Top 10 Worst Health Trends (That Everyone Thinks Are Healthy)

25:35You know, walking a lot, especially up and down hills. I mean, that's sort of the ideal rhythm for longevity for most people. So the new idea should be to train hard and recover hard, right? Recovery is part of the program. Sleep well. Get enough protein, right? Around 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. And take at least one to two true days of rest a week. Now, you can go on a short walk those days. That's fine. But you want to also track and monitor your progress. You know, I wear an Oura ring. A lot of people wear Whoop bands. But being able to track and look at what's your resting heart rate in the morning?

26:15What's your HRV? Having these apps and tools along with your own wisdom of listening to your body and knowing when to push it and when to rest, that's what you want to do for long-term health. Overtraining is discipline is not attractive. All right, number five, energy drinks, right? Here's the claim. Sugar-free energy drinks are a clean pre-workout and focus tool, all right? Basically, it's just caffeine plus a few vitamins, so it's totally harmless, okay? But the cardiac data shows otherwise in a medical journal, here's what they found, that 57 % of healthy people who drank 32 ounces of energy drinks had a much, much higher risk of potentially fatal heart arrhythmias.

26:59And in Chinese medicine, if you are constantly stimulating yourself, you are actually depleting something called your kidney yang, and that's tied to longevity. It actually causes something called stem cell depletion. So you start using up all of your body's stem cells. So now your body can't heal and regenerate and recover as well. That's the Chinese medicine point of view. So if you're always on stimulants, I look at some of these bottles and they've got Panex ginseng and loads. And the bigger issue is the caffeine, really high levels of caffeine. And that's telling your body, caffeine does not give you energy.

27:35Caffeine masks your tiredness. It basically tells your body, you're not tired even though you are, so you don't rest and recover like you should. And so later on, you have to pay the bill. This is like building up credit card debt, right? So you've used all of your energy reserves. You're using up all your body's ATP, all your cellular energy, but you don't even know it's happening. So it's like you haven't seen your bill in years. And finally, you get the bill back and it's tens of thousands of dollars. And you think, how can I pay for this? Well, the way most of you are paying for it is with hypothyroidism, chronic fatigue syndrome, low energy.

28:12If you're tired all the time, oftentimes it's because of this. And so stopping the excess caffeine, stopping the energy drinks, listen, it's fine to have a matcha green tea. It's fine to do some of these adaptogenic herbs like ashwagandha and rhodiola and reishi mushroom that sort of lightly build up. They actually build up your ATP energy over time. They're actually the things you want to be doing. So green tea and rhodiol and ashwagandha, those are fantastic. But the excess caffeine, the research shows, you're going to pay for it either with heart disease or according to Chinese medicine by using up all your adrenal and cellular energy over time.

28:49Number four, THC gummies nightly. Now, I saw this happen and I pushed back immediately. This was years ago. So back, I believe this is around 2018 when CBD and some cannabis was more legalized and it started states like Colorado, and then each state had their own laws. And I started seeing some of these doctors, and actually they were medical doctors, come in on the fringe, and some of them, a lot in the Western states of the United States, come in and start to say, okay, well, CBD, not only is CBD beneficial, but THC is beneficial as well. And I thought, well, that's not absolutely true. And then I heard them start to say, yeah, I mean, really, it's almost any dose that you can benefit from.

29:36Here's where this matters. Remember, the dose determines the medicine or the poison. THC, though it's natural and it comes from a plant, can have major, major side effects long-term. You know, and here's the thing I see some people saying in the natural health community. A nightly THC gummy, it's natural. It's not addictive. It's a way to unwind. You know, it helps me get better sleep at night. It's a way to get rid of the stress. It helps with chronic pain. It's way safer than drinking. Okay, so this is the narrative I'm hearing right now with THC and things like THC gummies. Now, what I want to share with you is what the medical evidence shows today.

30:13And I can tell you this as a practitioner, and I'm also going to share with you the ancient view of ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. Okay, so here's the functional medicine reality. Nightly use builds tolerance and dependence and fragments your REM sleep and your deep sleep. So you actually get worse sleep at night the longer you do THC. Now, here's the ancient TCM lens and view, okay? Cannabis depletes your qi long-term, okay? So qi is cellular energy. It's ATP, right? It's your mitochondria. Long-term use of THC, deplete and damage your mitochondria. That's what Chinese medicine says.

