BONUS: Eat Smarter: The Impact of Ultra-Processed Foods on Your Gut, Brain and Metabolic Health with Shawn Stevenson

Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, nurse practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives. this is bonus monday your most downloaded favorite podcast i love that this community runs the gamut from medical professionals research scientists science writers personal trainers and more these are your favorite most loved podcasts of the last five years i could not be more proud of the diversification of guests that appeal to all of you. Thanks for tuning in. This is the first episode of Everyday Wellness Podcast for 2023. And today I have a treat for you. I connected with Shawn Stevenson, who is the prolific model health show host, nutritional scientist, author, father. And today we spoke at great length about his background and how it impacted his trajectory into the nutritional health space. We spoke about fast food economies, the role of ultra processed food, the impact of subsidized food on our health, the gut microbiome, the danger of seed oils, metabolic switching, the vagus nerve and its impact on food absorption, intake and leaky gut. We also spoke about brain health and that our brain is highly influenced by the food we eat. Also the interrelationship with metabolic health and insulin sensitivity, how inflammation in our body impacts our brain as well, the importance of hydration and electrolytes and so much more. I hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it. Sean, it's such a pleasure to connect with you today. I know this is a busy time of the year. I'm really very grateful that we were able to connect. I know we met a couple months ago in your studio, on your turf, in the warm state of California, as opposed to the cold, wintry, central Virginia area that I'm in. You know, I'm from the Midwest, as you know, and so I could definitely understand. However, I am not upset about the fact that I have warm weather for the holidays and, you know, moving into the new year It is, it's a nice little bonus for sure But my wife likes to say that she misses, you know, the snow and the, you know, the cold weather But she would never go outside When we lived in Missouri, she would never go outside She likes to look at it, but she definitely didn't want to be in it And her being from, she's from Kenya So she really doesn't play with cold weather So, you know, I'm really grateful for sure Yeah. Oh, of course. Well, for listeners that aren't familiar with you and your platform, which would be a very small percentage of them, can you share with listeners how you became so passionate talking about nutrition, synthesizing research, and getting to the point where you are today? Obviously, when I was out in LA in September, an opportunity to connect with you and record for your podcast. And I just think your journey is one that is particularly relevant, given there are so many people listening that may be at a point in their lives where they're ready to make some changes and can see how, you know, you went from, you know, being a college student, having some chronic pain issues and having completely different trajectory. Yeah. Well, I was, my venture into health, you know, this was definitely not planned. I wasn't a kid that just like, you know, I want to work in fitness. I want to be a physician when I grow up, all these things. My connective tissue is through performance, you know, through sports. And I was a top tier athlete and, you know, my big kind of ticket to make it to the next level was through athletics. I really didn't know anybody in my environment who, again, went on to get a college degree. I was actually the first person in my family to graduate from college. And so I saw that as really my ticket into better circumstances and everything was going great. You know, I was the fastest kid in school, all the things. And I went, well, I was at a really good high school. And it was at track practice when I was 15 years old, where I had my first kind of glimpse into future problems. And I was doing a 200 meter time trial. And as I'm doing the time trial, so 200 meters, half the track. And as I'm coming off the curve of the track into the straightaway, my hip broke. So the top of my hip, my iliac crest broke. I didn't know at the time, I just kind of came up limping and, you know, I kept coming to practice for a couple more days, actually, because I didn't know I'd never been injured before. And eventually my coach was like, you need to go look, get looked at and got x-ray done. Sure enough. There's my hip bones kind of floating off in space. And the physician, you know, he had me do some physical therapy, some ultrasound treatments, men said, give me crutches. And, you know, that was that, you know, standard of care. This is called standard of care. Nobody asked how did a kid break his hip from running. There was no trauma. I didn't fall. I appeared very physically fit. Why did my hip break? Right. And so fast forward, I did get back on the track on the football field, you know, my junior year, which was the following year. I played three games, had five touchdowns, one, my final touchdown, I fell into the end zone. I was like limping into the end zone because I torn my hamstring as I was running into the end zone. And then that was the end of my year, pretty much. I came back a little bit the last game of the year, but I couldn't stay healthy. So I had about half a dozen more injuries happen over the next couple of years. And now I go to college hoping to red shirt as a freshman. This is where everything really, the wheels just kind of fall off. Within about a year, I get diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, right? So my spine has this kind of advanced arthritic condition. And same thing, I went in to see the physician. I was having leg pain and tightness. And he told me to get a scan of my spine. And I was just like, but my leg is bothering me. Why would I do that? I was so disconnected from how all this stuff works. And once he got the scan back, he put it up for me to see. And I was just like, oh, ready to go. Like my coaches, like my physical therapist in the past, just tell me what to do so we can get better. And he kind of looked at me with this look I'll never forget. He looked at me with kind of pity when I was like, okay, so what do we do? What do we do to fix this? And he said, I'm sorry, son. There's nothing that we can do to fix this. This is incurable. You have degenerative disc disease. And I asked him like, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? Should I change the way that I'm exercising? And I had no context really for asking him that question. I'll come back to that. But he said, these are the exact words. He says, this has nothing to do with what you're eating. This is something that just happens. And I'm sorry that it happened to you. And he said, I will get you some medication to help you manage this. I'm sorry, son. And that was that. And at the time there were two hot NSAIDs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. Vioxx was one and Celebrex was the other. And I was a prescription pad away. He wrote me a prescription for Celebrex. Vioxx ended up, now today we know, killing about 40,000 Americans via cardiovascular events and injured many, many more. And many young people included, by the way. And so again, I could have easily been in that number because I just wanted to, I did whatever he told me to do. I had no context for what was happening in my body. And so, you know, to fast forward the story a little bit over the next year and a half, I was just in an immense amount. I went from a nuisance of a pain to chronic debilitating pain to where like, it's a scale of one to 10. And my wife, I always have to reference a strong woman to validate this, but I have a very high pain tolerance. My wife knows this. And, you know, but the pain would be a 10, but it would be for a split second. Whenever I would stand up, this electric feeling like this jolt would go down my leg would make me physically jerk. And so to avoid feeling that pain, I would just sit and lay down as much as possible. And with that being said, I was also eating my college diet still, you know, typical university food, fast food pretty much every day and not moving now, which was my one kind of low hanging fruit that I still had when I still had fitness. Now that's gone. So now I'm just gaining weight like crazy. And over the course of this year and a half, two years, I did get another opinion, which I implore people to do whenever they get a life altering diagnosis, please take a moment, if it is not like dire straits, absolute emergency, get a second