Biogravitational Medicine & the Shocking Impact That Gravity Has on Our Health - With Dr. Brennan Spiegel

0:00You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.

0:11I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about this episode. It isn't often that an entirely new revelation happens in the field of health and fitness, and that's what you're getting access to today. We've got one of the leading scientists and researchers in the world on today's episode, and he's going to be sharing some mind-blowing insights about biogravitational medicine. All right, again, I cannot put this into words, how powerful this episode is, and looking at our body's relationship to gravity and how it affects all aspects of our health. Our special guest is a leading gastroenterologist, And so what really transitioned his career into understanding this relationship with gravity has to do with his association with our gut health, with our gastrointestinal health.

1:09And so he's going to be sharing some paradigm shifting insights about our gut health and its relationship to gravity, as well as our microbiome. All of this incredible cascade of microbes that live within our bodies and on our bodies, trillions and trillions of bacteria and their relationship with gravity and how it actually helps to keep us upright. All right. I'm telling you, this is so profound and not to mention the relationship, this biogravitational medicine implementation when it comes to our muscular function, the health of our cardiovascular system. You're going to look at your cardiovascular system in an entirely new way.

1:47And not only that, it's going to be just like, oh, that's why it's like that are you going to have moments like that and so again i'm so grateful to be able to share this with you today it's just adding another layer of empowerment of insight of understanding our bodies and our relationship in this incredible world that we're living in this incredible solar system and how we're a part of all of this and not only that we're not just looking at the physical relationship. We're also going to be looking at how gravity deeply impacts our mental health. What's happening with our experience of emotion is deeply and profoundly related to our relationship with gravity.

2:33And so be ready to learn some life-changing information. And of course, you're going to learn how do you implement some strategies to make you more gravity resilient. We're going to be talking about a few of those throughout the episode, but especially to close out this episode, you're going to get a masterclass in this and so many science backed ways that we can utilize this emerging paradigm of biogravitational medicine and fitness to our advantage. And one thing to consider before we get to our special guest, him being a gastroenterologist, He deals with our association with food and digestion, assimilation, elimination.

3:15And if we understand even what we're eating can give us a feeling of being weighed down, right? Or we can eat things that really make us feel light and energetic, right? Have you heard the term a light meal, right? So there are these things in lexicon we don't really think about, but they're deeply connected. And so I've got a question for you. Have you ever thought about why we seek out the foods that we seek? We are dealing with this intimate interconnection, this intermingling of all these different sensations and desires. And of course, in some instances, rewards. this is why we have the chemistry that we have is to drive us to seek out certain things now of course in our environment today we can get exposures we can get things in our system that kind of throw off that communication all right namely in the paradigm of ultra processed foods can throw off this craving communication center this apposite regulating network in our brain But did you know that one of the key drivers of increased cravings and food-seeking behaviors have to do with electrolyte deficiencies?

4:36In fact, a study cited in the journal Nutrients uncovered that increasing dietary potassium has one of the strongest correlations of decreasing body mass index of all nutrients studied, and it has a lot to do with its satiating effects. while an analysis published in the Journal of Nutrition and Internal Medicine demonstrates that magnesium suppresses hunger, lowers food intake, and reduces body weight. The most probable mechanism is through magnesium stimulating something called cholecystokinin, which plays an important inhibitory role in the control of feeding behavior. The emerging science is showing that there are three key electrolytes that are really operating to regulate our appetite and seeking behavior, our food seeking behavior.

5:23And those electrolytes are magnesium, potassium, and sodium. And dialing in the optimal ratios are really a powerful key in regulating our appetite, but also in our cognitive performance, in our immune system function, in our metabolic health, and so much more. So absolutely be proactive about eating foods that are rich in these key electrolytes. And also this is yet another great reason to utilize the very best electrolyte supplement in the world that honed in on optimal ratios of those three key electrolytes. These electrolytes are being utilized by Team USA weightlifting, by major sports teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, the list goes on and on and on.

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8:01It's definitely my favorite right now. Again, that's drinklmnt.com forward slash model. And now let's get to the Apple podcast review of the week. Another five-star review titled Such Important Information by CWYM Rhonda. Thank you, Sean, for all your work advocating for kids and families. Thank you so much for leaving that review over on Apple podcast. It really does mean a lot. And this is especially important for me. and you know again we're going to continue to bring on world-leading experts in the domain of pediatrics and just overall family wellness it's something that really helps to get me up in the morning is to to do whatever is necessary to create a healthier world for our children and for future generations but i'll tell you this it is something that has been a struggle because a lot of these algorithms, and this is real talk, they don't love it when you are talking about kids' health.

