Good.
I tell them at TAPS, who else would it be? Welcome to you? Project? Doctor Mark Cohen is back for that BT and I third fourth. Do you know how many times you've been here?
Doc?
So few?
Therefore, Yeah, fun.
How's life?
Oh that's awesome. I've been bouncing around the world and doing good things since I've retired. I've never been busier. And yeah, I've built in his heelands last week, I mean Arizona next week. I me in Melbourne this week. So what's this stuff?
What's the stuff that you're doing, what's got your attention and what's got you excited?
What I'm really excited about is I'm channeling or rediscovering medical practices that were really common a thousand years ago. So a thousand years ago there was in the height of the Persian Empire, there was a guy called Avisena who wrote that he wrote a textbook that they saved the most read textbook of all time for the canon of medicine. And in those times in Persia, he was doing contrast basing, so he was doing her mum thirsteen rooms and saunas and cold plunge, and he was combining
that with oxymals and oxymals. Oxymel means acid honey, where you mix vinig with honey, and that was the basis of medicine in ancient Persia. In fact, there was a basi of medicine. Hippocrates time and hypocative says that food be thy medicine and medicine bee thy food well, viegar and foods. They're both medicines and you can mix them together. And in ancient Persia a thousand years ago, they had twelve hundred recipes for these oxymals. It was like that
was the form of medicine you took. And I've just sort of rediscovered this. So I've got a you know, I'm working with vinegar and honey and I'm making oxymals, and I'm also doing a lot with bathing on the medical director of the Poeninsula Hot Springs Group and I'm the shareholder of the hot spring in New Zealand, and I'm off to Arizona next week on a cold plunge research workshop with a small group of cold plunge researchers
were all talking about ice bathing. So I'm really big into the sauna and the ice bath world now, and I've been big in the hebble medicine, got to write textbooks on heavy medicine. And I've been a doctor for thirty years in that space, and now it's all coming in together, and I'll just only recently realized this. This was down a thousand years ago. Yeah, I call it. I call it ancient future medicine because it stays. Yeah, it's old, but it's the future.
Did you say ancient future medicine?
Correct putting?
I think that's the title of my show. Thank you Now, I don't have to think about that at the end. How much stuff, doc, do you think that we have unlearned or just forgotten? You know, it's like you're saying a thousand years ago in Persia blah blah blah before that Hipiocrates, and like, I wonder how much genius the world has forgotten about.
It's pretty clear that's the case. And I know a lot of people talk about you know, these ancient mega liths and you know go blecktly Tepe and you know the Pyramids, and there's all the technology that we don't understand how people did. But with in terms of medicine, the stuff I'm really interested in is the stuff that was so obvious that our hominy ancestors used it even before we were even human, our homony way way two
million years ago. Ancestors are using it, and that every great tradition and every medical every medical practice, every master physician would prescribe these things. And they're actually so complicated we can't fully understand them. Yet they're so simple. You can do them at home with very little cost, training or equipment. And I like that. So things like hot and cold bathing, you can do that at home, just
hot and cold shower. Mixing vinegar and honey, that's anyone can make vinegar, make kombucha and ignore it for six months, or turn to vinegar you mix out with honey. And you just got to a bee keeper or have your own bees. And I'm just about to get my own bees, which I'm really my sixtieth birthday and my ex wife gave me from beehives, So that's pretty exciting, you know, just my suburban bee e and I'm making my own oxymors and we're expanding that. But these therapies, which are
super ancient, haven't been really talked about or promoted. I spoke, I got the key opening keynote lecture of the Herbalist and Naturopaths conference a couple of weeks ago, and I asked all the audience about two three hundred natropaths there, you know, who's heard of oxymors and about it? Maybe
a quarter put that put their hand up. And then when I told them oxyd memes acid mel memes, honey, this is acid vinegar that, oh yeah, the first year in the history of medicine, they mentioned that we never really talked about it. So these are things that I guess there's no industry around it because you can do it yourself. No one's selling you packets and pills and
making a big about it. And also beekeeping is hard to make a massive industry because you actually need to someone on the ground tending to the bees, and you need flowers and have one person with a harvester doing one hundred thous makers. It's a small industry.
And I guess with that kind of ancient medicine and all of these kind of herbal medicines, naturopathic approaches whatever, as you as you kind of intimated, it's it's not highly commercialable, commercially exploitable, right, especially so there's going to be a whole lot of industry, a whole lot of companies that don't want this to happen, you know, because and.
