 Now, before you think you should chew on ginseng roots or goji berries or have green smoothies every day, you guys might be surprised that most of the centenarians that live a long life aren't doing any of these things, that you see people in LA do, thinking they're being healthy. Now, in my mind, there are two real ways you can look at longevity in people and what you should actually be doing. One is you can look at statistical correlations, right? If people who eat McDonald's five times a day are 50 pounds overweight and they're more likely to die of a stroke, then, you know, probably there's something going on that we're at McDonald's. Or, you can look at people in these sort of populations and you can say, wow, people in Okinawa live a really long time and they don't have a lot of the health issues that other people have. Now, why is that? Now, in this video, I wanna share some dietary practices, not only from East Asia, but also from traditional Chinese medicine and how it can help you live a long life. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hain, board licensed acupuncturist and doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book, Master of the Day. So, let's jump in. Now, several times so far, I've been back to China and back to East Asia to learn from people really in the monastic tradition, monks and mystics and doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, because from my observation, this is really the original medicine focused on longevity. Why do people live a long life and why don't they live a long life? And what can we actually do on a day-to-day basis to make sure that people are doing the right things? Because when you go to a traditional doctor, they don't really give you much health advice and really, when you look at the medical school curriculum, it's not focused on health and longevity. There's really no principles for living well besides just eat right and exercise, but a lot of it is focused on diseases and medications and treatments for those diseases. So, what do we actually do though on our day-to-day rituals and routines to actually live a healthier life and live a longer life? You know, for example, when we talk about the blue zones, these zones of the world that were named by a guy named Dan Butener, who worked for National Geographic, he noticed that there are certain pockets where people live to be a hundred in very unusual densities. So, a high percentage or higher percentage. And on top of that, they avoid most of the illnesses that people have today, much lower rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke. They're happy. There's a lot of purpose and meaning. And he found that very fascinating. And so he wrote a series of books on this exact topic. Now, one of the things he points out, for example, is that like in Okinawa in Japan, they have this purple yam, this sweet potato that's very, very high in vitamin A and C. Certain countries eat lots of berries, like for example, blueberries, which are very, very high in something called anthocyanins. And in other places, they have, for example, olive oil. Monounsaturated fats are great for lowering the bad LDL cholesterol. It's so widely consumed all over Greece and Italy and Western Europe. And on top of that, they're really interesting studies showing that regular consumption of olive oil can cut your risk of diabetes by about 40% and decreases by about 20%. Your risk of lots of kinds of cardiovascular diseases. So there are sometimes the foods that have potential benefits and are protective in some ways. But I wanna focus on the meta high level principles. What are the big principles? As opposed to me saying, eat goji berries every day, eat ginseng root every day, or drink ginseng tea. What are the high level principles that really make the big difference? Now, four of those specific principles in general, I've actually focused on in a free guide I've put together, four daily rituals that could potentially help you address your life with traditional Chinese medicine. It's the first link right below this video, you guys. And it's something that focuses a lot on lifestyle advice as opposed to dietary advice. But let's jump back in here and I wanna point out the very first meta principle that I think really will make a difference. Now in terms of traditional Chinese medicine dietetics, you know, one of the things I talked about in that free guide that I just pointed out below the video is that traditional Chinese medicine and East Asian philosophy is based on yin and yang. Now yin and yang, you may have an idea of what they are, but in general, it is the relative balance between all things. For example, work and rest are yin and yang, but some people may need to work more and some people may need to rest more. So if you're working eight hours a day and it's not very demanding, you may not need as much rest in your free time. But if you're working 15 hours a day and it's very demanding and you're very exhausted, you may need more yin time to rest. You may need more hours of sleep, like if you're an Olympic athlete training six hours a day, they sleep 10 or more hours per day just to be able to recover from those workouts themselves, which is fascinating. So the more yang output goes up, the more yin rest must go up as well. But these relative principles apply obviously to the way you live and to your diet. You know, the number one cause of death today for people in the US is food. It's not like some weird thing. It's food. It's how much we're eating and what we're eating. The very first principle in yin and yang when it comes to practical longevity is how much we're eating, right? You know, in Japan in one of the blue zones, they have this saying, it's something like Harihachi Buu, which means eating until like three quarters full. So always leaving a little bit of room there. And this principle is very interesting because it falls into the realm of advice that's very boring and very obvious, but it's really very hard to do. It's not easy to do that. And that is yin and yang in action. One of the main things we know is for example, it's almost like one of my mentors described fatty liver, a condition you see people coming in with all the time these days. And even they're children that have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from drinking soda, for example, which is baffling to me. Fatty liver is like the garbage from what we call the middle burner, the digestive system. So if I'm consistently overeating or eating garbage foods, then you can conceptualize it as my body's putting garbage in the liver. Now the second level though is what we call warming or cooling. In traditional Chinese medicine dietetics, it's not just this food has antioxidants, therefore you should consume it until you die. Foods have a cooling or warming nature. So for example, very cold would be like let's say celery juice. Very warming would be let's say ginger juice or eating ginger or peppers. Now each of these, you