opinion. And if you can, from somebody who has a different perspective, not the same train of thinking, right? Einstein's quote, you know, relating to insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, right? Or going to the same train of thinking, expecting a different result, right? That's just not very logical, right? And so I did that, but it was still the same thing. This is incurable. I'm sorry. Here's some more drugs. And to put the kind of icing on the cake of the story, everything changed. It took two years, but everything changed when I saw the last physician. I got his opinion, same thing. Got some scans done. This is incurable. Here's some drugs. And it really hit me that I've been going to folks asking for somebody to try to fix me. And they keep telling me that I'm not fixable. and I had a choice to make because at no point along this line prior, I think there is some nature versus nurture stuff here for sure. But prior to this, I'd been very analytical in my thinking, very curious. I have this tendency to question things and to question perceived authority as well. And so, but I muted all that. And I think I muted that because of my life circumstances. I come from a place where, you know, again, I'm inundated with violence and poor food and drugs and gangs and all these things. And now somebody's telling me I don't have to fight anymore. I don't have to fight anymore. You have this incurable condition, just sit on the sideline. And there's something in my spirit that just had never really sat right with me, fortunately. And so I asked a question that night. Instead of this habitual question in my mind the last two years, I was like, why me? Why did this happen to me? Why won't somebody help me. Why me? Why me? It was just like this broken record. And I asked, what can I do to get healthy? Like I changed the question in the instant. And as soon as I did that, like it was like the matrix, you know, like things started to change in my mind. Like I started to like, I can go do this tomorrow. I can, you know, I'll go to the gym and walk around the track or get on the exercise bike or just do something. I could lose weight, right? Because it just seemed logical. My spine is compressed. I'm having this pain. I have two herniated discs. How about I get some of this weight off my frame, right? Now, because I didn't have access, well, I didn't know that I had access to information. First thing I did was I went to the gym the next day and I started on SlimFast. All right. Shake for breakfast, shake for lunch, sensible dinner. That's what the market has said, but the shakes were disgusting. It was so nasty. And I lost like a couple of pounds, but it really wasn't sustainable. But by me changing my thinking and what can I do to get well? What can I do to feel better? People that were in my life, like there was a woman that I was talking to for the past few years. And she was in chiropractic school. And I just thought she was super weird, her and her chiropractic friends, you know, the little, all this stuff and, you know, doing the adjustments and all this. But she took me to Wild Oats, which has since been bought up by Whole Foods, which there was one in St. Louis and there's one Whole Foods in St. Louis. And St. Louis is a big city and they existed this whole time, but I just wasn't attuned to them because of my question and my, I was just isolating myself and my thinking. And I go into this store and I'm seeing all this stuff that I'd never seen before and books I'd never seen before. And there was a reference book that had all of these scientific references for, you know, quote, natural treatments for things, right? And so my bone density was low and I was having this, you know, back pain and, you know, degenerative disc diagnosis. And there were some peer-reviewed studies in here. And again, I'm in college, I'm aware of this level of thinking, but I didn't know that this would relate to my body. I was in biology. I had nutritional science class actually. And when I saw this, I'm like, oh my God, like I never, I didn't know that omega-3s mattered for my bone density. Like I might literally have not gotten any omega-3s like at all, like for long stints of time. And this is not exaggeration. I ate fast food every day unless I didn't have $2, you know, because it was cheap, it was accessible. And more importantly, even when I ate something at home, it was ultra processed food, a box of macaroni and cheese would be a meal, which I just watched this series Hawkeye on Disney Plus, which I recommend for any family. It's a great family holiday thing. And there was a scene where this assassin makes one of the main characters a pot of macaroni and cheese, right? The Kraft macaroni and cheese. And I was like, I so get that. And they ate it as a meal. And so I might do that or a family can of SpaghettiOs or something. I'm not kidding. I ate, my body was just made of really low quality materials. And so now I realized I need these key nutrients to run processes in my body, to run my mitochondria, to, you know, for assimilation, for digestion, all these things. And so I started to, number one, I became a natural pill popper. All right. I'm just going to confess to you guys. When I found out about these nutrients, I was just buying all these supplements and I didn't really have money like that, you know, being a college student, the whole thing. And so, but then just by me asking questions and moving forward, it all struck me because I remembered something in my nutritional science class, my first year at the university, which I took it because I thought nutrition meant fitness. All right. I didn't know that it meant health and neither did my teacher. And no, he was teetering into obesity himself. And we learned about the food pyramid and the whole thing, but he would tell people to tell patients and, or if you end up working in the field to take a multivitamin, right. To get their, you know, vitamins and minerals. But there was a gap because there wasn't just one form of vitamin C. There are multiple forms of vitamin C. There are multiple forms of B12. There are multiple forms of, you know, magnesium. The list goes on and on. Which form do I need? And then that's when it hit me that food has all of it, right. It has an array of these things and cofactors that tend to make these things more recognizable by our bodies. And I've got a bunch of studies. Maybe we can get into some of that stuff today. Last part here, after employing this stuff, changing my nutrition, changing my movement practices, and also sleeping better because what I was doing during the day helped me to sleep better. Once I started sleeping at night, that was my biggest struggle those two years. I could barely sleep because of the pain. I got better so fast. When I got a scan done nine months later, my degeneration had resolved. I could see the light shining through my disc and my two herniated disc had retracted. I was pain-free. I was incredibly fit. And people at my university, my professors, faculty, fellow students, they all became my clients. When I graduated, opened my clinical practice in nutrition and consulting and started writing books and the show. And here I am with you today. If you're in midlife and you've started to noticed that your energy, your strength, or even your recovery just isn't what it used to be, I want to share something I've been thinking more and more about lately. For many women, we assume it's all about hormones and hormones are absolutely part of the story. But there's another layer that often gets overlooked and that's about cellular energy. As we get older, our mitochondria, the energy engines of ourselves become less efficient. They accumulate damage over time. And when that happens, it can show up as a very specific kind of fatigue. You're doing all the right things. You're eating well, you're strength training, you're prioritizing sleep, and yet something still feels off. That's why I've been incorporating timelines might appear into my routine for the last five years. What I appreciate up might appear is that it works at the level of the mitochondria, helping your body clear out damaged ones. Your cells can function more efficiently. And clinically this matters because mitochondrial health is tied directly to energy, muscle strength, and resilience. For me, this has been a foundational part of my routine as well as my husband's, not something extra because something that supports everything else I'm already doing. And for women in perimenopause and menopause, this is an important part of the conversation because supporting your energy at the cellular level can make a meaningful difference in how you feel day to day. And my