Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 744: Dr. Molly Maloof on the Health Impact of Makeup & Skin Care Products, the Best Diet to Rebalance Hormones & Promote Fat Loss, Strategies for Middle Aged Female Athletes & MORE
Episode Date: April 7, 2018Organifi Quah! In this episode of Quah, sponsored by Organifi (organifi.com, code "mindpump" for 20% off), Sal, Adam & Justin are joined by Dr. Molly Maloof to answer Pump Head questions about if she ...trusts normative data on routine blood tests, the kind of diet she would recommend for a woman suffering from PCOS to rebalance hormones, promote fat loss, etc, makeup & skin care products impact on health and strategies for the middle aged female athlete, i.e. how to manage/balance hormones, adrenal function, thyroid, etc with high levels of physical activity. Special Guest, Dr. Molly Maloof! She shares updates with her life since her last visit. (3:34) Take Your Pills Documentary and going off Adderall. (5:30) Developed insulin resistance after going off pills. (9:57) The importance of glucose monitoring and strength training (16:03) Fasting and your relationship with food (18:30) Glucose Monitoring Challenge at her office (24:40) Ketogenic diet and her response and if it’s right for everyone (27:30) Quah question #1 – Do you trust normative data on routine blood tests? (36:16) Quah question #2 – What kind of diet she would recommend for a woman suffering from PCOS to rebalance hormones, promote fat loss, etc.? (44:09) Quah question #3 – Makeup & skin care products in relation to impact on health. (54:24) Quah question #4 - Strategies for the middle aged female athlete? (I.E.) How to manage/balance hormones, adrenal function, thyroid, etc. with high levels of physical activity? (1:02:36) Related Links/Products Mentioned: DexaFit: DEXA Scans & Body Fat Testing Take Your Pills | Netflix Official Site Prescription stimulants in individuals with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: misuse, cognitive impact, and adverse effects Insulin and Insulin Resistance Oral Glucose Tolerance Test for Gestational & Type 2 Diabetes Potential Adverse Effects of Amphetamine Treatment on Brain and Behavior: A Review Adherence to hunger training using blood glucose monitoring: a feasibility study Viome | Gut Microbiome and Wellness Low Cholesterol is Associated with Mortality from Cardiovascular Diseases: A Dynamic Cohort Study in Korean Adults Organifi **Use the code “mindpump” for 20% off** Richard D. Lee, MD - Family Medicine in Palo Alto CA LabCorp | The World's Leading Health Care Diagnostics Company Lifepoint Informatics - EMR Integration & health information exchange The effects of a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet on the polycystic ovary syndrome: A pilot study DUTCH Test – Advanced Hormone Testing Psychobehavioral Effects of Hormonal Contraceptive Use The influence of contraception, abortion, and natural family planning on divorce rates as found in the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth Women attracted to masculine men only during ovulation: Study Women and Autoimmune Diseases EWG | Environmental Working Group LC-MS: a powerful tool in workplace drug testing Deer Antler Velvet—What Is It, How Does It Work? Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Dr. Molly Maloof (@drmolly.co) Instagram Molly Maloof Dominic D'Agostino (@DominicDAgosti2) Twitter Mark Sisson (@marksissonprimal) Instagram Lee Tilghman (@leefromamerica) Instagram James Maskell (@mrjamesmaskell) Instagram Also check out Thrive Market! Thrive Market makes purchasing organic, non-GMO affordable. With prices up to 50% off retail, Thrive Market blows away most conventional, non-organic foods. PLUS, they offer a NO RISK way to get started which includes: 1. One FREE month’s membership 2. $20 Off your first three purchases of $49 or more (That’s $60 off the total!) 3. Free shipping on orders of $49 or more How can you go wrong with this offer? To take advantage of this offer go to www.thrivemarket.com/mindpump You insure your car but do you insure YOU? If you don’t, and you are the primary breadwinner, you will likely leave your loved ones facing hardship and struggle if you die (harsh reality). Perhaps you think life insurance is expensive, but if you are fit and healthy, you can qualify for approved rates that are truly inexpensive and affordable. To find out if you qualify for the best rates in the industry, go get a quote at www.HealthIQ.com/mindpump Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, MAPS HIIT, an expertly programmed and phased High Intensity Interval Training program designed to maximize fat burn and improve conditioning. Get it at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Get Organifi, certified organic greens, protein, probiotics, etc at www.organifi.com Use the code “mindpump” for 20% off. Go to foursigmatic.com/mindpump and use the discount code “mindpump” for 15% off of your first order of health & energy boosting mushroom products. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Also includes 20% if you purchase! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Have questions for Mind Pump? 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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND That's for you ladies. Special guests. We brought reinforcements. This was really awkward for Justin.
It had a really, I didn't know where to go with this.
We have Dr. Molly Maloof with us doing our qua episode.
Now for the first 32 minutes,
we do our normal introductory conversation.
First we talk about the take your pills, documentary.
Apparently this is a new documentary on Netflix.
We all need to watch.
We're about at a roll.
Dr. Molly talks about getting off at a roll. That's a fun Netflix. We all need to watch. We're about Adderall. Dr. Molly talks about getting off Adderall.
That's a fun one.
We talk about insulin resistance,
fasting and bodybuilding.
Adam adds some insight there.
Glucose monitors and how they reveal true hunger.
That was a great tip that you gave us there, Dr. Molly.
Genetic variances and diet.
And we talked about cholesterol and hormones.
Then we get into the questions.
The first question was, do we trust normative data on routine blood tests?
I guess the question basically is, do we think the ranges that we're given by labs should
be trusted?
Dr. Mollie told us that those organizations are huge bureaucracies and they're not very
consistent mind-blown.
Damn the man. those organizations are huge bureaucracies and they're not very consistent, mind blown.
Damn the man.
The next question, what kind of diet will we recommend
for a woman who is suffering from polycystic ovarian syndrome
in order to rebalance her hormones and promote fat loss,
et cetera, great conversation in that topic.
The next question was, what about makeup and skincare
and its relation to health?
Dr. Molly talks about, in Dr. Andrew Sop,
disruptors, excuse me, that are quite common
in these types of products and what they can do
to your body.
So I'm finding those Kardashians.
I know what mask care adjustments using now.
Yeah.
And the final question, it's a nice blue.
What strategies do we have for a middle aged female athlete
on how to manage and balance for hormones or adrenal function thyroid, etc.
With her high levels of physical activity. We actually had a slight
I don't say I wouldn't say disagreement, but it was a great discussion on that part of the episode. Get on the juice
Also this month, we are giving away the no BS 6 pack formula for
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How much Adam?
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So find all those programs including the bundles with the free no BS six pack formula at mindpumpmedia.com
I'm excited to have you on as a guest of a
Qua episode a Q&A
We do not do this with with our guests. Yeah, we have we ever done a quaw with the guests
We've done it with one once one other time. We did it with Mike Mike Matthews
That's who's probably the only other guy that we would trust to do that with. That's right. We could pull it off.
A lot of trust we have in here.
Cool.
We'll see. We'll see how this goes.
Yeah, I got faith in you.
So anyway, what's how you've been doing?
We haven't seen you for like a couple months.
I got a text from you the other day about.
Wait, were we recording earlier?
We are now.
Well, don't worry.
The first part of all of that will put on the floor.
Nobody will be here.
That'll do his magic.
I really don't want my friends' name on the podcast.
Nobody will hear what you said.
We won't incriminate you.
Okay, okay, okay.
We just started the podcast.
Cause people know him.
Yeah, that's an animal.
That's for the pay foresight.
Okay, okay.
We'll listen to all that behind the scenes.
No, how you been, what you been up to?
You were telling me you got your resting metabolic rate
tested all of that?
Oh God, all right, so. How did you get that tested? What did telling me you got your resting metabolic rate tested all of that? All right, so.
How did you get that tested?
What did they do?
There's a company called DexAfit
and I had done my VO2 max at a fitness conference
last year and I had a really good VO2 max
because I had two people cheering me on.
And then this time the guys like,
yeah, I'm just gonna tell you what to do
and then you're gonna just run as hard as you can
and I'm like, wait, you're not gonna like cheer me on,
you're not gonna like push me.
And he goes, no, I'm like, well, can you please do that? Cause I'm not gonna run as hard unless you can. And I'm like, wait, you're not going to like cheer me on, you're not going to like push me. And he goes, no, I'm like, well, can you please do that? Because
I'm not going to run as hard unless you have, unless you tell me that I can do more.
And frankly, he didn't push me hard enough. And I didn't do as good. And so I was really
sad about that. Like, I was in the excellent range, but I wasn't like on the border about
standing like I was last year. And I think I could have gone harder. And then my last time I tried to do my RMR,
they said it didn't work.
So I don't know if it was because it was too low,
but this time it was really quite low.
And I've always wondered about that.
And I guess like-
So you feel like you have a slow metabolism?
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's okay.
Like we're gonna have a real talk now, everyone.
About two years ago, I went off of a very common
stimulant medication for ADHD called Adderall.
And you know what, like I'm actually okay talking
about this now because of that documentary
that's out called Take Your Pills.
I haven't seen it yet.
I've heard about that.
And you guys have to watch this because like,
the reality is that a lot of doctors
and a lot of medical students take drugs
and they take them because they die of noose each other.
I mean college students.
I didn't actually have a prescription in college, but occasionally, you know, you would,
my roommate had them.
So, and they talk about all about this in this documentary.
But the point is that like a lot of people from the beginning of the use of stimulants
and, and, uh, and fedamines as medicine in America.
People took them, actually, the story behind Adderall is really interesting because the doctor
who developed the drug actually named it after his wife because he thought that it was
a really nice experience, gave him a sensation of higher metabolism, higher well-being,
higher athletic performance, and so he named it after his wife.
Weren't endphetamines originally prescribed?
I think if I'm not mistaken, I've seen old ads from the 1960s or something like that,
or maybe I'm wrong, but where they would actually advertise methamphetamines to housewives.
Yeah, that's the point.
So I do more housework.
She can do more housework. She can play better tennis, you know,
like she'll be happier, she'll lose weight.
