it kind of goes into a crisis and it doesn't know what to do. And so it just, it calls, it doesn't die, but it's not really alive. And that's called senescence. So when the cell is senescent... It's confused. It's really confused, and it's actually really bad,

because a senescent cell, it's not alive, it's not dead, but what it is doing is secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines that damage nearby cells. So the more senescent cells you have accumulated in your bloodstream, in your liver, in your kidneys, in your muscle, you know, in your fill in the blank organ, the more senescent cells you have, the more pro-inflammatory cytokines that are being dumped out, the more damaging of the nearby cells, the quicker it's going to accelerate those cells to become senescent. Because not only do your telomeres get shorter every year, every time your cell divides based on that little problem I just mentioned,

but what accelerates the damage is inflammation, oxidative stress. You know, those things accelerate it. Right, because once you have this problem and you have this senescent cell and it's making all the cells around it unhealthy and miserable, then that just, you're just accelerating that process. Exactly. You're accelerating that process. So that's kind of like telomere. Um, okay. Let me, so that's part of telomere biology. So the other part, telomere for elementary school, telomere one-on-one. So that, that was fundamental, the fundamentals of telomeres. Now, the other part of this. Telemere for elementary school students. Yeah, the Telemere 101. So that was the fundamentals of telomeres.

Now, the other part of this equation is, well, what's this thing called telomerase that can rebuild the telomere? That's short. There is an enzyme, it's called telomerase, and Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2009, I believe, for discovering it. And it's able to take and add little DNA nucleotides to the end of the telomere so that it can lengthen it, essentially, make a shorter telomere longer. problem is this is the caveat most of our cells in our body with the exception exception of our stem cells or our germ cells so like sperm cells ovaries egg cells they do not they have a gene for telomerase but the gene is silenced so it's like the gene is not there. And so your blood cells, you're basically not rebuilding your shortened telomeres in your liver or your blood cells because telomerase is not active.

And there's a reason it's not active. The reason telomerase is not active is because if a cell is damaged, telomerase is not active is because if a cell is damaged, so if you've just treated yourself poorly, your body poorly, you haven't eaten the right things, and you have a lot of inflammation, a lot of reactive oxygen species chronically produced, you could damage your DNA in a region that could lead to cancer. And if you have a damaged cell, one of the things it does is it activates telomerase because when you activate telomerase, it can allow a cell to become immortal. It can allow a cell to survive indefinitely. And cancer cells have one thing in their mind and that is

immortal until they kill the host. So telomerase. Right. So that's problematic because you don't want proliferation of diseased cells. Exactly, and that's one of the reasons why the anti-aging field and potential therapeutic strategies to activate telomerase, the enzyme, can be dangerous. Right, you could just literally turn on cancer and and you know kill somebody with it basically potentially so so then the science or the research has to be attempting to determine a means of activating telomerase in healthy cells like being able to distinguish between cancerous or, or disease cells versus healthy cells, right? Yeah. Yeah. That would be, that would be one. Uh, this is, this is really like the, this whole notion of turning on the expression of genes and turning them off.

That's epigenetics, right? It is. That's called epigenetics. Yes. That's called epigenetics. And with the telomerase, there are some compounds that are actually available even today. One of them is called TA65, which what it's made of, for the most part, I think they've got some sort of proprietary blend, but it's made of something called astragalus. It's astragalus root. Astragalus root. Yeah. And what's been shown by a really pretty well-respected telomere researcher that I've known of for several years, Maria Belasco is her name. She's been doing a lot of research using TA65, both at the clinical level and also looking at animal models to look at mechanism. And she's published a couple of studies that I have read and I've been impressed with showing that TA 65 can, it can increase telomere length, um, in people and their blood cells over baseline. Uh, and this happened in about 40% of the people. And it was a pretty significant increase in tumor length.

In animals, so mice were fed TS65, and there was a variety of doses. They were fed, and it was shown to reverse signs of aging in their aged organs. So it was kind of like delaying the aging process. And they also gave it to older mice that had already been aged, and it was reversing aging.

And the question is, well, can it lead to cancer? And that's something that's being investigated in studies. But the underlying premise behind all of this is that if you can solve this issue, if you can figure out how to continually be able to lengthen telomeres via telomerase and do it with healthy cells, that you will then allow healthy cells to continue to divide. And in so doing, you are preventing the aging process from occurring. that would be the ultimate goal. And that's, you know, researchers are trying to figure out a way to selectively be able to do that, uh, at least in terms of a, a therapeutic treatment for aging. But in terms of what people can do now, I think, I think the real gold is in, in the prevention of the acceleration of telomere shortening, which is a big problem. I mean, there've been many,

many studies that have been done on identical twins that have shown twins that, for example, that, uh, are in the highest quartile of, um, vitamin D have telomeres that look five years biologically younger than the twins in the lowest quartile of vitamin D, um, but blood levels of vitamin D or exercise has also been shown. So twins that, um, that are the most active have telomeres that look 10 years younger than twins that are most sedentary, you know? So these are things that, uh, you know, vitamin D decreases. I was going to say, what is the relationship with, I mean, vitamin D is like a big thing with you, right? So let's, maybe we could talk about that a little bit. Well, vitamin D is, um, it gets converted into a steroid hormone in the body and that, that steroid hormone regulates

