Undoctrinate Yourself - #1 - The Maiden Voyage

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

In this solo episode, I provide insights into the personal and academic experiences that have led me to where I am today as a scientist and dissident of "The Science" and mainstream medicine. Here, I provide the framework and context upon which future episodes of the podcast will be built.

Hello and welcome to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast with me, Dr. Alexis Cowan. This podcast is brand new coming to you. It's been a long time coming, but I'm really excited that we are finally up and going. I have some incredible guests lined up for you over the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to take the time in this first introductory episode to really give you an idea of my intentions for this show, as well as my background. and the context from which that I'm coming and approaching these conversations and also just giving you some insights into my why, so how I ended up where I am and the story behind that. So thank you so much for joining me here on this inaugural episode. Let me begin by just going through my motivations for going into science. And for those of you who don't know me, I am a PhD from Princeton University.

I did my PhD in the molecular biology department there in the lab of Josh Rabinowitz, which is a big metabolism lab, specifically isotope tracing, which if you don't know what that is, basically we use these labeled metabolites infused into animals, including rodents. We've also done pig studies and even some human studies. And we can basically, using these labeled metabolites, trace the fates of the metabolites in the body by taking blood samples or tissue biopsies and we can see how different metabolites are actually being metabolized differentially across different organs, et cetera. So specifically, my project was focused on understanding how metabolism changes at the whole body level as well as

the tissue specific level in ketogenic diet compared to a high carbohydrate diet as well as between fasting and feeding. And so that was what my dissertation research was primarily focused on. Though I will say going into that project, I was initially focused on another project that had to do with exercise metabolism, but due to some technical challenges with that, I ended up pivoting about a year and a half into my PhD to the ketogenic diet project. There's a whole story to be unpacked there for especially aspiring graduate students, but maybe I'll describe that a little bit later. So just for this, you know, broad overview, I did my PhD at Princeton from 2018 to December 2021 is when I graduated. And then right after graduation, I started my own business.

So I started like a health and performance optimization consulting business where I'm working with clients. And I still do to this day, though my practice has been throttled quite a bit because I have lots of other things going on that I'll also describe to you. But over the course of 2022, I saw over 150 clients working on all areas related to health and performance optimization. And I would say the vast majority of my clientele are people who are disenfranchised with the standard medical model and are looking for more holistic solutions to their health care problems and their health goals as well. And that's something that I'm also extremely passionate about.

And that will become clear why when I go into my backstory about how I kind of came to where I am today. So 2022, that's what I was working on with my business, building that up, launching some courses, including a health optimization boot camp and a scientific literacy intensive course. in addition to seeing clients. And then early in this year, 2023, I started a postdoc position at the University of Pennsylvania in the lab of Christoph Tice. And this started in February, and I'm currently working on a project where we're essentially trying to combine data from spatial transcriptomics, which has to do with the MRNAs present in cells.

combining spatial transcriptomics with spatial metabolomics, which is another form of metabolic assessment that basically can give you the spatial resolution of different metabolites within cells of a tissue. And then similarly with the transcriptomics, we're looking at the spatial resolution of different mRNA transcripts within cells. And we're basically multiplexing this to be able to look at both within the same tissue samples, which we ultimately, would like to use down the line in clinical applications, maybe tumor profiling for enhanced pharmacologic recommendations and approaches to patient care as an example. So kind of have a lot going on between my practice and my postdoc. But in addition to that, I would really like to go

into kind of the background as to how I even got here to begin with because I think it's a story that can provide some important insights to you all with regards to how to navigate your own health and also just give you an idea as to how I develop the perspective that I do because I would say that not too many people that I've encountered in this space actually share my perspective and hopefully it can resonate with you. So for a backstory, I grew up in northwestern New Jersey, kind of the cows and corn part of New Jersey, Warren County, very rural. And I don't know, if you're watching the video, you can see or if you follow me online.

But I'm like a mixed race. So my mom's side of the family's white and my dad's side of the family is African American. And so growing up in this very rural part of New Jersey, I was like one of the darkest people that I actually knew. There were only maybe two people in my elementary school that were brown or black-skinned. So I kind of from the very beginning felt somewhat out of place within a community standpoint. And I only mentioned that because I think it ends up shaping some of my trajectories and perspectives moving out of that. But I was raised as an only child.

I actually have a half-brother. Shout out to Jazz, who's a retired pro basketball player and is absolutely amazing. But we didn't connect until I was in my early 20s. So I was raised as an only child. My mom was 40 when she had me. And I was raised by her, my grandma, and my grandma's kind of partner that she had acquired later in life. And so I was raised in this very interesting environment where my mom and my grandmother were

very, very, like, the archetype of the strong independent woman. And that was really what I was raised around with regards to female figures in my early life and up through my, you know, teenage years. And so I would say that ultimately, like, I was spoiled rotten as a kid as the only child and my the only only grandchild that lived nearby as well for my grandma. And in addition to living with her, she just spoiled the heck out of me. And, you know, so I had like a really nice childhood in that aspect. That was kind of counterbalanced by some health things that went on me with me from a very early age. So when I was two years old, I had to have this major mouth surgery. Actually, to this day, I don't know exactly what was wrong, but I think there was something wrong with the enamel on my

baby teeth was like basically rotting off of my teeth. And so I had this major like over four hour procedure at a like a dental surgeon. And during this procedure, which this would have been like 1995 or around then. He had during this procedure, my mouth cranked open mechanically for this entire four-hour procedure. And I just remember the excruciating pain in my jaw of actually having this device mechanically holding my mouth open beyond the extent to which it could actually open up. and I also had honestly pretty bad PTSD from this experience to the point where I remember his name was Dr. Nick and I don't remember anything else about him but other than his name and the way that he spoke because when he was speaking to me during the procedure I just remember this bright light coming down on my face not really being able to see his face other than like a mask on it and I remember him speaking very slowly when he was talking to me and after that point up even my teen years and even to this day to a much lesser extent, but when I would get super stressed, I would like have the cadence of my internal dialogue go down to that same rate of very slow speech

that I encountered during that procedure. So it was, it really left a mark on me psychologically and it was my first very negative, first of many, very negative medical experiences as an individual. And so after that procedure, you know, I was relatively fine up through about age of six. I was getting a recurring strep throat in first grade. My mom kept pulling me out of school because I kept, you know, getting strep again, even though I'd be put on antibiotics. It would go away for a period of time. And then I would get it back again.

And so she ended up pulling me out of school around halfway through first grade and homeschooling me. And during the time period where I was homeschooled from about midway through first grade, all the way through up to third grade, my weight kind of just exploded during this time. And I went from, you know, being average size than healthy child to somebody who weighed double their classmates by the time I went back to third grade. And we actually know now that that early life antibiotic use can contribute to childhood. obesity and obesity later in life. And that was something that I really experienced firsthand. And this is also on the backdrop of the 90s where we really didn't have that big of an idea around antibiotic resistance and the overuse of antibiotics. So doctors were giving these things out like candy back in the day without any regard for the potential consequences for their use.