I've seen pushback already. You know, hot and cold bathing, it's such a cheap thing to do. Were having a hot and cold shower, having an ice batha masually controlling to different ice bath companies. Now. In fact, the guys I'm going to meet in America in Arizona, they credit an ice bath company and they just exploded after Joe Rogan was promoting them. So that that's and they say,
you know, really beautiful ice bath, but they're twenty grand. Yeah, yeah, but you don't need the twenty brand ice bath to do cold bathing. He just need cold water, which is pretty cheap and easily accessible. And I'm really keen to promote these ideas. I also have products, So I'm making an oximal company, and we'll sell you the best oximal. We have vinegar that we've done research on. It's high polyphenols, got two hundred probiotics. But I also teach you how
to make yourself for free. That's how to create a culture. And I think what we really need on the planet right now, or what everyone needs, is to create a wellness culture. And having a culture that supports your well being isn't really about making money. It's actually about making healthy people, and healthy people will create value and make money. So first, my first objective in my life is to how do I co create a culture of wellness that can infect good health? Yeah?
Yeah, like just off the top of my head, Like when we think about building a culture of wellness, so I think about obviously I'm writing this down, so food not in order of imports motan's food, sleep, movement, exercise, lifestyle, stress, relationships. The way we socialize has an impact on fucking everything from cellular health to immune system relationships. How would you
not prioritize those? But how would you? So if we talk about like we know that people that are lonely and disconnected and isolated and don't feel loved or seen or you know, that affects their immune system and that affects everything from their cellular health up right. And we know that food plays a big role. We know that, you know, not just micros and macros, but all the other shit around that. And then we know that sleep is a big deal, and we know that movement, exercise,
you know, incidental activity, occupational activity, lifestyle stress. How would you sort those and what's missing from those jigsaw pieces.
So I've been trying to sort it's out for years. And I've got a philosophy of more meaning less words, So how to condense more meaning to f your words? And when you do that, it ends up as poetry. So I've sort of individentally become a poet. I think we shared some of my poet poems in the past, but I have this one poem which I call it the Recipe for Wellness, and it's super simple. It's bathing beautiful water, Prepare delicious food, make the most of every breath, Dance through every mood.
I thought you were going to say something about mood then, but okay, not nothing wrong of the moods, but in dance mood.
If you want, tend the soil beneath your feet, embraced sunshine from above, share your gifts with all the world, and fill your life with love. Social connection, they say the currency of wellness of connection. Yeah, connection to yourself, with the environment, with other people. And that's ultimately that
they're the priorities. And I've got I've got other poems to talk about all the different activities you can do in your life that improve this anxiety, and things you can do if you're anxious, upset, or a fraid or in pain that you can do with your body to relax your body. So there's all these little hacks and tricks, but I really there's it seems to be a big emphasis now on what activities can I do to prevent cancer or to be healthier, to live a long and
a healthy life. And people are living their life for the future of not being sick, rather than living their life for the moment and enjoying your life in the moment. And there's a tension between those two. But I really believe if you have the most fulfilling life in each moment and create as much connection as possible in each moment, that's going to pay off down the track.
I feel like a lot of us reactive with our health, not proactive, like we wait until something breaks or something falls off or we get terrified. What's the Is that just a fear thing, a laziness thing, or something else.
Great business model getting people to.
Get from a commercial point of view.
Yeah, exactly, a great business model, and that really changed my whole career in early nineteen nineties, I just graduated as the doctor and i'd come across a health retreat in Barry Skipsland and I was doing this yoga health retreat and I came across Clean Ornish and his yoga teacher, and he was the first person to prove that you could lifestyle change could reverse heart disease. And he sort
of said it, but I sort of paraphrased it. At the time, it was conventional treatment for a heart attack or heart disease was to open up your chest, take a vein from your leg, put that vein across the blockage in your chest, and repeat that every ten years. Because that's what you happened withy It was considered totally radical and extreme to relax, exercise, eat good food, and
share your feelings. And I saw that and I was a week in the hospital seeing, yeah, look if you do bypass two, sure you get forty grand, fifty grand. And I was part of the Health Enhancement lifestyle program where we were trying to educate people in a rehab hospital at to see the court and other places to do that. When we were charging four hundred bucks for
a lifestyle program and people just weren't interested. They'll paid forty grand for their heart to fix their heart attack because they won't pay four hundred dollars to live a healthy life. So there is a bit of I don't know if it's hedonism or people just they don't they want what they want now and they're not really interested in prevention. But I think the whole culture that we have this is where I talk about a culture of wellness,
because at the moment, we have a culture of illness. Now, food comes pre poisoned, our water comes pre poisoned, our air is poisoned. The industries, the biggest industries in the world are the ones that make only out of people's units. But it's a great business model, but it's not great for healthy people.
