 you realize that working out with that level of intensity a couple times a week and then sleeping or meditating with the same level of intensity the other days will get you better results. It makes people mad to hear that. Tell me how you went from a computer biohacker to hacking the human body or what you call, are you ready for this meat OS? All right, I was a genuine 300 pound computer hacker. I'm kind of like the guy in Jurassic Park the first time in Pizza Jolt Cola. But I knew that I needed to lose the weight. So I decided to go to the gym because I learned working hard gets results and I knew I could do that. So 90 minutes a day, six days a week, half weights, half cardio for 18 months. So you think after that I was seen a wall of muscle. I still had a 46 inch waist. I still weighed 300 pounds, but I can max out all but two of the machine. So I thought to myself clearly, even though I've been on a low calorie, a low fat semi vegetarian diet, it's because I'm eating too much lettuce. It's a moral failing is from not trying hard enough. I wasn't working hard enough because hard work gets results. But if you think about it, how many people do you know who worked hard their whole life and don't get results? It turns out it's a lot of people. So maybe we've been programmed to believe that if we work hard, we get results. That's done. The way it really works is when you have the right tools and knowledge, a small amount of work and gets great results. But we miss all of this because our bodies, what I call the meat operating system, you and I are made out of meat. So if our operating system is trying to make us lazy, and our brain is trying to make us exercise, then we feel guilty about the fact that we have a body that does what it's supposed to do. We end up having guilt and shame that hold us back from getting results. So once I released myself from this idea that I have to work hard, I just have to do the right things. I built a $100 million company and five New York Times bestsellers and hundreds of millions of podcast downloads. But it wasn't because I worked hard. It was because I got the right people, I got the right tools, and the same thing for my health. I'm 8.1% body fire right now just measured it at upgrade labs. And I'm never hungry. And I actually got too lean doing this stuff and smarter and harder. But it did take me 20 minutes a week of exercise. I just didn't have to sweat though. I kind of felt like I wasted some time there, but it was enough. Well, you know, your story is remarkably like mine. You know, I was a world famous heart surgeon, but I was obese. I topped all at 228,000, nothing like you, but big boy. And yet I was running 30 miles a week. I was going to the gym one hour every day. I was doing 5K, 10Ks, half marathons on the weekends. And I was having a low fat vegetarian diet because that's what, you know, heart surgeons do. And I kept gaining more weight. It makes you so angry. Like, what else can I do, right? I think a lot of people listening have done the same thing. Like I did what they told me. I didn't get results. It must be me. No, you have the wrong advice is the problem. Yeah. And, you know, I'd talk with my colleagues in cardiology and all and they say, oh, you can't fight your genes. You inherited this from your father. You poor guy. And you know, here have some statins, you're pre-diabetic, you know, let's get you on metformin, et cetera. And you're hypertensive, let's get you on high blood pressure medicines. And you got arthritis. Let's make sure you're taking your celibrex. And it's like they're going here, you can't, you can't fix this. And then of course, I met Big Ed, who changed my life. And you figured out that you're doing it all wrong. Why do you think this is so persuasive or evasive in our society that this is somehow our fault that if we'd only work harder, exercise more, eat less, that this is all our fault. Here's why. It's because the idea that we want to save energy in our bodies, it's been so present for all life forms on earth, that humans with our smart brains very slow but very smart compared to how fast our bodies are, we realized that that was holding us back. So we teach ourselves and we have for years, even the Puritans who founded America were really into this stuff. So we shame children for being lazy. Instead of saying, you know, it's healthy and normal that you don't want to do that. The reason you're going to choose to do it anyway is this. Instead, how dare you feel that so you get it from your coaches, you get it from your church, you get it from your parents, you get it from your teachers, you get it from your bosses when you're working at a fast food joint or whatever. Don't be lazy. So lazy equals shame. Shame equals you will be removed from society and the tigers will eat you. No, we know that's not true, but your body is dumb and it actually feels that shame hurts. So the idea is I'm not working hard enough. That's right up there with I am not enough in terms of what people really worry about when they're going to sleep at night. It's just it's it's being unkind to ourselves when you realize the reason we have technology, the reason we