Tim ‘Bio Hacker’ Gray - Part 1: The Biohacking Truth No One Wants to Hear

0:00Welcome to Catching Up With The Royals, a brand new show with me Richard Coles. And me, Emily Andrews. Every week we'll be going beyond the headlines, lifting the lid, and what life is really like behind the palace walls. Hello, sir. Good morning. I'm the Sun's new royal correspondent. Oh, he said, look at me up and down. Things are looking up. We'll be diving into the moments everyone's talking about. What does the world owe you if all of a sudden you've handed back your crown? Meghan and Harry can't keep hold of their staff. We'll reveal the secrets of an organisation usually shrouded in mystery and explore defining moments of royal history to see how the past still shapes the monarchy today.

0:38Now, you actually knew Princess Diana. I think one of the ways she acquired power was through that relationship with the present. But before that interview, no-one had really spoken and been so open. Was that a game-changer? So join us every week wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube and on Saturdays on 5 as we catch up with the royals.

1:02The secret to living to a hundred. Is it found in the blue zones or is it found on social media with the trend of biohacking? On this episode of The Unprocessed Truth, we're going to get into the detail and reveal the truth behind the overpriced gadgets, the exaggerated claims and give you the real scoop on what's important with your health and whether biohacking is just a trend or it is the real deal and it has underlying principles. We've got Europe's leading biohacker, Tim Gray, otherwise known as Tim Biohacker, joining us on the podcast. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. The link is in the bio.

1:42Let's get into it.

1:48Joining us today is someone who didn't just read about biohacking. He lived it and potentially even kind of invented it in the UK back in 2013. he's known as Europe's leading biohacker Tim Gray welcome to the Unprocessed Truth. Thanks for having me man. Great to have you. You aren't just a lifelong wellness guru that's lived the perfect life as I understand it you used to run a marketing agency you lived the city life you're burning the candle at both ends but you were crippled yourself by chronic health issues do you want to just tell us in your own words how this all started for you? Yeah I ran marketing agencies and as you know in agency life it's full fast paced very fast paced you know up at 8am coffee down in the mouth in the mouth jump into the car get into the office full-on client stuff all day long get home at eight or nine o 'clock shove some food down your throat dive into bed wash rinse and repeat and at the weekend get wasted that's basically the you know the average life i would say for agency and you know i thought being healthy was eating one of the swedish wraps from prate-a-manger that's really where my that's where i was and drinking coca-cola and red bull and vodka when i was out and you know all this stuff i guess just mainstream mainstream human yeah i would say um it'd be it got to the point i went i went actually went traveling i went to bali came back and started having kidney stones which was pretty stressful because one of them got stuck in my ureter which meant that I was rushed to hospital and it was insane it was almost like I was being cut open with a knife and then after that I was so stressed I was gonna have another kidney stone stuck because it was so bad that you know that put me into stress for a whole year and I was paranoid about it happening and then I got infections and IBS and so many different so many different things including brain fog that I couldn't really operate so luckily I was the boss in the agency and I could just say you know when someone says oh you know shall we do this this or this I'm like what do you think you know that was really my line for several years and what do you think and I thought yeah I trust your judgment let's go with that and then really my brain power wasn't there either it turned out I'd had so many different things going on including mercury poisoning and that was from my metal fillings because I had seven amalgam fillings which is partially mercury and also I was eating sushi every day because of course it's easy to eat sushi on the healthy yeah yeah there's a reason why you have wasabi with sushi by the way I was high in metals that turned out later to be a genetic issue with mthfr gene which meant i didn't detoxify or produce energy correctly based on my genetics which i figured out later and so it was just from a place of the medical system shrugging their shoulders and saying we can't find anything wrong even though i was falling apart that's where it began so one day he literally shrugged his shoulders the doctor after i'd been in the doctor's surgery every day for a week and I got to know the receptionist and the NHS doctor's text message.

