Change Your Diet to PREVENT DISEASE & Reduce Inflammation w/Dr. Roger Seheult EP 1156

My guest today is Dr. Roger Seheult, who is quadruple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, Critical Care Medicine and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is the co-founder of MedCram, a medical education company where his mission is to demystify medical concepts for people around the world. You guys really enjoyed the first time we had Roger on, so we brought him on again to really dive into the root cause of disease and how to prevent it! A lot of this information is fascinating and necessary, so I’ve split this interview into two separate parts. The second half will be out later this week.In this episode we discuss, why inflammation is the root cause of disease, how different diets affect our overall health, what happens in your body when you’re infected with COVID-19, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1156Check out his website: https://www.medcram.comListen to our first interviews with Dr. Roger Seheult: www.lewishowes.com/1063 & www.lewishowes.com/1064Adventist Health Study: https://adventisthealthstudy.org/studies/AHS-2Plant based diets, pescatarian diets and COVID-19 Severity Study:https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/18/bmjnph-2021-000272The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,156 with Dr. Roger Seheult.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:31Lewis Howes?

  Lee Hunt said, "The groundwork of all happiness is health." And Deepak Chopra said, "The way you think, the way you behave, and the way you eat can influence your life by 30 to 50 years." My guest today is Dr. Roger Seheult, who is quadruple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary diseases, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is the co-founder of MedCram, a medical education company where his mission is to demystify medical concepts for people around the world. And you guys so much enjoyed the first time we had Roger on a year ago that we wanted to have him back on and talk even more about the concepts that we dove into. And a lot of this information is so fascinating and so necessary that I've split this into two

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  parts. The second half will be out later this week. But in this episode, we discuss why inflammation is the root cause of disease, the best steps you can take to prevent diseases in your life, how different diets affect our overall health, what happens in your body when you're infected with COVID-19, how our immune system works, and how to minimize the effects on your immune system when you have COVID-19, and are quarantining at home, and so much more. If you're enjoying this, or you have someone you care about, you think would enjoy this as well, make sure to share this with them. A quick reminder to subscribe to the School of Greatness over on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. And we get incredible reviews every single week. This one is from Kim in the US, who said, "I love your approach and nature and the way you interact with your guests. You have some of

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  the most interesting and informative people on your podcast. I've gained so much and have made great strides in my personal growth and development as a result of tuning in." Thank you so much. Big thank you to Kim. And again, feel free to leave us a review of your biggest takeaway from this episode. And without further ado, in just a moment, I bring you the one and only Dr. Roger Seheult.

• 2:23Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest, Dr. Roger Seheult is in the house. Good to see you, sir. Excited to have you back here. Our last interview took off online. People loved it. And I love that you're a type of doctor that is very data-driven. You look at the data, you also have an intensive care unit here in California. So you see people coming in who are going through challenges every day, but you also are studying the data that's happening all over the country and all over the world around viruses, around inflammation and everything else that's happening right now. So I want to start with a statistic that I saw according to a report in the Journal of Nature Medicine,

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  that inflammation is the root cause of disease and it contributes to 50% of deaths in the US. And I'm curious, why do you, why do so many people suffer from inflammation? And how is it contributing to so much loss that's happening right now?

• 3:18Roger Seheult?

  That's a great question, Louis. So, right now, we're talking about coronavirus and COVID-19, and that's a whole section by itself. But, you know, as you may know, people get into the hospital because they can't breathe. And the reason why they can't breathe is because their lungs aren't able to get oxygen into them. So if you were to actually take someone's lungs and spread it out, so it was paper-thin, okay, because that's exactly what we're talking about. It's about paper-thin. It would be about the size of a tennis court. So think about a tennis court being wrapped up. That's the kind of layer that oxygen's got to diffuse through. So you know what happens if you hit your finger in the door? It swells up. So that's basically

• 3:58Roger Seheult?

  inflammation. And, you know, the Romans had a way of describing this. Everything in medicine is described in the Latin language. There's calor, which is hot. It feels hot. There's rubor, which it appears red. Okay, it's swollen. That's two more. And there is the last thing, dolor. And if you speak Spanish, you know what dolor is. That's pain. So those are the four cardinal things that you see with inflammation. So imagine that happening to this paper-thin thing that you're trying to get, it starts to swell, fluid goes in it, and now instead of oxygen being able to pass right through this paper-thin sheet, it's now thickened, it's now inflamed, and you can't get the oxygen. And that's why people are dying, because of inflammation in

• 4:42Roger Seheult?

  the lung. But it's not just the lung. The number one killer in the United States is heart disease. Or it used to be. We're becoming very good at treating heart disease. We'll talk about that.

• 4:54Roger Seheult?

  Heart disease and cardiovascular disease is a disease almost completely from inflammation.

• 5:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:01Roger Seheult?

  It is. So if you were to see angiograms. An angiogram is where they shoot contrast into the blood vessels of your body. And the ones that we're particularly concerned about are the blood vessels that actually supply the heart muscle. They have to beat continuously, every day for the rest of your life. And so they need a good supply of oxygen, which they get from the blood. If those blood vessels become diseased because of inflammation, they start getting ratty. Cholesterol starts to break and they get clots forming. And that's what happens when you get a heart attack, is those blood vessels close off and that heart muscle, which still needs to beat, is now being strangled to death. And that's tremendously painful. That's why they get that painful feeling when they have a heart attack.

• 5:47Roger Seheult?

  So we just talked about COVID-19. We just talked about heart disease. Let's go down and talk about cancer. A lot of the risks with cancer come as a result of inflammation.

• 5:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:58Roger Seheult?

  So yeah, people who have reflux or heartburn, there's cancers that can come as a result of that if you have that for very long, called Barrett's esophagus. It's not very common, but it can happen. Hepatitis. Hepatitis is an inflammatory condition of the liver. People can develop liver cancer that can come from viruses. So yeah, I mean, when nature says that up to half of the people in this country are dying from inflammation, that might actually be a short sale. It may actually be larger than that. Inflammation is a big deal.

• 6:27Lewis Howes?

  So how do we eliminate inflammation? What are the main factors that support us?

• 6:33Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, so inflammation by itself is actually not that bad. It's useful.

• 6:39Lewis Howes?

  When we're in pain.

• 6:40Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. Well, it's useful when you need it. So for instance, how does the body get rid of a virus? It gets rid of it by finding those cells that are infected with the virus and calling all their friends in to destroy that cell. And part of that is inflammation. The problem is, is when the inflammation goes out of control. And we talked about last time.

• 6:59Lewis Howes?

  Chronic inflammation.

• 6:59Roger Seheult?

  Chronic inflammation, yeah. So we talked about in our last interview. Vitamin D. Vitamin D is one of those substances that looks, if you just look at, just Google the structure of vitamin D and you'll find out very, very shortly that it looks like cortisol. It looks like a lot of the steroid hormones. And these steroid hormones go into the cell, go into the nucleus, and they go down to the actual DNA and they can manipulate and they can regulate, that's probably a better term, regulate the transcription of messenger RNA and tell the cells to be more inflamed, to be less inflamed.

• 7:39Lewis Howes?

  Vitamin D can do that.

• 7:40Roger Seheult?

  Vitamin D. And so that's part of the thought process about how vitamin D might be helping people with these inflammatory viral infections. We don't know for sure at this point how vitamin D, if vitamin D works in COVID-19, but we certainly have good evidence from going back to 2018, published in the British Medical Journal, that steady supplementation on a daily basis or a weekly basis with vitamin D can reduce the incidence of acute chest infections. That came out of Ireland, that came out of the UK, big meta-analysis, 25 different randomized controlled trials. And that was before COVID.

