How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention

26:06How do we get to the place where we start to choose healthy when we have the option? As opposed to, man, this is convenient. The Starbucks, I'm just going to get all the sugary drinks. I'm going to get the cookies. I'm going to, you know, when you have the money to buy healthy food, but you still choose the convenience, the high sugar, the high calorie foods that have a lack of nutrition. Why does that take place? Your culture has already inundated you with the deliciousness, the perceived deliciousness of all these ultra-processed foods. In the United States, the average American adult, according to the BMJ, it's one of the most prestigious medical journals, British Medical Journal, 60 % of the average Americans diet is ultra-processed foods.

26:46All right. Now, the revelation that I'm bringing forth in this new project, the E-Smarter Family Cookbook, is that a new study that was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, found that almost 70 % of the average child's diet is ultra-processed foods. All right. So you're inundated as a child here in the United States. If you're average, if you're the average child, you're inundated with ultra processed foods that is engineered by brilliant food scientists to taste a certain way that has this excitatory thing that influences what's happening with your dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, adrenaline, all these different hormones that make you feel exhilarated, that make you feel pleasure.

27:29right and so it's not just a taste thing it's a addiction thing that is taking place with our children all right and so you're inundated with this why would you even consider eating quote healthy it just doesn't even sound right right especially i'm tasty and you're young and so you're you've got your health is metabolic benefits on your side right and so you're gonna have the candy, the ice cream, the processed food, the packaged food all day long. Absolutely. The fast foods, all that stuff. If you're a free reign child in America, like we got free range chicken out here. If you're a free range child in America, you're going to go for ultra processed foods.

28:08And let's make a distinction to it. People are curious, what is ultra processed foods? So processing of foods has been done by humans for thousands upon thousands of years. All right. And it's just taking a food and processing it in a way that makes it palatable, that makes it easy to store, that make it easy to trade and to make it more enjoyable. So processing would be something like taking olives and using a stone press to make olive oil, right? That's extra virgin olive oil today, right? And something like tomatoes and making a pasta sauce. You can still tell where it came from. It's like a one step and then maybe adding some spices, some cooking, that kind of thing.

28:52Ultra processed foods is when the food is harvested. We'll just say a base food substrate. So we'll say corn, for example, and the corn itself uses kind of a base and also as a sweetener, right? I have to use corn syrup or corn syrup. And somehow that corn, that field of corn that you're looking at becomes pop cereal. All right. Got to have my pops, right? You don't know. You no longer, that hunter gatherer, if they were to see that box of cereal, they would have no idea where it came from. There's no essence left. It spins process so much, all these different, not only breaking that, that corn down into sugar and different substrates, but the additives, the flavors, the added flavors, added preservatives, colorings, food dyes, which we have strong data on this now of this being one of the underlying causative agents in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders are food dyes.

29:52Many food dyes have actually been banned in other countries that are still largely used here in the United States because they're disruptive to our nervous system, especially for our kids. And so, again, really starting to unpack these things, you start to realize like we're so disconnected from our food, it's scary because not that long ago, we evolved really. If we just take out the last hundred years, just put that to the side. If we look at the thousands upon thousands of years of humanity before that, our food, we were deeply connected to it. It was a tribal thing. We all had responsibilities in procuring our food.

30:29And not just that, the acquisition of the food, the preparation of the food and the eating of the food was a community thing. All right. It was something you talk about with your new cookbook, which is about really eating healthy foods that taste delicious with family because we've lost the art of connecting with family. When we eat, everything is fast or convenient or watching with the TV on, which I'm guilty of half the time, but not as a community. And you talk about in your book about how, you know, when you deal with family or friends you care about and you're eating meals together that you're specifically creating together or having some element or role in the creation process, how much more powerful is doing that consistently over time versus eating isolated and eating ultra processed foods by yourself.

31:23Yeah. The last time I saw you, that's what we were doing. Eating together. It was a celebration for you, for your birthday. Yeah. It was one of the most magical days, right? We'll always remember that experience. And funny enough, this was normal. I just came back from Maui, for example. This was normal. This celebration around food, right? Having a luau, like this is kind of like maybe a commercial. aspect of it now, but it's deeply rooted in sharing a food with your tribe, right? And celebrating life, celebrating our connection to food and to each other. And this is the mission right now. Now we're getting to how do we fix this?

