Dr. Darshan Shah: Can’t Focus, Sleep, or Lose Weight — it Could be From the Toxins in Your Every Day Products! (Do These SIMPLE Daily Swaps to Undo the Damage NOW!)

and wellness specialist. He supports certified surgeon, published author, entrepreneur, spent twenty five years as enable doctor too, with a deep knowledge in the areas of heart, cancer, trauma, and surgery.

health optimization and longevity clinic. Over twenty thousand surgeries under his belt. Doctor Shah has led innovations in wellness tech, published extensively, and hosts his own podcast, The Extend Podcast, educating people on how to add health span to your lifespan.

Please welcome back to On Purpose, Doctor Darshan Shah. So great, Darshan, it's great to have you back. Literally, we were just talking about the last episode we did together. It has helped so many people. It has a million views, millions of downloads, so many great comments. And as I was saying, what I love about your insight is that it's practical, it's easy, and it's simple. Anyone can do it starting from now. And that's how I want people to feel at the end of this episode.

we need to be able to mitigate against these until the laws catch up and we stop dumping this stuff into our environment. Right. So even though you're hearing a lot about toxins being everywhere. The reality of the situation is it's not too late to modify your habits in your environment, so you're not as exposed as you would normally be without some knowledge.

like BPA. They're forever toxins that are put out there in our clothing. So these are all things that are chemicals that were never in our environment before we started making them as humans. Okay. And so when we look at the breadth of toxins, there's one hundred and fifty thousand plus toxins in our environment that have never been here before. And the reason we use the word toxin

or toxic is because they do cause biological problems. They do cause hormone dysregulation, for example, they cause plaque in our arteries. These are all things that could eventually pile up and lead to chronic disease, and that's why we want to avoid them as much as possible.

can also go down downward spiraling as quick. So let's start whichever one I want to start, right.

thirty seven hundred percent change year over year. It's massive. So just make tiny little adjustments in your life every day and this will add up over the course of the year. You don't have to do it all in one day, right, So let's talk about air for example. Okay, obviously we're all breathing all day long, right, but where do you spend the most time in your day? Probably in your work environment, for you might be this podcast

studio and your bedroom at night where you sleep. Right, most of us spend six to eight hours in our bedroom and night. And the problem with air is when it gets localized into one area and doesn't have a way to escape into the environment, there's no way for it to clean itself. Okay, So the best thing you can do in both of these environments is try to open a window. All right. The outside air is generally cleaner than the inside air. And you can check this

on your phone app. It's on every weather app now, the air quality index, okay, and so it's kind of hidden sometimes you can find it on your app. And if the air quality index outside is green, you're probably safe to open your windows. Right, And how often do we open windows anymore in our life?

should be doing. I remember when I first heard about this, I was like, when was the last time I changed my air filters? It'd been like two years, and I called the people over to change it, and they look at the filter. It's like a bunch of dust and stuff in the filter. And a lot of people forget to do that. A lot of employers forget to do that at work too, So ask your HR department, like are we changing these regularly? Most employers do have contracts

with h FAC people that will change as regularly. And that's it. That's the Preto principle. The Preto principle states the twenty percent of actions that you can do to

achieve eighty percent of the result is where you should focus your energy, opening windows, changing air filters. And lastly, if you're an environment where you can't really open a window, for example, or the air quality index is not good, maybe you live in a city that's heavily polluted. There are fantastic portable air filters you can get that you can put in individual rooms for room size. Some of these are two three hundred dollars and they can filter

your air for you all day. And there you go.

You've cleared the air.

of these curious people. I bought one and I use it for a little while, and you'll be surprised how opening the windows all of a sudden it goes from red to green.

more water. Is great for your detoxification systems. But the water that comes from your tap in most municipalities has a lot of chemicals in it, okay, and so there are ways that you can filter that water out of your tap. So what I tell all my patients to do is look at where you get most of your

water from that particular sink. If you can get a reverse osmosis filtration system, which again is about two or three hundred dollars, and put it under your sink, you can install it yourself, or you can have a plumber do it for about one hundred dollars. That will completely remove all of the heavy metals, the toxins, fluoride, et cetera in the water, so that whatever water you're drinking

there is completely filtered. Now, if you can't get a reverse hosmosis system, there are of course those pictures that you can buy that have a filter in them, the carbon filters, and so that's another way that you can remove these toxins from the water. But in general, you want to be drinking filtered water as much as possible

out of glass bottles. So all the plastic bottles we're drinking out of, there's a ton of microplastics, especially if they're out in the heat that accumulated that plastic bottle. Try not to drink out of plastic water bottles, if at all possible. Get yourself a big glass water bottle, fill it from a reverse osmosis or filtered system every day. And once again, where do you spend the most time at home? Where do you get most of your drinking

water from? At home, probably your kitchen sink, you only need that one spot. And at work, trying to get your employer once again to get a reverse osmosis or some sort of filtration system, and that work sank as well.