9:02And so whether it's like YouTube or sometimes social media platforms, some stuff can peek through, but just in general, all the other health information tends to spread, right? Very well. But when it comes to kids' health and health education, and so this can deter creators from creating information and sharing information around this unless they are deeply passionate about it. And that's why they're doing the work. And so it really does mean a lot to get that feedback. And, you know, we've got to do whatever's necessary for our families and the power really is in our hands. And so I really do appreciate that.

9:39If you have to do so, please pop over to Apple podcast, leave a review for the show. And now let's get to our special guest and topic of the day. Dr. Brennan Spiegel is a physician, professor of medicine, and research scientist at Cedars Cyanide in UCLA. His research explores how emotion, physical experience, and the mind-body connection shape health and how innovations like virtual reality and biogravitational medicine can support healing and overall well-being. Dr. Spiegel has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and written widely acclaimed books that bridge science, technology, and the human experience.

10:18He's been featured all over major media, including in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The Atlantic. And he's here today to deliver a masterclass on how gravity influences our mind, body, and emotions in powerful ways. Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Dr. Brennan Spiegel. Dr. Brennan Spiegel, thank you for coming to join us today. Hey, thanks for having me. We're gonna talk about some mind-blowing ways that gravity's impacting our physical health and our mental health. Can you start off by talking about the relationship between gravity and our gut health?

10:54Oh yeah, so gravity was here long before we were, and it'll be here long after we're gone. So it stands to reason that every part of your body, not just the gut, your bones, your muscles, your tendons, even your brain and your nervous system evolved to manage this fundamental force of physics. That's what we do right now as we're managing gravity. So I'm a gastroenterologist. I've thought a lot about the gut and its relationship to gravity. And so when we stood up, which was only in the last part of our evolutionary history, we went from four-legged creatures with a center of gravity where our gut was kind of hanging down off of the spine like ornaments off of a christmas tree to being 90 degrees shifted and everything had to hang straight down and we evolved all of these suspension systems we have suspension cables basically in our belly and it's holding up the sack of potatoes that you have and i have and some people are better at moving that sack of potatoes around than others and it has everything to do with how strong you are, what you eat, what the systems inside of your belly are doing.

12:08We can unpack all of that. Yeah, oh my gosh. Unpack is a good word for it. You know, just these are things that, as we were talking about, you know, even in our university education, we're taught a very mechanistic view of the human body and physiology. And in reality, there are all these invisible forces that we just don't consider in medicine. And that's changing. and thanks in large part to your work. Like this is absolutely blowing my mind. Every single aspect of our health, obviously you just mentioned this, we evolved in this environment and our bodies become tempered to this environment in ways that we don't even think of.

12:44As we're sitting here, we're dealing with gravity. And you even mentioned within the gut itself, the microbes. So our microbiome is having a huge moment right now, thankfully. How do our microbes get into this conversation as well? Oh, man. Where to start? Okay. So just to unpack what you just said, you know, physics came first and biology came second. We are a product of this planet. Literally, we're standing on this rock, which has all these physical forces that were here long before the microbiome was here and long before we were here. and biology emerged in large part to stand up and stay up in the force of gravity itself.

13:29And when you give in to gravity, our health suffers. So let's think about that from the microbiome for a second. We probably emerged from the oceans. Life probably came from the water. In these deep sea hydrothermal vents, hot, dark, gassy, sulfuric worlds, where life first emerged. That's one of the leading theories. And in the ocean, gravity was there, but it wasn't very important because we were kind of floating around. And eventually, life evolved and came onto the land. And then gravity hit us straight on. And we needed pumps and tubes inside our body to circulate blood and oxygen. We needed a vestibular system to keep ourselves balanced.

14:15And it turned out we needed something else. We needed serotonin. And serotonin, most people think of as a mood elevator. And we'll talk about that. But it's actually a gravity management substance. And do you know where we get our serotonin from? The microbiome. So we have our own hydrothermal vent, another hot, dark, gassy, sulfuric world. It's the gut. And the microbiome hitched a ride on us inside of our body as we came out of the oceans and we gave them the ability to move around the earth and they gave us the ability to literally move by giving us serotonin and so it goes really deep as we start getting into this evolutionary history and then what does it mean for our diet and our lives and we can get into all that stuff yeah oh it's so fascinating so fascinating so these microbes are of course this is symbiotic relationship making things in us for us and as you just mentioned this is a revelation to be able to stand up against gravity.