32:01I talked about the larger culture scape that we're existing in and cultures like an invisible hand that's guiding our behaviors. We think we have free will, but our culture is really deciding what we're aware of and the choices that we have. Now, how do we change this culture? We start with our own family. We start with controlling the controllables. All right? Because I've been in this field for over 20 years. And thinking about all the time I've spent trying to target the bigger culture, it's very, very difficult. And what I found to be the most effective is changing the culture from within.

32:37Starting with yourself, your family, that starts to bleed out to your community. people start to see things different. They see an example. I didn't see any examples when I lived in Ferguson, Missouri. I didn't see what health looked like. And so for people to see me and my family, knowing where I come from, it changes everything. Now, how does eating together with friends and family start to shift this culture? Well, according to the data, I'm going to share three powerful studies with you. It's creating a protection for our health that heretofore, we didn't really understand. What does that mean?

33:09Science. So eating together with friends and family, and we start with study number one. This is researchers from Harvard. They gathered all this data on family behaviors around eating. And they found that families that consistently eat together have a higher consumption of vital nutrients that prevent chronic diseases and lower intake of ultra processed foods. Really? All right. So this is Harvard researchers. Why is think that is? There's a couple of reasons why. And I break this down in the book because I'm a why guy. I want to know why. And so one of the things that really jumps out is the intention behind eating together as a family.

33:47There's an intentional meal planning that's automatically going to take place. It's not going to be across the board all the time, but if you know I'm having family dinner tonight, you're thinking about it. It's an unconscious, subconscious thought process. us. It's like, okay, we got a plan. Like, what are we going to have? Right. Whereas today, if we're not, if we don't have this as a constant structure, DoorDash is on tap, right. Or just picking up something because we're not thinking, but we, we, we make the food decision last minute. And that's okay because we have access to that. That's okay.

34:17But when that becomes normalized, we get more and more separate from each other and also this protective mechanism for our health. So that's study number one. That's from researchers at Harvard. Now this next one was cited in the Journal of Nutrition, Education, and Behavior. And they looked at family behavior around food and the outcomes for the children specifically. And they found that families who eat breakfast with their kids, parents who eat breakfast with their children four times a week had dramatically lower intake of ultra-processed foods, higher intake of vital nutrients, at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at each day, most days of the week.

34:58And the list goes on and on, all these different benefits they were saying. But this is the most important part about this study. And by the way, they found that when the TV was rarely or never on for these families, they had an even further drop in their consumption of ultra-process foods, the kids specifically, right? Because of that marketing, that advertisement. Now, the most important part about the studies that this was looking at minority children who would generally be in the context of low income conditions, families like mine. We didn't know that eating together could help to protect our health in some strange way.

35:32But had we known, even if we were eating processed foods, just the behavior of eating together, it starts to create this protection. I'm going to share with you why this leads to the next study. This was a collaboration of studies. This was actually published in Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association. And I'm going to get all these resources and link them up for you guys too. Yeah. And they're all in the book detailed as well in the family cookbook. And so what these researchers uncovered was that, and this is the most important takeaway from today. This is the one, do this one thing.

36:05They found that families who eat together any meal three times a week. Okay. So parents eating together with their children or parent eating together with their children Just three times a week, dramatically decreased overweight and obesity in the children and decreased eating disorders and just overall decreasing the risk of the onset of early mortality and chronic diseases. Wow. By eating together with your family three times a week. That's fascinating. All right. This is the major takeaway that I want people to take on and make that a mandate, make it a mission to eat with your family, eat with friends three times a week, plan it, add it to your calendar.

36:47Because today we've got a lot of stuff going on. And a lot of times, if you don't put on your schedule, it's not real. Like literally plan it out. This could be whatever flavor it looks like for you. This could be, you know, family dinner on Wednesday and Thursday, and then brunch on Sunday, right? Just whatever works for you. But there's something really special about this process and we can unpack more of this why, but also the psychological aspect. And this was shown in data looking at adults and how eating together with their family dramatically decreased their stress levels. This was coming from a population of workers from IBM.

37:22And they found that as long as the workers were able to get home and have dinner with their family, it kept work morale high. But as soon as their work schedule and the demands start to dig into them spending time with their family and getting home in time for dinner, their work morale started to go down, their stress levels elevated. Now, why does this matter overall? Well, and this is another big takeaway from today. And this research as well is published in JAMA, but the research, this was a meta-analysis and the researchers determined that upwards of 80 % of all physician visits today are for stress-related diseases.