Are you bored at home by yourself?
Take, take a meth, it'll help you out.
Well, so now, you know, so it took me about a year
to taper and then, and then people always ask me this,
like how long is it gonna take me to get off this?
And I'm like, honestly, it might take you a year
because if you try to go cold turkey off of Adderall, you're going to be going through serious dopamine withdrawal.
And that's like really not a fun experience.
What's dopamine withdrawal like?
We'll talk to anybody who's used a lot of cocaine. Ask them how it feels. You know, like
it's this sensation that something's missing in your life. The sensation that like, you
don't have motivation to do the things that you want to do. For me, I felt very exposed
and vulnerable. When you take stimulants, you want to do. For me, I felt very exposed and vulnerable.
When you take stimulants, you feel very unstoppable.
And the funny thing is that a lot of the studies
are showing that it doesn't necessarily
improve performance in school.
It just gives you the impression that you're smarter,
so that you actually try harder.
So I mean, some people it does help, but.
Well, see that again.
That's very interesting.
That's fascinating.
That's like marijuana when I think I'm creative.
Yeah.
And then you look at it like you're looking at it.
Although I do believe that marijuana makes people more creative because I think it, because
the cannabinoid systems, the cannabinoid system is kind of like the brain circuit breaker.
So if you're adjusting activity on a global scale in your brain, you might actually find
more creative connections.
That's my own personal experience.
Well they actually did test it with...
Oh, I'm gonna go with that.
They did test cannabis, and there's a particular test
where I can't remember what it's called.
There's a name for it where if they give you a word,
you have to name a bunch of words that are associated with it,
and it's supposed to be a classic test of creativity,
and cannabis improves that.
Yeah.
But back to Adderall, they've done cognitive,
like, okay, does this actually improve cognition
and studies say, don't, it doesn't.
But it gives you the impression that you love your job.
And if you hate your job,
and you hate what you're studying in school,
and a drug gives you the sensation
that you actually enjoy it,
and you have a sense of urgency,
and agency to do the work, then you're gonna do it,
and then you're gonna fall in love with your job.
So, like, to me, I think actually it is a synthetic stressor
that gets your body to move towards something
that you typically wouldn't wanna do.
So, when did you go off that completely?
It took you a year, you said it there.
So, I went off completely about two years ago
at a meditation retreat.
And I definitely wouldn't recommend doing
like the full end cult turkey with coffee at the same time,
but they didn't have coffee at the retreat.
Oh, sorry, the talk at all.
No, there was definitely talking,
but I cried a lot.
That's so.
Yeah.
I came back and I was like,
okay, this is me, my new life now.
And I was terrified that I wouldn't make as much money.
I was afraid that I wouldn't have as many jobs,
and I was afraid that I wouldn't do well
and everything and the total opposite happened.
I actually made more money that year.
I also, my relationships improved.
I felt like I had more empathy,
but I definitely put on some weight,
like I gained about eight pounds,
and I think that was actually partially responsible
for the inflomer resistance that I developed
because now get this.
Now this is something I did a bunch of research in.
I literally had to like read all the papers
on this to figure it out.
But you know, we give anti-psychotic drugs to people
who have too much dopamine and it lowers their dopamine.
And what happens to these people, they get really fat, right?
So what happens if you're taking a drug
that gives you a lot of dopamine and they go off of it?
It's almost like you're getting the anti-psychotic experience now, right?
Interesting.
So I think it played a role in insulin resistance that I developed.
And I've read through forums on all sorts of websites that a lot of people have to turn
to ketogenic diets to actually get their body back on track and through exercise because
your metabolism is shot.
Also because, if I didn't mean directly, it affects the hypothalamus. So it exercise because your metabolism is shot. Also because if I
mean directly affects the hypothalamus, so it directly affects your metabolism.
Yeah, that's the part of the brain that controls your weight. The ventramedial part of your
hypothalamus. Yeah, I was about to say that. Just kidding.
So, but the other thing too is it's also to add on top of that, it's also an appetite
suppressant. So you might find yourself wanting to eat more. And then on top of that, it's also an appetite suppressant. So you might find yourself wanting to eat more.
And then on top of it, if you have low dopamine,
you might feel flat or down.
And then you use food like coffee.
I used to get really, really upset with coffee after this
because I was just like, I needed something.
Right, so that's, so you did that two years ago.
So now you feel like your metabolism slow as a result of
the whole process.
I do think it's slow.
I mean, I feel like I have a sluggish thyroid too,
which I've known for a while,
but maybe that was related to being on speed
for so many years.
I mean, I was on it for, since medical school,
when a doctor diagnosed me on the rotation
I was on with her.
She was like, you know you have ADD, right?
And I was like, well, yeah, duh.
I mean, I was like, but I mean,
what do you think I should do for it?
Go take stimulus and she's like, well, I take them
and I think they really help. And I was like, okay, you think I should do for it? Go take stimulants and she's like, well, I take them and I think they really help.
And I was like, okay, well, I'll try.
And secretly I was like, yes.
Of course.
You know what, so I went as an adult,
I went to a doctor and she had this poster on the wall
and it was like, do you feel this,
this that you may have adult ADD?
And I'm reading it and I'm like,
well, okay, yes, on all those things.
I know I probably have ADD, which by the way,
people with ADD also have the ability to hyper focus.
So a lot of people don't know that.
Yeah, no, I can totally hyper focus,
but I can't be around a bunch of people while I do it.
Right, right.
So I asked her, she had me take this quiz, and then she wrote me
a prescription for ADD medication. I didn't get the cool stuff though. They prescribed
stratera, I think it was called, which made me feel weird and loopy. So I never took it
again. And I'm happy then to give me Adderock. I tried Ritalin and made me get me headaches.
And frankly, a lot of the reason why I was happy to go off of it is because I just felt
like, okay, here I am trying to be a person promoting optimizing health.
How hypocritical am I that I'm on speed?
Let's get real.
This is bullshit.
And so I had to come to juice this moment in my life where I was like, I got to get off
of this.
And you know, like, the whole metabolic effects of not being on speed do suck.
I do feel like I have to work harder,
and I feel like I need to work out more to have the same experience.
Even just to maintain where I'm at right now, which is fine,
I do feel like I need to work out more than most people do.
Well, we've talked quite a bit off-air,
and the goal is going to be, and we're going to help you.
Oh, yeah. I'm so excited about this.
I'm going to, after we're done with the podcast,
I'm going to take you through an assessment, so I going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, after we're done with the podcast, I'm going to take you through an
assessment so I can give you better recommendations in terms of
exercises and stuff, but in our experience, I mean, you want to speed
up the metabolism, which, in the context of modern lifestyle, is what,
I think most people will probably benefit from because it's just so much food
around us and we're just not active in our daily lives, is, you know,
focus on getting you stronger,
which is number one.
Like if we can give you some good strength and build,
you don't have to build a ton of muscle either.
Just getting stronger tends to get the metabolic rate
to burn more calories makes you utilize insulin better
and all those other things.
So that'll be the goal.
What if your workouts been up until now?
I definitely did a lot of bodybuilding last summer
when I was dating a guy who was like super, super fit.
Yeah, but you over did it, didn't you go crazy?
I do feel like doing his regimen
was probably not the right way to go into it.
But yeah, because I felt,
I really did feel like I was high cortisol.
Like I felt like it was giving me,
it was kind of intuitive.
I was like, I was like, you know, Travis,
I don't really feel like I'm getting the results
that I should be getting.
And I feel like it's because my cortisol is so high.
And I think this is kind of maladaptive.
But I was also eating fairly low carb at the time.
So I'm wondering also if I wasn't feeding myself enough.
You know, it's really hard to say, but.
As insulin inversely related with cortisol,
like if insulin goes up, does cortisol go down
or does that matter?
So typically what happens is cortisol
makes insulin resistant.
So the insulin that you release your body cells
are resistant to it.
So you need more.
So it's a vicious cycle of insulin resistance.
Is this cause cortisol makes your liver
just release a lot of sugar?
Is that part of it?
And it makes your cells resistant
to the sugar that it releases.
It's just directly.
Oh wow, I did not know that.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
How common do you find that with your clients and patients?
Oh my God.
Oh my God, insulin resistance is everywhere.
And the thing is, is that I think it's highly, highly underdiagnosed because we don't
do oral glucose tolerance tests.
And we don't do, like, nobody goes to the doctor and does a two hour glucose challenge
with insulin measured at one hour and two hours.
Nobody does that anymore.
That's actually where we have a problem because there's 80 million people with pre-diabetes
in this country and most of them, like only 11% of them know they have it.
That's CDC statistics.
Part of the reason is the way you diagnose pre-diabetes is there's three ways.
You can use heboglomerate one C,
which doesn't catch everyone.
You can use fastened glucose,
which doesn't catch everyone,
because that only tells you about your fasting levels,
which is really your hepatic insulin resistance.
And then your muscle insulin resistance,
you catch through the glucose challenge test.
So one can be off in the other one now.
So one of that measures your liver,
how your liver responds, the other one is your muscle of that measures your liver, how your liver responds,
the other one is your muscle, that response.
I did not know that.
And there's isolated forms of both, right?
And then you can find them together,
but not everybody has them together.
What do you find most common with the people
that like let's say for example in liver,
they struggle there?
Is there a type of person?
Racerol fat, man, alcohol.
Like people who have fatty liver and fatty,
my visceral fat levels are tiny.
I think it's probably because I'm fairly,
my fitness is pretty much okay.
But my visceral fat, it's like point 02
or something super low.
So that's great, so that's not my issue.
But, you know, like, this is where, again,
glucose monitoring comes in, because if
you're not looking at your response to meals, you don't know how your muscles are responding
to the food. You don't know if they're easily taking them up. Like, I exercise like a really
hard workout yesterday morning, a bunch of high intensity stuff, and I had super low
blood sugar all day long because of that effect on my muscle. That's part of the reason why it's so good to exercise.
By the way, we're probably gonna recommend
that you don't do super high intensity workouts,
but we're not.
I'm guessing.
Yeah, because what we wanna do is send a signal
to your body to build muscle.