• 8:18Lewis Howes?

  Consistent vitamin D supplementation.

• 8:20Roger Seheult?

  Yes.

• 8:21Lewis Howes?

  Reduces chest inflammation, as I said?

• 8:24Roger Seheult?

  Chest infections.

• 8:25Lewis Howes?

  Chest infections.

• 8:26Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when you have a chest infection?

• 8:28Roger Seheult?

  Chest infection is like a viral. It's like a cold and it goes down and becomes a bronchitis. And this is what causes a lot of mortality, death. Pneumonia used to be known as the, as the old man's friend, because it would just put him out of his misery.

• 8:42Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 8:43Roger Seheult?

  That's what it was. Yeah. Look it up, old man's friend pneumonia. You can Google that and you'll see. So this, this idea that vitamin D, lacking vitamin D, especially in those northern latitudes, may be contributing to that. That's why a lot of countries in the northern latitudes have introduced programs to supplement vitamin D in, in the dietary.

• 9:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 9:01Roger Seheult?

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 9:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay, so would you recommend vitamin D for everyone then? Or if you're in sunlight, you're outside a lot, you don't need extra supplementation?

• 9:11Roger Seheult?

  So who are the people that are susceptible to vitamin D deficiency? It would be people who are older, because as you get older, it's harder to make vitamin D in your skin. Number two, people who have darker skin. This vitamin D is made, literally, from the ultraviolet B light from the sun. And it's made deep, deep, deep in the sun. So if you've got a lot of pigmentation above that, it's gonna be harder. You're gonna have to spend more time out in the sun.

• 9:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:34Roger Seheult?

  People who live in northern latitudes, people, you know, living in northern Europe, people living in Canada, the northwest, actually, anybody living above what we call the 35th parallel, which is sort of the southern border of Tennessee, is not really able to get enough vitamin D.

• 9:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:48Roger Seheult?

  And, and, and Lewis, we can talk about where we have come as a culture in the last 100 years. So, so think about this, just to sort of set up the rest of the talk. A hundred years ago, we spent a lot more time outside in the sun.

• 10:02Lewis Howes?

  All day.

• 10:02Roger Seheult?

  Than we did, absolutely. The other thing that's really important is we spend a lot more time sleeping.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  A lot of time.

• 10:10Roger Seheult?

  Back 100 years ago.

• 10:12Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 10:12Roger Seheult?

  What have we done in the last 100 years? Just look at a nighttime satellite image of the United States.

• 10:17Lewis Howes?

  Lights are on all night.

• 10:19Roger Seheult?

  We have basically turned night into day. And that has tremendous implications for us as human beings, as our culture, our health. Not, I mean, let's just take out, let's just take off the table the fact that we have severely cut back the amount of time we've allowed for sleep. That's number one. Number two, the socio-culture in this country that if you need to get some sleep, you're somehow weaker.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 10:43Roger Seheult?

  Right? So there's that stigma. Let's just put that off to the side. There's a whole nother aspect to it, and that is that light, especially at those very sensitive times before you go to bed.

• 10:56Roger Seheult?

  Stimulates receptors in the back of your eye to shut down melatonin production, which is essential and it's a very powerful anti-inflammatory. So you mix all of that together. So think about all of the socioeconomic things that have happened the last 100 years. Think about cities. Think about commute times. Think about how early you've got to get up in the morning to get to work. And then how long you've got to work. And then when you get home, what do we do? We want to relax. We turn on the?

• 11:21Lewis Howes?

  The lights, the TV.

• 11:23Roger Seheult?

  Turn on the TV or the iPhone. And this is hitting our eyes. There's a recent study that showed that the blue light filters don't do a thing.

• 11:28Lewis Howes?

  That's what I heard.

• 11:29Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Lewis Howes?

  You mean like the blue block, like the blockers?

• 11:31Roger Seheult?

  The blue light filters, because it's the blue light particularly. We know this from academia that seem to respond to those receptors the most or stimulate those receptors. The blue light filters don't work.

• 11:42Lewis Howes?

  You're saying wearing sunglasses or some type of glass blockers and watching your iPhone here, isn't that effective?

• 11:52Roger Seheult?

  It could work at the certain point, the sunglasses. What I was referring to was the was the actual machine itself has a switch in it that will make the light a little bit more redder.

• 12:01Lewis Howes?

  But it's still?

• 12:02Roger Seheult?

  Doesn't work.

• 12:03Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't work. Got you. So sunglasses might work.

• 12:05Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Lewis Howes?

  Might help out, but not, got you. Okay, cool.

• 12:07Roger Seheult?

  And then, okay, now on top of all that from 100 years ago, we're very agrarian culture. Not, we weren't as rich as we are today. And so as a result of that, we couldn't afford to eat a lot of the substances that we eat today, processed foods. Let's just talk about vegetarian versus meat. That's a hot topic.

• 12:27Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 12:28Roger Seheult?

  Back 100 years ago, it was, every piece of square footage of land was very valuable, even though we had lots of it, it was hard to farm. And we didn't have the big industries with the big machines, right? So we didn't have a lot of that money. So anything, if we grew this off of this part of land, we had a choice to make at that point. Do we feed it to the cow?

• 12:49Lewis Howes?

  Right, or us.

• 12:50Roger Seheult?

  Or do we feed it to us, right? Much easier to do the former than the latter. Nowadays, since we have so much grain, so much machinery, we actually have vast amounts of acreage in this country that are used to feed cattle. And so we are able to, probably more than any other time in our life, eat meat more than today than we were able to before.

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  Abundantly. Whereas 100 years ago was probably maybe once a week or something, yeah.

• 13:14Roger Seheult?

  If you look at per capita meat consumption in the United States, it has never stopped. It's continued to go up.

• 13:19Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 13:19Roger Seheult?

  Yeah. We're eating more meat today per capita than we've ever eaten before, per capita.

• 13:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I was just interviewing Dr. Matthew Walker, who's like the sleep expert in Northern California, I think in Berkeley, and he had saying a lot of same things that you're talking about. Like even if you you take down one hour less of one night of sleep, how it impacts the immune system is exponential. And if you do it every night, you sleep less and less. So you have one hour less sleep or two hours less sleep, or you miss a few hours. It really impacts the brain and the practice immune system and all these things.

• 13:55Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Lewis Howes?

  So sleep is a massive factor for having a healthy immune system is what I'm hearing.

• 14:01Roger Seheult?

  Absolutely, no question about it. I mean, they did this study once on some college students, okay? College students are our favorite.

• 14:07Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 14:07Roger Seheult?

  They'll do anything.

• 14:08Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Pull an all-nighter, got you.

• 14:11Roger Seheult?

  Well, I'll just put it this way, there's a way to determine where the circadian rhythm is, and it's to find the coldest temperature in the 24-hour period in the, you know, your core body, body temperature. And the way that the scientists like to do that is to put something up the backside.

• 14:24Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 14:24Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, that's part of the study. So the college students will do anything. But the interesting thing about this study was they had them do an all-nighter. How many times as a college student did you do a pull an all-nighter?

• 14:34Lewis Howes?

  I probably did once a quarter, when it's finals, you know, something like that, yeah.

• 14:38Roger Seheult?

  So the next day, they checked hundreds of different proteins, and they found all sorts of derangements. Things that were supposed to be high were low, things that were supposed to be low were high. And these are really important substances that regulate immune system function, looking for cancer cells. Some of them had to do with diabetes, had to do with hunger. So all of these things were manipulated just with one night.