37:5880%. Up to 80 % because of the stress-related component, because stress isn't just something that's invisible. Your thoughts create correlating chemistry in your body instantaneously. And so if you're having these habitual stressful thoughts and automatic negative thoughts, as our friend Daniel Amen discusses, when this is on automatic for yourself, you're just releasing these chemicals, a chemical cascade that can lean towards toxicity. They can be great in the short term to help you to survive short-term stress, acute stressors, but we were never designed to carry constant emotional stress, constant mental stress, constant environmental stress.

38:39So a lot of people might hear that like, well, I'm not that stressed. You know, my work isn't that stressful. We got to talk about this, something called an alliostatic load and your overall stress load. So what goes into your stress load individually? Well, we do have work stress. Yeah, that's a common one. We have relationship stress. Relationship stress can mess you up. Oh, man. It can mess you up. It was messed up for about 15 years in different relationships, man. It was like, it'll mess your health up. Absolutely. Your mind up. Absolutely. Your energy flow, everything. And it's based on your perception.

39:12Wow. It's based on your perception. That's what you think about it. And the correlating chemistry that you're going to be creating, the most powerful pharmacy in the universe is in your body. 100%. Because this isn't bio-identical. It is identical. You're creating chemistry for your receptor sites designed in you for you. There's nothing else more powerful than that. And so we've got, of course, there are also some great breakup songs out there. All right. Some great love songs that come from that. There's that. So we've got work stress. We've got relationship stress. We've got mental stress, emotional stress.

39:45We've got exercise stress. Exercise stress is what's known as a hermetic stressor. It's a good stress if you're able to heal from it and recover. Because the exercise isn't making the magic happen. It's tearing you down. The magic comes when you're able to recover, rebuild, come back better. But add that on to an already stressed person, spiritual stress. What if you feel disconnected? What if you feel like you're lacking purpose and significance, right? All these things, it starts to add into that overall stress load. And now here's another huge one, environmental stress. the environment that we are living in today is very very different from what our ancestors evolved in right there are tens of thousands of synthetic newly invented chemicals and we're talking about millions of tons released into our environment and so the very air that we're breathing is different and to take this into one of the cultural contagions that we need to protect our family from within our own household a really good friend of mine and she's one of the most brilliant researchers.

40:49She's the leading authority in the world on dietary oils. All right. So her name's Dr. Kate Shanahan. She has background as a family physician, but also she was a nutritionist for the Lakers during Kobe's time later in his career, helping to extend his career. Every time he would go to a different hotel and travel, he's bringing bone broth or finding a place where they would make it. Like that was one of his things that she introduced. Yeah. And also Dwight Howard was there too. She was like, he had the worst diet. He was eating all this candy and whatnot. Some of these guys, you hear about these NBA, NFL guys, it's like just candy half the day.

41:24Yeah. And they're just genetic freaks though. Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens. Yeah. But the injuries start to come. You start to feel tired. Yeah. But Kobe wasn't like that. Kobe was always looking for the edge. He was. Right. And so anyways, so she's got this huge database of research on dietary oils. And one of the research papers that she shared with me, and this blew my mind, I had to sit with it. I had to really sit and think about it. We're taking muscle biopsies of human fat cells back in the earlier part, around the 1900s, to see what makes up a human fat cell. What's in there? And in the biopsy, they found that the fat cell itself was made of about 2 % PUFAs.

42:06PUFAs are polyunsaturated fatty acids. They're naturally occurring in different plant foods like nuts and seeds, for example. And so that's all good. Now, they recently took biopsies of fat cells of modern humans, and they found that the average fat cell was made up of about 25 percent PUFUS, polyunsaturated fatty acids. now why does this matter polyunsaturated fatty acids are by their very nature very unstable right they're by their very nature very pro-inflammatory and they are a byproduct oftentimes unfortunately are coming along with things that stir about something called these reactive oxygen species or accelerated oxidation of your cells or accelerated aging to put in bluntly.

42:57All right. Now, what does this mean for us? About the span of about a hundred years, 2 % polyunsaturated fatty acids make up our fat cells to now 25%. What does this mean for us? The very ingredients that make up human beings has changed dramatically. The recipe for making a human is dramatically different. All right. And wondering why we're having such poor health outcomes. Could this be one of the causative agents when we're talking about our switchover in the oils that we're consuming? Where are we getting all these polyunsaturated fatty acids, ultra processed foods that are riddled with vegetable oils, canola oils, and all these unstable oils.