So, you know, fast forward to me, going back into third grade, already getting to the point where, you know, I was overweight, if not frankly, obese at that point. And so over the years, up through sophomore year of high school, that weight continued to spiral. And when I got into sophomore to early junior year of high school, I was around 270 pounds at peak. And for reference, at the time I was around 5'8. Now I'm around 5'9. But yeah, absolutely, you know, morbidly obese. And in addition to, you know, having all this excess body fat, I was also not doing well health-wise.

I would get constant upper respiratory infections. I had chronic knee pain. Actually, one time in seventh grade, I was crouching at my locker, and my friend's locker was right next to me. And when I was crouched at my locker, I actually tore my meniscus just from, like, crouching down into a deep squat. And I fell over, and everybody around thought that my friend had pushed me because I just fell, and my books fell out of my hands and everything.

But it was actually that my meniscus tore, and I literally felt my kneecap like thrust against the outer portion of my knee and push against the skin. I could see it pushing against the skin. And then it like snapped back into place. And then of course I had gym class right after that happened. And I for some reason, actually, I think this might have stemmed, you know, just from my early traumatizing medical experience. But I was always somebody who tried to hide when something was wrong. And so when I went to gym class, I just kind of suffered.

through the pain and like limped and just babyed that knee because I didn't want to go to the nurse. I didn't want to draw attention to it. I just wanted to kind of lick my wound in peace and be left alone. And honestly, that's somewhat a perspective that I've maintained to this day. I think, at least from my experiences, and I will continue to share those with you, my experiences with the vast majority of doctors and medical professionals is that they made things worse. for me, not better. And I found that my internal wisdom around what healing can look like and what my body needed was the most profound medicine for me at the time. And up until this day, I find my gut feelings and my intuition around what my body needs are extremely loud and vocal and easy for me to

interpret. And so, you know, I think on one hand, it's really good to hone your inner voice so that you're able to support yourself in the way that you know you need support. But of course, it's also really important to get support from external sources that may have information and insights that you may not have, but just with the mindset that they're there to support you, not to solve your problems for you. And so we have this idea of like doctors treat medical issues. And when we think about treating, like if we go out to dinner and somebody's treating, that implies that they're paying for you. Well, in the same way, by the same logic, if you go to a doctor and they're treating your condition, it's as if they're taking that on for you. But actually, that's not possible. Healing can only be done through personal exploration and motivation. Nobody can. can do that for you. So that's a tangent just to say that a balance is needed when we're going through a healing process, whether that's optimising our health or healing from a chronic disease or otherwise. We need to have a balance between listening to our bodies and our intuitions when

it comes to what's right for us, but also being open to hearing the options that are available and out there and just really finding practitioners who are aligned with our values around, you know, what healing looks like, whether that's, you know, the standard medical model, we're going to be drugging symptoms versus I actually want to understand the root of my issues or root or roots of my issues and go to the source when it comes to facilitating that healing process. So, anyway, back to the story. So when I was, you know, sophomore year and high school peaked at 270 pounds. I had a lot of chronic upper respiratory tract infections. I also was getting staff infections on my skin very frequently. So I held fat kind of uniformly over my entire body when I was big, but I definitely held

quite a lot on my midsection and it was primarily subcutaneous fat. And so it was like pushing out. And I had, you know, like big fat rolls that were like coming off of my stomach. And So my stomach kind of hung down and would press against my like upper thighs and pubic region. And so between the skin, like the skin of my belly and my, you know, upper thigh and like my, like my pelvis area, the skin would be like touching and would just get super irritated and rash. And then like I would get skin infections there that would be like oozing and bleeding and extremely painful. And again, I had the same mindset where it's like, I'm just going to. to clean it up and take care of myself. I'm not going to, you know, tell anybody that this is happening because I don't, you know, want this to be escalated to having to go see a doctor for it. There's also something important to mention is that I didn't have health care or health insurance, rather, as a kid. And so in that way, you know, we were not trying to go to the doctor at every drop of a dime because, you know, it costs quite a bit of money. And so I actually, I actually

actually think the only reason that I still have my tonsils to this day, thank God, is because we didn't have medical insurance, because the doctors always wanted to take my tonsils out when I was getting the recurring strep in first grade, but we didn't go through with it because it was a very expensive procedure. And this is also kind of a tangent, but it's just so crazy to me how quick medical practitioner or surgeons can be to remove body parts when something that they don't understand is going on with them instead of trying to understand what's going on. So, like, an example of tonsils, if you're getting recurring infections in your tonsils, it's not the problem of the tonsils. It's like, what's causing the infections? Let's look at what's going on here.

So anyway, that's just an aside. But at that point where I reached 270 pounds in high school and was dealing with all these other health issues, the knee, the skin, I also had terrible acne, the upper respiratory infections, I was like, I'm just over all this. And in addition to those reasons, I also just had like reasons of vanity. Like I wanted to be able to wear clothes that I thought were cute and none of those clothes would come in my sizes. And I just felt like I wasn't fitting in once again. Like I already didn't fit in because of the way I looked. But in addition to that, I didn't also fit in because, you know, I had acne and I was extremely obese. And so I was just like me kind of feeling like an outsider in so many different ways. And also just not feeling good in

my body energetically, just not feeling optimal and really wanting to change that. So I ended up joining a gym, a local gym with my really good friend at the time who were still good friends to this day. And I committed to going to the gym every day for at least an hour and a half daily for a year. And I also started counting my calories. So at this time, I really had only an idea of food quantity, not food quality, and I'll get into that in a little bit. But essentially, I would go to the gym. I would do an hour of time on the elliptical, and I would do 30 to 45 minutes of strength training. And over the course of that year, with also, you know, counting my calories, I was eating largely processed foods at the time, to be honest, just because, you know, actually counting

calories using processed foods is easier because you just look at the label and it tells you how many grams of protein, fat, carbs are in how many calories. And that's actually a real downside to just focusing on calories is that if you focus on calories alone, then you may be more inclined to eat a diet enriched in processed foods because they're just kind of easier to quantify and track. So I was eating quite a bit of processed foods. I would say I was eating like a high protein, high carb, low fat diet, which is kind of a relic of the, you know, 90s and early 2000s. There was like this fat phobia that really stemmed out of a lot of bad science, frankly. And this during this time was also the rise of like high fructose corn syrup and

the ultra-processed foods. But so over the course of that year, I was eating about 1,500 calories a day at 270 pounds and 5'8 and that's, you know, kind of where I was restricting myself calorie-wise. And I would go to the gym every day for at least an hour and a half, like I mentioned. And over the course of that year, I lost about 85, 90 pounds. And then in the subsequent few months, I lost an additional, like 20 pounds. for a total of around 100 pounds in like a year and a half-ish. And that was completely life-changing, as you might imagine.