• 15:02Lewis Howes?

  One all-nighter.

• 15:03Roger Seheult?

  One all-nighter.

• 15:05Lewis Howes?

  Man, okay, so sleep is a big thing to help prevent disease, it sounds like, but also inflammation, having inflammation. What are some other factors on how we can prevent inflammation? So get a great night of sleep. What is the, what is the research you've shown, seven to nine hours?

• 15:22Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, so actually, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's come up with some really good recommendations. Once you get out of high school, generally speaking, it's seven to nine hours of sleep, seven being the bare minimum.

• 15:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:33Roger Seheult?

  And who gets seven hours of sleep? I mean, I mean, I'm preaching, right?

• 15:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:37Roger Seheult?

  I should be preaching to a mayor because I need to get more than that. But when you are school age, you know, teenagers, if anybody's watching, it's eight, nine, ten. It's like, like elementary kids, like nine, ten.

• 15:49Lewis Howes?

  Now, you're in med school when? When were you in med school?

• 15:53Roger Seheult?

  I was in med school from the age of 21 to 25, which was like 96 to 2000.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Now, why did they put you through such rigorous hours and keep you up late and not allow you to sleep that much when?

• 16:05Roger Seheult?

  They should have known.

• 16:06Lewis Howes?

  They should have known, right? They should know that if you want to be, make less mistakes, have better decision making, have more like emotional regulation, they should help, I guess, med students really learn during the day and have them a break, right?

• 16:19Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. And so they figured this stuff out, but to turn the Titanic ship of medical education took a long time. So they knew all of this stuff. The irony is, is I went from being a third year resident to being a chief resident. That was the next step for me. This was around 2003, 2004. And this is when the 80-hour work week came in. So you're thinking 80 hours? Like, it's supposed to be 40 hours. No, the rule came in at that medical residents could not work more than 80 hours in one week period of time. That was the ceiling. And we had to really work hard to get that.

• 16:56Lewis Howes?

  To not go past that?

• 16:58Roger Seheult?

  To not go past 80 hours.

• 16:59Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 17:00Roger Seheult?

  So when I was a third year resident, this was in 2003, I was under, there was no rule. The next day-

• 17:07Lewis Howes?

  Work as much as you want.

• 17:08Roger Seheult?

  Work as much as you have to.

• 17:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow, to get the job done.

• 17:11Roger Seheult?

  I mean, you already had a salary. I don't know if you know this, but residents are paid a salary. I think at the time it was like, I think I was getting like $40,000, right?

• 17:18Lewis Howes?

  Working 100 hours a week?

• 17:20Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, worked out to less than minimum wage. But it's all part of our education. And then the very next day, July 1st, I walk in and now I'm the chief resident and I have to enforce on those people who are now residents, no more than 80 hours a week. I remember that very clearly.

• 17:35Lewis Howes?

  And you're like, this isn't fair. I had to do this, they get to do this?

• 17:38Roger Seheult?

  Exactly.

• 17:39Lewis Howes?

  So why don't they just have you cut it down to a certain amount of hours less than that and make sure you guys are also healthy and sleeping and clear and?

• 17:48Roger Seheult?

  It's a balance, obviously. Obviously, we want to be working at the highest abilities that we have. No question about it. There's a lot of factors that come involved, but basically, the dirty secret is, is that medical care in the United States is put a lot on the back of residents. Because we just don't have enough attendings and medical professionals to take care of all these patients.

• 18:16Lewis Howes?

  Right, gotcha.

• 18:17Roger Seheult?

  That's basically the bottom line. And so- Anyway, that's

• 18:19Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 18:20Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Lewis Howes?

  So what are some of the main things to help us prevent inflammation? So that if we attract a virus, it doesn't hurt us. You know, or it helps us minimize the pain or the side effects or anything that could hurt us.

• 18:36Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, so we have known for a long time that there are certain risk factors that increase the risk of death in viral infections. Let's say COVID-19 in this case. So BMI is one of those things. Body mass index.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 18:50Roger Seheult?

  Age is another one. Obviously, older people get into the hospital and don't do as well. Diabetes, hypertension. All of these things are may sound familiar as to who is having the problem. And very early on, we knew that the ACE2 receptor, this is this receptor on the cells, was the focal point for where the SARS-CoV-2 virus came in. The spike protein that we've all heard about interacts with the ACE2 receptor. Now, that ACE2 receptor, that ACE2 is not just a receptor to the entrance of the cell. It actually has a very important function in all of the cells, in the respiratory cells, in the GI cells.

• 19:30Roger Seheult?

  What it does is it reduces the amount of oxidative components, oxidative stress, pro-oxidative stress components. And it reduces that, and it increases the amount of antioxidants. So ACE2 is like this humming engine in each of your cells that is regulating the amount of oxidative stress that's going on. And when that virus binds to it, it shuts it down. So now, all of your, so your oxidative stress goes up in that cell, and your antioxidants go down.

• 20:03Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 20:03Roger Seheult?

  So if you can imagine, you're on the edge of a cliff. You are balanced. You are just sort of, and there's, imagine this cliff, and there's people standing in different places. Okay, there's some people that their oxidative stress balance is right on the edge.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 20:17Roger Seheult?

  And you could probably tell who these people are. They're older, they have some diabetes, hypertension, they're on a lot of blood pressure medications, maybe have some renal problems. They're standing right on the edge. And then there's the younger people who don't have these medical problems. They're far away from the edge. Okay? And then this massive Gust of wind comes called coronavirus.

• 20:37Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm, knocking people off the edge.

• 20:39Roger Seheult?

  And who are the people that are gonna knock them? Exactly, it's the ones that are on the edge. And so it's kind of like a stress test. This spike protein comes in, binds ACE2 receptor, and it causes problems.

• 20:49Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 20:50Roger Seheult?

  And remember now that when the virus comes into your body, it replicates and replicates and replicates up to, some studies have shown a billion to a trillion copies of itself inside one human being.

• 21:05Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 21:06Roger Seheult?

  And it spreads everywhere. It goes through, it goes to the brain. They've done autopsies. I've looked at the autopsies.

• 21:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 21:12Roger Seheult?

  It goes to the brain. I've seen slides in the bladder, in the bone marrow, in the heart, in the lungs. It's everywhere. And each one of these trillions of viral particles have spike proteins all over it. So you can imagine the load of spike protein and the complete shutdown of the ACE2 receptor, among other things.

• 21:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:33Roger Seheult?

  So that is one of the things that we talk about in terms of inflammation. So how do you prevent that from happening? How do you, how are you getting away from the edge?

• 21:43Lewis Howes?

  Get away from the cliff.

• 21:43Roger Seheult?

  Exactly, because you know there's a big gust of wind coming. Some of the things you can do for a long time, it takes a long time for it to work. Other things, sometimes you have to implement, you don't have time to do it. Somebody comes in, someone's sick, their diet is their diet, or whatever it is that they've had, right? So one of the interesting things that's come up in that, there's a guy named Dr. Varkey in San Diego that's been studying this thing called sialic acids. This is the newest thing, and it's actually very interesting.

• 22:13Lewis Howes?

  Sialic acids.

• 22:14Roger Seheult?