4:45It's Tim, I want to come on in. You know, that's how sick I'd been. And so I just figured stuff out and kept on going. And then you realise actually I've been running at 60 or 70 % for 15 years and then you figure out what flourishing is and kind of get addicted to being the better version of you or the best version of you. Yeah, wow. So everyone has that kind of health moment, that awakening where you change the game. you were sick and unhealthy and now you're incredibly healthy potentially the healthiest man in europe who knows i don't know what the measure is for that but biohacking is obviously a huge huge trend now it's all over social media brian john i'm sure everyone's heard brian johnson on a podcast somewhere about his stated aim of living into his hundreds living i would say i would say uh existing existing but we'll go into brian johnson in a minute but let's take it back to the beginning what exactly is biohacking in your own words to be quite honest if i could drop the label tim biohacker i would okay the problem is is when for instance i had someone come around to my house this morning to check out the kitchen and do some stuff and he said oh you know health and i said yeah i mean look me up i'm tim biohacker goes i know this name so it's kind of a sticky name so first of all is i think biohacking has had its day and now traditionally it's known as the longevity space which is where all the the money guys are trying to make all these compounds and things make money from but biohacking in its essence of what i believe it is is health optimization and that means using tech supplements or most importantly nature to make sure that you're living optimally for instance if you live on a beach every morning and meditate do you really need a red light device and grounding bed sheets absolutely do you need a hyperbaric oxygen chamber no if you're in a city what do you need all of these things so it's kind of like what's your environment like and what do you need to reverse the lack of nature yeah with technology or being in nature so the idea obviously is for me to bring up my kid eventually on the beach walking the dog every morning with a cup of coffee and you know instead of living in city life so really for me biohacking is exactly that it's nice clean and simple using nature to optimize your health or be optimal and supplements and technology where nature isn't available interesting i like that and i mean if i could get rid of the term biohacking now i would and i think it's kind of it's become a bit it's had a few weird bits of press around it and a few weird characters in it and where and i think whereas when you say health optimization in fact back in 2017 before i did the health optimization summit year one i with my marketing brain said to my mom once actually i run this meetup in london biohacker london she wants a biohacker and i was like oh mom doesn't know what a biohacker is so therefore keywords seo mindset health optimization so i did a survey on oxford street yeah and we did thousands of people in a day and do you want to biohack yourself less than one tenth of a percent of people said yes or even knew what it was 94 percent of people said yes they wanted to optimize their health five percent of people said a loved one one percent of people are busy london people pushing out the way so health optimization is biohacking so it's about making it accessible for everyone and as simple as possible because i have to be honest like i don't know when we met maybe 2017 pre-covid we you know i came to one of your early london biohacker meetups and I loved it because I was curious I was very curious about the space and I met lots of other people who were into the same stuff and at the time I was doing keto and they had these prove it keto and sachets you could drink and all this like quirky stuff which was interesting and intriguing to me but actually as a you know a young guy in London at the time I was just like I felt like I couldn't actually keep up with the like oh there's this new supplement or there's this new tech that you have to buy and it's really expensive right so where do you think the line is for people today in terms of how far do you need to go in health and like how much you need to invest because obviously brian johnson is probably spending a 200 grand a month or whatever on optimizing his health which no one can do the question would be more is are you living optimally are you eating healthy are you moving every day i i actually have something called the fundamentals of health which was inspired by dr.

9:15Ted Akakoso who's a 212 IQ smart smart man yeah very very smart he says on a good day it's 180 on a bad day 212 it's like yeah for that switch but um it's eat well sleep well hydrate well some well ground well move well love well relate well mate well you know these are the fundamentals of health you know and if you're not grounding or hydrating or any of these things, everything else isn't relevant. So you actually don't need any money to optimize your health based on the things that we evolved with. You do need to know how to navigate the world as obviously your Instagram and mine obviously teach people how to navigate or what to avoid.

9:57And because, you know, eating clean doesn't necessarily mean eating clean because you can pick up a salad and it's not organic and therefore you're filling yourselves with glyphosate or other pesticides that actually cause more harm than good when it comes from the nutrients you're not getting. So I would say you don't need any money to optimize your health. You need the mindset and the motivation to do so. And I think if we go back to my point of why I got into it, when things were just okay, it's the same in relationships. It's the same in anything. When everything's just okay, it doesn't spring you into action to make a change.

10:34When things are really bad and you hit rock bottom, there's a rising from the ashes, the phoenix, for a reason, right? Yeah. When things are really bad, we make a change. When things are OK, we generally just keep ticking over until something bad happens. Of course. And so I would say for most people, they don't even realise that they need to do anything because they haven't had something catch up with them yet. But looking at the statistics of one third to one half of people that end up dying with cancer or off cancer, that's a later marker. The problem is, is people don't see that right now.

11:05So they don't think, oh, I need to remove this now. you know we could say this about asbestos for instance look how how much of an impact that had on the world and how what we had to do to clear that problem up so the problem is humans are so smart we've become stupid we think because we're not seeing we're not seeing a problem right now there's no problem we don't need to eat organic because it doesn't affect me in fact okay well what's your mom like you know has she is she got cancer do you know like and is there a cancer and the family what do they eat like so it's very simple it's actually very simple but we have to have that motivation and we don't see it but i think it's a really important point you mentioned about the time frame of the the impact of these bad choices on a daily basis right because you talk about organic or non-organic you talk about ultra processed food and the reason why the industry gets away with it is because you'll be fine today you'll be fine tomorrow 10 years time maybe not 20 years time probably not right and it gets count on that's what they count on right so it's that like that um frog in the boiling water analogy right put the frog in the boiling water but just in cold water and then heat up slowly they'll never jump out because they'll never realize what's actually going on but for you and what actually changed your life what were some of the jaw-dropping things you experienced in changing your health that's a really good question i've had to do thousands of different supplements hundreds of different protocols multiple different diets you know even 30-day juice diet with no you've tried it no no um fruits just veg for instance yeah an adapted jason veil juice diet i did for actually 28 days and quit on the 27th because i was a moody miserable mother um i've done all of these things and it comes down to a few very very few things again and i think the jaw the jaw dropping moment was actually when i realized that and this is so stupid but so simple is that we need to replace the word sleep with repair that's the jaw dropping moment why because okay i'm going to cut my repair time short tonight yeah uh i'll repair when i'm dead it's like oh it just doesn't work the same way when you go actually we do damage to our bodies during the day we also collect energy during the day and use it when we sleep we are using the energy we collected to reverse the damage that we've done to our body and that repair time is reversing that damage so if we want to slow aging and we want to be healthier then we need to repair more which means sleep more so everything I do in my day to day life is optimised around being able to sleep well in the evening is it the number one biohack?

