Your top health questions answered!

Hey, good evening everyone, and thank you for taking time out of your day to come and listen. And, you know, I've never done this before, but I thought I would do like a chat session where you guys can ask questions. I have a bunch of things that I want to talk about too, but feel free to send them, type a little message in there if you have a question. You can't answer like specific health questions, like, "Should I take this thing or do that thing?" but more general things that you've just been wondering about. And, you know, I find that I spend a lot of my time doing patient consultations, just answering general questions, and I thought, "Well, why not just do it in a group?" You know, and for what it's worth, all the things that I think about and, and, you know, kind of struggle with in my own practice to figure out for people. And then I also want to show you, if you're open to it, you know, some more general functional medicine ideas, so you understand like how treatments should go. And, you know, I find nowadays with so many new doctors coming into functional medicine, that it's the veteran Alzheimer's like me, it's not a bad thing to hear from us once in a while and see the perspective, you know, because the profession is growing and changing, understandably, in a really good way, I think, overall. But, um, just want to make sure that we maintain the history and the origins of what the original doctors had in mind as they're setting this up. And we're going through, and I, I would just call it like a literal explosion in functional medicine right now, you know, it's like literally every month it's getting more and more intense, and we see it in a variety of different ways. So I'm gonna start off by talking about a couple of sort of big picture questions, and then we'll get to your stuff that you guys send, okay?

So, you know, I think the biggest basic question is like, and this is so silly that we even have to talk about this, is that, "What am I actually supposed to eat?" Is Paleo right? Is vegan right? Is plant-based? Is it Ornish's or Pritikin's or Schwarzbein's? Or, you know, who, who's really got this figured out? And this is a hard question, you know, and I've been thinking about this since I was 16 years old. You think I'd have a really definitive answer? But, you know, I think the best answer is, "It depends." It depends on where you're at, what you want to do with your health, and where your health is at now. And so the, the key components that I see, and, and the current trend is definitely heading towards Whole Foods Plant-Based, which is what, you know, we used to call a vegetarian diet when I was in college, whenever that was, like 35 years ago, or whenever that was in the dark ages. And, um, you know, I think if you understand the properties of meat and animal fat and what they do to your body, and for the good and for the bad, then you can start to get a perspective on, "Do you want to go on the Paleo train or the Whole Foods Plant-Based train?" And realize that this is a moving target. And I think that's one of the most difficult things to understand. I'd only have a slide on this, so I'm just have this other slide up here. We can, here, put up like, I don't know, some random slide. I don't really have a slide on the food. Oh, that's a good one. We can, let's put that one up and talk about talks.

And so, speaking of meat, so, you know, um, in, in the way that I was trained in functional medicine in the early 1990s, and this, you got to realize, goes back to my teachers who were doing this work like in the '70s. So going, we're going back all the way to the 1970s. In the chronic illness community, you know, the doctors that treat people who are chronically ill, what was found was, oh, I know, I kind of, I got a better image I want to put up here. We go. This is, this would be a perfect image in a, in the chronic illness community of, you know, doctors, which is how I was raised, naturopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists, a few medical doctors in, in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but not so many. You know, what was really on the table was, "How are we going to work with chronically ill patients who are extremely sick?" And I think what was discovered early on in that era was that grains are really difficult for some people to eat. Gluten could be, you know, the cause of a lot of the illness in this chronically ill crowd. And that because you're taking out grains, and taking out gluten-containing grains especially, you know, so these people even have a to the kinds and vegetables they can eat, fruit makes them sick, you're really kind of stuck using animal protein and animal fat as a heavy portion of the diet. And I think from a physiological standpoint, what we're thinking about with these folks is that you need animal fat and animal protein for cellular repair to a certain extent. All right, I shouldn't say it that way. You need, you need protein for cellular repair, and if you've got a lot of damage, you may need more protein than you can get from, from plants only. At least that was the theory, I think, in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. And so, in fact, you know, the way I was trained is that we were told to convince people to, you know, give up vegetarianism if they were a vegetarian to actually, you know, correct that because that was a problem. Almost like, you know, if someone has, you know, a certain religious orientation, you want to change them away from that or something. You know, it was almost a little strange when I look back on it now. But, you know, I think the problem that those doctors ran into, and this is going all the way up to the present day now, is that some people just have to eat meat. They have to eat animal protein in order to function because so many otherwise healthy foods are off the table. And so because functional medicine was developed by doctors treating chronically ill patients, my whole profession has a bias towards meat and animal fat as being essential. And you got to understand that every doctor is created, their knowledge base is created by the kinds of patients that they work with. So you can get really distorted in your view of the overall world if you're working with a certain patient population. It's very hard for doctors to kind of see outside the patients that they're working with. If you're working with all diabetics, you're going to see the world from the perspective of diabetic, etc.