  Sialic acids. So I won't even talk about the fact that some people believe that the virus actually uses sialic acids to enter into the cell. That's a whole nother topic. What I will mention, though, is we're all used to seeing the outside of cells on these, you know, these animations that they see on the TV. And they've got proteins coming up, right? Yes, yes. So imagine my arms are the proteins. And imagine I don't have a hand. That's kind of how they've been describing it. But that's actually not reality. Reality is, is that you've got proteins. And then my hand, think about my hand as glycoproteins. Glycoprotein, that's a sugar and a protein put together. And then my fingers are the sialic acids. Okay. Okay.

• 22:56Roger Seheult?

  That's, so really, it's the part of the cell that is the first thing that gets touched. Sialic acids are really important. Okay. Okay. It's a nine-carbon sugar. And actually, if you go, if you were to go to, let's just say, a HIV vaccine convention, almost the entire convention would be on sialic acids. Why? Because the HIV virus masquerades itself with sialic acids. That's why we haven't been able to get a vaccine for HIV. Because sialic acids are sort of like, put it this way, the Christmas tree is the protein, the decorations, sialic acids. Okay. That's what we're talking about. Gotcha. So here's the problem.

• 23:35Roger Seheult?

  The problem is with sialic acids is that the human body can only make one type of sialic acid. Let's call that N U five A C. I'm gonna get a little wonky here, okay? But if people want to look this up. So I'm just gonna call that A C. So a human being makes a certain type of sialic acid on its glycoproteins, on its proteins, on its cells, that is called A C. And that is self. Now, we used to have a gene, apparently. We used to have a gene, it's non-functional now. Really? That used to make a different kind of sialic acid called N U five G C. Okay. But we don't make it anymore. Okay. Why don't we make it? When did we stop making it? Good question.

• 24:20Roger Seheult?

  The biologists have their theories, millions of years ago and all this sort of stuff. Yeah. But we don't know, right? We don't know for sure, because we weren't there. What we do know is that animals makes both A C and G C. Hmm. Okay. Cows make A C and G C. Any mammal makes A C and G C. Okay. Okay. So. Here's the problem. When you consume those animals that make AC and GC. Okay.

• 24:51Lewis Howes?

  What happens?

• 24:51Roger Seheult?

  What happens is it goes into your digestive tract and it breaks it down. And the body absorbs the AC and the GC. It can't tell the difference between the two. And then it gets it gets absorbed whole in the body. And the AC and the GC gets put onto your cells.

• 25:08Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 25:09Roger Seheult?

  Okay.

• 25:10Lewis Howes?

  So we're getting animal GC now?

• 25:11Roger Seheult?

  Yes.

• 25:12Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean to us?

• 25:13Roger Seheult?

  The problem is is that you have antibodies against GC.

• 25:18Roger Seheult?

  Because it's not self.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  It's not self. It's not us.

• 25:22Roger Seheult?

  It's not us. We have antibodies in our system. It's not it's not hardwired, but almost all humans develop antibodies against GC. By the age of one.

• 25:34Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 25:34Roger Seheult?

  Okay.

• 25:35Lewis Howes?

  So if we're consuming GC, what does that mean?

• 25:37Roger Seheult?

  That means that now that GC gets put onto our cells and our cells start to look to our immune system as foreign.

• 25:45Lewis Howes?

  So our cells are what? Defending themselves against it then?

• 25:49Roger Seheult?

  The antibodies start to react against the cells with the GC on it. And what they get, what they call it is a psyllitis. Psyllitis. Anything in medicine with an itis at the end is inflammation.

• 26:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 26:03Roger Seheult?

  Pancreatitis, appendicitis.

• 26:05Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 26:05Roger Seheult?

  All of that. Meningitis. Just inflammation. So you get the psyllitis. And that, they believe, is one of the potential reasons for low-grade inflammation. So they always.

• 26:17Lewis Howes?

  Consuming meat?

• 26:17Roger Seheult?

  Yeah. So they always wondered, okay. How come people who eat white meat? Chicken, fish. How come they don't get the levels of heart disease?

• 26:27Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Why is that?

• 26:29Roger Seheult?

  This is what they think may actually be the reason. They could never figure that out. They did studies, huge epidemiological studies in the United States and in Europe. And they found that in some of the studies that it was only processed meats that were associated with cardiovascular disease and regular meat was not. But

• 26:47Lewis Howes?

  And what's the difference between processed and regular?

• 26:48Roger Seheult?

  Good question. So processed meats would be like sausage.

• 26:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 26:51Roger Seheult?

  It would be like cold cuts. It would be like, um, those, yeah, right?

• 26:58Roger Seheult?

  So those are, but red meat is just like the pure red meat that you'd buy at the supermarket.

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  Okay, got you.

• 27:01Roger Seheult?

  Okay, so that's the difference. But newer studies are now starting to show that it doesn't matter if it's processed or not processed. That you still get

• 27:11Lewis Howes?

  Red meat you're talking about?

• 27:12Roger Seheult?

  Correct.

• 27:12Lewis Howes?

  So white meat doesn't have the GC?

• 27:16Roger Seheult?

  It does not.

• 27:17Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 27:19Roger Seheult?

  Fish does not.

• 27:20Lewis Howes?

  Fish not, chicken?

• 27:21Roger Seheult?

  Yeah. So, so, so here's a study that was done and they said, okay, so, so let's connect this together. So here was an interesting study that they did. They, they got a bunch of, of people. And they said, give us exactly your dietary habits for like 30 days. And so they wrote down, it was meticulous. And then what they did was they went out and they, they looked at the food and they figured out in that particular food item, how much GC was there? And you should see this list. It was a French study. I'm glad it was a French study. And I'll tell you why. Because they listed every type of cheese you could possibly ever imagine.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:00Roger Seheult?

  So, because cheese is part of it. So you had, you know, mozzarella at the bottom and you had hard cheese at the, I mean, and so they listed it because there's a big spread. Some, some cheeses have hardly any GC in it.

• 28:11Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 28:11Roger Seheult?

  Other cheeses are just packed. Um, certain meats have a lot of, pork has a lot of GC. Other meats don't have as much. And what they did was they, they stratified it and they weighted it. And then they looked at the diet and they tried to figure out, okay, how much anti-GC antibodies did they have? And they matched it up. And it was this perfect correlation. So the more you ate of high GC foods.

• 28:37Lewis Howes?

  The more inflammation you had.

• 28:38Roger Seheult?

  The more antibodies you had, and they linked it to colorectal cancer risk.

• 28:42Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. So the antibodies, the more GC you have.

• 28:47Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Lewis Howes?

  Your body's creating antibodies.

• 28:49Roger Seheult?

  Correct.

• 28:50Lewis Howes?

  And that, those antibodies cause inflammation?

• 28:52Roger Seheult?

  That's correct.

• 28:53Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 28:53Roger Seheult?

  This is an immune system response. So when that antibody attaches to that antigen, that triggers an immune response because it's a foreign substance.

• 29:01Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 29:02Roger Seheult?

  And that's what causes inflammation. So what you have then is inflammation in the, in the, uh, blood vessels, inflammation in the colon that can cause colon cancer.

• 29:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 29:12Roger Seheult?

  So again, getting back to that nature article, inflammation probably causes more than 50% of deaths in the United States.

• 29:18Lewis Howes?

  Now, you are, uh, practicing near the Loma Linda area, right? You're not in Loma Linda, are you?

• 29:25Roger Seheult?

  Uh, I'm not in Loma Linda, but I practice close to it, yeah.

• 29:27Lewis Howes?

  Very close to it, what, 10 minutes, 20 minutes away or something?

• 29:29Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  And so some people might say, well, is he influenced by the blue zones? And by being in this region where it's most primarily vegan. Um, in Loma Linda, I think that's right. It's mostly vegans. So does that play any influence into you?

