Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, Dr. Casey Means (#57)

I think what it was for me is that I kind of look around the reality is that Americans are getting sicker every single year. Chrono's these rates are going up, kids are getting so sick. Age group children under the age of 18. So something's obviously not working. Yeah. There is almost no regulatory oversight for what companies can put in their product.

Fragrance says, alcohol manufacturing, public water, what people fail to recognize is that we're putting thousands of chemicals on our food in our bodies, in our water, in our furniture per day. And it's the synergistic effect of all these things together that can be so damaging. So... Metabolism is so simple. It's how we convert food energy to cellular energy. And what is our life? It is the bubbling up of all of those chemical reactions. What is death?

It is the absence of those chemical reactions. I had this patient I talk about her in the book, Sophia, and she's coming to see me for her sinusitis. It's very dramatic, it's very expensive for the patient. I know how to diagnose her, I know how to medicate her, I know how to operate on her. I've done literally nothing to make this person healthier. I don't really know why this patient is sick. And that's a problem.

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So awesome that we finally get to do this in person. I would love to start off by saying congratulations. I mean, you got a new book coming out. Good energy. It's called the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. May 14th, limitless health sounds awesome. Yeah. There's so much to back into here because I've been following your career for a while.

Obviously levels and continuous glucose monitors was, I think, how we first got that via that, we got introduced by a mutual friend. And levels was a game changer in that not many people still today aren't paying attention to their blood glucose levels. And just to see that being turned into a consumer product that's not just for diabetics, that gets into the world of giving people more data, arming them with more data. So they can understand really what's going on in their bodies.

Such an important mission. Yeah. But I would love to talk about and get into your journey. Because obviously you're a medical doctor, but you've got a different way. Walk me through that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I've taken a big pivot in my career. I did the whole like rising the ranks of the conventional system. You know, check all the boxes, go to medical school, go to residency, train as a surgeon. And I think what it really was for me is that I was about nine years into my training.

I'm four years into my head and neck surgery residency. And I kind of looked around and at the trends of what's happening in American healthcare. And the reality is is that Americans are getting sicker every single year. Like the more we spend on healthcare, now $4.3 trillion on healthcare. So the sicker Americans are getting. And it's getting worse every year. Connoisseurs, these rates are going up. Life expectancy is going down. Kids are getting so sick right now with like lifestyle diseases.

So something's obviously not working. Yeah. And when you're in the operating room day in and day out and you've got this scalp in your hand, like it's pretty dramatic. Like you're sitting there with this unconscious body in front of you. Yeah. And you're going to cut into them and change their life forever. And I was standing there, you know, I'm like a 29 year old, pretty sensitive woman. And looking down and thinking like, is there anything else we could be doing to be preventing some

of these like surgery? This is very dramatic. I'm going to cut into this person. I was I was head and neck. So it your nose and throat surgery. And we'd be drilling into their skull, sucking pus out of their sinuses, you know, doing ear surgery, you know, dilating the trachea for narrowing things like this. I'm looking at these patients and I'm thinking like we're doing these really dramatic things to them. But am I actually making this person like fundamentally healthier?

Like I'll never forget like that I had this patient I talk about her in the book. But Sophia and you know, she was like in her 60s and she had all the American disease disease. She had pre-day BDs. She had eye blood pressure. She had some depression. She was overweight. And she's coming to see me for her sinusitis, which is like making it hard for her to breathe through her nose. And I remember we went in, we did the surgery. It was her third revision sinus surgery.

And you know, you go in and you go to the motions. It's very dramatic. It's very expensive for the patient. And she's sitting in the post-op area. And she looks at me and she's like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I needed this so badly. And I'm like, kind of feel good. But I also feel like I've done literally nothing to make this person in front of me. Like actually healthier. Yes, we have sucked out pus from her sinus and made that whole bigger. I've basically done plumbing.

But like is this patient healthier? Absolutely not. Because the things that are actually causing the pathology throughout her body cannot be operated on. These are like fundamental issues with how the body is functioning. And at that moment, that was really a wake up call for me. I realized like, I don't actually really even understand why this patient is sick. Like I know how to diagnose her. I know how to medicate her. I know how to operate on her. But I went to Stanford Medical School.

I went to Stanford undergrad. I graduated honors. I have all these publications. I don't really know why this patient is sick. And that's a problem. That is a problem. And that kind of ripped me out of my slumber and put me on a journey towards really figuring out like why are patients in America sick? Like why are all these diseases going up at the same time? What's the connecting point? And why aren't we treating that? And so that of course led me to actually put down my scalpel.

I left the surgical world altogether. What year was this? This was six years ago. This was in 2018. I actually quit in my fifth and final year of surgical residency. And I said, I'm a doctor with all this training. I've got 50-year career ahead of me. I need to focus on really why are we getting sick? Why are we getting worse every year? How do we actually affect that? I think of all. Yeah. Anyone that's had aging parents has probably seen some version of this. My dad had a triple bypass.

And then six, seven, eight years go by. And then quadruple bypass. And it's just like band-aid. Great. Extended to the life by six or eight years. Another one. Another six or eight years. Third one, and then eventually he dies of a heart attack. And it's like nothing about that underlying issue was repaired. Yeah. And so how do we even start to begin to think about where can I do the detective work? Because so many people, I assume, have tried to figure out what's really the root cause here.

I mean, you can put to processed foods, you can put to sugar. What was your own journey like to figure out? Where's the real truth here? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, really what it was, as I was looking all the things I was treating as an ear nose and throat surgeon. And I was like, this is so fascinating. I'm treating sinusitis, laryngeitis, otitis, thyroiditis, paratitis, cellulitis, otitis. Everything is anitis. Anitis in medicine is the suffix that means inflammation.

So I'm like, oh my god, I'm an inflammation doctor. And I didn't even realize it. And a lot of it actually came down of sitting and meditating deeply on what is inflammation. Well, fundamentally, inflammation is this arm of the body, this sort of our army that fights things that it thinks are threatening. Right. And so I really did spend a lot of time just like sitting, staring at a wall thinking about that. Like our bodies are fighting something.

And then you think back to medical, so you think, okay, now we're learning that all timers in inflammatory condition obesity is an inflammatory state. Heart disease is an inflammatory state. A lot of inflammation going on in the American body. What does that mean? Right. Well, fundamentally, inflammation is the body experiencing some kind of fear, some type of threat. It is essentially biochemical fear.

So even for people who go deeper than just thinking about symptom management and whack-a-mole, medicine, and say, okay, well, it's chronic inflammation, we don't go with a level deeper and say, like, why is the body actually afraid? And that's a really interesting question to start going down. And then you can say, oh, yeah, it's the processed food and it's the chronic stress and it's this and that. But that still doesn't answer the question.

And so if you go to the, I think, deepest level, and this is the rabbit hole that I went on, you realize that actually there is something underlying this inflammatory state in the body that is actually even deeper. And that is metabolic dysfunction. That is an issue that is affecting 93% of Americans now, based on the latest research from the American College of Cardiology published just two years ago, 93% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction.

And this is a problem inside the cell that is really the centralizing point for how all these lifestyle things we talk about are generating inflammation because metabolism is the fundamental core process in the body of how we power ourselves. It's how we convert food energy to cellular energy. Right. I mean, the only thing that a layperson would know is like, okay, I want, or they'd say, I think they want a faster metabolism because they want to be skinnier.

Right. Right. Right. That's the only way we're ever told in school that if we don't go to school to become a doctor. Right. Yeah. Well, should we break? Let's break down. Yeah. I mean, because I think metabolism, it's the most fascinating thing I've been doing this now for 15 years. And I'm like, this is the most magical part of biology because metabolism is so simple. It's how we convert food energy to cellular energy, a currency of energy that we can use in the body. We are machines.

We have 40 trillion plus cells in our body. And every single cell in the body needs energy to function. Each of those 40 trillion cells is doing trillions of chemical reactions every second. And what is our life? It is the bubbling up of all of those chemical reactions. What is death? It is the absence of those chemical reactions. Death is the absence of metabolism working.

So the fact that we have 93% of Americans with some element of metabolic dysfunction in our modern world is basically like saying a lot of us are kind of like one foot in the grave while we're alive. That is what we're seeing. That is the chronology's epidemic. Would you say metabolic dysfunction? If we were to go into that piece of it, what I would initially think it just is, you know, would be like, oh, it just means like maybe they're overweight. How do you define that?

It's an underpowering of our bodies. It's literally not making enough currency of energy to power ourselves. And one result of that is that when we are having this problem, converting food energy, which is primarily glucose and fatty acids to cellular energy through the mitochondria, which is ATP. One of the things that can happen if that process is broken is that the body will store those substrates that it can't process into ATP as fast. Yes, that, yes.

And so the fat and the obesity epidemic is just one branch of fundamentally a core problem with the fact that the modern industrial world that we're living in, that our bodies are sort of sitting in all the time, is synergistically breaking the mitochondria, which is that part of the cell that converts that food energy to cellular energy. So then what happens? You get this underpowered cell and nothing could be scarier to the body than a cell that can't do its work.

So that is the deeper layer to this chronic inflammatory sort of world that we're living in. Did they call it like a senescent cell? Or is it like, is it a half functioning cell? I just kind of think of it as like a car that is running out of gas or a machine that doesn't quite have enough power. It's sputtering along to do its work. Does the body want to kill that cell? Does the seat is potentially dangerous? Yeah, it does seat is potentially dangerous.

So when the mitochondria is damaged by all these environmental and lifestyle factors of our modern world, which is across all the different pillars, ultra-processed food, we're getting less sleep, we have chronic low-grade stress, we're sitting 80% of the time, 100,000 environmental toxins that have entered our food water air in the past 50 years, our relationship with light and our relationship with temperature. All these things have changed drastically over the past 100 years.

They're all synergistically hurting the mitochondria. So that food to energy isn't working properly. The mitochondria, because it is hurt by all of these factors, insights what's called the cell danger response. It's like, something's wrong with me. I can't produce energy and it actually initiates a process called the CDR, the cell danger response. And that recruits the immune cells. It gets them all activated. There's something scary going on. Help. But this is the problem.

The immune cells can't help, because the problem is inside the cell. The problem is the way the environment is hurting the cell. So they are impotent. They are literally there. Like, oh, they want to like engulf a bacteria. They show up. They show up. They're called. And they create collateral damage. And they're speaking out all these inflammatory cytokines. But they can't fix the real problem, which is the fact that the environment is hurting ourselves.

