 All right, it's time to ditch the carrots and try these foods for eye health instead and If you feed your gut buddies what they want you could actually improve your eyesight. No joke And we're going to get into the one food you absolutely need to avoid if you want Beautiful eyes that shine first of all nuts Hazelnuts pine nuts walnuts will improve your eye health Why because they contain vitamin E the usable forms of vitamin E a Large study found that vitamin E together with other nutrients can help slow age-related macular degeneration AMD from getting worse The problem with most not all but most vitamin E supplements in multivitamins or even alone actually contained the wrong artificial isomer of vitamin E and What you really want is to get all the different forms of vitamin E which are to cough and all's and toco try and all's and You need to get that from whole foods like nuts again Hazelnuts pine nuts and walnuts are a big three for improving eye health dark leafy greens Why because they contain carotenoids? Lutein and zeaxanthin and you'll see many commercials on TV Advertising these particular compounds to help eye health and To improve macular degeneration or prevent macular degeneration in the first point these plant-based forms of vitamin a will lower your risk of long-term eye diseases including cataracts and AMD next up small fish and chovies mackerel oysters and wild caught salmon why They contain the long chain omega-3 fats EPA and DHA Now retinas the back of our eye that actually allows us to see things need two types of omega-3 fatty acids to work Well both DHA and EPA you can find this in fatty fish and seafood Now omega-3 fats seem to protect your eyes from AMD and from glaucoma Low levels of these fatty acids have been linked to dry eyes The important thing to remember is try to get wild caught seafood Not a day goes by that one of my patients tells me they're eating healthy organic farm-raise seafood folks the definition of farm-raise means that the fish were in a cage and they were fed Organic corn and soybeans the fish weren't followed around to see what they were eating Organically, so if you see the organic even if sounds wonderful like organic salmon from Scotland or organic Nordic salmon or Organic Canadian salmon Don't buy it look for wild caught the easiest way to look for wild caught salmon is by law Alaskan salmon has to be wild caught. That's not true of Canadian salmon is not true of Norway Not true of the Nordic countries. Just look for wild caught Alaskan just the word Alaskan salmon, and you'll be fine Yes, it's only available part of the year. That's okay Stock up during the season which quite frankly is right now and freeze it It'll stay a long time in your freezer to me the easiest way to get these small fishes to buy some sardines If you don't like the skin and bones get boneless skinless They're readily available even at Trader Joe's they're available at Costco And it's an easy way to get these small omega-3 fish into your diet next up dark chocolate dark chocolate greater than 72% cacao has polyphenols that will dramatically improve your eye health Berries contains several compounds that have been shown to improve eye health This was first noted back in World War two When British fighter pilots were actually fed Billberry jam every day to improve their night vision Why billberries billberries contain a lot of polyphenols, but you don't have to go eat billberry jam You can get your polyphenols from berries from particularly Raspberries and blackberries try to eat them in season polyphenols and dark chocolate Polyphenols and coffee polyphenols and tea will also benefit your eye health There was an exciting study published a few years ago by an ophthalmologist Who gave a polyphenol compound product, which I personally use called long jevon X to people with macular degeneration and Published results that macular degeneration improved by taking this Polyphenol product whose main base is resveratrol So there is good science behind the idea that this will support your eye health as well Now a word of warning not a day goes by that. I don't see a commercial on TV or in social media a Testing to various ways to bring out the brightness and whiteness of your eyes Everybody is fixated on getting rid of the redness and eyes and there's a very popular Prescription medication that will do this, but it comes at a price You'll see in my new book got checked that one of the biggest drivers of eye irritation and eye redness is a compound in healthy whole grains called wheat germ agglutinin now I've been Telling you since the plant paradox how dangerous wheat germ agglutinin WGA is for your blood vessels for leaky gut for heart health and brain health But suppose you're not worried about that if you want red eyes Have yourself some whole wheat bread. You will be loaded with wheat germ agglutinin You will make antibodies to it and it turns out that wheat germ agglutinin Sticks to your eyeballs you make an antibody against it and you get red eyes So save yourself a lot of money save yourself some prescriptions Stop eating whole wheat bread Easy way to get rid of the problem Now there are other great tips for eye health that I've talked about in the past First of all buy yourself a pair of blue light blocking glasses to protect your eyes from junk blue light Which is everywhere? Wear them when you're working on a computer Looking at your phone and certainly while watching TV at night now make sure their quality Blue light blocking glasses. There are many imposters out there that block little to no blue light and Look for my recommendations in my books or even online Finally Exercise your eyes. There's great ways to do eye yoga. You can do palming. You can do eye Rolling you should exercise the muscles of your eyeballs There are important muscles that will help you avoid eye strain And you'll notice that if you're staring at something for a long time You will definitely notice your eyesight diminished Take a break roll your eyes Have somebody tell a bad joke and roll your eyes at the bad joke Exercise your eyes Good one spoonful of this support healthy