The most important things that came out of it, though, were really my confidence in myself, and that would become even more accentuated after this period of time, because I really got into like Olympic weight training and lifting heavier weights, which improved my confidence like nothing else. just the idea that I could do something really hard and stick with it for a long period of time and reach my goals was something that was really important for me. And I think goal setting and goal achieving is highly underrated when it comes to mental health, just as an aside. Because a lot of times, if you feel bad about yourself, it's because you're not accomplishing subconsciously,

you're not accomplishing the things that you know you want to. Maybe you're not striving in life. Maybe you don't even have goals. Maybe, you know, you're not feeling well because of the diet that you're consuming or you're not prioritizing sleep or you're indoors all day and you're not moving your body. Um, there's a lot of reasons why an individual maybe shouldn't feel that good about themselves because they're not doing the things that they know they should do to take care of their bodies. Um, and their mind. and their psychological health as well. So I think it's an extremely underrated tool to set goals that are achievable, but that are trying and difficult. And working towards those goals tenaciously, honestly, you can do incredible things when you just have a really steadfast mindset about it. And so after that period of time, you know,

I was down to like 168 pounds by the, the time I graduated high school. And as you could imagine, my relationship due to just the very strict calorie counting, my relationship with food was kind of wrecked by the time that I, you know, kind of reached my quote unquote goal weight. I also had pretty bad body dysmorphia where it was like, you know, I had a lot of loose skin left over after I lost the weight when I still do. I never had a surgery to remove it or anything like that. But it was always like this constant reminder of the way I used to look like. And it really just for, you know, lack of a better word, really like effed up my mentality around how I viewed my body. And I think this is an unspoken issue

for a lot of people in the weight loss community. And it's something that I really emphasize with any clients that I work with around fat loss and especially if it's a lot of, a large amount of fat that has to be lost, it's really important to prepare your body and care for your body during that process so that you can minimize the amount of excess skin and stretch marks and everything like that that you might have after that process is over and you've reached your goal weight because there is a lot of energy trapped in those areas for so many years that's going to still be there even once the weight is gone. And it takes also, I would say, a lot of mental work and like psychological reframing to get into a new mindset, especially if you've

been used to inhabiting a body that looked a certain way for a long period of time. You really, it takes a lot of effort to see yourself a different way after that time. And I honestly can say that my body dysmorphia in the way that I viewed my body didn't really fully shift until, gosh, I want to say it was 2018 or early 2019 the first time that I had MDMA. It was absolutely life-changing and completely, you know, cut off my body dysmorphia like then and there in that moment and really just gave me a love for myself that I never had before and that I didn't even realize was missing until I had it. So that was extremely impactful for me. In addition to the body dysmorphia, I wanted to also mention that, you know, after counting the calories and everything when I initially lost the weight,

my relationship was food was wrecked and I started becoming bulimic and I was, you know, basically binging and purging starting in, let's see, starting in 2010. and that didn't end also until that MDM experience that I had. So that was in like 2019. So it was a good eight years on and off of really having an issue with bulimia. And that's also where this incredible medicine just completely changed my life and made me not want to harm my body in that way anymore. And like it became unthinkable. And so I'm really, really hopeful about the.

use of MDMA for PTSD, for eating disorders, for just, you know, trauma in general and facilitating the healing process. I can, I think that it can be such a potent medicine when used in the right set and setting with the, you know, with well-formed intentions. It can be so, so powerful. And, you know, I can speak for myself that it absolutely changed my life. And I also see incredible potential for it in facilitating healthy relationships and healthy marriages. It's been, you know, it's worked wonders for me and my partnership. I've been with my partner Keith since 2015. No, sorry, 2014.

Gosh, we're going on our 10th year. So in January, it's going to be our 10th anniversary. And, yeah, MDMA has been incredible medicine also for our, alchemy and our bonding. And so I, you know, I can't recommend it. Well, first of all, I can't recommend it, but like, because it's not legal. But if, you know, in the future couples therapy was facilitated by MDMA, I think it would just be revolutionary. And I actually think initially it was used in that capacity. So it's not unprecedented. And anybody who's taken it can attest to that. So anyway, I dealt with, after the weight loss, I dealt with the biolucing. I dealt with a

body dysmorphia. I dealt with the eating disorder. And after a couple years, gosh, how many years was it? So I would say starting in 2013, so I graduated high school in 2010. In 2013, I started getting pretty bad IBS symptoms. Like, that's actually saying it lightly. They were really bad. So I was basically not able to eat anything without getting intense bloating and getting. gas, like it felt like my intestines were going to explode inside me. It was like this sharp, sharp gas pain in my abdomen. And in my stools, I would have blood and mucus almost daily and would just kind of vacillate between diarrhea, constipation, just total hell, honestly, when it comes to digestive health. And I went to see a doctor, and they basically said, you know,

you're young, it'll probably go away by itself. We do have these immunotherapies. if you wanted to try them. But it's like, even at the time, I was at Moravian College, so I didn't mention this, but I did my bachelor's in biochemistry with a minor in math at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. And that's where I was at the time that I was getting these flare-ups. And so I basically decided that I didn't want to go the pharmaceutical route on that. I really wanted to figure out and get to the bottom of. of why this was happening to me to begin with.

And so I did a little bit of digging and research and found that elimination diets could be helpful for ameliorating symptoms and potentially identifying root triggers, root cause triggers of these symptoms in, you know, any sort of gastrointestinal issues. And so I did an elimination diet where I cut out wheat, dairy, eggs, soy,

and found that my symptoms completely went away over the course of a couple weeks. And when I reintroduced foods, I then identified that dairy was the primary trigger for all of the issues that I was having. And so that was the first moment where I really had an embodied realization of the impact of nutrition and food quality

and how that can directly impact the way that I'm feeling in my body, both acutely and chronically. And so from that point, I eliminated dairy entirely from my diet and was completely in like, quote, unquote, remission from the IBS or also of clitis or, you know, whatever you wanted to label it as, which is unprecedented within the medical literature. So the medical literature will say that these illnesses are incurable, which is total horseshit. this is not true. Just because the standard medical model and the reductionist scientific approach can't identify the reasons why these conditions are cropping up in certain individuals doesn't mean that the conditions can't be eliminated and reversed to actually reduce and ameliorate the illness. So this is actually a major problem, within the reduction of science and the way that we view illnesses is that we classify illnesses