30:54This is over 3 ,000 years old. It is absolutely accurate in this. By the way, this is why if somebody uses THC long-term, think about the kind of old adage of, we'd see this on TV. I had a friend like this growing up in high school, started using THC, and then he became less motivated and less motivated and less motivated. For a lot of people, then it leads to erectile dysfunction for a lot of men who use this, but it just depletes. It depletes your body. And so why does somebody get lazy and lose motivation? because their body is depleted. Think about when you're exhausted and tired. You don't feel like doing anything.

31:32You just want to chill and relax when you're exhausted. THC exhausts and uses up your body's cellular energy and ATP and wipes out your mitochondria. Now, listen, let's say you just had surgery, okay? And you want to do something that's natural for pain. Doing a THC-CBD combo for a few days rather than a more serious medication that's going to have further harm on your body or be even more severe in its side effects. You know, to me, that's where it's medically approved and it makes medical sense to me. But for long-term sleep, in a very similar way as melatonin, is not good nightly as a supplement.

32:15THC is not good long-term for overall health. Now, it might have less side effects than conventional painkillers and sleep aids, but overall, it's not a vitamin. It's not harmless long-term. If you are having issues with sleep, as I talked about before, do everything you possibly can to get better sleep. Magnesium glycinate, we talked about that. Also, if you've got chronic pain, turmeric and ginger, omega-3 fatty acids. If you're dealing with anxiety, start doing more breath work. Go to the Bible, read the Bible, meditate on God's word day and night, right? Get outside more, get more vitamin D.

32:51This is the path you wanna go down. Again, as a temporary short-term natural form of medication, it makes sense. It's not for long-term use. Anyone else that tells you otherwise is lying to you. And here's where people get confused. They see studies and they say, you know, THC or CBD or, again, CBD is a totally different category. That's typically fine for long-term use for more people. But THC for long-term use, they'll show you a study saying it had less side effects than this pain medication. Okay, that's great. It may have less side effects than the pain medication, but it still is going to have some side effects long-term.

33:26But here's the trend that is going to destroy your health. Using GLP-1s without the guidance of a functional medicine practitioner that's doing micro-dosing and helping you also change your lifestyle simultaneously if you're not doing it that way. By the way, we don't even know the full studies. GLP-1s, we do not have true great long-term studies on all of the side effects it's going to cause. All right, number two, nicotine rebranded as wellness. So here's the claim. Nicotine pouches and gum sharpen focus and boost performance. Listen, they're tobacco free and they're basically a clean nootropic.

34:03That's false. All right. Now, listen, I'm a big fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the amazing things he's doing as part of the Maha movement and part of the FDA and HHS. I really respect him and think he's doing a lot of great things. The nicotine gum pouches, there is going to be a side effect of those. And just because something is tobacco-free doesn't mean it's still not addictive. Listen to this. A study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Public Health, this is also from a Yale report. And what they found in the studies is teens are starting to use it. Also, nicotine raises your heart rate, your blood pressure, and it creates dependency fast.

34:43especially in developing brains in younger kids in their teens and 20s. This is not biohacking. This is building a chemical dependency with a wellness label. Now, listen, here's the reality. Using a nicotine gum on occasion probably is not going to cause these major side effects. But for most people, they get addicted and they start using it on a daily basis. Here's the other thing I want to share with you, the Chinese Medicine View, because we don't have a lot of long-term studies on nicotine gum pouches. The Chinese medicine view is when you're going to increase your heart rate, when you're going to increase your blood pressure, what happens is you dry up your fluids.

35:21What nicotine does is a side effect. Different herbs have different side effects. Nicotine dries up your body's fluids. It dehydrates you at the cellular level. And what that does long-term is it leads to higher blood pressure, heart issues, dryness, it ages your skin and body. And listen, you could go look this up for yourself. Use an AI tool. What would the side effects be according to TCM, Chinese medicine, of daily nicotine use? And you'll see it causes what we call a yin deficiency, which is a fluid deficiency, and also increases your risk of cardiovascular events over time. Here's what you want to do instead.

