The Diet Hacks To Improve Brain Function, Improve Relationships & Live Longer w/ Shawn Stevenson EP 1484

The Summit of Greatness is back! Buy your tickets today – summitofgreatness.com – Shawn Stevenson is a bestselling author and the creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the #1 health podcast in the U. S. with millions of listener downloads each year. A graduate of The University of Missouri—St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology, and nutritional science and went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. Shawn has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Muscle & Fitness, ABC News, ESPN, and many other major media outlets. He is also a frequent keynote speaker for numerous organizations, universities, and conferences. In this episode you will learn,The number one reason why healthy habit changes often fail to work long-term for most people. How metabolism and its intricate functioning impact sustainable habit changes. The profound influence of food on brain health and cognitive functions. Identifying popular foods that are damaging to brain health. The primary nutrient crucial for brain health and cognition. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1484For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960Want more health-focused episodes like this one? Michael Pollan - https://link.chtbl.com/1424-podDr. Jeffrey Bland - https://link.chtbl.com/1442-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.

• 0:01Lewis Howes?

  Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection. I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness, this September 7th through 9th, in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world, and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Josprey Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sanchero, and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

• 0:44Lewis Howes?

  So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com/summit2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there.

• 1:02Shawn Stevenson?

  We're not just victims of our environment. We are products of our environment, absolutely. We don't have any choice but to be. Humans are incredibly adaptable. What's different about us is that we're also creators of our environment. We can consciously create the environment that makes health automatic, that makes healthy choices easy and accessible. We can create an environment that makes love and joy and friendships more accessible, safety more accessible, creativity more accessible. This is what makes us so special.

• 1:33Lewis 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.

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  Very excited about this. We've been friends for, I don't know, probably a decade now, right?

• 2:01Shawn Stevenson?

  It's getting close to 10 years.

• 2:03Lewis Howes?

  It's been a while. And I've seen your evolution as an expert, a thought leader, a teacher, a scientist, a researcher. And there has been a lot of information over the last specifically three years that has confused a lot of people. A lot of people have gained a lot of weight, not only emotional weight, but also physical weight. A lot of people seem to be getting sicker more than ever now. Just things are happening and they don't know why they're getting sicker. And the first question I want to ask you is around healthy habits. Can you share the number one reason why healthy habit changes don't work long term for most

• 2:48Lewis Howes?

  people, especially when it comes to weight loss?

• 2:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And first and foremost, we need to start with, what's the situation that we're dealing with here? All right. So a paper that was just published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders detailed the health of American adults. And they established that 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy.

• 3:11Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean?

• 3:12Shawn Stevenson?

  So we're talking about blood lipids, we're talking about hormones like testosterone, estrogen, some derangement there. We're talking about blood glucose, things like C-reactive protein inflammation. We're talking about hemoglobin A1C and other blood sugar markers. I can go on and on, but metabolic health really is the foundation of health itself. Because the word metabolism oftentimes can get a little bit twisted. We tend to think about metabolism as burning fat. But metabolism is everything. Everything about human health and function is metabolism.

• 3:47Lewis Howes?

  What is tied into the metabolism? What is it including?

• 3:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Everything. So your cardiovascular health, your cognitive function, the health of your skin. Metabolism is taking place with every organ, tissue, and cell in your body. So this is number one is 88% of American adults are now established to be metabolically unhealthy.

• 4:07Lewis Howes?

  88%.

• 4:08Shawn Stevenson?

  But pair this with the CDC just published some new data. This year, they established that 60% of American citizens now have at least one chronic disease.

• 4:19Lewis Howes?

  Forty.

• 4:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Forty percent have two or more chronic diseases.

• 4:22Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 4:23Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, so.

• 4:24Lewis Howes?

  This is the CDC.

• 4:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, what I'm setting up here is looking at what is the, what is the conditions that we're in? When we're trying to change our habits, what does society actually look like? We shared just a couple of other stats with you. Right now, we're knocking on the door. We, we have over forty-three percent obesity rate here in the United States.

• 4:43Lewis Howes?

  Didn't it used to be like a third, like a few years ago?

• 4:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:47Lewis Howes?

  Now it's forty-three percent?

• 4:49Shawn Stevenson?

  There's been a titanic jump during the pandemic. As you set things up with the last three years, those numbers haven't even come out yet. We do know, according to the CDC, that childhood obesity essentially tripled.

• 4:59Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 5:00Shawn Stevenson?

  During that timeframe, for certain groups of children, children that were moderately obese, and even children who are of a healthy weight, gained an excess excessive amount of annual weight. So going from like two pounds a year to, to, to almost five pounds.

• 5:14Lewis Howes?

  Now, what is, what is obesity mean?

• 5:17Shawn Stevenson?

  That's a BMI metric, by the way. So this can also get into a little bit of controversy, like, is that the right thing? Because a running back who's five foot nine, two hundred pounds, he'd be considered, right? To be overweight and teetering into obesity, but he's a running back with probably eight percent, but like.

• 5:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:34Shawn Stevenson?

  But that's not what we're talking about. We know that.

• 5:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Shawn Stevenson?

  We know that obesity has reached beyond epidemic proportions here in the United States. But according to BMI, that's the, the big metric, the big metric that's being used. You know, uh, we've, we've got, just like I said, forty-three percent of American adults are clinically obese now. And with, until twenty thirty, which is less than seven years away right now, it's projected we're gonna hit fifty percent obesity in our society.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  What was, what was it ten years ago? The obesity rate in America, do we know roughly?

• 6:06Shawn Stevenson?

  About a decade ago, it was somewhere around thirty-five percent, thirty-three percent, like you said, by a third.

• 6:12Lewis Howes?

  And now it's forty-three percent. So it's gone up ten percent in a decade.

• 6:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, we're just talking about obesity. We're not talking about the inclusion of overweight and obesity. If we bring those together, we're at almost eighty percent of our society.

• 6:26Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between obesity and overweight?

• 6:29Shawn Stevenson?

  It's just going up in that BMI number.

• 6:30Lewis Howes?

  Even more.

• 6:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Lewis Howes?

  So overweight is more than obesity, or is it less than obesity?

• 6:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Obesity is more than overweight.

• 6:37Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 6:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so then we have. Degrees beyond that, morbidly obese, for example. And even those numbers, again, we have television shows now, we like, we turn this into entertainment, right? And even dating back to when we had shows like The Biggest Loser, for example. And early on in that process, actually, I've been reached out to several times to participate in those types of shows. And of course, I've, I've respectfully declined because it's putting on this entertainment factor. And this kind of concentrated effort for somebody to lose weight without really addressing the root cause of the obesity of getting into this situation. And this is what I was wanting to set up is that if we're looking at habit change and truly having sustainable weight loss,

• 7:23Shawn Stevenson?

  you would have to do something that is incredibly abnormal in our culture. The majority of citizens in our culture today are unwell. And we've had a massive transformation in the state of our health as a society in recent decades. Many conditions that were relatively rare are now normal, right? So if we're talking about things like obesity, for example, that is, and type 2 diabetes, for example, that's, there's a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the paper is essentially titled, Toward the Years of Diabetes. And what they found was that in the last 40 years, diabetes in the United States has quadrupled, right?

• 8:00Shawn Stevenson?

  So not just doubled, not tripled, but quadrupled. Something, something truly phenomenal has taken place, alright?

• 8:09Lewis Howes?

  Was type 2 diabetes a thing, you know, back in the day? Was it even?

• 8:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but it was rare. It was rare. Today, it is, again, it's becoming normalized where we have somewhere around 130 million Americans have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. This is facts, man.

• 8:25Lewis Howes?

  Hundred, that's like half America.

• 8:27Shawn Stevenson?

  About a third.

• 8:28Lewis Howes?

  A third of America.

• 8:29Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but type 2 diabetes or prediabetes.

• 8:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 8:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Okay, and so this is getting back-

• 8:33Lewis Howes?

  What does prediabetes mean?

• 8:35Shawn Stevenson?

  This is getting back into my original statement about metabolic hell, alright? So with prediabetes, we're going to see elevated blood glucose, right? So fasting glucose numbers, we're going to see- Potentially and very likely abnormalities in something called hemoglobin A1C. So your blood glucose is like a snapshot. All right, so right now, if we both were to chug a lug, you know, uh, some Coca-Cola, and then we get our blood glucose, uh, taken, it can look like, oh, man, we're like, we have prediabetes, right? But it's just a snapshot. Right. It's a snapshot, and you've got to think about the conditions. Hemoglobin A1C or A1C, that's more like taking a movie.

• 9:17Shawn Stevenson?