have cars is because we're lazy. Someone didn't want to walk. So he said, I'll ride a horse and he said, I don't want to shovel the poop. I'll build a car and I don't want to drive. I'll get in your plane and then that's not enough. Let's go to Mars. This is from laziness. It's it's a good thing. So when I'm working with my teenagers or something, totally, totally okay that you don't want to do it. Do it anyway. But that's not a shame thing. But we just have so much of this, like we almost don't want to look at it. And what the meat operating system does in the body is for about a third of a second before your brain gets any signal of reality, it's messing with what you can see. And there's a neuroscience measure you probably came across called P 300 D. And this is a measure that gets longer as you age. But it's when I do this, clap my hands. Well, you and I see it right away. Maybe there's a speed of sound going to your ears. No, there's a speed of sound going to yours. Then there's a third of a second. And then your brain gets the first signal there was a sound and then you think about it. Your body takes that third of a second to decide if the sound was worth showing you. It's doing that all the time in the world around you. And it also influences what you see. It's the one that makes the couch look so sexy. And the gym looks so just gnarly and unattractive. And then instead of going and laughing at the fact that our bodies do that, we go into this loop of oh my gosh, something's wrong with me because I didn't want to do the hard thing. No, you didn't. So don't do the hard thing. Do the smarter not harder thing. And the way you motivate yourself is just recognize since my body loves being lazy, let's do it marketing companies do to us. I have a family member, maybe it goes to the mall and comes back with a purse or a pair of shoes and says, look, I saved $250 on these or whatever it was. Yeah. Okay. How many times do you hear I spent $400 on it? Never, never. It's because the savings of energy feels much bigger than it is. And we know this is why you get a coupon and you'll go do all these crazy things for coupons that aren't worth very much because they feel big. So the way you motivate yourself is you pick one of the hacks from smarter not harder that aligns with your top goal. And then instead of telling yourself, I'm going to do this hard thing, you say, I'm going to go save 45 minutes on cardio. And then your meat operating system says, I'm going to save. Yes. And you feed your laziness as a carrot to motivate you. And it's so much less work that way. And all of a sudden getting your cardio is a lot like brushing your teeth. And you don't have to sweat anyway, because you have the right tools and you have the right motivation. How do you go about rating this cycle that's been put in our ads or we put it in our ads? Actually, let me bring up a great example way back when when the jogging craze came out. They interviewed the Kalahari Bushmen who are now called the Aikong, great long distance walkers. And they said, hey, you know, what do you think about running 26.2 miles? And they go, oh, why would anybody do that? You wouldn't chase an animal that long because it wouldn't be worth it. And an animal wouldn't chase you that far because he would have caught you and killed you long before that. And you're right. Our, you know, our biologic design is exactly the opposite of what we've been convinced. And I always point to my dogs. Yeah, my dogs want to go for a two to three, you know, mile walk, run, whatever, skip. But they spend the rest of the day sleeping. And you look at lions, they basically sleep, except when they need to catch something. And yet that programming somehow hasn't worked for us, or at least in our teach. It hasn't, especially in the West, you know, we don't take a siesta here. And it's because I think the industrial companies when we're starting the eight hour workday, five days a week, when we were putting kids in school, so that they would be good factory workers. Laziness was bad for profits. And so it just got built into the way the way we think of it is like that is so shameful. How dare you recover. But what the research shows in smarter, not harder is that if you really want to transform, you listen to the Bushman, because what they're talking about, there's what the body sees. So given that your body doesn't have a brain, your body makes a decision a third of a second before your brain does. So it has its own distributed intelligence, but it's very fast and very dumb. So it's trying to figure out from vibration, heat, stress levels, how much you're breathing, what's going on in the world around me. It's like this cloud of bacteria embedded in yourselves, try to figure out what the p3 dish is doing. So if you were to, and I'll take the example of cardio that I talk about in smarter dot harder, if you were to say, be hunted by a lion, just like they were talking about, you'd sprint like crazy, and you'd burn everything out as fast as you could. And if you get away, then you take a deep breath, go, wow, that sucked. But I'm okay. Like I think I'll eat a liver or whatever you would do. Right. What