 What you talk a lot about heavy metals and I think we ought to talk about that because just this week another study found that almost all of our baby foods are Poisoning our kids with heavy metals. You know you want to talk about heavy metals for our listeners and why that's so important It's funny because people hear heavy metal like it said they think it's music or they sort of have this idea Maybe mercury or lead or something, but it's just out there and I haven't been exposed But if anyone listening to your show right now where to get tested They are not going to have zero levels and yet over the last 20 or so years the Environmental Protection Agency says oh the safe level of mold was 20 parts of billion on sorry we meant 10 I mean we meant 5 and now the statement is there is no safe level of lead and even a small increase in lead Increases your cardiovascular disease risk very meaningfully it lowers IQs and kids and it's synergistic This is the bad thing about toxins if you have lead and mercury or lead and cadmium or lead and thallium or nickel or tin All of these things you might have a safe level But not zero of this one and a safe level this one But together the interfere with cellular biology to the point that it creates inflammation and inflammation is at the root of pretty much Every bad thing that happens starting with pre diabetes then diabetes Which blows up your risk of all of the other what I call in superhuman the four killers and you're very well familiar with this You know what's gonna kill the average person who hasn't read one of your books who doesn't do the basic stuff It's pretty much going to be diabetes Cardiovascular disease cancer or Alzheimer's like those are the big ones or you know car accident or something But that's so much lower likelihood Yeah, and so what Help us out. How can we limit our exposure to this and I know the number one thing you're gonna tell us is don't eat kale You know kale just tastes bad anyway, so we shouldn't eat kale just because it wants to live to 180 years If you have to eat kale every day, it's probably not a good trade-off. All right The number one thing wouldn't be don't eat kale, but And you've explored this and there are plant toxins And you're one of the major voices out there 100% accurate and one of the plant toxins aside from lectins is Oxalic acid which is not a heavy metal, but it's a toxin in kale. It turns out though There was one plant that is better than any other plant so far discovered that pulls thallium Which is a toxic heavy metal out of the environment and it is kale so people who eat a lot of kale in addition to kidney stones and gout and And vulvodenia and maybe other forms of inflammation from tiny crystals floating throughout your body they actually can have elevated thallium levels and Thallium is called the poisoners poison and it's not something that we really had a problem with in our environment Except when we figured out lead was bad for us. We pulled lead out of our gasoline Hallelujah, except they replaced it with thallium, which is a thousand times more toxic than lead It's just less famous. So I'm not saying don't eat kale But I am saying if you're going to live on kale, it's probably not going to help you So if you love it cook it dump the water and eat it a couple times a week And it's just fine if you tolerate that well But if you're thinking you know the kale salad three times a week is going to save your life It can increase your thallium levels functional medicine doctors who do testing regularly do see elevated thallium in kale lovers but the big smoking gun here is clearly Lead paint chips if you eat guacamole with those that's not how to do it. Okay, maybe that's not it it's it's fish and The reason for this is that we've been burning coal for a long time especially this so-called dirty coal and it goes up into the air and it rains down into the oceans and then It goes into the food chain at the very bottom of the food chain and then in the small fish Accumulate a little bit and then a big fish eats them and accumulates a little bit and a big fish eats them And these are things in us. We're the same way it goes into our tissues and it stays there So your job if you want to live to at least 180 which is my point in superhuman It might be possible. In fact, I think given some advances that are coming our way and thanks to pioneering work It including frankly robotic surgery is getting to that There's all kinds of cool tech coming in that's gonna make humans live longer and longer And we're just the beginning of a renaissance of this anti-aging technology space but if you were to go in and expose yourself to a 180 years of eating fish that have eaten fish that have eaten fish that being fish You're going to be 20% mercury by body weight not really But you're gonna have enough of it that you will not have a brain that works You will have Alzheimer's disease and probably cancer. So should you not eat fish? Well, you got no omega-3s So what do you want to do about that? You only eat fish that didn't eat that many other fish sockeye salmon Sardines anchovies small fish and when you do eat fish in the book I talk about some things you can take that will stick to the mercury in the fish in your gut So you can poop it out instead of having it go into your brain and maybe eventually pulling it out So there's a you know if you're gonna enjoy some fish You might even have some sushi But when you do you can do some preventative stuff with it and it you don't order the swordfish You don't order the shark. You don't order the big tuna Although frankly, I had a piece of tuna the other day I put it on Instagram and I had a big handful of chlorella Which is a fractured cell wall algae and the reason I know that chlorella works in addition to the studies that show it binds is That years ago I had a very advanced yoga practice and if I ate sushi that day If I or the next day if I tried to stand when a one-legged pose with my eyes closed I would tip over but if I had chlorella, I wouldn't tip over and it was very repeatable It's like the change in your practice the subtle changes at the edges of your capabilities That's where these toxins hit you. They're sneaky But they also take years off your life and they take we'll say life off your years Because if you end up with Parkinson's or MS or any of these other things associated with toxins all cybers in particular and Your quality life just went down whether or not you got more years It doesn't matter that much because you can't remember the last ones anyway. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, I've been interesting the the two biggest defenders for Mercury in in my practice are dentists and sushi eaters and because they you know, they like the fatty tuna and You know shishimi shishimi grade tuna and I've used chlorella now for 20 years And there's not a person that I can't get their mercury levels down using chlorella and activated charcoal I think you're right. I I take chlorella every day And I think everybody should But it's a great way to bind mercury. It really is Dr. Country, I just hats off You're you're a surgeon. You're you're a very well credentialed Western doctor And you've been doing this for 20 years and anyone who looks at you just look at your skin Look at your body. Look at the sharpness of your brain and you are doing something different than average and you have been for longer and This is the the point that I really wanted to get across in Superhuman is that look You're not gonna look 20 years younger tomorrow But if you just take less cuts if aging is death by a thousand cuts Take less cuts make them less deep and instead of just slapping band-aids on them heal them better than mother nature intended So you're still gonna take cuts You might have some sushi and love it, but you took your chlorella So you'll balance it out and maybe you got a little bit of mercury, but you can deal with that So it's just you don't slap yourself in the face over and over but you can still have a fun life And so my horror movie is the caloric restriction people the guys who say I'm gonna eat one third less calories than my body Really needs because I think it's gonna make me live longer. I'm cold all the time and I'm real thin I've got you know vegan sized pants because I have no calves left and and I'm really grouchy Exactly, it's it's not worth it. We don't have to do that to live longer You're supposed to be just radiating energy and and you do every time I've ever talked with you in person or on there You're like you're you're living it. This is what it's supposed to be like and and that that's something that metals will take away Yeah, no great point. So speaking of living longer the right way you focus on mitochondria a lot in your new book as I have What's so special about mitochondria? What what are these little guys? mitochondria are We like to call them the power plants and ourselves and this is that every every author every newscaster has said that but they are way more than that in my view of them after having written out one full book on mitochondria in the brain and then Superhuman focusing them as a major part of aging. These are Also the batteries to a certain extent that they're they're storing a certain amount of energy in them that they're recycling very quickly But they also sense the environment around you and then make decisions on how much energy or other chemicals mitochondria actually can manufacture things like neurotransmitters and hormones and They're embedded inside your cells anywhere from a few dozen at the very low end up to 10 or 15,000 mitochondria in some cells and women you can have a hundred thousand mitochondria in the cells in the ovaries because they have to send the environment the most to pick the right egg and to provide all that energy and They're amazing. They move they move themselves around inside the body They shut a little energy production things back and forth and we just found out in a study that came out two weeks ago Something that is a thesis for superhuman, but we didn't have a study for it yet Which was that when your mitochondria work better? They provide enough energy to the nucleolus which is a part of the cell and that is responsible for your DNA repair In other words if your mitochondria can make the amount of energy They're supposed to you know air plus food equals energy that energy will go into DNA repair And if they're bad at taking food in air and making energy that means pre-diabetic means toxic metals It means bull toxins. It means any metabolic dysregulation any inflammation Then you don't have enough energy to repair your proteins and another study was published today That came out that said you know what it turns out that errors in protein folding are an Unacknowledged cause of aging and always theorized it, but some people proved it You probably saw the study today too and so what's going on here is hey What if your power was better? What if you were better at taking food and air and making energy you'd have more energy right now? even if you're 25 even if you're 105 and You are not going to decline the way you think you will and you get the benefits of more energy now It's kind of a good deal Alright, so okay, so we need to have our mitochondria happy and working so Listening to this podcast is there anything our listeners can do right now to make their mitochondria happy One of the things you can do that is very low-cost is you can sleep effectively tonight Because the mitochondria there's a quadrillion of them or so sprinkled around in your body and they all have to coordinate themselves think of it like a Tesla these cars have Thousands actually of little laptop batteries underneath the car and they all have to work in unison well You're the same way. So what is the timing system? It turns out there's a part of the brain called the SCN That is the major timing system for your mitochondria and if they all know that it's daytime Then they'll all make energy and if they all know that it's nighttime They'll go into repair and reset mode But if some of them think it's daytime some of them think it's nighttime You're gonna be all over the place both mentally Hormonally Metabolically and it doesn't work. So what do you do to fix that? Turns out it's all about light exposure at night And to a certain extent it's about food exposure. So tonight Instead of staring at your bright screen turn your TV screen down put on some sunglasses You might notice I'm wearing glasses I started a company called true dark that makes glasses specifically for sleep But you don't have to do that. Make sure you have the darkest curtains you can get Most people don't know this the amount of street light that leaks around normal curtains a very small amount of light Increases depression by 63% at least it did in a study in Japan of 800 adults So make sure that your curtains aren't leaking light if you have to have bulk around the edges That's okay unplug the LEDs tape them over and Sleep in a pitch black room and you're gonna wake up even if you still got your normal six hours seven hours eight hours However much it is your quality of sleep will be better and in superhuman I write about how old people sleep versus how young people sleep and I post my scores I get more deep sleep and REM sleep than the average 20-year-old gets in eight hours And I'm getting it in six and a half hours Why why measure it with my ring and I black out my room if you got your ring on too So this doesn't cost much to sleep in darkness, but man it will change your mitochondria You'll wake up tomorrow with more energy and a better regulated system The other thing you can do right now as you could say tomorrow morning. I am going to skip breakfast You will not go into starvation mode. You will not die You might get hangry you might get hyperlibitchy and if either of those happens Then that means that your metabolism really needed you to do that And you should the next day have a nice breakfast no carbs no sugar and the day after that try it again See what you're doing is you're building metabolic flexibility and you're doing something called intermittent fasting Which is a very powerful technique for fixing all kinds of metabolic problems So let's see you slept better by turning off the lights and dimming the lights and you skipped breakfast And you can do black coffee you can do tea you do bulletproof coffee if you want the extra energy from that But no sugar no protein not even collagen protein And when you do that you're going to see changes. No, I think that's great advice Skipping breakfast. I think people say well, gosh, I'm gonna crash Well, if you crash skipping breakfast like you say that's a warning sign that holy Macro you have no metabolic flexibility