Unlocking Longevity With Four Essential Foods and Anti-Aging Strategies EP 1465

29:31or Dr. Eckberg said sugar alcohols are okay so now I'm going to eat that every day. I'm going to bake with it. I'm going to buy the ice cream with it and that's the thing. Everything in moderation. So sugar alcohols, if you eat a teaspoon or a tablespoon here and there, I think it's totally fine. But if you start baking with it and doing the ice cream and you start getting and half a cup a day, now you're definitely gonna upset the biome a little bit. Now, what matters based on your age range? You know, if someone's in their 20s versus, I'm in my late 30s, almost 40, you're in your, I believe 50s, you said.

30:13Does it matter based on how old you are of what you should be eating, how much you should be eating, types of foods, or is it pretty consistent throughout the decades? I would say it's pretty consistent throughout. And one analogy would be that, I mean, there's so many people, they say that women should fast this way and teenagers should fast this way and women over 40 or under 47. It's like, we love to complicate things, right? But are there different foods on the savanna for one giraffe versus another? An older giraffe and a younger giraffe. Yeah. Does the male and the female giraffe eat from different trees?

30:58It's like, not really.

31:02What was the things that you saw when you went to these blue zones that they did that maybe you weren't even thinking they would do? Like, what were the surprising things they did? Or the unsurprising things? Yeah, I mean, there were a few things I saw that were kind of striking to me. that made sense. But one was that in Icaria, which was one of the Greek blue zones, they eat so much wild food. So they had wild greens, summer greens, winter greens. They had wild mushrooms. They had wild sage tea. They had wild fish. They had so much wild food in their diet. And we know that wild foods are much more nutrient dense.

31:36Why? Because they're stressed. And stressed plants make more protective compounds. Those protective compounds are called phytochemicals. they give the color and the richness and the flavor. What people don't understand is the more flavorful a food is naturally, the more phytochemicals it has. Interesting. If you go to your garden at the end of August and pick a cherry tomato that's ripened in the hot sun that explodes in your mouth like the most incredible flavor. But if you go to a store-bought tomato and you cut it, it's like cardboard, tasteless. What's the difference? It's the phytochemicals.

32:09So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness of a food. So not the stuff you put on it or sauces or salt or fat or sugar to make it taste better, which food industry does, but just the natural flavor. So, you know, the more flavorful the food is, the better it is. So it's wild. They eat a lot of wild food and it's so flavorful. The other thing that was interesting was that shepherds, you know, had this culture of going and knowing exactly which plants to feed their animals at which time of year to graze them. So it would shepherd them. and they'd eat all these wild plants, but they know if this herb was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat this herb.

32:44And if this plant was coming in this time of year, they'd go eat that thing. I'm like, why are you doing that? He says, we know because the meat and the milk taste better when we, yeah. And so it kind of, you know, they were not doing it because it was better for them or because it was for longevity or because - Tastes better. Right, the cheese, yeah, it tastes better. So it turns out that we know now that phytochemicals are not just in plants. and phyto means plant. They're not just in plants, they're also in animals. So the work of Fred Provenza and Stephen Van Boet from Duke have clearly shown that when animals are eating a wide array of wild plants or a wide array of planted grasses and flowers and different things, they will seek out medicine in the food.

33:31So they will literally go and eat major calorie crops, let's say, But then they'll go and sample from like 100 different plants to get their medicines. And so these wild animals, these wild plants are being eaten, and the phytochemicals are accumulating in the meat and the milk of these animals. So studies have shown, for example, that you can have as high levels of the catechins in green tea in goat milk from goats eating certain wild plants. Yeah. So it's my belief, and there may be ways that even these get transmuted. So eating where you generally raise meat. I went to a restaurant here in LA last night called Matu, where they have regeneratively raised meat.

34:10Was it amazing? It was amazing. Now, it wasn't as like fatty and kind of like marble-like corn-fed meat, but it was delicious, and it was tasty and yummy and amazing. What was this place called? Matu, M-A-T-U. I'll have to check it out. Really good. It's from Everly Hills. And you'd love it. It's so good. And, you know, you can eat that and know you're eating from an animal that's been well taken care of, that's living out in its natural habitat, that's regenerating the environment, that's restoring the ecosystems, increasing biodiversity, conserving water in the soils, that's reducing climate change, that's producing more nutrient-dense food and rich in phytochemicals and good fats and more antioxidants and more minerals and just pretty much everything.