• 29:44Roger Seheult?

  It sort of gets me interested in that topic.

• 29:46Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 29:47Roger Seheult?

  But here's, here's.

• 29:47Lewis Howes?

  And do you eat meat yourself?

• 29:48Roger Seheult?

  I, I used to.

• 29:49Lewis Howes?

  Not anymore?

• 29:50Roger Seheult?

  No.

• 29:50Lewis Howes?

  Because you saw the data or because of other reasons?

• 29:53Roger Seheult?

  Uh, because I saw the data.

• 29:54Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 29:54Roger Seheult?

  I stopped eating meat in college.

• 29:56Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 29:56Roger Seheult?

  Yeah. And I didn't start getting into this until like a year ago, started looking into this.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  So why did you stop eating meat then?

• 30:04Roger Seheult?

  I think it was the influence of me being in Loma Linda.

• 30:06Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:07Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Lewis Howes?

  And just being around those.

• 30:09Roger Seheult?

  But here's the interesting thing. So if you look at, um, the Adventist Health Study 2, Adventist Health Study 2.

• 30:15Lewis Howes?

  Which is Loma Linda Adventist.

• 30:17Roger Seheult?

  Pretty much, actually, basically California, Southern California.

• 30:21Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 30:22Roger Seheult?

  50% of the people involved in that study, which were Adventists, 50% of them were not vegetarian. And this was the interesting thing about the study was because a lot of times when they do these epidemiological studies on diet, there's a lot of confounders.

• 30:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:38Roger Seheult?

  Okay, so here you had a unique opportunity to take a very narrow set of people, people living in Southern California, subject to the same air quality, had the same values, went to the same kind of churches, but because there's it's not a strict religious requirement in the Adventist Church to be vegetarian, it's a dietary lifestyle. They were able to eliminate a lot of those confounders and compare the vegetarians with the non-vegetarians, with the pesco vegetarians, vegans.

• 31:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah. So what did they find in this study?

• 31:08Roger Seheult?

  Well, if you line up, let's say you got vegans right here.

• 31:12Lewis Howes?

  There's some unhealthy vegans. I've seen some really unhealthy vegans who eat tons of processed.

• 31:18Roger Seheult?

  Potato chips, soda.

• 31:19Lewis Howes?

  Sugar.

• 31:20Roger Seheult?

  Absolutely.

• 31:20Lewis Howes?

  You can eat sugar all day and bread and create a lot of inflammation still, right?

• 31:25Roger Seheult?

  You're absolutely right.

• 31:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 31:26Roger Seheult?

  But I would say in the Adventist Church, people who are vegan tend to be that way because they're health-conscious. And that's the argument that a lot of people used was that, yeah, vegetarians and vegans have a better mortality rate because they tend to be health-conscious people. And it's their health-conscious activities like jet-smoking in general that's doing it. But here, see, now you've got the ability to kind of eliminate that, those confounders. Because generally, nobody in the Adventist Church smokes.

• 31:53Lewis Howes?

  Right, okay.

• 31:54Roger Seheult?

  So you can see what I'm saying?

• 31:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 31:56Roger Seheult?

  So if you've got the vegans here on the right, or on the left to you, I guess, and then the vegetarians, and then the, what they call the pesco vegetarians.

• 32:04Lewis Howes?

  Fish only.

• 32:05Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. And then you have basically the non-vegetarians.

• 32:08Lewis Howes?

  Any type of meat?

• 32:09Roger Seheult?

  Any type of meat.

• 32:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 32:11Roger Seheult?

  Any diet, yeah. You have this stepwise approach in terms of BMI. And the same stepwise approach in terms of diabetes. And the stepwise approach in terms of hypertension.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 32:24Roger Seheult?

  Absolutely. Yeah, it was published.

• 32:27Lewis Howes?

  There's, there's, there's so many people that are not gonna like this conversation that, that swear by this carnivore, you know, lion meat eating diet.

• 32:39Roger Seheult?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 32:39Lewis Howes?

  That say, I had all these inflammations, diseases, you know, physical ailments, pain, when I was only eating vegetarian, I only eating these certain types of food, raw vegan, vegetarian, whatever it may be.

• 32:52Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Lewis Howes?

  And then when I went on the steak only diet, or this diet, it went away.

• 32:56Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Lewis Howes?

  And I lost the fat, and I felt healthier, and I felt clearer.

• 33:01Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Lewis Howes?

  I've heard that by many people over and over again. What would be the, the cause of that, do you know? Or is it just certain body types, maybe?

• 33:10Roger Seheult?

  I, you know, it's, there's a Gaussian distribution of people. And so, we can't, all we can really say is look at the, the data.

• 33:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 33:20Roger Seheult?

  In terms of that data, though, I would, I would, there was an interesting article that came out, like, we're talking about paleo, basically, right?

• 33:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:27Roger Seheult?

  Paleo diets, Atkins diet, what was referred to the Atkins diets before. I'm sure there's differences between these two.

• 33:32Lewis Howes?

  Keto diet, yeah.

• 33:32Roger Seheult?

  Keto, keto diet. So, so there was a study that I, I found that was really interesting. This was a study that just came out, it was published, I have it here in front of me here, and my eyesight is going bad, I don't know.

• 33:45Lewis Howes?

  You're not eating enough meat.

• 33:46Roger Seheult?

  You need some meat.

• 33:49Roger Seheult?

  So, so the name of this study was Plant-Based Diets, Pescatarian Diets, and COVID-19 Severity: A Population-Based Case Control Study in Six Countries. So...

• 33:57Lewis Howes?

  Plant-based diets.

• 33:58Roger Seheult?

  This is plant-based diets versus pescatarian diets versus, and other diets. So, there was this, there was this network of, of healthcare providers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, UK, and the United States. Okay? Pretty Western.

• 34:16Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 34:16Roger Seheult?

  And most of these were healthcare providers. They're, basically, it was this network talking about, what are you doing for COVID? What are you, what are you seeing over there? What should we be doing here? They used this network to send out a very detailed dietary questionnaire, where they had at least 18 different meals that had been surveyed very detailed. Okay, so it was very good. And these are all, most of these were male physicians.

• 34:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 34:38Roger Seheult?

  I'll just put it out there, okay? I think it was like 70% male, 30% female. There were some nurses involved in this study.

• 34:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 34:44Roger Seheult?

  But all of these were healthcare providers. They were all, I mean, you can imagine, we're not talking about low socioeconomic versus high socioeconomic. So again, we're narrowing the field here. We're trying to get rid of these confounders. And they asked them, you know, what kind of diet do you have? And then they, the reason why they went for this is because these were the people that were highest at risk for getting COVID. They're in the hospital.

• 35:05Lewis Howes?

  The healthcare providers, yeah.

• 35:06Roger Seheult?

  Exactly, they're treating patients.

• 35:08Lewis Howes?

  How many, how many people were in the study?

• 35:09Roger Seheult?

  This was a 3,000. So they said here that 2,884 frontline healthcare workers from six countries.

• 35:16Lewis Howes?

  With these different, yeah.

• 35:17Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and USA. Individuals who reported following plant-based diets and plant-based diets or pescatarian diets that were higher in vegetables, legumes, nuts, and lower in poultry, and then red in processed meats. Okay, so those. And they, what they were able to do is divide these people into the plant-based diet versus, and they specifically said this, high protein, low carbohydrates.

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Keto, paleo type of diets.

• 35:45Roger Seheult?