about 5% of the human genome. So it turns on and turns off about 5% of genes. And I mean, you can imagine like not having estrogen or not having testosterone is going to be some pretty profound effects if you're deficient, you know, when you're supposed to make it when you're younger. So it has a very important role in many, many, many biological processes from everything from immune function to inflammation, to repairing damage to muscle growth, to brain function. I mean, just it's just 5% of the genome. It's a lot. Right. And what percentage of people are vitamin D deficient? Well, if you consider vitamin D deficiency at levels below 20 nanograms per milliliter, which is what the Endocrine Society defines it as,

and you define vitamin D inadequacy as levels below 30 nanograms per milliliter, then 70% of the U.S. population has inadequate levels. And there have been meta-analyses on studies from 1968 all the way up until 2013. There's about 60 or so studies that were all looked at. These are studies that looked at vitamin D, blood levels of vitamin D and all cause mortality. So people that die from anything that's non accidental, so cardiovascular related diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases,

respiratory diseases, just fra neurodegenerative diseases, respiratory diseases, just frailty, things like that. People with vitamin D blood levels between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter had the lowest all-cause mortality. And that's important because people think, well, you need vitamin D. And so they have this tendency to go out and just mega dose. It's good for you. I need a lot of it.

No more is better, Rhonda. It's not necessarily better, yeah, especially when it comes to vitamins. You have to, you know, it's tricky. So too much vitamin D can potentially be dangerous. vitamin D can, can potentially be dangerous. And, and me being out in the sun for an hour or two for a run or something like that, is that sufficient in Southern California? Or, cause I remember when we did, when I did your podcast, you asked me, you know, if I supplemented and I said no. And, and I got the feeling that you were sort of like, really? Like you were a little surprised, like you were coming from a place of like, I think you really should look into that. So yeah, I just was presuming because we live in a place where there's

a lot of sunlight and I'm outdoors quite a bit that, that, that sort of my body was taking care of it. And, you know, I think that's a fair assumption to make. Um, however, there are, there are many factors that affect the ability of your body to make vitamin D and to convert it into the hormone. So I think that everyone should get a blood test done. It's just you can go to your doctor and get it done for very, very, very cheap. California, they have a higher chance of making enough vitamin D because it is sunny most of the year. And because where we are latitude wise, you know, we're below the 30 degree parallel, it's called, which is what you have to be below that in order to have UVB rays hit the atmosphere. So in certain parts of the United States that are more northern,

that are above that 30 degree parallel, during six months out of the year, five to six months out of the year, UVB rays can actually hit the atmosphere. And UVB is what has to hit your skin to convert something called 7-dehydrocholesterol into vitamin D three. Um, but in addition to that, you know, latitude, which is what you were thinking of, um, age regulates that. So if you look at a 70 year old male, 70 year old male makes about four times less vitamin D from the sun than their 20 year old former, former self, um. Melanin, which is the dark pigment that protects people from the burning rays of the sun, also blocks UVB, anything that blocks UVB. So sunscreen, melanin, clothing.

So if you're super tan or you're very dark-complected, then you're not able to actually get the vitamin D that you need. Yeah. Well, you have to stay out in the sun an incredibly long, yeah. In some cases, an incredible amount of time to actually get enough vitamin D, which is not the case if you're living close to the equator in sub-Sahara Africa, where people that have more melanin, the reason they have the melanin is because they're so close to the UVB rays that they have to protect from the burning. So that's an adaptation.

But the other thing is also body fat, which you don't have to worry about, but because vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, it gets stored in fat, and the more fat that person has, the less bioavailable vitamin D3 is to be released into the bloodstream, where it then gets activated to the hormone. D3 is to be released into the bloodstream where then gets activated, activated to the hormone. But in addition to all these things, there's also some very common gene polymorphisms in the gene that converts vitamin D3 into the steroid hormone.

In fact, I've already seen three people, you know, four people's DNA out of, you know, 20 or 25 or so that have had had that have this polymorphism, which makes them less efficient at converting vitamin D3 into into 25 hydroxy vitamin D3, which then gets converted into the hormone.

So a blood test usually measures 25 hydroxy vitamin D. And that'll tell you like if you're supplementing with, you know, 2000, I use a vitamin D a day and you go get a blood test and your, your levels are like below 20 nanograms per milliliter. Something's up. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. So, and the only way you're going to know that is if you get a blood test.