friends at MitoPure are doing a big price cut. There's a one-time purchase is going from $125 per month to $99. With subscriptions, it will now start as low as $75 a month. The hope is that this will make Timeline more accessible to folks in my community who been on the fence or tried it and lapsed You can go to timeline slash Cynthia to learn more Again timeline slash Cynthia to learn more What an incredible story all stemming from a reframe you know, starting to think about what I can do about my circumstances, learning the value and the importance of nutrition being pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. And you touched on something that we haven't talked a lot about on this podcast, but I wanna at least touch on before we dive into other topics. When we're talking about hyper palatable, highly processed foods, you speak in the book about fast food economies. And these are essentially poor quality foods that are affordable. And so let's talk a little bit about subsidized foods, the impact of subsidized foods. And let's talk a little bit about what is most subsidized in the United States, because with the understanding that the federal government, and I'm going to provide a quote, between 1995 and 2010, the U.S. government spent $170 billion in agricultural subsidies to support major commodity crops and farm foods that largely show up at the drive-thru window, aka fast food. Why is this a problem? Wow. So as you know, and this quote has been going around a little bit on the interwebs for people in the health space, but I want to give a reference point to it, which today the average American is consuming about 60% of their diet is ultra processed food. That's coming from a meta-analysis in the BMJ. Now, this issue with ultra processed food consumption is even worse for our children. We're close to 67 to 70% ultra processed food making up the average American child's diet today. It is insanity. And I want to provide some context. What is this ultra processed food? What does that actually mean? Humans have been processing food forever, for a very long time. And we still have some processed foods that are very, very healthy. If you take an olive and you crush it, you know, through a cold press, you get olive oil, extra virgin olive oil. That's a processing of that food. It's a very simple process and it's led to, and this has been done for thousands of years and it's very health affirmative versus an ultra processed food where you take a, we'll just say a, I can't say a batch of corn, but in a very, very large amount of corn and you process it in a certain way, exposing it to high heat, various extraction methods, deodorizing agents, add a bunch of, a variety of different types of sugars, you know, whether it's, you know, dextrose, whether it's, you know, maltodextrin, whether it's, you know, cane sugar, the list goes on and on, artificial flavors, artificial color. You take that corn eventually becomes lucky charms. All right. That's an ultra processed food. It has no resemblance to where it actually comes from. It's lost any connection to anything real, right? That is an ultra processed food and that's making up the majority of our diet. These are things that have never existed before throughout human evolution. And now this is the main thing. It's the ingredients that make up our bodies. And it's scary, right? So how does this all tie together with our circumstances. Well, as I mentioned, you know, living in, when I was in Missouri, the majority of my adult life, I lived in Ferguson, Missouri and Ferguson, Florissant, you know, I moved to a little bit better part, you know, after I graduated and in that area, specifically while I was in college, I'm not exaggerating again, within a two mile radius, every fast food place you can name that is kind of local to St. Louis was there. So two McDonald's, Arby's, Krispy Kremes, Burger King, Wendy's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lee's Chicken, Papa John's, Domino's, all of this. I could just walk a couple blocks. It was all around me. As soon as I walk out of my apartment complex, there's a liquor store there, not to mention five other ones in that same two-mile radius. So I'm just inundated. That's all I see. I didn't know Whole Foods existed. There was no organic section in my grocery store. And so this particular exposure, how is that possible? where we have, where we pull up to that fast food window, because that's what I did, cost effective and tasty and dependable. It always tastes the same because it's chemically made to taste the same. I go to McDonald's and I can get two cheeseburgers for $2. And to get one avocado in my area would have been $2.50 at minimum, $2 to $3. Why would an avocado that is not cost intensive, it literally falls off the tree. If you think about what goes into I'm making a cheeseburger, right? All the various ingredients, the quote meat, the meat, the quotes cheese, the bread, the condiments, the wrapping, then the box that it comes in, the marketing behind it, you know, the list goes on and on and on. And all of the preservatives and all the chemicals that are needed to make this stuff shelf stable, because if anybody's ever had this experience where they bump into a French fry and somebody dropped between a couch cushion or in a car or something from McDonald's. You see that later on and it looks the same. That's not normal. So the question is, how is something so cost-intensive to make that burger should cost a lot more than an avocado? It has to do with government subsidies and how our policies have been created to make really low-quality food that are cost-intensive very affordable. And now here's the thing. I'm not somebody that is leaning towards conspiracies and things like that. Of course, this stuff has happened. Conspiracies exist, but let's just be rational about this and try to look for the good in people, right? I have this, my bias or my belief is that this might've even been started with good intentions, which is to feed families, right? To make foods more available. But the problem is companies, especially when they get big, they tend to start seeing people as dollar signs. And that's just the way it is. Especially, you know, we have quote, big agriculture, big food, and these companies control so much of not just our economy, but also they're so influential in government policy. And so, as you mentioned, 1995 to 2010, there's almost $2 billion doled out in government subsidies, primarily to farmers who are growing soy and wheat and corn, which are primarily going to be showing up through processed foods. So something that was like about potentially feeding American families now is making up what we're making our tissues out of. And what are the ramifications? Because that's the thing. It sounds bad, but is there any data on any outcomes? Well, this study was published in Janna Internal Medicine, one of our most prestigious medical journals. And they were looking at, is there a connection between our consumption of government subsidized foods and disease? Specifically, obesity is one of the things that jumped out. And so they did a great meta-analysis. They accounted for socioeconomic diversity, age, sex, and other variables as well, and compiled all the data. And they found that folks who had the highest consumption of government subsidized foods had nearly a 40% greater incidence of developing obesity, insulin resistance, and overall what we call today metabolic syndrome, right? So almost 40% more likely if you're eating a significant ratio of government subsidized foods, the foods that are cheap, the foods that my family was just inundated with, you're far more likely to be obese. And this is experiential. We could see it in my family. We could see it in my community, you know, in particular. So, and also another thing they noted in that study was significantly higher ratios of inflammation. And this was noted by C-reactive protein was one of the measurements they looked at. So just stacking conditions against our citizens, against our families, right? Our government is funding. And when I say that, when I say our government is funding, We're funding it. That's coming from our money. Our tax dollars are literally feeding disease and obesity. Right. And so, again, very little is going to people who are producing fruits and vegetables and higher quality foods. Like I'm talking a tiny, tiny fraction. Two hundred billion dollars is a significant amount. And that's only this is just one issue of why we're in the state that we're in right now, where, you know, we're not going to the door of 250 million Americans are overweight or obese. It's not an accident. This is kind of how the system is constructed right