  So because a lot of times people say, you know what? In those studies where people had high fat diets, high protein diets, did they ask them, were they eating a lot of carbs? Because it's the carbs that cause the inflammation, at least as the saying goes, right? Right, the bread and. The breads and all that stuff. So here you have physicians, ostensibly, and most physicians that I know that would say, yeah, I eat a high protein, low carb diet. They're doing that because they want to be healthy.

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 36:15Roger Seheult?

  Right? So you're, they're not probably engaging in other health risky behavior. So when they actually looked at all of these and they, and they checked them out for where they worked in the hospital, right? Because that's important. The pulmonologist is probably going to get a higher chance of getting COVID than a radiologist, right? It's not going to come through the screen, right? Right, right. So when they did that, it was astounding because what they found was that those physicians and healthcare workers that said that they had a high protein, low carbohydrate diet had four times the risk of moderate to severe COVID-19.

• 36:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 36:48Roger Seheult?

  Yes.

• 36:49Lewis Howes?

  Four times the risk, that means they were getting it?

• 36:50Roger Seheult?

  They were getting it, they were contracting it. So they said here that, how many actually contracted it? There was.

• 36:57Roger Seheult?

  There were 568 COVID-19 cases and 2,316 controls.

• 37:04Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 37:04Roger Seheult?

  And they said here that-

• 37:05Lewis Howes?

  I'm assuming they're all wearing their masks.

• 37:07Roger Seheult?

  They are.

• 37:07Lewis Howes?

  Are they all vaccinated or not vaccinated?

• 37:09Roger Seheult?

  This was before the vaccine.

• 37:10Lewis Howes?

  Got you. So they're all wearing their masks.

• 37:12Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Lewis Howes?

  Who knows? We don't know how many more people they're in contact with who had it, but you'd assume that they're all wearing their mask and-

• 37:19Roger Seheult?

  Right. So this is not a causation study upfront. This is an association. And we all know that association does not mean causation.

• 37:25Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 37:26Roger Seheult?

  So all we can say is that it was associated.

• 37:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:28Roger Seheult?

  So we can say that-

• 37:29Lewis Howes?

  It's not the cause, but it's associated.

• 37:30Roger Seheult?

  Well, we don't know that it's the cause.

• 37:31Lewis Howes?

  It could be the cause.

• 37:32Roger Seheult?

  Could be the cause, but we don't know. It's kind of like, you know, having a cigarette lighter in your pocket and then saying, "It's associated with lung cancer." But is the cigarette lighter actually causing the lung cancer? Or is it associated with the smoking that's exactly?

• 37:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 37:45Roger Seheult?

  So that's the same thing. So the question really boils down to, what are those doctors doing that say they're on a high protein, low carb diet that's causing them to have four times the risk of severe COVID-19? Is it the diet or is it something else they're doing? The study can't answer that.

• 38:01Lewis Howes?

  Right. But those people were eating a different diet.

• 38:05Roger Seheult?

  They were eating a different diet. Whether that's the cause or not, we don't know.

• 38:08Lewis Howes?

  We don't know.

• 38:08Roger Seheult?

  But it's associated with it.

• 38:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:09Roger Seheult?

  So-

• 38:10Lewis Howes?

  Do they have a lighter in their pocket too? We don't know. Yeah.

• 38:12Roger Seheult?

  So, but when you put that together with what we were just talking about with that cliff, right? And the fact that that kind of a diet's probably going to have higher sialic acid, new 5GC.

• 38:22Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 38:24Roger Seheult?

  Is that what's pushing them to the edge and causing them to fall over? Or at least getting them to the point where they're almost falling over?

• 38:29Lewis Howes?

  Right. So essentially we want to eliminate every factor that could be closer to the edge.

• 38:33Roger Seheult?

  Right. And this-

• 38:33Lewis Howes?

  GC is one of the factors.

• 38:35Roger Seheult?

  And this is what-

• 38:35Lewis Howes?

  And that is associated with meat.

• 38:37Roger Seheult?

  Correct.

• 38:38Lewis Howes?

  But not fish, is that right?

• 38:39Roger Seheult?

  Not fish.

• 38:40Lewis Howes?

  Not fish or chicken?

• 38:41Roger Seheult?

  Right. And so not fish or chicken. And so that's the interesting thing there is that they mentioned pescatarian or vegetarian. So pescatarian was grouped in with that.

• 38:50Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 38:50Roger Seheult?

  Yeah. It's really interesting. So it's this kind of the swiss cheese model of how I look.

• 38:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes, explain the swiss cheese.

• 38:56Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, so you know, people say, are you pro vaccine? Are you anti vaccine? Are you pro vitamin D? Are you anti vitamin D? And I look at it and say, look, people hear me talk about vitamin D and hydrotherapy and all these great things that we can do to treat COVID that have nothing to do with the vaccine. And they automatically think that, well, he's saying that because he doesn't want to take the vaccine. And then I talk about the vaccine and the things that it does. And people say, well, you're just talking about the vaccine. You're not talking. No, it's the swiss cheese model. So what's the swiss cheese model? So imagine a big block of swiss cheese with all the holes in it, you know, like you see on Tom and Jerry.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 39:31Roger Seheult?

  And you chop it up. And if you were to pull out any one of those slices, you would see that there's a hole in it somewhere. And you pull out a different slice and maybe there's a hole somewhere else. But the point is, is that when the bullets start flying, hopefully the swiss cheese stops it. But when the bullets start flying, the holes are in different places. So if you were to wear like a bulletproof vest, if you just wore one sheet, you could get hit.

• 39:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 39:56Roger Seheult?

  But the more sheets you put on, because each intervention works in a different way, the advantages of one intervention are going to help out where maybe there's disadvantages of another intervention. And so the whole swiss cheese model helps. It's kind of like in the operating room. We don't want to have post-operative infections. It's really important that we don't have post-operative infections because they can be lethal. So think about all the things that we do in the operating room to prevent that. Surgeons wear masks.

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  Wash your hands.

• 40:24Roger Seheult?

  We wash our hands.

• 40:25Lewis Howes?

  Gloves.

• 40:25Roger Seheult?

  Exactly, gloves. We put on sterile gowns. We have positive pressure ventilation in the room. We have a scrub nurse who monitors everything. We sterilize the equipment, right? So if we say that sterilizing the equipment works, we don't say, well, sterilizing the equipment works, why are you wearing masks?

• 40:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 40:42Roger Seheult?

  We don't say that, right?

• 40:43Lewis Howes?

  You fill all the holes.

• 40:45Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. We want to make sure that we approach 100%. And the best way to approach 100% is answering the test question, all of the above. And that's the method I take.

• 40:55Lewis Howes?

  So what are all the above ways to prevent? Contracting this or any type of virus.

• 41:02Roger Seheult?

  You know what? It's redundant. The good news is, is that if you, the evidence shows that if you line up your lifestyle to prevent diseases in general, you're gonna do great against COVID-19 and any variant that comes along with it. Okay, so, so you really need to, to set yourself up. And, and that, that is really, uh, there was another study that showed that a, another study, this is not this, the different study, that showed that a vegetarian diet reduced the risk of severe COVID-19 by 73%.

• 41:34Lewis Howes?

  A vegetarian diet?

• 41:34Roger Seheult?

  Yes.

• 41:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:35Roger Seheult?