We're not trying to get you to burn a shit ton of calories
while you're working out,
because that actually can cause the body to start to adapt
in a way where it becomes really efficient calories. So we see this this a lot with like we'll get clients to do a lot of running or do all they do is
hit style workouts and their metabolism's just adapt, adapt, adapt. And then we have these, I had
a hundred and I had a young lady, 120 pound X figure competitor or bikini competitor who was doing
an hour and a half of working out every day and was cum anything over 1200 calories you gain weight.
That's how much from a tablet I'm adapted.
Wow.
So we had to reverse out of that.
Have relief weights took us a year before I could get her to, you know, be able to consume
closer to 2000 calories with that type of activity.
That to me is my dream.
Like to be able to easily consume 2000 calories.
What you, what you should be able to do.
It's not like you're a four foot nine, little 80 pound girl.
I mean, you have enough size and muscle density
that you should be able to burn that much.
Totally. And I love eating.
So let's get real.
And I love eating vegetables.
Like I eat most, I mean, I fucking love vegetables.
I've got passionate efforts.
I'm sorry for causing.
I'm trying to work on that.
But for real, vegetables are like the day. I'm sorry for causing. I'm trying to work on that. Broccoli, yeah.
No, but for real, vegetables are like the key to optimal health
along with exercise, just because they feed your microbiome.
And if your microbiome is healthy, then you'll live long time.
But I guess kind of going back to the adder all thing, like when you're not eating, your
metabolism is like tanked, you know, because you're just not eating.
You're eating like maybe one, maybe one and two meals a day. And that's another thing that we, you know, because you're just not eating. You're eating like maybe one, maybe one and two meals a day.
And that's another thing that we, you know,
there's this big fasting obsession right now.
And like, I think I'm gonna get a lot of questions
from this discussion, which is like,
okay, so what about fasting, right?
Like, how do you fit into fasting?
This is my question for you guys,
until like a bodybuilding regimen,
because we know that it's good for apoptosis.
We know that it's good for your cellular health
long jeopardy.
So like, how does this work in your world?
I would not recommend fasting to somebody
who I'm trying to get their metabolism to amp up.
So if I get it, if I get it,
I do recommend fasting to a bodybuilder,
so that was one of the things I used to do
when I was one of the first coaches that I ever knew
that in a middle of a prep would make all my athletes fast.
Wow.
But they're all overfed, they're all, you know,
right, yes. See, you know, right.
You know, what was your goal there just to shed quickly?
Well, you know, that's part of me just being a butt head too.
Like, I just want to show them that, like, listen, this is something that you can do,
because the myth out there is that they're going to do that and muscle is going to fall
off.
Right.
You know, I mean, I remember what it felt like to be that kid too, who's trying to build
muscle and then also, you see the scale go down and then right away, you think, oh,
God, it was a pound of muscle that came off of me.
But that's not what's happening.
So I think I did it originally for just to show people like, listen, you can do this
and you can be okay because I found that in the competitive world, a lot of these athletes
had a really poor relationship with food.
And so I was trying to break that.
So for me, it was more about a relationship and the connection that you had with food.
That you were so,
because I mean, we can talk all day
about all the different health benefits to fasting,
but in my personal experience,
one of the most beneficial things that clients
and mine have learned from fasting,
is just the relationship with food is really great.
It's realizing that holy shit,
you could go two days and not eat food,
and your body is just fine.
That's the reason why fasting is in like every major spiritual religious practice.
Because of that, and that's why I practice fasting every month.
I do a 72 hour fast and I get the physical benefits from it and I notice those, but that's
not why, that's not what motivates me to do it.
It's that whole psychological aspect.
I feel like it's a reset. My palate gets reset.
I break the chains of food.
And what I mean by that is the emotional connections
or when I get cravings which are not real hunger
and all those different things.
Totally.
But if I get a client who has a,
what we would call a damaged metabolism,
and I hate using that term because it's not
that their metabolism's are damaged.
They're doing exactly what they're supposed
to eat. It's a tie.
Yeah.
But these are people who, okay, I'm not eating a lot of calories,
I'm doing a lot of activity.
Why is my body fat still high?
Why am I able to shed body weight?
And so those are the people I don't have them fast.
We don't fast at all.
Now, if they do fast, we'll do it for health
and it's very infrequent.
So the way I would incorporate it,
if you're looking for the health benefits of fasting, is not to do the intermittent daily fasting,
but rather to do maybe a 24 hour or 48 hour fast once, maybe a month or once every other month
for all those other benefits. So that's actually one of my goals anyway, it's just to do like two days
a month. That's it. So that's it. That would be the way to do it. With bodybuilders, I always did it, or competitors,
I always did it with the transition from,
in a surplus to going to deficits.
So let's say I just, you know, I'm coaching you
and you're getting ready for a show,
and I just gave you a surplus of, you know,
three days in a row of 2,000 calories,
which is a lot for you, you know, for those three days,
then on the fourth day, we're fasting, you know,
no food for the entire day, you know,
and I'd bring down the intensity in their training.
And for me, it was about breaking again,
that relationship.
Obviously, it's not advantageous for a competitor,
a bodybuilder to be intermittent fasting almost every day
or fasting every single week.
I just did it when I'd be transitioning
and more so to teach the lesser.
Well, there's also evidence to suggest that
when you have regular and consistent feedings of protein,
you actually become desensitized to it in the sense that your body uses it little less efficiently,
more of it is turned into energy.
And so for bodybuilders who are consuming all this protein, all this food, a fast, and
then they go back to eating the protein, it's like, boom, they get this boost from it.
And I notice that every time. So every time I fast, I notice when I,
it's like three days into my refeed or whatever,
where I notice like this, almost like this anabolic effect.
Well, I love what you guys are saying
because really, it kind of goes back to this idea
of what really health is all about,
which is adapting and self-managing
in the face of whatever life like hands us.
And, you know, I think for a lot of people in America,
if we had a mass famine, for, for you know like people would just lose it like this country would
not survive like we're asking a lot of countries people survive and they live
through like serious famines and like guess kids like yes there are children who
die but I do feel like we are very fragile country when it comes to food because
we're so over fed oh you know what I make this I make this point all the time and people will debate me
and then I win this debate every single time.
Most people in Western civilized societies
have never felt real hunger.
True.
They've never gone longer than 12 hours without food ever
and their entire lives.
So everything that they think hunger is,
is actually not hunger, but rather cravings
or emotional connection or set and setting. So when they say things is, is actually not hunger, but rather cravings or emotional connection
or set and setting.
So when they say things like,
I'm starving, I get starving by lunchtime.
You're actually not hungry.
You know it's time to eat.
You may be craving something.
I mean, real hunger is this.
If you're truly hungry, you'll eat anything.
When you're craving something,
it's one of these where you'll tell your friend,
like, I'm starving, they'll be like,
oh cool, let's go get Mexican.
I'm not in the mood for Mexican. I had that yesterday.
Well, let's get pizza. I'm not in the mood for pizza.
You're not actually hungry. Yeah. You just have craving.
And this is actually where, again, I love wearing a glucose monitor,
because I can see if I'm actually a low blood sugar,
I can see if I'm like in the range where I should legitimately feel hunger.
And there's two studies that I've been using to guide the programming of this
app around biofeedback assist,
like basically assisting people who have never felt hunger,
using a blood sugar monitor to show them
that your blood sugar isn't low enough to feel hunger.
Oh, that's brilliant.
Right?
No, I need to eat my blood sugar metrics.
So most people are eating and their blood sugar is like 100,
and I'm like, sorry, you're good to go.
You can actually last a lot longer than that.
Wow, I didn't even think about being able to use
the tool like that.
You imagine that?
What a great way to try.
Just ride in your plan.
I can't wait till everybody can have that.
I know, me too.
How long do you think it's going to be
till we can all probably, I mean, the goal is like,
the goal is the first quarter of next year.
Oh, wow.
And you're consulting with these companies?
Yeah, and they're two days a week.
Wow.
So we get one too, right?
Yeah, come on. Yeah.
You can have us.
Come on.
Let's see who has the best insulin levels.
OK, so I just got a case of these
glucose tolerance test sugar solutions.
And I am so afraid to consume one of these,
because like, what way, what is this?
It's the test that you get at the doctor
if you're going to see if you actually
have diabetes or not.
And I know my fasting glucose is good,
and I know that my blood sugar looks good
because I know what I feed myself,
but I've never done an actual glucose challenge.
And so I'm afraid to see what happens.
Is it pure dextrose or?
It's yeah.
How does it work?
Explain how it works.
So you start the timer and you drink this stuff
and actually you drink this thing and then you
like five minutes.
It's just pure sugar water.
Pure sugar water.
75 gram, hit of sugar.
Oh wow, there's a lot.
Yeah, and like what you typically do is you wait two hours
but you can measure it one hours and two hours
or you can measure every 30 minutes.
If you want to get an even more effective assessment
of like your peak.
But like we have a glucose monitor
so we can just find out when the peak is.
And this is something that's missing
from a typical glucose tolerance test,
is if you're at a lab and they give you this sugar water
and they only test you at one hour and two hours,
what if you peaked in the mid in between that, right?
So if you missed the peak, you don't even actually know
if you actually had an abnormal blood sugar.
So I'm basically gonna try to get
everybody in the office to do this.
I don't know if anyone's gonna do it, but like,
but importantly, you have to be eating carbs
before you take this test for it to be fully accurate.
Why, why, why if I could say I go into a keto,
is it just because I become hypersensitive?
You become physiologically insulin resistant.
It's like it'll naturally happen
if you eat just full ketogenic. This is like all over, I mean, this is like pretty well established stuff.
But, um, so like-
Wait, what do you mean by that? Explain that because that sounds fascinating.
So your your body becomes, um, your brain is like doing everything you can to get glucose
into it, right? So your, your, your peripheral tissues are saying we're not going to let
glucose in because we want to shun to tour brain.
Right.
So the test will show that you have insulin resistance when you go?
So yeah, so like I did the biome test and it's and it said that I had insulin resistance
and I was like because they have a glucose challenge and I was like but I was eating less
than 50 grams of carbs.