You've got essentially what happens is just a shit show inside the body, where you've got a well-meaning inflammatory system that is seeing a cell that is under duress. And it can't do anything to change it. It can't take the donut out of your hand. It can't make you go to sleep earlier. It can't stop you from using that synthetic fragrance in your shampoo. It can't do anything about that.

So it will keep trying and trying and trying, creating all this collateral damage in your body and not really fix the issue, which is that the cell is underpowered because of the way our modern lifestyle is hurting this precious structure in the cell. And that's the root of every single chronic disease we're facing in the Western world today. That's a big statement. It's... So the fire department's been called. And it shows up.

The house that's on fire is in an untouchable, like, impenetrable structure. And so the fire department was just hanging out and it's causing all kind of street collateral damage, like clogging up everything. And there's a lot of information. The information at times can be good for us, though, right? Absolutely. Can you explain when it's good? Yeah, it's good and acute issues. So you think about something like a wound.

You get cut by a knife or like, you get cut on a tree when you're climbing a tree or you get an infection that comes in. So there's bacteria that enter the body. Your immune system sees it, goes to it, and gulps it, kills it, and then it retreats. It goes back to the bone marrow, the lymph nodes, etc. And then it's fine.

During that time, what it is actually fighting that bacteria trying to heal that wound, it is going to release all these cytokines and different mediators, and that's why you're going to get the swelling and the redness and all of that, the hallmarks of inflammation. And then once that is complete, everything retreats and you go back to a nice homeostatic normal.

But with the issue with metabolic dysfunction, this fundamental damaging by our environment of a core foundational process in the body that allows all cells to function properly, because that's not changing, because the environment is not changing, the cells can never calm down. The immune cells can never stop their work because it's not getting better. So that's chronic inflammation.

And every leading cause of death in the United States, other than suicide, is fundamentally, in some way related to the immune system being on overdrive all the time. And the deeper layer to that, why it's not settling down is because we're not fixing the core, core problem, which is that our cells have bad energy. Our cells are not able to power themselves.

So this is why I think metabolism is so interesting, because on the more deeper and bigger picture and almost spiritual level, we are the way we're living and the way things have changed over the past 50, 100 years in our world so rapidly, so unnaturally, it's fundamentally dimming our life force, the way that we create life force in the body, which is metabolism, which is the conversion of food.

And you can think of food we take in 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime, like a football field full of food. And it passes through us, and it not only rebuilds our bodies structurally, but it also is converted into this life force, this energy force that we can use ATP. And right now, because of the damage to the mitochondria from all aspects of our lifestyle, this flow of essentially external potential energy, cosmic energy, food is blocked through us.

So there's a block of flow happening through the body that's leading to these diseases we're seeing. And that's metabolic dysfunction. And we talk about insulin resistance and blood sugar problems. So it really, it's a fundamental block of flow of energy through the body. And because every one of those 40 trillion cells needs energy to function properly, this is why it shows up as so many different conditions. Because this is the other key point is, we have 200 plus types of cells in our bodies.

We have glial cells and astrocytes and ovarian thicc cells and endothelial cells and hepatocytes. And we have all these different types of cells all throughout our body. And each of them, they're differentiated. And so underpowering in a liver cell is going to look different than underpowering in a brain cell, in a neuron, or in an ovarian thicc cell. We know that the leading cause of infertility in the US, polystetocabarian syndrome, fundamentally rooted in metabolic dysfunction.

We know that Alzheimer's dementia, now being called type three diabetes metabolic issue. We know that heart attacks and stroke, blood vessel issues are metabolic issues. So where this core foundational problem is showing up will look like different things. But we're practicing outdated medicine where we still define diseases based on their symptom profile rather than their cellular physiology. Because when we were describing these diseases, all we knew was the symptoms.

We couldn't see these invisible things happening inside the cells. So we described depression based on a collection of symptoms. We don't describe it based on the cellular physiology leading to those symptoms. That is outdated medicine. That it because we are still practicing in that very much descriptive symptom-based paradigm. This is why the more we spend on health care, the worse the outcomes are getting. Because we're not actually approaching the physiology.

We're just playing lack of mole, reactive symptom-based medicine based on this outdated descriptive way of looking at diseases. So there's a field that's really emerged in medicine called systems and network biology, which instead of looking at everything as silos, is looking at the connecting points between diseases based on the physiologic similarities. And that's where we go straight to metabolic dysfunction. This is fundamentally a book about systems and network biology.

What is connecting everything on that level that we can now understand because of the incredible tools we have to really understand inside the cell, we have not cut up in medicine yet. We are still practicing lack of mole medicine based on turning little knobs on biomarkers and symptoms. And that is why it's not working. And this is the biggest blind spot in health care.

And so this book is a re-imagination of how we could both understand our own bodies and how we could create a system based on our real true nature, what's really happening inside the body. Where if we focused the arrow that $4.3 trillion arrow on actually the right problem, which is at the center of the cell, it's much more foundational, people would heal rapidly.

But in our current approach, we could spend $20 trillion on our current approach and people will not get better because it's not actually focusing on the true physiology that's causing disease. Gotcha. So if you follow me on the Instagram, I'm sure you've seen I'm doing 90 days, no drinking today is day number 25. And I've upped my cardio a ton, which feels great. I've been rucking a lot, which is where you put this weighted backpack on, while you're hiking.

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I think this is great because these companies have huge marketing budgets. They're great at introducing meditation to the masses. There's a saying in meditation that the only bad meditation is the one that you don't do, which I fully subscribe to. But if you've tried these apps, and you're looking for something else, you're looking for a little bit more depth, and a clearly defined path from an authentic, fully accredited Zen Master, then you have to try out the way.

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I'm so glad that he's bringing these teachings in the form of an app, because typically you would have to go to a Zendo, travel out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now it's fully ready to go on iOS and Android. So with this app, you'll get to enjoy 30 free guided meditation sessions, and they're all different. They're fantastic. There's no credit card required. Check it out, download it for iOS and Android. And like I said, with this, you're going to get focused training.

You're going to get depth, and you get it quality over quantity. Thewayapp.com. It's the change in depth that I have a feeling that you've been looking for. So is this a healthcare problem, or is this an individual problem? Because it sounds like, in some sense, obviously, if I go to my doctor and ask for advice around how to improve my metabolism, they're going to look at me with a blank stare. Maybe not some of the doctors I work with.

There's a lot of outdated doctors out there that are going on information that, as you pointed out, that's decades old data. How much of this do we have to take control of ourselves versus rely on healthcare professionals? And where can the healthcare professionals be helpful in helping improve our metabolic health? Hmm. Great question.

Well, the reason of doctors are really not going to understand what you're talking about when you walk in and say, hey, Doc, how do I improve my metabolic health? Is because fragmentation and specialization and reactiveness is so baked into our system on every level. Oh, yeah, there's a specialist for everything. Everything. There are over 42 medical and surgical sub-specialties. And what's so fascinating is that the more we specialize in healthcare, the sicker we're getting.

So that's obviously not. They're not networking, talking to each other. They're not talking to each other, but they also fundamentally are seeing the body as a collection of separate parts. And that is very much tied into the financial model of healthcare. Because if you imagine we actually adopt what I'm talking about in good energy, and we talk about these core foundational pathways that if we really addressed them, we could actually melt away a lot of the branches of the tree.

Well, that would put a lot of specialists out of work. Right. So right now, the core problem with healthcare is it's financing, which is that we have a system where there's a devil's bargain between two of the biggest industries in America. So healthcare is the largest and the fastest growing industry in the United States. And that is a business. It's not a nonprofit. It's a business that's designed to grow.

And the way that the healthcare business in America currently grows is by having more people in this system, having more things done to them over longer periods of time. And that's a stark economic reality that every single person listening needs to realize. Because unfortunately, even though you're a doctor, I can almost guarantee when in-demetis and to help people and help patients who've created a better world.

They are working in a $4 trillion system that is also in a devil's bargain with a $6 trillion business, the food industry, which the food industry grows by having more people addicted to more food and the healthcare system grows by having more people in the system, having more things done to them. So together, those two systems impact every single thing your doctor learns, how the research is done, how the medical education is taught, how the NIH functions, everything.

So the system has these invisible hands in it that are corrupting every aspect of the way we're taught and the way we learn. So, you know, I went to Stanford Medical School and I can say, unfortunately, with certainty that you have incredible minds going into a school and a system that is teaching outdated bad medicine.

It's fragmented, silo-based medicine and that is in part because the economic reality drives us to see the body as separate parts to ignore root causes because that puts one body in 10 specialist office as opposed to truly foundationally healing that patient which would eliminate a customer.

So it's almost like the framework and the scaffolding are they're just the organizational structure of the medical system is, it's like you have these doctors that I presume have good intentions like to get in the medical school. They're like, okay, I'm here to change the world. I'm here to help patients that come to my office.

But because they are entering a system that automatically makes them choose a specialty, forces them into something that's siloed information, it's like we're never given the chance to never given the chance to consider the whole. And is that part of what's missing? Is like they just are put into a structure that's just not designed to really think through the kind of importance of having this holistic view on health?

Well, it's so interesting is that actually prestige in the system and financial success within this system as a doctor is very much predicate on specialization. You think about like who is the most respected type of doctor in our system? It's someone who is hyper-hyper specialized. Like that. Like a brain surgeon. A brain surgeon. And I think about when I was at the end of medical school choosing a specialty, I choose from over 40 specialties to devote my life to one very small part of the body.

Even baked into that paradigm is the idea that the body is separate parts. Then you go into that. So I was in ear-nose and throat surgeon to become even more prestigious. Maybe the chair of a department, the chair of the department at Stanford Medical School I was there was a neuro-autologist. So he became an ear-nose and throat surgeon. Then did a fellowship in autology. So two square inches of the entire body. And then you become a neuro-autologist.

And then maybe you get a disease named after you, which he had, which was called minor disease. So on every level, this micro getting more and more focused is actually what is associated with prestige. And then you get into, you know, you think about if someone like that starts to back up and think about the heart and the diabetes and the other aspects of their patient, well, they're so specialized that their knowledge based on those things has diminished.

And so if you start practicing in that way, you're almost, hey, you're not incentivized to do it. It's basically pro bono work because you're not paid to talk to a patient about holistic lifestyle strategies. And you're kind of practicing out of scope. So it's actually putting you at risk.

