#2018 Your Operating Manual - Dr. Cam McDonald

facilitate clients for them. And then dad was the local dentist, had a really really great dental practice, does a whole lot with byte structure and saw some amazing anyway, it did some really cool stuff, sort of a bit left of field dentistry and anyway, long story short, ended up doing X FIZZ and dietetics, exos physiology and dietetics. Wanted to save the world and fixed diabetes. By the end of exos physiology, thought I could do that with dietetics

as well nutrition. Went into a PhD looking at both and how we could reduce breast cancer like poor breast cancer outcomes with a Mega three excite. That was interesting and what I found from that this is where things really change. Because I was working in private practice at the same time, and I was I'd have people coming in and I'd saying, I'm going to reverse your diabetes. That's what I was telling all of the gps that

I was working, I'm going to reverse their diabetes. And some people, genuinely, I would see dramatic shifts in their blood sugar levels, and other people I would see no change. And I would be thinking, well, you're lying to me, You're not doing it properly, you're not telling me the truth about your diet history and your exercise. There's got

to be a problem with you. And after a couple of years of the most dedicated client I ever had, where I threw everything that I could at her and no change, like she lost negative one centimeter on her waist after two years. I was thinking what is wrong with me rather than what's wrong with you and your adherents. So I started looking at personalization. At the same time, I was doing my PhD, and I was looking at different bodies and how they respond to X and OMEGA three.

And as it turns out, there was a cluster of two or three people in my trial that just got the best results ever. And they were like Tiff, so they were sure athletic, amazing, just general superstars, and they just saw this most incredible change. And then the majority of my study population was not designed for the intervention

that I was running. I was asking them to do five meals per day and different types of exercise training that didn't really suit them, and AMEGA three wasn't as big a deal for them as far as their need their micronutrientl or macro micro macro nutrient needs. So I started questioning, I can't just be giving everyone the same advice, and so I started looking into personalization. I started looking

at genetics. I found you know, they were about six years into their data collection at this point, an organization called Shay Group, but they had zero health professionals practicing with it outside of the pilot group over in Europe.

But they collected ten thousand individuals and followed them for five years with this really hyper specific data collection of we're going to measure every nook and cranny of this person, and then we're going to see what happens to them over five years, and we're going to start doing something

with that data. Where now at three million human years of data with this very very bespoke data set, as it's grown into hundreds of thousands of individuals, and the whole idea is, we want to eliminate chronic disease and pain by the year twenty fifty. And the only way that you can do that is by having every person understood. You can't give running to everybody because fifteen percent of people get less fit when they run, and no one

talks about these statistics. Twenty percent of people will lose muscle when they do resistance training in a randomized control trial, you see these non responders. You'd send people out for walks. Thirty eight percent of people don't get any benefit from the walking, but sixty two do, so you can't just give everybody the same intervention. Mediterranean diet doesn't work for everyone,

Paleo diets doesn't work for everybody. And your environment affects your health, Your social life affects your health, The way that you put your brain to work affects your health. And so they quantified and measured all of these different things about what actually drives difference for your body and

what's the ultimate environment that you need. And now we've got fifteen to twenty years of research under our belt of this incredibly complex data set, we've layered it all in with the evidence space so that each thing that we're looking at has evidence space sitting behind it, and then AI kind of brings it to life. We've been doing AI since twenty eleven, and the whole idea is we want the right information to hit the right person

at the right time. And I've in my practice, I've seen reversal of diabetes, reversal of cardiovascular disease, MS Parkinson's, like some really really things using a combination of all the things that we do in the organization. And now we're applying that to health professionals training them, and that to be part of my job is trained health professionals running corporate well being programs where the individuals actually looked

at and provided support for. Same with schools and understanding different types of learners and how that your behavior and your learning style is actually driven from your genetics and your biology, and that can help you understand things like neurodivergence and a whole lot of different things things. So we wanted to find the individual, and we want to treat the individual and bring them to their happiest place.

So it's been a two decade effort and I feel like I've definitely found my life's purpose in it all.