we do in a cardio class, all based on that 1970s born to run guy is we say, well, working hard is going to get results. So I'm going to go for a 45 minute class. And there's going to be someone in spandex sweating all over in the front playing annoying music and yelling at me. And then I will use shame because if everyone sees that I'm not standing up on the pedals when they are, then I'll feel weak. So I'll use shame to motivate me. And then you sweat and you push and you do it and I'm a good person five days a week. And there's three studies now showing that if you do that, five days, five hours plus showers and washing spandex and whatever else you're into, wow, you should improve a lot. You'll get a 2% improvement after two months of doing that. If you do what I'm talking about, you'll do five minutes three times a week, you will not sweat. And it's not even hard for most of that five minutes. 12% improvement, six times better results from being lazy and having the right signal than just working hard. So like, you know, you were you were doing excessive amounts of cardio, I was doing it too, because we were told it worked. And we were told if we didn't do it, we were lazy. And I am lazy 100%. I'm lazy because I wanted to give results on less time. And that's okay. That seems appropriate. That's always to do. And that's just one of the chapters. That's the cardio chapter in the book. Right. All right. So cardio is is holding us back. Actually, let me bring up another example. I've got a good friend, he and his partner moved to Portugal a couple years ago. And long story short, he just works out like a maniac, mostly mostly cardio, but a lot of weights. And this guy wrote me actually texted me a couple weeks ago. And he says, you know, I'm so fit, I, you know, look at my muscles, you've seen me. But I am exhausted. I am so tired. And he says, I can't get past being tired. And I said, okay, let's review what you're up to. Well, of course, he does this every day. And he never takes a break. And I go, now that I know this, this is really easy to fix, you know, stop that. Stop punching yourself in the face. Yeah. So yeah, what is that? What? I mean, we absolutely have to have recovery period, right? We do. In fact, what the data shows is that if you rapidly bring a stress on like that lion hunting you, but and then you rapidly return to baseline. And this is a new principle that I'm proposing in the book, I called slope of the curve biology. It's not the amount of work we do. It's how fast we turn it on and how fast we turn it off. And this is based on work we're doing at upgrade labs, and it's a franchise now opening across the country. So you have biohacking with artificial intelligence driven workouts, so that you don't have to work very hard. But it's when you return to baseline, and you have adequate nutrients, I mean, your gut has to be healthy. I mean, you have to be eating the right stuff. The body says, Well, there's no famine. The thread is gone. But there might be another one. Let me just upgrade. And it's very simple. But if instead you say, Well, the tiger didn't catch me. But now the lady in the spin classes on me. So now I got to run at 50%. Now I'm going to do another hill. And you just send yourself a signal, I'm being hunted. And your friend is getting I'm being hunted every day. And the part of me that admires grit and toughness and our ability to overcome our inherent believed limit limitations. I respect that. And showing yourself you can do it is one thing doing it every day, because you believe it's going to work. That's not healthy. And I see so many people in this kind of shape where they're exhausted like I was when I did it, and probably like you were too. And you realize that working out with that level of intensity a couple times a week, and then sleeping or meditating with the same level of intensity the other days will get you better results. It makes people mad to hear that. But that's what the data shows. And that's what you show. You're at a healthy weight. That's what I show. And the amount of work to do it is so much less like it's very freeing to have this. I just go back to if I had an hour I was going to work out. And now I did my cardio in five minutes. And then I did my muscles in 10 minutes or less. And you can do this with AI driven feedback, or there's a bunch of technologies that work better than our main technology picking up rocks. And we've gone very far as humans because we concentrate the rocks in the middle plates and pick those up. They work better because they're heavier rocks. But maybe there's another way to get a signal to the body to grow muscle. And in the book I go through here's all the things that grow muscle faster than picking up rocks. You can still pick up rocks. In fact, you'll do a better job of picking them up. And I talk about things like blood flow restriction, electrical stimulation, or even just resistance bands. Why does they work better than picking up rocks, at least better on a per minute of adding muscle. And the reason that they work better there is that the body is expecting one signal from gravity. And it gets a different signal and