So it's baked in and all of that is a trickle down effect from the core financial incentives of the system, which is why incentives are something I'm really obsessed with, just conceptually because it's these very top line incentives that drive huge amounts of downstream effects that right now are very, very negative. But getting to your question about how much of this is about sort of individual responsibility.

I think that we all would love for the system to take ownership of this and really help us along this journey. But the system has virtually no incentive right now to change, to focus on root cause health and prevention of reversal of a disease. That's not currently the model.

So the reality that people just need to accept and realize and not complain about, but actually just internalize is that it is our responsibility right now to be healthy because the, that if you just go on the standard treadmill of American health, you're heading towards sickness. The majority of the country is six, six and 10 Americans have a chronic disease, 93% have at least one biomarker of metabolic dysfunction, 74% are overweight or obese, 40% of Americans have a mental health diagnosis.

It's not good. So you just really do have to take control. And what's incredible about the time that we're living in right now in human history is that we actually, even though all these trends are sort of bad and scary, we actually have access to more information about our bodies, no doctor necessary than we've ever had in human history. There's a confluence of technological advancements that make it possible for us to live the healthiest and happiest and longest lives in human history.

But we have to access those. And so this confluence of factors that excites me so much is one, we of course have the wearables. So we have these, the markers that can tell us a bit about our day-to-day biologic reality and how our behavior is affecting that. So heart rate, heart rate variability, step count, sleep, sleep stages, oxygen saturation, very helpful.

We also have this brand new bio wearable revolution, which is, you know, the continuous glucose monitoring, literally seeing our key metabolic biomarker in real time with everything we do. And now there's new biosensors coming out like the Abbott-Lingo, which is going to tell us about ketones and lactate and alcohol. Oh, I hadn't heard of that. Oh, yeah. So Abbott has a new consumer device coming out? Lingo. Lingo. Which is three, there are separate sensors for different bios.

So you'd kind of have to poke it out yourself to get all of them. But I mean, there's clearly incredible trends happening where we are going to be able to really, truly see how the environment is affecting our internal foundational health in real time.

And then the third piece is the direct to consumer lab testing, which I could not be more excited about, which is where instead of begging your doctor for scraps of information about your blood work, you go online, you order 100 biomarkers, you walk into Quest or Lab, or you get them drawn, or you prick your finger at home, you get the results in a few days with deep interpretations. And then I'll, of course, with AI.

We're going to have even more rich interpretations of what those labs mean, and what the tea leaves of those labs mean in a way that our doctors were never really trained to do. So these trends are very exciting. And I mean, I have a chapter in my book that's a bold statement, but I believe it. It's weird at a time now where we need to trust ourselves, not our doctors.

And I mean that only on chronic lifestyle-based conditions, because the system is objectively failing on protecting us from getting these diseases or reversing them. They're going up every single year, the more we spend. So what each individual must do if we want to be healthy is understand some basics about core foundational health, learn where we stand on the biomarkers that tell us about those factors like metabolic health, and take ownership of working to improve it.

And that is not as complicated as we think it is. The paternalistic and phantomizing health care system has benefited from making people feel like it's really complicated to be healthy. In most American states, patients don't even own their own health records. The doctor owns them. It's crazy. And we say, you need to sign these forms to get this information, because it could be dangerous if you have it. That's bullshit.

That is absolutely favoring the system, having an information divide from you, so they can take advantage of you. So I think we're entering an incredible era that I'm so optimistic about where don't trust experts. Don't trust the science. Don't trust your doctor. Do not trust me. Trust yourself by understanding your own basic biomarkers and tracking them over time and really taking ownership. For the first time ever, that is possible. And this is just a reason phenomenon. It's very exciting.

It's super exciting. In the book, you mentioned there's five biomarkers that you pay attention to that can predict deadly diseases. Yeah. Can you walk me through these biomarkers and what they are? Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, the sky's the limit on lab testing. I mean, we could get 100 tests. But the first thing to say that when you said it earlier, the fact that you can actually do it yourself now, most people don't know. Yeah, I've had so many friends that say, I'm very fortunate.

I have Peter Tia and some other people in my corner to help me out. And I'm like, oh my god, you don't know what your ApoB is and they're like, what is that? And I'm like, go get a test. And they're like, my doctor won't give it to me. Right. And I'm like, you don't need your doctor. Like you can go to life extension. There's a bunch of different sites you can go to now. And just buy the test for $30. $30. And then go down and get your blood drawn and see what your results are.

And people have no clue that's actually the thing. No more than you've known in 20 years from walking and getting a crumb from your doctor about information. Exactly. You have to beg for it. It's a way to get in and see the doctor. And this takes five minutes to buy it online. It's great. Literally. Yeah. I mean, just for people listening, you just mentioned one company I didn't. Life extension. So life extension. Levels can give you these labs.

Next health, inside tracker, function health, genova diagnostics. Like just write these down. It's not expensive. And you can actually get these tests. I wish Boston Heart did consumer lab testing. It's probably coming. It's incredible. Yeah. They have like some of them. Yeah. And everything. Yeah. So to talk about the five, like most basic, these are five tests that are under $100 total. Your doctor will probably actually order them at your physical with no argument.

And they can tell you whether you fall into that 93% of Americans who met a ball of thin healthy or not. Awesome. Let's get into these. I'm curious. Number one is fasting glucose. I'll just list all five of them. And then we can talk about the ranges. Okay. Let me write these down. So I have a fasting glucose. Fasting glucose triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, waste circumference, and blood pressure.

So there's been two studies in the past five years, one out of UNC and one from the American College of Cardiology using these biomarkers. I'll actually add on a six, which is hemoglobin A1C because one of the papers uses that as well. And when you look at those biomarkers, these six biomarkers, which essentially define metabolic syndrome, that's how they created these statistics that are crazy, which is that 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy now.

Literally 100% of Americans could be metabolically healthy. These are lifestyle-based biomarkers. I can't overstress how abnormal and unnatural and modern it is that this many people have this issue.

So for these biomarkers, for them to be considered metabolically healthy, the ranges they define are fasting glucose less than 100 milligrams through us leader, triglycerides less than 150 milligrams through us leader, HDL above 40 for men or 50 for women, waste circumference less than 35 inches for women or 40 inches for men, and then blood pressure less than 120 over 80 and hemoglobin A1C less than 5.7%.

So if you are in those ranges for all of those biomarkers and not on medication for blood pressure or blood sugar, you're part of that 7%. And the reason, I'll just quickly touch on why these actually get back to what we were talking about with the mitochondria.

I'm not sure how many people are listening versus watching, but if you just imagine the mitochondria as a blob and basically food goes in and ATP goes out, an environment is essentially hurting that process like big X to the mitochondria. What happens is it blocks the flow through it. And so because it's glucose and fatty acids that are going to be going through, if the mitochondria is broken, it will literally put a block to the cell taking in more glucose because it can't process it.

It's like, I don't have capacity for this because I'm broken. And so stay out of the cell because otherwise. So what then happens is that you're going to have, of course, if the glucose isn't coming into the cell, the glucose is going to rise in the bloodstream. So that's why fasting glucose can be a helpful biomarker to have a clue of what's going on inside the cell because that fasting glucose is rising because the mitochondria is broken. It can't take it in.

So then let's talk about triglycerides. Why would elevated triglycerides tell you something about this foundational problem? Well, when you have that excess glucose rising, the bodies, well, we don't want all this glucose in the bloodstream because that's going to cause problems. Excess glucose in the bloodstream will stick to things and cause what's called glycation, which is really damaging. That's a key root cause of a blood vessel blockages.

So the body's like, okay, we can't have all this glucose floating around. So it converts it to triglycerides and it stores it in fat cells. It also can store it inside of cells. So that's why elevated triglycerides tell us a clue about this. Chemoglobin A1c, which is essentially a measure of the percentage of your hemoglobin molecules on red blood cells that have sugar stuck to them. Again, it makes sense.

If the cell is blocking glucose from going in because the mitochondria is damaged, that blood sugar is rising. It's going to stick to hemoglobin on the red blood cells and that's going to raise your hemoglobin A1c. They call it like the three-month average of your glucose, right? Yeah, exactly. Because blood cells last for a few months.

And so essentially by measuring the percentage of hemoglobin in red blood cells that have sugar stuck to them, it gives you essentially like a three-month average of your, you can estimate a three-month average of your blood sugar levels.

And then waste circumference is relevant because when we have mitochondrial dysfunction and we're blocking that glucose from coming into the cell and that glucose is being converted to fat, that is going to turn into visceral fat, which is the fat around your organs. And it's going to be basically laid down as this layer on top of your organs. And that's going to show up as increased waste circumference.

And then blood pressure is a really interesting one because you might think, well, how could blood pressure relate to this mitochondrial issue? But this one's really fascinating. So a little bit of science tangent here. But back to the mitochondria. Inside the cell, mitochondria is damaged from the environment. Can't process glucose to ATP. So the cell is basically going to say, I can't take any more glucose in. The way it actually does that is through insulin resistance.

So the cell says, we're going to block the insulin signal. And insulin is the hormone that allows glucose to come into the cell. So the cell blocks the insulin signal transmission. And that's called insulin resistance. Then the body in its infinite wisdom is like, well, we can't have all this glucose floating around. We're turning a lot of it triglycerides. But we also want to try and like jam glucose into the cell because we just do not want it floating around in the bloodstream.

So the body secretes more insulin to basically try and drive glucose into the cell. But of course, the cell can't process it. So it's a shit show. And with that high insulin levels, one of the things that does is it blocks the production of nitric oxide, which is a chemical in the bloodstream that dilates our blood vessels. So that's why we get the high blood pressure.

So this is just a quick overview of why those biomarkers that we should all know can all tell us about something going on inside the cell inside the mitochondrial dysfunction. So every single person listening should go look at their lab results or they're going to the health record, look at their physical exam data from last year and see where they stand on all those biomarkers.

Because if any of those are out of range, we should be focusing a huge amount of our attention on getting it in range because having that a ball of dysfunction will lead to so many of these symptoms and diseases that we're suffering from in the Western world today. And those are all super cheap, easy to get. Let's talk about more expensive. A lot of people don't like to go get blood draws. Yeah. If you're going to go in and do this, it's your shot to say, okay, one stick, give me some more data.

