 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. So does healthy look different during the summer than say the fall, winter, or spring? Well according to my guests today the answer is yes and I gotta admit I agree with him so stay tuned on that. And by making tweaks to your diet and routine based on the time of year you might be able to become more in tune with your body and enjoy better health as a result. So in a moment I'm going to be speaking with the acclaimed health expert Dallas Hartwig and you probably recognize that last name. Dallas is the co-founder of the Whole30, a popular diet program that stresses eating whole foods. In his newest book The Four Seasons Solution he shares why and how to bring your body into harmony with your surroundings. Today we'll talk about how to sync up with your environment and feel like the best most healthy version of yourself. Dallas welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. So you've become an authority on healthy balanced living. Can you tell me what attracted you to this area in the first place? Sure it was certainly by no genius plan you know there was no master's scheme at the beginning of my life or in university or anything. It was more a function of part personal experience in the sense that I grew up in a family where my parents always valued health and taking care of our bodies. And then also a professional background. My undergraduate degree is anatomy and physiology. I went on to grad school for physical therapy always kind of cared about the rehabilitative aspects of things as well as the athletic performance side of things. It was always kind of it was always sort of woven into my structure all the way along. And back in 2006 and 2007 when I started doing more reading on nutrition specifically and then ultimately what became a seminar series in three books I started writing and speaking more on nutrition because I recognized its foundational impact on our quality of life. But it was sort of I sort of described myself as a accidental author more than anything else. Were you the chef and cook of the dynamic duo? I think we were probably fairly equally matched in that realm and for the first whole 30 book we got a friend of ours Richard Bradford to actually create all new recipes. So he was the actual chef but both Melissa and I really enjoyed cooking as well. So you would dirty your hands in the kitchen? For sure. Yeah I mean I was very fortunate to grow up in a family that my mom always experimented with different kinds of cooking and different ingredients and was very much into whole foods and I spent a good portion of my childhood as a vegetarian and we had a huge vegetable garden we preserved a lot of our own food. So food and where it came from and what to do with it has always been near and dear for me. Yeah that's great. Yeah my mother was the cook in the family and actually in a young age I was in the kitchen cooking with her from day one. My father just as a hilarious story could not cook didn't need to because my mother was so good at it. But one of the funny stories my mother was babysitting our young children in Ann Arbor Michigan and my parents at that time lived in Omaha and she left my father some Kraft macaroni and cheese boxes to cook and the the first night he called her and he says there's something terribly wrong this is this is like macaroni and cheese soup it's just pure water and she said you didn't drain the water you moron. So that's that's my father's some total experience in cooking. Fair enough. Well it seems like he had it seems like he had a good teammate then. So what what inspired you to write the four season solution which is which is definitely different than you know where you've been before with your books. For sure I mean it's it's the same but different it's different in the sense that it's not a function or a focus primarily on food although it does address that. I described the four season solution as the prequel to it starts with food to my first book. And you know I think it's kind of evident that the title it starts with food is kind of a good statement about the centrality and the influence of nutrition on our overall health but it's just the starting point it's just one foundational piece. And so my attempt with the four season solution is to give people a larger perspective a more integrated perspective a more holistic approach to putting different lifestyle components and in the book I detail about food about movement about sleep but not quite just sleep more about the light dark cycle more broadly and about connection and we often think about connection as connection to other people but it's also connection to ourselves connection to a place a sense sort of sense of belonging and a connection to the earth and then also a connection to a sense of purpose something greater than ourselves. So I put all those pieces together into a system to give people an opportunity to put foundational health behaviors into place in a way that works in a way that's sane and that doesn't require them to spend their entire bandwidth of their sort of disposable time so to speak on getting progressively more granular with health and lifestyle choices because I think that really ultimately erodes the other opportunities to have more interesting diverse rich human experiences. This book talks all about you know your how your behaviors should change depending upon the type of the time of the year. We become so disconnected and kind of above our environment and we control everything. Help us walk back and try to convince me and my listeners you don't have to convince me. Why it's so important to be in tune with circadian rhythms time of year. Sure go ahead. Sure. Yeah I think there's a fundamental idea here called evolutionary mismatch and really the idea there is that the world that we evolved in for the vast majority of human history is the world