34:51So that was a sort of a, I think a key part of their longevity was they lived on this stuff. You know, they basically were shepherds and goats and sheep for their livelihood. What was about their relationships? How did that play in? Did they have certain types of relationships with family members? Did they have intimate relationships where they married for long periods of time? Did they have 10 wives? What was the whole process? One couple I saw had a collective age of 210. That's crazy. So I don't know. I think being married is definitely a key to longevity for men. For women, not always, depends on if they're happy or not.

35:31Oh man. So I think having a happy, healthy relationship is such a key part of longevity. And they were very much in the realm of community. And it wasn't just like this isolated relationship. They were embedded in a context of a community that was totally supportive, that celebrated together, that played together, that worked together, that harvested together, that shared sheep together, that made cheese together. they were just doing stuff together as part of the way of life. And so, and they would just stop and talk and hang out and like chill. And it was like, nobody was like starting a company or nobody was like getting ahead in social media for likes and followers.

36:13I mean, they were just living life. They weren't striving or trying to get anywhere. They were just being. And so the culture was all about the power of these incredible moments where you share with people you love and care about and celebrate life and enjoy life and talk. We were driving out of this one town in Sardinia and I had these two guys that were really great and they were local Sardinians. And this car like stops in front of us and like blocks us. And this old guy gets out and he walks over to this stone wall and he's like waves us to come over. And I'm like, what's going on here? And he just waved us over, he wanted to talk.

36:49He saw us in the car behind, he's like, he just wanted to talk. So we sat on the stone wall for like an hour or so and chit-chatted about life and about his life. And he was karma, he was 85 years old, and super vibrant, fit guy. And he started telling us about his life and how there was a mudslide that destroyed the village we grew up in, which they moved the town a little bit higher on the mountain. But he still had his farm on that old area, his old family land. So he took us down, he had like six sheep, and he had a pig, and he had some chickens, and he had orchards, and he had a whole garden where he grew eggplants and peppers and tomatoes, and zucchini and herbs and spices.

37:23And it was amazing. And he literally took care of his entire property by himself at 85 years old. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't think I could do it. And then I'm chasing this guy up this hill after his sheep. And I'm like, I can't keep up with this guy. He's 85 years old. And so he was super vibrant, mentally sharp. You know, he lived with his family and they just had this incredibly deep culture. There wasn't nursing homes. I met Julia, who was 103 months. Like I say, I'm five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months. And she was like, didn't have kids and lived with her niece and nephew who loved her and took care of her.

38:01And she was still working. She was still working, making all this stuff for weddings, all the little tablecloths and doilies and embroidery stuff. I don't know how to do that, but she was making all this stuff and she was just so bright and still was walking around every day and taking her walks and hanging out with everybody and her friends and it was really amazing to see this culture where you know people were not ostracized or excluded but you know they were included in life and it doesn't sound like they're hustling for something they're working hard to maintain their life like their home their farm their land or whatever they have maybe their small business but they're not hustling for something greater is that right yeah no why why can you live long and still hustle hustle or just want more want to build something greater in your life.

38:48I think you can. I think it's really about what happens on the inside. Because one of the biggest things that regulates your epigenome is your mind. So your biggest pharmacy in your body is between your years. It's the most powerful pharmacy in the world. And you can activate it for good or bad. So when we are having thoughts that are stressful thoughts, when we're in toxic relationships, when we're worried or anxious, when we aren't in harmony with ourselves, it activates all these really nasty pathways that drive inflammation and harm your mitochondria. I mean, your microbiome is listening in on your thoughts, is eavesdropping.

39:31So those bugs don't like it when you are not happy. Really? Yeah. What is the process of that from an idea, a thought into the mitochondria? how does that transfer into a healthy information into a physical manifestation versus unhealthy information, data, and a thought into physical unhealthy? So what's the biochemistry of it? Well, for example, if you're stressed, you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and all these other hormones and proteins that then will trigger a whole cascade of downstream effects that activate transcription factors, that transcription factors that turn on genes that cause inflammation and all these other problems.

40:12So you're basically creating inflammatory thoughts or creating inflammation in your body, literally. Isn't that crazy? And you have receptors on your, like immune cells, for example, for neurotransmitters. So if you're stressed, your immune system is eavesdropping on your thoughts. That's why if you're stressed, you are more likely to have an infection or get sick or have other bad health consequences. Why do you think it is that our body is built this way that a thought can either make us feel and physically transform into joy and health or feel sick and then become sick? Why do you think our body - Why, from an evolutionary point of view?