says, I guess I should adapt. And it's driving adaptation, getting the signal in, then showing safety and showing adequate minerals, adequate nutrition, when suddenly, oh, that works really well. Everything in the book, there's a free version based on a new principle, there's a cheap version, and then there's the crazy billionaire version. And I collect those put them at upgrade labs. And that's now opening across the country, people can go to own and upgrade labs calm and open a franchise in their neighborhood if there isn't already one opening. And I just want to bring this to people. If you did all these things, you got your strength in your cardio. Well, the 15 minutes, what do you do with the rest? Well, we can put you in technology that makes you recover. Or maybe we plug your brain in. And we do the same thing for your meditation. Because I believe that when we're at full power, when our digestion works, our guts are healthy, our bodies are healthy, they were actually wired to be nice to each other. We're kind, but we're also very powerful and that makes us dangerous. And my new coffee is called Danger Coffee for that reason, like who knows what you might do, you might do the right thing, you might help the lady across the street, you might go back to school, you might get a new job, you might just be in charge of yourself instead of being triggered. And I want to build that world. You mentioned AI. Could I have chat GPT do my exercise for me? I sincerely hope you can, because I would be the first to sign up for that. Exactly, right? There's no moral failing in that. In fact, it would be beautiful. In the world, my ultimate goal is I would like to once a year, spend one minute and get all the exercise that I need for my brain, my mind, my body and everything. I don't know how to do that. I don't even know if that's possible, given all the tools that we know of today. But I'm willing to use AI to get us as close as possible to that. Today, Dr. Gundry, there are $400 million a year of ghost gym memberships. These people never go to the gym 400 million because it's not worth it. And our body knows it's not worth it. And you probably tried it. And it just made you soar and tired and you didn't get very good results. Maybe we can replace that where you just spent a half hour a week or half hour twice a week. But you got so many results, it was worth going. And when that happens, the amount of healthcare costs in the country will go down. And the amount of niceness will go up. And that's what we could do. So speaking of niceness, we know more and more and more every year that our anxiety and depression or lack thereof is controlled by signals from our microbiome. Oh yeah. And I'm working on my next book and it's actually, it startled even me to realize the power that our microbiome has over everything and including our niceness and yes. And we've done a horrible job of supporting our microbiome. You and I have written about this extensively. But why don't we dive in a little bit and talk about how we've destroyed our microbiome and what we can do to start fixing it. I think it's the fourth or fifth chapter of the book. I write about an anti-nutrient that doesn't get as much attention as lectins. And it's called phytic acid. We've been eating some foods because in the 70s, back when running was suddenly a thing. When the diet hypothesis things started to fail, they said, well, it must be because fiber. So they would tell you to eat high fiber foods, even if they shredded your gut, even if they were full of lectins, heck, even if they were full of lead, arsenic, and cyanide, it didn't matter as long as there's fiber because fiber was the cure for everything, right? Well, it turns out you do need the right kinds of fiber. I mean, you and I have talked a lot about this. You make great fiber supplements. I forget the name of the powdery one, but it's good. I put it in smoothies sometimes. Prebiothrive. Prebiothrive. Thank you. Yeah. And that's one of the orange stuff. And it has like orange peel pectin, I think. Yeah. I like that one. So when you look at that, okay, we have to get that into our gut. But the thing that doesn't get talked about enough is that there's a big evil company out there. And it was called Monsanto. Now it's called Bayer. And people may not know this part of it, but Bayer was spun off from AG Farben, which is the company in the 1940s that made the gas used in Germany. This is not a company with a history of doing good by mankind. And what Monsanto is doing is spraying glyphosate everywhere. And what glyphosate does is, especially in the US, we spray it on our crops, especially wheat, at the end of the season. So that makes the plant start to die. Because what it does is it steals minerals from the plants by chelation. It locks up the minerals so they're not available to the plant. The plant says, oh, no, I'm dying. Let's give all my energy to my babies. They're ripens a week sooner. And then they harvest the wheat and they give it to us. The minerals are unavailable because of this toxic compound that was put on it. Glyphosate kills bacteria in the soil, which makes the soil dysfunctional so mineral