So I would encourage you, uh, to get your, your vitamin D levels measured. Yeah. I had a blood test maybe nine or 10 months ago and it was fine. I don't remember what it was. It was fine, but I'm due to have another one. So maybe I'll send you my, my blood test results. You can tell me what I need to do. 40 to 60 is, is the sweet spot nanograms per mil. What are the other on the, while we're on the subject, I didn't mean to interrupt you if you had another thought on this, but just while we're on the subject of supplementation, I mean,

I'm interested in your overall kind of, you know, view and, and, and take on supplementation in general and beyond that, what other things we should be looking at in terms of supplementation just for basic, you know, optimal health. Yeah, actually I get this question a lot and I've gotten the question so much that I've now started writing a solo podcast that I'm going to explain it all because I've gotten I've gotten asked it so many times. I think in terms of supplementation, I mean, the word itself is supplement, I think the most important thing is to try to get all these vitamins and minerals and micronutrients, essential fatty acids, amino acids from food. And so the way I do that is by eating a very broad spectrum of vegetables and fruits and again, the fiber stuff. But so I really try to get, you know, like I drink a large smoothie

almost every single day that has kale, chard, spinach, celery, carrots, I mean, tomatoes, blueberries, apple. You have a YouTube video where you make the whole thing. Yeah. And I've got a variety of variations. That's just one of the variations i do but it always starts with dark dark leafy greens being like kind of the core base of everything exactly dark dark leafy greens are the core of everything and then i also eat a salad i eat salads you know lunch and dinner and steamed vegetables so i'm getting a lot of that but But in addition to that, I think there are a few really important supplements and I take them. One is vitamin D. I take the vitamin D because I actually wear sunscreen when I'm out in the sun.

I'm a little more concerned about skin aging. I think it's the female, being female, you know, females are a little more preoccupied with skin aging. it's the female being female you know females are a little more preoccupied with skin aging but um so i wear sunscreen and um so i don't really i'm not i'm blocking the uvb when i'm out there so i have to take a vitamin d supplement the other supplement i think is very important is i take you know the the getting the omega-3 fatty acids whether that's from your microalgae oil or your fish oil um i think that's very, very important. I've seen, you know, studies have shown that supplementing with the omega-3 fatty acids is also associated with lower all-cause mortality.

It's been shown to, you know, increase muscle mass, decreases inflammation, brain function, you know, it increases, you know, hippocampal volume, just all sorts of, I've just been convinced. It's one of my, it's one of the really important ones that I take. But the source is very important. You want to make sure that you're getting a good source. In the case of microalgae, it's probably a lot safer in terms of not being exposed to so much oxidation

because fish oil usually is molecularly distilled. And so it gets exposed to oxygen and so you have to yeah well there's also like you have to be concerned about mercury with the fish oil too i think right you have to be careful you have to be really careful that it's toxin free yeah there's like the garbage truck out there like dumping like just banging like this huge thing right outside the window it's all right. Go ahead. I think he's actually doing the recycle today.

Sorry about that. Yeah. So mercury, typically when you want part of the, it's like I can feel it in my bones. The mercury is molecularly distilled typically from most fish oil brands. But yeah, you do need to be careful of that. And the oxidation is one of the things that's critical with omega-3 fatty acids. They're very, very prone to oxidation. So taking in rancid fat can actually do a lot of damage.

So it's really important to get it from a good source. Nordic Naturals, I like. They have good microalgae oil. They're just a really good company. They do all of their isolation under nitrogen conditions, so it's not exposed to oxygen at all, which is a good thing. So I really like Nordic Naturals. And I have no affiliation, by the way, with Nordic Naturals.

I have no affiliation with VSL number three either. I like to talk about things that I believe in, things that I've researched. So that's the other thing that I really – those are the two really main supplements. Then I also take an activated vitamin B complex. And what I mean by activated is that it has an active form of folate called methylfolate, which is important for getting around a common, in fact, like almost 50% of the population has one form of another of a gene polymorphism in a gene that makes it more difficult for people to convert folate, which is found in dark green leafy vegetables, into methylfolate, which is a very important precursor for epigenetics and changing gene expression, turning genes on, off, and also very important for reducing homocysteine and blood vessels so i take a b complex with that so i i got a polymorphism that makes me a little bit less

you how are you able to determine that is that through like 23andme and doing your mapping and figuring that out yeah it was through 23andme i did i did figure that out through using the company called 23andme which which I really, really like them. They test for a variety, just thousands and thousands of very common gene polymorphisms. They isolate DNA from saliva. And you can really learn a lot from the results that you get back. They're doing health reports now which are not really that informative but another company that i really like called prometheus does it gives you a health

report well they had to be like didn't they had they had well they had that thing where they had to like because of regulatory reasons they had to stop what they were doing and then they've been reintroduced but they're don't really, it seems, explain this how there are certain things they can't say about how to use this information, right? So you can still get the information, but they can't make predictions about what this means. So a couple of years ago, the FDA put the lid on their ability to interpret any of the genetic data.

So it used to be a few years ago, they would give you a health report. It was a health report that would explain what these gene polymorphisms that you have meant, which is kind of important because most people doing 23andMe aren't scientists. Right, like when you get this information back, what are you supposed to do with it? Right, exactly. No context or ability to understand what it means. Well, so the FDA decided that people were, they were taking the information a little too seriously.