there was. I think he's a former NFL athlete who recently did his morning routine and he had the Saratoga water bottle, his blue water bottle. Yes, yes, and he uses that and it's like it's gone crazy, oh wow, and so far. But it's interesting to me that plastic have just been the norm for so long have been yet for someone who's sitting there going jay, I've been drinking out of a plastic war ball for ten years, I'm fine. What does a microplastic even do? What is drinking?

What is the big deal doctor show from drinking from a plastic war ball? What would you say?

but there's indicators in science that there is harm being done. So, for example, one of the indicators is they did a research study where they look at the blood vessels of people that have suffered strokes and heart attacks, and you can actually see microplastics in the wall of the blood vessel. And as we know, you know that cholesterol can accumulate there, that blood vessel can get blocked. That can lead to

a heart attack, it can lead to stroke. This is also happening in what's called the microvasculature, the tiny blood vessels that we can't even see with a naked eye. Those are more easily blocked. So we know every organ in our body needs blood to survive and to thrive, and you're blocking those micro vessels with microplastics. This can be a huge problem. There's a lot of studies also done where we're finding microplastics accumulating in our testees and ovaries,

also in our brain. They've done studies of this, and it can't be good. This is something that is blocking hormonal signals, is blocking neuronal signals, and we really got to mitigate our exposure. Plastic wasn't in our environment a degree. It is now one hundred years ago, and we're just running this mass experiment across all of westerns, across the whole world actually on what are the effects of microplastics

going to be? And what we don't want to do is, for example, when you reach one hundred years old and now all of a sudden a research study comes out that says microplastic accumulation leads to Alzheimer's disease, leads to cardiovascar disease. We don't want to end up there, right, So I don't want to say it's easy, but it's easier than you think it is to avoid microplastics.

you're buying wool or if you're buying one hundred percent cotton, chances are is probably safe. However, a lot of these synthetic blends can be a problem, So you really want to do some research there on your clothing. Even everything in our kitchen is made out of plastics, now, cutting boards, the tapperware that we store our food in. Right, and

here's the worst situation with plastics. When you heat up plastics in a microwave, for example, the sticks and the chemicals leach into your food at a very very high degree. So never warm up anything in the microwave in something plastic. If you have a cutting board, for example, that's made out of plastic, look at what's happening to the cutting board you'll see little pieces of plastic after you've cut your vegetables. Throw that away and get yourself a wooden

cutting board. Right, look at what you're stirring your food in when you're cooking a lot of those utensils that people use, they're putting a plastic utensil inside of their food, heating it up, and basically it's melting into the food. Don't do that. Get a wooden spoon or metal, something with metal. All of these small minute changes, it might seem overwhelming once again, like oh, I got to go

through my whole kitchen and change everything out. No, you don't have to do it all today. But over the next six months year, as you're losing tupp aware getting

rid of it bi ceramic storage containers instead, you know, as you're replacing things, get rid of the plastic and go more towards something that's more sustainable. Not only is it good for your biology, it's also great for the environment. Right. Yeah.

You put hot coffee in there. Guess what's happening smelting If you use those ca cups, the ones that come in plastic, those are heat going right through a plastic cup. You won't even believe this. A lot of tea bags are made out of plastic.

Same thing with tea bags. Now we use a special metal container that we put tea in, and we do it this way. It actually feels nicer. You feel more in connection with your coffee and your tea because there's not this kind of plastic barrier between you and your tea and coffee. And for your long term health, it's probably the right thing to do.

I do a lot of testing on our patients and our clinic that are suffering from multiple problems, and we can't figure out why do they have headaches and fatigue and brain fog and gut issues, and we find massive levels of glyphasate in their system. You don't have to do the testing to know this is a problem, okay.