that our current bodies are the majority of our current genetic makeup sort of expects and is most adapted to and of course evolution is an ongoing process we have ongoing adaptations to a more modern environment but it happens relatively slowly relative to the short span of time since the agriculture revolution and the industrial revolution and then later sort of technological and digital ages. So we found ourselves in a world that looks very much unlike what our bodies are adapted for and in the realm of food it's quite obvious you know the when you go into the corner store and you see the food packaged in foil packets that it has an indefinite shelf life that is in fluorescent colors it's quite easy to understand that that is not the food we are well adapted to to nourish us and to kind of live to kind of live an optimal life on and the principle that is kind of I can extrapolate that that principle to a larger picture and say the entire modern world is constructed in a very different way than the natural world it is binary right the light switch is on the light switch is off we are at work we are off work we are awake we are asleep and it become it has become very digitized and binary and that is not the way biology works when we think about the amount of light that's present outside throughout the course of the day it is a gradual moving from very dark to a little bit lighter to a little bit lighter to lighter lighter lighter and then a gradual fade away and all of our systems are like that so whether we're talking about digestive function or detoxification or the synthesis of neurotransmitters or any of those things they all happen and in sort of progressively graded ways rather than binary ways and the mistake we've made in the modern world is trying to fit a very dynamic oscillating organism into a very linear and binary world and it simply doesn't work we are not computerized machines and my argument that central in the book is that in introducing or reintroducing rather some of those oscillations into our everyday lives we are then able to undo some of the harmful evolutionary mismatches we've created with this modern world so that looks like addressing our movement patterns what we eat when we eat it looks at addressing the light and dark cycles it looks at addressing even the way that we connect with other people or are more withdrawn introspective and I think that's a piece that isn't discussed enough in the world right now so let's let's let's take me through give me something that I can change that I have control over right in this crazy environment okay it's it's spring for most of us although I guess there's snow some places you're in Salt Lake City still snow on the mountains I know for sure so give me some changes in spring that you talk about in the book sure that we're not doing perhaps right so I'll kind of describe what the sort of the sensation of spring is like in general and we're already very familiar with it's probably the most palpable of the seasons it is excitement and energy and anticipation it is spontaneous activity whether that is cleaning out the garage or putting the garden in or doing work on the yard or going for a run that you haven't done in months starting a new exercise program starting a new hobby it's the initiation and so much of that is driven by the hormone or the rather the neurotransmitter dopamine it's the the neurotransmitter of motivation and drawing us towards new things and exploration and novelty and that's what spring is all about so that energy of spring carries over into let's talk about movement over the course of a deep dark cold winter we may have sort of had the downturn and mood and motivation we have maybe have not exercised as often or maybe we've simply done it in shorter more intense bursts something like downhill skiing something like going to the gym and doing weight training but we are less likely to be outside for you know eight hours doing a long snowshoe or a long bike ride because ten in most places with temperate climates that's just simply less agreeable from a physical activity standpoint so spring is the emergence out of the semi-hyvernative state of winter and it's such a such an energizing experience and I think most people think of spring as like it's fun it's new it's exciting and spring is a really fun season to be in the great thing about spring also is that the food availability again in places that have different seasons really changes right so in the wintertime if we're eating locally and seasonally we're doing a lot of meat and fat and you know easily preserved you know root vegetables and squashes and those types of things but in the spring we've got this whole new crop of you know early spring greens and perhaps strawberries and those things that are coming up you know fairly early and so we have new opportunities for varied foods there as well and one of the sort of simple heuristics I write into the book about food is eat the foods that are available locally and seasonally in your area and if you move to a different place that means you eat different foods and that is in part because it's I love simple heuristics and simple ways of kind of thinking about this stuff but also it's simple but it's also perfectly in line with what our bodies would expect when we are more in sync with our local light and dark cycles as well right so it's none of these things exist in isolation so in the springtime it also means we might start getting up a little bit earlier we might start staying up a little bit later although asterix there depends on how much how late we've been staying up you know in the wintertime anyway so a lot of the success of each success of phase or each success of season depends on the how much we sort of immersed ourselves in the preceding season from a hormonal standpoint from a recovery standpoint because I think it's easy to imagine not