And so the, the current era that I see now, I see this all across the board, from restaurants being built, to the younger generation of people in their 20s and 30s and how they're choosing to eat, to the popular press, to all the hip, cool workshops. You know, I'm in Northern California and the western United States, spend my time here, and, you know, everything is kind of moving towards the vegan Whole Foods Plant-Based diet. And I think what you see with people who adopt those of diets, if they can tolerate grains and beans and they can digest them easily and digest them well, is you have a really wonderful and robust improvement of the microbiome. And all the bacteria and organisms in your gut respond beautifully to eating beans and fruits and vegetables. And the microbiome is sort of neutral to, in general, to, to animal protein and animal fat. And so in the non-chronically ill patient base out there, who do not have this catastrophic immune failure and horrible chronic GI problems, they might just have, for example, cardiovascular disease, or maybe someone just is recovering from a stroke, or someone has diabetes, which is a chronic illness, but they're not in this extreme level of environmental sensitivity and heavy metal toxicity. You know, they just have diabetes and that's it. Or again, some just have cardiovascular disease and that's it. Or maybe have some chronic digestive problems, but they're not super severe, they're not riddled with all kinds of parasites. Those folks respond beautifully to Whole Foods Plant-Based diets, you know, with no animal protein and no animal fat, and a very limited amount of fat at all. And so there's this huge spectrum. And I think, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do now as a practitioner is understand where the patient's coming from, what's the diet that they need to be on now, and then what's the diet that we want to move them towards over time. And what I see for sure, the healthier that people get overall, the less animal protein and animal fat they need to stay healthy. Okay. And so it's a moving target, and they can change. You can get be reliant upon animal protein for a long period of time, get healthy, and then be able to move to more of a Whole Foods Plant-Based diet. And so I don't have a strong, sort of fixed philosophy on this, other than I try to figure out what's going to help the patient the most. And then I do see as people get healthier and healthier, they can move to more of a Whole Foods Plant-Based diet. And when, when we see the features of these various diets, you know, the problem is that the human brain always kind of latches on to one aspect of the diet. And so with Paleo, people clearly latch on to the whole meat type thing, you know, and that you can just eat as much meat as you want because it's Paleo, right? And then that can get overdone really easily. If you're striving towards Whole Foods Plant-Based and you obsess and overeat vegetables and fruit and beans, actually, that doesn't really happen. People don't really overeat vegetables, fruit, and beans. You can't really, I mean, if you sit down and you're eating a, you know, a plate of, you know, kidney beans, are you really going to overeat kidney beans? No, it's just disgusting, you wouldn't do it. Are you gonna really eat too much broccoli? That's not gonna happen. So I think part of the thing with Whole Foods Plant-Based is it steers people towards healthier foods as a primary portion of their diet. And then when they cheat, they go out and they have like, I don't know, a cheeseburger or something, a hamburger, or they have a steak, or they have some fish. And so, you know, the cheating that you do on a Whole Foods Plant-Based, that if it's going over to animal protein, is not gonna be nearly as destructive as the usual cheating that we do, which is the whole chocolate cake, box of cookies, you know, let's eat a whole pizza kind of thing. So I think some kind of modified Whole Foods Plant-Based diet where your cheat days, if you want to have them, include eating meat. The doctors that I work with now estimate, you know, assuming that you're healthy and otherwise in good shape, around 10% of your total calories coming from animal protein is probably going to be about right. If you're not healthy, you know, you may need to have a majority of your calories coming from animal protein. We have patients in my clinic who can't eat beans, can't eat any other grains, where they have gluten or not, they can't eat any fruit, a piece of fruit, but the fruit makes them sick. And, you know, three-quarters of the vegetables are unable, they're all unable to eat also. So there's not a whole lot left with that kind of person, you know, other than, you know, focusing on on animal protein.