  It's like looking at the, the activity of your blood and your blood cells over a longer period of time. And that number is a much more valuable or valid number, but it's not as easy to get. You can't just do a, a finger prick at your local, you know, pharmacy most often to get that number, like it's getting a blood panel done. Right. Would be, would be helpful, and also talking with a physician who understands some of these metrics. But here's the thing, if we have abnormal blood glucose like that, what will happen? You're all prediabetes or diabetes is now we'll get put on to metformin, or we'll get put on to potentially, depending on the state of your pancreas and the beta cells and insulin you're producing, you can start taking exogenous insulin to try to manage your blood sugar

• 10:02Shawn Stevenson?

  because having high amounts of blood sugar is really dangerous. We didn't evolve having a lot of sugar in our blood. And so today, you guzzle a Mountain Dew and some Funyuns, like, there's going to be so much glucose in your, in your bloodstream that it can start to tear things apart very quickly. And so this is why insulin is so important because it takes and shuttles that glucose out of the blood. It starts to store it away in your cells, namely your fat cells, namely your muscle cells potentially. But insulin resistance isn't just about fat. It's all, it's also about your muscle cells. Because this is a primary site for glucose uptake is in your muscles. And so, but here's the thing, Louis.

• 10:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Are we dealing with an obesity crisis today? And this is our friend, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has talked about this. Or are we dealing with a lack of muscle problem?

• 10:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I was just thinking about, so say that one more time. Are we dealing with?

• 10:59Shawn Stevenson?

  A body fat issue as a society? Are we doing with, are we, are we dealing with a lack of muscle issue?

• 11:04Lewis Howes?

  It's both.

• 11:05Shawn Stevenson?

  It's both.

• 11:06Lewis Howes?

  I was just thinking with the amount of sugar. I mean, I used to have, I don't know, eight to 10 Dr. Peppers a day in the summer as a kid growing up in Ohio. Just like, but, but, and I wonder if I would, I wonder if I would have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. If I didn't work out as hard as I did for most of my life.

• 11:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Lewis Howes?

  If I wasn't lifting, if I wasn't running, if I wasn't jumping, if I wasn't doing explosive activities.

• 11:32Shawn Stevenson?

  That was saving you.

• 11:33Lewis Howes?

  That was, if I wasn't on sports teams, like just pushing my muscles in my body, building strength during that time. I think I would have been extremely obese.

• 11:42Shawn Stevenson?

  But what you were doing, even though your body was metabolizing this, this input, right? Because it isn't just food or isn't just a beverage, it's information. You're also accelerating your aging process.

• 11:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I know.

• 11:55Shawn Stevenson?

  That's the thing, because it's not just, I'm burning off this fuel. What type of fuel is it? Is it aging your vehicle, right? Because it's low quality. And again, it's not just the fact that you're making your cells out of Dr. Pepper. All right, because your body's going to be utilizing the materials you give it. But also the fuel that your cells are running on and how your cells are communicating are going to be based on Dr. Pepper. All right. And so, you know what I'm saying? And, and.

• 12:22Lewis Howes?

  Based on 60 chemicals.

• 12:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Lewis Howes?

  In sugar water.

• 12:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's crazy. You know, if you really think about what is probably the, the number one most inflammatory from a metabolic derangement standpoint? Thing that we consume in our society? It's a liquid sugar. All right.

• 12:39Lewis Howes?

  Liquid calories.

• 12:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Liquid, liquid sugar specifically.

• 12:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 12:42Shawn Stevenson?

  If it's coming in liquid form, because it's going to hit your, your stomach, your small intestine, your, your large intestine, it's going to hit your system so much faster, get shuttled into your bloodstream, your liver, all this stuff is getting hit so quickly because there isn't much, as much digestive energy needed to break it down. It's just like pure, uncut.

• 13:03Lewis Howes?

  Ew.

• 13:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Cocaina. You know, it's like, it's, it's dangerous.

• 13:07Lewis Howes?

  So what do you think is the root cause to the acceleration of obesity in America and around the world and the acceleration of type two diabetes and so many other chronic illnesses? What is the root cause? Is it psychological? Is it emotional? Is it our environments? Is it the excess of all the foods that are available that are processed? Is it our lack of forming uh, stable habits and discipline? Like what is causing us to consume so much things that hurt us and kill us younger?

• 13:39Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. This is what it's all about. This is what this conversation is all about. And I really think we can make a big change from this conversation. The people that we're both collectively able to reach, we can create a tipping point to help to normalize health again. Because what I was doing is setting up the state that we're existing in right now.

• 13:56Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 13:56Shawn Stevenson?

  It is very difficult to be healthy in a culture that is largely unhealthy, in a culture that is constantly feeding you messages and information and conditions that make being unhealthy so easy, right? And so.

• 14:12Lewis Howes?

  And fun and fulfilling and, you know, exciting and all these things, like to have all these foods.

• 14:17Shawn Stevenson?

  On the surface.

• 14:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:19Shawn Stevenson?

  On the surface, right? But it's not fun when we have diabetes. It's not fun when we have Alzheimer's disease. That is not fun. And so what we're talking about here is the culture we're existing in. And this is really the root cause.

• 14:33Shawn Stevenson?

  The primary reason that we're unable to make healthy changes long term is that we're existing in a culture that is largely unhealthy. And so what does this really mean? Well, culture is defined as the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of a group of people that is then passed down to future generations. All right. So the culture that we're existing is determining what we are aware of, how we think about things, how we interact with our world, how we interact with the people in our environment, the world around us, the food choices that we make is based on our culture. And so today, the majority of American citizens are born into a culture that is feeding them

• 15:14Shawn Stevenson?

  messages that is creating conditions around them that are making unhealthy choices so accessible. As a matter of fact, it's making it normal. Now, let me give you an example. So if, for example, we would go to a hunter-gatherer tribe, right? So like the Hata. We still have hunter-gatherer tribes in the world, right? Now, not to say that they don't have like a, you know, a nice T-shirt or something every now that they might get from, you know, but largely their, their, their culture is constructed in a way where an underlying belief is if you don't move, you die. Eh. Because movement is required for you to procure your food, for you to hunt, for you to gather, for you to get water, you have to move or you will die.

• 15:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So it's embedded in the culture that movement is a part of life. Here in the United States, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity. All right. We've done more and more things, more innovation that has taken, taken movement and activity out of it. All right. Now, again, it can be under the guise of doing something positive, right? Automation. But if we're taking away something our genes expect us to do, which is to move, what are going to be the downsides? Now, also, within the hunter-gatherer tribe, because of their culture, it blocks them from the awareness that 7-Eleven exists, that QuickTrip is a thing, right? That they can just, instead of going out and throwing a spear through an antelope, they can throw a spear through a hot dog, right?

• 16:40Shawn Stevenson?

  They could throw a net over nachos with chili and cheese. Right. They're not aware that that exists now again. They don't have access to it. Exactly. It's not a part of their reality. It's not a convenience store on the corner. Exactly. Now, this is not to say that there isn't a hunter gatherer out there who knows a 7-Eleven. Right, right, right. Overall, hopefully, people are understanding the analogy here now. To bring this to reality for for for me to use an example. I grew up in conditions where it's a glorified food desert, right? And I I struggled to use the word food desert because it sounds still sounds kind of good, like a desert. I think of Boyz II Men videos, like, you know, water run dry. Right. A food desert is not a good place to be. All right?

• 17:23Shawn Stevenson?

  So we're on food stamps, we're on WIC, we're getting money, we're getting food from charities. And. In St. Louis? In St. Louis, yeah. So like the Hosea House, we would get basically handouts for toys and for during Christmas time and for food. Mm hmm. And from my childhood into my adulthood, when I was in my university, I was going to college, working on my undergrad degree. All right, I was living in Ferguson, Missouri. And in Ferguson, Missouri, it is one of the most populated with fast foods per square foot of any place in America. Really? Yeah. Ferguson? Yeah. And so when I go out my door within a two mile radius, there's every fast food place that you can name.

• 18:06Shawn Stevenson?

  It's just all I'm I'm surrounded by, not to mention all the convenience stores, not to mention the cashing places, not to mention. Dollar General stores or whatever else, yeah. And not to not to mention the lack of anything that is affirming health. Damn. I didn't know what yoga was. There was no yoga studios. Are you kidding me? There's no gyms. There's no gyms, right? So if I go outside of my environment, I can get to those things. Now, ironically, the university that I went to, the University of Missouri St. Louis, was just outside of Ferguson. All right, just on the outside of the outskirts, and I had access to that. So that's where I turned my health around was at the university gym. That was kind of my low hanging fruit. But most of the people in my community didn't have access to that.

• 18:51Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, you know, you got to think about what choices am I going to make when I go out my door? If all I see is ultra-processed foods, that's all that I knew really existed. I didn't know there was a difference between fish sticks or wild-caught cod or salmon. Like, it's just food for me, and it's cheap. That's the other part.

• 19:11Lewis Howes?

  It's affordable.

• 19:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Because of the low-income environment that I'm in, and I can get two for $99 tacos, two for $99 tacos at Jack in the Box, or I could spend $3 to get an avocado. Like, why on earth would I get an avocado?

• 19:25Lewis Howes?