43:40And by the way, I encourage people, we'll put in the show notes as well, to go to YouTube and look up how canola oil is made. All right. And just watch. Wow. Wow. All right. It is going to shock you. If you look at olive oil, right, extra virgin olive oil, that means it's cold pressed and you're pressing olives and you get the oil. That's it. You're just pressing it down and then oil comes out. When you see how canola oil is made to be able to extract from the canola plant that amount of oil, it is scary. Really? So it's all this chemical processing, all these solvents, deodorizers. And by the way, because it stinks, you know, they're trying to nullify and neutralize the smell.

44:25And a lot of even inflammatory, like I'm talking about literally being able to catch on fire type of chemicals used in this process and to get something that looks uniform and clean. And then they put it in a plastic bottle and sit on store shelves. And plastics don't just biodegrade, they photodegrade. So light is breaking it down over time, by the way. And there's been a lot of science. I've talked about this on past shows about misphenol A. What would you say are the three oils we should try to eliminate from our diet and then three healthier oils that may even have some benefits? Yeah. Let's stay right here with extra virgin olive oil.

45:07So one of the studies that I shared in the new book, in the East Mortar Family Cookbook, looks at olive oil and researchers at Auburn determining that olive oil can actually help to reduce inflammation in the brain and help to heal the blood brain barrier. Incredibly. Like that's, that's astronomically powerful. Like why is this oil, why does it have such a resonance with the human brain and nervous system? That's amazing. And this is more monounsaturated fatty acids, by the way. And also if it's treated right, it's going to be bottled in dark glass because it's sensitive to light and heat. And so even using it, by the way, we want to make sure that we're not using it on too high of heat.

45:46And also traditionally, maybe finishing your dishes with it, right? So your plates, your food, or using it for salad dresses, pour on some olive oil, right? Our mutual friend, Dr. Stephen Gundry, he's an olive oil fanatic. He's obsessed with olive oil. It's like drinking every day. Look at his results. My guy is, you know, he's in his senior years big time and he's just so on point, like his cognition, his health, his energy. Last time I talked to him, he was like on a ski trip somewhere. It's amazing to see. It takes like a shot a day of olive oil, right? Yeah. And it's just like a crazy old man.

46:18Or he's like, oh no, he actually is looking at the data. And so that would be one in the healthy category. And another one, now this one, there's a little bit of, by the way, none of these are 100 % across the board for everybody. All right. We've got to keep that in mind. The new, the future of nutrition and health is personalization. For some people, olive oil is not your thing. You might have background genetics that don't metabolize this particular oil a certain way or small amounts or whatever the case might be. So you got to keep that in mind. So we've got nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics are going to be some of the leading fields of science, looking at how what you eat influences your genetic expression and also your set of genes, how it's catering towards certain things being better for you versus other things, right?

47:13Versus your friend, versus your wife, versus your brother, all right? Everybody has our unique cascade of genes. And on top of that, microbial genes, all right? So, all the genes that make up your microbiome, all the bacteria that make up your microbiome, they have their own genes. If we go gene for gene in the human body, 99 % of your genes are bacterial. It's the little critters, their genes. And so now where we're at today with science, we're looking at how our bacteria's genes are affecting our human gene expression. All right. So we can go down the rabbit hole. Sure, sure, sure. But just circle this back to another oil for us to look at would be avocado oil.

47:51Avocado oil is hot out here in the streets. We like it. You'd want that to come in a dark bottle. It's higher in monosaturated fats. And it's coming from a real food, an avocado. It's a lot more close touch than trying to process corn and make it into an oil. So, and that leads over to, and those are just a couple. For the audience watching or listening, I had my first taste of guacamole at your place. Yeah. Remember that? Actually, this sounds bad, but as a 40-year-old man, I had my first avocado, like hard avocado. Congratulations. You're a big boy. I still have the palate of like a 70-year-old child.

48:35But every time you've been with us, we've introduced something new. I know. And I was like, ah, I'm scared. But did I do it? I'm like, that's not that bad. But it's also - There's some salt out there. These great food experiences, you know, because you tore that guacamole up, let's be honest. I did. It was good. And also like the cookies that my wife made back in St. Louis, for example, like very, Again, using higher quality ingredients, but still, every now and then you want a cookie. Man, give me some of those. I think we add a casserole too. Ross and cookies over here, man. That casserole's amazing.

48:58Yeah. When you come by - Dude, I'm in. We've got some great stuff. I'm in. Okay. So, we got olive oil, avocado oil, all in dark bottles. What would be one more, you think? All right. Is there one more? Of course. Man, there's so many. There's so many popping to mind. There's good oils. Yeah. But there's a caveat here. So there are this category of seed oils, which that in and of itself, unfortunately, is going to invoke some controversy. And what I want to implore everybody who is really about that life and nutrition, let's come together. Let's have healthier conversations and not become so black or white or dogmatic about a certain thing.