having that spontaneous energy of spring if we have run ourselves ragged all winter and stayed up late and not gotten enough sleep and been under chronic stress and eaten an inflammatory low nutrient diet etc we're not going to emerge into spring feeling spontaneously energetic and all of those things are true for each of the seasons so the sort of a sequence that needs to be laid out there and spring just happens to be the season that we're in right now for the northern hemisphere and it's the most fun but it's also only part of the story so let's you mentioned hibernation so we're just coming out of winter in the northern hemisphere and you talked about for instance I have many friends in Seattle and Portland who consume eight cups of coffee a day in the winter because they're they're so depressed and it's gray and I trained in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the University of Michigan and quite frankly it is gray for nine months out of the year yeah for sure so so let's back up into winter do we fight against that kind of we really need to hibernate we really need to shorten our days or do we embrace that and if we embrace it how do we do that well that's the challenge right because winter is the sort of archetype or the symbolic season that is most at odds with our modern world so I talked about the idea of a chronic summer in the book and I use the word chronic to designate the sort of long-term nature of it but I also use it because chronic summer is directly connected with chronic disease so there is that direct tie-in there because the features of summer of excessive stress long days short nights under recovery effectively lack of an adequate sleep and recovery a relatively high carbohydrate and perhaps lower nutrient food supply again sort of asterisk depending on which food choices you're making and huge amounts of active physical activity emphasizing duration rather than intensity and so the sort of that component there and in the winter time it's the opposite of that and that's really hard to to do when we have work or school schedules that tell us to be up at a certain time to be at the office a certain time and so the the fixed scheduling of the modern world is one of the biggest problems when it comes to into integrating some of my recommendations because there's only so much flexibility that a lot of us have so to your point conceptually I think I would say that the best way to implement my recommendations here is to make as many changes as you can to be as in sync and lined up with the current season as it is outside in your natural environment as as practically possible and that's going to be very personal so for some people it's going to be you know if they are self-employed with a flexible schedule and they work from home they will sleep in a lot later in the winter and start dimming the lights and getting ready for bed a lot earlier in the winter but for other people who have less flexibility in that particular arena what it underscores is the importance of really getting on track with the things you can control and the things you can change so ideally yes we go into a a down cycle of energy and a sort of withdrawn restorative state in the winter that looks a little bit like a hibernation and you know in some cases I think that there's even a certain aspect of a sort of mildly depressive kind of feature of winter behavior that's actually normal that is that it does prompt us to kind of withdraw and rest and heal from the chronic stress of summertime and so it's no wonder then that so many of us have that same kind of lethargic depressive kind of symptom because really what our bodies are saying is you need some restorative time to recover from your chronic stress so that can be applied to any of the seasons because for most of us we have lived so far out of sync with any of the natural seasons that we need to really do sort of a therapeutic intervention and it's sort of an offset for that chronic imbalance so I think you've alluded to this where where does control of our lighting factor into this because it is partially under our control absolutely it's largely under our control fortunately and you know again exceptions to this would be people who are on call or who do shift work but for most of us it's largely within our control and that's a really beautiful thing because the presence of bright light you know particularly the blue wavelengths really has a significant alerting effect to our neurophysiology so you know I view it simply as blue light meaning kind of the either light that's actually blue or bright white kind of cool temperature light that contains a lot of those blue wavelengths that's the message to our brains that it is blue sky midday we should be alert we should be ready to go there is a potential threat we need to kind of be alert to what's around us and studies show that bright lights contain the blue wavelengths have a comparable alerting effect to a small amount of caffeine so there is this very alerting awakening effect there and we can really use that to our advantage but I think more importantly we can use the removal of that bright light especially that blue light at times when it doesn't belong also to our advantage so that looks like in the winter specifically because it's getting dark so much earlier it looks like dimming the lights and dimming the lights significantly and staying away from sources of blue light and I'm very glad to see that there's a lot of conversation now around healthy sleep habits around sleep hygiene around you know avoiding blue light in the hours before bed etc and that's really important so I underscore the importance of all of that and I think there's a little more to it than just avoiding blue light and here's why what the research seems to show is that there's a comparable influence on our circadian rhythms of the presence of bright natural light