based on clusters of symptoms. And if you, so if you go to a doctor and you present with a specific set of symptoms, doctor will look at those symptoms and then put you into a bucket with other people who present with these same symptoms. And then they will label that bucket with, you know, disease X, Y, or Z. the problem with this is that just because somebody shares symptoms with a group of other people that share symptoms doesn't mean that those symptoms arose from the same underlying mechanisms. And that's something that we just don't characterize in medicine. So there's different roads to get to the same endpoint. And for that reason, the ways that you can reverse and treat illnesses

in different individuals will vary depending on the roots taken to get to that illness. And that's something that we really need to unpack more within translational science is that the etiology of disease is not homogeneous. It can arise by a variety of mechanisms and how many varieties will differ depending on the disease at hand. But there's going to be different environmental triggers. that are causing illness in one person versus another. And it's really the job, in my mind, of a clinician to identify those triggers and make the patient aware of them

so that they can do something about it. Ultimately, all of us are born, you know, except for a very, very small majority of people, all of us are born healthy. It's just our environments that may or may not be conducive to our health, And if they're not, they wear on our bodies over time until gene expression profiles can change and the microbiome can change. And these shifts can happen. And that can influence the way that our bodies express themselves and express signs of illness over time.

So all that's just to say that it's really important to when you're thinking about optimizing your heart, health and staying healthy or treating illnesses or reversing illnesses, it's really important to find clinicians that are thinking about how your environment can be contributing to your condition and how that might be optimized. And just in the way that modern medicine is practiced, this isn't possible for the vast majority of physicians. So physicians back in the day used to come to your house and they used to know you and your family and they used to understand your life because they would literally be in your home and they could see the dynamics, they could see the exposures and the environment and develop an embodied understanding of your conditions and the way that

they might be influencing how you're feeling versus today there's this conveyor belt of patients going into clinicians' offices and they only have like three to five minutes to talk to their patient that they're not going to get any information of import during that time. There's not enough time in any case. Like there's there's barely anything that can be squeezed into that period of time. In addition to the doctors having this, you know, conveyor belt of patients that they have to tend to, they're also extremely burdened by the debt of being in medical school for so many years unpaid that most of them are arriving into their practice burned out. They're just literally getting by to, you know, start paying off that massive debt that they incurred to get the

education and the degree. In the past, medicine used to be such a revered profession. And now it's honestly a profession that not many may choose because it doesn't really have the glory that it used to have. Now it's really becoming somewhat of a failed profession. We have, you know, well over a trillion dollars in annual medical-related. debt per year as a country. It's in the top five contributors to our GDP. It's a system that's failing us. And it's failing the medical practitioners as well. And, you know, this just isn't good branding if you're trying to get people to go into practicing medicine. And I even have a friend who also shares a lot of my values with regards to health. And, uh,

she told me that she didn't have the energy to try to fight the system after, you know, going to medical school and having to pick a specialty. She just wanted to go into a specialty now that would allow her to make a lot of money so that she doesn't have to be burdened by this massive debt and that she can just kind of live her life instead of going into something like family medicine and trying to really get people on the straight and narrow path towards health, that she just feels. like it's absolutely futile and they're not given the tools to actually help people in this way. Physicians are really trained to be diagnosticians. They're trained to diagnose and treat medical conditions using a pharmacologic approach. They aren't taught the rigors of nutrition and movement practices and different lifestyle practices that can enhance your baseline health. They're not taught to optimize health in any way, shape, or form. They're only taught to optimize health. They're only taught to treat diseases. This is not a health care system. This is a sick care system. And many people

have said that, but it's like true in its purest essence. Like we're not caring for health. We're caring for sickness. And this is actually an important point that I've made when I first started my practice and on my website it says this, but health isn't the absence of illness. Health is a state that requires active striving and effort to achieve. At a baseline level, you know, there's some neutral point where you're neither healthy nor sick. To get sick, you go below that point of neutrality, and to become healthy, you go above that point. Just because you're neutral doesn't mean that you're optimally healthy.

And so we need to consider this spectrum when we're thinking about what we want for ourselves and the types of professionals that we want supporting us in our goals for our health and for our vitality. And so this has kind of been one long tangent to a certain extent, but I want to bring it back now to just my story and my timeline. So I found that Derry was the trigger for me and I removed it for many years. I graduated from Moravian College with honors in 2020. 2015. And then I worked actually at Bristolmeyer Squibb, which is a pharmaceutical company for the year

after my graduation. And I had fully intended to go to grad school after this. But the one school that I got accepted to to go right directly after my bachelor's was Wild Cornell in New York City. And I had recently gotten to a relationship with my current partner at the time. And we didn't want to move into the city. It was just kind of, you know, too much of a production. And so I ended up declining that offer and taking a gap year instead. And so I worked at BMS during that year in a monoclonal antibody development. And then I also was, you know, simultaneously applying for the next round of grad school applications and ended up also transitioning from BMS to this chemical company that I interned at as an undergrad called BASF. And so I went back to, and so I went back

and interned right before I ended up going back to grad school at Princeton, which I end up getting accepted. I actually applied to Princeton not having any idea what lab I was going to join or if the program would be that good of a fit. I ended up just applying because it was kind of close, like an hour and a half away, and I could feasibly commute there if I had to, and obviously it's, you know, an Ivy League school. I figured, you know, it's probably great. Just for some context, I had no idea that grad school and getting a PhD was a thing that you could get paid to do until my junior or late sophomore year of my time at Moravian College, where my genetics professor kind of took a special interest in me and helped me

get an internship through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and I was placed at Duke for a summer after my sophomore year to get like a mini-grad school experience. And that's why I really learned about like, oh, you know, you can do research when you're getting your PhD, you do research and you can get paid a stipend and you don't have to actually pay to go to grad school. Like I didn't, I'd never even fathom that that was a reality. I assumed that if you're going to school, you're paying for it. But, you know, so this kind of opened my eyes to this even being a possibility. And so I didn't know anybody with a PhD growing up. I, you know, didn't have anybody in my family who went to grad school or anything like that. So I was kind of in uncharted waters, so to speak. But I thought it was something that was very interesting.

And that also allows you to defer your student loans. So it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Like, you know, I want to continue my education. I really started getting into the idea of research and scientific ways of thinking. And so I wanted to continue that after, after my bachelor's degree. And so I applied to Princeton and I got accepted. And I started there in the fall of 2016. And it was really hard initially because I did end up commuting for my first two years there, which was an hour and a half each direction. And so that's three hours commuting

all, you know, each day. And I had to go in five days a week because I had classes every single day. and I, you know, made the most of that time. I ended up finding podcasts around this time, and I found some, you know, incredible podcasts that really shaped my thought in the beginning years, which was like mind-pump media. That's where I actually found Paul Chek through them and just completely opened the floodgates for me with regards to holistic health and thinking about what health really means and how to cultivate that. Paul Check has been such an influential figure in my life since I found him, you know, back in 2016 on Mind Pump.