now. And it's really interesting because as a clinician, I was able to witness this firsthand. And I kept saying to colleagues, there's something we're missing with our patient population. You know, I worked in ER medicine and cardiology. And for me, the amount of medications that my patients, every time they came in, we were increasing their blood pressure medicine. We were telling them to eat low salt. We were encouraging them to eat more heart healthy grains. And I put that in air quotes. We were encouraging them not to eat saturated fat, to avoid animal-based products. And so my plate and the predecessor to that have really reinforced many clinicians to continue giving out poor quality information that is not at all aligned with metabolic health. And you touched on inflammation. And I think maybe that's the place to start when we start talking about the net impact of these highly processed, hyperpalatable foods that most Americans are consuming. and the net impact on hormonal regulation, our gut microbiome, our liver health, and so many other issues. Not all inflammation is bad, as we both know, but chronic inflammation is problematic. So in terms of looking at these foods that we're consuming and chronic inflammation, what are some of the changes that go on in the gut microbiome vis-a-vis these hyperpalatable, highly processed foods? It's chaos. You know, we've got so much data on this now. And some of the most distinguished gastroenterologists in the world are my friends now, you know, my friends and colleagues. And just being able to get access to this information. Some of these folks have been talking about this stuff for decades and people thought they were crazy. Right. The microbiome. What? Who cares? Like, why are you studying poop? You know, and now we understand how our again, the microbiome is really having a moment right now. and how our microbiome and our gut health is impacting our mental health, is impacting our metabolism, our immune system. I mean, there's nothing that this particular field, and part of this is, you know, where I'm at right now today is, I think there's going to be a revolution in our thinking because we've become so parts oriented. And what I mean is we've continued to isolate and to become specialists and isolating us in two sections. and we are one whole entity, you know? And so our microbiome is definitely affecting our skin. It's definitely affecting our brain. What's going on in your toe is affecting what's happening in your brain. It's affecting what's happening in your eyes. It's all connected. And unfortunately, again, we isolate ourselves in a part. And then that parts focus becomes our, again, standard of care, right? We've got a thyroid issue. We attack the thyroid, right? Whether we are, you know, providing a particular medication, whether we're on a supplement route, whether we're using radiation to eliminate our thyroid, you know, whatever the case might be, and not thinking about the fact that your thyroid is connected to your hypothalamus, it's connected to your adrenals, it's connected to your ovaries, and it's all linked up together. There's an information superhighway there, you know, the HPA axis. But again, we don't think about, okay, is this something upstream or downstream? We have a very narrow look at things, you know, even again, in the field of endocrinology, there's an entire field of psychoneuroendocrinology, right? They don't talk to each other. Any of the researchers that are looking at how your thoughts are affecting your hormones, you know, that's a whole different thing. And even that field in and of itself is very tiny compared to all the endocrinologists we have today who are, again, looking at hormones and then painting a picture just exclusively on that and negating how complex you are. They're not looking at what's happening with your gut, largely not looking at what's happening with inflammation, you know, or your heart health or your nervous system, because those are like, those are somebody else's specialty. They'll send you to somebody else if they do that. Right. And so I believe there's going to be a revolution because we are inherently, all of this is existing in the same being, but also all of us are connected as well. We are part of the same kind of earthly organism. Sometimes I think of us as like cells in this body. And if everything is working in symbiosis, everything's kind of good. But when we get cancerous behaviors, we can start to really mess things up and our planet can revolt. And so again, we see ourselves in isolated parts. We see ourselves isolated from each other. And it's just very unusual because that doesn't exist in age. If just even with tenets of physics, like we're all linked up, you know, and there's causality behind everything. Nothing happens at random that just doesn't exist, you know? So I think there's going to be a change in our thinking. And when it comes to the microbiome and the implications with inflammation, wow. Okay. So number one, it's important to understand the connection between our brain and our gut. All right. So the vagus nerve is having a moment as well. Right. So there's this information super highway between your brain and your gut, constantly feeding back data. And researchers indicate that the majority of the data is going from the gut to informing your brain. Right. But there's this powerful feedback loop. And by the way, little not so fun fact, really chronic ulcers, you know, peptic ulcers. One of the treatments just a couple of decades ago to deal with these ulcers that were deemed to be really untreatable was to cut the vagus nerve and the ulcers would go away. All right. I don't recommend this treatment. This isn't something we're doing. However, it was very effective. And what does that indicate? How your thoughts are infecting what's happening in your gut, right? And how stress in particular is affecting what happens in your gut. And we know this, but we've pushed that under the table, you know, because stress is invisible in a sense. Now, with this being said, researchers at Yale University have affirmed that disconnection between the gut and the, actually, I'm going to come back to that. I'm going to say that in a moment. First, I want to share with you this. This is from researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And what they discovered was that this connection between inflammation in the brain, specifically hypothalamic inflammation in the gut, these researchers uncovered that inflammation in the hypothalamus can essentially cause the creation of excess body fat, inflammation, insulin resistance, and inflammation downstream in the gut. And that inflammation downstream, excess body fat, insulin resistance, creates more inflammation in the brain, right? So there's this vicious circle that happens. And a lot of us are just like, well, how do I know if I have inflammation in my brain? I don't have inflammation in my brain. My brain doesn't hurt. Our brain does not have pain receptors. You wouldn't know if your brain was on fire until something catastrophic happens. It's this cosmic joke, I think, you know, where your brain that tells you about pain everywhere else, but it can't tell you about pain itself. And I think it's because, you know, you'd go insane if your brain had to like deal with that. So with that being said, researchers at Yale University uncovered that data happening in your hypothalamus and your brain just overall, we'll just keep it simple. Because actually, I do want to talk about the hypothalamus. But what they found was that your brain can inform your gut on, based on its assessment of what kind of calories you have stored, nutrients you have stored in your tissues, your brain can tell your gut to increase the absorption of calories from the food that you eat, or it can tell your gut to decrease the assimilation and absorption of calories from the food that you eat and minerals and amino acids. Your body just, you don't just put stuff in and just calories in. That's not how stuff works. That's so rudimentary. It's such a very simplistic, almost idiotic way of looking at the human body that is immensely complex. Now we can communicate in simple language. And that reminds me of this quote from Einstein. if you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough. We can communicate in simple language, but we are not simple. We are not close. We don't understand hardly anything about us. The little bits that we do know, we turn it into everything. And it's this kind of mechanistic, Newtonian way of looking at humans. And here's the thing. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of all that, But look at the results. Is it working out for us? As a species, how are we doing? Looking at us in this mechanistic perspective, it's something is awry. Something is seriously wrong here. Now to tie all this together with the microbiome. So again, with inflammation kind of happening, whether it in the brain or in the gut it inherently affecting one another And I think it important also to just mention you said this earlier inflammation is not inherently bad We need inflammation Inflammation drives processes. It drives healing. It's a part of being alive. There's nothing inherently wrong with inflammation. However, when inflammation becomes chronic and excessive, it's the root of the word. We're looking at the etymology. This is basically to set on fire. right? There's this internal blaze happening. And one of the biggest kind of trigger points for that is when we're gaining excessive body fat. And the research is very clear on this. Once our fat cells, which can actually our fat cells can expand a thousand times their volume, we're great at storing fat. It's an evolutionary adaptation that got us here as a species. Fat isn't bad, but when it starts to carry too much of it, it starts to send out essentially a false stress signal to our immune system that, hey, we're infected, right? And so this heightened response, this inflammatory response is just like a ticking time bomb for all manner of things to be worse. And this is why obesity is tied to at least nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States, right? So we're talking hundreds of thousands of deaths per year with obesity being a comorbidity, including viral infections. Now, most recently, it's the number one risk factor is obesity because we're in this pre-inflamed state. All right. Last point here with the microbiome specifically. When we say the microbiome, we're talking about a dynamic cascade of thousands of different species of bacteria, trillions of bacteria. I struggle to even say thousands, tens of thousands. And this community have their own genes. They have their own reproduction. They eat, they have their waste. These microbes do a lot of intelligent processes. And the question is, why do we have them? And so many of them, they outnumber our human cells and our genes. Because if we go gene for gene, 99 plus percent of the genes that you carry going gene for gene are microbial and not human. So what the best data that we have, and I was just talking with Dr. Suzanne Devcota, and she runs a lab at Cedars-Sinai studying specifically food and the microbiome. That is her jam. All right. And she was sharing how essentially our relationship with these microbes evolved as a sort of outsourcing system over time for data. Our human cells don't have to carry and do certain things because we've got these microbes that can do jobs and it can share the load so the human organism overall can move on and do more evolved things, right? It's kind of, again, it's a symbiotic relationship, right? And so we have bacteria that make certain nutrients in us for us. We don't have to make them, right? So whether it's B12 or scaphos, short-chain fatty acids, it's that relationship. Now, again, we evolved with this today. However, that relationship has become skewed significantly where we look at an indigenous culture and take a look at their gut microbiome profile, they might have four times more diversity than we have today. Like we're losing species, we're losing diversity, breadth and depth. And when that happens, we're seeing the rise in pathogenic bacteria kind of taking over our vessel, right? And even pathogenic, I hate the black and white thinking on that because even H. pylori, there's benefit to be found. But once we find something that might be a problem, we try to kill all of it. And everything has a role, but it needs to be in its proper ratio and perspective, right? So, you know, we got into this place where we became very, you know, anti-microbial, anti-bacteria. And we're just attacking this ultra clean. And again, look at what's happened with our species. And also, last point here is the relationship between our immune system and our microbiome. They're the most closely connected, you know, relationship as far as our immune system is our microbiome because the majority of our immune cells are located in our gut. We're talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny cell layer between the two. And it makes sense, evolutionarily speaking, because if we were to eat something that could potentially harm us or kill it, we want the immune system to be right there. And or even if it's good, is this friend or foe? Are we allowing this to come into the system or are we going to attack it and set up the immune system, the adaptive immune system, the innate immune system. We're going to put labels on things where if this ever comes in, we don't tolerate it. But inflammation in the gut in particular via our consumption of ultra processed foods, which these are just, it's like, I just saw this guy, social media has some cool stuff from time to time, but it was like coffee mate. It is so messed up. If you look at the ingredients on the stuff and he's pouring it out and it's just like, It's so flammable. It's just like creating these huge fireballs. And people are just pouring that in their coffee every day. So to say that it's inflammatory, this is not a joke. And guess what? Ultra processed food, highly refined seed oils are the basis to be a, quote, creamer in our culture today, right? And the last piece I'll say here is, in talking with, she's one of my favorite people, Dr. Kate Shanahan. And she's probably the foremost expert on this topic of ultra processed seed oils, right? So, quote, vegetable oil. And I remember when my mom got it, the vegetable oil, because we're trying to eat healthier. Right. And I implore everybody after this episode, of course, you know, come to the model health show, check me out, but go to YouTube and just go in YouTube and type in extra virgin olive oil, how to make extra virgin olive oil or extra virgin olive oil making process. Right. And see it. It's very simple. Stone press. It's like, it's been done for a long time. Then type in how is canola oil made? All right. And make sure that you have your socks pulled up nice and tightly so it doesn't blow your socks off in a bad way. Okay. Because to make that, to take extract a kernel of corn, you know, or soybeans, whatever, to, to get the amount of oil necessary, you know, and also being that these oils are very, very volatile, Extra virgin olive oil is very volatile as well. It's not just free of being damaged. This is why it's typically bottled in dark glass bottles, cold temperature process, because those oils are very delicate and heat sensitive. And so taking this oil, high heat extraction method, then the first thing they have to do is they have to, I don't wanna give too much of the video away, but they have to wash it with a tremendous amount of chemicals, all right? And again, explosive stuff. they're using as treatment. And it smells terrible. So they use deodorizers and this high heat processing takes a very delicate oil, right? Omega-3s or omega-6s, these are mega oils. And it's creating a high level of rancidity. The most important takeaway is free radical activity, right? So it's oxidation of these delicate oils. And we're just consuming a tremendous amount of reactive oxygen species, right? So like free radicals. And so we're trying to get antioxidants in our diet to stay young and to be healthy, all the things we're consuming the opposite. And so Kate Shanahan, she shared with me this particular study, well, she's the first person to mention it to me. They did a biopsy of some folks at the earlier part, you know, like earlier towards the 1900s to actually look at what's the contents of a fat cell for humans, like what fats they're made of. And they found that the average fat cell back then was made up of about 2% polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs. These omega-6 fatty acids that are getting very volatile. It's not that they're bad, very volatile. We need a small amount. And that's what was typical at the time, about 2%. Today, taking biopsies of the average person, now the average person's fat cell is made up of 20% to 25% polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs. So we've literally changed the ingredients that the human is made of. The average person is made of completely different stuff. And it's these very volatile, pro-inflammatory omega-6 oils. And please, everybody hear this. There is data showing the opposite. Seed oils are great for you, right? There are studies on any of this stuff. The benefit of learning from somebody like myself is that I spend hours upon hours upon hours