Like shouldn't you guys tell me to eat 150 grams of carbs every three day for like three
days before I do this because that's generally what they say you should do to get back
to because frankly,
since being on keto, I am super insulin sensitive.
Like, my blood sugars are crazy low right now.
So like, there is a benefit to ketogenesis
by like really resensitizing yourself in the long term,
but during that period of time,
your body is responding like you don't have sugar
and you need to make sure your brain is fed.
Wow, that's so fascinating. Now, because of that, your body is responding like you don't have sugar and you need to make sure your brain is fed. Wow, that's so fascinating.
Now, because of that, now do you encourage people to go weave in and out of like a ketogenic
diet and grow up?
I mean, like, I, so I have slightly higher cholesterol if I do keto and I have, I just
checked my cholesterol, it's above 200 right now.
Yeah, it cares though, right?
If it's dietary, because you're obviously eating higher.
Everybody says that like
you shouldn't care, but like I just feel like I've spent enough
time with both the high carb in the low carb worlds to know
that both sides have truth to them. And I'm just not I'm just
not convinced that like saturated fat is good for everybody.
I'm glad you said that because it makes me feel better about
the experience I had when I went keto was and it was just me looking at I didn't even test my cholesterol.
I just thought this can't be ideal for me if I wasn't eating anywhere near life.
This all of a sudden I'm consuming all this fat.
It went over 50% of my diet ends up being butters and oils.
Yeah.
I just felt really not great by the end of the month.
You know, for like second week I felt pretty great. But then by the end of the month. Like second week, I felt pretty great.
But then by the end of the month, I was just like,
this is so not sustainable for me.
I do not feel well.
Did you also, well, that's a point in one.
Well, let's get real.
I have PPA, AR, Gamma, Genetic Defect.
I have an FTO defect, and I have APO E4.
Oh my God.
You need a SRP21.
I have a C3PO.
I have a C3PO.
I basically, I can't have a lot of such a thing.
People fat.
Like my genetics are telling me you cannot live on such a thing.
Those are polymorphisms that were some people just, and this is, again, this goes back
to each, when you look at individual people, they're very, very different.
Generally we can make general, you know, we could say generally, you generally, lower carbs may be better, ketogenic
may be better, but when you look at the individual, I'm sorry, but some people, there are some
people that are healthiest vegan.
There are people who eat that.
Straight up.
Just straight up.
So, it's very, very individual and you're talking about specific genes that we've now,
or variances that we've now identified that make it a higher likelihood
that you're not gonna do well with a lot of saturated fat.
But there's so much we don't know yet.
And so I think you get at the end of the day,
if you feel like shit, probably,
because I had people message me,
because we all went keto a while ago as an experiment.
And it's how I typically eat, not all the time,
but most of the time, because I feel best on it.
And I'd get messages from people and they'd be like,
oh, you know, I've been keto now for three months
and I still feel terrible and my digestion's bad
and how long does it take?
Okay, so that's not anything, right?
Yeah.
Like what about the gut health, right?
Like you cannot eat the level.
I mean, right now I checked my car ride tray
and take the last few days.
And I'm eating at least twice as many vegetables.
Now that I'm off keto,
but I'm still around like 50 grams of carbs, you know,
net carbs.
So like, am I in ketosis?
I don't feel like I'm in ketosis,
but I'm eating low carb,
but like I need a lot of vegetables
to keep my gut healthy.
That's how I, so I,
I'll eat very, very low,
star-cheek carbohydrates or low sugars and stuff like that,
but I do eat a lot of vegetables.
So very large servings of everything, broccoli, leafy greens.
I like to cook them because I can eat more when I cook them.
I eat very, very similar.
But yeah, I mean, those differences are, here's the thing I want to ask you about cholesterol.
Did you test to see, because I know you can have high cholesterol, but then you...
And of our lipid proviles.
Yeah, check your...
When I did, well, so I need to check it again,
because I had my in-checked in when I was eating
higher carbon in December, and my lip,
my lipoproteins improved.
But when I did check them after Keto last summer,
they had gone way up.
So the bad, even the bad forms of the bad ones went up last summer.
So that's what got me thinking, maybe it's not.
And not everybody happens to, it just happened to me.
So that's when I started really looking back into my genetics
and just like piling through all the studies that I've done.
And I'm like, oh yeah, it basically says,
this is what's gonna happen if I do this.
So, and it's not that you can't do it.
People can do keto with higher monoinsaturated fats
in omega-3s, but it's
just a lot harder and you're eating a lot of oil. And so I don't know about you, but it's
pretty gross. Like I felt grossed out and I was just like, I can't eat this much oil.
All of your life. Dr. Dom Diagostino, same thing as you. So he dramatically reduced the saturated
fat and then he increased the amount of other types of fat. I've seen what he eats.
All the oil, sardines, you know, that kind of of stuff. I mean like he does it. He makes it work. Yeah
No, it's just like the thing is you end up just eating like protein and green vegetables and so in like nuts and that's just a boring
Yeah, yeah, no I'm with you because at the end of look we all the three of us were personal trainers for a long time and so our
Experience tells us that we because a lot of times we'll
have scientists or doctors on the show and they'll tell us like, this is what's best, this is what
the study show. And we'll be thinking because of our experience, we'll be like, well that's nice,
but no one's going to do it. Sustainable. Yeah, no one's going to do it. So it actually
doesn't matter. So what you're saying doesn't matter because no one's going to follow.
I like the idea of doing it for like a month here and there. Like Mark Cissisand,
is that how you say his name? Cissism. Yeah. He says, you know, his whole story is now,
just do it twice a year or something like that.
And I think for a lot of people who are insulin resistant,
which is like third of the country,
more than that maybe.
Yeah, I think it's a really good reset.
I think for a lot of people,
we're so stuck on the insulin cycle and the sugar
and the carb cycle that like,
we just don't even know what it's like to not live like that.
That's why I think it looks so positive.
It looks so positive because we've went so far off
the deep end with it.
Exactly.
Well, no shit, everyone's seeing all these great things
from inside.
And then you really should not gonna die
if you eat all that much fat.
You know, you're like, oh, I'm not gonna die.
Well, it completely changed my relationship
with fats and carbohydrates.
I fell into that category of people that just,
I trained myself not to eat high fat.
It was like, I was on the low fat
Yeah, I had non fat milk in my refrigerator for god knows how long stayed away from butter
or stayed away from oil stayed away from all that stuff to keep it down
Then when I went keto
I and I was eating around that time because I was competing right before we switched over that
I was getting close to four to 600 grams of carbs every day
And so when we went keto, when they complete opposite,
and I saw all the positive effects from it,
the takeaway for me was, holy shit, like,
I don't need to eat that many carbohydrates,
and now my carbohydrates fall around somewhere
about 150 grams of carbs, it's not that much,
and I feel great.
And I don't have to be keto genic all the time,
and it allows me to have a little bit of fun.
That's the smart takeaway.
Yeah.
That's definitely a smart takeaway.
Here's another question on cholesterol. I've read studies that show that
people with higher cholesterol tend to have longer lives in the sense that they have lower
rates of all-cause mortality. Well, so here's the thing. I had a client who had had like a
triple bypass and he was just holding on to his statins and his red e-stress, like it
was a security like it.
Like he was pushing his lipids so low.
And I was just kept on telling him.
I'm like, well, first of all, I wrote him like a 20-page report on his health and I said,
look, like you cannot live with this low cholesterol.
Like you're not producing enough hormones.
All of his hormones were low.
I mean, like it's just not healthy to live,
the all-cause mortality happens when it's really low.
Okay.
I don't necessarily know if higher,
I don't know the evidence on higher,
but the real evidence that I found was that
people who have the lowest cholesterol
tend to have the highest all-cause mortality.
And so, and then the other thing that people don't talk
about is how, like,
depression's high too with really low cholesterol.
Exactly.
But really about hormone production.
Like you can't make enough hormones.
And there was a question from somebody on one of the Instagram posts about hormones
in middle age.
And if you're not eating any cholesterol, and if you don't have enough in your body
from its own production, you're not going to make enough testosterone.
You're not going to make enough of all of your sexual hormones,
and you're gonna feel like garbage.
Well, something that I experiment with,
by the way, I do mine now,
as I go, I fast once a month, and then I do,
I go keto last week of the month, I eat carbs,
and then I recycle, and I'm just messing with this right now,
going in and out, and it seems to work really well for me.
Well, you're kind of developing metabolic flexibility,
right? That's the goal.
Like, isn't that what we all should metabolic flexibility, right? That's the goal.
Isn't that what we all should be able to do?
That's the goal.
Shift to whatever fuel we want to burn.
And also encourage diversity in my microbiome and all that stuff.
I seem to feel the best doing it this way, so very interesting.
Let's get into some questions.
I know we got a bunch of questions.
We got sent to us.
This quads brought to you by Organify. For those days you fall short on getting your organic veggies or whole food nutrition I know you got a bunch of questions, I got sent to us. by going to organify.com. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com.
And use a coupon code MindPump for 20% off at checkout.
First question is from Rachel Ersoff.
The question is, do you trust normative data
on routine blood tests?
Now, I think she probably means like,
do you trust the ranges that they give you on blood tests?
When you take a blood test, it's always like, if you're within this range, that means you're
okay.
Right.
What do you think about that?
Well, I used to believe that if you're in the normal range, everything is fine.
Then it occurred to me when I started working with this company and this Dr. Lee, Dr.
Richard Lee in Foster City, that there's a whole range of normal.
And when we were developing this expert system
for optimizing and off-using labs,
I was like, well, what are you basing your ranges off of?
And he goes, this is off of 10,000 athletes and high performers
and where they're, where their hormones were at.
And we were not putting people out of range,
we're boosting their hormones to get to the optimal range.
And I was like, okay, so you have a totally different range
that most doctors do, right?
And he's like, yeah, absolutely.
He's like the range that most doctors are using
is a designed for that region.
So whatever your lab region is in,
like Northern California will have a lab where we'll have a range for that region. So whatever your lab region is in, like Northern California,
we'll have a lab core,
we'll have a range for that area.