And, yeah, I'm just so forever grateful for his teachings. And, you know, I'm still a huge fan of his to this day. And now he has his own podcast now living in 4D, which I highly, highly recommend. he's you know he's a real one and provide some really incredible guidance when it comes to the foundational elements of health and what it means to be healthy and so you know i was go back to my story i was commuting very far at the time balancing classes trying to also like take care of myself and at the time i was also living back you know near where my undergrad was in the lehigh valley pa and we actually had a really bad black mold in that house that happened after

there was an HVAC issue in the crawl space attic area of the home. Once that happened, like, there was a bunch of water that sat and then created a really bad black mold problem throughout the entire house. I would get headaches every single day. I had brain fog almost constantly. Let me just get a drink of water. It was incredibly toxic, and it's something that I really am a champion for now is identifying mold in your. home environments or your, you know, any environments that you frequent because it can just absolutely wreak havoc on your life. It is an absolute sink for energy. It will just zap your life force from you. It's probably the major cause of thyroid issues that's not talked about. It will cause migraines,

headaches. It will cause sinus issues, allergies, skin rashes, candida and fungal overgrowth within the intestines. And so it can really just wreak havoc generally. And it's something that I really urge people if they think they might have an issue with it to do some probing, maybe get some home testing or take a mycotoxin urine test to see if they're being exposed. That's super important. But anyway, so my first two years at Princeton, I kind of suffered through this commute. That was also coupled with the fact that, so during a science PhD, typically there's a rotation process where you kind of are trying on some labs to see if they're a good fit. And then if you find one that's a good fit and the PI likes you, then you can join the lab and you can do your PhD research there. And so the

molecular biology department where I was had three rotations that everybody would do. And for my first two rotations, I just did not feel like it was a good fit. And so it really had me feeling downright depressed because I was like, you know, if this third lab isn't a good fit, then I'm going to have to like quit and go home. I'm not going to be able to find somewhere to go. But my third rotation ended up being my, you know, wildest dream rotation from day one. I walked in there very nervous and like anxious that it wasn't going to work and I would have to leave the school. But I was paired with this postdoc whose name is Chil-Soon-Jean. and he's now at UC Irvine in California,

has his own lab there now, but he's just an absolute ray of sunshine and just you couldn't ask for a better mentor than this man. I am so thankful to him to this day because he just renewed my spirit with regards to my academic pursuits and my professional goals and really just gave me the confidence

and the skills needed to flourish throughout my PhD. So from day one, you know, we ended up chatting about like branch chain amino acid metabolism. I had been super into just in my spare time doing a lot of research around exercise physiology and exercise metabolism. And so I had a lot of just background knowledge on these topics. And he had been doing some research with BCAAs, the branched chain amino acids and his PhD. And he was continuing it into the postdoc.

And so we ended up on the first day having like a pretty indebt. depth conversation about BCAAs and their importance in health and disease. And so we just hit it off immediately. And I kind of hit the ground running in Josh's lab, Josh Rabinowitz's lab, where I was doing this third rotation. I ultimately ended up joining the lab in early 2017 and staying there up through my graduation in 2021 December. And so, like I said, my initial project was on exercise. metabolism. It was using a rodent model that was kind of rife with issues. We had trouble infusing the mice with our tracers, our metabolic tracers, because something about the infuseate temperature or the salt concentration, these mice would just not be able to run very

far on the treadmills that we had. And so there was just a bunch of technical stuff going on that made it really not a great project for an early PhD student to tackle because there's just a lot a troubleshooting that needed to happen. And I feel like early in your PhD, you really need to start building momentum. And this project was preventing that from happening because there was just so many little things that needed to be tweaked and troubleshot that I couldn't actually, you know, get a foothold and get myself moving in the right direction. And then, so after a year, literally a year of troubleshooting this project, it might have been even a little bit over a year, I ended up, you know, basically finally telling my boss that this wasn't working and I needed to pivot.

I needed to do something else because I was just losing my mind. And, you know, he agreed and I ended up switching to a ketogenic diet project. And I was published within a year and a half of starting that project. So that's when we published the paper, quantitative fluxomics of circulating metabolites in cell. And I share that just to say for anybody who's thinking about pursuing a PhD or graduate school in general in doing research, that it's just really important to be transparent with yourself about where you're at and what's feasible for you. And being really open and honest with your bosses about where you're at. I really just learned that by hiding the struggles that I was having and not being honest with myself about the fact that this may not work, I was just hindering my own ability to progress and potentially just move on to a different project. And so, you know, for me, I'm like pretty stubborn. And when something's not working, I kind of just want to brute force it until it works because, like, I just want to feel that sense of accomplishment.

Like, I could make this work and make it happen. but you have to know your limits and boundaries around like, you know, there's a breaking point where it's like if you're putting more energy in, it's not actually worth it. You're just draining yourself. So that was one of my biggest takeaways from my time at Princeton is that you just being honest. And honestly, this is just a lesson for life too. Like be honest with other people, especially if you're accountable to those people. Just be honest with them about where you're at. Because a lot of times people want to help and support you. And by not sharing your needs and how they could support you, then they're not getting the opportunity to actually be there for you in that capacity. And that ends up harming both of you and it harms the relationship. And so by being honest with where you're at, being honest with yourself and with those other people, it actually cultivates trust within the relationship. It also directly can benefit you because now you're not struggling in futility to get something done that, you know, it was just not going to work or, you know, it's just not the best use of your time. So I, you know, I urge people

in general, whether they're in academia or not, to just be really transparent and honest about, you know, whether it's a project or whether it's a problem that you're having in your home life. Like, it applies to all issues. Yeah, so basically I worked on the ketogenic diet project, and then I published that with my colleague who's also actually a faculty member at Harvard now, whose name is Tony Hui. He was the co-first author on that paper with me. We published that together. And then, yeah, it got really great feedback.

And it was a great paper, in my opinion. And I would urge you all to check it out if you're interested. it really just outlines the changes in metabolism that happened in response to ketogenic diet versus high carbohydrate diet, also fasting versus feeding. And what we really found in this paper was that there are these futile metabolic cycles that can maintain substrate oxidation in the face of changing nutrient inputs. And so let me unpack what that means. So when you're eating a carbohydrate-rich diet, that means there's lots of glucose coming in.

a pathway called glycolysis that's responsible for turning that glucose into something that can be burned in the mitochondria, to make ATP in the mitochondria, or it can be excreted as lactate, which is a three-carbon version of glucose, so glucose of six carbons. In glycolysis, it gets broken down into two, three-carbon units, and that three-carbon unit can be pyruvate, and it can go into the mitochondria to enter the TCA cycle as acetyl-coa, or it can be converted into lactate, and excreted into the circulation, that lactate can be picked up by the liver and converted back into glucose that can then subsequently go back to the circulation and reenter a tissue such as muscle. So this is an example of the Corey cycle, which is commonly referenced with an exercise.