40:51Why do you think that is? Isn't that crazy? It's a crazy thought. You think something, it's not actually, it's in your mind, right? Where it, you know, it's like, and then it transfers into your body. Well, I think, I don't know, Louis, but I think, you know, we have a built-in stress response system, which we needed. Like if we were getting chased by a saber tooth tiger, well, we needed to get on a move. And we needed to like jack up our cortisol and pump our blood sugar up and get our blood pressure up and our heart rate up and flood our body with glucose and just all this stuff that needs to make, it's like the story of how someone sees their kid under a car and can lift up a car.

41:27Like why can that happen, right? Because we have the system built in to deal with acute stress. That's a good thing. The problem is we have a society and a life that drives chronic, unmitigated, unrelenting stress. So unless you are very clear about how to discharge that stress, because we can't avoid it, right? But how do you discharge it? How do you not react? And how do you have a different perception of relationship and what's happening to you? It's all about perception, right? So I always say stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife's cheating on you, but she's not.

42:06And you get the same physiology. Or you can have the same input. Let's say you're James Bond, and I put a gun to your head, versus Woody Allen, it's going to be a very different set of responses, right? Same input, very different response. So that's the beauty of our minds, is we have the power over our thoughts. You remember Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he said, between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom. For those of you who don't know about Viktor Frankl, he was in Auschwitz, and he was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz, and he chose not to let even the most horrific thing that's almost ever happened to human beings affect his own well-being and happiness in inner life.

42:50That just blows my mind, right? So when you think, oh, my life, this and that, we always have a choice, you know? And whether you have stuff or don't have stuff, it's all about our perceptions. So mindset and your thoughts are a key part of longevity and health. And having meaning and purpose. That was the other thing in these cultures. They had so much meaning and purpose. Like Carmine had such purpose. He had to go and take care of his sheep and he had to feed his family. And he wanted to support the other members of the community by giving them food. And he fed his animals the extra. And so he had a meaningful life.

43:20And he also had a very active mind, was reading books and learning all the time. So that extends your life up to seven years. Wow. Having meaning and purpose. Because you hear the story sometimes of like, you know, someone in their older years, their husband or their wife dies. And then within six months or a year later, they die. Or a week later, yeah. Or a week later, right? You hear that story often. All the time. And is that because their meaning has lost or just when they have a broken heart and they don't know how to overcome that? Both. I mean, there actually is a phenomena of a broken heart.

43:55I had a patient with this once who had this incredible. They were deeply in love. They were married for decades and decades. She got breast cancer and died. And he was relatively healthy, and all of a sudden he went into heart failure. Come on. Like, boom. And it's in the medical literature. It's literally a broken heart, and it causes actual clinical heart failure, where your heart muscle can't pump the blood around. Now, that's from, what is that from? Is that from thinking and then feeling the heart, you know, the pain in your heart? Yeah, it's the physiological phenomena that happen when you have a stress response, the flood of all these stress molecules in your body that damages the heart.

44:34And we were able to get him better, but it was through energy healing, which sounds kind of wacky and weird, but it was really through his own, you know, getting back in his body, being touched, being held, being energetically reset. He was able to reverse the heart failure. It wasn't by taking some fancy drug or getting a heart transplant. So he didn't pass away from that. No, he didn't. But some people do. We fixed it, yeah. But some people do. They might isolate themselves even more, and then their body just starts to shut down. Loneliness is the biggest killer. Loneliness seems to be a bigger risk factor than smoking or bad food or almost anything else.

45:07What happens when we're lonely? Again, it's a stress. We're social creatures, Lewis. We all are meant to belong. We have a longing to belong, and if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, you stick a human out in the desert or a forest by himself, forget it. They're not going to last long. Forget it. And so this is not true just of humans, but it's all of creation. And E.L. Wilson, who was a Harvard professor, wrote many, many books, he just died, but he was a very, very thoughtful guy. And he wrote a book called The Social Conquest of the Earth. And it's about how from ants to humans, we all work together, like ant colonies, right?

45:41They're all working together. And so we have to work together to survive. And that's why altruism is actually a medicine. Altruism and serving and helping others actually activates healing mechanisms in our body. It activates dopamine in the same way that cocaine or heroin does.