But I mean it is I think people don't realize how much prescribing medication, prescribing nutrition, prescribing education, sorry exercise, even prescribing education.

and out in about twelve to fifteen minutes. And then that medication could be a ten out of ten for me, it could be a two out of ten for me, or it could be a five. And so there's this the way that our individual physiology interacts with all of these different things that we do too or for our body. But that's you know, that's not really spoken about a lot in mainstream medicine. And even you know, like even the idea of I'll shut up.

will not change their blood pressure. This is where it's not even a matter of do I take the drug or not. People's bodies just respond. Why we have blood pressure. For example, one person, it could be their nervous system that's just on and driving a sympathetic response throughout their body.

Another person, we know there's individuals with actually skinnier archrees and so the pressure in those arteries is higher and that naturally creates a blood pressure, whereas somebody else who gets forgotten altogether the way that their arteries are, they get low blood pressure and they go great, you're fantastic.

As I know, this is diabolical because this can be really bad at the other end as well, And so we forget about the range first and then we look at There was a really great study looking at at systematic review in two twenty nineteen looking at the effectiveness of hit training and it's it was thought to be the panacea. Yeah, we're going to fix everything with hit training.

Thirty thirty three percent are likely to get a result, thirty four percent are uncertain to get a result, and the difference thirty three percent are unlikely to get a result with it. So it's literally a third or third or third for uh. You look at a cycle class and you know who's going to get the benefit. We don't know. Everyone feels exhausted and feels like rewarded afterwards.

But if if you're doing it in the morning, it could be that your body doesn't tolerate stress that well in the morning and it actually creates a greater stress response for the rest of the day, you're completely exhausted by lunchtime and you don't recover. I've had c C Suite people that I've taken through a bit of a program stop training in the morning and get four hours of productivity back in their day because they're not exhausted from their training. They train in the afternoon and they

get two to three times the benefit. So that level of nuance, the timing, the type of training that still applies to foods, and the timing of foods, when you should eat your foods, when your biggest meal should be, the types of nutrients that you're more likely to need right through to you know, we had one individual with a very complex case of like nosebleeds, headaches, dizziness, just NonStop, and it turned out that the profile actually said you

should not live it altitude. You need to move down to the bottom of the mountain. And she'd been doing everything for ten years, seeing every specialist that she gets there, and literally she had to remove kale and moved to the bottom of the mountain and all of her symptoms resolved in two weeks.

look at disease. We forget, We're forgotten completely about who's the person with the disease. Because somebody who needs a dry environment that treats them, a person who needs a human environment that's going to treat them, a person that needs three meals per day that's going to treat them. But if they're and so this is where you know, Hippocrates said this two and a half thousand years ago, and lots of people have said it in different ways.

There is no such thing as disease. There's a person with a disease and if you understand the person, and this you know, comes into the nearer divergence here as well. If you put a child into an environment that makes them happy, they don't have neurodivergent symptoms anymore. In some instances they behave really well, they focus really well, but you put them into an environment that doesn't match them, and their symptoms erupt, and so understand the person then

we can start to understand the disease process. But it's it's been I mean, it's been the best journey for the last ten years. And I could talk about it for hours, but I'll stop there for the moment.

might not work for you. You know, like someone has a handful of almonds, it's a healthy snack.

I was mildly peckish. I thought, you know, i'll go and i'll get myself a coffee at seven to eleven, which I know is not the high watermark for but fuck it, that's what I did, and while I was in there, I went, I might grab one of these. In hindsight, bad decision. Chicken wraps. I'm like, it's just a chicken wrap, like chicken and salad. Can't be bad. I didn't read the box anyway, got out, had a bite, I'm like, oh, I don't know. I don't know anyway,

So I ate this wrap. It was only like maybe four hundred and fifty calories or something, but I don't know what the fuck was in that, but it made me feel sick until last night, like I just there was something where it was margarine, whether it was I don't know what it was.

things like that generally. But it's amazing when you get out of because I know exactly what works for my body with everything, with food, with sleep, with supplements, with rest, with recovery, with socialization, with time alone, with time with people, with stress, with calm, with and then I just chuck this. And you wouldn't think one little thing could have such an impact, but it.

we never ask those questions. People don't get any kind of barometer about that, and then you end up sort of masking what life could feel like, or masking the amount of pain in your body with caffeine and busyness

and alcohol and whatever it may be. You know the number of people that I know that go home and just have a glass of wine to take the edge off it as opposed to you know, what is actually creating the edge, you know, And even that question, I just prefer to wake up a little bit more sluggish and I'll just have another coffee and then I'll be fine. It's we are supported by our society to live like that, caffeinated, masking the real signals that are coming from our system.