35:55If you want to focus, get a good night's sleep. Okay, that's where it starts. That will be any pouch any day of the week. Get more time outside. Eat a protein-rich breakfast full of vitamins and minerals with things like berries and eggs and other brain-boosting food, right? Do beetroot juice. Do ashwagandha. Some MCT oil and lion's mane mushroom. These are much, much better options for long-term performance without the side effects. And number one for trends that are harming our health, by the way, I have two bonuses after this, but number one is extreme detoxes, all right? So here is the claim.

36:37Flush the toxins out with a juice fast or a colon cleanse or a liver flush or a parasite cleanse and just reset your whole system overnight. So here's the nuance. Again, the dose determines the medicine or the poison. Listen, I have a lot of friends in the wellness industry, and so I have a friend, and she always thinks that more is better. And so when she started hearing about coffee enemas, she started doing them every day, every day for months. You know how depleting that is to the microbes in your colon? That's not healthy. Here's something to think about, okay? This is a really important principle, one of the most important I've ever mentioned on the show here.

37:20Your body heals itself. What we're here to do is support your body, okay? We're not trying to force it to do things. We want to support the body. That's what medication does. It forces your body to do something you don't want to do. A blood pressure medication is forcing your blood pressure one way. A statin drug is forcing your cholesterol to do something. You know what vitamins and minerals do? Vitamins and minerals support your organs in performing at their best. That's what a lot of herbs do. They help change your environment. They get your body in a position to where it can perform at its best.

37:51When you do higher doses or do a lot of these forced detoxes, you start putting things at such high doses, you're forcing your body to do it. Here's the reality. No vitamin, no supplement, no detox heals you. Your body heals itself. If I get a cut on my hand right now, you know what? Vitamin doesn't necessarily heal that. My body heals itself. If you have a dead body, moments after somebody dies, the body stops healing. Why? Because the spirit within us, that's what heals us. Now, herbs and vitamins and minerals, we need those building blocks your spirit does in order to put your body together, in order to heal.

38:27But they don't heal you. So a detox, it does not heal you. So the way you want to think about detoxing is think about what the Bible recommended for detoxing, right? Proper sanitation, talked about doing some herbs here and there, and it talked about doing things like fasting. It's just supporting the body and doing what God already designed it to do. So if you are doing a detox, often the times you don't want to do the highest dose possible. You will harm yourself. I want to share, I've done this to myself before. Before I knew what I was doing, okay, I started, this was many years ago. This was like my first year in practice.

39:01I decided to do what I would call just a very intensive parasite cleanse because I thought, oh, I have a parasite because I started having a few symptoms. Now, it turns out I was just too stressed out. I was working too many hours and my cortisol was too high, so I started getting SIBO. But I didn't know that at the time. And so I did a really aggressive detox for a month where I did every herb you can think of, black walnut, wormwood. I did diametaceous earth. And then after that, I had loose stool for a year. Now I finally got turned on to Chinese medicine, learned what I had done to myself and completely healed my body within about a month.

39:39I mean, it took about 90 days, but really after one month, I was almost completely healed once I learned what I had done to myself. But overall, I've harmed myself before being too extreme and detoxes. And this is before I have the 20 years of experience that I now have and working with tens of thousands of patients. But here's the reality. More is not better, okay? More aggressive is not better. Think about how amazing God made your body and just naturally supporting it and giving it what it needs. That's what most people need. Now, that's not to say if you have something like cancer or a major parasite or another issue, you don't need to go to what some people would consider doing more extreme diets.

40:18Like I remember when my mom had cancer, Jordan Rubin, a gross friend of mine had cancer, he was doing mostly green juices and salmon and avocado almost every meal, right? And so that does seem extreme, but going more extreme with food or being very extreme with very healthy foods is different than doing high-dose herbs and colonics and a lot of these other treatments simultaneously. So listen, I am a fan of doing detoxification the right way. It's almost a daily detox. Here's one of my favorite ways to detox, do a little bit of intermittent fasting. Listen, I'm a fan of detoxification periodically.