So like a working muscle consumes glucose. It can make lactate. The lactate can be converted back to glucose, which can then be taken up by the muscle once more. what we found was in this paper is that the metabolic flux, so the, you know, kind of the uptake and excretion of carbohydrates was actually maintained quite significantly in the ketogenic diet, even though there were no dietary carbohydrates coming in. And so that was perplexing because, you know, we thought that carbohydrate metabolism, metabolic rate was going to go quite down because, you know, there's no carbs coming in. So, you know, why would that flux be maintained? And then we also saw in the high carbohydrate diet that fatty acid flux was still, you know, very high, even though the diet was low in fat. So essentially, you know, there's not that much fat coming in through the diet, but the fatty acid metabolism and the use of fatty acids for energy production was still quite high.

And so in our paper, what we showed was essentially there's these futile cycles that can basically, in the example of like the quarry cycle, we have glucose to lactate back to glucose. So technically there's no net effect of that process. You're going from glucose and then you're going back to glucose. So it's considered like a quote unquote futile cycle. But what it actually does is it maintains these, the activities of these metabolic like pathways so that the pathways stay open so that if glucose is encountered through the diet on a meal, that those pathways are open and ready to assimilate those carbohydrates.

So, you know, as it turns out, what we said in the paper was that these futile cycles maintain robustness to divergent dietary inputs. So essentially, if there's no carbs in your diet, you want to keep these carb metabolizing pathways open so that when you do eventually encounter the carbs, they're going to be utilized effectively. And the same thing was true for fat. So we want to be able to burn fat effectively, even in the absence of dietary fat, because, well, especially because fat is also indogynously stored, it's a major fuel source. Regardless of dietary inputs, you can make fat from carbohydrates and also to a lesser extent from amino acids. And also, to a lesser extent, from amino acids and store that as body fat.

But essentially, you want to maintain flux through these pathways so that, you know, the pathways are robust to whatever dietary inputs are coming in. And so that was the main takeaway of that paper. And so fast forward, I started working on another project about the pharmacokinetics of endogenous metabolites. And at the same time, I was a plight. for a postdoc at Harvard in the Integrative Medicine Department, or Integrative Medicine Program, rather.

And I ended up getting accepted there, which, you know, it seemed like a great fit, but a couple things were wrong. So, firstly, I went to this talk that had like a very famous vegan scientist giving a talk from Harvard. And just, you know, from my own experiences around health. I have this very deep understanding even at this time that any ism with regards to diet is ultimately unhealthy. We need to be flexible mentally when it comes to our dietary and nutritional requirements. Because these requirements are changing meal to meal, day to day, season to season, year to year, it's like our bodies have divergent

needs depending on the conditions that we're giving ourselves. For example, like, you know, a professional athlete needs more protein than somebody who is training to be a monk and is, you know, sitting, meditating for seven hours a day, for example. But any sort of ism when it comes to diets are locking you into a specific structured way of feeding yourself and nourishing yourself. and that's a problem because it doesn't take into consideration the fluctuations in our nutritional needs in response to a variety of inputs and a variety of conditions. And so I already had that perspective going into this talk, but the vegan scientist, physician scientist was giving his talk and showing figures on like Mediterranean diet versus

his vegan diet, and the effects on different health metrics. And the hypothesis around his study was that the vegan diet was going to be superior, and his results reflected that the vegan diet was superior for lowering blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and body weight. And so I asked, you know, very politely in the chat, I was like, you know, did you guys look at body composition in these, patients because a vegan diet is very low in protein by and large. And especially over the course of like this 12 week intervention, especially because there was no movement guidance also provided.

And, you know, as far as I could tell, no protein supplementation per se, that a very large portion of the weight loss during this period of time may very well have been lean mass. And the last thing we want to do is lose lean mass while maintaining fat mass if we're trying, you know, if we're losing weight. Ideally, we want to gain lean mass and lose fat mass, but at the very least, we want to maintain lean mass and lose fat mass during weight loss. And nobody would answer my question. And there was just a lot of dogma and just kind of very rigid energy in this talk. And it gave me like a very sour taste in my mouth. with regards to, I don't want to say with regards to the whole program, but I just got a bad,

kind of a bad feeling. And then in addition to that, during this time, my mom had been diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C virus that, and this all kind of plays into the whole play and like theatrics of my life. But what turns out that have happened was that when she gave birth to me in 1992, she received the blood transfusion after having me that was tainted with hepatitis C virus and the screening for HCV in donated blood didn't happen until like a couple years, a year or two after this. So she was infected from this blood transfusion and had no idea that this was, you know, that she had this issue until she was literally serotic. So she had cirrhosis and essentially liver failure. and this was like 20, 21.

No, it must have been like 2020. And so the virus had, you know, proceeded to kind of wreak havoc in a low-grade way over the course of 30 years and culminated with this just complete wreckage in her liver. And so I didn't feel good about moving to Boston for this postdoc when her time may have been limited. And so I ended up turning down the postdoc at Harvard and just deciding that I was going to start my business during the year after graduating.

And so this is actually a really important story. It's very, very sad for me to share, but I think it's important. So when you have a chronic liver disease, and this is the case for a lot of chronic diseases, the disease itself doesn't usually end up being the killer. What ends up usually being the killer is these kind of secondary issues that arise incidentally as a result of vulnerabilities in the system. So in her example, she had varices in her stomach. So she had these bulging veins in her stomach that was due to basically blood being backed up from the liver. Like things weren't flowing very well there. And so she ended up getting like a pretty bad cold in October of 2021.