  A history of a vegetarian diet. Interesting. Yeah, so that's just one, okay? So what are the other things? Sleep. We could talk about fresh air. We could talk about sunlight. We could talk about stress. We could talk about, so all of those things, but you know what? I have seen people, and, and I, I'm in the intensive care unit. I work in an intensive care unit and it's a one, it's a one unit hospital. What I mean to say is, is that if anything happens on the campus of that hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether it's a hangnail, whether it's a delivery and it goes wrong, it shows up in my unit.

• 42:11Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:11Roger Seheult?

  So nobody dies in that hospital without coming through my unit first.

• 42:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 42:15Roger Seheult?

  Sometimes I'm the last person they see.

• 42:16Lewis Howes?

  They get sent to you if there's something really bad.

• 42:18Roger Seheult?

  That's correct. We don't have a surgical ICU and a medical ICU and a cardiac ICU.

• 42:23Lewis Howes?

  It's one ICU.

• 42:23Roger Seheult?

  One ICU. And it comes to-

• 42:25Lewis Howes?

  If it's a baby, if it's a grandparent, it doesn't matter.

• 42:27Roger Seheult?

  Well, the baby goes to the NICU. They would go to a different hospital.

• 42:30Lewis Howes?

  Got you, got you.

• 42:31Roger Seheult?

  Cause I'm not a pediatrician, but yeah, other than, the mother would come.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, sure.

• 42:34Roger Seheult?

  The mother would come. If, if she was in danger, she would come to our unit. Absolutely. So the point is, is that I see all of this stuff and I can tell you that I have seen people with COVID-19 in my unit that didn't have risk factors and they were pretty young.

• 42:50Lewis Howes?

  They didn't have risk factors?

• 42:51Roger Seheult?

  No.

• 42:51Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:52Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Lewis Howes?

  They ate?

• 42:53Roger Seheult?

  They ate.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

  Well?

• 42:54Roger Seheult?

  They, they, they seemed to, they weren't obese, let's put it that way.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:57Roger Seheult?

  Maybe, and I didn't ask them if they, if they had, had a vegetarian or non-vegetarian. So, so, and that was back when we didn't have the Delta variant. We are seeing now with the Delta variant that it is hitting younger people. It's hitting people without comorbidities harder than, than the-

• 43:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 43:14Roger Seheult?

  Than the non-Delta. Oh yeah. Absolutely. So, so what I am saying is, is that-

• 43:20Lewis Howes?

  Are the, are the, the younger generation that you're seeing in this unit, are they recovering? Are they passing away? How's that?

• 43:27Roger Seheult?

  It's been so, it's been so recent, like here in Southern California, we're, we're talking here, what, April, sorry, August 17th today, right? Yeah. So we're talking, this is early August, we're just starting to see, couple of weeks, and they're still on the ventilators.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 43:43Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Lewis Howes?

  How young are we talking?

• 43:44Roger Seheult?

  Uh, 30s.

• 43:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 43:46Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, late 30s.

• 43:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So they come in because they're at home quarantining, they can't breathe, and they're like, I need to come in.

• 43:53Roger Seheult?

  That's right.

• 43:54Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 43:55Roger Seheult?

  Yeah, and there's, there are, so we, we've talked about lifestyle, and obviously you can't do lifestyle changes when you get COVID-19. You can do it, but the effects are not going to kick in right away. So there, so the question is, is what, what things can we do? We know what we can do in the hospital. We have treatments in the hospital like dexamethasone. We have treatments in the hospital like anti-inflammatory mediators. Like we talked about inflammation is the problem in the lung, right? So there are medications like something called tosulizumab, which is an antibody against IL-6, which is supposed to reduce inflammation. We're not really seeing it help with oxygenation early on. That's something we can do in the hospital. We can talk about all of the things like getting enough sleep, like making sure your vitamin D

• 44:39Roger Seheult?

  levels are good, like making sure that you're, you're getting enough fresh air and sunlight, and that can happen on the way to it. But what do we do during that period of time where you've contracted COVID-19, but you're still at home, you're not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital? That's a very important period of time.

• 44:57Lewis Howes?

  What should you do then?

• 44:59Roger Seheult?

  That's about seven days. So to understand what you need to do during that period of time requires you to understand what's happening, okay? Now, so let's talk about the immune system. There's two parts to your immune system. We talked a little bit about this last time, but let's get into it. There is the innate immune system. The innate immune system are all the cells that go around your body and eat up things, macrophages. And they're not educated on what the protein specifically looks like, they just know that it shouldn't be there. This is the innate immune system. The innate immune system is very powerful when you are young. As you get older, the innate immune system becomes less and less powerful. The innate immune system is the immune system that is responsible for making a fever.

• 45:45Roger Seheult?

  Kids, the kids get a viral infection, at the drop of a hat, they've got a fever. It's very

• 45:51Lewis Howes?

  The fever helps fight against it.

• 45:53Roger Seheult?

  Yes, exactly. And that's where we're going with this. But on the other hand, adults who get infections, they rarely get fevers. They don't get fevers as often as kids get fevers. And the reason is because the innate immune system in the young is very strong. The key here is that you need a very strong innate immune system. Because it shuts down viral replication. One of the products of the innate immune system is a substance called interferon. You may have heard of this. It's a very well-named substrate. It's a very well-named substance because it interferes with the virus.

• 46:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay, interferon.

• 46:29Roger Seheult?

  Interferon. So remember that, interferon.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  We want to have that.

• 46:32Roger Seheult?

  We want to have that.

• 46:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. How do you get that?

• 46:34Roger Seheult?

  You get that from your cells and having a very strong immune system. But there's another way you can get it. We're going to get to that. Now, that's as opposed to the adaptive immune system. The adaptive immune system is a different part of your immune system. It's the part that comes afterwards. It's the part of your immune system that recognizes antigens and makes antibodies. The problem is, is that the adaptive immune system comes in about seven days later. So, and what happens is that it starts attacking all of the cells in your body that are infected. So this is the typical scenario for somebody that ends up with COVID-19 in the hospital. The innate immune system is there. It's trying to fight this virus. There's this tug of war going back and forth for the whole week.

• 47:20Roger Seheult?

  The virus is suppressing the innate immune system. The innate immune system is trying to suppress the virus. The virus does a workaround and gets into cells and starts infecting many, many, many cells. Okay? And so the person's just sort of going along for the week. Then all of a sudden

• 47:36Lewis Howes?

  Day seven.

• 47:37Roger Seheult?

  Day seven. The adaptive immune system comes online and they see what's happened. It's kind of like the parents just came home.

• 47:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 47:45Roger Seheult?

  Okay, right? And they're like, wow, all of these cells are infected. Go to it. And now you have an immediate reaction that goes against all of these cells, especially the cells in the lungs, because that's where the virus got into. And that's why these people start to have inflammation in the lungs. You got your tennis court now being swollen.

• 48:06Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 48:07Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. So the problem is, in COVID-19 failures, is that the innate immune system is too weak. And the adaptive immune system is too strong.

• 48:16Lewis Howes?

  So what can you do in those first seven days to make sure it minimizes that?

• 48:19Roger Seheult?

  So what I propose, and we're looking at this, but what if you look at history, if you look at history, this seems to pan out.

• 48:29Roger Seheult?

  Boosting, enhancing the innate immune system is a great way to suppress it. How do you do that? Well, interferon. One of the ways that has been tried and looked at is by increasing core body temperature for about 20 minutes.

• 48:43Lewis Howes?

  At a time.

• 48:44Roger Seheult?

  At a time.

• 48:45Lewis Howes?

  Multiple times a day?

• 48:46Roger Seheult?