The effort to be more mindful is great. But even still, and this is probably what the most exciting stuff about the work that we do is when you get a symptom, we can now say, well, this is why that symptom is there. You know, if Tiff goes, oh, I've got a bit of a headache or whatever it might be, I could say, well, these are the three things that are going to be most relevant for tif based off what we know about her body as far as headaches

are concerned. My headaches for a body like Tip, a lot of it's actually muscle tension and stretching appropriately actually makes a big difference. But for somebody else those headaches is because they've eaten their meat too quickly and it's digesting poorly, and that's creating a headache. That's the most likely reason for example. So it's not just identifying the symptom,

but then actually being able to navigate to cause. And that's what the data and the AI actually allows us to do now, is to say I'm feeling like this. We actually had an individual she was using the app. She had burning tongue or something like that. I'm not too familiar with it, went to the doctor and you know rightly, so six minute consultation got some nonstroileni in

flams happy days. She then went home and asked her digital twin essentially and said, like, I've got burning mouth into well for your body, it's likely related to your mental stress, So do this breathing exercise, avoid these three foods or whatever it might be. Three days it was resolved. It was really fascinating to see if you understand cause and you make the right treatment, then all of these alternative things actually become very very powerful when they're precise.

So yeah, this is definitely the thing that we're trying to do is raise everybody's knowledge about well, what do I actually need to do and then assess how does my body feel when I do that? Because that's going to be a more true measure.

So it's this is one of the issues with randomized control trials is I want to test this one thing, and yes, I'll try and control for all of these other things. But there's there's a real development and evolution that's coming to the way that we're going to interpret research like that. But I won't get into that too much unless we unless we do. But so let's say that you've got a person and they're a night owl, okay, and so night owls are people that not that they

have to wake up late. But if you stress them in the morning, if you give them some sort of stress loud pitch, noises, lots of mental activity, physical intensity. If you give them a stress in the morning, their body goes WTF and it says, my village must be burning down. I need to be on high alert now. And what we see if you put an individual through high intensity training, their cortisole levels will go up and they'll stay up for longer. Now, cortisole is one of

those chemicals that actually contributes to muscle loss. You go and find muscle, you break it down, and you turn it into fuel so that you can keep going because your body goes I'm in stress. I've just got to keep going right now. I'm not going to worry about anything else. I'm just going to survive. Whereas, if you take an early bird and you get them to do that same training first thing in the morning, their cortisole levels go up and then they return to normal within

fifteen minutes. So what you've got is two people doing the same training. They've been given the stimulus, but then one person's been exposed to so much more stress hormone as a result of that training that they don't get to a crue muscle for that period of time. They don't get the synthetic response, or at least it's been negated somewhat by cortisol. So and then it may disrupt sleep. It may reduce their sleep quality because their rhythms now

out and their cortisol's fluxing all over the place. It could disregulate some of their appetite as well. It might reduce some of their activity later on in the day, because they're now a lot more tired and wiped out because they did that training. So there's a whole lot of different factors that can come into this that then mean that you don't get a net growth of muscle

over time. But obviously it's multi factorial. But then for the early bird, you know, it's like geez, I feel so great after that, and they eat well, they sleep well, you know, the recovery is better. So you know, it's not just the training, obviously, it's all of the systemic effects that happen after that training and when that training occurred.

which is catabolic into the mix, you know, and all that, then people start to get stressed around what's not working. They kind of throw fuel on the non muscle building fire. Yeah, that's that's just such an interesting thing because trying to get especially young men and teenage boys and women as well, But it seems to me to be more blokes and boys to understand that you're not building muscle in the gym.

You're just creating a stimulus that might lead to that if the other things are okay, you know, if you get the rest, if you get if you get the recovery, if you get the nutrition, if you harmonially are in a good place. Yeah, just trying to because all you're trying to do in the gym is to stimulate your body to respond a certain way.