What would you, because I consider these like pretty table stakes, like numbers, like, basic, they are as basic as it gets, but they're important. I mean, if you, if we were to dinner party and ask everyone what's your triglycerides, I bet no one would know. Right. Everyone needs to know. Right. Minor 47, what are yours? Like, you need to know. I feel like there's a few things that are also like, you, apobies, gotta be a huge total.

It's like, would you consider that to be the biggest predictor of heart disease? I think at this point, the apob is thought to be pretty much the best marker we can look at. And nobody orders somebody order. So let's talk about the second tier. So that is, yeah, you got them done. You got 75 bucks. Go do it. Right. Because you, we need to make that 7% of Americans much bigger. But then, of course, there's the fun. Let's get into the next one. Yeah. Give you more riches.

So apob, of course, apob is basically telling us about a protein that lives on what are called lipoproteins, which are these structures, these spherical structures in the blood that carry cholesterol. And the particles, these lipoproteins that we know promote heart disease, there's several different types of in the blood, but they all have this apob protein on them.

So by looking at apob, you can actually understand all the blockage promoting cholesterol containing particles in the blood as opposed to just like one, which is LDL. So apob is like a broader picture of these potentially blockage causing particles in the body. So it's really important. So apob is a key one. And what's so crazy, Kevin, is that there's not a standard range of what we should be shooting for.

I think at this point, Peter Tia wanted to be less than 50, so 40, 50, yeah, if you get it done and look at the lab slip, it'll say like less than 130 is fine. That's insane. Huge range, right? So I was in the 130s when I got mine tested. Wow. And my dad died of a heart attack. My grandpa died of a stroke. Like it runs in the family, it's a genetic thing. Yeah. And so they put me on a statin initially. And he got all of my other my triglycerides, all my HDL, everything was looking great.

And then you go test apob being it's still high as can be. And it's like, oh shit, okay, there's still an issue here, right? And so I ended up going on a, is it PSK one and him? Yeah, and three, yeah. Yeah, and that was, and that's a shot. And you do it once every two weeks. And it dropped my apob being like crazy. Wow. And so that got me, it's a much cleaner mechanism than I guess in the statin. A Tia prefers it, it's expensive as hell. Insurance. It doesn't cover it.

It does for some people, but it won't for me. I think God, the Amazon started covering it. So, oh, well, Amazon prime, I don't know if you use prime pharmacy, but it's kind of amazing. For CGMs, yeah. Yeah, so it's great. So, basically, Amazon prime will have cheaper than your insurance oftentimes. So, my insurance was charging me like $2,500 a month for this drug, which is crazy. Yeah. But that was for three shots, that's six weeks. And they now prime was at 1,500 or something like that.

So, it's come down dramatically. It's still very expensive. Yeah. But it's like that or death, like I'll choose to spend a little bit more on the compound. But, you know, that was a huge aha moment to me because no other doctors were talking about this. Yeah. I couldn't find any literature anywhere. And this was like eight years ago that it's here, it was like, hey, this is something to pay attention to.

Yeah. And I feel like that's the same thing going on with a bunch of other markers, you know, home assisting, LP LA. Like there's a bunch of things here that probably are a good additional add-ons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Oh, vitamin D levels. I just saw that in your book. That's like another great one. So, just run through and I unpack all of these in the book. And one of my favorite parts of the book is just literally looking at what are the standard ranges for these tests?

Yes. Are ridiculous. And then if you actually look at the research, like where should we actually be shooting for? Often it's like half or a third of what the standard ranges tell us. So, the other tests that I think can be really valuable, you mentioned APOB. I really like HSCRP, which is an inflammatory motor. So, high sensitivity, C-reactive protein. It's a protein made by the liver.

It often goes up in states of inflammation because something really important for people to realize is it's not just the APOB containing particles that are going to cause heart disease. It's those particles dropping off cholesterol in the blood vessels and creating the inflammatory cascade that leads to plaques and blockages. So, it's not just that. It's also the mix of damaging physiology happening the blood vessels that creates a fertile soil.

And those two main damaging physiology are oxidative stress and chronic inflammation. It's that swirl of cholesterol, oxidative stress, which can be thought of as essentially like damaging reactive molecules in the body, plus the inflammatory cells that together create these mucked up plaques in the blood vessels. So, because of understanding that physiology, we want to have a sense of our oxidative stress and our chronic inflammation. It's not C-reactive protein. Yeah, okay.

Absolutely. Now, this is one where the standard ranges are absolutely insane. They say basically like less than three is okay, less than one is ideal. The research actually suggests that less than 0.36 is ideal for the least risk of disease. So, that's 10 times less than what people, a doctor might say, oh, you're okay. If I saw someone with a 2.9 CRP, I'd be very concerned. I want to see it. The lab usually goes as low as it will go as less than 0.3. That's what I want to see.

I want to see very low CRP. You're scared. I mean, now I got to go back and look at mine. I don't know. People should be looking at their CRP. And remember, inflammation is biochemical fear. Mm-hmm. So, if your CRP is high, you need to be going and looking through every aspect of your life. The toxins in your shampoo. Yes. The childhood trauma that you haven't resolved. Your fear of mortality. What is causing fear in your body? Because all of it can impact your immune system.

Right. So, CRP, now a test that almost no one talks about that I think is really important is GGT. Who I don't know what that is. That's talk about this in the book. And it's. I love Newtons. Gamma Glutamil Transferase. I'd be curious to hear what Peter Tia thinks of this one. So, GGT, it's a protein that's made in the body that's concentrated in the liver. And it's one of the few tests that can offer a hint of what the oxidative stress levels in the body are. And so.

And as an output of the liver, so this is come along with the AST and LT. It's really interesting because one of the roles of GGT is to metabolize glutathione, which is one of our key antioxidant molecules in the body. So, we're churning through glutathione really quickly. We're going to raise our GGT levels. And this is on a standard liver function panel test, but no doctors are looking at it as a sign of oxidative stress.

So, I read about this in the book, but for GGT, the lowest risk for men is less than 25. And about less than 20 for women, although some papers suggest less than eight. So, we really want to shoot for GGT to be low. So, I like GGT for oxidative stress, HSCRP for inflammation. Look at that in concert with the APOB and the LDL and these other markers, because that's going to give you like, through those tea leaves, you can see like, what's happening in my vessels?

You know, and then on top of that, I really like to look at liver function tests. So, ASG, I'm bad because honestly, I can, so I quit drinking recently, which has been great. But when I was consuming alcohol on a regular basis, my liver ends up to just not through the roof, but they're not good. Like 40 kind of issue, like 38. And you know, it's you like to see them in like nothing. What do you want to see? 317. Yeah. And the reason is because the liver is really our key metabolic organ.

You know, it is the organ that's going to really be so key in determining our level of insulin resistance, because it's connected to the pancreas, which makes insulin through the portal vein. So, if there's problems with liver cell functioning, it's going to be inciting more insulin resistance in the body, because of this deep connection between the pancreas and the liver.

And so, one of the things that can damage our liver cells is if they're filled with toxic fat from basically part of this insulin resistance process. And so, when we're ST and ALT or high, it's a sign that there's damage to our liver cells. We want pristine livers. We want pristine livers, which means they're not filled with fat. They're not dying.

So, this means of course, getting rid of all the added liquid sugar, any fructose, beer, alcohol, refined processed grains, refined processed sugars, these things all are going to go straight to the liver. So, the liver is the first pass from digestion and it's connected to the pancreas. So, we just want to make it pristine. So, AST and ALT are really a sign of that. So, less than 17 is where we want to shoot for, based on my review of the literature.

And the insane thing is that the standard ranges are less than 55 and 48. Right, exactly. Which is really, that basically means there's damage happening. So, those are ones that I love. So, we've talked about GGT, AST, ALT, HSCRP. Most important test, I think, other than APOB that you can get is fasting insulin. Yes. Absolutely critical test. I'm going to have to ask you about that. It's like $30. Yeah. And is... What's that going to tell people that comes back high?

If it comes back to the mitochondria. If the mitochondria is damaged because of our environment, from all these different factors, food, lack of sleep, sanitary behavior, chronic stress, poor light hygiene, environmental toxins, etc. The cell is going to block, want to block glucose from coming in because it cannot process it through a mitochondria. The way it will do that is creating insulin resistance, blocking the insulin signal into the cell.

The body will respond by creating more insulin to try and drive, to overcome the insulin resistance to drive the glucose into the cell. Because the insulin will open up the shell, the shuttle, the glucose in. When insulin binds to the insulin receptor on the cell membrane, it creates an intracellular signaling cascade that brings glucose channels from inside the cell to the cell membrane, glute-for-channels that let the glucose flow in.

Insulin resistance, which is fundamentally related to mitochondrial dysfunction, will block the insulin can bind to the receptor, but it will not transmit the signal inside the cell. Therefore, the glucose channels will not go to the cell membrane. The body wants that glucose out of the bloodstream, will secrete more insulin to try and overpower the block. So what will happen is your blood levels of fasting insulin will rise.

That is a clear clue to you that there is a problem inside the cell with mitochondrial dysfunction, with the cell filling with toxic fats, etc. So I look at that biomarker as just a clear signal that there is a foundational dysfunction in how ourselves are able to power themselves, which is not good. We need to be able to power ourselves.

So fasting insulin's critical, why it's also critical from a disease risk standpoint, is that fasting insulin, as it rises, and the body basically is trying to jam that glucose into the cell, it will work for a while. It will overpower the block and allow the glucose to come into the cell. So for a long time, the glucose in the blood can actually look normal while the fasting insulin is rising. Fasting insulin changes 10 to 15 years earlier than fasting glucose changes.

Because it's overcompensating for so long. So we are missing this huge window where people are becoming an expressing profound insulin resistance, but their fasting glucose looks normal. But how do we define diabetes in our country? Fasting glucose. So there's probably this gigantic swath of people who are deep on the insulin resistance spectrum. And they have no clue. They have no clue. So this is an example I mentioned in the book, which I think is so powerful.

And I'll just use you and me an example. We both go to the doctor. We get our fasting glucose checked, because that's the marker that we check in American medicine. We each are 88 milligrams stress liter. The doctor says to each of us, you're totally fine. You're doing great. You're in the clear. Yeah. Let's say I have a bunch of mitochondrial issues and my body is expressing insulin resistance. And so my fasting insulin, which is not being checked, is 30. Mm-hmm.