And so glyphisate is sprayed on vegetables and fruits. There are certain fruits and vegetables that are very susceptible to glyphasate spraying because they have very thin skins and so the life estake can actually penetrate in the skin into the fruit. And so those are the ones if you're not buying organic, you want to wash them really, really well before you eat them. The Environmental Working Group is

a great website EWG dot org. They have what's called the Dirty Dozen on their website, and these are twelve foods every year they test that have high levels of pesticides on them, and those are the foods you want to either avoid. What are the sometimes it's blueberries, sometimes it's apples. It's like anything with a thin shell on it. And so you want to be really careful about those

types of foods and having a good washing routine, and then you know, trying to buy organic if at all possible. I think there's this misconception out there that buying organic is super expensive. Actually, if you go to farmers markets, a lot of them are willing to deal with you, and you know, give you a good price on things, sometimes better than your supermarket. I found this myself, where I can find better pricing at the roadside stand or at an organic farm than I can at my own supermarket.

And so I think if you try to get organic if you can, and if you can't, look at that list on the website ewg dot org. Try to avoid those and at least look up a YouTube video on how to wash your fruits and vegetables effectively.

don't have to think about what you're getting. You just pick it up, throwing your cart, and you zoom out of there, right, And I think we need to go back to a time period where humans lived, where we were much more mindful about what we were putting in our body. We respected food, We thought about our food before we ate it, and we enjoyed the meal, and so you cooked it home more. I think we need to go back to a lifestyle where we have more of a connection with our food, and then all of

this stuff becomes more automatic. One of the biggest things I'm constantly trying to work on is just eating slower. Yeah, right, I find like it's so easy. I was thinking about this where it started so when I was a kid, I ate fast in school because my mom would make me an Indian packed lunch. Sometimes we talked about the

embarrassed of it, so I'd eat it really fast. And then when I worked in the corporate world, if you took a lunch break, you were just not hustling, like you weren't effective enough, So then I'd eat really really fast. When I was a monk, we ate very very slow, but we only ate like one meal a day, so

it was very limited practice. And then when I left again, I went back to the corporate world and working world, and you're eating fast again, and I find what I'm eating slow, my digestion is better, my stress is better, everything's better.

a state of rest and relaxation. That's the parasympathetic state. But like you said, most of us eat in the sympathetic state where we're stressed out. Just trying to get through the meals. Sometimes we're on our computer or our phone while we're eating, and we never allow our bodies to go into this parasympathetic state. And we spend ninety percent of our life in sympathetic and ten percent in parasympathetic. And it's the exact opposite of how our caveman ancestors

used to live. They used to rest and relax all day long. They would walk around. The only stressful times they had is if they were being attacked by an animal or another you know, So we need to get back to taking time to eating our food, just not only for a digestion, but also for a parasympathetic state to have just an opportunity to spend some time with us.

And when you're in that state, you do have time that your body is able to recover and all your body needs. Your body doesn't need a lot of time to recover, but it does need some time to recover, and meals is a perfect time for that.

we buy in our supermarkets is filled with toxins. If you ever look at the label on it, you're like, you can't even pronounce ninety percent of the words on there, right, And just because you can't pronounce them doesn't mean it's a toxin. But the minute you start looking them up, you're like, oh, my gosh, there's some bad stuff in here.

Thank goodness, there are apps and there are websites now that can help us to understand what's inside of these products, because it's hard for the average Joe to really understand all these chemicals and they're bad or good for you. And so you can scan these products. And we mentioned this on the last podcast. There's an app call think Dirty. It's an app called skin Deep. There's a few of them out there that people can use. And the beauty of this is you only need to do it one time, right, Like,

how many times have you changed toothpaste in your life? Really? Really yea skin at once you're like, oh wait a minute, that's at the red level. Probably shouldn't be buying that. Let me see what the alternatives are. Okay, here's something that's green and it's affordable to me, and I can switch to that and then once you switch to it, that's it. You made that one percent change that day, and this is going to stack up to thirty seven hundred percent change for the rest of the year for you,

year after year after year. Right, same thing with your skin products that you use, your lotion, your hair wash. You also want to try to minimize the amount of perfumes that you use, your deodorants, all of it. You want to kind of look at There are perfumes out there that are considered non toxic, like essential oils and

things like that. But still our skin is an incredible barrier to the outside environment.