early in the day in a way to anchor and synchronize all of our different body systems that has just as much if not more impact on a circadian biology than the inappropriate presence of blue light after dark so said another way getting enough natural light early in the day is really important and perhaps even more important than avoiding blue light in the evenings and so I'd like to kind of shift the conversation a little bit around light instead of saying okay I can just put on these blue blocking glasses and continue watching Netflix at 10 p.m. right before I fall into bed I think that's a little bit missing the point because it's not just the blue light and the way it affects our physiology but there's also the idea that if we are on our computers answering work emails or watching a psychological thriller on Netflix there's also a lot of other psycho emotional stimuli that are going on there that can also bring up our cortisol levels blunt the release of melatonin and basically make it difficult for us to ease into that deep restorative sleep mode so the great thing about light is that we can to your point largely control it and I think that's a really wonderful thing because we can both add in natural light with 5 or 10 or 15 minutes of faces in the sun you know not staring at the sun obviously but in the bright natural light even if it's overcast outside it still dwarfs the amount of light we would get inside even with bright artificial light and in the book I write about the sort of the measurement of brightness the measurement of light there in lux and if we are outside on a cloudy day it's going to be around 10,000 lux plus or minus and to give you a sense of scale if we are inside in a department store or a grocery store that feels really brightly lit the amount of light there is only about four or five hundred lux so it's a tiny fraction of the actual amount of light that we would get if we are outside even on overcast day so people will say but it's not that sunny in Ann Arbor and I say it's okay ten minutes of being outside even an overcast day really helps to anchor and synchronize your circadian rhythms even more than bright light in an artificial sense which is surprising to a lot of people and was to me when I first came upon this research. So you know interesting anecdote when I when I moved to California years ago and particularly in the Southern California area I would go back to the University of Michigan or spent a lot of time over in Europe particularly in the winter lecturing and attending conferences and operating in numerous hospitals and I was struck something I hadn't ever noticed that the University of Michigan Hospital was dim compared to what I was used to in Southern California and the same way it was in Europe I'm going well they have any you know why don't they have any bright lights what's the deal well of course in the winter in Southern California particularly in Palm Springs it's pretty bright and for sure our hospital was very bright and it never occurred to me until I went back to winter climbs that people whether they knew it or not and this was fairly universal had had adjusted their light level down for winter and it turns out was probably a really good idea I think so I think so I think the thing that we sometimes miss the opportunities to do is to introduce more oscillation across the course of our day so in the book I talk about this idea of dark days and bright nights sort of an inversion of what the natural light pattern would be because when we're inside even you know in a brightly lit hospital it might unless there's enormous you know huge windows and tons of skylights it's still only going to be several hundred lux as compared to up to one hundred thousand lux at midday full sun on a on a clear day so again it feels bright when we're inside but the amount of light we're actually getting is still quite small so I do encourage people to really make sure they get some time in natural light every single day ideally within an hour of waking to really coordinate those those circadian clocks because we are of course familiar with the concept of jet lag of changing our circadian rhythms by some number of hours by flying to a different time zone to a different part of the earth but really that's what happens if we have either a lack of bright natural light to anchor our circadian rhythms to synchronize all of our body systems or if we have different going to bed and different wake times at different days of the week we're effectively experiencing jet lag all the time on kind of an ongoing basis so that circadian rhythm disruption is increasingly recognized as a risk for all manner of chronic disease certainly cardiovascular disease and many others so what about why don't I just buy a full spectrum light bulb and stare at it for 15 minutes in the morning will that work it will help it will help and that's actually one of the recommendations I make to people who live in urban environments where going outside still because of tall buildings still doesn't give them direct access to the sun or for people who have to you know for work or school or childcare reasons have to wake way before you know that the sun actually rises particularly in the winter time so yeah a full spectrum light bulb that includes those those blue lights and LEDs are a great option here you can get what's basically a little light box this often used to treat seasonal effective disorder and you can get those that are about as bright as about 10,000 locks so you're getting pretty much what you would get outside on a cloudy day and you can use that for 10 or 15 minutes to synchronize your circadian rhythms and that can be putting on your makeup in the morning or reading a book or drinking your coffee or whatever that's good it's acceptable to good it's not great because it's not it's not as bright as it could be if it was full sun outside