blood sugar All right, what is blood sugar really? Yeah, it's not just a term for diabetics although we hear it on TV all the time blood sugar is what? measured when you get a Fasting glucose in your doctor's office or now with the continuous glucose monitors that are becoming all the rage Glucose really our energy currency. That's what we use to make ATP for the most part Glucose is really important to keep within a very fine range Why because elevated glucose actually is very damaging to the inner lining of our blood vessels And that lining has got a fascinating name called the glyco Kalex glycome and sugar and these are a very fine web of Sugar molecules that protect the lining of our blood vessels. They protect the lining of our blood grain barrier they actually protect the eye surface and Studies have shown that if blood sugar blood glucose goes a little bit high for a little period of time that that glyco Kalex becomes damage and That's becoming increasingly clear why blood sugar? spikes are probably really bad for Heart health for brain health because of the damage to the glyco Kalex All right, so what are some great tricks to support? Healthy blood sugar levels my number one trick is a relatively new sweetener called Allulose now if you've read my most recent book Unlocking the keto code, you know that Allulose is my preferred sweetener of choice Allulose is actually a true rare sugar. It was first discovered in figs It is a true sugar, but unlike sugar table sugar, which is sucrose which is half fructose and half glucose by the way this sugar has no effect on Blood sugar levels. It has no calories and it's the first FDA approved Prebiotic sugar replacement. That's really important. So why is Allulose so cool? You might ask well when it was being developed in a study comparing the effects of consuming Allulose cellulose in a commercial diet and rats with insulin resistance The Allulose group had improved insulin sensitivity after seven weeks insulin sensitivity means that it's easier to sell sugar to your cells and That's what you want for keeping your sugar levels low in another study 30 participants received a 50 gram dose of sucrose or table sugar followed by either a placebo or Allulose the Allulose group experienced significantly lower blood sugar levels after 30 minutes than the placebo group and study after study shows that Allulose blocks the effect of elevated blood sugar even after consuming a cup of coffee Now the great thing about Allulose is that it gives you a sweet taste without spiking your blood sugar and It does it while feeding your gut buddies with prebiotics It's a win-win. In fact, there are some very encouraging studies that's supplementing with Allulose Not to get things sweet, but just supplementing with Allulose can have a dramatic effect on weight loss particularly on losing Abdominal fat and as you know fat in your gut you're out of luck The other thing that's great about Allulose is it tastes very much like pure sugar. There is nothing artificial about Allulose so Put a teaspoon or so in your morning coffee Pour it over some goats or sheep yogurt to get rid of that tangy taste that many of you complain about Put it in your green smoothie Bake with it. It's a great addition to your armamentarium Particularly when we're looking at keeping blood sugars under control now number two Cinnamon now if you needed more excuses to include cinnamon in your diet, this is it Numerous human studies have confirmed that cinnamon can lower fasting blood sugar levels from anywhere to 10 to 30 percent Why well, it's loaded with polyphenols Polyphenols are superb mitochondrial Encouplers and if you've read unlocking the keto code, you know that when we uncouple mitochondria We actually waste calories Waste sugar and that's part of the effect of lowering your blood sugar. So it's a win-win I mean, did you ever wonder why there's a cinnamon shaker in almost every coffee shop and there's actually very good examples of adding cinnamon as You're brewing your coffee to reduce the blood sugar spike that coffee often causes The V&E's are actually famous for doing this V&E's coffee has a considerable amount of cinnamon added to the coffee and that's what makes it a V&E's coffee Now you've been probably told that if you really want to lower your blood sugar One of the best things you can do is Eat whole grains Now I'm here to tell you that that could not be further from the truth Here's why The problem is that most of the grains in whole grain foods have been Finally ground up. In fact, I'll ask my patients go to the store buy a loaf of whole grain bread and Open it up and look at a slice. Do you see any whole Grains in there? Of course not. They've all been ground up. Now the problem with starches starches in general if they're whole are Slowly digested and that would in fact keep blood sugar low But once you grind up these starches into a fine powder literally pulverized they Instantly turn into blood sugar faster than actually Sugar gets into your bloodstream table sugar That's why for instance bread has a glycemic index of 100 While white table sugar has an index of 80 if you wanted to keep your blood sugar low The last thing you want to have is ground up grains Even if they're whole now Why do you hear this so much because the original research was done with rats Who were eating grains whole and Then that was extrapolated to human populations that also ate their grains whole And yes, these people in general had quite nice low blood sugars. And yes, the rats did too But that doesn't mean that when you grind up That whole grain that you're going to have the same result. This is marketing 101 Now finally things could actually get worse Once you grind up a whole grain the fats in that whole grain go rancid very quickly. They rust they smell so companies add antioxidants like BHT to prolong the shelf life These antioxidants are some of the most profound endocrine disruptors there are So the fact that you're taking a whole grain and now pulverizing it you're now adding an endocrine disruptor So you now have a double whammy from increased blood sugar endocrine