uptake doesn't work, and it kills bacteria in our guts. And it's interesting how many people can tolerate wheat in Europe that's not sprayed, and they eat anything in the US, and they get all sorts of symptoms, including me. I've had almost no gluten lately, but I did eat baklava and some croissants in Europe, and I was actually okay, I took some enzymes. But here it's disabling. What this means is we're getting foods that kill our gut by them. We're eating more and more of these fake foods, these plant-based foods that are ultra processed. And we're ignoring all the toxins that kill your gut bacteria in favor of focusing on carbon dioxide in the air, which is the least of my worries. Talk to me about atrazine, talk to me about glyphosate, and talk to me about mineral depletion of the soil. We got to fix our soil. That's why grass-fed dairy is important. That's why organic regenerative agriculture is important. And that's why I have a 32-acre organic farm where I'm doing this. When you do that, fixing the soil fixes the gut, fixes anxiety in the body, fixes the brain. And that's just how it works. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I have a big practice on autoimmune disease, and we're really good at fixing autoimmune disease. I publish data over 90% of autoimmune disease resolves in a year by following my program. And most of that is restoring gut health and the gut wall and leaky gut. And a lot of my people go over to Europe and they go, this looks so good. Okay, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to have croissants. I'm going to have pasta. I'm going to have pizza and overdo it when you're there. And they don't react. And they go, oh my gosh, Dr. Gundry has cured me. I'm fine now. And they come back to the United States and they start eating arbreth or argranola or whatever. And within a week they're, you know, they're on the phone going, oh my gosh, you know, my psoriasis just popped, my leaky gut. I can feel it. My headaches, my migraines are back. What the heck? I thought you cured me. No, you had non glyphosated food for a while. And yeah, it's, it's scary. If the U.S. government was functioning, they would have seized all the bank accounts from Monsanto and they would immediately stop allowing this to be done to our food and our population and to our soil. It's going to take a generation to fix what they've done to our soil. And there's no excuse for it. None whatsoever. And we know this now. You have impeccable credentials. There are tens of thousands of physicians out there who are seeing and saying exactly the same thing. So this is an emergency level thing, because the U.S. is the only country on the planet that makes 1.85 times as much food as it takes to feed our population. But that won't keep happening if we keep spraying this stuff. And why is it allowed? And if you're a farmer or a rancher and you're spraying this, this is your last year to spray it because you will be held accountable for what you're doing to the earth. And if you're someone who has allowed this, you will be held accountable for allowing this. This is just broad spread poisoning of people. We maybe didn't know it 30 years ago. We surely knew it 20 years ago. And now it's just obvious. Yeah. And I think that's why a number of the European governments, despite the fact that Bayer pays a lot of money to the EU parliament, are passing laws to outlaw glyphosate. The solution is distributed agriculture like they've done in Europe forever where you have sheep or cows or goats and chickens. And they fix the soil. They fertilize the soil. They make distributed food. It's just harder to make profits for big companies that way. But that doesn't bother me. They don't need profits that big unless they're doing a good job. Right now they're doing a terrible job of helping us be healthy. You and I are fortunate that we've been able to figure this out and that we can afford to go buy grass fed food and we can buy the gluten-free stuff. But if you can't afford that stuff right now, this is really serious and it doesn't have to be that way. But we have to remember that sickness is good for business. That's a good point. In fact, there's something that happens in economics. I studied AI and I really am a computer hacker and distributed systems create unpredictable behavior sometimes. And there's something called a system equilibrium where things just end up at a stable point. And it turns out the most profitable business model ever is one, at least one, I found out of a side that may be monopoly, but this might be better than monopoly. That's when you convince people that something works when it does the opposite of that. So imagine diet soda. I drank about 15 of these a day when I was obese because I wouldn't have any sugar because I knew that, well diet soda increases obesity. So they have a customer for life and they add some addictive substances as well, like NutriSweet. So I'm drinking this going I'm fat and I keep getting fatter so I keep drinking more of it. Now if they made diet soda that worked, they would sell less of it because eventually I'd be thin again and say maybe I'll switch to regular soda. By the