13:57it's the number one thing it's the number one thing sleep because for instance if you've got a kid right? two two kids even better for the example you get woken up in the night you pushed your limits it's harder to show up as a father and a good partner when you're underslept yeah or when you're jet lagged and traveling how stressed you are during the process because you're underslept it's hard to show up as a human less emotional human and more logic especially you know for men i would say because you have to hold that ground the whole time especially for your whole family right so it's hard to show up as a a man and you have to hold that ground for your whole family right you have to be the rock and so if you're underslept it becomes a lot harder and it also all decisions in your life become a lot harder if you're underslept so i put the emphasis on sleep another thing on that would also be you know community for instance it's not what's in your fridge it's who you're with when you shop and eat that counts because you can you know if it makes it to your fridge you're likely to take it regardless of how clean and optimized your health if it's in your fridge it's convenience i take it we don't waste it exactly right i always say if it's in my cupboard it's gone i'm gonna eat it doesn't matter what it is exactly and those are those around us when we're shopping are so for instance our community helped shape us by hanging around with five smokers you'll be the sixth hanging around with five millionaires you'll be the sixth we naturally shape to those around us and for people say well i don't believe that i'm not i'm not easily shaped by the world around me so okay cool so let's just look at the country you live in now are you culturally similar to everyone in the country as you or are you completely different i.e culture completely out there so i know i'm quite similar okay cool you are shaped by your environment more than you realize so therefore sleep community are the two most important things of all those are the aha moments and i think it's so simple and it's not easily marketed and you can't make money from it therefore it's not talked about enough fair point yeah yeah yeah but i mean it's amazing it's free it's accessible to anyone and it's i mean the community piece is always a thing that comes up consistently in the blue zones right it's not just what they eat which is what gets studied the most it's like purpose community friends family that whole network gives you a purpose for carrying on right till you're 100 i love blue zone by the way i was actually quite funny because when you know why it's named blue zone why is it because he used a blue marker marker pen on the map when he was marking them out and it was like okay so it was just a blue marker he picked and therefore it was called the blue zone but it makes it sound like it makes it sound like grease and turquoise waters and this special place but it was just a blue pen yeah it's literally just a blue marker pen on the Matt.

16:48Amazing. Awesome. All right. Well, so there you're jaw dropping, like good realizations as a biohacker. What are the flip side? You've said you've tested hundreds of thousands of supplements, hundreds of routines. What's one of the like weird, surprising things you've had happen to you? Because I love the test and learn approach, but sometimes it's going to go wrong, right? First thing I want to caveat with what I'm going to say is if we look at Brian Johnson, for instance he he is doing loads of crazy stuff and he is showing the world what is possible to the extreme of many angles he doesn't fully understand health in my opinion there's quite a few things that he's done for instance taking thyroid meds to have optimal thyroid taking the med isn't the same as optimizing your own thyroid right or you know measuring your nighttime erections and saying that you've got the erections of a 21 year old but taking Cialis every night it's not really understanding health so he's he's living but he's not living yeah right but we need extreme cases like that and ben greenfield who's a good friend of mine he's one of the extreme biohackers or as well testing these things to show us what's possible and then we can choose you know shoot for the shoot for the moon you know shoot for the stars you might hit the moon yeah that type of thing so there are things i've done that i think are a bit crazy or people think are very crazy for instance actually ben greenfield shared on his instagram about two or three years ago that he went to serasota in florida for ozone methylene blue and antibiotic injection into his prostate ouch i know but you've done it any guy listening to this wince in over that one yeah they inject a big needle through your bladder into your prostate ultrasound guided but i went for that because uh my partner had had cystitis after we were intimate and you know and it happened with two of my partners and i'm like i always kind of like a typical guy blame the girl yeah and uh and then when i heard this piece of content about it from ben i was like actually i'm gonna try this so i flew over and did it i've done it twice and never had the problem ever again and i'd had prostate issues on enough since i first got ill so it's actually that was one of the the weird things now to make it even weirder as they said well what painkiller do you generally want your nitrous oxide or something or other i said have you got ketamine because it's obviously that's what its original purpose was for right yeah you know i'm not gonna lie i'm a fan of ketamine from time to time um and um yeah they gave me a 15 milligram dose iv and i left the planet saw the divine went flying in the cosmos and um yeah and thought i was on the resuscitation table because i could hear a beep beep beep beep oh man dude dude you've you've gone too far this time of all the stuff you've done optimizing your health you've gone too far you thought you killed yourself