better hair care for people. I think we're convinced by advertisements on TV that we need to wash our hair every day, right, And the reality is The more you wash your hair, the more you're drying your skin, the more you're killing the microbiome of your hair, and your hair becomes more and more unhealthy. That's why every time you shampoo, you need a conditioner, because your shampoo is

drying your scalp. In reality, especially for men, if you wash your hair once a week or once was with shampoo, with shampoo right once a week or once every other week, it's much better for your scalp, much better for your hair, less exposure to toxins, your microbiome can flourish. When I learn this, it completely changed the quality of my scalp from you know, having dandro and having lots of dry scalp issues itchiness all day long, to having a great head of hair and no scalp issues.

it's super absolutely.

scientists decoded our entire genome, and we thought this was going to be the answer to disease, This was going to be the answer to reversing crime disease, keeping us live longer. And what we're learning since then more and more is it's not in the DNA. It's more about how our environment turns on and turns off. Segments of our DNA to either keep us healthy or develop in the opposite direction. And so we used to say, even just five years ago, that your DNA is really only

twenty percent of the equation. Now we're saying your DNA code is actually probably ten percent or less of the equation. Is which DNA segments are turned on and off? That's totally your environment.

usually later on in the process of accumulation. Okay, So you don't want to wait till you start feeling something. You want to start making these mini changes now so you stay healthier for the long term. Some of the symptoms of toxin accumulation include brain fog, include allergy symptoms, your skin has exima for example, you can have fatigue, not sleeping well. These are all symptoms that if you go to a doctor, they're like, I don't really know

what's going on. Really, toxic accumulation needs to be the fourth leg of that stool that we always talk about of health, right you, We have sleep, we have exercise, we have our nutrition. Toxins is that fourth leg that we need to start mitigating on so that we stay healthy for the long term.

Doesn't mean that the game is lost or it's too late. You just have to start somewhere at some time. To start decreasing your exposure so your body can catch up.

do that, right, I think there's.

with and air fresheners for example. You don't need any of that stuff, Okay, if you need very few products as diluted at different levels to clean things, and so soap is extremely effective. There's a great company I have no financial affiliation with them, called Branch Basics that I've gotten to the founder. She makes one product is non toxic.

You buy a big bottle, it'll lasts you for months, and you just dilute it to different levels for your windows, for your toilets, for your floor, and that's all you need. It's actually simpler and cheaper to do it that way. You know, she's changed how we clean our house completely because now we spend less money last time cleaning our house and it's not using toxic chemicals.

of Google, they are all telling us, Look, what we're seeing is we're going to be able to apply the power of artificial intelligence and quantum computing to the problem of disease. And there is not a zero chance that during our lifetimes we'll be able to cure most disease using this incredible power that's coming. Right. We're not there yet,

but there's a lot coming. So it's a really amazing idea to think about this, right, And it might sound like science fiction to some people, but my I found sounded like science fiction ten years ago, right, So what I want people to know is that just stay healthy and alive long enough to experience this technological revolution. Now that being said, if you go to the CDC's website, they publish every single year the top ten causes of death.

Number one is heart disease. In the top five are cancer and also Alzheimer's disease and metabolic disease is also in the top ten, but metabolic disease is one of the root causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and heart disease. So we can talk about all of those four because

I think they're important to touch on. And the reason is people might think that it's outsourced to their doctor to prevent them from getting these diseases, from getting these chronic diseases, but really, the Western medical system is not well equipped to prevent and to turn around these chronic diseases. But we, through our habits and through our routines, we absolutely can make these diseases a possible non entity during

our lifetimes.

or just old men, most people thought. The reality situation is there are people in their forties getting heart attacks, and women are particularly susceptible. And the reason is women don't have the same symptoms men have. Women's symptoms are more symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, inability to get

their day done. Men have severe chest pain at times with heart attacks, right, And so women get diagnosed later with heart disease and therefore they can't get treated for it. So there's lots of different types of heart disease. The one that we're mostly focused on is development of what's called plaque in the blood vessels of your heart. Plaque is the thickening of the blood vessel wall due to

many different factors that cause it to close off. Believe it or not, even though there's a lot of blood going through your heart, the blood vessels that supply your actual heart muscle to keep it alive are really kind of tiny. You used to operate on these when I was a surgeon, and you have to look under a microscope a lot of times to see these blood vessels to operate on them. And so they get blocked pretty easily. And that's what we're talking about. And how do they

there's a combination of factors. Say there's four factors that lead to heart disease. Most people think it's LDL cholesterol. That's not true. The four factors that lead to heart disease or number one metabolic disease, and that's just a fancy way of saying that our bodies unable to handle them. On of sugar that we have, so a glucose level high all the time, and our insulin levels get high all the time. Second factor is inflammation, and we can

dive into that a little bit more. Third factor is damaged to the wall of the blood vessel that's called the endothelium that happens when you have high blood pressure that's untreated for a long time, which over fifty percent of Americans have, and or high stress levels or even overtraining. And lastly is an accumulation of cholesterol in your blood vessel wall, specifically a kind of cholesterol that's grouped under what's called APO B, and we can talk about that and why that's important.