and I think also it's it's a little bit like the blue blocking glasses where yes it's helpful but it's only kind of part of that equation because I think if you can imagine the difference between sitting in front of a bright light that's 12 inches from your face for 10 or 15 minutes in the morning no matter what you're doing inside in getting ready for your day it's a very different experience than stepping outside sitting in a chair or walking for 10 minutes in bright natural light while breathing fresh air and moving your body even if it's in a very casual way it's a very different sort of organism level experience so yes those those kinds of tools are really helpful and I frequently recommend them when we can't control all of the factors when we when there's just simply no way to experience the more natural version but if we can get to the place where we're having a little bit of movement a little bit of fresh air a little bit of exposure to green spaces or blue spaces kind of a little bit of a natural environment even if it's just a small garden outside or some you know a lawn at the city park that definitely has a down-regulating effect on our stress levels in ways that sitting in front of a lightbox simply wouldn't have so in general the principle the heuristic here continues to be the closer we can get to our truly natural environments the better off we're going to be probably speaking great segue so forest bathing you kind of alluded to that come on is that a real thing or it is a real thing it's not a thing that we're very familiar with in North America but other cultures particularly in Japan the idea of immersing ourselves into a very calming environment has profound effects on our physiology particularly of our nervous system and the research is quite robust on the way that being in that kind of environment can settle and ground and balance our nervous systems reactivity so said another way said the opposite because I'll remind listeners that the spending time in the forest or in any natural environment is effectively our organism level our biological baseline so even though it seems like a kind of a stretch or a weird thing to go and do that's actually our baseline that's what our bodies expect and in the modern world of course we've created an entirely different scenario so going back to the place where we are spending time in quietude in stillness perhaps alone not necessarily but perhaps alone is a very healing calming stabilizing experience and can really help us manage the chronic stress of the fast-paced urbanized digitized modern world so it's a in the same way as eating an ancestrally informed or sort of paleo type or evolutionary type diet spending time in the national environment is profoundly healing and the more I can do with it and the more people can do with it in their own lives the better off they're gonna be what does the density dweller do in those circumstances that's a good question because again a lot of this a lot of the answers to these questions are damage control answers they are there's not a perfect answer but we'll get this close as we can so in a very urbanized environment a lot of it looks like getting up to city parks when and when you can it looks like getting your feet in the grass sitting even in a really busy place like New York City there are parks and trees and areas that you can do that there are flower beds there are there are sort of mini oasis of this experience and really focusing on that part of it I think can be more impactful and more restorative than we actually imagine one of the other things that's interesting is that even looking at pictures of beautiful natural spaces can have a lesser degree of calming soothing restorative experiences to it so if you can't actually get anywhere near you know plants trees water like that kind of thing even looking at a like a like a coffee table book of beautiful photographs of natural environments surprisingly it sounds very tried and quaint and almost like a throwaway recommendation but it can actually be really helpful and then when you can on weekends on vacations really prioritize getting into those natural environments because again many of us have real restrictions in the things we can't do and so for things that we can't easily do on an everyday basis when we can on times when we have full control really making sure that we prioritize those healing experiences okay we talked about we talked about light we talked about outside how should and you talked about this when you started how should our food choices change with the season yeah I'm actually really curious to hear your perspective on this because I'm certainly familiar with your work as well and you know the short heuristic is eat the foods that are locally seasonally available in your area my general recommendations on food look like some omnivorous mix of meat seafood and eggs a wide range of nutrient dense whole plant foods like vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds and the inclusion of large amounts of you know whole unprocessed natural fat sources whether it's from animals or plants or both so that can change across the course of the season and what I find most interesting about the nutritional aspect of this paradigm is that it partly explains a lot of the very confusing and conflicting nutritional research because if you can delve into the research you can find fairly good research on Mediterranean diet on paleo diet on low carb high fat on plant-based or vegan or vegetarian approaches on a ketogenic approach and so there's this real confusion amongst I think the kind of the average person they're like I don't know which one of the things is true this doctor says one thing this the doctor says something else this nutritionist says nutritionist says something else and I think if we think about the amazing adaptations the amazing the amazing versatility of