Oh, I don't know that.
That is super interesting.
I do not know how this gets down.
Yeah, because like, if you believe it or not,
not every lab communicates in this country.
And believe it or not,
lab core is one of the largest bureaucracies in the country.
And if you think that like lab core of Florida
communicates the lab core in Northern California,
you'd be so extraordinarily mistaken.
Oh, wow. Yeah, so there's different regions and then
there's different and then there's different like normative range now
there's there's you can go to lab test dot com or lab tests online and they're
gonna have a range and if you actually started looking comparing all these
all these different companies you're gonna find that they're all slightly
different so the range gets bigger and bigger than this overall, right?
And so the reality is that these ranges are designed
for diagnosing disease and identifying
with someone is truly sick.
And so in other words, if you're outside of the range,
you might have the likelihood that you have a disease is high.
But otherwise, it'll not.
That's one of the insurance companies will pay
for the doctor to act.
So that's a great.
Right?
Like people never think about the healthcare system like this.
They think that's good.
So how would I highlight that?
It's some, yeah.
People think that the system is somehow designed to serve you, and it's actually not.
It's designed to serve the insurance companies so that they can decide what you will get.
And they don't want it, it's just the truth, okay?
And like anybody who works in healthcare knows this. So when you look at a range, you want't want it. So fuck this. Yeah, it's just the truth, okay? And like anybody who works in healthcare knows this.
So when you look at a range,
you would always ask your doctor,
like how did they decide how to interpret that number?
And I personally think that the numbers
for men's testosterone are like really, really low.
Like you have to be so, so, so, so low testosterone
to get a diagnosis of hypogodonism
that like, you're basically, I don't want to use these words,
but like, you're basically like...
Preview-best in girl.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
You're really soft.
And at this, so, so, when we were,
when we were using different hormones to boost up to optimize health,
we were doing it with the knowledge that we don't want
to push you out of that range,
which is something that happens when people are taking hormones
from God knows where they got them, right?
Or maybe they don't have a doctor's supervision.
You can end up with, it's kind of like the 80s bodybuilders
who were all taking hormones because they were kind of
like dosing themselves.
I mean, this is the same problem you see
in the LSD microdosing world.
It's like when you don't have someone
who has experience watching and making sure
that you're not hurting yourself,
you can really hurt yourself.
So the key is that you wanna stay within the range
and you wanna stay in the optimal range.
And like, there's different standard deviations
of abnormal for every lab.
Yeah, I think this highlights how important it is to hear
how the patient feels.
Also, because I was gonna ask you, can you give an example of where someone might be off the normal range,
but that's because they're doing something that you know about and it's like, you're not
bad.
I guess the thing I want to emphasize is thyroid hormone.
Most doctors are just looking at TSH and free T4, and they're not looking at free T3,
which is the active thyroid hormone, right? And they're not looking at total T4 and total T3, and they're not looking at free T3 which is the active thyroid hormone, right?
And they're not looking at total T4 and total T3 and they're not seeing what's being converted. So or what about antibodies
or reverse T3? Yeah, or antibodies, right? So if you're not looking at a full thyroid panel and you're just saying oh your TSH is normal
What if you like ridiculously have thyroid symptoms and you just there's no way of knowing because all they do is say your
TSH is normal. And that is like how medicine is practiced in most of the country.
I had a client like that where she had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but they would test
her TSH and T4 and they're like, no, you're normal, you're normal. So she had to go find
specialists and then they tested her antibodies and whatever. And they're like, oh, you have autoimmune
issues. And your body's producing this, oh, you have autoimmune issues.
Yeah.
And your body's producing the thyroid, but you're not utilizing it.
So it's like you have no thyroid.
Yeah.
And so she had to get, I mean, but this took her, by the way, like a year and a half.
Okay.
So I had a patient just like this who did not want to take thyroid hormone.
And I said, look, we can do our best to optimize your auto immunity.
And we did.
But at the end of the day,
like he didn't want to take the drugs.
And so he suffered for two years.
And you know what happened?
He went to another doctor.
Doctor says, you know you have Hashimoto's, right?
And he's like, yeah, well,
he's, and now the doctor basically convinced him.
He's like, you should just take this.
And though the doctor's older, wider,
more, you know, like more experience.
And he just, he just has taken
the thyroid hormone. And he's like, oh my God, I feel so good.
Like you fucker. Well, you know, you know, you could have done this. Like, I gave you through
away the bottle I prescribed you like two years ago.
You need to have white hair. That's what it is.
You need some white hair. But, you know, it's just, it's a delicate thing though, because
like now, now you get, now what's your on it,
you're like, okay, your month to month things can change
and like your dose can change and your needs can change.
And so, you gotta go by, I think at this point.
You're a lot of it's feeling when it comes to hormones.
That's it, it's very subjective,
because again, same exact person I was talking about earlier
she'll tell me like, oh, you know, too much thyroid,
I need to start lowering it a little bit
because I'm getting this.
I think we should be prescribing kits of like
microdosed thyroid hormone so you can like literally
dose up to what feels right for you.
So you can go by the smallest increment up or down.
You know?
That would be brilliant.
I know.
I think that's a business idea.
So many ideas.
Dr. Molling, we might want to start with the mind-pup.
Yeah, and you know, the same thing with we talked about
testosterone, like you could be a man and you could have lower testosterone in the range, and you know, the same thing with, with, we talked about testosterone, like,
you could be a man and you could have
lower testosterone in the range,
but you could have incredible
angrogen receptor density,
where you've got all these receptors,
so less testosterone, for you, you may feel great,
or the flip, you may have all this testosterone.
You talk, look, I, you know,
because I've been in the industry for as long as,
and because I've been in the industry as long as I have, I've talked to many
men who've been on anabolic steroids.
So they're taking a lot of testosterone and they'll have symptoms of low testosterone
because the receptors start to shut off.
So now these guys are taking...
They've gotten regulation.
Totally.
So they're taking testosterone and they've got the testosterone of like 50 gorillas and
they can't even get a boner because all the receptors go down.
Or they have really high sex hormone binding glabulin.
Yes, or that, or that which actually makes it kind of...
I have a client who has like way too high of such sex hormone binding glabulin, and we're
trying to figure out why, because we think it could be related to too much thyroid hormone
he got prescribed, maybe his dose is too high, and that could be pushing up the...
But like, I'm just like racking my brain, like you've got a 1,500 natural testosterone level,
but your free testosterone looks like you're deficient.
And so ...
How do you lower that?
We're trying a bunch of supplements right now, but like I think he needs to go down on
his thyroid dose.
So very interesting.
We're trying to figure it out.
Cool.
All right.
Next question is from ... what does that say,
Miss Petronis 1996.
What kind of diet would you recommend for a woman suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome
to rebalance hormones, promote fat loss, etc.
Did you know that it's for that PCOS?
Yeah, I didn't know.
So, so what, first first of all explain what that is
So PCOS is a pretty pretty
Common hormonal disorder in a lot of women living in Western countries where you end up with insulin resistance in your ovaries and
Insular resistance throughout your body and you end up with high and undergents.
So you get things like hercetism and you get things like acne.
Which is more hairy, right?
More hair, acne.
And these are the most women are not looking for, right?
No, not fun.
And is this because of the name of it, does it mean you're literally getting cysts on your
ovaries?
Yeah, you see if you do an ultrasound, you find cysts on the ovaries.
And you also, a lot of these women have been fertility issues
and abnormal menstrual periods.
How different is that from like something like
endometriosis?
Well, endometriosis is when the lining of your uterus
sort of escapes your uterus and starts growing
into your pelvic region.
It's a very different, very different problem.
Okay, okay.
But the problem with PCOS is that we have a lot of people who are just living off of refined
carbs and sugar, right? Like talk to any young woman, what do they eat in college?
Like they're eating carbs and they're doing cardio.
And so this is one population where I would recommend someone go on a month-long ketogenic
diet just to snap back your body into not being insulin, not having to be experiencing
such incredible insulin resistance from this condition and being able to resensitize
your body towards using a different energy source. Because a lot of these women just cannot lose weight
because their bodies cannot metabolize carbohydrates.
Wow.
Another thing I would recommend if that's the case,
is resistance training.
Or resistance training for sure.
Yeah, because nothing, I mean, resistance training
by far of all the forms of exercise
that'll help your body deal with incident-long term,
is resistance training because
you're building muscle, you're conditioning it and muscle is a great tissue to help balance out,
you know, how your body uses sugar and how your body deals with insulin. There's actually a really
cool Instagrammer called Lee from Lee from America and she's this young lady in her 20s who's like
totally dealt with PCOS and her website is filled with experiences
and descriptions of what she's gone through.
So follow her if you wanna learn even more
because she's just a wealth of knowledge
for a young 25 year old, she knows so much about that.
What was her Instagram handle again?
Lee from America.
So what are the symptoms of this?
Is there a lot of pain during their periods?
Are they, because I heard these.
So oftentimes they have missed periods.
So they're not even having periods sometimes.
It's a lot of irregularity.
How do they find, how do they,
they're not ovulating.
How do they diagnose PCOS?
Is it through, it's through symptoms and through ultrasound.
Okay.
You don't have to have the ultrasound for the diagnosis anymore, I believe.
It's a constellation of symptoms and lab tests.
But for a lot, so I met another doctor whose wife was really suffering from PCOS and he
put her on the ketogenic diet and she got pregnant.
So I was pretty impressed.
Wow, that's super rad.
And you said that they're not ovulating?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that that happens with PCOS.
Yeah.
How common would you say it is? Oh, I think it's really common. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that that happens with PCOF. Yeah. How common would you say it is?
Oh, I think it's really common.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, shit.
Does birth control affect something like this?
Oh, they put you on birth control.
To help?
To help with all the symptoms.
Wow.
To quote unquote, regulate your periods.
But the thing is, you're definitely not going to be ovulating.
What it does is just gives you more consistent periods.
It doesn't fix the problem.
It lowers your... So what happens when you go on birth control
is it actually will raise your sex hormone
by new globulin, which will bind up more hormone.