way, I don't drink any soda. It's unnecessary and bad for you. But you know, at the time and it turns out exercise is the same thing, big exercise. You're going to have to subscribe to this gym membership and you're going to have to have it for life. And maybe I think there is a minimum necessary but they're selling it. But if you do go to the gym every day, it doesn't work your title all the time and you get stuck on it. And most people who go don't get results because it doesn't work very well. So a gym that was perfect would have less people in it. Ah, that's upgrade labs. We're happy for that. All right, you bring up something fascinating in the book I agree with. Tell me about low quality protein. I mean, come on protein is protein is protein. There's it's just amino acids. Who cares about where my amino acids come from? I love this for a long time. A calorie is a calorie. It was moving like the online bullies or others say, you know, a Snickers bar and a diet soda cancel each other out because of calories, like all this nonsense and they're always very angry because they're malnourished and hungry. So calories are not a calorie when you eat the calorie and what calorie is really makes a difference. So the big food industry is like, aha, we'll trick them again. Let's talk about protein. There are keto cookies that are high protein made out of gluten. It's just straight gluten because gluten is a protein. Also sarin the nerve gas that was used in Tokyo subway attacks. Yeah, that comes from Jack beans as a plant protein. So therefore, all plant proteins will kill you and you should never eat a plant, right? Or maybe not. Also, spider venom will kill you. So therefore, you should ever get an animal either different proteins do different things. And some proteins are more absorbable than others. And what you'll find with plant based proteins, especially when you eat them with the whole plant, they're always packaged with an excessive amount of carbohydrate. They're usually packaged with a lot of a lot of either protein inhibitors. So you cannot use the protein because the plant doesn't want you to eat its babies. And they're packaged with lectins and they're packaged with phytates. So you got this protein, and it wasn't very available and it caused inflammation and it shredded your gut by design because they don't want you to eat it. You don't have three summits like a cow. You're not a goat or a pig who can eat a lots of things, but even pigs are very sensitive like we are here. So I guess a protein isn't a protein because we have animal and plant proteins that can kill us. That means there must be a sliding spectrum for which proteins are better. And we can look at how many amino acids or the ratios of amino acids are, and we can say, all right, that's a good way to measure proteins, assuming you can get to the amino acid. And it's sort of like people intuitively understand that if you use a condom and you have sex, pregnancy can happen. If the plant put a condom around a protein with chemicals, you will not be able to use that protein. It will not do what you think it's going to do. So that vision of a barrier around something, it's really important to understand. And so you're saying, well, I ate my garbanzo beans and they had this amount of whatever protein, you probably couldn't get to it. And you probably ate hundreds of grams of carbs to get that little bit of protein. It didn't work. When you look at animal proteins, what I find is that red meat, grass-fed red meat has the highest biological availability. You might need digestive enzymes to get to it, but it works very well. If you're not allergic to it, dairy protein works very well. Chicken works reasonably well. In fact, it can be better than beef for some people, but it comes with another downside, the Omega-6 fat. And then if you get down from there into the plant-based proteins, they are less bioavailable. The other thing that happens when you eat proteins is amino acids are like letters in the alphabet. Peptides are words in the alphabet and proteins are sentences or paragraphs. So you're saying, well, I got a bucket of letters here that's taken amino acids, assuming your body's going to reassemble them, which it will do. But if you eat certain proteins, they can also as peptides be signals to the body. So when we're talking about things like collagen protein, the collagen protein that I'm famous for, for kind of turning into a large industry, oftentimes it's dye and tripeptides. But these are words with two and three letters, like if, ands or buts, you need lots of those. So you take a peptide, that's so different than just taking an amino acid and so different than eating, you know, gluten, which is a protein. So you guys, okay, there's a difference. Animal proteins are superior and more absorbable than plant proteins. My favorite plant protein, if I was to try to get my protein from plants, which I don't believe is a good idea for a lot of people, would be hemp, de-fatted hemp protein, because it's higher in IgG. There's a conversation about anti-aging and mTOR to be had here too, if you want to go there. Let's go there. Why not? One of our favorite