the human organism we can recognize that there we are able to physiologically metabolically adapt to a wide range of different nutritional inputs so if I could just sort of structure this across the course of the seasons a Mediterranean diet that is rich in things like poultry or seafood or eggs and lots of vegetables and healthy fat sources might look a lot like a springtime kind of diet well what's available in the spring a plant-based or vegetarian approach that is really rich in a wide range of seasonally available plants both vegetables and fruit with less emphasis on fat and protein might look like a summertime diet the fall might look like a paleotype or low carb high fat kind of a little more emphasis on protein fat a little less emphasis on fresh greens and that might look like a fall diet and then a really carb restricted or even ketogenic diet might look like the winter because it's just not the same availability of fresh plant matter especially carbohydrate rich fruits so if you map things out that way what you see is that there's the opportunity for adaptation across the course of the season so that we can get the insulin sensitizing effects of many of these different approaches we can get the anti-inflammatory effects we also don't get stuck eating the same foods you know over and over so there's sort of a food cycling component to it there and we also have the opportunity to notice for ourselves with sort of cyclical experimentation what approaches work best for us and you know I'll harken back to my work with the whole 30 ultimately the whole 30 is a a short term 30 day experiment on what foods work well for you and we can continue to do that across the course of many seasons so we continue to learn more and more and more about our own individual immunological sensitivities and metabolic preferences and so I think there's an opportunity for us in the food realm to shift our dietary approaches on one end it's incredibly simple eat what's available locally for you on the other end it can look very contrived and structured and I'm going to do a ketogenic approach in the winter and I'm going to do a plant based lower fat approach in the summer but really it's all the same story what's underneath that is really all the same story and I think there's a way to think about food that is less complicated than many of us really do yeah I think that's a good description I've tried to make people cycle their their diets I think this is now my 18th year of from January through June during the week I don't eat any breakfast I don't eat lunch and I eat all my calories in a two hour window between six eight o'clock a night and so far so I'm 18 years into that and why do I do such a stupid thing well number one you know my research as an undergraduate Yale was human evolutionary and social biology and how do you take a great ape manipulate its food supply manipulate its environment and get a human and so one of the things great apes only only gain weight in the summer and they actually only fruit in the summer because that's when it's available and they gain about eight to ten pounds and for instance orangutans female orangutans don't come into heat until they've gained eight pounds from eating fruit right and you know most hibernating animals eat lots of carbohydrates or actually lots of protein bears will eat huge amounts of protein from salmon and carbohydrates from berries and they become insulin resistant so that they will store fat and then they don't eat for five months so and you look at you know modern hunter-gatherers like the hanzo they follow a very cyclically eating pattern and the really cool thing is their gut microbiome changes like a 180 between seasons between right and I think that we were designed to cyclically change our gut microbiome literally totally changed the species and that communication of those different species with the organism they live in us I talked about in the longevity paradox I think is paramount to long-term health and as I talk about in my next book the energy paradox people are going to be blown away by the effect our microbiome have on our energy production it is actually scary how much dependence we have at every level on the health of our microbiome so yeah I agree with you you know we have different approaches I I've certainly in my practice with you know 70% of my practice is now auto immune disease I've certainly become wary of the effect of lectins on on the average American whose right whose gut microbiome has been decimated our protective ability there's a recent new paper that shows you can actually put in some really good bugs that eat gluten and break gluten into smaller particles that become harmless and I just published a paper at the American Heart Association last month taking lectins away from gluten sensitive people and following them for six months and they actually in 9 out of 10 out of a 50 became tolerant to gluten we could really introduce it to them interesting that's because they're got microbiome change and it's because they no longer had leaky gut so their immune system was no longer on overload right well it's interesting you should mention that because my very first foray into nutrition as a scientific approach really happened reading about autoimmunity and lectins I read a paper by Lauren Cordain back in 2005 or 2006 and at the time I was playing national level volleyball I had a chronic shoulder tendinosis and couldn't get the inflammation to subside and hadn't even occurred to me that my diet would be a part of that because I thought I was eating conventionally healthy and everything was good and based on that one particular paper I started doing some personal experimentation and all I did was eliminated legumes and grains for my diet for six weeks that's the only change I made didn't do anything else I just stopped eating those because they're rich sources of lectins and