studying this information and looking at all sides of it because I'm aware of my biases. And to be a good scientist, you have to look at the opposite of what you believe. And I take what is the majority of data say? What is the logic say? What is our history of a species say? And then I make a determination and share that with the world. I don't just grab something and build my... No, that's part of the problem. We're being so... There's so much infighting about minutia and silliness. So again, there is data affirming, hey, there's no problem with vegetable oil. What I would want you to do immediately, which is just a logical fallacy. Is that an ultra-processed food? For who's ever promoting that, is that an ultra-processed food? Yes, it is. Should we be cautious about ultra-processed food? Yeah, of course. All right. Whereas, check this out. here's a little tip for everybody. All right. Walk away for today. Researchers at Auburn discovered that extrovert oleocanthal rich, antioxidant rich extra virgin olive oil is one of the few foods ever discovered that actually helps to reduce brain inflammation. Specifically, they found that, and again, we don't know how it works, but it's able to reduce inflammation in the brain and help to heal and repair the blood brain barrier that gets damaged via inflammation, leading to more inflammation of the brain. What is it? I don't care. I wasn't a big fan of olive oil, but when I see that data, I'm like, what is it about that food? That's remarkable. How does it have that intelligence for its association with humans? And so that's what we want to lean on. And also, again, we've been using it for thousands of years versus, you know, quote, vegetable oil or canola oil being used for like a few decades made by this lab, you know. It's just, we've got to just use our logic and have healthy conversations. and I think that's gonna obviously lead to healthier choices. Absolutely, and I'm glad that you brought up seed oils. Obviously, I encourage everyone to read food labels, be fastidious. I think it was Dr. Ben Bickman that said the number one consumed fat in the United States right now is soybean oil. And I believe it was Dr. Kate Shanahan that indicated that when we consume seed oils, they actually damage our mitochondria and the cellular membrane of our mitochondria for two years. So, you know, if you have these things at home, we're going to encourage you to lean into healthier options, whether it's extra virgin olive oil, whether it's coconut oil, whether it's avocado oil, et cetera, and try to slowly kind of weed these things out of your diet. And when you go to restaurants, don't be afraid to ask what your food is being cooked in. Ironically enough, when I was last in LA, I was talking to a waitress and she said, oh, you'd be surprised how many of the $100 steaks in LA are cooked in seed oils. And I thought to myself, I was like, oh my gosh. So just ask. There's nothing wrong with asking because you may not be exposed at home. You may get exposed when you go out to a restaurant or you may feel like you're encumbering your host or whomever just to kind of have a sense of what's being served. And I would definitely encourage people to go look at how canola oil is created. I promise you after looking at that, it will change your perspectives significantly. Now, when we're talking about brain health in particular, obviously, this is an area that I'm very vested in and in terms of making sure that my brain stays as healthy as possible, especially as a middle-aged person. When you're looking at helpful things that we are doing in our day-to-day life, things to me that seem relatively benign, but have a large net impact on brain health, what are some of the common ways that people don't realize that they're doing things that are setting themselves up for having brain health issues? Obviously, metabolic health is critically important, but what are some of the other things that people are doing in your opinion that are impacting brain health significantly? Yeah. So obviously, our brain is, it's an understatement to say how important it is. It's like a governing force over everything about us, right? Some researchers believe that it's kind of the seat of where so much of our emotions are coming from, our ability to process data, obviously, our perspective, but also there's so much regulatory control happening in our brain. So the health of our brain really is the health of us, right? A healthy brain is going to lean much closer to a healthy life. And the opposite is true as well. And I believe that today, the biggest kind of hidden epidemic, hidden problem that we're experiencing is brain inflammation. And there's going to be so much more coming out about this. So you heard it here first. All right. But with that said, you know, because again, inflammation downstream, excessive body fat, which has become epidemic is creating inflammation in our brain, specifically our hypothalamus. And the question should be why, like why, what's going on with the hypothalamus? Well, hypothalamus is sometimes a pituitary, but depending on who you talk to, it gives the label of being a master gland in the body. Right. And I feel it's a master gland because there's an integration point in your hypothalamus for your nervous system and your endocrine system, right? So your neurotransmitters, you know, your ability to kind of read and understand your environment internal and external, right? That's kind of the big thing if we're looking at the nervous system. So that data is critical because that data is determining how your genes are getting read, right? So epigenetics. So we want to have a healthy interaction with our environment, internal and external. Our endocrine system is our hormones, right? So hormones are really like these chemical messengers that are communicating data between the cells in your body, right? So we want good data, accurate data to be communicated, right? It's basically telling your cells what to do. And so we want to make sure that that everybody's on the same page. So that integration point is in your hypothalamus to the best of our awareness today. And your hypothalamus is also a governing force of your metabolic rate, All right. You're in kind of internal thermostat. We know that your thyroid is largely identified as like, this is where so much of metabolism control is happening, but upstream is that thermostat, right? So whether it's your, literally your body temperature itself, right. And your metabolic rate and metabolism is so much more than just calories or digesting calories. You know, this is, everything is metabolic. Even your immune cells have metabolism. There's a whole field of immunometabolism and just the metabolic health of your immune cells and how they're taking in energy, processing things, how healthy are they, right? So again, we have to stop putting things in these pithy boxes, like it's the end all be all. So it's that thermostat. It is so much of what's going on with your sexual function, with your heart rate. There's so much going on with your hypothalamus. And so we want to do what we can to help to reduce inflammation in our brain overall. But because of that vicious circle, it can be pretty complicated. And there's very few people out there saying, hey, we should address the inflammation in your brain if we want to get this weight off. But I believe we could do things together. But this means, I think here's the most important points from today's conversation, which is your brain is literally made from the food that you're eating. Okay. It's made every single cell, every dendrite, every axon terminal, every neurotransmitter, it's all made from food. It doesn't just come out. This isn't a damn magic show and Dr. Strange is living in your brain. It's all made from food. All right. And so what are you making your brain out of? Like seriously. And we have certain brain cells stick with us for decades, right? It's different from the rest of our bodies, but there's always this repair happening. And also that, you know, we have the telomeres and, you know, how they're aging, you know, and also how they're communicating with each other, right? So like signal transduction, right? So the cells being fit to take in data and to send data, all of this is determined by food. And so if you're making your brain out of low quality things, because your body's going to do what the best that it can, your brain is going to struggle. period. Now this leads to what can we do to have a healthier brain? What is the number one nutritive thing that our brain is made of? It's made of water. It's primarily made of water. And this cannot be stressed enough. It is so freaking simple. To put this in a little