You, your mitochondria doing great, you don't have insulin resistance. Your fasting insulin is two. Mm-hmm. Yours is two minus 30. Okay. So I am profoundly insulin resistance and have a much higher likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, stroke, chronic liver disease, chronic kidney disease, depression, anxiety, gout, infertility, migraine, chronic pain, all of these conditions. And that doctor is telling both of us that we are the same.

But we look the same to the base on the lapse of pulse. Because we're both young and we look the same. And actually, I'm going to probably die earlier and I am going to develop these expensive terrible chronic diseases. But I don't know because they are not checking that test. That is so problematic. Now, probably on my labs, my triglycerides would also be starting to creep up. Right. And because some of that and my blood pressure might be creeping up too, so I could probably see some clues.

Mm-hmm. But let's say my triglycerides were 125 and years were 40. The doctor would still say we're both normal. Right. Because less than 150 is the reference ranges are all screwed up. So my call to action for people is like, the system's not helping us on this. You have to take ownership for these basic tests that we're talking about. It's in the book. It's one chapter. Peter Tia talks about it all day. It's in his book.

We need to take ownership for these tests because A, we can, with the technology and direct to consumer tools we have today. And B, because the system's not changing fast enough. Yeah. So we talked about, yeah, fasting insulin. I think the other one that I love is vitamin D just because it's involved in like literally dozens, if not hundreds of chemical reactions in the body, many of which is. It's really a hormone that it is a hormone, right? Yeah. It's a hormone. Yeah, it's a hormone.

And it's related to immune function, metabolic function. I was 12, by the way, when I just got my check. Now, the good news is that this was a decade ago. A decade, okay. Yeah, okay, okay. So when I first had my check, it was like 12. And even back in this before I had it at T, it was like, it was over a decade ago. And even the docs by the way, it was like, that seems a little bit low, thankfully. Yeah. And I started supplementing it and got myself up to the 40s-ish range. 40s, okay.

That's good. The standard, the NIH recommends 20 to 50. And I would say that from the research I reviewed, we really want it more like 50 to 60, 60. Yeah. Yeah. Like 40 to 60, 50 to 60. But I mean, if you're in the 25s, like it's too low, that such thing is too much vitamin D. I worry about that. So these mega doses of things. We can talk about home assisting too and help people make a dose to correct that. Very hard to have vitamin D toxicity. It is possible. It is extremely rare.

There's been times for me where I'm taking 10,000. I use a day and I recheck and I've barely got it up like five points. To me, honestly, I think a huge part of why the vitamin D levels are so insufficient in our country is because the average American is spending 93%. 80% of their time indoors. We are not seeing the sun. And we are not even getting baseline amounts of sun. If you think about the concept of indoors, it's actually a very new concept in human history.

And we have now, we live on this spectacular planet with this spectacular star in the sky that literally is our life source. It creates hormones in our bodies. It creates, it's photon energy is what helps define our circadian rhythms. Its photon energy is sort of the carbon carbon bonds of plants that ultimately we then, like when we're doing metabolism, what we're really doing is liberating the sun's energy from carbon carbon bonds in our mitochondria to power our lives.

We are intimidated to the sun and we are choosing to spend 93% of our time in a box totally separated from that energy. No wonder we're sick. And then of course, there's everyone's demonizing the sun. But like safe interaction with the sun where we're not getting burned is absolutely critical for our circadian biology, our hormonal biology, our metabolic health. And I think that if we safely could spend more time outdoors a lot of our vitamin D would be a lot better.

Cause I think supplementing can only go so far. Yeah, that's a great point. I feel like there's more to it than the METSI will probably figure out related other positive benefits that come from the sun that aren't just vitamin D related over time. Like I just get a natural mood boost from the sun that you don't get from self-mentation. There's more going on there than we know of. Yeah, I mean, it's full spectrum light. And we're light sensitive organisms.

Yeah, remember when everyone was like, what was it they were obsessed with? Was it vitamin E or something? Or was it careteens where they were like, they were beta-careteens was like the hotness and like the 90s or something. And they're like, actually, it's the whole range. It's mixed careteens. Like you have to have the whole spectrum to have the whole complete picture for your body. And I think the subsets would just any one thing is dangerous territory to be in.

Yeah, well, it's like carbon capture. It's like we focus so much on like me to capture carbon. It's like we need to build an ecosystem that has a healthier relationship. And this is what I love the farmer, Will Harris, who's the CEO of White Oak Passers, he's been on Rogan and several podcasts. But what he talks about when we think about like carbon and things like that, it's you can't have linear solutions or isolated solutions for complex ecosystems.

And the body and the environment are complex interdependent ecosystems. And so linear solutions like isolated solutions like carbon capture or statins. It doesn't work because you can't take a heavy hammer to a complex interdependent ecosystem. You need several subtle nudges that create a harmonious system for health of that system.

And that's a fundamental shift we need to have in both the environmental conversation and the healthcare conversation is how do you actually utilize multi-dimensional nudges that take into account the true nature of the system to create harmony rather than to force it into something, which will never work. It will never work. Love to cover a couple more biomarkers real quick. Just why I have you here.

And then anything else you want to add to that extended list for people, well, we've covered so much about fasting insulin and a fasting blood glucose. What are your thoughts on a glucose tolerance test? Are they still useful? Because I had one done about a decade ago. You drink this sugary drink, which is just like pure glucose. And then they draw your blood at intervals of 30 minutes or whatever it may be.

And I got to see a picture of, not only the spike in the curve, and I guess you can do those CGM obviously today. But you get to see the insulin response as well, which is cool. And the one thing I figured out a decade ago was that I, but was a poor disposal of glucose. I'm like glucose was say elevated longer than most peoples. So on the standard all glucose tolerance test, they're not going to be testing insulin. So that was a special test that I must have happened.

That's a T.I. ordered it for me. So yeah, special one. Okay. There are no people. So it's just glucose. Oh, well, then you can just go see. Yeah. I was going to, I was like, this is, I will never, Glucola will never pass my lips when I am pregnant. There is no chance in how I'm going to take a glucose. That's a hard one too, because the doctors won't let you go unless like you actually do those glucose tests.

If you're pregnant, there's doctors who are trying to bend because there are some toxic chemicals in the pool. They put coloring and like artificial fiverries. Mine was like pink or something. So weird. What does it do to your baby? Like it's biking the hell out of their glucose like on day zero. Yeah. I will not ever be taking glucose because I've been aware of continuous glucose monitor, high pregnancy, and see if I'm ever getting above 120, 130, 140. And if I do, I'll pursue it further.

But I mean, if I can have a constant movie of my glucose throughout my entire pregnancy, it's infinitely more valuable in my mind than having this super unnatural load. And who knows what that's doing to you, to the baby, to your stress, your inflammatory markers, and just basically getting three data points from that. So now what you're talking about is an insulin response test, which I think can be very valuable.

But I think that unfortunately for the average person listening, I doubt their doctor would even know a that it exists or how to order it. I never learned about this test until Mark Heimann and Peter Tia were talking about it in their books.

But basically, it's you take a glucose load 50 or 75 grams, then you see what happens to the insulin levels over time, which can be very, very valuable because if you can get a baseline fasting glucose and then see what happens after the glucose load and after two hours, you can really start to see like how potentially elevated your insulin levels are over time and get really early signs of insulin sensitivity.

So Mark Heimann actually thinks that that particular test, the insulin response test is the most important test in like all of medicine. I've never had it done for myself. I think at a baseline fasting insulin for everyone listening. And certainly if you have a functional precision medicine doctor who can order that, that can be really helpful too as well. Well, who's your favorite? And I'd be curious to know what levels are doing on this front.

But so many people, these concierge doctors are insanely expensive. A lot of people would love to have this type of advice, this type of conversation with their doctor. There's a bunch of startups that have tried. I thought one medical was going to be that for a hot minute. I was like, oh, one medical is going to be like that cool little hip doctor that gets it. And then it turned into just a big enterprise. And yeah, what are your thoughts on, is anyone doing it well?

And then what are you doing at the mentioned? I didn't even know you could order tests from levels now. Is that something that level is going to, is going to kind of like hopefully play a bigger role in over time? Certainly with theoretic consumer blood work for sure, because glucose monitoring is an incredible tool, but it's not telling you everything as we all know. Like it's one data point.

And so actually having the contextual information from your blood work is very important, which is why we move towards offering focused lab work as well. I think that some of the companies that are doing it well, I mean, in terms of easily accessible, more precision functional medicine, I would say parsley health is a really great option because it's telemedicine. It's covered by insurance and it's quite inexpensive. I haven't seen parsley yet. Parsley, yeah.

So I always recommend that for people who are looking for an entry point to a doctor who kind of gets it more. And they make sure their physicians are kind of up to speed on the latest science or on. All trained by the Institute for Functional Medicine, which is quite aware about a lot of this stuff. You're not going to have a fight about ordering fasting insulin with a doctor. Amazing. Then there's the next health I really like, which is expanding throughout the US.

And that for about, I believe $200 a month, you can get access to a functional medicine, precision medicine doctor, and a really extensive lab panel. So that adds up, but like $200 a month is like something that is reasonable. And then the concierge doctors you're going to be getting to that higher price point. I love IFM.org, institute for functuralmedicine.org, which has a provider directory.

And so in every single state, there will be dozens if not hundreds of doctors who are practicing this type of medicine, many of whom may take insurance. And then books, I mean, I think that outlive and good energy and a lot of David Prolet or Mark Hyman, Terry Wallace, they're got free. They're amazing people writing about this stuff. And so a lot of it is just like doing your own they run a Patrick's grade to you. They run a Patrick, absolutely. This is super helpful.

I didn't even know about those organizations. That's great. One last bio marker and I promised to stop and get back to some of the stuff in the book. Home assistant, what are your thoughts on it? It seems like nobody really knows what it is. Yeah, I mean, home assistant is a marker that can really give us some strong, strong information about our heart disease risk. But it's not causation. It's more correlated. No, it's more correlated.

There are not like standard ranges, although for my understanding, and I don't quote me on this, it's not a test that I actually order very often, but we want it kind of less than eight. I think what it does is it gives us a sense of sort of our methylation, our V vitamins sort of status. If we're not essentially recycling some of our V vitamins well, which are involved in like a lot of different biologic processes, home assistant can go up.