Well, and you think about that, you know, how people have paid forty grand for an operation but not four hundred for a wellness program or whatever. Right, And then I think about as an excise scientist, I think about, you know, people paying people putting ozepic in their body right, which essentially, among other things, kills their appetite, whereas and
has some pretty disgusting side effects. Whereas they could get you know, albeit a bit longer and a little bit well, a lot more discipline and effort, you know, but obviously with modifying lifestyle factors, you know. But it's it's like people would rather appeal than some kind of work or effort or discomfort, you know. And it's like that's why
instant gratification sells. That's why surgery cells because I can just go in and you weave your magic and I come out and you know this is Yeah, this is I think very much indicative of a lot of people's thinking, like quick fixes, magic pills, instant gratification cells.
Well what's the saying that instant gratification is not fast enough anymore? Yes, people that right now. And so what I'm interested in is things like that you want to do because they're fun in themselves. So that is the gratification. So I've been making these oximals myself. So it's honey and vinegar and I put herbs in it, and I put a lot of bitter herbs. So you've got the sweet and the sour and the bitter. And what that does, It just sparks your brain off. It tastes like it
tastes like sherbet candy. So it's sweet and sound like. It's almost like a dessert wine, and you'll sip it and your brain just does backflips because it's got all these different flavors, and we put leaves, roots, flowers, fruits, and fungi, so it gives a really broad favor profile. You want to have it every day because it's so delicious.
And then the side effect is it's super good for you at balancing your blood sugar, it helps gut microbiome, it feels better, you sleep better, you got more energy, it stops the blood sugar spikes. So all these secondary benefits, but they're not the reason why you're having it. The reason why you're having it is it tastes delicious and it feels good to have it. So they're the sort of things I'm interested in.
How do I I'm just right now, which is terrible protocol. So it's O X Y M E L right yep Oximal is a mixture of honey and vinegar used as medicine. According to Scientific America. Recently, the mixture is but used been used successfully in biofilm for topical uses on wounds where bacteria has become resistant to antibiotics. Both ingredients have been used historically as antseptics, but the combination blah blah blah. Okay.
So it's interesting because it was one thousand years ago or two thousand ars that they were using this. But last last year there were two big scientific studies published on oximals and one was a review article reviewing all the history of the pre clinical and clinical studies of oximals, and the other study was a really interesting one where they took manuka honey and vinegar and they diluted the manuka honey to the point where it didn't kill bacteria anymore.
And they took the vinegar and they diluted that to the point where it didn't kill bacteria anymore. Then they took the two dilutions and mix them together and it did kill bacteria. And what that showed is that there's a different mechanism of action between the honey and the vinegar and that their synergy. So there's a combined effect of honey and vinegar that's effective against bacteria. And what they found there was the vinegar with the highest polyphenols,
and polyphenols are like the plants immune system. They're they're the chemicals that the plants used to defend themselves. They're often what really expensive foods are really high in. So coffee and chocolate and red wine and olive oil the high in polyphenols. And they found that the high polyphenol vinegars had a much bigger difference. So they use pomegranate vinegar and date and apple and white wine vinegar. We use kombucha vinegar because green tea actually has more polyphenols
than apples or grapes or pomegranites. So the highest polyphenol vineggar you can make is that I know of, is kombucha vinegar. And people can do that at home pretty much for free sugar tea and some water and a bit of time, and you can make your ow kombucha vinegar. And it does does depend on the tea that you use. I mean, there are different qualities of tea, and I think there's a reason that tea is actually the most
drunk beverage on Earth. He's drug more than coffee or any even just more than water, I think in terms of just as a bear fridge, and it's got a broad flavor profile. But to make a high polyphenol vinegar and mix that with honey, you've got you've got a really potent form of medicine that never gets resistance for
antibodic resistance, never builds up against it by films. You know, they did some studies on biofilms and by films bacterial form sheets, especially in the back of your throat or on wounds, and then show that the honey vinegar combinations are super effective against buiofilms.