Like it was just, you know, 100%. Like some predeterminant. Yeah. Like if it says you have an like some predetermined yeah like if it says you have an increased risk of prostate cancer like oh my i'm going to get prostate cancer which isn't necessarily the case because there's a very complex interaction between your lifestyle your diet you know everything that you're doing in your lifestyle and your genes so and there is some component of chance as well but lifestyle is very important so they used they used to tell you kind of what it meant fda decided that people were taking extreme measures based on that information they were getting and through all sorts of bureaucratic stuff that i don't quite

understand um they shut them shut that part of them down so 23andme for for a few year a couple of years after that still tested for those polymorphisms, still gives people the raw data. Just people don't know what to do with it. It's like, what does this mean? There's an A here instead of a G. Okay, what does that mean? Right.

But because other companies that don't actually directly do the genetic testing, but can tell you what that means, tell you what the data means based off of what's in the scientific literature, FDA couldn't shut those companies down because they're not the ones doing the DNA testing. They're just saying, oh, this may mean this. So it's not the analysis itself that's illegal. It's just the fact that it's the same entity doing it. The same entity doing the DNA testing and giving the health reports. Right.

So the 23andMe kind of, you know, they've been negotiating with the FDA for a couple of years and found a way to now have some health reports that are able to tell you. I think there's about 36 or so they do. And I recently used used their health report service and i it really wasn't that informative to me but i'm looking for genes that i find think are interesting like genes that regulate the way my body metabolizes fat you know genes that regulate the way my body metabolizes folate or you know things that i think there are some there's a direct actionable thing that a person can do to like bypass a defect they may have or to make the outcome

better and is this the thing that you're currently working on right now yeah writing on to help people interpret all this information i am yeah so um like i said, I do like another company called Promethease, which is $5. And it's like a tool that will take your 23andMe data and match it to about 55,000 published polymorphisms in literature. And kind of spits out this report that's like very overwhelming. But it does a pretty good job. Just like you can scroll down the list and it'll say, Oh, increased risk for prostate cancer or, uh, increased obesity risk or, you know, things like that. So I really like them. Um, but in addition to Prometheus, I've been working, um, on a genetic tool that is going to first the beta version that's I'm going to hold,

I'm trying to release this month, um, is going to, this month is going to, it interprets what some of these genes that I've sort of handpicked as the first sort of report that I find very interesting that have a very, what I think, important effect on someone's, the way their lifestyle will, it can direct the kind of lifestyle they have based on knowing this information. For example, there's a gene polymorphism that when you cook meat, when meat, doesn't matter if it's fish or chicken or red meat, when it's cooked at a high temperature, so frying or grilling, when you grill, something is produced called aromatic um aromatic uh hydrocarbons that are carcinogenic and these things get detoxified in our bodies where our body inactivates them by sorry aromatic heterocyclic amines hydrocarbons or something else the heterocyclic

amines they become carcinogenic, but our body using a certain gene can deactivate them to not be carcinogenic. Well, there are a lot of people out there that that gene is very, very, very slow. And so if they have that gene, that's the slow version. And I've seen quite a few people that have it. That means that they probably should avoid frying their meat, grilling all the time, and probably should bake it, or as Rich says, knot it in heat. But you get the point.

So the point is that I've been designing this tool that sort of, and there's lots of examples like this where it's dietary related, and the way around it. I have to move again. The sun is chasing you. I know, it's chasing me. Sorry, keep going.

So there's a way around it. And that tool's going to be free um it and i'm just going to basically nag people to to help crowdfund that's cool so is it it's going to be like a technology-based tool though it's not like a written document it's going to be it's going to be a technology-based web tool so you'll go to to my website foundmyfitness.com, and you'll enter in your name, and then you'll create a password. And then you'll be able to export your 23andMe data after signing all the disclaimers. Right. Like, this is not medical advice.

This is Rhonda's opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah. You'll sign all that. And then your 23andMe data. So we've set up an API with 23andMe where we can now take their data. Oh, wow. And then it'll, you know, I've been working with some very skilled programmers. One of them is my husband and then one's a good friend that have been helping me basically design this tool. That's really cool.

And they've been doing all the programming stuff and I've been doing all the science stuff. Right, right, right. Wow, that's cool. So it's been a lot of work. And the first report that I'm going to put out is the beta version. And I'm, right. Wow, that's cool. So it's been a lot of work and the first report that I'm going to put out is the beta version and I'm really hoping

this will elicit feedback and it will be probably around 30 to 40 genes that I've chosen first to do just to see how it works. But I'm really excited about it and like I said, it's free. So I'm a big proponent

of the 23andMe. Unfortunately, they just raised their price by 100%, so it was $99, and once they came out with this new health report, which is about 36 different genes, they tell you, they raised the price to $199. Wow. But I still think it's very worth it,

extremely worth it. I've been like, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit, but like, kind of too scared to do it. Like, I'm worried, like, I don't know that I want to know, even though I know what you were saying, like, it's, these are just sort of baseline predispositions that are influenced by so many other things. And knowledge is power. And knowing these things can allow you to make better decisions to avoid these you know outcomes right but there's still something inside of me that's like preventing me from doing it i think a lot i think that's that's very uh human very human feeling i mean my father-in-law is the same way um i'm not like a luddite you know it's like i don't i know i'm not somebody who's afraid to go to the doctor and you know what i mean like i want don't, I know, I'm not somebody who's afraid to go to the doctor or anything. You know what I mean? Like I want, I kind of want to know. And yet I can, I know I feel this tug like, yeah, but do you really want to know that much?