bit of context, actually, let me share this study with you guys. So this was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and revealed that even mild dehydration has a significant negative impact and increases fatigue impairs your mood reduces reading speed in their study mental work capacity And this was for college students and test taking was all kind of reduced. Their ability to perform was reduced. And here's the other, this is the good news. Within a short amount of time, getting them properly hydrated alleviated all of these symptoms. The very best supplement for your brain is water. There's so many fancy pants, nootropics out here. I'm a fan. There's great stuff. But if you're dehydrated, what are you doing? That's a waste of money. We're missing the point. Your brain is mostly made of water. It needs water. It needs that exchange because all of your brain's trillions of processes that are taking place happen in a water medium. And so the best data that we have, about a 2% drop in your body's baseline hydration rate can lead to all this mental impairment. All right. So number one, water. The next question usually is like, how much should I drink? The very best answer is it depends on you. And that's not the answer a lot of people want to hear because we want that dose. We want that recommendation. Take two of these and call me in the morning type thing. We have to take more responsibility. We have to listen to our bodies. And I understand that information could be skewed. If we're not in a good state of health right now, you know, our body can be informing us that, you know, we need to stop by Krispy Kremes, right? Like it's my intuition, you know, it's an intuitive thing, but the intuition obviously is very important, but that communication can be coming from a processed food company, you know, informing your decision. And so there is a tenant here, kind of a baseline tenant, which is taking your body weight, dividing that number in half, and then targeting that amount of ounces. So a person that weighs 150 pounds, divide that in half, you get 75, target 75 ounces of water a day. It's a good baseline, but you might need more, you might need less, but it's a good baseline if you're somebody who needs numbers. And also I want to make sure if you're not drinking enough water, which you know if you are not, to give yourself something to target. Now the other question is, how do you do it? You know, I've been, I just crossed my 20th year in this field. So I've heard so much, all right. So many things working in the office where I work one-on-one with people doing these different events, all these corporate, you know, wellness programs, all this stuff I've heard. I struggled to say the word, but I've heard every excuse in the book. Right. But these things aren't excuses if it's real to somebody in the moment, but you know, it's people like, you know, why can't stop peeing, you know, listen, There's nothing wrong with peeing, you know, but of course we don't want to be running to the bathroom, you know, every hour or whatever, every, you know, people exaggerate, you know, every 20 minutes, I got to go pee. If you're dehydrated, your body is probably going to go. It's not just even the water too, which I'm going to get to in a moment. But if you're dehydrated, your body's going to go through a process. It's going to try to end with the new, out with the old. Exchange is an exchange process. Your body's also going to choose a higher order stuff. So it's going to get rid of stuff and it's a waste channel to get rid of metabolic waste. We're not talking about drinking so much water that we're just like diluting our tissues, by the way. We need to have water that has structure. Okay. And what do I mean by that? You do not find anywhere in nature. By the way, throughout human evolution, we set up shop where the springs were. We set up shop where there's a water source because it's the most important thing. And so, but you don't find in nature, you don't find distilled water in nature. All right. And I don't want anybody getting upset, all right, if they're a fan of distilled water, but it's just not, that's not normal. All right. And not to say we can't use that to great benefit because things that are not normal, haven't existed, can be beneficial. We have to be open to that. However, water in nature, it's always water is known as the universal solvent. So it's water combined with minerals, right? It's going to absorb what's happening in that process of going through a spring. It's like the earth's water filter. It's amazing. With that said, one of the key things for water and for our brain is sodium. Your brain cannot actually retain fluid without sodium. We would die. But when we hear sodium, we think of blood pressure. That's the way that we've been programmed. And in my book, Eat Smarter, I went through, I shared a plethora of studies just dissecting that very rudimentary argument that if you look at, again, the vast majority of data, and I even included a meta-analysis, no big deal, just from Harvard or someplace like that, affirming that not only is this conversation skewed as to like, it's such a detrimental thing, but if you're deficient in sodium, this is one of the big triggers for developing insulin resistance. right? Like sodium is critical for so many things. I already mentioned retaining water in your brain, but if we talk about retaining water, that can be the problem with our blood pressure, right? Over 70% of the sodium in the average American's diet is from processed foods, ultra processed foods. All right. That maybe might be the problem and not some high quality salt, you know, in your water or some high quality intelligently sourced electrolytes or sodium in real food. It's probably not the problem. All right. So researchers at McGill University found that sodium works as a quote, this is a direct quote, a quote on off switch for neurotransmitters in the brain that number one are critical for neuro protection and also for neuro regeneration and protecting the brain against degenerative diseases like epilepsy. It's just sodium, right? Again, we put these things in these pithy boxes. We don't understand how important it is. Sodium is critical. It's one of the most important nutrients. It's an electrolyte. It's a mineral that carries an electrical charge that enables your cells to talk to each other. All of this happening here, electrical energy exchange, information exchange. For deficient in sodium, it could be a big problem. And also again, the quality, there isn't just one type of sodium. There's a variety. There isn't just one type of magnesium. People know more about that now, right? Sulfate, citrate, right? There's so many different types of magnesium. Real food first, right? And then intelligently sourced. We need to question and ask, where are people getting, where is this source coming from when we buy a supplement? Like, is it, do they actually have good standards on where they're getting what they're getting? So I mentioned water, electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium. those three are particularly important for cognitive function. All right. And outside of that, one more thing I want to mention, because if we take away the water, the dry weight of the human brain is mostly fat, right? So a lot of people know this by now, but protein is not that far behind by the way. Okay. So maybe we'll say, you know, if 12% of the brain is fat, you know, like the water weight plus fat, maybe seven, 8% is protein. These numbers can vary a little bit and then a little bit of minerals in the mix. Your brain isn't really storing carbohydrates like that. It's using it. And researchers at Harvard actually found that your brain will gladly confiscate half of the glucose you take in any meal. Our brains are hardwired to sop up glucose again through our evolution because we never came across it like that. It was not something we had access to. Today, it's so much. And all of that sugar running its way up to the brain, neuroinflammation. Running its way up to the brain, now we have this dub today, Alzheimer's. Many researchers called it type 3 diabetes. So there's an insulin resistance taking place in the brain. And also some of the research on kind of really on the cutting edge of neuroscience, insulin in the brain isn't just about opening up the brain cell to give it sugar. Insulin is working as its own kind of signaling molecule and helping to turn processes on and turn processes off beyond just its interaction with glucose. Insulin is doing some really interesting things. Now, what if we have insulin resistance in the brain? Because of all the sugar, that's a problem. So with the fat, so I'm just