If somebody wants to start, you know, making their own, is there a recipe? Is there is there a Can they go somewhere?
Sure? I mean, just they can google it online. I've been studying these recipes because in the past what they do sometimes there was fifty percent vinegar and fhibuous en honey, and they used to boil it. And I think the boiling it was a way to stop it fermenting, because if you don't stop the fermentation, it actually becomes more delicious, It becomes fuzzy, and then it turns to meat and becomes alcoholic, right, so, which is not necessarily bad thing.
And actually I've been researching that the origins of meta and that the word need has the same roots as the word medicine. The very first medicines were made from honey. Honey used to be the most most valuable thing on earth. If you if you're a caveman or a hominid, you know, honey is the most dense form of bluecoats. You can a wound or a burn and it will cure the wound or a bern. You can put any other food
in it and will preserve the other food. And if you get it wet, it'll ferment and turn it into alcohol and become medicine. So honey is the most amazing substance.
So you can get ship faced and treated all at the same time.
That's what happens.
Yeah, exactly. You know when you finished medicine. So you're a doctor, doctor, You're you're a double doctor. You're a medical doctor in Europe.
Doctor.
I did two PhD so doctor, doctor, doctor, Oh you did too, of course you did, okay, well, before I asked, mate, so what did in what order did you do your doctoring?
I start off with Western medicine, then did an honors degree, then took some time off and did a pH d in Chinese medicine, then went back and finished my medical degree, and then did a second PhD in Electrical computer systems engineering.
Of course, as you do. Yeah, no, of course, Okay, so you're a three times doctor. Well that is fucking ridiculous. When you when you finished medicine Western medicine and then you headed off to see Dean Cornish and the like Dean Cornish at ol Audis year, did you get push back from you? You know, your your colleagues.
Who I have, but not as much as my mentors and the people before me. Right so, And because because I have, you know, got a medical degree in two PhDs, I'm often accepted by the medical fraternity. But and I used to be the head of the Australasian Integrated Medicine Association. I had that at the start of the two thousands, and I was involved integrated medicine and acupuncture research and
stuff throughout the nineteen nineties. And most of the research I've done is all the stuff there's no money behind it, meditation and acupuncture and herbal medicine and spas and saunas and things like that, and there has been pushed back, and this still is pushback. You'll read mainstream articles about cold cold water swimming and ice bading and they'll say, oh, yeah, look it does help with depression. But it can kill you, so be careful. You know, they sort of just try
and sort of put a damping on it. No pun there. But I haven't had nearly the pushback that there was a generation of doctors before me who are ten fifteen years older than me, who are getting deep and getting attacked at. And I do have colleagues in the integrated medicine community you have been really pushed hard against. And they keep on telling me that a kite flies highest
and it's got a strong wind against it. But otherwise I've made a conscious decision in my career and in my life that I don't want to fight against anything. I want to work towards what I want y So I want health and wellness and to have fun. I mean having fun is really high in my values. So all the research on stuff that's fun, you know, health retreats and spars and saunas and hot spring and yoga
and meditation, it's all fun stuff. There's not a lot of money in it, but it's really fun rather than sort of trying to fight a system or trying to tackle and there's great people who do that, but that's not me.
Yeah, I think also, sometimes you know when people live in a certain eir co chamber, you know, they and they've believed something for a very long time, and they've had a certain operating system and existed in a certain paradigm of thought and behavior and whatever. That also becomes their identity. So if you question anything, you question their
identity as well. So yeah, it's very and people are emotional and people are self protecting, and it's like, if you question my belief or my ideology, then you're attacking me, you know.
And and there's a book called the Four Agreements, which I really love, and let's saying that being peckable with your word, don't take anything personally, don't make assumptions, and do your best. So not taking anything personally is really great. So you know, if they're attacking you, they're not really attacking me. They're just they've got their issues and poor them. So that's that's stead me in good, good position. Throughout
there's always detractors, and then sometimes it's been good. Like in the pandemic, people were trolling and saying, oh, you can't talk about Sauls as reducing viral infections because and that it's obviously true. So I end up writing a peer reviewed article about it, just to get back at
these people who are try to kick me down. And you know, I published that article, and then I publish a whole lot of articles on hydro thermal facilities because when you're in a sauna, you're improve your immune system and it'll dissolve any viruses, say they melt. And because of that article, I've been told in Europe that was translated into half a dozen languages, and a lot of spar centers were allowed to open because of that research. So sometimes it is good to get you back up.