49:32So seed oils in general, the majority of these seed oils out here on the streets that are riddled in processed foods, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about hemp oil, flaxseed oil, chia oil that's cold processed, that's stored in shelf-stable ways. It's generally going to be in a refrigerated section. You can find some really valid benefits here that's backed up with peer-reviewed data. All right. So there's a plant form of omega-3s that can be utilized as an energy source by the body pretty efficiently and also can get converted into some of the omega-3s, DHA and EPA. to help to fuel your brain and nervous system.

50:13Now, your conversion process is going to depend on you. It's going to depend on your genes, your microbiome, your overall metabolic health. So, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But first of all, where does that analogy come from? That's terrible. Who's throwing babies out? But with seed oils just being all bad. Certain seeds, but the important thing is they cannot be exposed to very much heat at all. Are they going to become oxidized and rancid? so those are the ones i would say and as far as the ones to avoid absolutely avoid um vegetable oil quote vegetable oil it's not made from vegetables by the way all right it's the framing because it sounds healthy you throw this is called health washing throwing the label on a thing and making it sound like it's healthy and marketers are using this like crazy now right so you can get a box of cheerios it's like it's heart healthy right honey nut cheerios lower cholesterol they actually had to change that.

51:10Really? Yeah. Because they finally face some backlash. But also now it'll say gluten-free, right? Gluten-free. Oh, you're a gluten-free diet. They're just fat-free, right? They're still throwing these catchphrases onto things with an ultra-processed bowl of crap. But by the way, vegetable oil, I put this study in the book as well. This was published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology. So it's a top journal looking at how inhaling different things, fumes and things like that creates toxicity in the human body and other animals as well. What the researchers found was that just smelling vegetable oil during cooking can damage your DNA.

51:48Holy cow. But the biggest focus needs to be on the quality of that food that you're eating, that you're building your tissues out of real sustainable materials and that things that your cells can recognize, your cells, your genes have evolved having some exposure to this versus hot fries. Right. Right. Which is very different from the metabolic impact that that's going to have. Versus, and again, you can do things in a certain phase. Like you were guzzling Dr. Pepper like you're getting paid for it. And you can get by. But at some point, there's a cost with everything. Absolutely, man. There's a cost with everything in our universe.

52:26There's causality. And so being able to be empowered and start to see through a different lens, like is this real food or not?

52:37based on what i'm hearing you talk about it almost sounds like if we stop thinking about mental health not stop thinking about it but focus more on gut health it sounds like it connects to the brain and the mind and it'll create more alignment in ease versus disease more it's a new frontier it opens up the avenue for more solutions and by the way because the gut also connects to other parts of our body as well. You know, again, remember I told you, like, I'm all about the common denominator. Pull that bow back and send a single arrow through as many things, many problems as you can. Imagine if we could actually tackle mental health, mental wellness, and physical wellness all at the same time.

53:18And, you know, gut bacteria clearly plays a role. It's not, you know, it's not the only thing, but, you know, it is the undiscovered country. Because there's a, who is the doctor? Dr. Emmerin Mayer, I think it is. I don't know if he's got a book called Gut-Brain Connection. I think it's somebody like that that's talking about these things as well. And it seems like a lot of the things that are stemming from the brain disease or challenges is in the gut. And it's also linked to longevity, it sounds like as well. Exactly. Well, this is what we're beginning to really, I would say, unravel and take, you know, go into the layers of the onion to say, all right, if gut health is important for you in your, you know, normal active adult life, which we now know it is, what role could it play towards actually fostering, supporting, maybe even triggering those signals for longevity?

54:11I mean, maybe, listen, I mean, so I always talk about our body like this. We're all different. You know, we've got different genetics. We've got different, you know, like, of course, most people say they've got different metabolisms. But it turns out that when we are born, it's like taking a laptop out of the box. Our operating system is all set. When you and I are born, my operating system and your operating system, pretty much the same. Our OS was exactly the same. Exactly. And so why is it that our, I mean, maybe your metabolism and my metabolism are closer than more different, but, you know, because we take care of ourselves.