This is what's so crazy about this is this incredible guy took five hundred individuals from about one hundred and thirty different families and he made them do aerobic training, so on the bike, forty five minutes being supervised on the bike. And what they found is, firstly, your genetics determine your baseline VO two, like how fit you are is very much based on your VO two on your genetics.

And secondly is that there were the super responders. In every study, there's a super responder, the twenty percent of people that just skyrocket their results, and then there's the other twenty percent that get a negative result. He showed that even people with good training or no training didn't matter. There were specific families where they would get no response or a negative response from three times a week, forty five minutes of cycle training at seventy five percent of

their max. But it says the study, if you look at you know, if you look at this amongst other studies, you'd say, on average, everybody improves by this much. And it's immediately inaccurate for most people, because some people improved twelve hundred. The average was four hundred and some are negative five. And that has been repeated that study so

many times. And then when people try and say, oh, non responders to exercise don't actually exist, they're just not training hard enough, what they try and do is they just bump up the volume so that everyone's doing five hours of really intense exercise per week. And what they find is that the people that are superresponders don't actually respond that much more. They get the same result that

they got it two and a half hours. And the people that didn't respond to two and a half hours of this really intense exercise, they get a three percent improvement in their fitness and they go, great, see there that guy, whereas another person's getting a fifty percent improvement in their fitness. So all you've got to say to the population now of Australia is, hey, everybody can get a result, and you can get a three percent improvement if you do five hours at seventy five percent per week.

You know, we can't even get Australia off the couch for the most part, or definitely and there's other countries like this too, to say, oh no, you're going to get virtually no response after five hours of training. It's not about non response, it's about people are different. And there was another great study just looking at if you give a power athlete power training, they get more powerful

and they get more aerobically fit. If you give endurance genes endurance training, they get more aerobically fit, more endurance, and they get more powerful. But if you switch the modality and make the think about this. You take a high jumper and you make them train the world's strongest man, what's going to happen to that high jump? They're going to break in half because they're this delicate little string bean that's designed for jump really high heights. They aren't

designed for that kind of strength. But if you train them in their strength, in their strength, which is endurance, I guess you know high jumpers are quite powerful, but let's talk ultra marathon runners or something like that. You see, when you align the training with the person, you get the response. And that's the same thing with food. Some people metabolically need three meals per day and a light dinner.

You align the fuel intake for that person based off their digestive function, and their body starts getting better and that might resolve. I've seen sleep, app noir, diabetes, weight problems, fluid retention, just by having the right timing of meals. But you take another person, they need six meals per day, like Tip is a five to six meals per day. Give her a snack or she starts hitting screens, you know,

maybe biting chairs. It might be some people need the regular consumption and if you provide that, their mood improves and their metabolism improves. But that's same six meal per day on the three mil a day person makes them more sluggish and hold more weight. So if you give the body what it needs, what it's designed to do, align the treatment with the person, that's when you see the diseases start to improve. And that's that's what we

don't do. We're working symptom symptoms in rather than person out, and that's what needs to change.

these things. That's not a standalone single thing. And you know, you have a thought and depending on the thought, well, there's a physiological consequence to that thought.

puts your body in a stress state. It's the same thing, but from a different person. And it's probably not even so much about that body touching my body as much as it is how I feel about that fucking body touching my body. So in other words, I'm actually creating this physiological negativity as my interpretation of old mate hugging me, who I don't want to hug me?

I've known the organization. Actually we're at the point now where it is exactly about all of those things, and AI allows us to actually understand all of those things in real time about the person. So research is going to move from a randomized control trial meta analyses model, which is the meta analyses is the average of the averages,

which is even less specific for the individual. It is like, oh no, on average, this works some of the time, but not it doesn't anyway, won't get it that The future is personalized algorithms, which is, this person has woken up at this time, They've had this particular amount of work, this type of work in the morning, and that's created this heart rate variability for them. And then they had a cup of tea, and that cup of tea seemed

to normalize the heart rate variability. Then they had to hang out with John, and John seemed to normalize their heart rate variability and help them into a recovery phase. Then they had a call from their partner and their heart rate variability went wild, and their skin conductance went all over the place, and then their fatigue levels, their productivity went down, and then they had a bit of food here or whatever. It might be, so much so that the way health will be really in the next