And so it's sort of giving us a clue about some foundational processes in the body that are related to like many, many important things. So for people who's home assistant is high, which like most people I've seen, I rarely see a home assistant that's actually like in the super healthy range. I don't know if we've had it tested. No, mine's really high. And mine is more related to, I believe I have the MTHFR mutation, genetic mutation.

So I really can't absorb the V vitamins in the way that I should, especially like full eight and 12. And so if I supplement with it, I can get it down a little bit. Honestly, alcohol is the biggest one for me. If I drop alcohol, it goes down. No way. Interesting. And pretty rapidly too. Yeah, most people talk about if you have a high home assistant, you want to get unmetallated V vitamins. Like because you're basically not methylating, you're not doing that process well.

If you do too many of the methylated Bs, they give you anxiety and weird stuff happens. Too much. Yeah, just like I get really like, creepy crawlies on arms and it's horrible. But probably everyone should be, if you're taking a V vitamin, you probably should be taking methylated V vitamins, because you're going to kind of get more of the active form. But yeah, it's a test that I would just say, I haven't gone as deep on it, to be honest.

Yeah, but I have seen in patients and myself that it's kind of hard to get it below 80. It's really hard. Although I stopped drinking also in January, and I'm now really curious to, I totally know that it had a relationship with alcohol. So I was excited to check it again. Yeah, I took a month off last year and then I took, there was one point where I would just took a couple weeks off and I happened to be getting a blood draw at the same time.

After a couple weeks, and I was just completely dropped. Oh, that's so cool. And then of course, the second I started drinking, I was just shooting right back up. And I was like, oh, damn it. Yet another data point on why that glass of wine in the heat of being stopped. I know. Good. So, okay, cool. This is super helpful. You mentioned something really crazy. I took a note here, because I didn't want to get away 100,000 toxins have been introduced.

The scariest thing I think about is, especially with kids, we give them to drink out of glass bottles and things like that. I think about all these microplastics that are being released. Did you hear about that teetless tea bags? Did you hear about that? Do you know the plastic tea bags? Did you hear about how many, it's like a billion microplastics or whatever get released in each tea bag? Is it the way their laser cut and everything, they have all these little fragments?

What do you think about all these toxins? What are your biggest offenders? How do we fix them? Is there such thing as detoxing? Can you sweat some of this stuff out? Runopathic will say, sulfur fain's great. Like it shows that people that live in environments where there's a lot of pollutants in the air. If they take sulfur fain as a supplement, they literally contest the urine afterwards and see the pollutants in the urine, which is just insane. How do you tackle pollutants?

It is astonishing to me what's being allowed. There is almost no regulatory oversight for what companies can put in their products. And there's a lot of really crazy loopholes, like especially around fragrances and alcohol manufacturing and like public water, where things just don't have to be disclosed. And I think people just need to be aware of that, is that there is not some like entity at B protecting our products from potentially damaging chemicals.

There's like this concept called G-RAS, which is generally recognized as safe designation. I always thought that was grass, but yeah. But what's interesting about it is that companies can essentially self-elect to do the research on G-RAS and it's the companies themselves essentially showing safety. There's no real oversight. And nothing in G-RAS talks about the synergistic effects of these different chemicals being in our body at the same time.

So people will make cases like, oh, we'll glyphosate with roundup. Well, these studies, which are of course like all paid for by industry, like doesn't show that it has a really a ship with cancer or whatnot. But what people fail to recognize is that we're putting thousands of chemicals on our food in our bodies, in our water, in our furniture per day. And it's the synergistic effect of all these things together that can be so damaging.

So I think we all need to be really aware of it and take reasonable precautions to protect ourselves from these toxins. We're all lustig. He's metabolic health warrior, crustorameridus of neuroindocrinology at UCSF. He actually thinks that 15 to 20% of the entire chronic disease and obese epidemic is the result of the environmental toxins. He was an author on like a 150 page paper that came out two years ago, which was entitled Obesigins.

So there's a new class of these, these chemicals are now being categorized as Obesigins, which what that actually means is that many of the chemicals have been positively related now to essentially promoting fat promotion in the body through a lot of different mechanisms. Some is because they change our epigenetics, they literally change the folding of our genome.

Many through the mechanism of how they impact our microbiome and of course our microbiome is getting familiar to our metabolic health. The bacteria and our gut make byproducts that talk to our mitochondria, it's incredible. And then of course, as direct mitochondrial toxins through all these different mechanisms, we're turning ourselves into like little 3D printers of fat basically, because we're blocking our metabolic activity.

So I would say broadly speaking, the main things we want to really be aware of are air, water, what's on our food, our personal care products at home, our home cleaning products, and then like our furniture essentially, because those are some of the things that we're like exposed to all the time. Let's walk through each of those just real quick. So air, I got that cover, I got a bunch of blue air filters and I changed my filters regularly. So I have take out the volatile chemicals and whatnot.

They try to detect them as well and turn them on. Yeah, do the cooking in the kitchen, they turn themselves on, they try and get to work. But also like a little life hack here, just go outside. Our air outside is so much less polluted than our air inside. In an LA? I think, I mean, the homes are, we're just literally surrounded right now by products. No, it's a great point. I laid down the other day, it was a play with my dog and my body hit my rug. You know when you get the right light angle?

And the pop? And you see the pop. Oh God, yeah. All these little micro things are floating around. And I'm like, what the hell are these those squiggly things in the air? And I'm like, oh, that's like nylon fibers coming off of like, that I'm breathing in. Yep. So I mean, yes to air doctor, yes to filter. What is that with air doctor? It's like a great filter, like a hapa filter. Is that your favorite one? I like air doctor. I mean, I don't know which one's the best, but I think this is good.

I use blue air, but. The nice thing is when you take the filter out and you see that it's black because of all that stuff. And then you know, okay, it's doing something perfect. But here's the key. Go the fuck outside. I just, I always step back and it's everything the business, right? What do we really need to do? Go outside. We need to get out of these damn boxes. We need to take our calls outside. Outside. In the sunshine. Exactly.

So yes and people need to go outside because 93% of our time in force. Because it's also instilling fear. Like when you're in a box and you're not seeing the long distances and you're not seeing the star in the sky and the mood, like we get fearful because we think that we're small. Yeah. When in fact, we're part of this greater huge universe. I wrote this 400 page book with thousands of references and I'm like, key points. God's side and be in nature and eat food that's not poison.

It's not really that complicated. Yeah. There's a lot of complicated stuff in the book. So air, be outside. And if you can filter your air, that's great. You scared me about fragrances. You said that a couple times now. Very bad. And like I spray shit on my neck all the time. I'm like, oh, ASAP makes a cool new scent or something and I'm like spraying all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And deodorant as well. Sadly I haven't found my brand yet.

Yeah. And I'm just kind of like brining the stuff at CVS and whatnot. I try to not get the aluminum ones. I don't know if that's even a thing. Yeah. What are your thoughts on like personal items like that? Like how do you determine what you can put on your skin, what you spray on? I guess the skincare stuff can be pretty clean because at least you can see the ingredients. You cannot. They do not have to disclose the fragrances. This is the label.

Are you talking about like the crappy skin skincare? I'm not crappy. I mean, from the highest end perfumes to the lowest end CVS product. No, I'm thinking for perfumes for sure, but I'll have like lotions and stuff. They don't have to disclose ingredients. They have to par food. Like you see it's either fragrance or perfume. And that's contained inside of that. There's hundreds of chemicals. Yeah. OK, OK.

Dozens of untested and many are known to be volatile organic compounds and no-crittos ruptures. So I mean, I very much believe that we need to move every home care and personal care product to either totally unscented or exclusively scented with essential oils. And not that all essential oils are universally good, but they are, you know what's in the product. If it says organic lavender oil.

So I think one of the easiest ways to free up capacity in ourselves from potentially harmful obesity-genic compounds is to move everything towards unscented. And when you actually start making that list, it's a lot of things because it's deodorant, perfume, lotion, shampoo, shaving cream. How much is that really gets in your body, though? I was always wondering that because like I'm sitting there in the shower. I have a friend sent me this bar, so from France and it smells amazing.

Yeah. I'm like, OK, there's chemicals in here, whatever. But it smells good. I'm like lathering up and whatnot. And I wonder, am I being too paranoid because I'm washing it right off? Is that really getting absorbed in my body? I get what I'm spraying on something. How big of a hit do you think we're taking from that? I think it's big. You think that's bigger? I do. I mean, I go hiking now. And every person I walk by, I feel like I'm walking through a plume of fragrance.

Yeah, like an ax commercial. Everything. And you have to think about the cumulative exposure. And then also, I just fundamentally, the skin is the largest organ in the body. I don't want to put anything in my body or on my body that I don't know what it is, especially in the face of a chronic disease epidemic where life expectancy is rapidly going down. So that's just my framework is like, this is my temple through which in this lifetime, I can connect to God. That's how I think about my body.

And so I don't want to be putting things in or on my body that are made in a factory and are undisclosed to me in the face of this horrible healthcare crisis. So I think for me, for me, you're doing like rock salt shit. I use, you know, I like, what am I using right now? Like Schmitz, because it's, I know every ingredient on there I can recognize. And it's only scented with essential oils, at least the lavender one is. But what about like perfumes? Like I don't use perfume.

What if I just spray it on my clothes? I mean, do you think you're getting any of that? I mean, I'm really, I mean, I mean, the thing is is that some of these scents are like, volatile organic compounds that are associated with respiratory issues, headaches, things like that. There's gonna be a brand out there that is like just super cool. It just doesn't tell you.

Well, I use Aussie Organics, which is a, it's actually a company that's founded by a medical doctor who's mom similar to mine, died of pancreatic cancer. It put her on a journey to understanding a lot of the harmful chemicals in our products. Can you see that one more time was helpful? Osmia, OSMIA. Okay. And it's every ingredient in all of the products is sourced sustainably. And it's, it doesn't have anything. You basically can't recognize. It's just beautiful stuff.

And I feel very comfortable putting it out on my body. Okay. I use Schimp who that's only scented with tea tree oil, like actual tea tree oil. Brand that you like to use that doctor bronorship, they have with all the stuff right now on the outside. Gallons of Dr. Bronner. You like it. I'm obsessed. I use the unscented Dr. Bronner's Organic Castile soap. We use it for our hand soap in every bathroom. I use it for body soap. The bars too. Have you tried the bars? I love the bars.