19:50and then five minutes later i came to and there's just a nurse with a clipboard standing around so I was imagining it but the point is the procedure was great it worked really well but it was definitely definitely out there however any guy having prostate issues where the doctors just check your prostate every year and you know tell you it's something you have to live with no there's a treatment called Prostablue that you can actually have well you mentioned methylene blue within that and I'm sure some people have seen the pictures on Instagram of blue tongue smurf tongue whatever you call it like explain in layman terms what methylene blue is why people are using it methylene blue is one of the very first if not the first pharmaceutical drug ever made when pharmaceuticals were made for purpose not just for profits you can use methylene blue in fish tanks and you only have to put a little bit in a fish tank when it's got moss and mold and stuff in there to see how much it kills all the pathogens yeah it literally cleans it out and now what it is is it's blue people say oh it's only dye for genes and stuff true it has got other uses but when you look at it on a compound level it donates an electron to the electron transport chain which is basically supports our mitochondria for our energy on a cellular level it also helps with our oxygen utilization as well yeah so if you're on a plane for 10 hours which is a lower oxygen environment having something like methylene blue will help your body to utilize the oxygen that you have got therefore less stressing your mitochondria and also donating electron to electron transport chain which is part of our fundamental energy uh equation yeah okay so it's also in every accident and emergency toolkit in every hospital do they have it because for carbon monoxide poisoning it is so powerful it's supporting your mitochondria wow that and help clearing so many things that it's used as that so when people say methylene blue is dangerous they don't know what they're talking about because it is used in hospitals around the world even for carbon monoxide poisoning that's how powerful it is but it's also very good antifungal antibacterial it's great you know to make you look funky with a blue tongue as well it also helps clear problems in the guts if you've had gut issues from imbalances also helps with that as well so i really like it i use it as a nootropic mainly because it helps with mental clarity because if you're under oxygenated and you're living in a city and not having so much fresh air your brain won't be as sharp as it could be yeah so that's why i use it and i use it on every flight i ever use amazing and so it's something you would take every day or it's more like a hack when you need it yeah i mean it's like a supplement is to supplement it's not something you take every day yeah um and i think like i do like some of the smart drugs on nootropics and various other things like that my favorite obviously being methylene blue and one called qualia mind which is high in alpha gpc um choline so this is very really good for me yeah um i would take it probably once a week if i have a really head down day or full-on day i'll take it then nice very interesting stuff i have tried it it is it's got a nasty taste though you can get capsules that are you you swallow it i just did the liquid on the tongue and it was pretty grim you get the capsules now and the funny thing is if you take vitamin b uh like some of the vitamin b's like b5 whatever it makes your p yellow well if you take methylene blue it makes your p blue so if you take both it comes out green it's like you're peeing lightsabers every time i take a leak i'm like i almost want to instagram this but it's not appropriate lovely lovely stuff um all right i think your crew and come bonkers right now you'd be right let's talk about diet then because we talked about you know it's about being back with nature what environment have we got around us but food is obviously such a big part of this and nutrition is actually primary to ensuring we have good health um do you think diet can really turbocharge biohacking and it's fundamental to it or do you see like a lot of people just jumping on all the trends but not really sorting out their diet like how do you see diet fitting into the biohacking world my brain goes in so many different ways with this one first of all if you're not eating properly you're doing everything wrong i mean it's like literally it's one of the fundamentals you know eat well sleep well hydrate well some well ground well you know this fits in there yeah um the problem is is people don't necessarily understand what eating healthy is and if they are eating healthy are there any anti-nutrients in the food that you got to worry about as well and you know the pesticides is a classic example of that or the quality of the meat is it factory farmed crappy meat that has not been looked after and the nutrient profile is completely different yeah completely different and actually you know almost void of nutrients so I would say that if you're not eating right you are not respecting your body on a daily basis enough giving it enough energy so therefore it's always going to struggle with everything the same goes for sunlight exposure as well you need to have a certain amount of natural sunlight exposure for your energy production also for your hormones the moment the sun hits your skin it's sulfates our cholesterol into hormones so if you don't get enough natural light exposure your energy won't be right and if you don't get the right food your energy won't be right it's two very basic things so what is the energy you're putting in and are you blocking it half the time or are you not getting enough sun exposure because you're paranoid to think that it's going to give you cancer even though we survived with it for millennia you know there's so many so many nuances within food so i would just say if people people say well what do you eat well no one ever know that i was on any diet in fact i'm not i meat grass-fed organic regenerative wherever possible wild fish not farmed fish because that's one of the most toxic foods of all maple syrup honey white rice brown rice sweet potato white potato coffee tea water and occasionally a sparkling sparkling water with some natural flavor in it that's it what about the fruit and veg I mean I have blueberries and a few things like that but to my extent I don't really need them as long as I get my carbs from sweet potato white rice is more than enough for me.