Okay, so now let me see here. My, I think my audio is okay, right? Yeah. So if the audio is garbled, it's probably your internet connection, is my guess. So let me go on. I'm going to handle a few other things and I'll start to look at questions. Okay, so you guys can keep asking questions if you want. Courage. The next thing I want to talk about a little bit is, what's too much or too little exercise? Because that's another thing, you know, we see some people who get into, most common thing obviously is not enough exercise. Other people that just over-exercise. And so, you know, I'm always been kind of a strong advocate of physical fitness. I ride my bike a lot, I run a lot, I've done more more hours of yoga than I could count, thousands of hours of yoga. I like to stretch, I do free free weights and strength exercises a couple times a week. And so I think with the exercise question, the more physically fit that people become, especially the more lean muscle mass that you have on your frame, the healthier you're going to be. And so if I can take a patient and put five or ten pounds of lean muscle on them, I know they're just going to, their health is just going to improve and skyrocket. Now, how does that happen? It happens to working out through a variety of ways, whether you're doing high-intensity workouts, or it has to involve something that's, you know, resistance exercise. So it's got to somehow involve weights or some kind of strength and resistance type of exercise. But you don't have to do it very much. So my workouts right now that I'm pretty happy with are, and I'm 54 years old, so you got to take that into account. I'm not like 20 anymore. I don't like riding my bike for five hours across the countryside every day like I used to. So, you know, in my age group, I'm doing, you know, strength training with kettlebells, very, very hard, high-intensity workouts. I do two workouts a week, sometimes I do three, but not very often, and they're about 12 minutes long. And I'm telling you, if you're doing a kettlebell high-intensity workout, but all you can handle, anyways, 12 minutes is plenty. And then I ride my bike almost every day for 45 minutes to an hour, maybe an hour and a half on a long ride day. I do yoga and stretching pretty much 100% of the time in the mornings. And then I do sort of freestanding strength training exercises pretty much 100% of the time too. That would be like lunges and squats and push-ups and sit-ups. I do those pretty much every morning. And then I run a couple times a week, you know, once or twice a week for around 40 minutes. So strength training, cardio, and then the combination of stretch and sort of static strengthening exercises without weights. That's kind of how I'm keeping myself in shape. And my muscle mass is brought be a little bit less than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but it's not bad, you know. I can still, I can't lift quite as much weight as I used to be able to. I used to be able to deadlift 150 pounds pretty easily. Now maybe I can do 100, you know, but it's enough again for my age, I think it's an appropriate amount of strength and whatnot.

Next question, and these are questions that have come in frequently, so I want to cover them, and then we'll get to your questions in a minute. What was the other one here? It goes, oh, the purpose of meditation. You know, people ask me this one all the time. Patients always ask this one. And then we'll talk a little bit about sleep, and then a little bit about supplements, and we'll open it up for your questions. So, you know, I have this, I have this revelation. So I spent a couple years of my life in monasteries in Asia when I was a young man. I, when I was 18 years old, I lived in a monastery in Japan, a Zen monastery in Japan, that was very, very strict. And when I was 23 years old, I went back to Asia for a couple years and I lived in a Taoist monastery in southern Thailand. Most of the time I spent a little bit of time in northern Thailand, and I spent, mmm, three, four months in a monastery in Nepal as well during that trip. So as a total of around two years, then with Japan is maybe two, two-and-a-half years total time in monasteries. So, you know, I thought I knew a lot about meditation. And it wasn't until 25 years later that I realized what was actually going on, which is that when you're working with an enlightened Buddhist master, as I did, you know, and they're meditating all the time, they're not meditating to de-stress or relax. They're meditating because when you're enlightened, that's just what you do. You just sit around and you breathe. Because so, in other words, you know, I was thinking that meditation was a tool to get somewhere. And the reality was that it's more like, "Okay, when you get to that point, when you get to that spiritual connected point, you end up meditating." You can't get spiritually connected by meditating. It works the other way around. How funny is that? It's kind of ironic. And so again, I meditate every day. And I meditate, however you want to call it, I do spiritual practices every day, usually for around two hours on a good day. If it's a weekend and no one's around, it'd be more like three or four hours. Last night, I probably got in about four hours, five hours. But well, last night, this morning, have you want to say it? You know, I was up around 4:00 in the morning and I practiced all the way until about 8:00. So I got about four hours in last night in this morning. And I'm very committed to it. I think it's one of the main tools that we can use to heal. It's not the easiest thing to pull off, but I encourage you guys who are interested in it to at least take a class or start to explore ideas around meditation. The practice I'm Brian doing right now is a Taoist meditation practice, which I relate to the most out of all the different things that I've study. And it's really become a centerpiece of my life in a lot of different ways. Okay, so the purpose of meditation, it's not really, you know, to relax and to shut your mind off and to de-stress. The purpose of meditation is to get in touch with your spiritual self. And, and so meditation can mean anything from golfing to gardening to spending time with your kids to, you know, painting the room in your house to make the room look better. So in my world now, meditation isn't like you're sitting there and trying to turn your brain off. Meditation is more about, "What can you do that gets you more spiritually connected?" Whatever that may be. And I mean, I have some, I'm thinking about one of my more spiritually connected patients. She doesn't ever meditate, pray, or do anything religious. She just gardens. That's her way of being connected is to be in nature and with nature. And boy, it's working for her really well, you know. And so there's a variety of different ways you can do that. And you can use meditation, quote-unquote, as like a relaxation technique, but that's more like a psychological rebalancing technique. And that's not the point of what I learned in the monasteries in Thailand and in Japan. The point was that it's a spiritual practice. It's not a psychological distressing technique. And so I really want to encourage the people that I work with to pursue their spiritual life. And whether that involves meditation in some way or not, that's fine. But, you know, to look at meditation from a deeper angle than just as a stress reduction way to go.