We use it for dish soap. And then we use eco's or blue land for our dishes and our laundry. And then I use a lot of vinegar and water for spray cleaner, like counter spray and basically just mix up white vinegar with water. And then I use of course like non-toxic makeup, like beauty counter, thrive cosmetics, ritual to fill. There's a lot of brands now that are really transparent.

And so when you get rid of a lot of the personal care products, the bath products, the home cleaning products, think about that. That's like hundreds of exposures per day. That's really, yeah. And you just feel better. Of course get rid of all air fresheners. I mean, that's the craziest word in the world, air fresheners. I have a diffuser and I use, diffuser is an oaky oil. But it's like a Japanese wood, like a cypress. It smells amazing. Sounds amazing.

Yeah, so you're fine with diffusers and like as long as it's like a real ingredient. You know what's going into it. Yeah, yeah. So I found this amazing regenerative farm up in near Halama and Santa Barbara. And they basically create sage oil from their regeneratively grown sage and they make a room sprite with it. So I'm like, I feel great about that. You know, and it's also supporting regenerative agriculture, which is so critical.

So just kind of knowing what's in the products that you're breathing and putting on your body. And I think one of the easiest ways to get rid of the most toxins is simply to shop at the farmer's market. Because if you think about doing that, you have food that is not covered with synthetic pesticides grown in good soil that is so the food itself is going to have more nutrients for bite, which is critical for health.

People don't realize how much nutrients has been lost out of our food over time, right? Like it's just like night and day from where it was say 40 years ago. And day, like you think about, we have these 70 metric tons of opportunity that we take in in food in our lifetime. We take in 70 metric tons of molecular information in the form of food.

It's drastically decreased in nutrient composition just because of the way our soil has been decimated by industrial agriculture, tillings, synthetic pesticides, and that fertilizers that have killed the microbiome or soil and the microbiome of our soil is what injects the food with nutrients. So that was dumb of us to do. And then you take that food that's already nutrient depleted and then you put it through ultra processing and factories, which strips more of the nutrients.

Then you ship it across the country. The average reason food travels 1,500 miles to your plate. Every day that a food is out of the ground, it's denaturing the helpful proteins and antioxidants and micronutrients in the food, the vitamin contents. So if you take a food directly out of the soil and it was recently alive, you're going to have such a higher density of those helpful nutrients every day that it's away from its life source. It's going to deplete.

And so on three levels, transport, processing, poor soil, that 70 metric tons of life giving opportunity that we put through our bodies is just becoming empty and depleted. And so one, just like people think local and farmers market is frivolous, like nothing could be more important. It's food that is going to be higher nutrient per bite. So in a sense cheaper, right? Because you're actually getting more nutrients per bite. You look at the obesity epidemic right now.

It's like, what's really happening? We are eating ourselves to death. We're the only species in the world that is eating ourselves to death. In human history, right? We're literally guvaging ourselves into the grave why? Well, if you think about the body, it's brilliant. It has nutrient sensing cells all throughout the gut. And it's just looking. They're just always sampling and looking for what it needs to have proper function.

If our food is totally depleted, and we're just loading up with things that aren't helping at all, like omega six oils from soybean oil, the body will push you to keep eating until it gets. It's trying to fight with needs. So saying like, oh, I shop at the farmers market, I shop local. It's not frivolous because what you're really doing is giving a higher nutrient density source to your body to meet its needs, so that it can function properly.

And it will get you to stop eating when it gets what it needs. Like every other animal species in the world that doesn't have a chronic disease or obesity epidemic. Drafts are no beasts, and they don't have pub med or experts. They are eating real food. That's one of the easiest ways I think to clean up the toxins and to just help with general health is because you're not buying something covered in plastic. You don't even need to put in a plastic bag at the farmers market.

Just pick it up, put it in your bag. It doesn't have synthetic pesticides, and it's not being transported long distance. Let me ask you a question about that. So this is really fascinating because so many people over time have said, well, it's organic versus non-organic and organic is three times as much. I don't want it. It's not worth the value. I can just wash my spinach off at an extra couple of times. And what you're saying is completely, well, it's similar, but it's also different in that.

If you were to take, let's just say, some spinach, for example, and you grow it on a conventional farm, the soil nutrients are depleted. And then you take a local farmers market grown in somebody's backyard with a full on worm farm where they're producing high quality compost. And you take those two things. One, you ship across the country, takes maybe a week to get to its destination.

And then it shows up, and the other one I'm buying in the farmers market, wish, if you go to the farmers market, it's not going to be that much more expensive. It's not going to be like crazy, whole foods expensive. And you compare the nutrients of those two. What would you think is the order of magnitude difference in terms of density of nutrients versus the conventional versus the local farm? I think it's significantly higher.

The data supports that because you can look at regenerative organic and conventional and the regenerative has higher nutrients across almost every major vitamin mineral, antioxidant compound, omega-3s, everything that matters. You can also taste it. Yeah, that's true. People are kids. Have you had a strawberry from Costco recently? It's disgusting. I know. I mean, this is the one thing that I will give Daria, my wife a lot of credit for is she's gotten our kids to eat and try almost everything.

And largely because she buys in season, high quality, locally grown ingredients that taste so much better. Yeah. That tastes so much better. If we reframe towards nutrient density program, we would find clearly that the food from the farmers market is actually cheaper. Because you're getting more per bite. Right. And not to mention, I love this thing that Mark Heimann says, we in America, every cheap piece of food that we buy, we are paying for it four times over. It's not a metaphor. It's real.

We are literally paying for it. We are paying for the food itself. So let's say we're buying an $8 happy meal or whatever it McDonald's. You're paying that $8 for the food. You're also paying your taxpayer dollars for the farm bill subsidies that make the unhealthy commodity crops cheaper. The corn soy and wheat that that cow that was tortured in a confined animal feeding operation was fed. You paid for that through your taxpayer dollars for the farm bill.

You pay for the environmental destruction that's happening from the pesticide-covered synthetic fertilizer-covered food that was grown conventionally. And the way that that's literally killing our water systems and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of New Jersey, et cetera, et cetera. And creating a dust bowl in the Midwest.

You're paying for that in your taxpayer dollars and you're paying for the health care costs that you will rack up due to eating that food for yourself and every other American. You're paying probably $100 literally for that happy meal. So when people talk about organic or local being frivolous, it's if you are someone who claims to be an environmentalist and you're buying a conventionally grown food, that is not an integrity. And let's say you have the money to afford it.

The health of farmers who are spraying synthetic pesticides, they are living shorter lives. They're getting cancer at high rates. The dead soil is leading to top soil runoff, which blah, blah, blah. We could go on and on, but this is not just about the nutrient content of the food or even the pesticide itself. It's what's happening to our earth that has done a trickle down effect on everything.

And so it's simply one of the easiest ways to meet the needs of the body is to just buy the highest quality food that you can. So yeah. Let's just say people are listening to this. They're like, okay, I get it. I mean, I want to change things. I want to fix my body. I'm going to go do these tests, see where I stand and then make some changes. What can people expect throughout the book and where do they end up in terms of what are they going to have to do? I mean, is there dietary changes?

Is there exercise rights? Like what are they going to get out of the book? Yeah, yeah. So I think it's filled with practical strategies and practical tips, but I think biggest picture, like it's in a re-imagination of our relationship with our body based on connection rather than fragmentation. It's a different way to look at the true nature of the body that we can build our life and our health choices on that isn't hollow, that's actually real.

And there's a very spiritual element to the book as well, because I think that where the health conversation has really lost its way is one, it's assets to not trust ourselves and to really relinquish our agency to experts. And two, it's very despiritualized. And it's, I think in many ways, lacking in joy.

And I think that there's a real way for us to reconnect with people, with the earth, with our limitless divine nature, that if we can make that the foundation of our health journey, everything becomes a lot easier. Because a point that I make in my favorite chapter the book is the last chapter, which is called fearlessness. The highest level of good energy is that I think a root, root cause of the chronology's epidemic that we're dealing with today is fundamentally rooted in fear.

It's fundamentally rooted in us believing that we are more insignificant and small and limited and scarce than we actually are. If we step back and really looked at the big picture of what's happening here on this incredible planet and this incredible miraculous journey of being alive, and by buying into the system of fear that we are so deep in right now in our modern culture through just the despiritualized Western world,

our digital culture that's streaming sensational media towards us 24 hours a day, our culture, our isolationist culture, where we don't really have like the communities to help us process normal life events that now we're labeling as trauma. All this stuff has made us feel very fearful and has turned us into consumers of anything that will help mitigate our existential anxiety about our lives.

And so a real call to action in the book is to examine that matrix that we're a part of and to take steps to be freed from it because I believe a health journey has to start on that solid foundation of truly waking up for us to know why we're doing the cold plunge and why we're buying the organic food. Like it's bigger than just checking things off a box. It's about true limitlessness and liberation, which we all can access, but we've got to realize the system that we're all deeply embedded in.

There is kind of a matrix-style waking up moment that we have to have here because I feel like we're all stuck just so heads down in this race to, oftentimes we don't know what, but like this environment, I remember my childhood, which was very much like this, where I didn't pay attention to anything. I was just like, okay, I'm just gonna do whatever's fast as quick as easiest, big, big, extra size, like the largest I could possibly get, like crappy McDonald's food I was buying.

And it was like, it wasn't till later in life where I finally, and especially now, even though just still learning in these last few years that you have this moment where you realize, I need to step outside of all this and to your point about getting outside and just realizing that there's so much more to explore here as a human. And part of it is waking up from this cycle and breaking this cycle of alcohol, of shitty eating, of binge eating.

And for me, some of these things, like you mentioned, co-plunge, some of these things like sauna, co-plunge, there are tools to kind of like help you wake up a little bit because you're like, wow, I didn't know my body could feel like this. You know, I just got out of my co-plunge this morning. I've been doing it every single day, since I quit alcohol.

And it's like, when you finally realize how depressed you've been, and I don't say depressed in like the suicidal kind of way, but just like your emotions and like, it just weighs you down, you know? And then you're like, wow, there's a different way to feel. And that can be through changing my diet, it can change my relationship to exercise. And do you feel that we all kind of need that wake up moment? What do you think is the catalyst for that?

What causes someone to go from like stock to kind of waking up to something bigger? Yeah, oh, well, I think. We could probably do another hour podcast about this alone. I think that people, everyone kind of knows that some things are right. We all kind of know. Things aren't going to right. Like everyone knows, everyone knows like our kids aren't supposed to be like doing all this stuff that they're doing. Like all the kids shouldn't really be depressed and glitching out on their devices.