could say, well science says that celery juice has this compound that's very beneficial or peppers have this compound, this antioxidant that's very beneficial. But one person with acid reflux eats a lot of peppers and they are on fire for hours. One person who's prone to bloating and diarrhea drinks celery juice, they get bloating and they get crazy diarrhea and crap. Should these people continue to eat these two foods when their body is clearly saying nope, not a fan, they shouldn't, no. Or they shouldn't in large quantities. I'll give you an example here of two common diagnoses that we see. Acid reflux and let's say SIBO. So acid reflux is very commonly with people, there's changes in pancreatic enzyme production, there's changes in stomach acid, a large percentage have low stomach acid, not high stomach acid. And SIBO, you know people have issues with their microbiome, they have issues with leaky gut, they have issues with too much bad bacteria, not enough good bacteria. They may have issues with bloating, with irregular bowels. Now where do these fall in the TCM spectrum? SIBO is what we call very often deficiency cold and acid reflux is what we often call stomach heat. So when you throw what we call stomach heat, a bunch of peppers, a bunch of coffee, a bunch of red wine, and then when you throw what we call spleen deficiency with cold, you throw a bunch of the coldest substance you can find which is pulverized celery juice. You're gonna see an exacerbation of those symptoms that is pathological, it is illness producing. Symptoms are the little canaries in the coal mine that the breadcrumbs trying to show you, stop doing it. But people will come in and say, Dr. Alex, I don't understand, you know, someone, the medical medium, some doctor, some YouTuber, an Instagram video, said I should do celery juice. And this is where we run into this conundrum. But warming and cooling diet, a lot of people with acid reflux need to eat a more balanced diet. More cooling foods like more sauteed vegetables, more green tea instead of coffee, and less alcohol, smoking, and heavy coffee consumption can really worsen that as well. And really a more Mediterranean diet, whole grains, brown rice, cooked veggies, that kind of thing. And on the other side, those people need to deal with a more warming diet. So they will do better with like more meats, more stimulating spices, that can help sieve out quite a lot. They're also antibacterial and antifungal. And in general, they need to be eating warm meals, physically warm, temperature warm. Have cooked warm meals, not cold sandwiches, not smoothies, which is very common. These are the temperature, or sometimes what people call the energetic quality of food. But this is very important in TCM dietetics, and it is dead on clinically. Now, if you guys didn't know, I do see a limited number of new patients in my private practice every single month in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine. And if you guys want, you can reach out to my clinic. You can either call us or email us down there below if you wanted to book a visit with me and discuss these kinds of things more. Now, the final TCM principle is what we call flavor and nature. The nature is what we just discussed. Nature is like the temperature. Is it very cooling? Like you don't want to eat spices on a really hot and muggy day, even though they do that in India and Southeast Asia. You don't crave that. You want to drink watermelon juice, right? Or eat fruit, fresh fruit, cold fruit. And when it's cold, you probably don't want to sit there and eat a cold sandwich or like a, you know, gazpacho, like cold soup. You want to have something warm that feels good. So when we come to flavor, ancient traditional Chinese medicine doctors noted that certain flavors have an effect on certain organs. And also certain organs have a certain preference for certain flavors. And when organs are diseased, certain flavors can harm them. So let's say sweet is associated with the spleen dash pancreas. Now, can you imagine what the number one issue today is around sweet foods and flavors? Diabetes, right? So we say the spleen craves sweetness. And for people who are diabetics, they need to be very careful with the flavor itself of sweet. You know, we're talking sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy. The sweet foods in general includes carbs and sugars. Those are the ones that are the most damaging to people with impaired spleen pancreas function from a TCM point of view. The number one condition being diabetes. So being very careful of the flavors you eat. Now on the other side, you have people with flavors that will benefit functionings of certain organs. So for example, when we talk about acid reflux, let's talk about the flavor of bitter. A lot of people don't like bitter flavors because it doesn't taste very good, but it's very, very medicinal. For example, we have wangchin, scutillaria, or jishu, which is unripe orange peel. These are very, very potent for treating the functional root of acid reflux and indigestion. And they are very bitter herbs. You drink that formula, it tastes very, very bitter. And what those bitter herbs do, they often are very high in berberine, which has a very profound effect on blood sugar and all kinds of issues, but the bitter herbs have a strong effect on the liver and gallbladder function. So bitters are very good for people who get indigestion of a certain kind and who have functional gallbladder or functional liver issues. For example, they've done studies showing that you can actually give rats a formula, high in jishu, unripe orange peel, and they can actually prevent the development of fatty liver, even with a bad diet. Pretty crazy, but bitter in this case is what benefits this certain kind of organ, right? This pathology, we should say. It's like in Europe, you know, they're very fond of drinking bitters after a big meal, coffees are bitter, there's all kinds of different bitters in Europe, but drinking bitters as a digestif is a common cultural practice for very, very long time, and there's a real scientific benefit to that. Now, some of these daily practices and rituals like dietetics are featured inside this new online program I've launched called Introduction to Healing with Traditional Chinese Medicine. We go through some of the dietetics principles and some of the organs that are related and correlated, like for example, the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, as well as other healing practices, herbal formulas, breath work and energy healing practices and we also have a pretty good community of people in there sharing a bit about what they're working on and what's been helping them. So if you guys want, you can check out this new online program I've launched. It's the first link pinned below this video and it's also in the description. Check it out if it resonates, and if not, I also have another related video I want you to watch right here before you go, so check it out.