54:49But why is it that people develop such divergent, so different metabolisms, for example, or maybe longevity patterns? And it turns out, you know, just like your laptop, you know, if you take care of your laptop, you turn it off at night, you clear the case. I'll pick the software. Yeah, you update the software. You make sure that you pad it when you're traveling. Clean it. Clean it, all that kind of stuff. And let's say I'm not so careful. I drop it. It gets really hot in the car. I spill coffee on it or whatever. What do you think is going to happen to our operating system? Or I download all kinds of stuff.

55:27Let's go break. Well, what's going to happen is that your computer operating system and mine are going to diverge. You're going to go this way. I'm going to go that way. And actually, definitely for our metabolism, but probably for our longevity, as well, that's actually what happens. We start to diverge our patterns. We're all born the same way. And the reason I'm bringing this up, because I think for anybody who's listening to this or watching this, people tend to think, I'm the fate of my genetics. There's nothing I can do about it, so screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do. Do whatever, drink whatever, yeah.

56:01What I want to really emphasize is that we are all hardwired to actually heal. we can get back to that healing we can heal to get back to our original state which is designed like the laptop to function its entire life of the device with an intact operating system you know what do you do with your what do you do with your computer you know uh you know hopefully you don't have to reinstall the operating system take good care of it but if you don't take good care of it clean the cache clear do a virus scan you know like clean it up yeah take good care of And that's kind of how I think people should think about longevity is that it's not like just set a number.

56:40Okay. This is not like booking a seat in a movie theater online. I'm going to get that number and that's what I want. Okay. Good luck. You know, I think that, you know, it's a journey. We need to focus on today and keep focusing on as far as we can actually see and keep doing that. You know, it's like longevity, you know, there's a quote from E.L. Doctorow, who is a novelist, who once said like, writing is like driving at night. You can't see beyond your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. And that's kind of how I think about longevity, living as long as you can go. I mean, you know, but you want to actually make sure that you are enjoying yourself and you're fully aware of what you're doing along the same way.

57:26Yeah, 100%. And seeing what's in front of you, not just only focusing on how do I make it to 100 or 110, just enjoying the moment. The horizon is important, but honestly, so is what's directly in front of you. Sure. If someone watching or listening has maybe neglected their health for many years and they're now living in excess weight or maybe even obesity and they've been on a pattern and a routine of eating poorly, drinking a lot of excess alcohol, whatever it might be, and just not taking care of their health. and you were to prescribe just a 90-day game plan to reset their metabolism and try to get the right things going again, what would you prescribe that individual?

58:15And how much do you think they could actually recover and start to heal from years of not taking care of their health? First of all, I think that we're able to recover a lot of our health and heal ourselves by making small moves. And this is really important. Not extreme moves. Big moves are, some people can do them. Most people can't maintain big moves. All right. Small moves, almost anybody can actually do. And of course, you know, people are very complicated. and, you know, that the scenario you described is somebody who's like, you know, been super unhealthy their whole lives and, you know, not done the right things and are overweight and they're alcohol.

58:58I mean, I think you were stacking, you know? I mean - Maybe it's not that extreme, but maybe it's, you know, 20 to 40 pounds overweight. How about this? Like the typical person who hasn't taken care of themselves for most of their life. Maybe not too extreme. What can they actually do, you know? And maybe it's not 90 days. I would say, you know, like, hey, you know, I think you should take a look at things that you can actually do in a month or two, give yourself a little runway, all right? Take it easy on yourself because stress and putting too much pressure on yourself doesn't actually help.

59:28But some of the principles I will tell you that is supported by evidence, scientific evidence and clinical evidence is number one, I would say switch to eating more of a plant-based diet with whole foods, all right? So I just said a mouthful there because what I'm saying is that eat more foods that you are buying whole and fresh and cook them yourself. Not processed. Not processed. Okay. So you can cut down on your ultra processed foods and focus more on your whole fresh foods. Immediately, you're going to be flooding your body with more of Mother Nature's pharmacy. That's pharmacy with an F, not a PH.

1:00:10Yes. All right. And that's going to start healing and prompting your gut to start doing it as well. but you're going to start getting a lot of stuff that is not prescription. Before you go to the next point, can you make a distinction, if you can explain to people, because I don't think people truly understand, when you eat one processed meal, what is happening with a processed food, whether it's ultra-processed or just processed and not it's complete whole food that you cook, what happens when it enters the mouth of ultra-processed food or something that's processed and goes through the gut and out, what is happening to your body with that versus just single-ingredient whole foods cooked and in the system?