or like early November, and she had a really bad cough. And what happened was, you know, she was coughing, coughing, coughing for days and like over a week. And when it up happening was that the cough caused one of the veins in her stomach to rupture. And she had this, you know, pretty massive internal bleeding that she wasn't aware of until she had tarry stools within, you know, a few hours after this. She got rushed to the hospital, but had lost so much blood that her kidneys went into shock and ultimately what ended up happening was she had kidney failure, they put her on dialysis, and ultimately, like, once the kidneys failed, there's lots of overlap between the liver and the kidneys. And so the kidneys were probably her saving grace

for a long period of time. They were taking a lot of the burden that the liver couldn't take on. Once the kidneys were offline, it was just like this rapid decline where she ended up passing away in December of 2021, literally two weeks before I graduated. So you can just imagine what a heartbreaking and tumultuous time this was. I was also dealing with her medical care for like the three weeks that she was in the ICU. Also, you know, had just submitted my thesis for review and like was preparing to graduate and then had all of this stuff come up with her medical care and it wasn't clear to me in the beginning

whether or not she actually had a chance of making it so like I was just you know on the phone for hours a day with different specialists and other doctors that were friends of friends so that could get another second opinion on things and so it was just a lot she ended up passing away

in like mid-December 2021 I graduated like a week and a half, two weeks later. Of course, the department and my boss offered to like push it back, but I just wanted to get over with and move on with my life. And so that happened. And the reason I said, like, oh, the irony with regards to the theatrics of how this kind of played out, if I look at it from like above, is that I've, like, from my own first person perspective, I already been dealing with this mistrust, this distrust of the medical system,

and just it constantly failing me on a personal level. And then, you know, I get to the point where my mom is literally passing away because of another failure of this same model. And it's done nothing but fuel my fire for revolution and change. like I can't even explain the magnitude. So that's one of the main... Sorry, let me get a drink of water. This is one of the main intentions I have for this podcast

and just from my own professional and personal career and endeavors is that I need to see this system change in a positive way before I die. Like, it's unconscionable the things that are going on in medicine. And it's the antithesis of medicine. Like, we're not practicing medicine. We are practicing numbing and masking symptoms so that you can, you know, then provide another drug that gives you alleviation of the symptoms caused by the initial drug, for example. What we're doing is, is harming people at a very fundamental level, and we can do so much better. Like, we don't have to take this route. It's not working. It's so clearly not working that it's maddening and

makes me want to, like, rip my hair out. Like, I don't understand how everybody in the system isn't making a racket, but at the same time, and I teach this in my scientific literacy intensive course, the incentives in place are making it so that doctors are kind of wedded to big pharma, and it's creating this pharmaceutical industrial complex that everybody is kind of getting, taking care of financially into the point where it's like nobody's actually motivated to make a change

because that would mean that those pockets aren't being lined anymore and ultimately I think the solution for this is taking healthcare out of the capitalist system. I don't think it can be embedded

within the economy in this way because by its very nature then people are going to try to make the most money they can. But health care cannot be incentivized with monetary gain. It has to be incentivized with, sorry, it has to rather be incentivized to provide the best care. Like the output of success for like a good health care system should be the health of the population, not how much money the system makes. Because we can see the outcome of the current incentives with the, you know, well over a trillion annual spending on health care costs, we're currently optimizing

for financial output. And there's no incentive to actually reduce that, you know, $1.5 trillion or whatever the value is now expense, because that's a major facet of our economy. If you shrink that amount, then you're actually harming the system economically. And so we're not being motivated to make positive change in this area. And it's got to stop because we're literally killing ourselves here. We're among the sickest countries on the planet despite being one of the richest. We're supposed to be, you know, the quote unquote, best country in the world, the one with the most promise, the one with the American dream and yet we are suffering the most. And it's because we're so detached from reality. We're not in touch with what's actually going on because it's too painful to actually witness and

recognize and acknowledge the fact that we went down a path that was the wrong path. At some point, we took a wrong turn. And the people who are being held, the people who are in charge aren't being held accountable and they aren't willing to man up and say, that mistakes were made. And that applies to many aspects of the current model, but was specifically exemplified during the COVID lockdowns and like all the whole COVID situation in general. There is no accountability. There's nobody stepping up saying that, you know, we were wrong and now, you know, we need to make updates to our guidance. There's none of that happening. People are just doubling down on their initial opinions and their initial dictum.

and refusing to actually take accountability for mistakes that were made, even though those mistakes have cost many people their lives and their livelihoods. And, you know, it's an absolutely incredibly painful situation to acknowledge. But I am hopeful at the same time because as I've, you know, graduated and had my own, started my own business and gained some momentum on Instagram, I've encountered some absolutely incredible humans that just really have restored my faith in humanity and my hope that we can actually achieve a new paradigm that may be possible, but that it's only possible with each of us contributing actively. We can't be passive bystanders for things that we believe in.

Otherwise, we are actually helping the converse to be true. We're helping the current system to stay in power if we're not actively building a new system. And so my goal and my intentions for this podcast are really to educate, to provide perspective, to also just kind of excite people and to ignite conversation. and ultimately evoke change, whether that's at the level of policy, whether that's building a new system, whether that's making changes to the current systems. I think ultimately, you know, Buckminster Fuller has a quote about like, you have to build a new system. There's no utility really in complaining and, you know, breeding resentment around an old, outdated system where you just really need to just build a new system. We just really need to just build a new system. We're just building. the new one and focus on what we can do to make positive change and not focus on the negatives of the current paradigm and the current reality. And so that's really my goal is to think about the ways that we can do better and think about what that's going to look like in a very actionable

way and how to accomplish that. And I really think ultimately it comes down to education. almost everything that is wrong today comes down to failures of education. But, you know, just as an example in our primary and secondary school, we're not taught anything useful about health, like, in a real sense. Like, in my opinion, health class was the most useless class, and that's saying something, but it was the most useless class in all of grade school, where it should be the most important class. People should be taught.

kids should be taught how to feed themselves, how to cook, like what nutrition really looks like. We should be taught how to move our bodies. We should be taught how to take care of ourselves financially. Like there's other aspects of health that are really important too. Like, you know, how to be an entrepreneur, how to build out a business, how to manage our money, how to have healthy interpersonal relationships, how to communicate effectively, how to, you know, engage in relationship and be ultimately just like to be a good person. And I think we're really failing as a system with regards to our education.

And like the health class is just one example. But our education system is really built to create automatons that are good little boys and girls who can go off and do exactly what they're told. the education system is not built to create critical thinking, free thought, sovereignty. It's not created to make high functioning adults that have a say in the world and are able to kind of create their own realities and, you know, stand up for what they believe in and think in new ways and create new paradigms, none of that. And I think this ultimately stems out of the way our education system was initially built to, you know, stand up. really create factory workers who could work well on an assembly line. And it shows. We really need a new education system that is built around the foundation principles

of what it means to be healthy first and foremost. And then from a healthy baseline, we can worry about, you know, becoming more intellectual and learning facts and learning concepts and putting the pieces together and building a scientific understanding and a broad worldview. We can't learn effectively from an unhealthy baseline, and we certainly can't sit for eight hours a day under fluorescent lights, completely, you know, sedentary and fed garbage food from the cafeteria and be expected to be healthy, you know, functioning human beings. This is the absolute antithesis of what we need to be, you know, intellectual and also intelligent. There's a difference between those two things. the current system is really shutting off all of our innate intelligence, and it's making us just pure talking head intellectuals. It's making us have a bloated sense of ego and self and what we know, and it's not at all allowing us to identify with what we don't know,

and the limitations of our science and our information and all the wonder in the things that we don't understand. Like, people leave undergrad with this skewed sense of that we know more about the world than reality that we do. There's so much more that we don't know than what we do. And if we identify with what we don't know, then we're just, you know, infused with the sense of wonder and the majesty of the universe and really compelled to seek out understanding and seek out information and do so in a creative way versus being told. all of these facts and things that we are supposed to know as a fact, when in reality, you know, facts are really context-dependent, and all of the facts that we've identified in science are based through our five senses, which our five senses are very limited.