15:20This is the capacity of serotonin. We, again, just tend to look at it like this kind of feel-good neurotransmitter slash hormone, but it's so much more than that. Yes. So serotonin is a mood elevator. And even just think about that. Elevate is up when we're high. When you take psychedelics, psychedelics explode serotonin in your brain and you literally feel high. You literally feel buoyant like you're floating. So there is a neuropsychology to gravity too. When you're depressed, you're down. You feel like gravity is pulling too hard on your body. You can't get up out of bed. You're exhausted. You look down at your toes.

16:01Your body language is slumped over. And we can talk about that too. this is also serotonergic but the serotonin in the gut that comes from those micro those trillions of organisms living in us helps prime all the pumps and tubes in your body you and i would be flaccid sacks on the ground right now like a baby a baby has not colonized its gut microbiome yet it has very little serotonin and as a result it's not able to move very very well against gravity But as we build our microbiome, we generate serotonin. It primes your cardiovascular system, your lymphatic system. There's something called the baroreceptor reflex, which all of us have to keep us from passing out.

16:46Little sensors inside your major blood vessels that measure pressure. And all of this works together in large part because serotonin's effects across the entire body, and we can go into even more examples, helps you stand up to its force. This is remarkable. I want to circle back to the structure of the gut itself. And reading your book, I really got it. I got things at a different level. Even how elegantly placed everything is with the gastrointestinal tract, I really saw and understood that it's designed to resist gravity, right? But you have seen also in your work as a physician how issues with gravity can impact people goals gut health.

17:32Can you talk a little bit about that connection? Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's easiest to tell a story. A couple months ago, I saw a patient in my clinic, a young woman who had been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, which is a very common condition. And she had recurrent abdominal pain, bloating, discomfort, and no one had really been able to figure out what to do about it. So I went in and saw her after my student had seen her. And I always shake my patient's hand. And I shook her hand, and I noticed right away that her wrist was clicky. A little extra clickiness. You may have shaken somebody's hand and noticed it clicked a little bit.

18:10Well, for a doctor, that's a clinical clue. And it was already the first sign in my mind that there may be a gravity problem here. Because the next thing I asked her to do after introducing myself, I asked her, can you bend your pinky back for me? How far back does it go? Now, I can only bend my pinky 90 degrees. She went back farther. I asked her, can you take your thumb and move it to your forearm and touch your forearm? I can't do that. She easily did it. Can you touch the ground without bending your knees easily? She also was double jointed in her elbows. She had very flexible joints. Well, it turns out that if your joints are flexible, the insides are flexible too.

18:49And I decided to do an x-ray, first with her lying flat, then standing up. And her sack of potatoes, right, that intestinal system literally collapsed into her pelvis when she stood up. She had gravity intolerance. It turns out she had a condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is more common than people realize. And people who have very flexible joints sometimes get stomach pains, and what they're experiencing is gravity intolerance. They also get lightheaded and dizzy when they stand up too quickly. There, the issue is collagen, which is a structural protein that helps us stand up to the force of gravity.

19:26And with these conditions, it's a little bit abnormal, the collagen, and this can lead to forms of gravity intolerance. So we diagnosed her right there from shaking her hand. Wow, that's fascinating. So in a case like that, what can you do? Yeah. So once you realize and you can see the picture, it's so obvious that the gut literally like collapses down. You realize, well, what's going to help with this? Strength training, for starters. Abdominal activity, also something called hypopressive exercises where you suck your belly in and like you're pulling up that sack of potatoes into your chest, hold it, relax, pull it up again.

20:09And what you're doing is you're not only working out your anterior abs, but all of what I call the tensegrity systems inside of that sack of potatoes. That suspension system is a tensile integrity system, tensegrity. This is the connection points between the systems. We always talk about the individual organs, but we rarely talk about where they come together, the seams of the body. and exercise like hypopressive activities help strengthen those seams so that works swimming is great it's a horizontal activity and these are just a few examples of how we approach a patient like this to help strengthen their ability to stand up to gravity yeah it was remarkable to see because again it clicked for me like how often folks with a wide range of gut issues also have low back pain yes talk about that a little bit so you know the back i talked about earlier how we stood up as humans were two-legged creatures and there are advantages to that one advantage is we can get up high and see another is that we can run very long distances because we can breathe at whatever rate we want to because we don't have an organ sloshing back and forth against our diaphragm but the disadvantage is our center of gravity is very narrow and high which is why we fall down a lot easily we fall down you know you don't see giraffes like collapsing in the middle of the african plains like we fall down a lot as we get older because our center gravity is so high now what does that have to do with the gut well the spine if i'll do it right now you sit up straight is a chassis that is holding up the abdominal cavity and when you sit up straight and you move your shoulders back you straighten your spine you lift up your diaphragm it's like a marionette on strings if the strings are tight the marionette comes up but if the strings come down or are too stretchy like with ehlers-danlos syndrome the marionette collapses back pain is a sign that you're giving into gravity either the structure of the spine is breaking down or the muscles, the anti-gravity muscles on either side of the spine are not strong enough.