Yeah. And genes are kind of scary, but I've known so many people that have learned so much that, I mean, that they have from knowing their 23andMe data have made lifestyle changes that have dropped their cholesterol, a hundred points, their LDL cholesterol that have, you know, dropped their blood their blood pressure from like like really hyper hypertensive to like finally a normal range just by learning some some gene polymorphisms that they had vitamin d was another one i had a friend that was just had this polymorphism where they didn't convert vitamin d3 even though they were supplementing with 4 000 i use a, and they couldn't get their levels up. And it wasn't until I was able to see their genes and go, this is the cause of it, you know, and they had to take much, much higher dose than what a normal person would take. And finally, we're able to get their vitamin D levels up.

And they started to lose weight and just all these good things started to happen. But I understand the fear. I understand the fear. Well, if you start meditating, then I'll order my kit from 23andMe. Seriously? We have a deal. That's the deal we're going to make. I will do it. All right, cool.

I mean, it's so easy for me. Well, it's easy for me too. I just click a couple buttons on the computer, right? Yeah. I would love to get your feedback too on the tool. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. Well, there's one more thing i want to talk about before i'm going to let you get back to your life um and it's a broad subject but maybe we can kind of crystallize it a little bit and it's the it's this dividing line between nutrition and lifestyle oriented around performance athletic performance versus overall long-term wellness and longevity. And I feel like these two things are somewhat at odds, like it's a Venn diagram where there's certainly overlapping aspects of them, but they're not exactly always compatible. And as I get older,

I'm 49 now, and I'm somebody who's very interested in athletic performance. And I want to continue to be able to perform at the highest level that I can, but not at the cost of my ultimate long-term wellness and longevity. And I feel like in the kind of health space online, whether it's podcasts or YouTube or whatever, there's so much emphasis on performance nutrition. You know, like, how can I get that extra, you know, whether it's like, you know, building muscles faster, stronger, recovering faster and all these sorts of things. And I feel like for the most part, the audience for these, for all of this are people that

are really weekend warriors. Like it's, it's not the elite Olympic athletes that are sort of the audience for all of this content that's out there. It's people that really should be, in my opinion, my subjective opinion, should be thinking more about kind of long-term optimal wellness

than trying to get that 1% performance enhancing aspect that maybe some kind of nutritional protocol will afford them. I didn't say that very articulately, but you get where I'm coming from? No, you, you're incredibly articulate. And I, I think I, you know, I agree with you that, you know, there is often a trade-off with performance and longevity, whether it's athletic performance or cognitive performance. I mean, there are tons of people out there taking nootropics, and they probably are experiencing some benefits, mental and performance benefits,

but I'm not sure that it doesn't come at a tradeoff. Or athletic performance, where people will go to extremes where they'll you know even as to take you know hormones to to get that that performance boost to get that muscle mass yeah or maybe something else too maybe something else yeah yeah um and and in those cases i think it's pretty clear to me that there is a trade off when when you're when you're doing something as extreme as taking like super physiological levels of different hormones, steroids. Right. But beyond like kind of performance enhancing drugs and that whole world, just like daily kind of, you know, nutritional habits, I suppose maybe we could just focus on that. you know, nutritional habits, I suppose, maybe we could just focus on that. Yeah. You know, it's kind of funny now that you bring that up, because in my mind, I've recently been a little, I've been focusing on the overlap between performance and in longevity,

uh, and finding some, some supplements, finding some nutritional components that are increasing muscle mass, uh, decreasing inflammation, decreasing muscle atrophy. All these things are also associated with living longer. So that's obviously an overlap, but I've also seen, and I'm not really familiar with, you know, I've seen out there in the blogosphere people talking about gains and like eating Pop-arts and like like just eating like crap and then like just working out like and you know it's it's anabolic or you know because

of like the sugar and the insulin and you know it's going it's and i'm like i just don't think on any level that eating pop tarts is good for Like, I don't care how much you're working out. Yes, they do. There are people. I'd like to see this blog. In fact, there was some, like, cyclist that was, like, cycling around the United States. And one of my relatives shared it with me. Oh, it was this guy who was eating McDonald's. Or he was eating all his food was fast food. Yeah.

Fast food and, like, Pop-Tarts and stuff. And so, anyways, I'm just, you know, that sort of stuff is really, it irritates me. Well, there's still this idea that you can train your way out of a poor diet. And it's easier to believe that when you're 19, you know, and you can just eat whatever you want. You go work out and you feel great and you get stronger and you don't put on any weight. As you get older, you realize that that's a straw man argument that I think that you have to start paying attention to those sorts of things. But I think there's a, you know, there are certainly a way of eating that's oriented around short-term performance goals that is at odds with, you know, kind of how you want

to live your life in general. Yeah, I do think that along the same lines of, you know, people eating these refined carbs, which I find just extremely, it's just confusing how anyone could think that's good for you. Um, I think a lot of people are really focused on taking, taking a lot of protein and, you know, protein, we don't really need that much protein. I mean, obviously, if you're really wanting to gain muscle mass, you need to take in more protein because you won't gain a lot of muscle mass if you're not getting, you know, a certain amount of protein. But the idea that the average human being who, you know, goes to the gym for 45 minutes three days a week and, you know, tosses a football on the weekend or something like that needs to be drinking protein drinks all the time. Yeah.