five years, definitely the next ten years. It's all about standardization of augmented reality goggles. You'll be walking down the street it'll say, oh, harps mate, I know that you're trying to do your best to recover. You've been in a slightly sympathetic state, or your heart rate's been up a little bit for the last hour. You've got three meetings for the rest of the day coming up. I've ordered a green tea on the way to that. It's going to be ready for you to pick up for

you to consume. But also listen to this music as well, because we need you to return back to this baseline to catch some rest so that you can go back into that anabolic state. And oh, you know what, we listened to that song at that time it didn't work, try this song instead, and then it auto populates the next song that then does get you into the right state, whatever it might be. Like, this is where we'll well,

we'll start to really see it in real life. What are the various cues of what brings us into our best health, down to the vegetable, down to the way that we move our body. It's going to be a completely different world when it comes to health. The health without Thinking is the tagline, but the idea of it is that once you've been exposed to these things, once you go, oh, the green tea did really help? Then how was I feeling at that time? I was feeling

a little bit off? That's weird, Okay, have that granted. What happens over multiple exposures to that is you start actually getting real cues for oh yeah, actually no, I beat my alarm to it. I knew it was going to tell me my heart rate was a bit off because I felt it before it came up, because the last three time I felt like this, and then I got the alarm on my watch or the alarm on

my goggles, whatever it might be. So it actually allows us to use AI to re educate our very specific cues, but then it goes so much further, I think, than what we could do in the past, because we have this incredible understanding of the differences between individuals, of how people can find their purpose and do all of these incredible cognitive exercises in improving the health and well being. So it'll include all of that. So it is a truly exciting time to be alive. There's no doubt about it.

nervous system. To know how they feel in that space and one of the best things I ever did was I built this office that I love where I'm just looking at all these trees and my office is nice and comfy, and when I come in to hear I feel more creative and more focused and more calm than any other room in the house, in fact, any other I don't think you could put me in a workspace where I would feel better.

And Yeah, when you think about, for example, among many other things, how long you spend at like for us, like Tiff, for you or me, how long I spend at a computer or at this desk or on you know, in zoom calls, or on podcasts or reading fucking papers or writing papers or answering emails, It's like, well, if you're going to spend a lot of time in that space, in that position, you might want to make it a really nice space to be in because that's good for

your body and your emotions. And your cognitive function, but also you know, just for your happiness level. And I don't think most of the people that I talk to they don't think about their work environment in terms of the relationship that it has or the impact that it has on their health.

If you had a BMI that was twenty two or below, you would lose weight in that environment. And this is because a bigger body naturally has a more anabolic free disposition to stress. So that is, I'm going to grow in stress, I'm going to get bigger in stress, whereas skinnier bodies they have a catabolic response to stress, and that is I'm going to waste away. And so this is where so where people started and this is just from work. This isn't the food that they're eating, this

is the environment that I'm in at work. And then we had a really fascinating experience. We run a bunch of worldness programs and one that really sticks out in my mind. She was actually the BMI of twenty two or below and her we do a depression anxiety stress scale that's twenty one. It's a well validated tool for general population and mental.

topping out both scales. The change that we made to her, we knew that her body, based on the way that she was built, she was highly responsive to lots of noise, lots of light, lots of people because her nervous system, her ascending reticular activating system, is much more awake, and whenever she gets any kind of neural input, any kind of sensory input, it goes to her amigdala, which is her sort of stress response center, and then for her it goes up to her brain, whereas other people it

goes down into their system, and they get and they want to punch stuff for her, she processes all of her stress cognitively, and so she was in an open plan office with air conditioning, bright lights, lots of people talking all of the time, in a really active culture. We moved her just based on the basic recommendations in her environment. We moved her to a quiet room where she could control the lighting and the temperature and didn't have anyone around her. In three weeks, her dash scores

went to zero. It was truly, my nervous system is completely overwhelmed. I cannot get out of my head and what is.