26:21I tried carnivore for a year and it was actually quite eye-opening but my body just couldn't convert it into energy quick enough because I'm a skinny guy and my metabolism is quite fast and not having enough carbs means that I run out of energy quite quickly. So I think you know the tailored approach to what works for you is the key thing but the basic principle should be yeah like but i mean it's quite heavy meat based still sounds like no i'd probably i would say probably 40 50 percent 40 or 50 percent is meat and sweet potato white white rice white potato i do have blueberries 250 grams most mornings in the morning well i was going to say what about the antioxidants the polyphenols from the fruits and veg exactly and there are some but i don't go overboard with it and i think the problem is is you can end up chucking so much in and again a lot of these things have so many different pesticides and whatnot then sometimes it's better to avoid than just having it for the sake of having it i can see you thinking differently here so i want to hear your take on this well like i get a little bit annoyed with the people on like you'll get the hard elitist like health people going you know too much fructose in fruit is going to make you fat and you know it's all you know the anti-nutrients in vegetables whilst like oxalates and i understand some of it not all of it i won't profess but i'm just like no one has ever got ill from eating too many fruits and veg like the health situation we're in with 63 percent of the uk overweight or obese rising cancer rising diabetes rising heart disease has got nothing to do with our fruit and veg consumption i don't believe okay i want to challenge on that one go first of all is it's not about the fruit and veg it's about the stuff that comes with it so for instance if we're looking at the pesticides or the things it's grown with and factory farm food if you're growing in your garden very different yes the other thing is is that we are at a place in our lives where we weren't a hundred years ago so for instance we have gut issues for instance if you use and i'm pretty sure you've done this online as well but dishwasher tablets for instance yes okay alcohol thoughts or foxolates within uh dishwasher tablets actually break down the gut lining.