45:59For people that don't have that type of discipline, how can they be consistent on the nutritional intake over a lifetime and make it their lifestyle and not just a diet? Yeah, I mean, it's such a basic good question that people always want to bring it back to like tracking and things like that. I think that doesn't, that works, tracking works, but you're talking about it at a deeper level, right? Because I experienced the same thing. I can have the most steadfast meditator monk that I'm talking to and they will still battle with this, right? And it's some to the point where we have so much things, so many things that are just available at our fingertips that are just in not in alignment with how we've continued to evolve as you know it's like we just technology and food production and the food industry is growing at an exponentially faster rate than how we are changing right so we have these things that are available that just simply shouldn't and outside of putting yourself in a in a locker and like away from these foods a total echo chamber like you are fighting temptation all the time and we have to recognize that there's only so much power in your prefrontal cortex There's only so much willpower.

47:14So much willpower. Yeah. Like it's a finite resource. So with that, you have to kind of change your way of thinking. And the way that this occurred to me like three years ago or so, when I had a really, really bad like sinus infection. And I've always had some kind of recurring sinus infections ever since I was little. But I had one that was really bad and I couldn't taste or smell for like two months. And that was something where I realized like, why am I still craving these certain foods? I can't even taste them. And it was like this aha moment where I'm like, this is clearly a mental thing because something sweet hits your taste buds.

47:46It's not just the taste of it. It's what it's doing in the brain. So changing your relationship with food, changing your relationship with struggle has been a very big thing. So for me, I always had this kinesthetic awareness thing with my workouts. With workouts, it was like if I inflicted pain upon myself and it was positive pain for a workout, I could flip this kinesthetic switch that was like, I called it my pain switch. And I would flip that pain switch. And you know, as an athlete, that's sometimes what you do. And it happens inadvertently. Sometimes you visualize it, but visualization is huge.

48:17So for me, I'd visualize flipping the pain switch. The switch is off. I can now push it harder and push it past my normal aerobic capacity, anaerobic, whatever. I realized, why can't I apply that same thing to nutrition without becoming robotic, but becoming very, very aware. And so I've changed my relationship with how food makes me feel. So like, and that's taken a lot of work. What do you say to yourself? What's the conversation, the inner dialogue, the mental strategy you use to do that? As simple as it sounds, whenever I would eat something for about two or three months, I would simply say like food is fuel, food is fuel.

48:53And that sounds very, because you don't want to take the fun out of it. I still love food, right? So when you do that, but you have to train yourself to believe that like, okay, if I'm eating this sugar, That's okay, but remember it's fuel and I should use it, right? Or if I'm and that's the thing here. So I'm gonna eat it, make sure I move my body, go for a 10-minute walk, walk up some stairs, move it a little bit, just get it out. When you change the relationship with food, you're not abstaining. You're changing the reaction, right? So like... And I should never have a bucket of ice cream and then just sit around.

49:26It's just the thing, right? It's like if you're gonna do it... Eat it in the morning, eat it for breakfast, whatever. And then go move all day. Exactly. So that relationship, I mean, it gets much bigger than that, right? But that relationship with food is everything. And so many of us have a distorted relationship with food. And for me, I've been on opposite ends of sort of the spectrum, right? Like when I was younger, I was practically, as a runner, I was practically eating disorder category the other direction. Like I have to be as light as possible. Oh, I don't want to eat that. I don't want to get fat.

49:56And then it kind of went the other way. It was almost like masochistic where I'm just like, I don't care. I'm fat already. Let's just go all the way. Okay. Now it's kind of like fine, a little bit of that middle ground, but the pendulum probably swings much more towards how I was when I was younger. Got to stay lean, got to say this. But I also have recognized that food is still reward. And we were constantly told that food shouldn't be treated as a reward. Don't reward your kids with food. I call on that. The reason is, is because food has always been a reward right it's always been a reward you get the hunt and you get the food yeah you go gather you get some food yeah it's simple right it's what you have to do is you just have to once again change the relationship with feelings attached to food recognize that those feelings are there but do something with them rather than just let them let them be and consume you if I am gonna go and eat that ice cream then I'm aware of what that's doing in my body and I'm not gonna let that turn me the other direction and get depressed and go to eat more.

50:56I'm going to say, you know what? This is an opportunity, an opportunity to move more, an opportunity to move tomorrow. And that's not having this transactional relationship again, because what you don't want to do is say, I'm going to eat some pie and now I'm going to punish myself by going on the treadmill. That's the exact wrong thing to do, right? But you do say, okay, I'm going to eat this pie. Great. I've got full glycogen tanks. I'm going to go work out. I'm going to get the best work out of my life. Having kids has really made this apparent because kids are constantly, I want a snack. I want a snack.