Okay, let me see here. One last one. Oh, sleeping patterns. Now, this is really interesting. So, you know, for so many years, I thought, "Okay, you go to bed around 9:00 or 10:00, you wake up around five or six, you get your seven or eight hours of sleep, and everything is really great." But as I started to look into sleep cycles more recently, and I'm doing this now with my sleep cycles quite a bit, I often go to sleep around 7:00 or 8:00 at night and get four to six hours of sleep, and then be up for two or three hours, and then have a few more hours of sleep, and then wake up kind of officially around 4:00 or 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. And, you know, I thought this was kind of strange. I have fallen into this weird sleep pattern. I started to research it, and actually, in the good old days, a lot of people slept like this. Pre-electricity, a lot of people would just go to bed when it was dark. And this time of year, I don't know, it's maybe around 7:00. Sleep, you can't sleep from 7:00 until 7:00, right? You can't sleep for 12 hours. Nobody can do that unless you're really exhausted or something. But, um, you know, sleep for four, five, six hours, wake up around midnight, one or two, have a few hours of awake time, and then boom, sleep another few hours, and then wake up again. So that sleep, split sleep cycle, which seemed to me that be dysfunctional for some people, depending on your lifestyle, whatnot, can actually be really a fine thing. Now, I have all kinds of odd sleep patterns now. Sometimes I will sleep for 12 hours, sometimes I'll sleep for four. But it's very interesting to me when I'm really in the right rhythm, I'll usually get around four hours of sleep, you up for an hour or two, and then get another three or four, and then BOOM, it's 4:00 in the morning, and I'm in good shape. Now, admittedly, going to bed at 7:00 or 8:00 at night is not possible for most human beings. My son is in college right now, and I'm single right now, I don't have a relationship, so I can go to bed whenever the heck I want. And if it's 7:00 and I want to go sleep, I just do it. And there's no one to complain about, and I don't have to cook dinner for my kid or whatever, you know. So I have this luxury right now, no reason, let's just in last year of being able to control my own sleep cycles again, like I was when I could, when I was younger, when I was in the monasteries, I had a really unusual sleep cycle too. I would go to, I would always wake up at 2:00 in the morning. So I'd go to sleep around 9:00, get about five hours, and wake up at 2:00. I'd always want to be the first one at the meditation hall, so I'd get to the meditation hall around 3:00, before everyone, you know, all the lazy people would get there around 4:00 in the morning. And so I did that. But okay, and I was in my 20s, a little, you know, younger and a little more spry in those days. I could get by on five hours of sleep as long as I meditated for 10 or 12 hours. That all kind of worked out really well.

Okay, then the last question here before you open it up to your questions is, "What is one of the basic essential supplements everyone should take?" So this is predicated on people eating properly, wherever you on that, wherever you are in that spectrum between Paleo and plant-based, and wherever you need to be, you know, for where you're at with your diet and your stress levels, you know, now and what you've done in the past. But in general, I think there's some key things that it's pretty much impossible to get enough of. Actually, I can actually circle it on here because it's one here. And we're assuming you're not horribly stressed. But one thing that I think we're incapable of doing these days is getting enough detoxification support because there's so many environmental toxins. You could eat broccoli all day long, it's just not going to work. So you need to, if not every day, at least sporadically, take something that's going to help your liver out. Just common sense. The other thing is that unless you eat perfectly like a saint, every single meal, decade after decade, you're going to have some level of a little bit of damage to the gut lining, some kind of inflammation in your gut. And you should do something kind for your gut on a pretty regular basis. The best way to do that is with probiotic-containing foods. If that's not realistic, you're not going to make your own sauerkraut and go to that kind of, you know, or buy it because it's really expensive, whatever. Then you should be on some kind of a probiotic, not all the time, but periodically, you know, throughout time. And then on the other side, then the deficiencies that I see in almost everybody that we screen carefully would be for minerals, antioxidants, sometimes B vitamins, often. So minerals like magnesium and zinc, you know, we see deficiencies in minerals with almost everyone that we work with. So that's kind of a, you should cover your base on that, right? So I'm kind of liver support, some kind of GI support, usually some kind of probiotic, and then minerals are almost always deficient.