And you know, my tendency is just really to follow the stuff that I love doing, rather than trying to fight against something else.
So while I've got you here, I want to I'm going to I'm going to use you a little bit. Okay, So infrared sauna or steamwre sauna.
Whatever makes you sweat. There's been no studies comparing the two. And in fact, I had a PhD student SHOWI Hassan, who's a brilliant medical doctor. She did a PhD. It's eight years researching saunas, and we were going to do the first ever human clinical trial comparing infrared sauna with traditional with exercise. She was doing this with the Queensland Institute of Sport. We had it all set up and then their traditional sauna busted and then the pandemic hits.
So we ended up doing the study, but we didn't use the traditional sauna, so we didn't we compared disordering with exercise. We looked at detoxification and the effects on the heart, but we didn't compare directly infrared with traditional sauna. I had it both home. I'm pretty privileged. I yes, I was given an infrared sauna about fifteen years ago, which I still haven't. I built a traditional sauna, and I prefer the traditional sauna because I love putting. I
love the steam. I loved able to loft the steam around and wave it around. I love putting cold water on my body when I'm in the sauna. Putting squater on your head or on your feet when you're really hot is just super delightful, and you can't do that the red sauna. But I think that the benefit it.
Really is from the stress and sweating and doing something you don't really we want to do, or doing something to the point where you're comfortably uncomfortable.
MM.
So, whether it's an infrared fat or a hot bath or whatever it is. If it's if it's hot enough to make you sweat and turn on your physiological air conditioning. Yeah, your panther willle bit, your heart beats harder, you know, you sweat, you turn on your heat shop proteins and all of those biochemical things that happen. That's the benefit. So how do you get there? I think is less important.
I know there's a lot of variables around kind of cold water immersion and ice bars and cold showers and because you know, the temperature of the tap border in Melbourne is probably different to Queensland, to work of course.
But pretty cold this morning. Yeah, this morning it was like six six degrees out of the shower or something exactly.
So is there if somebody's thinking, you know what, I want to introduce a little bit of cold water or cold showers into my life? Is there a Is there are kind of an optimal time one to three minutes or something.
I credit a little song and dance for this expression. I don't know, I told me you set me up. So I did a lecture series about seven eight years ago with Wim Half When I was I was talking about the science of the wim Holf method, and all the vow for males, all the full on by fighters and martial artists were all getting into the ice bath. And then I ran a retreat at wing Ghana, which was a luxury hell to treat in Queensland, and they were like autun seventy year old mostly females, who said,
we're not going to get into the cold water. We don't we don't do cold and I was I sort of worked, O, how can we make it appealing for them? And I came up with little song and dance. I call it the cold water Hokey pokey, so you can do it home in the shower and and it makes it really easy. But basically what you do you start off with the hot shower, and everyone loves the hot shower, and you get well, you get hot. Then at the end of that you turn the heat up a little bit,
so a bit prickly hot and a bit flushed. And then the hardest part of the whole thing, the hardest part of any cold water immersion is the decision to do it. It's jumping into the swimming pool or just getting wet that's making that decision the hardest if you make the decision, you're going to do it. So you turn the hot water off and the cold water on, but you just wet your left foot, right, it's okay,
you know you're hot, and your left foot. Then you do your leg, and then you do your right foot. In your leg, your left hands and arm and your other hand and arm. And what that does. It pushes the warm blood. It constricts the book blood vessels in your arms and legs, and that pushes all this warm blood into your core. So you're still feeling warm even though your arms and legs are cold. Keep breathing calmly and smile to yourself, because that's what it's all about,
breathing calmly and smiling to yourself, being comfortably uncomfortable. And then you take a really big breath in and as you as you're slowly breathing out, you put your left side in, And normally, when you putst side in, the water would hit your neck where the blood vessels are close to the surface, and that courses you. That would normally cause you for gasp, and that's the cold water hypeer ventilation reaction. But if you're already breathing out slowly.
When you do that, you don't but you do feel the cold, but it doesn't have that emotional shot to it. So you just slowly breathing out. You put your left side in and you're right side in and your front side in, and you chain yourself around. Then keep calmly and smile to yourself, because that's what it's all about.