six weeks later my shoulder that had been bothering me for over a year was completely pain-free and fully functional and that utterly blew my mind the fact that some simple dietary change like that in a otherwise healthy dietary approach could have that significant effect on my ability to heal peripheral musculoskeletal tissue like that just totally blew my world open and that was really the starting point for my whole foray into nutrition study so lectins have been something that have been kind of on my radar for a long long time and I think I think I heard you say that with a healthy gut and an oscillating microbiome instrument exposed to certain dietary lectins is probably not a big problem yeah I think I think that's do I think that the vast majority of Americans because of our antibiotic use because of our and acid use because of glyphosate and everything have probably the worst microbiome in the world and most of us have a leaky gut do I think with regimen and control you can take control over this and restore your gut and your gut wall yes I'm not published papers about that and do I foray into trying these things yes I do but I usually regret it quite frankly so I think I'm more tolerant to it than I used to be certainly but I have a number of my autoimmune patients they can't cheat yeah they just can't and we can measure it I mean or either they're gonna tell me or we can see it in their blood work totally so all right so one thing we have talked about is exercise should you change your exercise routine over the year well of course that's a trick question because the obvious answer is yes in the same way as all of these other things should change as your environment outside changes so in the same way as your food supply changes in the same way as the light dark cycle changes so does what's going on outside and our natural sort of desires and drives to do things so it feels really normal to in the first warm days of spring want to get outside to go to the park to go on a bike ride to work in the garden like that's what we are drawn to do naturally and the more we can notice and pay attention to and validate those intuitions that are in us the better off we're going to be big picture and so we'll take that very palpable dopamine driven spring experience and then we'll move that forward through the season so here's how it goes in the summertime it looks like lots of time outside going hiking riding our bikes swimming at the lake playing catch throwing the Frisbee for our dog whatever and that's a really natural thing to do to be outside for large amounts of time to have many hours a day of relatively low intensity general physical activity and every now and then pick up and move something heavy so you're maintaining the musculoskeletal structure and that might like look like wheel barrowing or hauling bags of mulch in the yard or digging with a shovel or carrying wood for a construction project it might look like going to the gym and doing some resistance training but there's this anchor this consistent theme throughout all the seasons of an anchor of real world functional strength training and that looks like picking things up squatting lifting carrying climbing things much like we did when we were children you know we climbed trees we scrambled up rock faces we we raced each other across the park and those are the kinds of things that are unstructured and really really good for adult humans as well because we've become excessively contrived and and and over structured even in our exercise programs so i also call for more general movement walking to the grocery store to you know an extra mile to carry your groceries even though it's more physical work it's also i think better from a physiological standpoint and there is this also this strange and subtle experience of sort of foraging and bringing something home in the same way if you've ever had a your own vegetable garden and you've picked your own greens out of the garden or carrots and brought them inside and washed the dirt off and eaten them for dinner there's a sense of satisfaction and connection that's there that isn't present when you have food shipped to your door or you go to grocery store and park you know right outside the door so the fall version then looks a lot like spring it's a sort of a moving in the direction of contraction it is less duration and more intensity in our activity so it still looks like a wide mix of real world activities but it's less you know less of the many many hours outside and somewhat contracted and then the winter is the total opposite pole to summer so winter is a lot less overall physical activity and i'm not necessarily endorsing being sedentary but what i'm saying is the you know four or eight hours outside on the weekends is not something you're probably going to want to do as much of in the winter and that's normal and that's totally okay and the anchor behavior of functional strength training remains so general movement you know and there's sort of an inverse relationship between intensity and duration across the course of the season so summer is relatively low intensity with long duration winter is higher average intensity and shorter average duration and within all of those parameters you can choose a wide range of different either exercise programs or just kind of real life stuff and i really encourage people to do more real life stuff like going rock climbing or going trail running or things that are less linear and less binary and a little more oscillatory and three-dimensional okay so what you're saying is i can't sit on the couch all winter but hey i'm not eating so it's okay right well isn't that an interesting thing right because when we this is how we get the cross-linkages between these different systems so in the wintertime when you are having a wildly shortened feeding window you're probably taking in fewer calories because