51:24It's like they have five stomachs. I don't understand that. And like, how do you, like if they're reaching for like a Lara bar or something that I would still consider healthy, but has a decent amount of sugar from dates and stuff, right? Like they, kids just crave these things. And how do I teach them that you, yeah, you can eat that, but we should really get out and move, you know? And, you know, it's kind of like how I translate it to them is, hey, it's fun to feel good. It's fun to feel good, right? You've got this energy from that bar. Doesn't that feel good? Let's get out and let's use that energy.

51:54Let's go have fun. And now it's to the point where my kids are like, can I have a lar bar? I want to go outside and play. I'm like, this is awesome. Let's go. Without actually molding them in any weird way, I've helped them light a spark to understand that when they eat this, and at a young subconscious level in their brain, it's probably forming something that's beyond what we even know in research, where maybe they taste something sweet now they naturally want to move versus saying like oh shame guilt i shouldn't have eaten this it's terrible no we're gonna go have fun we're gonna play and uh but i teach them that with not just sugar i teach them that with with fats too because i think it's also fundamental to learn that all food is fuel yes but be in touch with how it makes you feel so how i retain that discipline it's the exact same way it's like how do i feel what did what do i feel after i eat this did i feel crappy, okay, well, then that's probably a pretty good articulation of what that's doing in my body.

52:53And with that, it's really turned into this intuitive eating. And that's like, I guess, I mean, it's a great segue to talk about how fasting has worked, right? Because fasting has allowed me to have more flexibility with my diet in the confines of still like appropriate discipline because I can flip that switch on and off a lot easier. Fasting, not fasting, fasting, not fasting. And you're one of the, there's a few things I want to talk about here before I get into fasting. One is the mantra, it sounds like you had, the mental switch, the mantra of food is fuel. So is that something you would think about right before you were making a decision of what to eat?

53:29No. Usually something? Usually while eating it. While eating it. So it wasn't helping you make a decision of like, okay, here's a candy bar. Am I going to decide this is, is this going to help me and fuel me in a positive way or a negative fuel? That's too willpower-y. That takes too much energy. You would still eat the candy bar if you needed, or if you did. Yes. Granted, this was happening three, three and a half years ago, so candy bars weren't really in the equation anymore. But that being said from... Because of an apple or whatever. Yeah, or something. Because I would still crave fruit or whatever.

54:00But yes, exactly. It's like while I'm consuming it, it's really trying to teach my body and understand this visualization. You know the power of visualization, obviously. Just yourself and the guests you've had on. it's like that visualization with eating something can be just as powerful so you would say this as you're having a bite of the apple or whatever it might be be having an internal conversation food is fuel and then having a positive relationship with something that might be looked at as negative before is that i'm hearing you say precisely yep and training your body to appreciate the food and to say okay i'm going to go act and move my body after i eat this and it's going to help me, it's not going to hurt me, and I don't need to be shameful about eating this.

54:41Is that kind of the process? Because a lot of people that eat something and they feel good because it tastes good, but then they feel shameful. And that doesn't help them. Because then they have more of that to have the good feeling and then feel shame again. And the cycle continues. Because what is happening here is much different than what's happening here. And in our world, Like we get this instant gratification from food, especially like the translation of, I see a direct correlation with my time scrolling social media and my addiction to my phone, direct line item correlation to how much I crave snacking and things like that.

55:16It's the same firing, you know, right? It's like that same dopamine itch that needs to be scratched. And just in the same way I get addicted to looking at my phone or checking my email, that usually correlates with how much my addiction to food is at that point in time. But you don't just say, I am going to resist the urge to check my email. I'm going to resist the urge to check my email. Sometimes it takes, what is the response? A lot of times, you'll check your email first thing in the morning. You'll get a negative email and it hits you then. You're like, this is how I'm starting my day? This is what I'm going to do?

55:49Screw that. And that's your catalyst. But with food, you eat a Snickers bar and it feels so good up here. You feel like you're doing the right thing. It's amazing. Everything is telling you in that immediate moment that this was a good decision, Louis. Like you did the right thing. And your belly afterwards is like, oh, why is it digesting weird? And now I feel like lethargic. And you go out and you move and you try to do something with it. And yeah, you're going to have some fuel, but you're going to be like, you know what? It's crazy enough. That didn't feel as good as when I had that apple.

56:18And you start creating this internal checks and balances. 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.

56:52I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And 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.