looking at the snack basket in the hotel. I couldn't eat any of it because most of it wasn't plant based now, but I was looking on the back of it and there was a bag of a very famous chocolate which the packet is only this big, like it's tiny, yeah,

and it has sixty percent of your daily sugars. That's if you should even be eating that much sugar anyway, But it's sixty percent of your daily sugars in a bag that I would as a kid finish in like three seconds, right, And so it's worrying to think about the amount of sugar intake we're having without even knowing. I don't think we're aware of how much sugar is in a packet of chips, a chocolate bar, the drinks that we're drinking every day, right, Like, there's no understanding

of it. So let's go through each of those as well. Let's start with number one.

my sandwich. Well, the refined white bread combined with the condiments like the ketchup and the mustard, there's a lot of sugar in there. There's even sugar is sometimes added to the meats that you're eating, and so if you were like a continuous glucose monitor, a sandwich for a lot of people can cause a huge spike. There are easy ways to mitigate this problem, and one of them is, of course avoiding refined grains, avoiding ultra processed food, but

also starting every meal with some fiber. If you put fiber into your system first, your body's ability to absorb the sugar that follows it is much reduced. That's one thing you can do. And the second thing you can do is move around after every single meal. All right, So instead of you go to a restaurant they give you a basket of bread or tratilla chips, say I'm not going to have that, please. Instead, I'll start with

the side salad. And as soon as you're done, instead of just going straight to your car or your couch, go for a little five, ten fifteen minute walk. Those two simple actions can completely change your body's relationship to sugar. In addition to avoiding ultra processed food, sugary drinks, et cetera. Yeah, I love that one. That's been the big one for me. Just I've been trying to structure my food eating in

that way, and the walking part is life changing. I've found that if I sit on the couch to what's a show, straight off to dinner, I'm now getting some massive reflux, I'm digesting food badly. There's there's some sort of discomfort that I'm feeling, whereas just walking around for ten minutes, all of a sudden, I'm comfortable. And that's it's such a small, simple step that people can say it's a small simple step, and you know, it doesn't

take a lot. Actually it really doesn't, just takes five ten minutes if you can do it.

high blood pressure. Let's define that high blood pressure is anything over one thirty over eighty in my definition, and there's huge research studies showing that for every ten points that you have of your blood pressure being over one thirty over eighty, you have a fifteen percent chance of having cardiovascar disease, an increase of fifteen percent of having cardiovascer disease and complications from it. So it's really important

to manage your blood pressure. Right. The problem is most of us don't even know we have high blood pressure until it's way too late. And the reason for that is where do you get your blood pressure? Meassure, right, your doctor's office? Yeah, right, if you even go to a doctor. Fifty percent of people don't even go to see a doctor, right, So that's true. Yeah, fifty percent of people don't see a primary care doctor. All of their medicine is administered through urgent cares and emergency rooms.

That's crazy, It's crazy right now, It is really crazy. If you talk to urgent care and er doctors, they think it's one hundred percent because they're seeing people all time. It's the busiest they've ever been since, you know, ers and emergency rooms were even invented. So anyhow, I think that even if you get your blood pressure measured at a doctor's office, usually it's a garbage measurement. And the reason for that is you're doing one blood pressure measurement.

Usually it's the last person that is just hired the doctor's office doing your blood pressure. And also, you know you're stressed out, you might have white coat syndrome. Usually that blood pressure is looked at. It's like, we'll take it again next year, next time you're here, and then it gets kind of ignored. The best way to do this I would do this if you're in your thirties is buy a blood pressure cup for your home. Look up a good YouTube video and how to measure your

blood pressure. You want to do a first thing in

the morning, sitting in a specific way. You want to do it three times, and you average those three readings. You want to optimize for one twenty over seventy. You want to try to be as close to that as possible. If it's anything over one thirty over eighty, that should bring an alarm bell in your mind. You want to try it again next week, do the same procedure. Try