1:00:57First of all, I think that this idea, that the word, I mean, we're now beginning to have this conversation about ultra-processed foods as a society, right? And it's damn well timed that we actually did, all right, because we do know that ultra-processed foods aren't good for you. But the word process and ultra process often gets confused. So let's start there. Okay. So raw foods are, I mean, whole food ingredients are like going to the grocery store and just eating the food without doing anything to it. Banana. Apple. Exactly. Spinach. Oh, right. Carrot. Right. Single ingredient. Single ingredient.

1:01:34The salad bar is a great example of really just like whole individual ingredients that you put into a bowl and just eat them one by one. Most foods that we cook, by cooking them, we're processing. Okay. I don't know if you've ever seen... So anything that we do to manipulate food is processing. So if you've ever made pasta by yourself, you take a big pile of flour and you crack some eggs in it, and you just take your fingertips and work it, and you then roll it up and roll it out and cut it up. Okay. So that's processing. Yeah, of course. So that's different... Than all your processing. Going to ultra-processing, which is having a factory extrude the ingredients, shape them into animal crackers or whatever, and then adding flavors.

1:02:16Food coloring. Adding coloring, adding stabilizers, adding olsifiers, and then throwing in all these chemical ingredients that you can't pronounce. You have no idea what they do in there. That's ultra-processed. Okay, so the difference between something minimally processed versus ultra-processed. processed, what happens to the gut, the bacteria in your gut, and the body and the immune system with having those different options? Yeah. And I'll tell you what we know as a release to longevity. So first of all, I try to break it down really simply. Our body is like your car. When you put... Our food is our fuel.

1:02:57When you go to the filling station, you get a choice. You're going to actually put in... You got four different kinds of fuel you could put in, all right if you put in good quality fuel it your car is going to drive better over the long haul it's going to drive better every now and you put in some crummy cheap fuel it's all right you're not going to notice but if you do that day in and day out you're going to notice it for sure all right so you put something good into your body your body's going to respond really well you put something bad in your body your body's also going to respond accordingly sure in a negative way so simply in simplest terms that's actually what the difference is between ultra-processed, which isn't really good for you, and your body's going to revolt, and it's going to trash your body from the inside out.

1:03:39In ways, some ways we know, and other ways we don't even know yet. By the way, the whole conversation about ultra-plastics, but micro-plastics, all right? Hey, you know what? If you've ever seen the amount of machinery and plastic that has to, you know, the machines that the processed food has to go through, Who knows how much microplastics are actually found in ultra-processed foods. It's like leaching through, yeah. That remains to be seen, you know. And so what I say is that the least amount of processing you can have for your food, the more you can be assured that it's going to be a quality food that you're actually going to put into your body, and your body will react well.

1:04:22So what's going on when you feed your food minimally processed whole foods? your body is going to extract immediately as many of the polyphenols as it can out of it goes in your stomach it's absorbed into your bloodstream those polyphenols go to town the effect of a polyphenol of eating polyphenols and there's a lot of polyphenols in foods strawberries blueberries an orange an apple uh broccoli all right when those all those polyphenols basically get into your bloodstream and think about it um like uh starting a symphony of effects you know if you ever go to like listen to a symphony orchestra it's not just usually one instrument that goes off the whole the whole orchestra goes off and that's what happens when we eat poly foods with polyphenols the dietary fiber tumbles down we might absorb some of it Some of it we don't absorb, goes tumbles down all the way to your lower gut.

1:05:26What does it do? It feeds our gut microbiome. We've got 39 trillion hungry little baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed. Okay. And the dietary fiber we eat actually feeds them. How important is this? And we know it's really important, not only because dietary fiber seems to be eating dietary fiber, lowers the risk of diseases like dementia, diabetes, cancer, improves outcomes for cancer. But for cancer, for example, there was a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center that looked at people with melanoma, okay, a deadly form of skin cancer, getting immunotherapy. So they're getting the state-of-the-art treatment, requires their own immune system to go to town.

1:06:09That's the 70 % in your gut, requires the gut bacteria. Gut bacteria need to eat, okay? Got to feed them. Turns out for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreased mortality by 30%. Mortality, death. Okay? Death. Decreased it. Decreased it by five to six grams of dietary fiber per day. Now, what does that look like? Dietary fiber, five to six grams? You get a medium-sized pear has five to six grams of dietary fiber. Not a big ask. Okay. You do one of those a day. One of those a day or the equivalent to get the dietary fiber. All right. So, and again, now you get all the polyphenols and so like powerful effects.