disruptors And let me add the final nail to the coffin Whole grains contain lectins and for years and years and years since grains have been eaten People have been trying and succeeding in getting the whole out of whole grains Because they've been eliminating the lectins and we should not be fooled This is going to be fun And this is important information that I've been talking about now for my last three books starting with the energy paradox Unlocking the keto code and now gut check and that is the importance of mitochondria Now most of us who had high school biology remember seeing a picture of a cell and in that cell there were these Kind of wiggly squiggly things that almost looked like a radiator That are mitochondria and if you remember we were taught that the mitochondria is the energy powerhouse of the cell and that's absolutely true if you've read any of my recent books You know that mitochondria we think our ancient bacteria that two billion years ago were engulfed by other single cell organisms and Made an exchange that instead of being eaten that the mitochondria that bacteria would take the food that the cell ate and convert it Into the energy currency adenosine triphosphate ATP in exchange for not being eaten And apparently it was a very good deal because almost all advanced life forms of plants and animals use Mitochondria to make ATP but they still retain some characteristics of being engulfed bacteria One of the more fascinating things is that mitochondria have their own DNA Separate from the nucleus of the cell now and what we're going to learn today that's exciting news because normally a cell has to divide to Split all the DNA into two new cells But a mitochondria can divide on its own to make two new mitochondria or from that matter Replace itself with a better newer mitochondria without the cell having to divide and that's really exciting because once we know the stimuli to Allow mitochondria to repair themselves and to divide that opens up all sorts of opportunities for improving our ability to make ATP regardless of the state of the rest of the cell Why is that important? Well, remember back in high school biology We maybe saw one of these guys in a cell or two of these guys in a cell But in fact cells can be packed with mitochondria Thousands of mitochondria even as in a muscle cell for instance Thousands of mitochondria in an important neuron for instance So it's not just a couple of these little guys. These guys are essential for producing ATP and quite frankly the more ATP you produce Out of the foods you eat the better off your muscles are your brain is Your heart is you name it the better Also, my research has shown that you really want the mitochondria In the cells that make up the wall of your gut to be in tip-top shape Because that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of you surviving well for a very long time okay, now If you've read the energy paradox for that matter if you've read unlocking the keto code You know that our modern lifestyle is really good at Mucking up the works with our mitochondria our modern lifestyle and the foods we eat Really damage our mitochondria and our mitochondria when they're damaged One of two things is possible First of all if a mitochondria is damaged beyond repair normally it literally Explodes and it's called apoptosis and that explosion of the mitochondria gets rid of the mitochondria No doubt about it, but in the process of exploding it actually produces Cellular debris that causes you guessed it inflammation So the more damaged mitochondria that you have and the more that they undergo apoptosis The more inflammation there's a second way that mitochondria which are damaged can be taken care of and that's called autophagy better known as Self-eat eat itself now when mitochondria undergo autophagy It's got its own term called Mitophagy or eat your own mitochondria what that literally means is the mitochondria undergoes Recycling rather than exploding and spewing out all the various components of a mitochondria It literally recycles every last bit so that autophagy or Autophagy is Really good for you because not only doesn't it not make inflammation But it also Recycles the components so that you get a fresh new mitochondria So that's what you want to do and if you've actually Read about how we do that we there are numerous mechanisms to improve A mitophagy time-restricted eating is one of the most famous methods of making mitophagy Exercise is one of the other great ways of improving mitophagy But as you'll learn in gut check having the right microbiome and having the right nutrients for the microbiome Maybe another way that we really haven't known about until recently Let's talk about an exciting new compound called urolithin a a little bit of history We have known for a very long time that there is a polyphenol that's present in raspberries in pomegranates in a few other compounds Walnuts for example called egalic acid and egalic acid has been a darling of Us polyphenol experts because we've known from studies that pomegranate extract raspberry extract with egalic acid seems to have some pretty cool health promoting properties and It's been a darling of polyphenol Enter a company called timeline nutrition, which is a Swiss based company this Swiss based company a number of years ago began investigating various polyphenol compounds including egalic acid and looked at the possibility of ice band extension in worms for example in mice for example and Low and behold they found that egalic acid Seemed to be really really interesting in terms of promoting longevity So they doubled down on how egalic acid were and low and behold They found that it really wasn't egalic acid. That was the miracle worker. They found that if you had certain bacteria in your gut That those bacteria would convert egalic acid into the active compound a postbiotic Which is called urolithin a Now what's so exciting about urolithin a is that? when you look at animal studies urolithin a promotes mitophagy that is Recycling damaged mitochondria and making new ones and the process of making new ones is called mitogenesis All