And eating massive amounts of, you know, steak all the time is insane. It is insane. And I think if you look at some of those guys, they don't look like they're really in the best of shape, in my opinion. So where does this protein obsession come from, do you think? Probably because they want to gain more muscle. They want to be that muscle man, that muscle man looking kind of person. that like muscle man looking kind of person. But, you know, protein intake, especially in the context of someone that's also eating refined carbohydrates

and not getting their greens, not getting their fiber. So if you have someone that's just sort of eating a bunch of meat and, you know, bread and crackers and their cake you know um can be a really really dangerous thing because because of what we were talking about earlier in the podcast because of the inflammation their their oxidative stress that leads to the damage of the dna the damage of a cell um when you when you have that in the context of a high protein diet, what happens is protein activates this whole pathway in the cell, the IGF-1 pathway, that allows

a damaged cell to override the mechanisms in the body that sense the cell is damaged and go, oh, this cell is damaged. If I don't kill it it could potentially become cancer and when there's a lot of igf1 around insulin like growth factor that's like kerosene it's like kerosene it's a it it it it says oh no you don't want to die grow grow grow and so it overrides that whole protective mechanism. And that protective mechanism is there for a reason. It's a very important mechanism to get rid of a cell that has basically escaped the immune system. Our body has a lot of different ways to make sure we don't get cancer.

One of them is the immune system, which we talked about. And the other one is this pathway, a genetic pathway, many different genetic pathways that get activated that will, as soon as a cell gets damaged, the cell senses it, turns on the expression of one or many different genes that then kill it, program cell death. It's called apoptosis. So IGF-1, which is activated by protein intake, specifically from essential amino acids like leucine, it activates IGF-1 very robustly. And so protein intake in the context of someone that has a lot of inflammation, that has a lot of damaged cells, the average American that's just going out and getting their burger

and fries and, you know, they're not the kind of person that's really health or fitness oriented or obsessed. It can be very, very dangerous. And that's been shown. It's been shown mechanistically in animal studies. It's been shown in epidemiological studies that protein intake, you know, is correlated with, you correlated with cancer incidence. And of course, that's also, like I said, it's in the context of people that are unhealthy and have damaged cells around.

Right, and when you're taking in excessive amounts of protein, you're not even metabolizing all of that into your muscle, right? What happens to all of that protein? How do you metabolize it? Where does it go? The branch chain amino acids get taken up into your muscle cells to build muscle. But the protein

gets broken down into amino acids and the amino acids are used to make new proteins inside all your different cells. And so it serves a very important role because just like I mentioned, when we were talking about telomeres, every time your cell replicates, it has to replicate all the DNA. Well, guess what? All that DNA is the template to make, eventually to make proteins. And proteins are made of amino acids. And so your cell needs building blocks to make those proteins out of the genes. So you need amino acids.

You need them to do everything. And we should just be calling them amino acids, right? Like why do we even use the word protein? Like I had Ray Kronese on the podcast. He's like, I don't want to talk about protein. Never use that word. Yeah, I actually interviewed him too. And he's a friend of mine.

But yeah, he wants to like rethink that whole don't use carbohydrates or proteins. Right, just eradicate these words that we've applied to macronutrients because it just gets people caught up in these, you know, like sort of mental funnels that screw us up. Yeah. Well, the thing with the amino acids, you know, like people and the thing that is also very confusing when we say protein is that protein, when someone hears the word protein, they think of meat. They think of eating meat, right? But proteins, when I say proteins inside the cells, I'm talking about something that was made into a protein from a gene in your body. So amino acids were assembled together to make your protein to do a certain function inside of your cell. So the dietary protein that people are eating, there are amino acids that people are taking in and get used to make proteins inside of your cells.

But the thing is, is that there's no other cell that loves proteins or amino acids more than a cancer cell. Because cancer cells are growing at a much faster rate than any other cell in the body so they need amino acids they need those building blocks to make more cancer cells and so that's another thing that that amino acids or a high dietary protein intake can can do is fuel the growth of cancer cells not only IGF-1 and overriding those cell death protective mechanisms and saying, grow, grow, grow, but it also gives them the building blocks to make new cancer cells, to make more of them. And so that's another very important thing to keep in mind. However, I will mention that as we're aging, as we get older, starting at about middle age, humans begin to lose between 0.5 and 1% of muscle mass each year.