1:06:51How quickly does it actually, does dietary fiber and these polyphenols, how quickly can they change the fate of your gut bacteria within 24 hours? Come on. You can start getting changes. So, and I wrote about this in my book, Eat to Beat Disease. You have kiwis, okay? And you measure the gut microbiome. and you can within 24 hours after eating one kiwi you can start to grow more healthy gut bacteria in the first day all right by four days you start growing other bacteria that are healthy as well so you know like you're asking me what about the what about the dude who actually hasn't been taking care of himself look this is what i'm telling you go eat some whole fresh foods that you prepare yourself okay cut down some of that ultra process stuff i'll talk about what the ultra process stuff does in a second.

1:07:40And you'll start to get these changes. You're hardwired to do this. Your body wants to do it. Let it do its job. Yeah. Okay. And you'll start to feel the effects or maybe, or at least your body will feel the effects within 24 hours. Well, the changes start fast. And so, definitely within a few days, you will start to feel much better. I mean, listen, you ever go on like a crummy food bender and then, right? Don't feel good. Don't feel good. And then you say, you know what? This sucks. I'm going to actually eat healthy now. You start getting it back pretty quick. Yes. You're like, I am so glad I'm doing this, right?

1:08:21So the changes happen fast. So I think, you know, so number one, it is within everyone's power to be able to actually make these moves, okay, that count, simply by shifting to whole good healthy foods. Because, you know, the bad stuff with the artificial preservatives and artificial coloring and all that, you know, the simplest way to think about what they might do besides dump chemicals into your body is they can kill your gut bacteria. That's not what you want to do. You know, killing the gut bacteria, by the way, is like we're talking about the symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, you know, where Handel's Messiah, big choir in a big concert hall.

1:09:00You know, like hurting your gut bacteria, like ultra processed foods with all these artificial things. It's like sending in hooligans from a British football game, screaming into a concert hall and kicking over all the instruments. Wow. That's what processed foods do. Ultra processed. What are other things that ruin the gut bacteria then besides ultra processed foods? Well, alcohol will do it. Smoking also can affect it. Not getting enough good sleep, not getting exercise can also affect your gut. What about vaping? Vaping, oh yeah, vaping is also, I mean, look, cigarettes, vaping, cigars, pipes, it's all part of the same continuum.

1:09:49There's nothing better about vaping. In fact, research has actually shown that the flavoring that they put in vapes are actually probably even worse than some of the stuff that you have just in a plain cigarette. So, you know... So, vaping or smoking or cigars, that doesn't help the gut bacteria. No, not at all. Does it impact it in a negative way? Yeah, it impacts it in a negative way, really. Yeah, because guess what? All those chemicals, instead of eating them, now you're inhaling them, and they go right into your bloodstream. Instead of from your gut, your stomach, it just goes right into the bloodstream from your lungs.

1:10:21And now, you know, everything is affected. That 60 ,000-mile channel of highways and byways is delivering whatever the menthol flavor or the whatever flavor you've got all over the place. You really don't want that. How much of a block, if someone is smoking every day or vaping or doing cigars or pipes every day or they're inhaling some type of smoke, how much of a dam are they creating in the flow of health throughout their nervous system, their bloodstream? I don't have a number for you, but it's pretty significant. Really? In fact, it's so significant that some of the researchers looking at environmental toxins have been even looking at not only smoking and vaping, but looking at even cooking.

1:11:12Think about the line cooks at a restaurant. The smoke, you mean? And all the fryer smoke. The grease and everything coming up. Listen, you and I - Smells good. We probably have spent more time, we've probably done our time standing in the front of a grill in the summer, right? Of course. And we're flipping the burgers or grilling the steaks. Hey, you know, like that's part of the, you know, that's part of growing up, you know, and doing our thing. All right. Think about all that stuff that we're breathing. We know that grilling meat puts carcinogens into the meat. What do you think we're breathing in?

1:11:51Oh, man. Okay. Fortunately, you know, like most people aren't... It's minimal. But if you're a line cook in a restaurant, you're going there doing that... Eight hours a day. At the station, eight hours a day, every day. Okay? So what I'm saying is that, like, what we expose our bodies to makes a big difference. So these are choices that we make. And, you know, researchers and public health and policymakers, like, I think that there's starting to be a convergence in recognizing that, you know, So if we want a healthier society and healthier individuals, all right, we got to just be a little bit more alert to the fact that what we're exposed to can have like a really, really big impact in ways that we didn't think about before.

1:12:34Now's the time to think about it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.

1:13:12And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.