Other life on the planet has different ways of sensing reality, and their ways of sensing reality are no less correct than ours. It's just different. different perspectives entirely. And so I really think we're much more limited than we like to believe, but there's nothing wrong with that. Like, we should be excited about the fact that we don't understand as much as we think we do. It should be a motivation for us to think about the ways that we might be able to, you know, better approach problems that we have no understanding for. Like, we need to consider more of the unknown unknowns. And less so much.

much less of a focus on the known knowns. And that is one of my major, major grief points with the way that science is taught specifically. It's taught as a set of facts to memorize. And this is like the case for most subjects, but it's particularly problematic in science because it's the idea that you can teach facts to memorize as facts in science is like the opposite of what science is. Science is an iterative process that allows us to hone our work. worldview and get a better understanding of what reality is, like the nature of reality. The idea that

you can memorize quote unquote facts about science is just so wrong because facts are, are like concretized. Facts are immovable. But science is fluid and ever changing. Like we can't be locked into just seeing things a specific way because then we're going to miss out on the reality and the truth of what might be in front of us. So it's something I think a lot about. I think a lot about epistemology in general, like learning how to learn and how to teach effectively through an epistemological point of view.

But then in addition to that, just thinking about the ways that we're failing in education system and then what it might look like to actually build a well-functioning system that better serves us. Because I think if you start at a very young level with reinforcing, you know, these foundational principles of health, which would include, like, movement, nutrition, sleep, our environments, our light environments, being in the sun, like having a relationship with the sun and the seasons, like getting into our environments and being,

realizing that we're a part of the environment and our ecosystem and that we're not separate from it. These, like very basic ideas and principles of health, if we can build from there and really identify with the needs of our physical bodies and make sure that we're catering to those needs, then the mind can flourish and learning can happen so much more effortlessly. All these kids diagnosed with ADHD these days because they can't sit still for eight hours, well, actually, a healthy child shouldn't be sitting still and shouldn't be able to sit still for eight hours. It's a flaw of the system and the adults in the room saying that they should be sitting for that period of time. It's absolutely appalling that this is the situation that our

children find themselves in. And we also dealt with it in school. It's just completely unrealistic for the biology of young children and up through teenage years. Like, in general, people shouldn't be sedentary for those long periods of time. They shouldn't be having to focus their eyes and their minds on one thing for extended periods of time like that. You need natural breaks built in. And especially, you know, under the fluorescent lights, which we're going to get into on future episodes, the whole light environment thing. But fluorescent lights are probably the worst lights you can sit under. They have huge spikes in the blue wavelength range and the UV wavelength range. And they have virtually no red in them.

Relative, you know, compare this to the sun where you have full spectrum red all the way through violet and then you have ultraviolet, et cetera. And you have infrared as well on the other end of the spectrum. The fluorescent lights really just have these very, very artificial peaks in blue and UV, and it's extremely stimulating to the nervous system to the point where it's going to be causing burnout. The blue light stimulates glucose release into the bloodstream, so glucose starts running high. It gives you that kind of like just burned out, fatigued feeling in your brain. It's also metabolically not great for you because it also stimulates cortisol, which is related to glucose balance.

and homeostasis and like can can basically elevate glucose levels in the sugar in the in the bloodstream so you've got this cortisol and glucose response from the blue light uv light is great in some context in the context of the sun for example but in isolation with blue it's extremely stimulating to the nervous system and it tells the body virtually that it's noon on a summer day noon and June. And so if you're exposed to UV light and, you know, it's later in the day or it's super early in the morning, you're sending this signal to your body that it's the middle of the day and it creates this discordance that makes it really challenging for your biological clocks and the different tissues of your body to stay in the proper alignment to facilitate your

endocrine health, to facilitate your circadian health. And we're going to get all into this on a future episode for sure. But I just wanted to bring it up here because it's one of the really insidious aspects of living an indoor life in public settings that is not discussed. So, you know, you'll see these lights in all shopping stores, like grocery stores, schools, gyms, like all of these environments. And it's just a real issue. And on the future episode, when we get into circadian health and light environment, we're going to discuss, like, you know, what lights are more appropriate, but, you know, kind of spoiler alert,

you want to have as little lights on inside the house as possible during the daytime. And during the day, if you can get outside as much as you can, even if it's under like an umbrella or whatever, ideally, even if the sun's not out, the clouded sky still has quite bright light that's coming through, and this is a natural light that's balanced in different wavelengths, versus sitting under something like an LED, like white LED lights also have a very high peak in the blue wavelength spectrum, which is stimulating to the nervous system and signals that it's, you know, middle of the day in the summer once again. And the incandescent bulbs, which caused the same issue. So if you're going to use light bulbs in the house, incandescent bulbs are going to be better because they have more red wavelength light in them to balance out the blue.

but you know ideally you're just minimally using light at night and if you're going to be on screens wear really good pair of blue blocking glasses i have a protocol through my practice it's called the foundational protocol you can you know hit me up on instagram or shoot me an email at dr alexis jasmine at gmail.com requesting that protocol i usually charge 30 dollars for it but for all my new listeners of the podcast just you know shoot me an email that you there or a DM on my podcast, Instagram, or my primary Instagram page, and I will send it to you for free as a thank you for joining me on this first episode of the podcast. And, you know, I think I covered most of what I wanted to cover here. There's kind of an infinite amount of time that I could

continue to go on. My experiences and my perspectives are extensive. We'll probably have to continue this again, but my voice is like hoarse at this point. And I think I went longer than I intended to, but I hope this provided you with some insights and context to the way that I see the world so that, you know, moving forward when I have guests on and we're getting into some really deep topics around different aspects of science that you can kind of see where I'm coming from. And ultimately that, you know, will help. you with assimilating the information and deciding, you know, what information is really resonating with you versus what you might have questions on. And so I just want to really thank you for being here

and taking the time to listen to this. If you've made it all the way through, please, you know, drop comments or, you know, if you're listening on Spotify or Apple podcast, just drop comments, ratings, help to build some momentum early on here. But feel also free to share this with a friend. great and, you know, I'm just really excited to continue this journey with you all and, you know, give you some great quality information that I feel really good about to ultimately, you know, help improve our world and the quality of our health and our life. So I hope everybody has a great day and thank you for joining me.