And it becomes more and more difficult to keep muscle mass. And so at that point, and this has been shown in a very well-done study by Walter Longo at UCLA, who showed that the dietary protein intake in people that were, I think it was younger than 65 years, once it got to 65, no, 55 years of age, once they got to 55 years of age, then protein intake, low protein intake was actually correlated with a higher all-cause mortality. Not cancer, but all-cause mortality. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that as you do get older, muscle mass becomes very, very important because the stronger you are,

the more muscle mass that you have, the less likely you're going to fall and break a hip. That stuff can take you out. You can fall and break a hip and you get a staph infection and die. Yeah, you're done. Yeah. So, frailty is another major concern for an aging person. So I do think there is a balance between maintaining your muscle mass and focusing more on protein intake as you become 60, 65 years old, and you've escaped.

I mean, once you're reaching 70 to 80, once you hit 80, you're likely not going to get cancer. I mean, maybe prostate. Most men, prostate cancer is a very slow-growing cancer, so I guess that's always a possibility. But generally speaking, if you make it to 80, you're likely not going to get cancer. You're going to be past that part. Yeah. When you look around the internet, I mean, certainly we're in a time where people are more interested in health and fitness and nutrition than they ever have been. And if you poke around the internet, the blogosphere, YouTube, podcast, whatever, there's no shortage of, you know, information, quote unquote, information. But

as somebody who, you know, really is immersed in the scientific literature and has, you know, conducted the research and really understands the mechanisms that are at play here and the complexities, when you kind of poke around and see what people are saying, I mean, how does that make you feel? Do you get just like, because it's got to make you crazy, right? When you see stuff that isn't correct. Oh, it frustrates the hell out of me.

Do you have to avoid going online or how do you approach all of that? I have to calm myself down and focus on the big picture and the things that I think are more important because I could spend my entire life just going on and just talking about all the stuff that I read that is bullshit and BS. Sorry.

What do you think is the biggest kind of misconception that's being propagated right now? Maybe like the top things that people are walking around believing that you think you would like to disabuse people of? I think that probably, so this is a really, like you said, you know, there's lots of complications and nuances, you know, that go along with any thing related to health, you know, anything that is, has to do with human physiology and the body is extremely complicated. And I think

something that's very, very popular right now is this ketogenic diet and high fat diet, which, um, I just, I think has been taken and blown sort of out of proportion. And I don't think people really understand. They just think it's sort of out of proportion. And I don't think people really understand. They just think it's sort of like this thing that's great for everything. And it's just like cure all, prevent all. Right, it's going to cure disease. You're going to lose weight and like all this stuff. Yeah.

And there's actually a lot of things to consider. The types of fats you're getting, you know, the types of proteins you're getting along with the fat, the micronutrients you're getting all sorts of complexities. I mean, there are, you know, for example, there's polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated fat, and you know, everyone's on this sort of saturated fat is good kick. Suddenly saturated fat is your best friend. even none of the studies say that by the way yeah i i think it's a response i think that a response to um to some of the the mis the the the bad data that was put out there and also um the the fact that you know cholesterol the

complexities of cholesterol and what cholesterol is doing in the body and types of cholesterol, just there's been so many things that have come out to then stated one thing and then, oh, we find out, no, it's sort of this other thing. And, but really when we look at it in detail, what was out there the first time was true. It just was, it was generalized. And so, you know know it's a lot more complex than we had first you know realized and that's kind of how things get thrown out of proportion and all these like misconceptions occur and all that stuff just from the over generalization yeah well now and now more than ever when there's pressure for page views and so headlines have to be clickbaity right you know You know, so the sort of, you know, opportunity for propagating misinformation becomes more tempting and proliferate.

As I've been digging more into the gene polymorphisms and genetics and looking at all these different genes that are regulating the way we metabolize fat, the way we transport it, the way we process it, the way we use it, utilize it, we're different than the guy out there crossing the street. We all have different variations of these genes that have to do with the way we metabolize and utilize and catabolize and transport fat in our bodies. And many, many people actually can take in saturated fat and it cause insulin resistance based on a certain gene polymorphism they have uh if they don't have enough polyunsaturated fat but they have too much saturated fat it all depends on the ratio because the polyunsaturated fat is important for activating this certain gene that you know that takes the fat up into adipocytes or that allows fat to be used by you know by your liver cells it's complicated it's complicated. Right. And so, and so when I just see this diet where it's like, oh, just eat your butter every day. I'm like, well, you know, fat's good, but you know, some people, it may be that you need to be eating more

fat from nuts and from fish or from avocados, from plants, olive oil, you know, things that have, you know, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat versus saturated. It's very, very complicated. Um, and so when I, when I see that just eating, eat your butter, eat your butter, eat your butter, I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm not entirely sure that's healthy for everyone. Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that kind of, uh, protocol plays out over the next five years and people that are really on board with it to see where they're at and what they're doing a couple of years from now. Yeah. I, you know, I'm going to, I plan on doing some videos and talking about it a little more in depth. I am personally extremely interested

and I'm doing some comprehensive reading on it because I want to know for myself, uh, I don't really have, you know, a horse in this race. I don't really care. I just want to know what's the healthiest, you know, way I can live and what I should be eating. Um, and so, you know, I, and I do think there are, I get into like knockdown drag out arguments on YouTube with people. No, I'm not really get so crazy emotional they do they're emotionally attached to it and you know that's human nature and especially when you're you're putting something out there and it's like your whole health you know pyramids relies on that fact that it's good and and there are benefits for ketosis and you know ketosis is when you're burning fat and you're making these ketone bodies like beta-hydroxybutyrate that can have a lot of very positive benefits in the brain and the body, lots of good things going on.