So it does make you feel better
because you're not dealing with this crazy hormonal
creatinon sense, but it doesn't fix the problem
and just covers it up.
Wow, so it's just covering up the symptom.
On that note with birth control,
what are your feelings on that?
I'm glad you went there.
I went there.
Oh, guys.
Yeah, what do you mean?
I mean, like, look, I was on birth off-non
for a lot of my 20s and then when I decided to go off of it
in my 30s because I was like, you know,
I'm going to want to eventually have kids
and I just have a bad feeling about being on something
that I know is shutting down my health access.
Right, for that long. And, you know, so, you know, I think for a lot of women feeling about being on something that I know is shutting down my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my my acne issues with diet, but also my liver was not in the best condition after going off
of birth control.
I realized I had some detoxification issues that I needed to remedy.
Another reason why it's fun to start biohacking your genetics is because you can start learning
all about your detoxification of different hormones.
There's a really good, great company
called Precision Hormones that does this dry urine test.
And most people aren't looking at the whole metabolism
of hormones, they're just looking at the blood hormones
and just doing like a quick check, like once a year maybe.
And that doesn't give you enough data
to know how your hormones are being metabolized.
So if you have any issues with
cataclylamethyl transfer ACE or with CYP1B1
or CYP2DA, like these are things
that you can test for and learn about.
And so I take a bunch of supplements now
that can help me balance my hormones.
What kind of, if someone goes to a doctor
and wants to have a hormone panel?
You really want to go to a functional doctor.
Okay, I was just gonna say.
You really want to go to somebody
who's got their, you know,
chops. Do insurance does insurance cover functional?
Some of it's starting to cover it. There's a company that my friend, James Maskall,
has just started that's trying to create a more affordable version of functional medicine
for the masses. I think he might actually pull it off, but he told me that they're working
with insurance companies and that they're paying doctors.
And I'm like, if that's really happening, that's amazing.
I think it'll save them money eventually
because they're doing so much such a good job.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting point
you made about birth control earlier.
There's gotta be a large chunk of,
and I'm sure it's not the majority,
but a sizable minority of women who are prescribed
birth control, not because they're trying not to get pregnant.
No, to remedy something else.
To control.
Oh my God, birth control is literally prescribed
for everything under the sun and upstack tricks
to treat every hormonal problem.
Because what does it do really well?
It turns off your hormones, right?
It's like what it does is it's a feedback loop switch, right?
So it's like, you guys know this,
you take testosterone enough, you can shut down your gonadal access and you won't make as much
firm. That's right. Same thing happens with women's ovaries, right? You give them enough estrogen,
it'll have negative feedback loop on the brain, and it'll start shutting down ovulation. And,
you know, we wonder why so many women are struggling with infertility. And here's the fascinating,
here's what really fascinates me, can find these studies now they're starting to find
that women's preferences in
you know uh... the opposite sex changes
when they're on birth control for some degree
yeah and did you did you know that was part of the reason why i went out did you
start to see the guy you're dating different guys after the fact you know you wanted
more manly man probably afterwards or something like that, so it's supposed to be. I don't know if it was more manly man,
but I did feel like I was worried that I would meet
the man in my dreams, go off birth control
and then not one to many more.
That's a statistic, by the way.
I've heard that that can happen.
Yes, that's a real statistic.
Divorce rates go up, it's a significant,
it's not a human number, but yeah.
But I also know that I feel like
pheromones are important, like chemical messengers,
and like a lot of what's happening
in an interaction with people is actually unspoken.
And I feel like when it comes to sexual attraction,
I want the most authentic attraction to come from my body,
right?
My body to be telling me what it should be.
Like I wanna be like, yeah, this is real.
Not like, am I in no more men, not into them?
You know, like I-
Which is what security right now is.
Yeah.
I read this whole article on it where they showed all these tests
and they showed, they took pictures of men
and then they digitally feminized the faces
or digitally masculinized the faces.
And it was subtle.
It was subtle.
So you could see it was the same person,
but you could tell one is a little more feminine,
one's a little more masculine.
When women are ovulating, they mostly want the masculine version,
when they're not, they want the more feminine version.
When they're on birth control, the feminine version.
And so it definitely changes your preferences.
And then they interviewed this one woman in this article I read
where she said that, she loved the way her husband smelled and she loved everything.
You know, just just being around and putting her nose up to him and smelling him, then she
went off birth control and she could not stand his smell.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Terrify.
See, wouldn't that suck to have to deal with that?
Oh my God.
I'm terrible.
I mean, at the end of the day, this is a gigantic experiment we've been doing.
And we don't really totally know if we've, we've, we've, I mean, I'm just looking at signals
from society and you know, there is, part of it is women are waiting to longer to have
kids.
I'm one of them.
But the other question is, is like, do we, do we have to start asking ourselves like,
are we contributing to the infertility epidemic with this many hormones?
I don't know.
I think so.
I think it's an experiment with us.
We don't know.
With our biology.
I also think socially it's been a big experiment.
Yes.
Because for the first time in history,
look, forever, forever, up until recently in human history,
sex was connected with pleasure, connection, and babies.
And now what we've done is we've eliminated babies out of that.
And that is a big social experiment.
It is.
And so there's a lot of sociologists
that comment on that and stuff.
I think it's very fascinating, but excellent.
All right, so the next question is from,
what does that say there?
Jay, Feline, Jay.
Jay, Lennon, Niko.
There you go, yeah, thanks, Doug. Jay, Len, Len. No, Jay. Jay Lennon. There you go.
Yeah, thanks, Doug.
Jay Lennon Lennon, something like that.
Makeup and skincare in relation to health.
Oh my gosh.
Please.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
What about makeup and skincare stuff?
Do we need to worry about what's in that?
Yeah, so I can't just say that if I die from anything
that I've done to myself, it's probably the amount of chemicals
I've been putting on my body since I was in maybe six grade.
Because there are endocrine disruptors everywhere, especially women's beauty products.
And I'm actually in the process of trying to, like, as a side project, not that I really
need to do this, but because it's fun.
I'm developing a bunch of products in my kitchen right now because, like, I'm looking at all
these things and I'm putting on my body regularly.
And I'm like, really?
Am I doing this? Like, are we doing harm to our ability
to actually reproduce by putting things in our body
and making ourselves look a certain way
in order to reproduce?
Right?
Yeah, irony in that.
Iarnie.
The irony in that.
It's crazy when you think about that.
That's such a great point.
Oh, I finally met someone because I'm hot
and now we can have kids.
Oops, can't have kids.
Right, so I'm wondering if that's part of why a lot of women
have hormonal dysfunction is maybe it's because we're
painting our bodies with all sorts of chemicals every day.
And every single woman in Hollywood and music today
has got to make up line now.
And I'm sorry, but the Kardashians and what
they have done to people's faces.
No.
Like, you guys seen on Instagram, what people are doing now with contouring?
It's just gross.
We touched on this a while ago and we got really sensitive.
Remember I think we had some pushback on some people that were all mad at us?
It's like you're painting a new face on your face.
It is.
It's a completely new person.
You're masking your beauty.
What I want is I found through a bunch of really cool
products, like you can't get really good skin with great skin products, but like, I have
celiac. A lot of women in media have autoimmune diseases, a lot of my friends have autoimmune
diseases. And like, I keep on asking myself, okay, is autoimmunity definitely part of the
fact that like, we have such disorder gut microbiomes, but also is it because so many women,
which by the way,
audimunity definitely affects women more than men.
Yeah, you guys are more sensitive to it.
Like maybe it has to do with what we're putting
on our body.
I just say more sensitive or more that you've been
disrupting it for so long.
Maybe we've been disrupting our bodies for so long.
Yeah, because in doctrine for people that know what that means,
these are chemicals that have a weak affinity
for hormone receptors or they affect the hormonal system.
Okay, and on top of that,
how many women are just so mean to themselves,
there's always a psychological component of every disease.
And I keep an eye to myself,
how can a country, America, really heal
if so many of us are
told to hate our bodies and hate our minds, hate our faces and hate the way we were naturally
born and have to be someone else?
You know, like I actually got funny guys, I got a private message from a young lady from
the Mind Pub podcast who had breast implants.
And I guess this is kind of like a side discussion,
but I guess we're on the topic of cosmetics and cosmetic changes for beauty and
and for, for, you know, overall health and confidence.
And I'm convinced that like she's, she has like,
you know, breast implant-related autoimmunity, you know,
because she's, she basically got implants and right after that developed autoimmune disease.
Is that common?
Is that happening?
That also?
It's considered to be a condition.
Like doctors are, like there are women who like-
It's controversial only because there's so much pushback
from the cosmetic surgery community.
They don't want people to know
that there's these negative-
But like let's get real.
Like your body is rejecting something.
Yeah.
And like what, what my theory is, is what's happening is like when, when you get real. But your body is rejecting something. Yeah.
And like what my theory is is what's happening is like when you put something foreign in
your body and it starts, your body starts attacking the foreign object, your body starts
making scar tissue around that object.
Your capsillation.
And then your tissue is like still trying to attack things and you can get crash reactivity
with your own body, right?
I agree.
I agree 100%. And also, it's a bummer.
And also just from a esoteric standpoint,
such a fake boob guy.
Yeah.
He is, you know.
I'm a, I'm a, I'm a,
proclaimed.
You know what, dude?
It's,
Well, the technology does seem to be getting better
and better for these plants, but.
Here's a, and I look, I get it, it's, you know,
it's your body, do as you wish.
And I understand for some people,
I get, actually, it doesn't matter. It's your body, do as you wish. I understand for some people, actually, it doesn't matter.
It's your body, do as you wish.
But on an esoteric level, if you think about it, you hate yourself so much, you hate your
body so much.
We know that our thoughts and how we think about things affect us biologically.
We know this for a fact.
For a fact, I can literally measure chemicals in your body and hormones.
Have you think about happy thoughts? Have you think about sad thoughts?
Have you get stressed out?
And we can see things changing.
100% are good.
And those are the things that we know to measure
and we know the relation.
There's a lot of things we still don't even understand.