And then you put your whole head in. If you take a big breath as you're brething out and you put your whole head in, move your head around, stand still, get a drenching, slowly turn yourself around, continue breathing, calmly, smile to yourself. That's what it's all about. And then you go poke you put the water on your groin, water on your kidneys, oh hokey, pokey, put the water on your armpits, and then all the places vessels come close to the surface. And you'll find if you do
that that takes about one minute. You end up standing under the cold shower quite comfortably. And at that point you're breathing comfortably and you can turn it off and get out and you'll feel tingly and alive. And you've started to day singing and dancing and doing something that you didn't want to do, which makes everything else that
you don't want to do. If there's that conversation or that job or that mess you have to clean up, you've already practiced that whellpower of just getting along with it and doing it. So that's that's and it doesn't cost any money. You don't need a membership, you don't need special clothes, you have to do anything other than cold shower, so that's that's super easy. Or you can buy a twenty grand Icepa and like yourself with the
whole hot tub scene room my spa sorta situation. So it's, as I say, there's high endways to do it, there's always a way you can do it quite inexpensively.
Well, definitely in Melbourne, Like I try to finish my showers with about a minute of just no no hot water at all. And when I first started, it's fucking horrible, but it just gets it gets more and more, like you get used to it over time and you get out and there's just a lights up my brain like a Christmas tree. It's just it's a really good feeling.
And also I think, you know, I don't really do it for this but for me, there's a real psychological and emotional benefit as well as the physiological like I feel great, I feel more energetic, but I also feel clarity and I you know, I what in terms of like treating mental health using these kinds of mechanisms and treatments, you know, and like depression and anxiety and which is pretty rampant mental health, you know, and rather than reaching for an anti axiotic or an antis So there is.
Good research on that. But again the problem is there are a lot of research on cold water swimming as an antidepressant. Yeah, it's not an industry. No one's making money out of it, so it's not really widely promoted, whereas prozacs are multi billion dollars and drug And just on that point, one of my PhD students is I'm Lauren Burns. She was or she's graduated now. So Lauren Burns. She won the gold medalp for taekwon do at the Sydney Olympics and she's an absolute champion of a human
being but also a world champion athlete. And in her PhD she interviewed people who are multiple world champions and asked the how do you set the top of your game, how do you how do you say the best in the world in your sport over multiple years? What do you do, what do you think? How do you perform? You know, what do you how do you practice? And she were published a few papers on that, and you know, mindset was the biggest factor. Social connection came up really strong,
and they hadn't been widely talked about. But one of the things we did was ice bathing, and when we interviewed them, or when Lauren interviewed them, they said that they started doing ice bathing for recovery, but they kept on doing it for the mental health benefits because when they when they were doing in the ice part, they're just in the in the ice part, that they're not thinking about the past and the future, what their competition's doing,
and just gave them mental discipline and that clarity and that focus. So and that was that hadn't been talked about widely before. And this was there was one Lane Beachley, who was the surfing World champion. She but she spent most of the time in cold water anyway. But all of the other athletes she interviewed who are multiple world champions areadio icepaving and I all said it was for the mental health benefits, not to the physical recovery and benefits.
Yeah, we love Laurence. She was on here a couple of weeks ago. She's a gun And I think also unis A did did some research looking at exercise as a treatment for depression, which like really really really outperformed drugs.
So bottle it. It'd be the most successful drug ever.
Yeah, What's what's something that if anything that you've you have ever done a one ad on where you got something wrong, or you were taught told train something that you later on went that's bullshit, or or there's a much better way. Is there anything that you've either done a one id on or really had to unlearn something.
That's a great question. I haven't haven't thought about that before. I mean, there's a lot, a lot that I learned in medicine that is now no longer true, even though I was taught it thirty forty years ago when I was studying medicine. I mean, all the discussion about brown fat we were taught, you know, there's no brown fat
in the in the adult body. It's only in babies and hibernating animals and that's that's been a one ady for the medical community, not me personally, who are saying, oh yeah, brown and fats in everybody and you can develop it, and that the process you've described earlier where you gradually get used to the cold, that was a process that everyone went through every year one hundred years
ago before we had central heating. That as the winter got gone on, it got each dag a little bit colder, and you built up your brown fat stores and the brown fat actually makes heat and protects you from the cold. So that's there's all a whole lot of research now about brown fatter and people using it, but improving brown fat to lose weights because brown fat eats up white fatter uses white fatter's fuel to generate heat. But I think the benefit it's not so much for the weight loss,
it's for the metabolic benefits that you get. So that's that's where the medical communities change. The other thing I guess is the whole our whole attitude of bacteria. Again forty years ago and I started medicine, the bacteria of the enemy. You know, you needed antibiotics and germs were bad. You know, you want to disinfect into antibiotics and all these things, and now we're realizing, hey, germs are actually the best thing ever. They're actually supporting our health and
not just in our gus. One of the biggest revelations I had just it was only three four years ago, this was published talking about the skin micro bio that when I when I started medicine, we were taught you the service area your skin is one point eight square meters, which is about the size of the single bed. If I skinned you and lay your skin out, it's about the size of a single bed.