40:56Your liver, your kidney, your gut, your skin, your lymphatic system, your colon, they all need support. Your job is to support them, not to force them. Drink more water. Eat more fiber. Get more steamed cruciferous vegetables. That's going to help detoxify a lot of things out of your body, take a probiotic supplement, drink a little milk thistle tea, doing those things regularly, right? Sweat through exercise or using an infrared sauna, prioritize sleep. These things are naturally going to cleanse you and help you heal. Doing an aggressive detox oftentimes is not the best way to heal. So the reality is doing a short, sensible healthy eating plan and lifestyle plan is going to beat out the daily colonics and the juice only fasts and the mystery cleanse pills every day of the week.

41:48All right, now I have two bonuses here when it comes to trends I want to hit on, and these are very important. Okay, here's the first one. Wellness orthorexia. I had a roommate in post-grad. This guy was at the time probably the most fit human I had ever met. and he was obsessive about it, okay? It was an obsession. And later on, he was diagnosed with a condition called orthorexia. And it was a mental health disorder that crippled his life for a period of time. Now, I wanna say this about him. One, I'm so proud of him, this person. I still know him, I'm still friends with him. And he overcame that in a really powerful way.

42:24And listen, he's still incredibly fit. He's still incredibly healthy, but it's not an obsession for him anymore, okay? God's more important to him. His family's more important to him. and it's not the greatest obsession of his life. But I know people, and I especially, you know, I work out at home a lot, but also I go into the gym here in Nashville. Lifetime fitness, and I do see some people in there and I know, and you can see it in them, they have this orthorexia. And here's the claim that they'll make. Well, eating perfectly clean and optimizing every habit is just a form of discipline, okay?

42:55And more control is always better. It's just not true. Can I tell you this? One of the single biggest things I see that causes disease today in people, and I'm talking about real serious disease, autoimmune disease, cancer, is people obsessing over their health. Listen, you should be prioritizing your health. You should not be obsessing over your health every minute of the day. It becomes negative. It creates medical conditions. Because what happens is when you're doing that, when you're obsessive, you're staying in a fight or flight state. You are driving cortisol high. And that's making you ill.

43:31It's throwing off your hormones. It's damaging your recovery, not to mention taking away all the fun out of life and not living by God's design. And just so you know, by definition, orthorexia is an obsession with correct eating and being healthy, okay? Oftentimes these people can look at themselves in the mirror and there's a dysmorphia there and even how they look and appear, but they are absolutely obsessed. And it drives chronic stress, social isolation. So it's like you can't eat anywhere or yet you couldn't ever miss a workout for anything, nutrient gaps from over-restriction, and a constant low-grade anxiety.

44:08And here's the irony. That chronic stress response elevates cortisol, disrupts sleep, strains relationships, and can do more damage to your body than eating a piece of bread or missing a workout. So here's what you should aim for. Consistency, not perfection, okay? It sort of followed the 80-20, or listen, if you want to go a little bit overboard, go 90-10. But the 80-20 principle exists for a reason. Health is a tool for a bigger, fuller life. Health isn't the end goal. Running to win the race and honoring God with your life, that is the end goal. Now, we want to have great physical health to do it because you can do it longer, and we're called in the Bible to honor God with our bodies.

44:53It says in God's Word, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. it. We should honor God with it. But when you go and read the New Testament, even Paul says things like, listen, if somebody puts a food in front of you, eat it. The goal is to advance the kingdom of God. It's not to eat perfect every moment of the day. And I'll share this with you. I was kind of borderline before I got married. And listen, I wasn't, I would say, completely out of balance, but I was probably a little bit more of the, let's call it 98, 2%, right? I did on occasion in a couple times a year. I would not eat perfectly, but I was very, very restrictive with my eating.