  Well, there's two, there's a couple of things here to talk about. One, because there was a time in my life, six months, where I was on food stamps, when I was actually a professional athlete, but on food stamps, because we got paid $250 a week. We got free housing, and we had a roommate, which was an apartment. And then we had, uh, they gave us free food stamps for the local fast food restaurants, right? This is a professional athlete playing arena football. So I'm eating every type of sandwich and burger and whatever else I can find. And I'm trading with my teammates of like, hey, I want this thing, and I'll trade you this, like the food stamps. It was like food. You can't live off a couple hundred bucks a week, really.

• 20:07Lewis Howes?

  In America, at least, it's challenging. And, um, so I was grateful for the, the support when I didn't have the finances to go and buy food, right? My own food or healthier food. And I think these programs that provide food stamps, charity food, you know, when the restaurants give food or the grocery stores give food to local charities, I think that's a powerful thing. We need those things. But there's also something that happened to me. Once I started to make a little bit more money and I could afford my own apartment, and I could afford my own food at the grocery store. I didn't choose healthy, but even though I had the ability to, I didn't choose healthier for many, many years.

• 20:54Lewis Howes?

  And now is that? How do we get to the place where we start to choose healthy when we have the option? As opposed to, man, this is convenient. The Starbucks, I'm just gonna get all the sugary drinks. I'm gonna get the, the cookies. I'm gonna, you know, when you have the money to buy healthy food, but you still choose the convenience, the high sugar, the high calorie foods that have a lack of nutrition. Why does that take place?

• 21:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Your culture's already inundated you with the deliciousness, the perceived deliciousness of all these ultra-processed foods. In the United States, the average American adult, according to the BMJ, it's one of the most prestigious medical journals, British Medical Journal, sixty percent of the average American's diet is ultra-processed foods. All right? Now, the revelation that I'm bringing forth in this new project, the Smarter Family Cookbook, is that a new study that was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, found that almost seventy percent of the average child's diet is ultra-processed foods.

• 21:50Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 21:51Shawn Stevenson?

  All right? So you're inundated as a child here in the United States. If you're average, if you're the average child, you're inundated with ultra-processed foods that is engineered by brilliant food scientists to taste a certain way that has this excitatory thing that influences what's happening with your dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, adrenaline, all these different hormones that make you feel exhilarated, that make you feel pleasure, right? And so it's not just a taste thing, it's a addiction thing that is taking place with our children. All right? And so you're inundated with this. Why would you even consider eating, quote, healthy? It just doesn't even sound right.

• 22:35Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Especially, I'm tasty and you're young and so you're, you've got

• 22:38Lewis Howes?

  You're healthy-ish.

• 22:39Shawn Stevenson?

  all these metabolic benefits on your side, right? And so this is-

• 22:43Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna have the candy, the ice cream, the processed food, the packaged food all day long.

• 22:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely.

• 22:48Lewis Howes?

  The fast foods, all that stuff.

• 22:50Shawn Stevenson?

  If you're a free rein child in America, like we got free range chicken out here. If you're a free range child in America, you're going to go for ultra-processed foods. And let's make a distinction too, if people are curious, what is ultra-processed foods? So processing of foods has been done by humans for thousands upon thousands of years. All right? And it's just taking a food and- And processing it in a way that makes it palatable, that makes it easy to store, that make it easy to trade and to make it more enjoyable. So processing would be something like taking olives and using a stone press to make olive oil. Right? That's extra virgin olive oil today. Right? And something like tomatoes and making a pasta sauce.

• 23:34Shawn Stevenson?

  You can still tell where it came from. Slide right. A one step and then maybe adding some spices, some cooking, that kind of thing. Ultra processed foods is when the food is harvested. We'll just say a base food substrate. So we'll, we'll say corn, for example. And the corn itself used as kind of a base and also as a sweetener. Right? High fructose corn syrup, but corn syrup. And somehow that corn, that field of corn that you're looking at becomes pop cereal. Right? Gotta have my pops. Right? You don't know, you no longer, that hunter gatherer, if they were to see that box of cereal, they would have no idea where it came from. There's no essence left.

• 24:16Shawn Stevenson?

  It spins process so much, all these different, not only breaking that, that corn down into sugar and different substrates, but the additives, the flavors, the added flavors, added preservatives. Colorings. Food dyes. Yeah. Which we have strong data on this now of this being one of the underlying causative agents in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders. Really? Are food dyes. Many food dyes have actually been banned in other countries that are still largely used here in the United States because they're disruptive to our nervous system, especially for our kids. And so, again, really starting to unpack these things, you start to realize like, we're so disconnected from our food, it's scary because not that long ago,

• 25:01Shawn Stevenson?

  we, we evolved really. If we just take out the last hundred years, just throw, put that to the side. If we look at the thousands upon thousands of years of humanity before that. Our food, we were deeply connected to it. It was a tribal thing. We all had responsibilities in procuring our food. And not just that, the acquisition of the food, the preparation of the food and the eating of the food was a community thing. All right.

• 25:27Lewis Howes?

  That's something you talk about with your new cookbook, which is about really eating healthy foods that taste delicious with family. Because we've lost the art of connecting with family when we eat. Everything is fast or convenient or watching with the TV on, which I'm guilty of half the time.

• 25:47Lewis Howes?

  But not as a community. And you talk about in your book about how, you know, when you deal with family or friends you care about and you're eating meals together that you're specifically creating together or having some element or role in the creation process. How much more powerful is doing that consistently over time versus eating isolated and eating ultra-processed foods by yourself?

• 26:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. The last time I saw you, that's what we were doing. Eating together. It was a celebration for you, for your birthday.

• 26:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Shawn Stevenson?

  It was one of the most magical days, right? We'll always remember that experience. And funny enough, this was normal. I just came back from Maui, for example. This was normal, this celebration around food, right? Having a luau, like this is kind of like maybe a commercial aspect of it now, but it's deeply rooted in sharing a food with your tribe, right? And celebrating life, celebrating our connection to food and to each other. And this is the mission right now. Now we're getting to how do we fix this? I talked about the larger culturescape that we're existing in. And culture is like an invisible hand that's guiding our behaviors. We think we have free will, but our culture is really deciding what we're aware of and the choices that we have.

• 27:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, how do we change this culture? We start with our own family. We start with the controlling the controllables. All right. Because I've been in this field for over 20 years. And thinking about all the time I've spent trying to target the bigger culture, it's very, very difficult. And what I found to be the most effective is changing the culture from within, starting with yourself, your family. That starts to bleed out to your community. People start to see things different. They see an example. I didn't, I didn't see any examples when I lived in Ferguson, Missouri. I didn't see what health looked like. And so people to see me and my family, knowing where I come from, it changes everything. Now, how does eating together with friends and family start to shift this culture?

• 27:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, according to the data, I'm going to share three powerful studies with you. It's creating a protection for our health that heretofore we didn't really understand. What does that mean? Science. So eating together with friends and family, and we start with study number one. This is researchers from Harvard. They gathered all this data on family behaviors around eating. And they found that families that consistently eat together have a higher consumption of vital nutrients that prevent chronic diseases and lower intake of ultra-processed foods. Really? All right. So this is Harvard researchers. Why is that? Why do you think that is? There's a couple of reasons why. And I break this down in the book because that's, I'm a why guy. I want to know why. Right, right. And so one of the things that really jumps out is the intention

• 28:34Shawn Stevenson?

  behind eating together as a family. Right? There's an intentional meal planning that's automatically going to take place. It's not going to be across the board all the time. But if you know I'm having family dinner tonight, you're thinking about it. It's a, it's an unconscious, subconscious thought process. It's like, okay, we got a plan. Like, what are we going to have? Right? Whereas today, if we're not, if we don't have this as a constant structure, DoorDash is on tap, right? Or just picking up something because we're not thinking about it. We, we, we make the food decision last minute. And that's okay because we have access to that. That's okay. But when that becomes normalized, we get more and more separate from each other. And also this protective mechanism for our health. So that's study number one. That's from researchers at Harvard.

• 29:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, this next one was cited in the Journal of Nutrition, Education and Behavior. And they looked at. Family behavior around food and the outcomes for the for the children specifically. And they found that families who eat breakfast with their kids, parents who eat breakfast with their children four times a week had dramatically lower intake of ultra-processed foods, higher intake of vital nutrients, at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at each day, most days of the week. And the list goes on and on, all these different benefits they were saying, but this is the most important part about this study. And by the way, they found that when the TV was rarely or never on for these families, they had an even

• 29:59Shawn Stevenson?

  further drop in their consumption of ultra-processed foods, the kids specifically, right, because of that marketing, that advertisement. Now, the most important part about the study is that this was looking at minority children who would generally be in the context of low-income conditions, families like mine. We didn't know that eating together could help to protect our health in some strange way. But had we known, even if we were eating processed foods, just the behavior of eating together, it starts to create this protection. I'm going to share with you why. This leads to the next study. This was a collaboration of studies. This was actually published in Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

• 30:39Lewis Howes?

  And I'm going to get all these resources and link them up for you guys, too.