28:36And so we're having gut issues, high inflammation in our gut, the junctures aren't tight anymore, we're not getting enough sunlight exposure, which the sunlight actually helps fix that. We're then adding pesticides in from foods with irritants in there and some anti-nutrients, which I'll touch on in a second. And then our guts can't handle it. And then for me, where I had really bad IBS, and I'm talking 15, 20 times a day on the toilet because of eating plants that my gut couldn't handle. right and then when i went majority carnivore and less less veg not necessarily less fruit my gut stabilized and it meant that i was actually holding on to the nutrients for longer the other thing is on the oxalate thing for most people it doesn't matter it's fine completely fine you know our livers can deal with this however if you have a liver stress issue if you have a methylation gene issue you could have you are producing endogenous oxalates okay so you are actually producing them and people can tell this by when you go for a pee this is a weird one but you can look in the toilet and you can see if the water is slightly sparkling after you've peed yeah it's called disney pee right it's the the oxalate crystals actually hitting the water and popping and it causes this sparkling right it's not just your pee frothing right so the thing is is oxalates are bad for some people when their guts aren't right that it's fine for everyone else so if you've had for instance calcium oxalate kidney stones like i have and you've seen them and had them analyzed when they've come out like you probably want to avoid oxalates because your levels are high naturally because your liver can't deal with them which is your kale smoothie in the morning exactly and that's just like a bomb for someone like me and you can take things like calcium citrate to bond to that so it draws out the oxalates blah blah however the thing is is there's the devil's in the detail and not everyone is in the same and we our guts have been uh exposed to things that we wouldn't historically and also plants have been genetically modified and changed quite significantly so our bodies just don't know how to deal with them the same so for me the easiest route is what works what actually works for me as a human what works for you as a human what works for your team as you whatever so i think it is annoying when someone says and i'll touch on paul saladino here who you know he's a friend yeah however he does because of social media everything's bad everything's bad everything's bad even he's added a lot of stuff back in himself everyone does take the piss out of him now as the carnivore md who now eats animal-based spaghetti which is just squash it's just a plant i know i know i saw this last week on yeah and it's like yeah how are you calling a squash animal-based pasta i mean it's a bit rich isn't it like i know he's trying to keep on brand but like it's a vegetable there's nothing animal-based about it and so i get i my point is is i agree with you that it's annoying where everyone says be afraid of everything but i think the message to take from it is it should be hyper personalized based on what works for you and and if it is causing your causing digestion issues by having a lot of these plants and stuff or if you can't afford organic as a minimum then you know you probably want to minimize consumption and make sure that you're just having really high quality less less of more high quality i mean the thing i always say is there's a clean 15 dirty dozen by ewg so you can see which ones are actually fine to buy or better to buy non-organic than not and then if you you know if you can afford it make sure the dirty dozen are organic because they're the ones which will have the highest pesticide residue and i agree with you on the pesticide point like obviously we can't prove it you know it's very hard to isolate what compound is giving everyone cancer and increasing all the rates but the reality is it's happening and pesticides probably have a part to play in that um and yeah in individual cases you can always have intolerances i mean my wife anya she had um ulcerative colitis and we went through the whole process of changing her diet and you know she couldn't tolerate tomato skin didn't digest um she couldn't tolerate heavy fiber foods like beans because it was just too inflammatory to her gut and we needed to take everything away and now we've been able to build it back in and it's fine so context actually matters and understanding what's in your food is important i think i agree with that so we can agree ish i was watching your face squirm as i was saying it i'm like oh we're gonna have to do this one i try and make it simple for everyone right and simple you know i just for the majority of people if you eat fruit vegetables meat whole foods diet dairy you're gonna be on the right path as jamie oliver says real food doesn't have ingredients it is the ingredients that's the rule that i live by really simply you've got to have some ultra processed foods in your basket though surely tim come on you've got to have a guilty poly greek yogurt oh that's not an ultra processed food i mean it's quite processed though but i mean it's not ultra processed it would be classed as a processed food i guess i had a king de buono the other week and i had a chocolate croissant recently as well so you will you will what a rebel you will indulge in a croissant on the weekend sitting here preaching about health but you're having a chocolate croissant you're naughty boy um no i mean i to be honest i don't really buy any processed stuff pretty much at all you know that you know for instance a chocolate croissant from once in a while when i'm in an airport it's quite nice but like you can make your life about exceptions right and that's you know that's part of it you know if you've if you've got a healthy cupboard and a healthy fridge at home and you have the odd croissant on a weekend i don't think it's really going to do much you know there's um i heard this about 10 years ago which really helped me on my journey doctor doctor i want to live forever so do you drink nope do you smoke nope do you eat any processed foods nope do you go skydiving nope do you have unprotected sex nope why do you want to live forever pick your poison i mean that's really what it comes down to it's like and that's where it goes back to the point with brian johnson it's like he's alive but he's not living he's like literally he's like existing you know i won't go on a flight across the you know across the sea because i will ruin my 100 sleep score for three months in a row so yeah and sleep alone because it doesn't interfere with your sleep well actually if you look at the studies of how much better sleep is when you're actually with a partner regardless of being woken up you know and what it does to your heart health and stuff you know that's not living and and so i think pick your poison would be the and you've got to enjoy life now and again right it's that simple and it shouldn't all be so would you say 80 20 90 10 99 1 what's your percentage 92 to 95 percent yeah yeah high i always say 90 and i thought i was pretty extreme but the thing is it depends on how much does it affect you when you don't yeah for me i know that if i do it too many days in a row then my my energy starts lagging or i start having brain farts or you know and i'd just rather hold myself accountable for the most of the time but still be able to let go when i need to so that's a good question then what is your body saying like what's going on in your body because you're an optimal human you've optimized your health then when you have the bad croissant and a few bad days like socializing whatever what's going on what's the first thing you notice okay so if i have a chocolate croissant i don't really notice to be honest um one yeah um five maybe a different story you did a whole chocolate croissant all by yourself um um i don't really notice anything on it like for instance like that but i did actually test having a mcdonald's um about a year ago i was at the airport in stuttgart and i was like there's no food nearby i had my glucose blood glucose monitor in i got my new gabbit ring which is better tracking than my