it again the following to the same procedure. If this key's happening for three to four weeks in a row where it's over one thirty over eighty, you need to go see a doctor and bring them your blood pressure measurements and show them what you did. Because we have a lot of different ways to control blood pressure doesn't need to be just medication. There's sleep issues like sleep apnea that can lead to high blood pressure. There's dietary issues like too much salt in your diet, which I'm

not saying salt is bad for you. Salt is good. Some people will eat a lot of ultra processed food with a lot of additional salt and sugar that can lead to high blood pressure. Everything is very interrelated, as you can see, right. So the key is knowing. Once you know, you can mitigate for the bad effects of high blood pressure. The problem is now we diagnose blood pressure issues five to ten years too late. Then it takes us five to ten years of messing around trying

to tree it before we finally get it right. So people are living with high blood pressure for ten twenty thirty years. By then a lot of damage has already been done.

beneficial in reducing blood pressure naturally. Going for a walk after meals, sleeping better, all of these things, simple things, right.

comes down to the basics. And then being really aware of these little nuances. I feel like the more time I've spent with you, you realize, Yeah, it's about these simple things like your nutrition, your sleep, your exercise. And then at the other end, it's about the microplastics, the toxins, and these are the more nuanced things that require a bit more organization and orchestration. Right. Inflammation is one of the root causes of heart disease.

to all of us different roles. Right, So cancer cells get missed and you develop cancer, Amyloid accumulates in your brain, you develop Alzheimer's disease. These things happen because our immune system just literally doesn't have the capacity to do all the different jobs we're asking it to do. So there's one place where most inflammation starts, and that's in your gut. Okay,

most of our immune system. Eighty to ninety percent of our immune cells are located in our gut, and when our gut is unhealthy, toxins are instantly absorbed through our gut into our bloodstream, and that our immune systems is asked to fight these off. And so it's really important to maintain a healthy gut so that our immune system is allowed some time to do its other jobs.

is very important. We talked about toxins. The less your immune system has to deal with toxins, the better it has the capacit city to help detoxify you from viruses and fungise you don't get sick. And then lastly I would say is keep your gut healthy, you know, make sure you're eating a lot of fiber. Make sure you're avoiding things like advil and nonstroidal anti inflammatory drugs unless you absolutely need them. Don't take antibiotics unless you absolutely

need them that can kill your gut bacteria. Keep your gut as healthy as possible. Lots of fiber. It's super important as well for your gut to be healthy.

time to sort through all these things. Sometimes just writing someone a prescription for an antibiotic gets them out your door. And people are seeking antibiotics all the time. They want something, they want to pilt, they want to quick fix a pill to take. And I think that we have to be much more mindful because the same antibiotic that's killing your sinus problem is killing your gut bacteria. Right, So unless you absolutely need it, I would be very careful

about taking antibiotics and nonstoroidals. I think now you know, we've come to this age where we can buy these things over the counter and massive tubs of like one hundred and eighty pills of adavil, right, and the mini you have a little ache or sore, Even people going to the gym, they take a little advil before and to get a better workout. It's killer for your gut bacteria. So you want to avoid these if at all possible.

What do you do for a headache instead curcumin? Yeah, there's lots of natural remedies for you know, headaches, taking a nap. Circumin is a powerful anti inflammatory, especially if you take it with the paverin, which increases this absorption. Try at first. You can even try this if you're having back pain, neck pain. Look, I'm not telling people live with pain, absolutely not, But don't also become a chronic user of advil every single day.

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talked about. If your doctor talks you about LDL or you're following your LDL, really that's nineteen eighties nineteen nineties medicine. Now we have a new biomarker that everyone should know what this number is, especially once you hit the age of forty called apo B. Apo B is a protein wrapper around all the bad forms of cholesterhol. I'm doing air quotes here for your listeners, the bad forms LDL, VLDL, LP, LITLA, all these forms of cholesterol that are damaging to your heart.

So if you know what your apo B level is, you want to continually improve your diet, improve your activity, your sleep, your exercise to get that lower and lower so that you don't deposit cholesterol into your arteries.

of athletes in our practice. You know, these are people that are trained athletes, that are at the top of their profession, and when I do some simple blood tests on them, I see they have a ton of inflammation, They have metabolic disease, they have i ApoB the cholesterol marker, their hormone levels are off, and we have the technology now very simply to look at this. We just don't because we look at the mirror and we say, well, that must be healthy.

you have a family history that is not your destiny, your environment can turn off those genetic signals depending on the lifestyle and the environment that you live in.