• 30:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, and they're all in the book detail as well in the family cookbook. And so what these researchers uncovered was that, and this is the most important takeaway from today, this is the one, do this one thing. They found that families who eat together, any meal, three times a week. Okay, so parents eating together with their children or parent eating together with their children, just three times a week, dramatically decreased overweight and obesity in the children and decreased eating disorders.

• 31:15Shawn Stevenson?

  And just overall decreasing the risk of the onset of early mortality and chronic diseases. Wow. By eating together with your family three times. That's fascinating. All right. This is the major takeaway that I want people to take on and make that a mandate. Make it a mission to eat with your family, eat with friends three times a week. Plan it, add it to your calendar because today we've got a lot of stuff going on. And a lot of times if you don't put on your schedule, it's not real. Like literally plan it out. It's gonna be whatever flavor it looks like for you. This could be, you know, family dinner on Wednesday and Thursday and then brunch on Sunday. Right? Just whatever works for you, but there's something really special about this process. And we can unpack more of this why, but also the psychological aspect.

• 32:00Shawn Stevenson?

  And this was shown in data looking at adults and how eating together with their family dramatically decreased their stress levels. This was recent, this was coming from a, a, a population of workers from IBM. And they found that as long as the workers were able to get home and have dinner with their family, it kept work morale high. But as soon as their work schedule and the demands start to dig into them spending time with their family and getting home in time for dinner, their work morale start to go down, their stress levels elevated. Now, why does this matter overall? Well, and this is another big takeaway from today. And this research as well is published in JAMA. But the research, this was a meta-analysis and the researchers determined that upwards

• 32:43Shawn Stevenson?

  of 80% of all physician visits today are for stress-related diseases. 80%. Up to 80% because of the stress-related component. Because stress isn't just something that's invisible. Your thoughts create correlating chemistry in your body instantaneously. And so if you're having these habitual stressful thoughts and automatic negative thoughts, as our friend Daniel Amen discusses, when this is on automatic for yourself, you're just releasing these, these chemicals, a chemical cascade that can lean towards toxicity. They can be great in the short term to help you to survive short-term stress, acute stressors. But we were never designed to carry constant emotional stress, constant mental stress,

• 33:27Shawn Stevenson?

  constant environmental stress. So a lot of people might hear that and like, well, I'm not that stressed. You know, my work isn't that stressful. We got to talk about this something called an allostatic load in your overall stress load. So what goes into your stress load individually? Well, we do have work stress. Yeah, that's a common one. We have relationship stress. A relation- relationship stress can mess you up. Oh, man. Can mess you up. It was messed up for about 15 years in different relationships, man. It was like, it'll mess your health up. Absolutely. Your mind up. Absolutely. Your energy flow, everything. And it's based on your perception. It's based on your perception. Where you think about it. And the correlating chemistry that you're going to be creating. The most powerful pharmacy in the universe is in your body. A hundred percent.

• 34:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Because it's, this isn't bio-identical, it is identical. It's the, you're creating chemistry for your receptor sites designed in you for you. There's nothing else more powerful than that. And so we've got, of course, there are also, there's some great breakup songs out there. All right, some great love songs that come from that, there, there's that. So we've got, we've got work stress, we've got relationship stress, we've got mental stress, emotional stress. We've got exercise stress. Exercise stress is, is what's known as a hormetic stressor. It's a good stress if you're able to heal from it and recover. Because the exercise isn't making the magic happen, it's tearing you down. The magic comes when you're able to recover, rebuild, come back better. But add that on to an already stressed person, spiritual stress.

• 34:56Shawn Stevenson?

  What if you feel disconnected? What if you feel like you're lacking purpose, insignificance? Right? All these things, it starts to add into that overall stress load. And now here's another huge one, environmental stress. The environment that we are living in today is very, very different from what our ancestors evolved in. All right, there are tens of thousands of synthetic newly invented chemicals. And we're talking about millions of tons released into our environment. And so the very air that we're breathing is different. And to take this into one of the cultural contagions that we need to protect our family from within our own household. A really good friend of mine and she's one of the most brilliant researchers.

• 35:39Shawn Stevenson?

  She's the, the leading authority in the world on dietary oils. All right. So her name's Dr. Kate Shanahan. She has background as a family physician, but also she was a nutritionist for the Lakers during Kobe's time.

• 35:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Later in his career, helping to extend his career. Every time he would go to a different hotel and travel, he's bringing bone broth or finding a place where they would make it. Like that was one of his things.

• 36:03Lewis Howes?

  Bone broth.

• 36:03Shawn Stevenson?

  That she introduced. Yeah. And also Dwight Howard was there too. And she was like, he had the worst diet. He was eating all this candy and whatnot.

• 36:10Lewis Howes?

  Some of these guys, you hear about these NBA, NFL guys, it's like just candy half the day.

• 36:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  And they're just genetic freaks though.

• 36:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but the injuries start to come, you start to feel tired.

• 36:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Kobe wasn't like that. Kobe was always looking for the edge.

• 36:23Lewis Howes?

  He was.

• 36:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so anyways, so she's got this huge database of research on dietary oils. And one of the research papers that she shared with me, and this blew my mind, like I, I had to sit with it. Like I, I had to really sit and think about it.

• 36:41Shawn Stevenson?

  We're taking muscle biopsies of human fat cells back in the earlier part, like the 19, around the 1900s. And to see what makes up a human fat cell, what is, what's in there? And in the biopsy, they found that the fat cell itself was made up of about 2% PUFA's. Okay. PUFA's are polyunsaturated fatty acids. All right. And they're naturally occurring in different plant foods like nuts and seeds, for example. And so that's all good. Now they recently took biopsies of fat cells of modern humans. And they found that the average fat cell was made up of about 25% PUFA's, polyunsaturated fatty acids. Now, why does this matter? Polyunsaturated fatty acids are by their very nature, very unstable.

• 37:27Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. They're by their very nature, very pro-inflammatory. And they are a byproduct oftentimes unfortunately are coming along with things that stir about something called these reactive oxygen species or accelerated oxidation of your cells or accelerated aging, to put it bluntly. All right. Now, what does this mean for us? About the span of about a hundred years, 2% polyunsaturated fatty acids make up our cell, fat cells to now 25%.

• 37:59Shawn Stevenson?

  What does this mean for us? The very ingredients that make up human beings has changed dramatically.

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 38:05Shawn Stevenson?

  The recipe for making a human is dramatically different. All right. And wondering why we're having such poor health outcomes. Could this be one of the causative agents when we're talking about our switch over in the oils that we're consuming? Where are we getting all these polyunsaturated fatty acids? Ultra-processed foods that are riddled with vegetable oils, canola oils, and all these unstable oils. And by the way, I encourage people, we'll put in the show notes as well, to go to YouTube and look up how canola oil is made. All right. And just watch.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:42Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. It is going to shock you. If you look at olive oil, right? Extra virgin olive oil, that means it's cold pressed. And you're pressing olives and you get the oil. That's it.

• 38:54Lewis Howes?

  You're just pushing it down and then oil comes out.

• 38:56Shawn Stevenson?

  When you see how canola oil is made, to be able to extract from the canola plant, that amount of oil, it is scary.

• 39:03Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 39:04Shawn Stevenson?

  So it's all this chemical processing, all these solvents, deodorizers. And by the way, because it stinks, you know, they're trying to nullify, neutralize the smell. And a lot of even inflammatory, like I'm talking about literally being able to catch on fire type of chemicals used in this process. And to get something that looks uniform and clean. And then they put it in a plastic bottle instead of store shelves. And plastics don't just biodegrade, they photodegrade. So light is breaking it down over time, by the way. And there's been a lot of science. I've talked about this on past shows about misfenol A.

• 39:42Lewis Howes?

  What are the, what are the, what would you say are the three oils we should try to eliminate from our diet? And then three healthier oils that may even have some benefits?

• 39:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Let's stay right here with extra virgin olive, extra virgin olive oil. So one of the studies that I shared in the new book, in the East Mutter Family Cookbook, looks at olive oil and researchers at Auburn determining that olive oil can actually help to reduce inflammation in the brain and help to heal the blood-brain barrier. Incredibly.

• 40:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Like that's astronomically powerful. Like, why is this oil? Why does it have such a resonance with the human brain and nervous system? That's amazing. And this is more mono and saturated fatty acids, by the way. And also, if it's treated right, it's gonna be bottled in dark glass because it's sensitive to light and heat. And so even using it, by the way, we wanna make sure that we're not using it on too high of heat. And also, traditionally, maybe finishing your dishes with it, right? So you plate your food or using it for salad dress, pour on some olive oil, right? Our mutual friend, Dr. Stephen Gundry, he's an olive oil fanatic.

• 40:48Lewis Howes?

  He's like drinking it every day.

• 40:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Look at his results. My guy is, you know, he's in his senior years, big time, and he's just so on point, like his cognition, his health, his energy. Last time I talked to him, he was like on a ski trip somewhere. Just, it's amazing to see.

• 41:04Lewis Howes?

  Takes like a shot a day of olive oil, right?

• 41:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, and it's just like a crazy old man. Or he's like, oh, no, he actually is looking at the data.