have air conditioning? It's like, ah, just agitated. It was like, great, who's had an interaction with John where he's been agitated? Your hands go up, you go great, did you ever think that it was the air conditioning? All you guys are thinking John's a terrible bloke. It just turns out the firmo stat was to play and these things we just we don't put together. We're not thinking of them

as contributing to our health. But if you submit yourself to that experience, you go, I hate this job, I'm out, when in fact I hate this room is actually what you mean. The work is fine, the team is fine, but we have to create a narrative out of what we feel. And often that narrative is the thing in front of me. Work is the problem, when in fact it wasn't at all. So it's the idea of place is so fascinating.

lot of us live unconsciously. And that's not an insult. It's just how I see things in that we kind of get out of bed and we get back into the canoe on our river, and it's our life has already got momentum and fly, and we kind of just step back into that momentum and we do what we did yesterday the way that we did it yesterday, the day before.

river to be able to see what's going on. We've got to get to the side of the metaphoric bank or the side of the river, to get on the bank so we can be more aware of what we're doing and how we're doing it, because it's very difficult to be objective and aware about the thing that you're in the middle of, you know, so being able to try and step back and go what is going on and when I'm in that environment, or when I sleep with the air on or the air off, or two

blankets or one blanket or all that kind of stuff.

feel more love for my friends. I feel like the day is actually worth living, Whereas if I don't do that work, or if I'm miss or disorganized, that actually creates strength to me, but for somebody else's. I just love having my family over and cooking them a meal,

and I love the idea of us connecting together. There is nothing more grounding and peaceful for me than that, you know, another person is I just love getting into nature and immersing in nature and going for a walk and just listening to the birds and being connected to nature. Another person says, I just love being in my hit class, trying to beat all of those other people in the

class and just winning. I hate not winning, and I feel so good when I can compete and win and I'm in some sort of challenge or excitement or doing a different thing, experiencing a different place, doing a different adventure. Another person's like, I just love being around my best friends. It doesn't matter what we're doing, it's social so and the reason why I share those and it can be I just like time by myself in a nice quiet room where I could just be completely with my own thoughts.

And the reason why I share that is because everyone's searching for what should I start with first? Is it exercise? Is it food? Is at sleep? Is it whatever? But what we know from the work that we've done, we know that there is a different People have a biological mandate for their top priority. And for me, the way that my brain rewards itself, it's productive work makes everything cycles around that, and if I get that right, it works for somebody else it is is my family safe.

The third is Is it just my group of friends and spending time and having fun? Is it or a sense of freedom if somebody else is a challenge. And this is where if you think of it that way, rather than oh, I need to get things right, that you can start with what are the environments that just

make me feel fantastic? And my suggestion is to just incorporate more of those things into your life rather than trying to look for every little nook and cranny and every little variation of exercise, whatever it might be, Just go what is going to make me feel amazing? What kind of weights do I really like to lift? Kind of cardio do I absolutely love doing? And when you know, if I had the choice on the weekend, when would

I do it? What would make me feel like I'm not rushed in the morning and I could wake up and just do it in my own time and really enjoy it. Who would I be with? So I would make a do a bit of an audit of when do I feel at my best? And is it the people? Is that the place? Is it the activity? Is it the food or is it not the food? Is it just the people? Is it the solitude? Is it the

work orientation? And actually have. And normally, you know, culturally we're rewarded for working really hard, but then culturally we're punished for putting work over our family, in friends or whatever it might be. So there's this total tension that's happening all the time, and people think that, oh, me looking after my family's not enough. You know, me just wanting to spend time with my friends, it's not enough.

That's not a good enough reward. And what I would really encourage you to do is actually just think what is my favorite thing to do, and then bugger what everybody else thinks, and just think I love that that makes me turn up as my best I'm going to do more of that. And that in itself is a recovery that in itself is eliciting flow and reward. And because in those times you actually feel, you look at your physiology, it's focused, rewarded, and calm, and that is

the signature of health. So if you've got that, you are maximizing life in that moment. That's all life's about, pretty much, that combination of things. I've got focus, I'm calm, and I'm feeling rewarded. If we could all be in that space all the time. Life's a breeze, and those things come from things that align with us. So I would look beyond the normal scope and I would look for things that truly make you feel inspired. That's where i'd start.