But then they realize there's a thought yeah, and then they use.
That measurement for measuring the size of burns and the proportion of the body for different things. But then someone calculated, oh, well, there's actually three million sweatlands on the body and all these sabaceous plans every time that the skin dips down and comes back up, and if you stretch that out, it's thirty square meters. It's the size of a cat.
And all those little glands in the sweatlands and the sabacious glands when the skip the skin dives down, that's where the bacteria live and those plans secrete oils that support good bacteria, and those oils protect you from protect your skin from drying out, They protect your skin sun from sun damage, and in cancer and sunburn. They also feed the good bacteria that protect you from infection. And
that's that was never talked about in the past. And what I've realized is when you bathe in chlorine, you oxidize those oils and you get rid of those those good bacteria, and you actually make your skin more prone to drying out, more prone to sun damage, more prone to wrinkles and aging, and more prone to infection. Wow. So that's yeah, And that's that's when you think about it. Oh yeah, chlorinees and oxidizer. It kills bacteria. If you if you're washing your skin with that, it's kind of
stripped the natural oils off. But those are your protection. So that was a revelation to me. And I've always been really keen on water, you know, and I do have a water filled company and I promote that, but it was really these and the whole water industry is a it's a whole nother rabbit hole because water is so complicated. But one of the simplest things you can do to change your health is just improved the quality of your water.
So is that just by filtering? I mean, obviously water that's sitting in a plastic bottle in a hot car, that's just a try. Can you just explain to people what salts are and what they.
Do and disruptives. So falets are a type of plastic. They're used in a whole lot of they're often us in fragrance, so they make the smells last longer in the air. And but microplastics in water is one of the biggest issues. I think it was the University of New South Wales did some research about four or five years ago and they used to make it in Australia and pretty much everyone in the western world eats a credit card of plastic the week A week.
A week.
I thought that was I thought that was a year. Look it up.
And that's because that's because plastic, among other things, there's plastic in our water. And when we have a plastic bottle filled with water, especially when it's sitting anywhere near sun, it leaches plastic into the water. Right.
And the think about the companies that make in a bottled water, they don't make the water, they make plastic bottles. Water but yeah, we need a credit CARDO plastic week. Most of that comes from our water. Yeah, I do the microplastics everywhere. Now there's nanoplastics, which is the next level. So you're talking about thal aides and endochrome disrupting chemicals that hang out on the plastics, and a lot of
those chemicals are what we call obe sigents. They make you a bet, they take your commodal system, and they cause infertility, and their carcinogenics they cause cancers. So pretty much all the diseases of the modern world you can trace back to us polluting ourselves, which is tragic when you think about it. But again, I'd rather than try and fight pollution, I'd say, Okay, how do we clean it up? And how do we live without that? So you filtery of water, and there are ways to do that.
You can even if you don't have a water filter at home. If you've got a hot bath, you can turn on the bath really hot, put the fan on and wait twenty minutes and the chlorine will evaporate out. And I do that in hotels and stuff, and I'm traveling, so there are ways to get rid of CHLORI out of it. A system and when you do that, your
skin changes, actually you feel better the surface. There's lots of little things that you can do, but affecting your water and obviously food as well, just plastic packaging and food, so that the increase in endocrime disrupting chemicals, not just stalates but also I mean pfasts. They were talking about the perfluorinated compounds and the forever chemicals. There's made a couple of minutes about it recently. It's just a global disaster and there's no living organism on Earth that isn't
impacted by these chemicals. Down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench ten kilometers down at the bottom of the ocean to the top of Mount Everest, they're found microplastics. Yeah, yeah.