• 41:11Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 41:12Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, so that would be one in the healthy category. And another one. Now, this one, there's a little bit of, by the way, none of these are 100% across the board for everybody. All right, we've gotta keep that in mind. The new, the future of nutrition and health is personalization. For some people, olive oil is not your thing. You might have background genetics that don't metabolize this particular oil a certain way or small amounts or whatever the case might be. So you gotta keep that in mind. So we've got nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics are gonna be some of the leading fields of science.

• 41:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Looking at how what you eat influences your genetic expression and also your, your set of genes, how it's catering towards certain things being better for you versus other things, right? Versus your friend, versus your wife, versus your brother. All right? Everybody has our unique cascade of genes. And on top of that, microbial genes. All right, so all the genes that make up your microbiome, all the bacteria that make up your microbiome, they have their own genes. If we go gene for gene in the human body, 99% of your genes are bacterial. It's the little critters, their genes.

• 42:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:26Shawn Stevenson?

  And so now, where we're at today with science, we're looking at how our bacteria's genes are affecting our human gene expression. All right, so we can go down the rabbit hole here.

• 42:34Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 42:35Shawn Stevenson?

  But just circle this back to another oil for us to look at would be. Avocado oil.

• 42:41Lewis Howes?

  Mmm.

• 42:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Avocado oil is hot out here in the streets.

• 42:44Lewis Howes?

  We like it.

• 42:44Shawn Stevenson?

  You'd want that to come in a dark bottle. It's more, it's higher in monounsaturated fats. And it's coming from a real food, all right? An avocado. It's, it's a lot more close touch than trying to process corn and make it into an oil. All right. So, and that leads over to, and those are just a couple. What about?

• 43:06Lewis Howes?

  For the audience watching or listening, I had my first taste of guacamole at your place.

• 43:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Lewis Howes?

  Remember that?

• 43:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Lewis Howes?

  Actually, I, this is, sounds bad, but as a 40 year old man, I had my first avocado, like hard avocado about a month ago.

• 43:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Congratulations. You're a big boy.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  I still have the palate of like a 70 year old child, but uh.

• 43:26Shawn Stevenson?

  But every time you've been with us, we've introduced something.

• 43:28Lewis Howes?

  I know. And I was like, ah, I'm scared, but did I do it? I'm like, it's not that bad.

• 43:32Shawn Stevenson?

  But it's also.

• 43:33Lewis Howes?

  Salt on there.

• 43:33Shawn Stevenson?

  These great food experiences, you know, because you tore that guacamole up. Let's be honest.

• 43:37Lewis Howes?

  I did.

• 43:37Shawn Stevenson?

  And also like the cookies that my wife made back in St. Louis, for example, like very, again, using high quality ingredients, but still like every now and then you want a cookie.

• 43:45Lewis Howes?

  Nah, give me some of those.

• 43:46Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, I think we had a casserole too.

• 43:47Lewis Howes?

  Over here, man. That casserole is amazing.

• 43:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, when you come by, we've got some great stuff.

• 43:52Lewis Howes?

  I'm in. Okay, so we got olive oil, avocado oil, all in dark bottles. What would be one more, you think?

• 43:57Shawn Stevenson?

  All right.

• 43:58Lewis Howes?

  Is there one more or?

• 43:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, there's so many, there's so many popping in mind.

• 44:01Lewis Howes?

  There's good oils.

• 44:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but there's a caveat here. So there are these ca, this category of seed oils, which that in of itself unfortunately is going to invoke some controversy. And what I want to implore everybody who is really about that life and nutrition, let's come together, let's have healthier conversations and not become so black or white or dogmatic about a certain thing. So seed oils in general, the, the majority of these seed oils out here on the streets that are riddling, riddled in processed foods. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about hemp oil, flaxseed oil, chia oil. That's cold processed, alright, that's stored in shelf-stable ways. It's generally going to be in a refrigerated section.

• 44:44Shawn Stevenson?

  You can find some really valid benefits here that's backed up with peer-reviewed data. Alright, so there's a plant form of omega-3s that can be utilized as an energy source by the body pretty efficiently and also can get converted into some of the omega-3s, DHA and EPA to help to fuel your brain and nervous system. Now, your conversion process is going to depend on you. It's going to depend on your genes, your microbiome, your overall metabolic health. But, so I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But first of all, where does the analogy come from?

• 45:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, who's throwing babies out? But with seed oils just being all bad, alright, certain seeds, but the important thing is they cannot be exposed to very much heat at all. Are they going to become oxidized and rancid? So those are the ones I would say. And as far as the ones to avoid, absolutely avoid vegetable oil, quote vegetable oil, it's not made from vegetables, by the way. Alright, it's the framing because it sounds healthy. You throw, this is called health washing. Throwing the label on a thing and making it sound like it's healthy. And marketers are using this like crazy now, right? So you can get a box of Cheerios, it's like it's heart healthy, right? Honey Nut Cheerios.

• 45:58Lewis Howes?

  Low cholesterol.

• 45:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Lowers your, they actually had to change that.

• 46:01Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, because they finally face some backlash. And, but also now they'll say gluten-free, right? Gluten-free, oh, you're a gluten-free diet. Or like, they're just fat-free, right? They're still throwing these catchphrases onto things with an ultra-processed bowl of crap. But by the way, vegetable oil, I put this study in the book as well. This was published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology. So it's a top journal looking at how inhaling different things, fumes and things like that creates toxicity in the human body and other animals as well. What the researchers found was that just smelling vegetable oil during cooking can damage your DNA.

• 46:39Lewis Howes?

  Holy cow.

• 46:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Just smelling it.

• 46:41Lewis Howes?

  Now, is there any, is there any studies, I'm sure there are, that you're aware of? And maybe you don't have the data with you right now, but are there any studies that talk about? If you smoke cigarettes, smoke weed, smoke. Um, what are the other things that people are doing?

• 47:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Vaping.

• 47:02Lewis Howes?

  Vaping. If you're cigarettes, weed, vaping, or inhaling any types of toxic smokes. Or if you're drinking alcohol or taking other prescription or non-prescription drugs recreationally. How does that affect your body, your DNA, your metabolism? Whether you eat unhealthy ultra-processed foods or if you're eating healthy foods but doing these other drugs and substances? Is there any data that talks about that?

• 47:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow, man, that's, that's a huge question and that's a huge array of inputs. And so the overarching piece here, number one, is understanding, okay. What have we evolved having exposure to, right? And the concentrations that we're getting exposed to. Because the, in the, the conversation around something like marijuana, for example, can be very inflammatory. But have humans been consuming some form of that throughout our evolution? And what are people smoking today, right? And so adding all these pieces together and on top of polypharmacy, which is multiple medications. Right now in the United States, about 70% of our adult citizens are on some form of prescription drug.

• 48:17Lewis Howes?

  Seventy percent?

• 48:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah, 70%.

• 48:21Lewis Howes?

  Do we know?

• 48:22Shawn Stevenson?

  So it's normal. It's normal to be on medications.

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  Is that America or is that world?

• 48:27Shawn Stevenson?

  It's here in the United States. We're the most, we love drugs. We love them. Here in the United States, by far, we're the most, we're the most chronically diseased society in the world. And also the, the, the biggest consumers of pharmaceuticals, of course, because we have this mismatch going on. Here in the United States, just last year, we had a $4.2 trillion invested into our healthcare system. 4.2 trillion. We can't even fathom, we can't fathom how much money that is, all right? And the next closest country is like, we're four times, it's not even close, like, how far away we are on our healthcare investment, but we're not getting better. That's the thing.

• 49:07Lewis Howes?

  What are some of the healthiest countries? That take the least amount of

• 49:11Shawn Stevenson?

  Ah, Japan is one.

• 49:12Lewis Howes?

  Drugs that have the least amount of obesity.

• 49:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Japan's on the other end of the spectrum with obesity.

• 49:17Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 49:17Shawn Stevenson?

  But also, again, there's

• 49:18Lewis Howes?

  They also have like high suicide rates too, don't they?

• 49:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Every, every country has their thing.

• 49:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 49:23Shawn Stevenson?

  But also you've got to look at, with something like that, that might not necessarily be a result of food. We're not just this linear thing. This can be a cultural thing where this perceived stress, the perceived value, the list goes on and on.

• 49:35Lewis Howes?

  Pressure in other ways, yeah.

• 49:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Overall, chronic diseases are extremely low compared to us. Obesity extremely low compared to us. And this was getting me to my point of, what you talked about, all of those different pieces, how does that affect our health outcomes? With polypharmacy, there was a paper, we, we might have talked about this during the, the age of, you know, the, the virus that took over our lives. And there was a paper that was published, looking at polypharmacy specifically, and finding dramatically higher rates of infection and severe outcomes from the virus when people are on multiple medications. And the biggest culprits were PPIs, proton pump inhibitors or acid blockers. Why would that be?