Alright, so let me, let me the questions that are starting to flow in here, and we'll see which ones I can answer. Wondering about sleep stages and patterns. I think I actually kind of covered that a little bit. I think the main thing was sleep. If you don't want to do the crazy thing, is just to go to bed to as close to 9:00 p.m. as you can. If you can just ratchet things down and go to bed as close to 9:00 p.m., whenever you end up waking up, that I think is a key. Going to bed later than that is going to be problematic for most people. Headaches triggered by light. You know, that's a classic adrenal symptom. You know, it's the inability for the body to close the pupils quickly enough. So you might think about dreaming. There's a really wonderful book, it's called Adrenal Fatigue, and there's a wonderful book about that, and he talks about that in the book. I think the best way to detox. So I just bought, I am infrared sauna, maybe a year and a half ago. I use it every day, 20 to 40 minutes. It's the best thing I've ever bought. It was kind of expensive, it was like three grand. They have cheap ones you can buy on Amazon for a grand, I guess they're probably okay. Seemed a little dicey to buy a really cheap one just because of the EMFs and stuff like that. So I splurged. I've already got my money's worth out of it, you know. I've used it, like I said, everyday, 20 to 40 minutes, sometimes if I'm really obsessive, I'll use it twice a day. I feel so much better every time I get out of that sauna. And I think it's the most efficient way to detox. Just pulls everything out. And, you know, the one that I bought is small, it's a one-person unit, so it's the size of a small telephone booth. I have it stuck in the corner of my meditation room. Doesn't take up a lot of space at all, and doesn't take up a lot of electricity. It's infrared, and I just love the thing. As a matter of fact, as soon as I'm done with this talk, I'll be using it. Pretty much use it every day. Is it fasting safe for various health conditions? So fasting is very difficult. Fasting can be one of the most healing and beneficial things that you can do. But you really need to do it under the supervision of someone who knows how to fast. I, if you want to fast, do not see me as a patient because I'm not the kind of doctor that knows how to fast people appropriately. I just know that it's a super important thing. You want to find someone who's, that's an area of specialty because you can do all kinds of amazing and wonderful things with fasting, and you can cause a lot of damage. So I highly encourage it, but you need to find a doctor. But don't come to me because I don't know how to do it very well. You want to find a doctor, whatever your problem is, that does that specific thing every day.

Okay, questions about insulin assays. What criteria do you use to decide if it was a necessary test? So insulin is sort of a basic lab that, you know, a lot of functional medicine doctors run right away. I have a personal obsession right now in the lab testing world with what's called the ION panel. I can show you guys this quick here, and maybe just pull it up on the website. So about two years ago, I started a training program myself where I'm the student, you know, not the teacher. I also teach doctors in my regular classes, but I started a training program with a man named Richard Lord. So Richard Lord is the doctor that developed organic acids testing, the GI Effects test. He's the scientist behind much of what is used in functional medicine practices now. He had been retired for a while. I dragged him out of retirement, and I work with him now every Monday. And his life's work was basically the ION panel. And so he's been training me on how to use this test appropriately. And I'll just show you what it includes. It's pretty amazing. So a weight, that's going to be hard to read. Let me, um, let me pull one up here. So it stands for, I think, Individualized Optimized Nutrition, or something like that. Let me see if I have a sample one. You think they would have it right on here? Let me see. Sorry, I wasn't. Here we go. A sample report. So this is like the crème de la crème. It's run by Genova Labs. It's called an ION panel. Involves a blood draw and a urine sample. And the test includes amino acids, life's building blocks of life, right? Amino acids. Doesn't get more important than amino acids. And they break them all down. It's pretty cool, just for that part of the test. It's a pretty cool test. It includes homocysteine, important for all kinds of inflammatory cardiovascular type issues. It does a nutrients and toxic elements. So that's the good stuff and the bad stuff. The good stuff being the magnesium and the calcium and the zinc. The bad stuff being the arsenic and cadmium and lead and mercury. Checks all those in whole blood. It looks at CoQ10 levels and a variety of different really powerful antioxidants, including some famous things you may have heard of, like lipid peroxides and whatnot. It looks to see if your DNA is being damaged or not. That's pretty important. You don't want your DNA damaged. Can lead to problems. It checks for vitamin D. And then it has this whole extensive fatty acid section. And I'm not going to pretend to understand this. I basically spend my Mondays going over these labs with Richard Lord because this is really, really complicated. There's so many details involved in this. It is just mind-numbing. But I'm learning how to do it now. And I have a teacher that developed his test. Now, organic acids, I'm really comfortable with. The, when a central component of this test is organic acids, and I do these a lot on my patients, and I'm already pretty good at doing these. So that's looking at fat burning, carb burning, energy production, B vitamin markers, methylation, very important. Most of you've heard of methylation. It checks for neurotransmitters, oxidative damage, and then detox pathways. And then it has a section on GI. So that's a really, really important test. And they give you this kind of summary here about all your different body systems. And, and to respond to that question about insulin, they have a whole section here that's looking at metabolic syndrome. But it's not just looking at insulin as a single marker. It's looking at all the factors that relate to, to metabolic syndrome or syndrome actual problems with blood sugar, everything from the fatty acids to the minerals, etc., etc. So that's kind of my, and it's not even that expensive a test. That Genova, knock price down on this thing. The cash price is like, I think, $500, $600. It's not that much for the amount of information you're getting. It's really a deal.