  Up to two or three times a day it's been done, yeah. And then cooling it down, and then doing a brief cooldown, hot, I mean, very, very hot and then cold. So where did this come from? Couple things, there's a guy by the name, we talked about this before, I think, Dr. Yorick. He took these neurosyphilis patients in his clinic, and he noticed that when they got a fever,

• 49:09Roger Seheult?

  they got better. So he injected them with malaria.

• 49:12Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 49:13Roger Seheult?

  Okay, so he took out blood from people with known malaria and then injected the blood into, oh yeah.

• 49:17Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy, isn't it?

• 49:19Roger Seheult?

  That's what he did. I mean, it was, it was well controlled. He monitored them very carefully. And they developed high fevers. The high fevers caused the interferon to go up. There was a study experiment where we checked in a study, the amount of interferon coming out of cells at various temperatures. By the time it got to 39 degrees Celsius, which is about 101, 102, somewhere in there, don't, don't quote me on that, but around that area, a fever, interferon levels spiked tenfold.

• 49:50Roger Seheult?

  Tenfold. Interferon is, does a great job at killing viral infections. Do you know, we used to have patients with chronic hepatitis C. Hepatitis C was a big problem. I used to, I was trained in the VA system. We had people, they got it from tattoos, from intravenous drug use. Hepatitis C, chronic hepatitis C, it's basically a bloodborne virus, and it infects the liver and causes cirrhosis. After many years. Do you know today we can cure hepatitis C?

• 50:20Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 50:21Roger Seheult?

  Do you know how we do it?

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  How?

• 50:22Roger Seheult?

  High doses of interferon. It's called pegylated interferon. And we can do that.

• 50:27Lewis Howes?

  Does that cause a fever? No.

• 50:28Roger Seheult?

  It makes you feel like you have the flu.

• 50:30Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 50:30Roger Seheult?

  It does, because it's exactly what it does.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  It fights against it, it kills it.

• 50:33Roger Seheult?

  It just eliminates the virus.

• 50:35Lewis Howes?

  So, so do you wanna, so when you, when someone gets a fever in general?

• 50:39Roger Seheult?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Lewis Howes?

  Do you not wanna eliminate the fever? Do you wanna keep the fever?

• 50:42Roger Seheult?

  Exactly.

• 50:43Lewis Howes?

  You wanna keep it?

• 50:43Roger Seheult?

  Exactly. Unless it's causing problems. Now, remember, not to get medicine.

• 50:48Lewis Howes?

  Fever is a good thing.

• 50:49Roger Seheult?

  Fever is a good thing.

• 50:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:51Roger Seheult?

  It's a great thing to have. And so what are we doing with fevers? We're giving Tylenol. Paracetamol in Europe.

• 50:57Lewis Howes?

  We don't wanna do that.

• 50:58Roger Seheult?

  We don't wanna do that unless the fever is so high that it's causing the heart rate to race, or the patient is becoming delirious.

• 51:04Lewis Howes?

  So I used to always just put like a cold rag on my forehead and it'd make me feel better. Do I not wanna do that if I have a fever?

• 51:10Roger Seheult?

  That's fine. Cooling down your head is fine.

• 51:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay, but the rest of the body?

• 51:14Roger Seheult?

  The rest of the body. So, so what do they do in these things? And it's interesting. What's been done in history? If you look at the 1918 pandemic. In the, in the, in the army hospitals, where the soldiers were coming back and they had the flu. They thought, the doctors at the time thought that they were dying from the symptoms of the flu. Fever, muscle aches. Hey, we have aspirin. Aspirin just came out in 1899. So they were dosing them up the wazoo with aspirin.

• 51:41Lewis Howes?

  For the muscle pain.

• 51:42Roger Seheult?

  For the muscle pain and for the fever. It took care of the fever. Some of these people were probably toxic. I mean, we killed a lot of people unfortunately with aspirin. The saying was is that the German, the German Bayer aspirin killed more patients than the German bullets.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  Oh my goodness.

• 51:57Roger Seheult?

  In, in the First World War.

• 51:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:59Roger Seheult?

  Now, there was a group of hospitals at the time in North East United States that was not doing that. What they were doing was the opposite. Instead of bringing the fever down, they were doing these treatments.

• 52:09Lewis Howes?

  And the fever up.

• 52:10Roger Seheult?

  They were putting them, they were placing very hot packs on them, increasing the temperature so they were sweating. They were putting their feet in hot baths. This is 1918. These, these sanitariums, as they were called, those hospitals, they didn't have the modern medical things that we have today.

• 52:25Lewis Howes?

  Hot, cold, hot, cold, that's about it.

• 52:27Roger Seheult?

  And so what they found was this. This is really interesting. When they looked at how many people came down with the flu and then progressed to pneumonia.

• 52:38Roger Seheult?

  And then finally to death. They found that in the hospitals where they were practicing what they call fomentations or hot packs. Yeah. That they did the best job at preventing the patient from going to pneumonia. Hmm. But once they got pneumonia. It's hard. It didn't work. There was about a 50/50 chance of them dying. By the way, it was about a 40% chance of them dying in the Army hospitals. So the Army hospitals were doing a little better job at once they got pneumonia going to death. But the problem, the thing was is that in the sanitariums, hardly anybody was going to pneumonia. And so at the end of the day, there was about a 1.5% case fatality rate in the sanitarium and over 6% in the Army hospitals. So what happened?

• 53:20Roger Seheult?

  So you know, this led to a lot of intrigue and studying this. And this is where Yoreg, Wagner Yoreg got his idea from. It was this Melu, this environment of understanding of heat and cold and hydrotherapy and this sort of stuff. And he got the Nobel Prize for doing this in 1927. Very intensive. It's difficult. You've got to place the patient down. It takes time. You have to set it up. You have to heat the water up. You have to do all of these things. And so by 1928, we discover penicillin. Penicillin is a pill. You manufacture it. You can give it to people and it's a lot easier to do. So you have a choice. Do you do the hot fomentations or you just give them the pill? Mm-hmm. It's a lot easier to give them the pill. And so that's where we, as a, as Western society, and look, I'm a, I'm a critical care physician.

• 54:05Roger Seheult?

  I give medicines out all the time. It's useful. When a patient comes in with a stroke, I give TPA to break up the stroke. I'm going to do that before I do hydrotherapy. That's, that has to work really quickly. So I, and just because I'm talking about these things doesn't mean that I'm not, I want the best of both worlds. I'm the Swiss cheese model. Yes. Everything that works, let's do it. Exactly. And so, and not to say that because this works, we don't have to do this. Not to say that because we're sterilizing the equipment, we don't have, the surgeon doesn't have to wear a mask, right? Everything, all of the above, because that's really what we deserve.

• 54:37Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, make sure to share it. Again, don't forget to check out part two coming soon in a couple of days later this week. Make sure to check that out. It'll be the next episode coming out. And if this is your first time here, thank the person that sent you. Whoever texted you this link, whoever posted this on social media, just send them a message back thanking them. And also click the subscribe button right now. Leave us a review. Let us know what you enjoyed most about this and spread the message of greatness to someone that you care about. You can text a friend, you can put it in a WhatsApp group chat, put it on social media. Just make sure to tag me when you post on social media so I can stay connected with you as well. And I want to leave you with this quote from Dennis Waitley, who said, "Time and health are two precious assets that we don't recognize and appreciate until they have been depleted."

• 55:21Lewis Howes?

  Time and health, that's what it's all about. Maximizing our health, maximizing our time, making sure we're taking actions, doing the things we enjoy to do the most. I'm so grateful for you and I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.