going to share this really quickly. Omega-3s obviously is super important here. When we hear that the brain is mostly fat, that we can have this tendency. And I know that I did early on in my clinical practice. You just need to eat all the fats, like get all the fats. Your brain doesn't really, even your brain's diet is a little different from the body, but it's all good. It's all connected. So just be clear. But when it comes to saturated fats, for example, you know, when we're babies, which is dramatic growth and development of our brains, mother's milk is a substantial amount of cholesterol. cholesterol, the dirty word, cholesterol and saturated fat. It's incredibly high ratio of saturated fat. Why would that be? Is nature just stupid? Did nature not read, you know, this book on saturated fat? No, like that's, it's again, it's so ignorant because if you look at just the natural design of things, saturated fat isn't bad. There is a place where this can be problematic. There is a place where water can be problematic. When everything is put in a proper perspective, we need saturated fat, absolutely. But our gates for absorbing saturated fat decline as we get older. So that might be an indicator that we don't need as much later on in life because your brain will actually make its own cholesterol, for example. It makes it itself because it's important. And so do we need to target it dietarily? Not necessarily. Same thing with saturated fat. Your brain is already pretty established once you get past maybe 25. So your need or your assimilation to go to your brain is going to get tempered down some. So with that said, the type of fat that we do know for a fact that we need for a lifetime, what I'm going to share with you as a game changer is omega-3 fatty acids. All right. Probably everybody has heard about omega-3s and we need to get omega-3s in. I'm going to give you the ultimate reason why. So this particular study, the researchers used MRIs to actually look at the brain and see with the person's intake of omega-3s, what's the impact that it has on the brain. All right. And so this study was published in the journal Neurology, top tier, high impact journal in this field. All right. And what they did was when they were looking at the test subjects brain, they found that the people who consumed the lowest amount of omega-3s, EPA and DHA had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. Their brains were shrinking prematurely versus their counterparts who were consuming ample amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. The researchers noted that lack of EPA and DHA in the diet was particularly harmful to the memory center of the brain, a.k.a. the hippocampus, which lost neurons at a rate equivalent to two additional years of abnormal aging by not getting in enough omega-3s. People who ate less than four grams of DHA per day showed the highest rates of brain shrinkage than those who were eating six grams or more who had the healthiest shrink-proof brains. All right. So when I'm talking about like, what is your brain made of your brain volume itself, because the mega threes aren't just coming and making new brain cells. They're helping to support and to reaffirm the structural integrity of our brain cells. That's what they're doing. All right. And they're also enabling signal transduction. And when I mentioned in particular, the memory center of the brain, all right, listen to this. So this particular study was looking at the memory and the impact with omega-3s. This was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They found that simply by increasing the intake of DHA into test subjects diet, they were able to improve both memory and reaction time. And they found that essentially DHA is a critical part of memory formation itself. All right. We could forget about making memories without it. All right. That was a little bar there. You see, there's a little poetry we could forget about you see that but are we doing it now the question is where do we get it and by the way DHA and EPA when I was you know working this probably about 10 years ago I had this revelation maybe nine years ago but everybody was coming into my office I had them like taking chia seed oil and hemp seed oil and flax seed oil like gotta get these omega-3s I had the data on omega-3s but because I had my belief system, my bias, I thought that they were all created equal. It's just omega-3s and omega-3s are omega-3s. That was ALA. That is the plant form of omega-3s. And it is not what is feeding your brain and supporting your brain. ALA is going to be used more as a kind of energy source. It's not for the structural integrity of your cells. It does not work like that. And our bodies can convert a tiny amount of ALA into DHA and EPA, but depending on you, your unique metabolic fingerprint, your health of your microbiome, your age, your other genetic factors, so many things go into computing this. You can lose upwards of 95% in the conversion process. It's not efficient at all. If we're on a vegan or vegetarian protocol, this is a must. You absolutely have to find a source of DHA and EPA. The vast majority, 99% of studies are done using fish oil. Krill oil, K-R-I-L-L, has some clinical trials that have been done and found efficacy there for omega-3s. And actually it has an additional benefit, which is astaxanthin, which is this very powerful antioxidant. And it's red, by the way, and it really has been found to improve the assimilation of the omega-3s. Now, krill is a microscopic shrimp. So somebody's ethical belief might not allot for that. At minimum, please get yourself an algae oil. The rub is, we don't have clinical trials affirming its efficacy. All right. We know that the omega threes are there. So I don't want you to have to wait around because you need them. All right. So get yourself an algae oil at minimum, but food first, even though I'm going to write to the supplements, food first, again, even in the journal neurology, they found that people who eat at least one seafood meal per week do in fact perform better on cognitive skills tests. All right. In particular, two to three is ideal top-notch. And so that's number one. Besides seafood, which everybody pretty much knows that fatty fish in particular, then we have grass-fed beef. We have eggs. There's a variety of places that you could find DHA and EPA in our diet, right? But regardless, we have to make sure that we make this a mandate because we're talking about literally losing your brain volume if you're not getting in enough omega-3 fats. Wow. I am just absorbing all this goodness. I know this is going to be an incredible first podcast for 2023. I could speak to you for hours, but obviously I want to be respectful of your time. Please let listeners how to connect with you on social media, how to listen to your amazing podcast, which I've been honored to have been a guest, how to get your books and how to connect with you outside of the podcast. Awesome. Thank you. It was so fun having you in the studio with me and people can find me. My show is called The Model Health Show. And you could find this wherever you listen to this amazing podcast. You could find The Model Health Show. And, you know, I'm very grateful to say, you know, with podcast charts, it's kind of like billboard charts, you know, hits come out, you know, it moves from time to time. But we've been number one health podcast in the country many, many times over the years. And I think it just speaks to, you know, our quality of care. You know, I just care a lot. and we want to make sure that folks feel empowered and making learning fun, you know? And so, yeah, people can find me on the Model Health Show and YouTube as well. We do some stuff there. And on social, I'm at Sean Model and I'm most active on Instagram and on Twitter. So I'm always posting cool stuff there. And yeah, so the books, anywhere books are sold, Barnes & Noble, Target, Amazon, all that good stuff. You can find Eat Smarter is my latest book. It's a national bestseller. And Sleep Smart is my first book. It's an international bestseller. And yeah, it's just going to add a lot of empowerment and not just years to your life, but life to your years, you know, having those resources. So yeah, that's where you can find me. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you do to help us stay healthier and more educated and knowledgeable. Thank you. I received that. And thank you for doing what you do because it's truly, truly a gift, your experience and, And just how you share your life and your heart, we all need it more than ever. So I just really appreciate you. Thank you. Likewise. If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe and tell a friend.