right mitophagy Breaking down a damaged mitochondria Mitogenesis then making it into a new one. So needless to say Breaking down damaged mitochondria without doing damage great idea Making new ones an even better idea and so what they found was that urolithin a Was actually the magic ingredient now What's so cool about that is you gotta have the right gut bacteria to make urolithin a and Unfortunately research has now shown That only about 12% of us Have the right combination of gut bacteria that if they're exposed to Let's say pomegranate seeds or pomegranate juice They then will make urolithin a that will then have the actions that we want only 12% That doesn't sound very good Why is that important? Well the important thing is you could eat all the raspberries in the world you could drink Six glasses of pomegranate juice and unless you are one of the lucky 12% You're probably not gonna make the compound that you're looking for Urolithin a what's really fascinating and I talk about in gut check if you look at super old people Who are thriving in their mid to late 90s early 100s? this group of people Have the bacteria that make urolithin a Son of a gun we're learning more and more that it may not be the Compound that we're eating but it's the bacteria that are eating that compound that make all the difference And here's just another connection now that these super old people have bacteria that make urolithin a and That's one of the reasons. They're super old because they're constantly Upgrading their mitochondria through autophagy and mitogenesis so What's really impressive is that we now have science? That shows that this in fact is true not only in animals, but in humans so Might appear is the name the trade name of urolithin a that's made by the Swiss scientists at timeline nutrition and Many of you may have heard that I'm so impressed with urolithin a that I've had their chief scientist on my podcast it's that important and quite frankly, I've been taking this compound since it was introduced and I prescribe it to a large number of my patients particularly with issues in Muscle mass problems in autoimmune problems and in neurologic problems. So let's get into the science a bit All right, so in one study There's a worm that we use in longevity studies called C. Elegans That is set as is stood the test of time in that what we find in this worm study Invariably translates into higher animals including humans So that groundbreaking research often starts with this little worm So it boosted the lifespan urolithin a might appear boosted the lifespan of C. Elegans worms by 45% over worms that didn't get this compound and it increased mouse aerobic performance in other words, how long they could run on a treadmill by 40% versus mice who didn't get it now it turns out that it kick starts my top of G in humans and Human studies now show that you get a impressive boost in muscle strength Just by taking might appear urolithin a regardless of changing a strength training program So that's pretty dog and exciting news once again Yes, you may be you're one of the lucky ones who could drink pomegranate juice or Have a lot of raspberries and make urolithin a but you're probably not in fact There's some studies that suggest you would need six glasses a pomegranate juice per day to even have detectable levels of urolithin a And I can't tell you the sugar content of six glasses of pomegranate juice So imagine how much easier it is to get the benefits of Mitophagy and mitogenesis just from a supplement So in humans within six hours of taking might appear urolithin a is detected in the bloodstream and After a month of use you can actually measure an uptake in mitochondrial activity and These benefits can actually continue to accrue over the next four months now I've been taking this compound and I Attest that I see benefits for myself and my patients one of the things that has been remarkable for me is You know, I'm now in my 70s and as many of you know, I'm an avid hiker and Think nothing of going 10 12 miles in heels on hikes but I noticed over the last few years that my balance on steep rocky slopes both going up and maybe going down was not as good as it was before and I could say I'm just getting old and maybe I should get some hiking sticks, but I could actually, you know Feel that there was something going on Imagine my delight that since taking might appear my balance and stability has returned to my Levels where in my 50s and 60s and the only thing I did differently I didn't get a wobble board. I didn't increase my Pilates was add might appear And so I'm I'm a big believer from a personal standpoint now anecdotes But don't mean anything, but I can tell you that a number of my patients Who I have put on for multiple reasons have noticed a big difference. So It's kind of cool You know, and that's why I'm excited about this compound There's recent evidence that this compound Activates natural killer cells which are really important in not only cancer prevention But cancer treatment and that's actually one of the reasons I started this last patient on it So the the sky is the limit many of us believe that cancer is actually because our mitochondria have kind of Fallen off the grid and are no longer producing the way they should and if you like this theory which I do getting mitochondria back on the grid back operating back Producing energy may be a very effective way of preventing cancer and maybe even treating cancer So again when your mitochondria go you go when your mitochondria in your brain goes Your brain goes when your mitochondria in your muscles go your heart is a muscle go That's what goes so any compound that now has a proven ability to clean up damage mitochondria and Make new ones and actually improve Muscle mass and performance. That's something well worth My interest and your interest and that's why I personally am such a fan of Urolithin a and The company timeline nutrition and that's why I wanted to tell you more about why this compound is is worthy of your interest Thanks so much for watching this episode, but don't go anywhere. I think you're gonna love this next one