Like we're all kind of feeling a little flat. So I think we're at this beautiful time. I think COVID accelerated it. For everyone's things aren't quite going right. And we all know. And so this is where there's a real opportunity for light. We, I believe, we can be so high on life and we can feel incredible. Truly, that's why I put the word limitless in the book because it's so possible, but it does require like ripping the cord out from like we're all matrix batteries right now.

And it's very scary, but I think like the vision is like on the other side, it's very beautiful. I can just speak to what I experienced in healthcare as a microcosm of this conversation that we're having, which is what I saw was that the healthcare system and even in my medical training, I was in some way taught to weaponize the fear of mortality and the fear of death in a very dramatic way against patients to get them to essentially do whatever the healthcare system wanted them to do.

And so for the financial goals of the healthcare system in these insidious ways, we actually weaponize fear against patients specifically about mortality to get them to take the pill, to have the surgery, to be dependent at the teeth of the system because you look at the Western culture, which is so different. And you look at the Stoics, Indigenous cultures, Eastern cultures, all of these cultures deeply meditate on Sufi, Rumi, all of it.

You look at Hephae's Rumi, Roki, Stoics, Marcus, everyone's thinking about death like all the time, meditating on it, curiosity about it, thinking about it, writing the cycles of life, except for us in America, we don't talk about it, we're scared of it, we're hide it, we put people in boxes, they can't in the ground, so they can't decompose, we literally put for maldehyde in people's bodies so that they won't decompose. I mean, this is fucked.

And then the system, the healthcare system and being a surgeon with that scalpel, it really feels very poignant because you tell people if you do this thing, you take this pill, you get the surgery, the subtext is, you just might not die. And it's like we're all gonna die. And this is part of the eternal connection cycle. Death is scary, we don't fully know what's on the other side but it also is totally natural.

So there's this funny thing of where when we actually examine the things that scare us and meditate on them and engage with them, we become much more powerful because the footing comes from a place of reality, from a place of curiosity, from a place of acceptance and then we can make decisions with just a lot more grounding as opposed to from a sense of being petrified and feeling that this is a scarce world.

So this is why getting outside is so important because nothing is a greater teacher towards overcoming the existential fear of mortality than just being outdoors around plants and animals because what you find is that there's actually nothing to fear, like there is always spring after winter and there is always high tide after low tide. And we are in a continuous cycle. The morning comes after every dark, it just keeps going and we are not separate from that. We are totally a part of that.

And by keeping us inside 93% of the time, sitting in a, we're literally only by pedal organism on the planet and we lock ourselves in a chair 80% of the time inside a box and 93% of the time, of course we're fucking sick and scared. Right? And of course we're gonna take whatever pill to try and mitigate that anxiety and buy Netflix and buy this and that. That is the foundation of the health journey is actually going on that path.

And then you think about we circling all the way back to the beginning of conversation. If one of the roots of our sickness and our deep illness in this country, mental and physical is mitochondrial dysfunction bleeding up into chronic inflammation, which is fundamentally a fear response in the body, what could be more scary to a body than a mind that is constantly afraid of its own mortality from birth?

Like every single day we're sitting here afraid and not knowing what to do with that fear, that's living in our bodies. And so there is a liberation that is very deep that needs to happen, that starts, I think on that spiritual level that makes all these other things more joyful, like the cold plunge. It's not like I'm trying to avoid death by cold plunging so I can have mitochondrial biogenesis.

It's like I'm trying to be present and feel alive today and see what my body can do, this miraculous thing, like you're talking about, like it makes you feel, whoa, I didn't know I could feel that way. So coming at it from joy rather than scarcity. It's so important. I will see the on one side of this that scares me is like there's people that don't pay attention that are like still in the matrix plugged in. There's people that have unplugged a little bit and then now are on this health journey.

And then there's people like anything, politics comes to mind, but the extremes can also be bad. And so I see a whole subset of these longevity people that are like, I wanna be the live forever people. And it's, you're not embracing death, you're actually trying to prevent it. And that is anxiety provoking alone because you're taking it too far. And then it becomes an obsession rather than it, I just want health span.

Yes. I just want to be playing with my kids and meeting their potential partners or whatever it may be when I'm in my 70s and 80s and seeing that joy and watching life unfold. I'm down with dying. I still have fears around it. And I'm working through that stuff. And I think the spiritual stuff is a big component to helping alleviate some of that stuff.

Yeah. But I also worry about taking it too far as well because some of these longevity experts are coming in and being like, oh no, we have to live forever. I'm like, actually, what if it's cool we die? Like why don't we wanna live forever? Like maybe that's a great new chapter. Yeah. And then, you know, I think, you think about memento more, you know, and there's a native saying that's today as a good day to die.

It's like there is something that feels very in conflict between the longevity conversation and the more acceptance conversation. And I think we all know like when you go down almost any spiritual path, like the true suffering that we're all actually trying to get away from is the suffering based on attachment. And being attached to life is a form of attachment that causes suffering.

And that feels very caught up in the long, in this like what I do think is the extreme of the longevity conversation. Ultimately, this conversation, everything we're all doing and the buying the coal plunges and the saunas and the NAD and all of it, it fundamentally is to reduce suffering because we wouldn't do it otherwise. We wanna move towards happiness, we want some type of fulfillment.

But what's so interesting is that if you look at almost any spiritual tradition, like they talk about attachment is the root of suffering and cravings are a form of attachment. And we live in such a rich, like cravings is just such a big, we were craving all the dopamine hits and everything.

But where almost every spiritual tradition leads us is that really the only way to overcome attachment and cravings and suffering is by connecting with our divine nature, by finding God essentially, whatever that means to you, connecting with source, spirit, something bigger than us.

So I've moved more, I think, into this perspective of it's that internal, meditative, almost like separating from our senses, like being very present, being with nature and going inward to find that connection with whatever you wanna call it, God, source, the field, that the foundation of the health journey really has to start on because everything else will never get us to the true happiness that we're seeking because it's all about avoidance of suffering.

But the only way you can truly avoid suffering in my paradigm is connecting with God. And God being a term that I just mean like our truest, eternal nature. You're not saying anyone, genre of the legend is that reality is that like we are in an infinite eternal universe. The mistake in thinking is us thinking we're separate from that. Right.

And if we believe we're in a dualistic situation right now where there's sort of a material and energetic confluence that is our lives, what we forget is that part of that is the eternal infinite. We focus so much on the material part of the body but not the other part. So we'll also focus on just the sensors that we have. Like there's this idea that like everyone seems to think that I'm separate from everything else because of the data that's at the ready, which is my eyes.

The few little tiny lame sensors, they're not lame, they're amazing. It's not the entire spectrum. And we've seen even with science like on what we can now observe with just even like infrared or X-rays are all these different ways of looking at our observable world. There has to be just an infinite amount of ways to look at the universe that we can't even perceive. For sure. And if that's the case, how can we act like we know it all? It's crazy. It's crazy. That is our suffering.

Yeah. That is our suffering. And one thing I love to think about is, so the body, it's so cool. Like we think of the body as a thing, which is totally false, right? It's completely not woo-woo. It is false to think of the body as a thing. We are quadrillions of atoms that are a buzzing hive that are constantly in exchange with everything else. And literally every time we breathe and take an oxygen, we are changing our form. It's not coming through us.

It's literally binding to our electron transfer, and it's not. And so we are a buzzing hive of matter. And it's literally a limitation of our visual system that we don't understand that we are actually constantly in flux. We shed our entire gut lining and reprint it every two to four weeks. We shed our entire skin lining every 40 to 50 days. We are a swirl, not a thing. And I love the Taoist saying, the human body is a process, not an entity.

I think if we just built the health care system on that foundation, realizing that we're a process, not an entity, we're not a thing, so much would get better. Because we'd be focusing our interventions on our true nature, which is a flux, which is a process, as opposed to thinking of, I'm a thing separate from other things, and I'm alive, and then I'll die. We build our entire medical system on those foundations, which are false. Right.

Then you look at, you think about the body, the swarming hive of matter and energy. And in between each atom, you know this, like 99% of it is just empty space. Yes, it is. Yeah. And for some reason, we identify with the atoms and not the space. Right, exactly. Even though the space is 99%. If we identified more with the space, we'd realize that we actually are the space, and the space is infinity. Right. But yet, for some reason, we identify just with the atoms.

So I think that a big part of the problem, why our health care system doesn't work, is because it literally isn't even looking at the body for what it is, which is a process. And what's so empowering about meditating on the body as a process, not an entity, is that you realize that every day, our lifestyle choices, what that really means, is how are we going to shift the process to the process that we're going to be tomorrow? We're constant. So we have the choice of essentially interacting.

Lifestyle choices, fundamentally, are how are we going to interact with matter and energy in a way to change the course of the process of the body? There's different energy forms we get to choose from, thermal energy, sony coal plunge, light energy, blue light, artificial light, more physical, material, potential energy, food, sound energy, music, mechanical energy, hugging your partner, and each of these things shift the process towards either more function or more dysfunction.

But I think just, all, this gets a little bit out there, but I think the core thing to realize is that we are not basing our choices or our system on a realistic view of what the body actually is. It will not work if we don't do that. And so a lot of the process of unplugging from the matrix, I think is just literally stepping back for five minutes and thinking about what actually is my body.

And then how do I interact with the energetic opportunities and forces around me, light sound, thermal energy, mechanical energy, et cetera, to build something that is somehow conducive to a more positive, enjoyable and connected subjective experience of this life, essentially. Yeah. Your next book has to be a spiritual book. Like, you got it. That would be amazing. Yeah. You go deep into the science and I think it turns you into thinking more about spirituality.

That's been my journey, for sure. Yeah. I love that. Awesome. Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but this has been amazing. It worked and people find you on the internet. You have that amazing Instagram, by the way. I love the videos you're putting out. Thank you. Yeah, I'm on everything. The book comes out May 14th and it's everywhere. Books are sold. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all of it. Good energy. Good energy. I'm at kcmines.com.

I have a newsletter that comes out every week called Good Energy Living. I am on Instagram at Dr. Casey's Kitchen and I'm on every other channel at kcmines.com. So come find me. Awesome. Well, thank you for being on the show. Thank you.