you're emphasizing protein and fat which have higher satiety signaling and so your total caloric expenditure because you're doing less physical activity is lower but that's also okay because you're perhaps taking in fewer calories overall and again there's lots of ways to slice and dice that but that's often what happens with people when they are doing less physical activity and they're eating more satiety inducing foods so yeah and it's totally okay and of course the carbohydrate restriction and the shortened feeding windows have an insulin sensitizing effect which partly mitigates the fact that you're not doing as much activity so there's these beautiful and elegant off you know kind of balancing systems where in the summertime which is the opposite of that where you're doing you're eating more carbohydrate you're sleeping less you're basically under recovered for the period of summertime you're doing a lot of physical activity you're generating a lot of oxidative stress and also what's happening is you are eating a lot of nutrient dense plant and animal foods that help to buffer some of that oxidative stress and you're improving insulin sensitivity through long duration relatively low intensity physical activity so you're staying insulin sensitive across the course of the entire year using different mechanisms to do so which you're never getting to a state where you are sedentary chronically inflamed and insulin resistant yeah i've uh told a number of my patients very overweight patients that i can put them on the grizzly bear diet and lock them in a room and have them not eat for five months and i guarantee you it's incredibly effective for weight loss absolutely and it actually protects muscle mass which is right and i don't have a whole lot of takers on the grizzly bear diet no but but you make an interesting point though is that a lot of these these same sort of physiological underpinnings these echoes of our evolutionary past still exist in us today and we can leverage some of those patterns and not necessarily have to lock ourselves in a room with nothing but meat and fat for five months but we can leverage some of those same systems to our benefit while still enjoying nutritious delicious food and having a social life and you know doing physical activity so but i i love that you gave that example because it's a hundred percent true and we can just extrapolate some of the same principles there for our own sort of health optimization so before we go what is one thing in the book that people would surprise people hmm ah so here's one it's not necessarily a big one but it's one that i've said and people kind of look at me sideways sometimes i am against new year's resolutions and the reason i'm against new year's resolutions is because um our bodies don't know when january first is they don't know anything about the calendar year and so uh just declaring to ourselves and to people around us that on this certain day in mid winter we are going to initiate some new behavior program whether it's an exercise program or a diet or whatever the commitment we've made to ourselves and other people is i argue that mid winter is the least opportune time to do that because winter is for rest and restoration and thinking and retrospecting and planning for the future and really it's preparing ourselves to go out into the world in the coming spring and that's true both in the literal spring and also sort of figurative spring and also true on the shortened timeline it's true of nighttime going into morning and so if we don't do each nighttime going into morning or winter going into spring we are not going to be very energetic come springtime so i actually argue that a new year's resolution is more properly placed in early spring and is dreamed about and planned for and prepared for in the mid winter so i think that new year's resolutions should be mid-march or something perfect all right very good well dallas thanks so much for coming on today where can listeners find all about you and your work and where can they get the hands on the book so the four season solution is available pretty much everywhere books are sold i encourage readers to support their local independent booksellers right now during kind of pandemic time that's tough to do but if you can find independent booksellers online i encourage you to do that it's also available barns of noble amazon and many of the major booksellers as well there's also information available on my website dallasheartwake.com and i'm moderately active on instagram as well all right very good well take care of yourself and congratulations on the book great talking to you thanks so much all right so we got the audience questions susanne on youtube wrote in and asked does taking vitamin d in large doses affect your heart or arteries so there's every now and then interesting studies that come up that vitamin d in large doses may affect your bones may affect your arteries but none of those studies have actually looked at the combination of vitamin d3 with vitamin k2 and you've heard me talk over and over again that if you're going to take generous doses of vitamin d3 which i do recommend you should absolutely take vitamin k2 as well and let me give you one extra little piece of advice there is very good research showing that statin drugs actually increase calcification in coronary arteries which seems extraordinary because you should decrease calcification coronary arteries if you believe in statins but the literature shows that statins interfere with the effect of vitamin k2 so here's my tip for the day if you're taking a statin drug and you folks know who you are please please please add vitamin k2 to your regimen you don't need much you really only need a hundred micrograms or so of either mk4 or mk7 or both preferably so great question before you go i just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you