aura and i was like there's no food around i don't have many german followers so i'm not going to be judged i'm going to eat one of these dirty burgers and some of these wings right and i just like i'm going to test it and i'm going to take photos of everything i'm going to document it i'm going to look at see whatever it happened it wasn't just an excuse to eat a crappy mcdonald's it's not food no i was like i'm gonna be all right nothing in the world's gonna change you'll see what happened was well i ate my mcdonald's i went through security went to get onto the flight they'd canceled the flight so they put me in a hotel overnight i woke up in the morning and i was ill for the whole day i was literally on the toilet i must have gone like 50 times literally just my body was like get out get out get out get out i literally like left the hotel 10 minutes late checked and got back to england straight back in the bathroom again i was very it was actually really bad now i might have just been unlucky but i do notice for instance if i do have like for instance a burger with bun or you know crappy fries that are done in cedars yeah opposed to beef tallow ones or whatever i do notice it's a lot heavier i do notice the next day i feel like i'm almost a bit hung over and i notice actually under my eyes the skin around my eyes isn't quite so tight and i've got some water retention and I'm it's almost like I'm a bit hungover and it's what I was like before I got into the health space that's what I was like on a daily basis so I know that once doesn't really affect me too much generally if I do it for a few days in a row for instance you know a few weeks ago I brought um I brought a chocolate bar with hazelnuts in it and I was like start chocolate it's got hazelnuts in it great you know I'm gonna I'm gonna treat myself to it the whole thing was gone and then the next day i'm like i want another chocolate bar and i fancy bag of crisps and i'm like hang on a minute like i sucked back into this processed food sugar spike thing and like i just i just have to have a zero tolerance for it with very very rare exception it's a slippery slope what is it but it's an interesting point that you touch on because i'd be the same i think if i ate mcdonald's i would feel almost hung over the next day if i have a takeout because there's no options and it's 11 o 'clock at night because i've been working late and i then have a takeout i will feel rough the next day but why do you think most people can eat mcdonald's and get away with it and not have that same experience whereas you and i live pretty healthily and then we feel the impact in a different way it's a great question so number one is they don't know what to look for number two or they might have health might not have health issues or might not be the canary in the mine yeah you know um for instance when you first when you first ever pick up a glass of wine and the waiter says you says do you want red or white you're like oh i don't know i've never had uh i'll go with red yeah so one day you only know red or white next time it's like okay i like red i like this grape this region this year yeah and then when you have a glass of Shiraz at your local pub which is poured sloppishly into your glass you're like hang on a minute I know this down here I'm refined to the point in my awareness of this is what how good this can be and this is how bad this is so it's the same with our health when you've gone well actually you've become focused on something for a long time for instance I know when I eat McDonald's or something like that the next day I wake up feeling hungover if you've never thought about that pattern you won't necessarily make the pattern yeah you won't be able to dial into it and it's like and it's the same with i had a conversation with a friend of mine who one of our speakers recently dr dominic nischwitz who's the world's leading biological dentist and i said to him how often do you get your hormones tested he goes oh you know like once every month or so so how about you i said well i do it quite frequently i said but i've got to the point now i know i know on the day of my test how high my testosterone is or if my estrogen is high and i can base that on you know how my libido is how i'm hunting in the world you know for instance a single man not hunting but kind of like you notice people around you more um when your testosterone is higher just as women when they're ovulating for instance they notice the opposite sex a lot more when they're ovulating i've become so dialed in to my hormone balance and having it tested i've now become so aware of it hyper aware of it and so i now know if i've had something for instance lack of sleep for two nights in a row i've been traveling i'm like i know my testosterone is lower right now and my estrogen is higher because i've become dialed into it and interestingly then you almost don't need to test it anymore because it's that awareness because i remember i tried the whoop band for six months for my sleep score was fascinated by it you got the app on the phone and after a while it was just the same data and you could feel how you were feeling and go well i didn't have a great night's sleep or i did like do you really need the expensive tech well if you've never driven a car at 30 miles an hour you'll never know what 30 miles an hour is like the moment you've done it once and when you've done it 100 times your gut then says this is a 30 miles an hour yeah you've got to you've got to measure it to know and it's the same on a day-by-day basis with us with eating mcdonald's or crappy processed foods versus the people are just doing every day and not even paying awareness to it they're just driving the car they're not even looking at the speedometer they just don't they have no awareness about it but the moment they start going i notice this they're going to start noticing it more and they're stopping them to come in tune to it and going actually yeah i feel like i'm 10 or 20 off the day or i know i'm just struggling to show up as a good partner today oh what could that have been oh actually last night i had a few beers for instance so i think we're the canaries in the mine yeah we've been focusing on our niche and others haven't that's all and they need to focus that self-awareness right if you have a meal and you feel crap after it maybe it doesn't agree with you whatever that is faster sometimes that takes a couple of days to show up for instance my brother suffers with my migraines like chronic migraines so 14 to 16 a month something like that and they're debilitating in bed level being sick migraine and for years i've always believed it to be histamine issues which same as me we have a double histamine gene mutation unfortunately um but for him it showed up 48 hours and it took him tracking his food for years 48 hours after having rapeseed oil or sunflower oil in any form in from any foods or anything for him to have a migraine so it always took two days to show up so he couldn't attribute that for years to figure out if it happened immediately oh i've had this what was in it i've got a migraine ouch but when it's delayed it's harder and i had the same with avocados in fact i the histamine in avocados is so high that i'd be in bed with a migraine the next day and it took me years to figure that out as well it's only because of my brother and his cedar thing that i started looking for the patterns for two days does he still have migraines now has he got rid of he's actually on a peptide specific peptide that actually helps migraine sufferers reduce it down to one day a month so it's actually significant i still think there's a histamine and a liver and a gut issue that needs working on but it's a question i do get all the time when i do lives though i do live q a try and help people and you know they'll be like i've got eczema or i've got this like what should i do and my first response is always like i don't know i can't tell you because it could be a different trigger for different people and it brings me back to i remember when i first started tonic as a business i got migraines not severe like that probably three or four a month noticeable that i'd have like maybe one a week these like days i'm just like i've