45:34And then I got married and Chelsea loosened me up a little bit. And now I follow probably more of the 90-10 rule. And so you know what? When we go to Italy, I have gelato and I have bread. And even now, even if we're not in Italy, you know, we have, you know, you call them cheat meals. I prefer vacation meals. We don't eat perfect. Our kids don't eat perfect. We eat really good. It's a big priority for us, but it's not absolutely perfect because we have more important things in our life. So listen, it's okay on occasion to eat birthday cake with your kids. Now, I know some of your kids may have severe food sensitivities.

46:07And so like my daughter Arwen, you know, sometimes we've actually brought her own birthday cake, but sometimes she will eat the cake or cupcake at the kid's birthday party. Listen, here's what you be looking out for. Notice if eating clean has started to come with major guilt, anxiety, and isolation. Now, here's the other thing I do want to say. Don't go too far in the other direction though either, right? We should be disciplined. We should be consistent. That's how you grow. That's how you get better. You should do the hard things. You don't want to do the easy thing. You just don't want to live on fast food and you don't want to just live on fast food and processed foods.

46:42So you are called to be disciplined. That's a virtue. That's a good thing. But again, what I would keep in mind is follow the 80-20 rule or the 90-10 rule. You know, here's how I did this in college. In college, I decided that I was going to eat great five days a week, follow a meal plan. And then on the weekends, or at least on Saturday, I was going to take the day off and sort of eat what I wanted. And sometimes still, I would eat pretty good. But you know, if we were having pizza, I'd have pizza. If we were having, you know, if we went out to a restaurant, I would just kind of get whatever I wanted.

47:13And so I would have kind of that six days a week, and let's call it maybe a Sabbath. I took one day a week on Saturdays, and I said, I'm going to kind of eat what I want on Friday nights and Saturdays and do it that way. So listen, this works different for everybody. You might be a person right now, and maybe you got a recent cancer diagnosis, and you need to be eating very clean right now, okay, and not necessarily go off script too often. But long-term for most people, you want to follow that 80-20 rule and not fall into health being your God or your idol. Now, this last trend is maybe the most damaging trend of all, new age spirituality.

47:49Manifesting tarot cards, you know, channeling spiritual guides. These are a huge trend today. And I've seen this trend growing now for a while where people don't want to plug into religion. They want to just tap into spirituality. Now, listen, there's a nugget of truth here in that we are spiritual beings and we are created to connect with the divine. And we should be looking around with a spiritual sense, not just a physical sense. We should be walking around with a spiritual sense of what's going on in life. And a lot of people feel this emptiness in their life because they have not tapped into the spiritual or the divine, and specifically into God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

48:32And so there's an emptiness there, and so they're trying to find a way to fill that with spirituality. But the thing you're missing in your life is not any spirit. It's the spirit of Jesus. It's the Holy Spirit. And when you find that, it changes everything. And the thing it does is, and here's why it's dangerous, it takes your eye off the truth. It promises peace. It promises healing. It promises power, but it points you inward. It's all about yourself as God. And that's just going to lead to more emptiness. It's like, go and find yourself, right? That's part of that New Age spirituality. It's find yourself, discover yourself.

49:07There are multiple truths happening at the same time. And I think it's absolute stupidity. If you think about this, people are opening themselves up to almost anything in any practice. They don't even know what they're opening themselves up to, right? If you're opening yourself up to something in the Christian faith, for instance, you know you're opening yourself up to Jesus. You're very clear about what that person is and what he's doing in your life. If you're just practicing New Age spirituality, what spirit are you opening yourself up to? Do they love you? Will they give their life for you?

49:39You know, think about it like this. I'm trying to think of who are all the world changers who are in the new age spirituality, right, throughout history. I can't think of a single one, right? You look at the people that actually changed the world and did the most good in the world, you'll notice almost all of them were of the Christian faith. So here's the reality. You were made for real connection, not with the universe, not with some other spirit, likely a demon, but with God who made it and who knows you by your name. And if you are missing something in your life, you know, I love following Russell Brandon, looking at his conversion and how he has changed as a person for the good.