subjects. Okay. So for listeners, mTOR is a compound that's, when your body's in growth mode, it goes up. And I've written a big anti-aging book. I mean, you have it as well. So like we share similar thinking and we've read the same PubMed studies and I greatly respect the work you're doing. So with mTOR, if it's chronically elevated, you get chronic inflammation because your body's always in growth mode. It's almost like over-exercising, right? And if you don't have enough mTOR, you have sarcopenia, you lose muscles, right? So in the anti-aging world, the number that I came up with after looking at a bunch of papers was on average, 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Good quality, absorbable protein, a lot more if you're going to eat plants. Problem is if you do that on a daily basis, you'll probably lose your muscle mass and you'll start to look puffy. It's not enough protein. So the reality is a higher animal protein diet some days and fasting or protein fasting on other days works exceptionally well to keep your average protein there. People worry about protein-raising mTOR. They worry about animal amino acids like tyrosine increasing it or methionine and tryptophan actually more than tyrosine. Increasing mTOR, it doesn't matter because guess what raises mTOR the most? What? Carbs? Oh sugar! So are we blaming protein for what sugar did? I think we are. Yeah, you know it's fun. I so far the best measurement at least I think for measuring mTOR activation is insulin-like growth factor one, IGF one. And I, you know, I measure insulin-like growth factor one on my patients every three months and we have games of okay let's see if we can lower insulin-like growth factor one particularly there's no no shame in having an elevated insulin growth factor up till about the age of 40 but after that you look at successful aging super old people you look at the blue zones and you look at my patient population in their late 90s early 100s and I have a bunch of them their insulin growth factors run about 50 to 70 that don't worry about it but so the object of the game is to try and lower it. I see most people who have an insulin growth factor one above 200 these people have a very high risk in my practice of developing cancer. Why? Because it's not called growth factor for nothing it's designed to make things grow and one of the things that I've learned is as we get older there is nothing in us that we want to grow so we have a game and let's get this down and there's really three ways that I've found in my practice you bring up two of them shivers and starches elevate mTOR elevate insulin growth factor one. Animal protein certain animal proteins at least in my practice clearly elevate insulin growth factor dairy more than meat it depends on I'm actually as I wrote in my last book I'm liking the keto code I'm a big fan of cultured fermented dairy products particularly goat sheep and ate two milk products big or as a big fan um the third thing then we've seen we do fun stuff say hey let's limit animal protein this round and don't change anything else and the University of St. Louis did this a number of years ago and they did it with calorie restricted individuals and they changed them now that I'm saying they should do this they changed them to a vegan calorie restricted diet kept the calories the same their insulin growth factors went down about 50 points just by doing that now let me ask you this idea if one's also a marker for human growth hormone yeah are we just getting rid of human growth hormone in these people uh great question well that's why I like the idea of cycling yes see that's the trick we work on circadian rhythms we always have really yeah it's it's like I joked in the last book it's like you know maybe we hadn't eaten for two weeks and we killed the buffalo and you know gee I want to stay in ketosis because ketosis is great for me and it'll suppress my insulin growth factor one so even though I just killed a buffalo I only want four ounces of that liver it's like really of course not you know we are designed to feast or famine and we are designed to cycle um right we are and and this allows for animal protein in meaningful amounts you know if you're looking to grow muscle which a lot of people in their 80s or 90s need to do so they don't break a hip then you eat more animal protein but you provide a signal maybe the very easy ones that are the ones that don't require you to get injured from smarter not harder but you get a signal and then you have your animal protein and you have your carbs and tour goes up but then the other days you're fasting or you limit your protein and I have not had good luck by consuming plant-based protein and even if you can find a clean one without all the arsenic and metals and lectins and all the stuff that's in these are highly processed products what I end up with is it doesn't seem like it does anything metabolically right so I eat it but then like I shrink yeah right and any thoughts on that well I think the third factor uh in lowering IGF-1 is and you brought it up is time restricted eating intermittent fasting and that's actually the most powerful that I think to