got a migraine i can't function i don't get them anymore but for me what changed it was actually just taking a magnesium supplement regularly so i must have had most likely a magnesium deficiency that was driving it whereas obviously it's histamine and something totally different for you well the interesting thing is is magnesium was once thought to have around 400 interaction with 400 different enzymatic reactions in the body but now it's around about 1300 and um the way that the body relaxes from magnesium specifically and some of the enzymatic reactions it's related to actually is to do with histamine as well so it could still be the histamine and also helps with inflammation quite significantly so yeah the histamine causes is around for inflammation obviously so reducing it isn't always a good thing but when it's high from foods as well as so yeah so the magnesium could have been the thing that just triggered it for you interesting yeah but that's why it's so individual right okay so we talked a bit about you know what you eat and what your diet is but if we're talking health optimization what is like one powerhouse food people should be eating what's your go-to like nutrient dense well apparently the most nutrient dense food on the planet is liver which no one wants to eat because it tastes funky in fact i know some hardcore people that actually freeze it and then slice it off frozen have it as a lucky little lollipop in the morning i think that's extreme and jumping on the bandwagon um have you tried raw liver with maple syrup i wouldn't eat raw liver i'm sorry i just wouldn't eat raw liver have you tried it no no so i tried raw liver with maple syrup and funny enough because it's raw it doesn't have quite the same like texture and pungent taste when you cook it so i thought it was actually quite good but again it's that extreme thing of like who's actually going to slice up raw liver and just chow it down like i definitely don't do it regularly raw liver dude yeah don't want to eat that so come on and if it's not liver what is it so i don't think it's one thing i think it starts with gut health first and having the right enzymes to be able to break down those foods and that means also having the right stomach enough stomach acid to break down those foods in the first place so and i'm going to jump onto this food part i just want to say the precursor stress when we're stressed we eat through our salt so we need more salt salt sodium chloride hydrochloric acid stomach okay so if we are low in hydration status we're not drinking enough water with minerals in it our stomach acid won't be enough if we're stressed we're not going to have enough stomach acid which is why people's digestive systems start shutting down when they're stressed meaning you're not going to digest your food properly in the first place right so anyone that's living a stress life pretty much anyone in london should be having hcl betaine something like this to support the digestive system so that's the first thing so it doesn't matter how nutrient dense your foods are if you're not digesting it it's a waste it's just a waste of money and time so i would say first of all stressed hydrate more have some electrolytes things like lmnt in my opinion isn't the best brand out there there are some other good brands out there in the uk there's repower um and uh another brand i can't remember off the top of my head but they've got the right electrolytes and the right balance to help you for not only for energy mental clarity but also your digestion because of the sodium content in it okay interesting in terms of the foods i would say nutrient dense foods well the problem is with the plants the majority of them aren't on rotated soil so they're not rotated crops meaning that the the minerals and nutrients from the soil that should be there aren't so the plants look the same but they're not actually the same and they don't taste as good so you're not getting the same nutrients and then if your digestion isn't working properly you're definitely not getting the nutrients so what's the shortcut well okay i hate to say it nutrient dense foods typically are more meat-based they are i mean and there was actually a piece i read a few weeks ago about a guy that had the lower part of his digestive system cut out because of gut issues okay and he had a bag connected to the end of his upper intestine whenever he ate plants they came out undigested whenever he ate meat it was pretty much all digested and the body assimilated it almost nothing came out so by going completely carnivore his body was assimilating the nutrients from all the meat he was eating showing that the body in the in the first part of the digestive process took the nutrients pretty quickly but the plants not so on the assumption your digestion isn't working fully the thing to do would be eat more meat more meat good meat and i'm not just talking the crappy process nasty packet stuff but people say meat's harder to digest than plants for some people yes depends on are they stressed do they have a genetic component to it what does their microbiome look like for some people they eat meat for instance the next partner of mine she's like i can't eat meat because it's just so heavy on me yeah a lot of people say okay well when you look at her microbiome is it balanced no it's not is she stressed yes she is she's not breaking down that food properly because of various reasons doesn't mean that everyone's like that i understand also there's the percentage of people that actually thrive on a plant-based diet i actually thrive on it and i'm not talking ethical for a minute here like forget the ethical component i understand about animal cruelty i get it but my my goal here is talking about health you assimilate meat better majority of people assimilate meat better and the nutrient profile is higher and it's more dense whereas the plants are often not rotated and devoid devoid in most of the nutrients that we would like to get from them and an easy way for this was actually i was in mordives um about six weeks ago a speaking event on an island called soniva island and everything was grown on the island and they said do you want the salad and i'm like no it's crunchy water and they said just have the salad it's like okay so i had the salad i was like holy crap this lettuce this cucumber these tomatoes taste like nothing i've ever had before like it's really so significantly different like this tastes like proper salad yeah it's like whereas here it's not so why are you eating it like it's a different thing like a classic iceberg lettuce versus you know yeah something grown locally and in natural soil so i don't want to be the guy that says eat meat meat meat meat meat i'm talking about eating for nutrients and i think if you're growing your own plants win but that's not a reality for everyone or if you can go to the local farmer yeah that can't afford to get on organic certified but you know ethically he is great move you know and does the food taste like food does the carrot taste like a proper carrot or does it just look like a carrot and this is why most people end up with 50 percent of people end up with cancers because they're not getting the nutrients they're having too many pesticides and you know their gut's not working properly it's actually a very simple equation it sounds quite depressing when i say it like that to be honest well yeah it is and it's hard to have these conversations but we have to have them because ultimately if we're aware of it then we can do something about it and i think you know that's probably the biggest miss i think for people is we all talk about ultra processed foods and additives and chemicals and this and that but it's the combined fact of yeah you're putting a heavier stress load on your body with all those additives and chemicals that they have to deal with but at the same time the more you eat ultra processed the less nutrients you're actually eating because ultra processed food is nutrient void and it's that lack of nutrition that then means your body can't deal with it as well so you're kind of hitting it at both scale both ends of the spectrum and messing it up and that's why it's getting worse and worse and worse That's what it is.