So if you hate on your body enough,
can that manifest into your body
then attacking itself?
Theoretically, I could see that being a possibility.
Absolutely.
You know?
Interestingly, there's plenty of research on stress and blood sugar. itself, theoretically, I could see that being a possibility, absolutely. You know?
Interestingly, there's plenty of research on stress and blood sugar.
And I don't know if I mentioned the last time I was here, but people who are exposed to
racism have higher blood sugars, have higher risk of blood sugar problems later in life.
I mean, like, kids with adverse childhood experiences have much higher rates of chronic
diseases later in life and depression.
So.
Absolutely, this is why I mean, like a spiritual
or meditative practice, I firmly believe,
and this is something that I've only recently added
into my, you know, my lifestyle,
because it was always, it was the last brick
because up until relatively recently,
it was like, okay, exercise, yes, and then eating, right?
And then that changed a lot and learning about nutrition.
And then it became okay about sleep and okay,
have good relationships.
And it was like the last thing was like the spiritual practice.
And when I really examined things, I looked and said,
well, spiritual practices in some way, shape, or form
have been a part of human history.
And we're wired to have these experiences. in some way, shape or form have been a part of human history.
And we're wired to have these experiences.
It's probably an important thing that we should,
like you exercise your muscles,
why not exercise that part of you?
Because that can turn into other health things, so.
So obviously less is more as far as the makeup is concerned,
but is there a good product?
There's like the Environmental Working Group has a website
that you can start running all of your cosmetics through.
Oh, that's cool.
I actually, one of my projects that I haven't done yet
that's on my to-do list is to basically take my bathroom
and run everything through it.
Find out what I got to throw away.
What's the website called?
Environmental Working Group.
Excellent.
org or dot com, do you know?
Dot org, I believe.
And there was a study that is mentioning, called the Hermosa Study.
They took a bunch of Hispanic young women and had them measure their urine before and
after removing most of their cosmetics from their regimens.
They found that the chemicals in their urine dramatically lowered.
There was a dramatic difference in the amount of excretion of these chemicals
that really shouldn't be in.
A lot of the problem is that a lot of the worst cosmetics
affect the most impoverished people
because they're not taken out of the cheap products yet.
So like you can still find treclosin
in Johnson and Johnson products.
You can still find.
Which is antibiotic, right?
Yeah, antimicrobial.
You can still find phalates in nail polishes,
you can still find parabens.
I find parabens in expensive products sometimes,
but generally speaking, you find these in the cheaper products.
And who buys cheaper products?
Well, people who can't afford them are expensive ones.
And so it's not fair that the people who are suffering
the most are probably the people who don't have the education
to know better, to choose more healthier products.
But frankly, like a lot of what a lot of women don't know
is that you can make pretty amazing body oils
from coconut oil and essential oils.
You know, like simple stuff like that,
you can make your own cosmetics.
My girlfriend uses avocado oil.
Oh, great.
She'll use that in her legs and I'm like,
damn, what are you got in your legs?
They taste good.
All right, so I see you in my breath.
So, my bad.
All right, final question is from Elizabeth H. Harris.
Strategies for the middle aged female athlete.
How to manage and balance hormones,
adrenal function, thyroid, et cetera,
with high levels of physical activity.
Bottom line, the impact on the endocardan system as a whole.
Okay, so this might be controversial
because I have clients who are pro hormones
and against hormones, some of the ones that are against them
tend to be the ones that are like,
just fundamentally believe that all drugs are bad
and they should be not using anything ever.
But that being said, I think that if you look at society,
if you look at humanity, it's really amazing that we're living past 50, right? Because like,
our life spans are just getting longer and longer, but so we didn't really have to worry about
menopause, like 200 years ago. People just died, right? So now people are living.
And the question is, do we want to live
with the, you know, like the fact is,
is that you've got like 200 receptor sites
in your body for estrogen.
And your brain is just a fundamentally different brain
when you don't have estrogen.
So what typically happens to people in cultures
where they don't have access to hormone replacement
is men as they age start reducing their testosterone production.
A women as they age start reducing their estrogen production.
And if you look at old people, they start kind of looking like each other.
Right?
They kind of lose their gender identity, which is fine.
You know, it's totally fine if you want to age like old Chinese women in the middle of rural
China, that's fine.
But we live in a modern life where we have technology
that can enable us to live differently.
And my personal belief is that when I hit the age of a pause,
I'm definitely going to be taking hormones
and I'm definitely going to be tweaking them
based on my labs because I don't want to suffer.
And I want to be able to do things with my body
till later in life.
So my personal preference would be
that if I was a middle-aged woman,
I would get tons of hormone testing.
I would go to an expert doctor
and I would get replacement based off of what I needed.
Do you think being a competitive type of athlete
at this age makes it easier or more challenging
for this person.
Well, the thing about being a competitive athlete is you know you're putting your body under
an even more stress because I'm guessing this person is probably a high performer in other
areas of her life, which means like, you know, how many competitive athletes do you know
that are in their middle age that are just doing that, right?
Right. Yeah. So I'm guessing she's probably an executive or probably somebody who has like-
Right. How you do anything is how you do everything? that, right? Yeah. So I'm guessing she's probably an executive or probably somebody who has like...
Right. How you do anything is how you do everything?
Yeah, right. Yeah. So when you're working a lot and you're exercising a lot, you have
to ask yourself, how are you recovering from the stress? And so that's really a big important
part. But then when you're doing like high levels of physical activity, the question
is, is like, how was that affecting your body?
I think we've talked about this before,
but sometimes I see people who get into CrossFit,
and I see them get this really strong limbs,
but then they have a gut.
And it's because oftentimes, I think that it looks
like a high cortisol habitus.
Looks like somebody who's got too much cortisol.
Now, if someone, a lot of women have thyroid dysfunction,
it's just such a problem that like,
I'm surprised people don't these days,
but the question she has to find out is,
where does she have a problem
and where can she mitigate that problem?
Where is the delta that needs to be addressed?
For somebody who's a super crazy athlete,
adaptogens are key, but you want to make sure
you're taking the right ones for your body.
I just found out that Oshwaganda is a nightshade.
So somebody's got autoimmunity, that might not be the best one
for them.
Gojibaries as well, or nightshades.
Not great for people with autoimmunity.
So I would get tested. So I would get tested.
So I would get typical blood labs,
including estrogen, progesterone, sex hormone,
my new glabulin, testosterone.
But for a woman, you want to make sure you get the LCMS,
not the other test, which is for men.
And that's because certain testosterone test will not
pick up the testosterone
in women with as much sensitivity.
The elisa test is the one you don't want if you're a woman, and see what the high sensitivity
one, then you want to get CRP, you want to get homocysteine to check your inflammation and
your oxidative stress, and then you also want to check your DHEAS, your morning cortisol,
and then you want to look at your cortisol rhythm, and you want to look at your hormone metabolism.
And then you want to get that full thyroid panel that I told you about before.
And those are the same tests that we were doing at Genesol that I still do my practice
today.
And I do them because I think that it gives you a nice picture of how your hormones are
responding to your daily life.
And then in these people I would also look at heart rate variability.
You make a good point because at the end of the day it's about quality of life. And then in these people, I would also look at heart rate variability. You make a good point because at the end of the day, it's about quality of life. And
if a medication, and we always say this too on the show, because sometimes we come across
as anti-all medicines, and I think we come across that way sometimes because we're so
over-medicated, generally speaking. But at the end of the day, if it improves your quality
of life, then go for it.
It is dosing. Like, I always start people on the lowest possible dose.
Like, I had a client with pretty much zero testosterone.
She's like, what do I have no libido?
I'm like, well, why don't we just start you on a tiny bit of testosterone?
And by tiny, I mean, like, the pharmacists I was speaking to at the compounding pharmacy
was like, you do realize this is like really, really, really small dose, right?
And she's like, we never, we never dose the slow.
I'm like, well, I want to dose the slow.
Gave it to my client.
She totally noticed a difference.
And she's like, I don't, and I was like, you know, you can go up if you want, but you
don't have to.
She was like, this is perfect.
So like, turns out you can actually do really well with lower doses of things.
You can.
And the other thing, too, to consider here, we're talking about a female.
Now men and women are very different in this, in one, in many regards, but in this regard
in particular, men, if we're healthy, if we're fit, if we eat adequate fat intake, and,
you know, we got good strength and all that stuff, theoretically speaking, we can, we can
produce sperm up until the day we die.
We can actually theoretically speaking impregnate someone until the day we die, even if we live
yeah, even if we live until the age of 80.
Great power.
Now women go through a change where they literally their bodies no longer fertile, like you
cannot have to do more.
You can interestingly, you cannot produce eggs, but women can have babies
with the aid of hormones for a lot longer than we realized.
Yeah.
Definitely.
That's a good way.
I would speculate how long?
Um, we would have done it in their 50s.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah.
But still, there's this change that happens naturally
in a woman's body, which just stops having,
an evolutionary, evolutionary scientists think that this happened
because the role of the grandmother
was so important in the tribe,
where she needed to stop having babies
so that she could help her daughter or her son
or whatever take care of their babies.
And so this became this like evolutionary strategy,
if you're well.
So it's a big change, but yeah, even, you know, here's the thing like, if you tackle
everything, including your sleep, your exercise, your diet, and you're doing all the things
right and you're resting because you're in high level athlete, you know, you might be
overdoing everything like, well, that's, I feel like questions like this remind me of
like the, we get a lot of these, they're just different, they're just phrase differently,
it's like the eat your cake and have it too. It's here if you're asking you're asking a health
question how do I take care of my health or keep something healthy meanwhile while I'm this
competitive athlete in advanced age like you know when a lot of people we think athletes are healthy
but doesn't you can be athletic but you doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy. Oh my god totally
and so it's really like where are your priorities?
Like is your priorities in the, you know,
the endocrine system and being healthy,
or is it in being a optimal athlete?
And if it's being an optimal athlete,
there's no doubt I'm gonna push you in the directions of,
okay, well then, you know, taking hormones,
getting this done, maybe we go that route
because you care more about that.