Have you heard of a guy called David Gillespie who wrote Sweet Poison?
Oh no, I haven't. Yeah.
Yeah, So he's one of Australia's most prolific writers. Is a lawyer, but is a researcher, he's an inventor. Is a little bit like you, and that he's quirky. You're quirky, you know you're quirky. But he's a fucking genius. And yeah, he and I talk. We do an episode once a fortnite, and he's dead against seed oils and daletes and endocrime disruptors, and he talks a lot about it, talks a lot about the dumb shit we do to our body basically.
But he was talking recently, we're talking him. He was wheeling out these figures about the rapidly declining testosterone production in men, you know, and what the average how much testosterone I can't remember the numbers, but it's like, compared to seventy or eighty years ago, it's crazily low.
And he was suggesting that boom counts had gone down too dramatically.
Yeah, sperm count sorry, that's what I meant is plummeted. And he was saying that within the next ten to fifteen years that like a lot of like a fair percentage of males won't be able to produce enough sperm to get someone pregnant. Essentially, like fertility.
Look at infertility is an epidemic in the modern world. Yes, that's the way. Ten fifteen years, so a lot of couples have infertility issues, are having a sistive fertility because the normal system doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So in terms of moving forward, if somebody wants to do like a little bit of a stock take on their own life, you know, their own lifestyle is there, and I know there's no three step plan for anything, doc, But if somebody is listening to this and they're like, where do I start? Because when we go, oh, well, there's food, and there's sleep, and there's lifestyle, and there's stress and anxiety, and then there's booze and there's you know, there's should we take
Should I take a drug for this? Or should I have a cold shower? Or if somebody wants to, for want of a better term, start to renovate their life or change their operating system, where might they start?
I think you need to start where it's easy, where you enjoy it, so and start with something you can actually keep going on. Ye, So, and it all starts with the decision to do it so that that will power. So like hot and cold shower, that's a great place to start because you're exercising will power. You don't need to buy any equipment. You know, you can just do it.
And that little cold water hockey pokey I talked about, you can just start with the first you know, you can spend a week just on your arms and legs and then work up to the second verse, and then you can do the whole thing. So I think you want to do baby steps. You want to do something that's sustainable. You want to do something that's fun, because otherwise you're not going to keep it up, you know, whether it's going you're getting a gym membership or doing
you know, jogging every morning or something. Unless it's fun for you, it's hard to keep up. And then one of the really effective things I found is changing your flavor profile by having more bitters in your life. Right, and if you have more bitter, this is a Chinese medicine sort of knowledge, you reduce sweet cravings. Most people get their business from coffee and chocolate. That's where they get their polyphenols as well, actually occidents in our life.
But increasing your range of business, so having and please do that in Europe, and having a pair of teeth before dinner, you know, a digestive with business, prepare your liver for digestion and opens up your palace so you enjoy your food more. You tend to eat less, you tend to enjoy your food more, you digest better, and you don't get the big blood sugar spike and it actually stops you craving sweets. So tweaking your flavor profile is much easier than going on a diet for meaning
your body to enjoy good food. Never even sort of that.
So where are you off? Do you go on somewhere next week?
Where you go? I'm going to Phoenix, Arizona, So I'm going for the shore to stay to the longest day and it's forty six degrees integrated there today. But I'm at an ice bath conference. There's Morosco Forge, there's an ice bath company that have blown up with Joe Rogan support, and they're bringing you a whole lot of a whole about a dozen researchers on ice bath. They're a beta, talk to each other and plan a conference for next year.
So and they invited me to go. I said, yeah, why might sounds like fun meet some good people.
How ironic? How ironic that you go into one of the hottest places on earth for an ice bath conference?
Exactly, that's hilarious.
How do people how do people find you doc and connect with you and follow you?
I'm not super active on socials. I do have a Facebook and LinkedIn profiles just Mark Mark with a sea, and I have a website Doctor Mark d M A r C dot co. And I've got a lot of poems and all my academic I've got one hundred academic papers and books and products and stuff that they can get from my website. But i do try and post about my life on Facebook and LinkedIn just to keep
people up to date with what I'm doing. And I'm really open to having people contact me and yeah, where I can, I can provide some value.
Well, we appreciate you. Will say goodbye here, but once again, Enlightening, thanks for coming to have a chat on you project.
Great. It's always great to chat with you. Pray we do it again sometime. Thanks TOC