Next question. Oh, on the very high beta-hydroxybutyrate. Let me show you here. As a matter of fact, I just had that up. So let's go right back there. Where'd my ION panel go? Here it is. So the question that just came in is around hydroxybutyrate. And let me show you where that is on here. So beta-hydroxybutyrate, right here. If that number is extraordinarily high, can mean a couple different things. It can happen if you've cut out carbs. Your carbohydrate. In which case, it's a normal finding. It's not like there's anything wrong. So if you're on a super low starchy carbs diet, low grain, that that'll shoot up. How do we determine what something can and cannot eat? Well, it depends on how sick you are. If you're not sick at all, then I would try to figure out what's the smallest amount of animal protein you need to feel good. And I would figure out what's the smallest amount of animal fat you need to feel good. And then have the rest of your diet coming from proteins from plants, right? Vegetables, fruit. The proteins from plants are known as beans, nuts, and seeds. And believe it or not, there's even protein and potatoes. So there's a fair amount of protein you can get from the animal world, but you can get equally good quality protein from plants. That's where the animals get their protein from in the first place, right? So my question is, if you're already super healthy and you're not fighting some chronic illness, then it's just see what's the smallest amount of animal protein you can get away with. If you're wondering what I do, I do right now is I pretty spread vary strike Whole Foods Plant-Based like Monday through Thursday, sometimes Sunday through Thursday, four or five days a week. I'm really pretty strict. I don't have any animal fat, a very little fat at all, and I have lots of fruits, vegetables, beans, potatoes, grains, all that. And then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is my variable day. Friday and Saturday, I usually have almost always, well, not always, but three quarters of the time, I'll have animal protein.

Okay, let's see. Another question here. Do you have any anti-inflammatory diet recommendations for inflammatory osteoarthritis? I think one of the more powerful things you can do, and you can certainly do it with food. So the anti- you would want to cut out. And again, as I was just saying, you would want to go as much as you can Whole Foods Plant-Based. If the grains make you worse, and the beans make you worse, then you can't do it. You got to flip and you got to go do more of a meat-based app. But I try the plant-based first if you can, because it, the best way to get the anti-inflammatory effect is with, with the plants. But not everybody can digest the plants, right? If your gut is really messed up. So then the other option that it's really potent and totally safe for most people to take is turmeric. That can be a really effective way to get inflammation down in the body. See really amazing things with turmeric and ginger. Those two things. See magnesium oil. I just use regular magnesium in a powder or in a pill. I don't know much about magnesium oil. Some people use liquid magnesium, but I don't know much about it in the oil form. How do you protect your face? We use the sauna. I don't, you know, I do like a skin rub thing where I rub all the skin off everywhere. And I don't know, somehow that works for me. It's a little strange, but it seems to work. And then, is there a relationship between hormone levels, estrogen, testosterone, etc., and cognitive decline? I think the research now, and there's a, there's a man who's really kind of leading the charge. You guys should know about if you don't know about him already. They pull it up here. He's an incredible scientist and physician. His name is Dale Bredesen. And it's really quite a remarkable human being. I've heard him speak many times. And I have no, I know a large handful of doctors that have gone through his training program and really liked it. So I'm here. Is the Bredesen protocol? Dale Bredesen. He's sort of the master of cognitive decline right now. Really understands how this works. And they're getting incredible results working with people. Here's his paper on prionik loops, anti-prions, etc. And they're really focusing on the inflammatory response and how that leads to cognitive decline. And this group of doctors, I know several of them really well. I'm not friends with Dr. Bredesen, but a couple of his senior students are I'm pretty close with. And they're really, really onto something here and getting results that I would have thought were, you know, close to impossible. He's also a very interesting person. And his background is, it's quite remarkable, especially if you're into academics. So he graduated from Caltech. And, you know, my son is a physics major now in college. And we went to visit Caltech. Caltech is a really big deal. Just getting into Caltech, very few human beings can are that smart, right? It's sort of like MIT on steroids, you know. And so clearly he's got, you know, the intelligence level of a very rare human being. And then he's decided, you know, after you guys medical degree and had his more conventional medical career, he decided to really launch into looking at what leads to cognitive decline. So his group is really wonderful. He's also at the Buck Institute, was the head of the Buck Institute, which is a very interesting organization. So you guys don't know about Dr. Bredesen, you should check him out. He's a really smart guy.