I talked to so many people that say, my mother got Alzheimer's, so I know I'm destined to get Alzheimer's. And I tell them right off the bat that even if we did a gene test for you, there's a gene test for Alzheimer's called a POE if that comes up positive, that you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's.

We know we have the technology now to reverse that trend and prevent Alzheimer's in you from ever occurring, and in fact, we can keep you mentally sharp for the rest of your life if you just put into place simple lifestyle interventions.

genetic risk, this is actually developing Alzheimer's. Okay, So, the old test for Alzheimer's was we would have to do a high radiation scan of your brain to see if you had potential Alzheimer's disease developing. Because the radiation, because of the complexity of the scan, no one will get it until you've had a lot of the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's. Now we can get this blood test that highly correlates with the scan. It's called the Peetow

two seventeen blood tests. It's just come out a few months ago. Actually, it is very new, and I'm incredibly excited because now we can screen for Alzheimer's. We can see if our treatments are working because this blood bio marker can go up or down. It's actually a quantitative number. It's not just a yes and no, so we can actually see what direction you're headed and if the treatments are working.

is a technique called mental reprocessing. Our brain loves to work, It loves to do something. Specifically, what it loves to do is to learn new things, think about them, and then talk about them to somebody else without like an electronic device in front of you the whole time, right, So reading, thinking about it, talking about that book to

somebody else very powerful. This is why there's this huge study done on nuns that had genetic risk for Alzheimer's but never got Alzheimer's even into their eighties and nineties. And the reason is what were they doing. They were constantly learning about religion through their Bible and talking about and teaching it to people. This is what kept their brains healthy. Wow.

about something that isn't that you. So you're thinking about the person that cut you off in traffic, or you're thinking about the person who spoke to you badly at work, or you're thinking about your boss or whatever maybe, And none of those thoughts are learning or helping you or healing you or making you happier or making you healthier.

They're just spinning around in your mind absolutely, And as soon as you learn something, it interrupts that pattern now and now you're like, oh, wait a minute, I learned this really cool thing today, I'm going to share it with three people. And all of a sudden that's actually helping your brain.

as you sleep less, as you expose your shelf to more toxins, this is a problem. The opposite of that is having good levels of BDNF, Your BDNF increases, and you've seen these studies with meditation increases, with active learning increases, with exercise, walking increases BDNF levels. Anything you can do to increase BDNF levels in your brain, you should be doing it every day.

Doctor Dale Bredeson wrote a book called The End of all Zheimer's and it really gets your head wrapped around the multifactorial nature of Alzheimer's and all the different things that leads to it and is not just one gene. It's not just amyloid for sure. We know that as a fact, and it empowers you to understand that there's a lot of things you can do to prevent Alzheimer's and even reverse it if you have signs of cognitive impairment.

So I think it's really important for the mindset shift to happen, just for all of us as a population, that this is not the destiny that we are going to be handed. Is Alzheimer's disease or being frail that does not have to happen. We can all live vibrant, long, healthy lives. And I'm a big believer in education. There's certain books that I love. We've talked about a few of them. That's one that I think is very important.

WHOA one of us is going to get it? And that's a really sobering, painful experience, especially because so many people right now are losing people to cancer, even people are quite young. Yeah, you know, I have friends losing people their age. I have mentors, I have uncles, aunts, whoever may be. It feels like everyone I know at a certain point has it. Now, how do I avoid getting cancer? Right? Right? So?

but you know it's a big problem. Right However, other cancers, because we have better screening for cancers, we're diagnosing more more of them, but we're also treating more of them at a much earlier stage.

of reasons for that. A lot of those reasons are at the root causes of health that we talked about, poor metabolic health, inflammation, exposure to toxins. Once you start understanding those are the root causes and you start doing something about those root causes, your personal cancer risk starts to go down. And I think that's important.

can't predict what's going to happen in the game. You can plan for the game, and then based on your opponent's moves, you then strategically have to shift. And the quicker you spot your opponent shift in strategy, the better you cancer. The quicker we spot cancer, the quicker we see signs of ought disease, the quicker we see signs of Alzheimer's, the quicker we can make progress. Right, how late or early are we spotting cancer, heart disease Alzheimer's.

you know out there listening. If you're over the age of forty, you have not a colonoscopy done, get it done. These are things that your insurance cover. Skin cancer is another great example of this. There are apps now that you can scan molds and see if they're cancerous or not. Right, most people wait until it's just way too late to

go see a doctor and ask about it. So I think there's some level of personal responsibility that we have to take here to be more proactive and understand what are some of these markers, what do they mean, and can we check them earlier? And also we have to challenge our medical professionals that we see, why are you not checking certain blood biomarkers. We need to check these on a regular basis every time you go to the doctor.