• 50:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, your stomach acid is incredibly important in neutralizing, right? Parasites, viruses, invaders coming into your system, which this is going to be, your immune system is right there, a cell layer, just one cell distance between your gut and your immune system. All right? Your immune system is mostly located right around your gut.

• 50:41Lewis Howes?

  But if we're, we're, we're taking something, a chemical in a drug, or smoking something, and then we're ingesting it, how does that impact our metabolism?

• 50:51Shawn Stevenson?

  I was going to get to that.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Shawn Stevenson?

  So, number one, just really quickly, PPIs, um, opioids was the second, and also psychiatric medication, so antipsychotics.

• 51:05Lewis Howes?

  Antidepressants or anti, yeah.

• 51:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Three biggest culprits, leading to poor outcomes. Looking at, again, when, when folks are consuming pharmaceuticals, and having poor outcomes from that virus, so making you more susceptible to infectious diseases. Now, why is this? I can go through multiple layers on this. Let's look at the big, one of the big agents here, and this would be the way that it impacts your liver. Your liver is responsible for drug metabolism. That's like, Even let me give some respect to the liver. Okay, what what word is in liver? Live. Live. Right? It's just using etymology like it's got some really important relevance for human health and functionality in our survival. A liver isn't something you could just get a new one. All right.

• 51:51Shawn Stevenson?

  But also the liver is the most regenerative organ in our bodies. Outside, you know, outside of like skin, things like that. But your liver, you can get a portion of it sliced off and you can grow some of that liver back. Wow. Which is very, that's like, that's like some lizard stuff. That our bodies can do. Growing out the tail, yeah. Yeah, our livers are very regenerative and they do so much to protect us. And again, it's responsible for drug metabolism. So all of those foreign items that are coming in, your liver is doing its very best. Doing a lot of work. To process, but also to to to compartmentalize and send things different places, but also to store things. This is why today we have an epidemic. This is one of the leading causative agents for so many chronic diseases.

• 52:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. What does that mean? So oftentimes fatty liver disease, we relate it. Well, just historically, it was related to people who were drinking a lot. All right. The liver couldn't take all the alcohol. It would, it would basically become have an obese liver. Inflamed. Incredibly inflamed. And it wouldn't be able to process. Exactly. Anything. Exactly. And your and your liver also, again, it's in, don't, I just, I struggled to talk about this because it's not operating in isolation. It's in communication with your heart, your lungs, your brain. Connected. All connected in the same person. But non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, that is skyrocketed in recent years, increasing our risk for heart attacks and strokes, for diabetes.

• 53:20Shawn Stevenson?

  And in particular, sugar is one of the biggest problems because your liver also is handling the glucose you're taking it. So we talked about insulin shuttling. Glucose into your fat cells, muscle cells, but also it's going to get stored in your liver as glycogen. All right. So and when that gets tapped, you know, like it reaches its full point. And you got, and your liver keeps on taking more and more of that burden. Like I'll take what I can. I'll take what I can. I take, I'll take what I can. Because we can't keep shuttling this and your insulin resistance goes up. Your insulin sensitivity for your other cells goes down. Your liver's going to just keep getting kicked its liver nuts, basically.

• 53:57Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Just, ooh, constantly.

• 54:00Shawn Stevenson?

  And so it's going to create this kind of inflamed state.

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:03Shawn Stevenson?

  And if your liver goes, man, like it's a rap. It's really a rap. Yeah. So to relate all the stuff that you talked about.

• 54:10Lewis Howes?

  And it's hard to keep the rest of your body healthy if the liver is not healthy. It's hard to keep your brain, your thoughts healthy. It's hard to keep your heart healthy, your skin, your other organs.

• 54:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Your liver is deeply connected to your skin health too. Yeah.

• 54:23Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. The list goes on.

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  So what impacts the liver the most? What types of foods, substances hurt the liver the most?

• 54:31Shawn Stevenson?

  That's a, that's a tough question, but you know, the things that you already mentioned, again, being that is responsible for drug metabolism, alcohol metabolism as well.

• 54:39Lewis Howes?

  Are there any benefits to drinking alcohol?

• 54:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, that, you know, that's a, that's an inflammatory question. But I mean, you know, my, one of my dearest friends and mentors, Dr. Daniel Amen. I mean, he's looking at the brain. He's, he's been doing this stuff a long time. And he also, we, him and I send studies back and forth. And you know, the thing is, we're going to validate. We're going to affirm anything that we enjoy. Right. And we're going to have a tendency to ignore like, and I've even seen it in my clinical practice back in the day. People would be like, I don't want to know. Right. Don't tell me anything that's going to make me think differently, this thing that I enjoy. And I'm not about taking joy away. I'm a joy advocate out here. I am about informed consent.

• 55:23Shawn Stevenson?

  I am about intelligent usage and utilization of things. And so. One of the things that we see, and by the way, humans have been consuming alcohol for a long time. Alcohol is actually a macronutrient. Okay, so this is important. We have fats, proteins, carbohydrates. This is what I was taught in my university. You know, I went to a private university first. I went out to Lindenwood. But, you know, my university education was telling me there's these three macronutrients, and these are your three things you gotta focus on from a nutritional perspective and manage calories. Those are the two things to do. But in reality, water is a macronutrient as well. And alcohol is a macronutrient. Your body can use alcohol to fuel processes. That's what makes it a macronutrient.

• 56:09Shawn Stevenson?

  That being said, when you consume alcohol, it does something really interesting. It kicks on this phenomenon. It's called fat sparing. And so you might be, you know, you and I are just hanging out here now, and we haven't eaten in a while. Our body's going to be utilizing our stored fat for energy, should it need to, right? It can break down stored glycogen from the muscles and from the liver. Yeah, but if we're just chilling and relaxed, the body's really good at using stored fat when we're just doing low-impact things, all right? Now, we bring some alcohol here and we drink that. Suddenly, fat burning stops completely. Your body automatically switches over completely to utilizing that alcohol because this is why.

• 56:54Shawn Stevenson?

  This is what makes it different. Your body can't store alcohol. Your body can store the other macronutrients, but alcohol is incredibly volatile. We evolved. If we're really gonna look at this picture, hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans would find fruit that had, you know, fallen from the trees or whatever that had begun to get rotten and ferment, right? And consume that. And we developed over time the ability to metabolize that ethanol, to metabolize the alcohol that's getting resulted from this fermentation process. So it's like, we have that pathway. It doesn't mean that all alcohol is bad. We have it for a reason. So again, I'm trying to create a balanced indication of this here.

• 57:39Shawn Stevenson?

  However, then we created distillation. We was like, okay, this naturally occurring alcohol here, not enough. We need more liquor in the liquor. We need more alcohol. We need spirits. All right. And so this process of distillation took it to another level, increasing the alcohol content of things abnormally. And it hits our cells different. This is something that's again, it's relatively recent in human evolution to have access to so much alcohol at one time. And so with that being said, and with fat sparing taking place again, this shuts down fat burning. All right. Especially if you drink at night. It's you're not burning fat overnight. Yeah. It's again, your body has to use that immediately. And your liver is immediately going on red alert because it has to try to process this without killing you because

• 58:24Shawn Stevenson?

  I don't think we we really realize or talk about often in our culture, how many people die from alcohol poisoning. Right? And also not just the deaths, but also the resulting brain damage that takes place. Like I I just lost my father recently and I was actually at his funeral about two and a half weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago now. And he had been in assisted living facility for about 15 years because of drugs and alcohol. Really? Creating brain damage. And he developed epilepsy from that. And I've seen this again, real time firsthand. I grew up in that environment. I grew up during the crack epidemic. I've seen the impact that it had on my family members. I've lost family members to violence and the associated consumption of these things.

• 59:09Shawn Stevenson?

  I've seen it firsthand. And so I had a decision to make. Am I going to follow that path or am I going to do something different? And let me tell you, Louis, this is why I'm here today, man. It's very difficult to change when you're in an environment that you're inundated with this stuff. I saw it as the only way until I got exposure to something else. Little happy accidents, little moments like getting bust out in the quote DSEG program to Lafayette High School and getting exposure to a different environment, having a friend that lived out there and going over to his house and seeing like, wait a minute, you guys aren't getting woken up by people fighting, stuff breaking at night. Like you could just go to sleep and it's like, cool. Like everything's going to be normal when you wake up in the morning. Like it created this sense of certainty and peace.

• 59:54Shawn Stevenson?

  And I'm just like, oh, I'm going to live here. When I quote grow up and you've been out to my house out there right by Lafayette. It's so crazy, man. And I didn't think about that until we moved in like that week. I was like, oh, my God, you know? And this is this speaks to the power that we have because it's not just.

• 1:00:12Shawn Stevenson?

  We're not just victims of our environment. We are products of our environment. Absolutely. We don't have any choice but to be. Humans are incredibly adaptable. What's different about us is that we're also creators of our environment. We can consciously create the environment that makes health automatic. That makes healthy choices easy and accessible. We can create an environment that makes love and joy and friendships more accessible. Safety more accessible, creativity more accessible. This is what makes us so special. Okay? Other animals, this is again, this is what makes humans exceptional. Shout out to the beavers, you know, saying they could build dams, they they got their own beaver life.