me the most impactful study that was done with Italian cyclists who were on a training table for three months you all had to eat the exact same food uh but one group of site cyclist had a 12 hour eating window they they breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning and they finished eight o'clock at night the other group had a seven hour eating window they had break fast at one o'clock in the afternoon and had to finish by eight o'clock at night exact same food only the seven hour eating window guys lowered their IGF-1 they both had the same muscle mass and the seven hour eating window lost weight even though they ate the same amount of money calorie in calorie out I feel like we should just take that that little snippet there and just replay it as a reply every time an online bully tells you that calories in and calories out just you know exercise less than work Eric has more in us it's it's such nonsense that you just proved it as as clearly as could be proven in all of humanity the other thing that really matters and that's one of the chapters in the book is we've got to get our minerals because if you're eating plant-based proteins they have less minerals than you're going to get from animal-based proteins so things like a liver powder or even things like the dairy we're talking about they have a much higher amount of usable minerals and I find that that so many people have tried plant-based diets that it's stripped because of phytic acid it stripped minerals out when I was a a vegan and then a raw vegan I I broke two teeth just because I didn't have any I got cold all the time I got autoimmune issues I didn't have before and when I was able to restore my minerals by taking what in the book I call vitamin dake d a k and e and I know that you make you make supplements with those in it because they matter they do but what I don't think people have talked about enough is that those those specific animal derived for the most part fat soluble vitamins they drive minerals into cells so things like vitamin a retinol not the plant-based vitamin a that helps iodine get where it needs to go in the body and others control zinc and copper and calcium and magnesium so the combination of macro minerals trace minerals and vitamin dake that is really magical for helping to heal the gut getting bone density and my kind of proof point for a little human guinea pig I had bone surgery recently I'm on my foot because an old yoga injury that that did not heal right so I'm here actually in Beverly Hills and the guy goes to cut in I'm awake because well it's how I roll and you hear the bones out and what the heck I'm having a hard time getting through the bone and after the surgery said Dave I operated on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter like like what are you doing when doing is managing my minerals in addition to my protein intake in addition to my fasting in addition to stimulating my bones with the kind of exercises here that don't take much time that's why I was worth writing a book you can actually have the Wolverine thing going on yeah you know my my wife Penny was it was a great marathon runner she ran and finished the 100th running of the Boston marathon but she ate a typical marathoners diet you know would have bags of popcorn and chips and the corn chips and pasta and she had osteoporosis in her 40s and you know this is a marathon runner so when we changed her diet she resolved her osteoporosis even though she basically backed off on running and it's like wow how'd you do that you know you're not pounding the pavement anymore if we changed her diet completely and the other thing I think we you brought up when we first started talking maybe it's a good place to kind of sum up number one our soil is so completely depleted of minerals and vitamins and number two what people don't realize is you have to have a soil microbiome yes to make these minerals available for absorption via the plant roots and so we've done a double number and we have no minerals in our soil anymore and we have no more soil microbiome so it's like worse root you have to take mineral supplements there's no way to get it from your food today maybe if you live in the middle of nowhere you farm all your food which is what I did in Canada I could get most of my minerals but that's not reasonable and so when I'm traveling and actually all the time I take my minerals and I do it before I take my cool new tropics and my anti-aging stuff and all that because the foundations matter yeah and that's something basic that I think everyone listening can do you don't have to go the billionaire biohacking route that's not I think no this is not what it's about yeah there are simple steps that you can do you know the more you kind of do those simple steps the better off you're gonna be and I thank you for telling people steps that are doable and heck don't exercise as much that sounds good get more results I think it's doable in fact the science says it's doable and you combine it with a healthy gut magic happen make sure to check out the next one here one of the keys to longevity and being thin is the amount of polyphenols in their diet