But if you look at me as a client, say,
I like to run, I have these athletic things I like to do, but it's less of a
priority than my health and the advice I give is going to be different.
Yeah. And it's same thing with being a man, like, you know, once I hit my mid 40s and
50s, if I think to myself, like, God, I'm not like I used to be when I was in my 20s.
Right. I could take testosterone and start to feel like I used to, or, or not in,
understand that I'm eating or whatever.
But as far as quality of life is concerned, I'm 100% on more than one.
One of the things that I'm kind of against though is this obsession and San Francisco
and Silicon Valley of people taking growth hormone.
Is that a big thing?
It's a really big thing.
Yeah, a lot.
I mean, I was at a party once and I literally saw these two guys that I know.
One guy was handing the other guy
like a kid for growth hormone.
And I was like, is that what I think it is?
And they were like, don't you didn't see that.
And I'm like, oh my god, that just happened.
And I was like, it's cool.
Like I totally understand what you guys were doing.
It's not a big deal.
But like, what I don't understand is why people,
even by the way, this is like, funnily enough,
someone quoted in this article that was written about me that like Peter Tillie used this
growth hormone.
And so I immediately texted my friend who's a doctor and I was like, I didn't say that.
I did not say that that was like heat.
I didn't even mention his name.
But it apparently was public knowledge at this point.
So the journalist was writing about it.
And I found out that that was true.
And I was just like, do people,
do people who want to live forever,
why are they taking a substance
that definitely leads to increased risk of cancer?
Like if you have a little bit of cancer
and you're poor growth hormone on it, it's gonna grow.
In the context of inflammation and cancerous,
and it's a bit of a problem.
And this is the thing, like when I start using
replacement hormones later in life, later in life,
you better bet your bridges
I'm gonna be getting MRIs on a yearly basis,
checking for cancer.
Like, because these are growth hormones, right?
Like hormones help us grow.
And part of what sucks about aging is we don't grow as much.
We start declining.
And so you have to be vigilant about cancer
if you're gonna be doing these things
because you aren't risk.
Like.
That's a good point because if you had like an estrogen sensitive cancer, and you're
taking estrogen.
Exactly.
You know, it could be a bad thing.
But even more of a reason to make sure that your lifestyle is healthy, even more of a
reason to make, like, you know, since our last podcast, I've actually like really re-evaluated
my lifestyle because I'm starting to ask myself, like, as I start studying more Chinese medicine,
there's this idea of, when you fully exhaust yourself, you're actually
draining your quote unquote, jing, which is this source of energy and vitality and life
force. And I'm kind of like, well, maybe the Chinese people actually had had some knowledge
on this that like me letting myself get so exhausted that like I basically sleep for like
14 hours on occasion, maybe that's not good for me, you know, long term.
So I've been asking myself like,
where can I actually find places in my life
where I can just say, I'm gonna do less.
That's so rad.
So you're studying Chinese medicine right now.
I mean, I'm studying a lot of things,
but one of the things that I'm personally interested
in is Chinese herbs.
There's apparently like 50 Chinese herbs
that are like the compendium of like,
like I had some herbal
tonics in LA. Um, at the super hippie amazing grocery store called Erwan as you probably
see in my Instagram stories is my favorite place in the whole world. And I drank these these
tonics and I was just like, this is insane. How good I feel. And I was just like, I've got
to figure out what this is all about. So now I'm just like studying all the adaptogens
and so awesome.
But some deer antler velvet.
What are some of the things you're finding?
What do you think?
What are you finding?
What are you finding?
Apparently it's a tonic for libido and testosterone.
And-
Remember the kick on the deer antler spray for a-
That was so hot that it was like the big thing.
Did you start taking it?
I mean, I have some and I put it in my-
I'm putting it in my like tonics that I'm creating.
Is it working?
I mean, I, I'm actually fairly celibate right now.
So, I feel like I have a good libido, but like, it's being transformed into my work, not into my sexual life.
So you're all horny, could be your hungry, could be your hungry, too.
You know, I, you know, I'm reading the fuck out of the books right now.
I was, you know, I heard I took a hyper productive.
I'm a hyper productive.
Like, I am in love with my vegetables, but like, not like, that's gross. I was genuinely like hyper productive. I'm a hyper productive.
Like I am in love with my vegetables,
but like not like that, that's gross.
You guys are terrible.
You guys are terrible.
I'm just trying to tie it all in.
This is ridiculous.
No, but I am interested in this concept of like the balance
of Chinese herbs and achieving more of a sense of well-being.
And because like you can have one,
this ton was like $16, let's get real.
Like I was like, this is ridiculous.
This cannot be this much money.
And so I started looking at all the ingredients
and then I went back down to LA and I went to the store
and I go, hey, can you just like,
kind of like screen shot that recipe
because I want to make this?
I found out that I was using the wrong amounts of things,
like too much chilegit.
And so I've in modifying mine.
But I'm kind of being guided by how I feel,
but also now that I'm looking into the actual science
behind all this, I'm like, there are, man,
thousands of years behind all this stuff.
So if I had three of me and I didn't have five jobs,
I would probably be going back to school,
but I have a textbook and I have the ability to read.
And one of the things I really find
the most valuable of my medical education
was that I learned how to teach myself anything.
I didn't go to all my classes.
I spent a lot of time watching videos.
I spent a lot of time in my room just feeling frankly like garbage
because I didn't take great care of myself
for part of medical school.
So I learned how to teach myself and everything
through just watching videos and reading textbooks
and that's how I learn now.
That's so awesome.
Yeah, the Western medicine is based off of the scientific method.
Chinese medicine, erivetic medicine, or not
because they weren't using the scientific method.
And what the scientific method does very, very well
is it breaks things down into components, into pieces.
And then it dives in super deep on those pieces
and really gets a good understanding of those pieces.
But through doing that, it loses sight of the entire thing,
which is why Western medicine tends to treat
the human organism as pieces.
Like go to a hormone doctor, go to a gut health doctor,
go to a doctor that works on the nervous system.
Whereas with Chinese medicine,
it's the human organism and it always has been.
So when they look at herbs and your organs worth,
whatever, they're looking at you from a whole perspective.
So for chronic issues,
I have lots of experience with Chinese medicine.
My uncle is a Chinese herbalist.
And I've learned a lot from him and that's how he explains it.
And he goes, you know, when it comes to chronic issue,
like if you go to a Chinese medicine doctor and you tell me
have some chronic issue, they're gonna look at your diet,
they're gonna look at how you sleep,
they're gonna look at, you know, how you're moving,
they're gonna look at the types of foods you're eating,
and then they're gonna look at herbs and based on all those
things and your whole life, then that determines
what percentibetions and your emotions.
That's another thing that they take into account
that we don't even consider.
Right, right, right.
So we just go to the mental health department.
That's right, that's right.
That's why I think it's so fascinating
and I'm really happy that someone like you
is diving into that.
Well, the thing is, is that a few years ago,
there's a Chinese researcher who won the Nobel Prize
for finding the cure
for malaria, and it was an old Chinese formula that like, how is she getting a Nobel Prize
for this?
It's already been around for thousands of years.
That's interesting.
That's amazing.
I won the prize for reading an old book.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure it was more than that, but like still, it's just, I think it was art
of miscent or something, something like that.
Do you feel like we're going in the right direction
with that or do you think we're getting worse?
Do you think we're...
I think China is totally, totally losing,
losing one of the most valuable things
that they've ever contributed towards society
by adopting the Western model of medicine.
Wow.
Yeah, they are buying up as many antibiotics as they can.
They are building clinics just like we have.
They are like, people are getting sicker and sicker
and they've got far more pollution than we do.
And they think that the Western model is someone more valuable.
They really value our healthcare model.
Because it makes a lot of money.
It makes a lot of money.
That's what they value the shit out of it
because they put some money in their pockets.
Yeah, turns out.
So I feel like it needs to be preserved.
And I don't think that necessarily everything
that they have that's applicable to their culture
is necessarily perfectly applicable to Western cultures.
But that's because they have different genetics than we do.
And I feel the same way about Ayurvedic, like Doshas.
Like I don't actually think that the Ayurvedic
nutritional model is necessarily purely translatable
to someone with different genetics than that.
But I think that there's something that we can learn
from every cultural medicine.
Yes.
That like, I mean like acupuncture, come on, coughing.
Yes, absolutely.
I think there's lots of truth in all of those things.
And if you look at all of them,
you get a much clearer total picture.
Well, I think where it gets all muddies
because some of the things that we can explain
and when someone tries to,
that's where you get the counter, right?
It's the language that they use.
It's just the same thing I used to fill about talking to somebody
who was in the massage therapy
or hearing someone talk about cheese.
We give names to these things that we're uncertain of
that we've been using or being practicing for hundreds
or thousands of years.
And then you get the Western scientists that come in now,
there's like, oh, that's a made-up word,
or we can't measure that or prove that.
So we're just gonna disregard it completely.
It's like, it's like a acupuncture.
I used to have an acupuncture somewhere, Jim,
and she would explain like,
she and the meridians and how the acupuncture does this,
and I'm at first first I was like,
oh, this is such a bullshit.
Like what are you talking about Chi and like mystical energy?
And then I thought to myself, like,
well, there's actually a lot of times where you go to the doctor
and you have referred pains, you have pain in one area.
And it means that this organ is hurting or something else.
And we know these things for sure.
Like maybe they're working with the nervous system
with these needles and they're getting the nervous system
to communicate, like, they're just using different language.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Totally.
And I mean, there's always that quote, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Ooh, I like it.
I'm not thinking about the right that though.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Yeah.
Well, that's something I learned in Metzgold, believe it or not.
Oh, very cool.
Well, as always, it's been freaking awesome.
Really excited to have you on our show. It's fun time, guys. Sem, very cool. Well, as always, it's been freaking awesome.
Really excited to have you on our show.
It's fun time, guys.
Semi-regulally, we can expect you back, right?
In a little while.
Yeah, you keep on training me and getting to me
in the shape, I'll keep coming back.
Oh, yeah, I like that deal.
Love it.
Thank you very much.
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