We see if there any other questions coming in. Oh, questions about pain. So let me show you my favorite pain solution, and we'll wrap up in a couple minutes. Okay, just got one or two more questions that have come in. So this fellow's a good friend of mine. So if you have musculoskeletal pain, back pain, neck pain, things like this, it's a really wonderful exercise program that's been created called Foundation Training. He's got books, he's got CDs. Let's find Eric on here. Is he not here? To see, should be. Eric Goodman is the creator of this. Where's Eric? Oh, yeah, there he is. That's actually Eric, right there. I think. I don't see him. Money. Let me find him because you got to see a picture of this guy. He's the character. That is not him. That's Thor. Oh, there's Eric. That's Thor. There's Eric, right there. So I love this guy. He's an incredible human being. He's got a lot of his best stuff on YouTube for free. So if you're interested in figuring out how to get out of pain, you know, Eric is the, the least money-oriented human being I've ever met. And he's like, "Yeah, Dan, I just, you know, put everything that's good on YouTube for free. I want people to learn how to do this stuff." So they're very simple exercises, are really easy to perform. They look a little dorky, but they work incredibly well.

Okay, let's see. A couple more questions here. Oh, liver support. Well, I think there's two things you can do for liver support. And this is, this is non-lab based, okay? So non-lab based, meaning that you don't have to do a fancy lab test. If you want to do a fancy lab test, you know, obviously that's my whole job. You can come in, you pay someone like me to do the fancy lab test, and you find out exactly what your liver needs and how messed up it is, and we dial it in perfectly. If you're just doing a generic, "I want to take care of my liver" kind of thing, then there's two tried-and-true things you can use. One's called silymarin, also known as milk thistle. And you can buy it in a liquid form, like in a tincture, combined in the capsule. I think the tinctures are probably better if you can get it. I buy mine at the farmer's market. They just have it right sitting nearby, my little milk thistle thing. Every couple weeks, super, super effective for your liver. And then the other sort of liver powerhouse is N-acetylcysteine, or NAC, some people call it. N-acetylcysteine. How much did you take? I don't know. I would say, you know, around 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day is probably about right. I don't think any harm could come from anyone from taking these two things. They've both been around forever, and they're both can be really supportive for your liver. If you had any side effects from taking them, you just stop right away because something's probably seriously wrong. You need to go see a doctor for sure.

Let's see. Oh, can you talk about soy? So there's nothing more controversial in the food world than soy. You got, if you just say the word soy in a group of integrative medical doctors or integrative physicians or chiropractors or naturopaths, you know, half the room's gonna be running to take the soy and throw it at the other half of the room who's trying to run and get the soy and eat it. Okay? So there are huge advantages and huge disadvantages to soy. The disadvantage to soy, which I think we would all agree with, is if you eat massive amounts of soy, you're gonna have a problem, especially if it's processed soy. It's like soy that's a filler in foods, soy that's a protein powder, soy that's in a protein bar, not so good. If you eat soy in its whole form, as a whole food, either as soybeans or as tofu or tempeh or something like that, then it becomes a question of how much can you eat? If you've never been to a Japanese restaurant, get your miso soup, which is made from soy, right? And and you'll get, um, like a little piece, little piece of tofu, little pieces of tofu in there. They're not eating like tofu burgers in Japan. They're eating small amounts of soy. And for most people, that can be really healthy. It can help prevent all kinds of cancer. It's a really good food. If you're OD'ing on soy, I've seen people OD on soy before and see too much of it, and that can be a pretty big problem.