Every year. I think it's important to ask your doctor to check for metabolic health, for inflammation, for ApoB the heart biomarket that we talked about.

And so some of them are blood tests. Some of them are simple tests to obtain at home, such as your blood pressure that we talked about. And I can list a few of these for you, and then we can give people a resource. Right, Okay, So some blood tests that everyone needs to understand hemoglobin A one C. This is a three month average of your blood glucose. Your doctor won't raise an alarm until it gets to five point seven or above. That's pre diabetes, six point

five or above his diabetes. You want to keep it as close to five point two or below. That's optimal range. If it starts ticking up to five point four, five point five, five point six, now we have a problem. We can just start making changes in our diet. In our movement to get it back in the right direction. Inflammation is tracked by a biomarker called E just CRP highly sensitive C reactive protein. This is a very simple, extremely inexpensive blood test. Your insurance covers it. You want

this as close to zero as possible. If it's over one or two, there's inflammation going on, most likely in your gut. Your gut starts at your mouth. You look at your oral health as well. The next biomarker we talked about at length is ApoB that's the one of your cardiac risk of all the bad forms of cholesterol. I also like tracking vitamin D levels. This is vitamin

D is a hormone. We track yours. We know that you know we need to supplement the vitamin D. Sometimes it's hard to be out in the sun thirty forty minutes a day. Right. Then there are markers that you can do at home. Blood pressure. There's a special kind of scale that I try to get everyone to buy. Is a scale that goes way beyond weight. Weight to me, is not super useful. What is useful is amount of skeletal muscle mass you have and how much fat mass

you have. You always want to make sure that you have enough skeletal mustle so that you can live your

day to day life. But also your metabolism lives in your muscle. People that struggle with poor metabolic health often have a lack of good amounts of skeletal muscle, and so we can track this using what's called the bio impotent scale. These are like twenty bucks. You can buy them and you step on them with bare feet. This is electrical current that you don't even feel, goes through your body and it tells you these numbers and you

see what direction you're headed in. What's really important here is men after the age of forty women after menopause, we start decreasing our skeletal muscle mass rapidly, and you want to start increasing your protein intake and increasing your strength workouts to track this skeletal muscle mass as well. So these are some of them, and there's a few more that are a little bit more technical but easy to follow. Once again, cheap easy insurance cover some of

these things. I think it's important to empower yourself with these numbers. And where can people go to get my website doctorshaw dot com and there's links right on there. They're free. I want everyone to have them. You don't have to come to me as your doctor. Bring this list to your doctor. That's fantastic, Doctor Show you. Honestly, every time we talk, I walk away feeling lighter, I feel clear, and I feel so confident that I can

actually make a change in my health. And I'm so glad that you share things in such a concise, interesting and also optimistic lens. You that people can go and live and make a change in their life. And these

resources are going to be huge for people. I think this episode is going to be one that everyone's going to share with a friend, a family member, whether you're dealing with a fear, whether you're worried about a particular health challenge that you might have, or you're just trying to get the basics right and be on the lookout for toxins in microplastics. I hope this episode has served you today. Doctors Show, Is anything that I didn't ask you about that you really want to talk about or

share with me and my audience? Yeah, I think you know. One important topic that you talk a lot about is how does mental health tie into all of this? And I think it's so important, and I'm seeing this more and more in my own clinical practice that if I don't address mental health, the physical health sometimes struggles in following. But also the opposite of true when I have patients that have struggling with mental health issue, whether it be depression, anxiety,

attention deficit, bipolar. If we're not looking at the biomarkers and what's going on in your biology, we're never going to be able to make major changes up here, right. And so a lot of people are on the high doses of medication, sometimes multiple medications, and guess what, the minute we get their hormones fixed, they're vitamin D fixed, they start reducing their dosage. We get people off medications

a lot of times, so they're so interconnected. So my reason for bringing that up is a lot of people they feel physically fine, but they're struggling with mental health issues. They still need to look under the hood and see what's going on in their biology.

many shifts or at least positive improvements. Yes, and I would encourage anyone who's struggling with something mentally to also go and prioritize these things that seem very physical, but ultimately it's just health exactly right.