50:17It's so powerful to watch and see in that very same way. That only happens with a very specific type of spirit and person in Jesus. And here's what the Bible says in 1 John 4.1, test the spirits to see whether they are from God. That's the first thing you should do. Next is 2 Corinthians 11.14, Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. There's a lot of people that are tapping into the spiritual realm as a trend right now. I think everybody from Taylor Taylor Swift to Chrissy Teigen to a lot of people in Hollywood today, they are tapping into the spiritual realm. The question is, what spirit are they tapping into?

51:00And this is important because your spiritual health will impact your physical health as much or more than anything else. So here's what you need to know about a lot of these trends. A lot of these trends, some of them hold a nugget of truth. Some of them, if done properly for the right people, they can be healthy. For some of them, they'll lead you down the wrong path and they're going to have major side effects. So here are the patterns behind all 10, right? Oftentimes it starts as something real, right? Cold exposure, fasting, GLP-1s, even nicotine harm reduction. Most have a legit kernel that the marketing exploits.

51:37Okay, that's what happens. There's a little bit of it that's true. And GLP-1s can be boosted in your body. It's a real peptide, but it's not used properly. Then here's what happens. The dose makes the poison. A good tool used daily when it's not supposed to be maxed out as people do it or unsupervised fails and causes harm rather than help. Here's the other problem with these trends. It ignores your unique biology, your sex, your age, your labs, your life, your stage in life, a protocol built for one body gets sold to millions. This is why personalized medicine matters so much. And also, it oftentimes replaces the fundamentals.

52:20Every fix should come back to typically your spiritual health, your sleep, getting enough protein and fiber, movement, sunlight, recovery, your faith. The pattern is always the same. The real thing is taken too far and out of context and sold back to you as health. So here is the four question filter. Number one, who is selling it, okay? Is there a product? Is there a code? Is there an affiliate link? By the way, that's not always bad. There's some great products out there. I take a lot of products, right? I take a lot of supplements. I use a lot of red light and infrared sauna and I do all kinds of things.

52:55But it's important to know. Okay, number two, where's the evidence, okay? Is there a real study, especially a human study that looked at it or thousands of years of evidence doing it this way. Number three, does it fit my biology, my age, my sex, my labs, my condition? Is there a protocol for someone like you specifically? And number four, what are the downsides, right? Everyone's always talking about the upsides. What's the trade-off, right? It's important to know what those are. So here's your assignment. Pick one trend you've been tempted by and run it through the four-question filter before you spend another dollar or take another dose.

53:34Then double down on one thing that actually works for you. Tell me which one you're going to do in the comment section. And remember, before you do a lot of these trends, it's important to build the foundation of a good diet, getting good sleep, reducing stress, spending more time outside. Build your foundation first. Now, listen, if you want the real evidence-based approach to healing your body at the cellular level, something I created for you is a blood work guide. Listen, I think one of the best things in order for you to know exactly what you should be doing, which diets will work, what biohacks will work, what trends will actually work for you is to actually get the right type of blood work done.

54:15And the problem is today, a lot of these companies, they're not running the right type of blood work markers. And so I put together a free PDF of the top 25 blood work markers that you need to know about in your own body so you know exactly what's going on in your health. And also something I encourage you to do to help build the foundation for your cellular health is I just wrote a book with Dr. Wilcold. It's called Heal Your Cells. And you can go on amazon.com and just search Heal Your Cells, Dr. Josh Axe. You can find the book there. And this book really is a deep dive in advanced nutrition, natural medicine, longevity, and goes through how to have radically great health the right way.

54:57And finally, I want to say this. I'm not trying to make you afraid of every health trend. I'm trying to protect you. And what I want you to do is I want you to be able to focus on doing the things that matter most, the things that will really move the needle and help you experience your greatest level of health. And I want to encourage you to subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed yet, so you don't miss a thing. Also, we've been getting a lot of five-star reviews lately. So thank you, all of you who are leaving those five-star reviews. If you haven't done that, we'd be grateful for that as well, along with sharing this with one person who really needs it.

55:30And finally, I want to encourage you to download the free Top 25 Blood Markers Guide. Just type blood work in the comments, and we'll send you the link for free. I just want to say thanks so much for tuning into the Dr. Josh Ack Show. I want to encourage you, take care of your temple, and I'll see you on the next episode. www.subtимieplace.com