• 1:00:52Shawn Stevenson?

  But with us as human beings, we have the ability to think externally of all these things. Right? You know, I don't, I don't really want to disrespect beavers. Shout out to all the beavers and the dams. But I'm my point being that in reality, regardless of the circumstances, the maybe the dam that the beaver built. We can foresee, we can plot, plan, we can create, use different materials. We can think about and measure and monitor all the problems with it. We can think upstream, downstream. I know beavers think about that too. Let's shout out to the beavers. Okay? But bottom line is, you know, for us today, to for us to take full control of our ability to create.

• 1:01:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And for but for us to do this, and this is something that I'm so grateful for you because you've been on a mission to talk about. For us to do that and really understand our power to create, we have to put aside our victim story. We have to take responsibility.

• 1:01:48Lewis Howes?

  Watch out now, you're gonna get people coming after you. Tell people to let go of our victim story.

• 1:01:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Listen.

• 1:01:53Lewis Howes?

  But what if you're what if you're raised in a challenging place and all you have is food stamps? So you don't have the jobs.

• 1:01:59Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm that guy.

• 1:02:00Lewis Howes?

  You're at a food desert and you're.

• 1:02:02Shawn Stevenson?

  This is what makes me different.

• 1:02:03Lewis Howes?

  Obese already and you're you can't get a job and you've got your parents are not around and.

• 1:02:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Most of the people.

• 1:02:08Lewis Howes?

  What if all these stories?

• 1:02:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Most of the people who are being warriors to try and say like, listen. This is not fair out here. It's about access. You have access, they don't. I come from that. I come from conditions where I didn't have access. I come from conditions where I was in the most poverty state here in the United States. I was getting food from charities to feed myself and my family. My mother, and again, like, well, why don't you guys just work harder? My mother worked overnight at a convenience store. She got stabbed eight times and almost died. Okay? I lost my father to crack and alcohol. So when people are talking about this stuff, they don't really know what they're talking about. You're trying to stand up for people.

• 1:02:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, it matters. You want to have access to, to health, to healthy relationships, to a healthy environment. It was a risk me going outside because of a drive by. I grew up in that environment. But what people don't talk about and don't understand is all the beauty that exists there, too.

• 1:03:09Shawn Stevenson?

  There's so much beauty. There's so much kinship. It's under volatile circumstances. It's like war. It's like soldiers bonding. All right?

• 1:03:17Lewis Howes?

  Coming together, helping each other, supporting each other.

• 1:03:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly. And we also developed this resilient, this resilience that most people will never understand. And so, yes, creating the conditions where this is normalized, where people have access, that's one part. But even with that story, it's been like, oh, people need more access to healthcare. What kind of healthcare? The kind of healthcare that is simply medicating symptoms and not helping people to address the root causes of their conditions? That are making these companies, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar companies, more profitable while people continue to suffer. And by the way, one of the studies that I referenced is looking at obesity and chronic disease. Being in that state in a low-income environment makes it harder to get out of that environment.

• 1:04:02Shawn Stevenson?

  And that's a fact. And we know it. I know it experientially. Until I got healthier, I couldn't. I didn't know. I couldn't. I didn't have the awareness, the energy to lift myself out of that situation. So the access matters, yes. But also, we also have a choice. We also have power to change, even within the most. The trying, difficult, toxic, abusive circumstances, we have the ability to make a difference. Even if it's just the difference in our own mind, even if we're in an abusive situation, and which I've been in, I grew up in it. I had the ability to change my perception. I could have been sitting here today with you and holding on to that story about all the bad things that happened to me from my parents.

• 1:04:47Shawn Stevenson?

  All the violence, all the abuse, but I chose to change my perception, to forgive them, to see even the glimmer of good that was in my stepfather. Which was, there was actually a lot. And we got to celebrate that at his funeral and all these people that got to see him because he got clean. He had to. He's in this adult. Living facility and all these people coming up and sharing these stories that I'd never met before.

• 1:05:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Really.

• 1:05:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Sharing the same stories that I grew up with, his childlike nature, his always cracking jokes and making light of things. And also his work ethic, because even that was, that was the thing I chose to take. It was the number one thing, no matter what happened to him, no matter what he went through the night before, no matter how. Inebriated he was, he always got up and went to work. He never missed a day, never missed a day. And so I picked that up. And so my work ethic, when I'm not doing this, I'm researching, I'm working myself, I'm studying, I'm teaching every day. I'm infatuated with it. I must do it. And I picked that up from him. Now, also.

• 1:06:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Knowing this is the case and hearing these stories by all these people that were coming up. I chose to see that childlike nature because this also was the first man that I ever met that beat a video game. All right. He had Mike Tyson punch out, you know, he got the Nintendo, he beat the game, you know, he'd be up late at night. Sometimes I could get up, you know, after my brother and sister went to sleep and. And hang out with them, but there's this childlike nature, but something would change. Something would change over time with, and he had this story. He came from an environment of abuse, of, you know, substance abuse as well. And he's replaying that. And then the demons would come out, all the things that he's been exposed to, all the oppression, all the things. And who's he gonna take that out on? The people he loves most.

• 1:06:43Shawn Stevenson?

  But I chose to see that he was doing the best that he could with the person that he was, circumstances what he was handed. And so we get to choose the meaning, we get to choose how we allow these things to control us. Or how we take control.

• 1:06:59Lewis Howes?

  It's a powerful story, man. Thanks for sharing this. And for, you know,

• 1:07:05Lewis Howes?

  there's people that are gonna listen to this or watch this. And I know people are gonna share this with their friends who are maybe struggling or dealing with health challenges, or maybe are in cities or environments or communities that aren't of a culture or mindset of health. Or they don't have the access to healthy foods. And the culture chooses unhealthy decisions.

• 1:07:30Lewis Howes?

  And it's just, they don't have the time to think, they're exhausted, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed, they don't have the money. And life didn't go their way to be able to make those choices, or they've been unhealthy for a while now. What would you say to those individuals who are struggling? When they're just like, it's easy for you to say, even though I hear this story that you were in that situation.

• 1:07:52Lewis Howes?

  But it just doesn't seem possible for me. What would you say to them?

• 1:07:57Shawn Stevenson?

  The piece that I didn't share, that we've talked about in the past, was that when I was living in that environment, I was diagnosed with an arthritic condition of my spine and bones. I was rapidly deteriorating. I was on a plethora of medications just to be able to sleep at night. Because the pain would keep me up at night. It was, it was absolute terror. It was anguish. It was constant pain and fear. I was living in fear. I was living in fear of standing up. Because every time I stood up, this sciatic lightning bolt would just go down my leg. And so I just stopped standing up as much as possible. And at the time, the physician that I was working with, the first physician, he of course took a look at my MRI. He told me that I had the spine of an eight-year-old

• 1:08:42Shawn Stevenson?

  person when I was just 20. I was just a 20-year-old kid. And he told me that this was incurable. I was just going to, this is unfortunately is gonna have to live with this. He was sorry, but he was gonna give me some, something to help me manage it. And there were two really popular drugs at the time, by the way. One was Celebrex, it's an asteroidal anti-inflammatories. And the other was Vioxx, alright. And if people know about Vioxx, Vioxx ended up killing, this was a drug that was distributed by Merck, one of the most powerful drug companies in the United States, even today. And this is again, over 20 years ago. Vioxx factually killed 40,000, at least 40,000, the estimation is 40,000 to 60,000 Americans, killed, this is a fact,

• 1:09:27Shawn Stevenson?

  killed 40,000 at minimum of our people. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of injuries and cardiovascular events that took place. And what they did was, they knew the risk. They saw it in the drug trials, but they, they, they did a little bit of this, a little bit of that to hide the risk. And one of my friends and colleagues, John Abramson, has done some really great work on this. He works in healthcare policy at Harvard, no big deal. And he was brought in in litigation in a lot of these big drug company trials. Drug companies, just regularly, it's always something going on. And I'm talking about massive loss of life here. 40,000 people. And my physician put

• 1:10:08Shawn Stevenson?

  me on Celebrex, not Vioxx. I would have taken either without question. I just wanted to get out of pain. I might not be sitting here with you, because a lot of young people died as well. Alright, now, all of this to say, even in that circumstance, there was little pieces of hope. There were little pieces of light that I can grab on to. Because especially in those dark times, when it seems like everything is wrong, you're totally alone. Even my old mother, who I talked about earlier, and her situation that she went through. She disappeared, you know, she was going through something in her life. I lost my mom. I couldn't, you know, she wouldn't. I couldn't find where she was at. She left me. And this was after she borrowed some money from my refund check from UMSL from my college.

• 1:10:52Shawn Stevenson?