22:25And you lift that abdominal sac because the pulley system connects right around L4, right around your lumbar spine. So you literally need to stand up straight to open it up. And when the gut opens up, it moves better. It digests better. The last thing you should do if you have digestive issues is lie down flat in a bed for days and days like we do in a nursing home or in a hospital where people give in to gravity, they get bowel paralysis. So, you know, it goes on and on. Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the most marked examples of movement as medicine, right? Especially again, being in those circumstances.

23:05You also shared the story in the book with your mother-in-law and being in a nursing home and just seeing progressively worse gastrointestinal issues as, you know, people are being kind of relegated to lying down a lot of the day. And so having movement as medicine, at least getting up and walking around, it's exercise. It's exercise that we see kind of superficially, but we're really exercising within gravity as well. That's it. So our relationship to gravity is like a fish to water. The fish is designed to survive and thrive and move through this aqueous, buoyant world that it's in. I don't think it knows it's in water, but that's what it's doing.

23:46we are the same way with gravity. We are designed to survive and thrive in a world of gravity. And the better you do it, the more you engage with it, the stronger your body becomes and the easier it is to stand up to it. And I think about where we are right now. 200 years ago, this building wasn't here. There were very few buildings here. There was chaparral. there were some farms there were people standing up to the force of gravity strong thin working their asses off to survive and that was 200 years ago what about 2 000 years ago 10 000 years ago all of human history was about fighting gravity standing up to it mentally and physically and now we have regressed we literally are giving into gravity mentally and physically and we have to stop that.

24:40This is a great segue because speaking of about 200 years ago, in honor of this episode, I just re-watched John Carter with my youngest son last night on Disney Plus. Shout out to John Carter. And so this was one of those big budget films Disney poured a lot of money into. It's based on a series of books. And this former soldier, right, from about 200 years ago, he happened upon a portal he was in he was seeking treasure essentially but he happened upon this portal that delivered him and i'm not going to give away the punchline like how it happened but it has some basis in science right but it's still science fiction but this portal delivers him right to mars and he spent his entire life battling here and literally battling just not just gravity but battling people within gravity.

25:34And so once he lands on Mars, his entire physiology, his muscles, his ligaments, his tendons, his cardiovascular system, his nervous system had all been training against gravity for his entire lifetime. And when he lands on Mars, even trying to take that first step, he's so explosive, he flies off the ground. He's a superhero essentially. And this is an express idea or delivery of what can happen once gravity is displaced. if you're training because you don't know how strong you really are until that gravity is removed that's right that's right so in the book I talk about my own experiment I call it operation gravitate where I decided for eight straight weeks I was going to weigh myself down I'm on a bigger planet and I want to see what it was gonna do so it looked a little crazy I wore almost like a tactical vest some people looked at me a little funny it was a weighted vest 20 pounds I put 20 pounds on each ankle and I always use a standing desk at work plus I had a balance board and my author photo in this book is me literally standing in my office looking all goofy and I did it for eight weeks everywhere I went I did it not the balance board part but the weights and I I'm a scientist I wanted to measure what was this going to do to my strength and so I measured my vo2 I I measured my ability to walk up a standard flight of stairs.

27:01I measured my one mile time, running time, a whole bunch of other, how many squats I can do. And what was amazing to me is not only did I get stronger, not only did my VO2 go up just by passively walking around with weights dangling off of me, but I lost weight also. And I wasn't even intending for that to be part of it. And so it turns out that we have this system in our body called the gravitostat. It's like a thermostat for weight. And if you weight your body down, especially quickly, not progressively through weight gain, the bones feel the tension. And they tell your body, like, gravity just got crazy strong.