Okay, is NAC a natural product? I mean, it's a supplement, so it's like chemically derived. If you want to stay with natural, do the silymarin because that's just a plant that they throw in a bottle. Let's see. Another question. Holistic psychiatrists. Yeah, there's a lot of really good holistic psychiatrists out there. I'll just name a few that I know well. And then if these don't work, then perhaps, you know, you could find someone, you know, that they could refer you to. So there's Cat Topes, who is, you couldn't get a better psychiatrist than Cat. There's another close friend of mine, I've known for many, many years, who was equally good. I couldn't even pick between these two. These would be like choosing between Rocky Road ice cream and Butter Pecan ice cream. I just couldn't even choose. These are the best. Carol Baniyas, equally amazing integrative psychiatrist. Carol Baniyas, B-A-N-I-Y-A-S. And K. Cat Topes. Two incredible women and two incredible psychiatrists. They're both really great people as well. Oh, here. So Tracey's asking to go. Oh, and somebody just mentioned Kelly Brogan. Kelly Brogan's awesome.

Let's see. Go back to my chart. Well, we got a lot of files open here. Can I me show you here? I'll talk about this chart for a second since someone's curious about it. So in functional medicine, we're trying to do four different things simultaneously. Trying to figure out the underlying cause, treat physiological damage, fix the body systems, and handle your symptoms, all at the same time. A good functional medicine doctor can move between these in different ways. Okay? So in other words, they can relieve symptoms, but find the underlying cause. And sequencing this is a really difficult and challenging thing. Many times, once you know what the underlying causes, you don't treat it right away. You have to set the person up for success. So you can do that gradually.

Okay, why is it hope so far to find functional medicine docs in the East Coast? Just because everybody that's cool lives in California, Nevada, and Oregon? No, I'm kidding. There's just too many people. There's so many people and there's not enough functional medicine doctors that are trained. But, you know, go to the IFM website and check it out. There's, you know, another thousand functional medicine doctors getting trained and certified, you know, every year. So, you know, that's a doable thing to do to figure out. Go to Institute for Functional Medicine, find a doctor in your area. If you want to work with me, I work with people over the phone, so you can work with me wherever you are. More questions. So one of my favorite doctors, I love this guy. I just love this guy. And I've interviewed him a couple times now. He is just the coolest doctor. And there's a documentary made about him, right? It's called Forks Over Knives. And it's just a wonderful film. It's on Netflix. You can watch it for free on Netflix. Where's Dr. Esselstyn? No, they don't have a picture of Esselstyn in here. He's the most humble man. Let me find him for you. I'm just laughing because he's, he's just like the sweetest guy in the whole world. And he's not a schlep, right? I mean, he was, you know, in practice for decades at the, at the Cleveland Clinic, which is, you know, arguably when probably the top medical facilities in the world. The Mayo Clinic doctors, when I say they're top, but, you know, it's in the top three, anyways. Here he is. He's a wonderful guy. So Caldwell Esselstyn. Easy character. He's a very interesting man. Has got a really interesting history. And so he's, um, in, in Dr. Esselstyn's world, where he works with people who have had a heart attack but survived, he puts people on zero oil diets. So no olive oil, no coconut oil, no fish oil, no, no oil at all. Now, you got to realize, this is a way to treat people who have already had a heart attack and who don't want to drop dead from another heart attack. For a healthy person, you can eat oils, obviously. But if you're interested in the no oils approach, he's the, to look up and read about. And he's got a lot of science behind what he does. Remember, it's just like to the beginning of this conversation, not everybody needs to stop all oils. But if you just almost drop dead of a heart attack and your arteries are blocked, you should seriously consider doing something like Esselstyn's diet. Does that mean that I do that? Absolutely not. You know, I eat oils all the time, and I can get away with it. I don't need oils every day, though. You know, Thursdays, woman, and there's whole days when I go without any fat and I lean out and I feel great, you know, for doing that. So there's different, you know, sort of different versions of this. Anyway, he's a very interesting man. His family's been in New York State since the 1600s. Is that even possible? Yeah, I guess it is. You think about there were people that were coming over from Europe around the 1600s. Very, very interesting doctor. And then just the sweetest guy. And Forks Over Knives is really worth watching too, especially since it's on Netflix. I'm a real Netflix fan.

Okay, I'm gonna wrap it up for tonight. I hope you guys enjoyed the talk. I'm glad everyone joined. I'll be doing something patient-oriented, you know, every month or two, so you can keep a lookout for the next topics coming up. Doing a lot of teaching right now and traveling, so my schedule's a little tight. But I'm gonna hope to join you all in another conversation soon. Okay, have a good rest of your evening. You know, bye for now.