And that's irrefutable. And I absolutely believe that. But it's like a crisis state for the body, though, right? Is this something that you could, you know, forge as a long-term lifestyle? Like, what are the implications of being in that state, you know, all of the time or a large percentage of the time? We don't really know. We don't really know, especially in humans, what those long-term, you know, effects are or would be, you know, but we do know that the signaling molecules themselves, Um, you know, but we, we do know that the signaling molecules themselves, the ketone bodies like beta hydroxybutyrate have been shown to change the expression of genes in

a good way. They have been shown to, uh, to improve, you know, cognitive function in the brain. They're a very easily utilizable source of energy. Uh, so that's also good because for a lot of different reasons and, you know, I don't want to get into that's a whole other podcast, but, you know, I think there are ways to, to make ketone bodies, um, like, you know, from, from eating, you know, certain types of medium chain triglycerides that could be therapeutic potentially, uh, without getting, eating all the butter and you know having

all the fat and microneedling deficiencies and things like that but I'm not sure I'm really not sure and it's something that I'm looking into and I want to I want to understand and I think it's I think that people that think they understand it most most people that really don't understand it, like me, I mean, I'm learning about it and I want to understand, but it's so incredibly complicated. And the more I learn, the more I realize it's even more complicated than I thought. But it's so refreshing to hear you say that because there's so many people on the internet

who claim to have it all wired and know exactly what it is and what it isn't. And I get suspicious. wired and know exactly what it is and what it isn't. And I get suspicious. And they are, they don't have nearly the level of, you know, uh, of education or expertise that you do. Yeah. Understanding. But so, yeah, that's, that's probably one of the, one of the things, and there's, there's quite a few out there. There's quite a few out there. When are you going to write a book? I'm, that's something that I'd like to do. Um, I'm sort of, as I'm, as I make videos and as I you know put information I have a newsletter where I write articles and stuff um I am compiling my

thoughts for a book trying to think of what exactly I want the book to be on um and so that is something that I I haven't started yet. I haven't made an outline, but I'm thinking of doing that soon. You should definitely write a book. I really want to. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I really want to. But I want to write a good book, and I want to do all the research,

and I want people to understand the message, too. So it's all. I hear you. Good. Well, I think that's a good place to close it down for today, but I'd love to have a round two with you at some point because there's so many other things. Like I had my notes. Even stuff we talked about that we were going to talk about, we didn't even get to.

But that's podcasting, right? So much to talk about. Yeah. Anyway, super fun and really informative and just incredibly illuminating. So thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Rich. I really like talking to you. So if you want to check out Rhonda, she's pretty easy to find on the Internet.

Definitely check out her podcast, Found My Fitness, which you can find on iTunes or her website, foundmyfitness.com. And that's also your Foundmyfitness on Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, right? all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

And I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes to this episode that relate to all kinds of stuff that we talked about today. Cool.

Awesome. Thanks, Rich. Really enjoyed the talk. Thank you so much. Peace. Plants. All right, you guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Peace. Plants. from Rhonda to the next level. So you can find that all at richroll.com, episode 209. It's easy to find.

While you're at it, make a point of subscribing to my newsletter. I send out weekly podcast updates, video updates, my musings, never any spam, just good stuff. If you want access to the entire RRP catalog beyond the most recent 50 episodes that you can find on iTunes, I've got an app for that. And it's free. Just search Rich Roll in the App Store. It'll pop right up. Free download. You can have the entire catalog in the palm of your hands. I know there are some bugs in the current iteration of the app. I actually have a couple guys working on it right now. We're going to be releasing a new version of that soon. So stick with it. And all of those issues will soon be solved. In case you missed last week's episode, I talked a lot about my

commitment in 2016 to video, I'm going to be posting a new video every week on my YouTube channel. So please subscribe there. It's youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll. I'm also posting daily stories on Snapchat. A lot about my morning routines, nutrition, daily habits, random musings, behind the scenes of the podcast. So if you're into that kind of thing, you can find me every single day on Snapchat. My username there is Iamrichroll, I-A-M Rich Roll.

For all your plant power and RRP swag and merch, visit richroll.com. We've got tons of cool products there to take your health and your vitality and your plant-powered experience to the next level. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. And if you're into online courses, I've got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about setting intentions and setting goals and achieving them, and also The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Both are multiple hours of streaming video content. It's really great. They're very affordably priced, soon to be a

third course. Julie and I are getting ready to shoot a course on relationships, and that will soon be up at mindbodygreen.com as well, probably some point this spring. In any event, thanks for all the love, you guys. I appreciate you listening, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media, for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I love you guys. See you next week. Peace. Plants.