27:41We got to get lighter. And metabolic activity goes up. And you can lose weight just by having pressure on your body. Now, you got to do it safely. But that was the idea of in the movie. Because I felt the buoyancy when I took off the weights. It's like, you know, a baseball player on the on-deck circle weighs down their bat. And then when they get to home plate, they take the weight off and they're strong and fast. Because in relation to where they were before, they're much stronger relatively. This is so good. This is so good. And this is stuff, this is where we get very practical. Yeah. Right?

28:12Practical and tactical. And I want to talk a little bit more about, you mentioned improvements in your VO2 max. Like, have you seen, well, of course you have, but can you share some of the insights that you've gained as far as gravity and association with like our cardiovascular health? Yeah. So the cardiovascular system is an anti-gravity system because you have to pump five liters of blood up and down and up and down all day long. and you and I are again talking to each other not passed out on the ground because you're getting enough oxygenated blood up to the control center which is the farthest part from the ground so what do you need to do to make sure you don't pass out well you have to have muscle tone you have to contract your legs a lot you need to drink enough fluid adequate hydration is absolutely vital for life on this planet because it helps you prime your pumps and tubes to get oxygen into your brain In fact, there's evidence that Alzheimer's disease and other forms of cognitive decline are in part associated with how much fluid you drink.

29:22If you get orthostatic, where you get lightheaded too easily, if your sodium levels are elevated, which means you're too dehydrated, those are associated with Alzheimer's disease. When you sleep at night, this is another reason why sleep is so important, you reperfuse your brain when you lie down. and there's some evidence that our ancestors who used to live in trees when they finally got down from trees to ground and became horizontal at night their intelligence exploded and it may be because our brains finally were able to purge out amyloid and reperfuse with oxygen because we changed our relationship to gravity at nighttime so these are just a few insights among many about how important the cardiovascular system is for gravity it doesn't matter where we look we're going to continuously see this relationship that i'm so grateful to be able to essentially lift us up to seeing this in a broader way yeah and delivering this message so again whether we're talking about our musculature cardiovascular health the health of our nervous system our gut health gravity is a huge part of this for us to now wake up and consider i want to go to one of my favorite parts of the book and you mentioned a little bit earlier but feeling up right being feeling lifted up you talk about feeling down as well and this relationship between gravity and our mental health yes let's talk about this a little bit so we've been talking about the gut, and I'm a gastroenterologist, and I see a lot of patients who have chronic belly aches, gut feelings, we call them, butterflies, and we try to find the reason.

31:11We do an x-ray, we do an endoscopy, we take pictures of the camera, we do blood tests, we can't always find the cause. It dawned on me one day that there's something that causes that in every human. It's gravity. Think about last time you were on a roller coaster and you're falling. what happens? Your belly lights up. You get butterflies in your belly. That's your body telling you that you're about to die. Because we're not supposed to fall 20 stories, we die. We ride roller coasters because we're practicing our death, but we know we're safe. Some people, though, do not want to ride a roller coaster, especially some of my patients with IBS.

31:52They feel like they're falling all the time, metaphorically falling. It's like we have a G-force accelerometer in our belly that's telling you that you're at risk. And some people have very sensitive accelerometers that fire off when they're in an airplane, when they're in an elevator that drops too quickly. And here's the crazy thing. Rock climbers like Alex Honnold, who scaled El Capitan without any ropes, he's the ultimate gravity fighter. He doesn't get any gut feelings dangling off the side of a cliff. When they look at his brain, he has the exact inverse brain as somebody with irritable bowel syndrome or somebody with chronic anxiety or fibromyalgia.

32:41His amygdala, the emotion center in the middle of his brain, is quiet. Whereas people with chronic pain, chronic abdominal pain, their amygdala is on fire. and it's like a ventriloquist throwing its voice into the belly saying that you're falling. And if you get gut feelings a lot, you can rethink and realize I am not falling. That is literally an illusion in my brain. And so we use virtual reality, for example, to reprocess these ideas. We use vagus nerve stimulation to reprocess your relationship cognitively to the force of gravity itself. Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. As the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates stated, all disease begins in the gut.

33:32And more than 2000 years later, we can be empowered to know that all health begins in the gut as well. So number one, we want to avoid the things that absolutely trash our gut and our gut microbiome. Eat real, wholesome foods that feel good for our bodies and with this emerging science regarding probiotics to yes understand the value with probiotics aka for life pro meaning for and biotic meaning life but understanding that's just a snapshot of the incredible complexity of what's going on in our gut supporting our gut health because our probiotics need prebiotics in order to flourish in order to proliferate.