  I got a refund check and I was paying my rent with that. And my mom asked to borrow some money. I was like, Mom, listen, I have to pay this rent. Uh, she disappeared. My mom, my own mother left me to get put out on the street. I'm in chronic pain. Oh. I don't even have my mom. Damn. Let alone my dad, you know, I just, I never even met my biological father. You only need to keep going on how fucked up this can be on paper. Right. But the bottom line was this, even in those conditions,

• 1:11:18Shawn Stevenson?

  what happened was I grabbed on to that glimmer of light and I kept ignoring it for a long time. And that glimmer of light was my grandmother, who kept on checking in on me every now and then. Like she knew that there's something was not right with me. And I just remember like how much she loved me and how much she invested in me and how much she knew I would be somebody and I'd do something special in my life.

• 1:11:46Shawn Stevenson?

  And

• 1:11:48Shawn Stevenson?

  and so just being able to honor her, I decided to get my ass up and to do something about this. After all of these physicians told me that they couldn't help me, I had to decide, what am I going to do about this myself? Because I'd been outsourcing my health and my, and my potential to other people. And that's impossible, right? You could have people that can help you along the way, that can provide resources and coaching, but change is from the inside out. And so I made a decision to get well. Most people never do that. Please hear what I'm saying. Despite your circumstances, decide. Decide. And the resources, there are things right now in your world and your environment that are already there that you're not seeing because you're tuned into how fucked up it is

• 1:12:32Shawn Stevenson?

  and how incapable you are. As soon as I made the decision to get well, no matter what, matter of fact, this is what I said, all right? And this is crazy. I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to get well.

• 1:12:45Shawn Stevenson?

  And I asked the question, what can I do? What can I do to feel better? What can I do to get well? What can I do to be the healthiest person in the world?

• 1:12:54Shawn Stevenson?

  I had no right to ask a question like that in the circumstances that I was in. And within a week, a friend of mine who I'd known her for years. She took me to Wild Oats and Whole Foods like I'd known her for years and she was in chiropractic school. I thought she was so weird, right? Her and her friends, like she'd invite me to some things, just like, man, you guys are so weird. She took me, but now I'm seeing through a new, you know, new lens. I I'm seeing through new eyes and I'm at this place and I'm going over to the books and I'm like, looking at my condition, this arthritic condition and I'm finding, there's studies here like, wait a minute, this. I I'm deficient in vitamin D, but I'm, wait a minute, omega threes, like, where am I, am I getting any of this stuff like?

• 1:13:38Shawn Stevenson?

  And I found out like there's a mismatch, there was an environmental mismatch. My body was a result of the inputs that I was giving it. And so now I started to change the inputs and start to give my body all these things that had been lacking. But it was based on something that was already present that now I'm tuned into. And by the way, I didn't have money, I didn't have money, okay? And so now I'm in a situation where I'm risking for me to buy this omega three supplement. I'm risking paying my light bill, all right? But here's the rub, this is what happened. When I start to invest in myself, I start to feel better, I start to make more money.

• 1:14:14Shawn Stevenson?

  You got more energy. I start to find more opportunities, I start to acquire more resources. When I first bought some goji berries, which are pretty popular now, there's tons of, tons of studies. And I talk about it in the book as well, just one of these great foods, but they didn't have them at Whole Foods or like even at these health food stores yet. And I was like getting them from this, there was like a, a, a Chinese herbal place where they did like acupuncture and stuff. And I went in there and I like talking to the guy and it's just like a super, like I felt like I was in a movie, you know? You got some goji berries I can get for me, yes. Yeah, you know, it's just so interesting and, and by me doing that and investing in my health, within about two to three years, I was getting goji berries from free, from the top company

• 1:14:58Shawn Stevenson?

  that was distributing goji berries, and this is true story, all right? As a matter of fact, this is, I mean, they saw me, they were doing an event somewhere, it was like one of those health expos. And I, and, and somebody was asking a question to one of the people in the booth. And the person wasn't, she was like working with somebody else. I was like, oh yeah. And I started telling her about whatever it was, maybe it was like chocolate or something. And then the other employee, but who was actually the manager of the setup, she heard me talking and she came over me. She was like, who are you? Like, that was incredible.

• 1:15:29Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Cut to, I end up getting connected to the CEO of the company. They sent me a pallet to my house in Florissant Ferguson, a pallet of these superfoods.

• 1:15:39Lewis Howes?

  That's awesome.

• 1:15:39Shawn Stevenson?

  And I started teaching nutrition classes and tell, bro, do you understand?

• 1:15:44Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:15:44Shawn Stevenson?

  That was from me saying yes, me investing in myself, me saying, I decide to do this no matter what. I will find a way. I don't want people to downplay their capacity for greatness. I don't want people to downplay their capacity for figuring things out, for finding a way where there's a will, there's a thousand ways.

• 1:16:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I love that, man. And I think it's also important to know that.

• 1:16:10Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I don't think life is designed to be easy for everyone. I don't think anyone is supposed to have an easy life. Even if you're born in wealth, you still have challenges and other things you gotta deal with. Maybe not money challenges, but other stuff you gotta overcome. But I feel like, once we accept, they're like, okay, there's supposed to be some challenges. How can I accept or embrace that this is a part of life always? And find peace with the challenge and start looking at things differently, then it's gonna feel a lot easier as opposed to hard and challenging. So it's a perspective around that as well. So I'm grateful for that story because I just think people need to hear that.

• 1:16:51Lewis Howes?

  And I think people who feel like there's no way out, need to see more studies, more stories like yours, explaining what is possible when you have a lack of health, you can't stand up, your parents are gone, you got no money, you're in a sick culture and community and town.

• 1:17:11Lewis Howes?

  All that. So it's possible, which I think is really inspiring. There's something you said there that I'm just curious, I wanted to touch on. About forty thousand ish people dying from a drug that was prescribed uh, from our health professionals and health companies, drug companies.

• 1:17:30Lewis Howes?

  Do you know the stats on how many drug-related deaths there are a year in America?

• 1:17:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, I do. Of course I do.

• 1:17:36Lewis Howes?

  What, how many, how many people die due to drugs every year?

• 1:17:41Shawn Stevenson?

  This is according to the EJS Center for Ethics at Harvard. You know, again, reputable organization. And the research is affirmed, and by the way, I did all of these resources, anything that I talk about, you can triple check. All right. And so again, it's the EJS Center, because something like this is paradigm shifting. The EJS Center for Ethics at Harvard determined that about 180,000 Americans die annually from prescribed, from properly prescribed medications.

• 1:18:11Lewis Howes?

  180,000 die a year from prescribed medications, from like doctors saying, take this.

• 1:18:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, properly prescribed medications. Now, again, this is not to create any kind of controversy. We need our physicians, we need pharmaceutical companies, we just need more ethics. We need better understanding. We need more education around the possible downsides and not treating a symptom. Instead of helping people to remove the underlying cause of the condition, so they don't need the drug, they don't need the added risk.

• 1:18:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:18:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, that, that's just deaths. We're not talking about the millions of hospitalizations. Again, these are all confirmed, but this is why most people don't know this. And this is why we need to have a little bit more compassion for this research from these, again, from research at Harvard. Is that this isn't something that's easily checked off on a death certificate, right? We, we know today about comorbidities. But saying that this person died from a drug, properly prescribed drug, requires that the researchers dig so adamantly into the data.

• 1:19:12Lewis Howes?

  Finding the cause.

• 1:19:13Shawn Stevenson?

  It is very difficult, because it could be anaphylactic shock, it could be, you know, heart attack, whatever.

• 1:19:20Lewis Howes?

  And what caused that?

• 1:19:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah. You feel me? This is, this is the problem. This is another mismatch with perceived data. Right, that, that the public sees and actual data, there's a mismatch.

• 1:19:31Lewis Howes?

  There's probably more people die every year that are somehow related to prescribed drugs.

• 1:19:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Very difficult. It's very difficult to say. It's very difficult to pinpoint, especially if time has gone on. Right? And now again, but we have a model today of healthcare that is drug dominant. They live in drug model of healthcare in the United States. It's not, it's not true healthcare. It's a model that is farming sick people. It's a model that is dependent on repeat customers. Right? You getting well is losing a customer. Why on earth would they do that? It's just not logical. Right? And so the more people that are taking these prescription medications and the longer they're taking them, the better. It's just, we have an unfortunate healthcare model that depends on people to be sick

• 1:20:20Shawn Stevenson?

  in order for it to be sustainable. And our economy here in the United States, obviously there are a lot of problems. One of the safest, most surefire bets for investors is investing in healthcare. Because we have so many sick people. It is one, it is one field that continues to grow.

• 1:20:38Lewis Howes?

  Phew, man.

• 1:20:39Shawn Stevenson?

  And so for our economy to depend on the sickness of its citizens, we have a very twisted reality right now. Which goes back to, we have to change the culture. And the culture starts with you and your family. Because here's a cool thing about culture. Yes, we can go and visit a culture, right? I just visited a culture in Maui, for example. I've never been to Hawaii, that was amazing.

• 1:21:00Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing, yeah.

• 1:21:01Shawn Stevenson?

  And so we can go and visit a culture, but when we go to a culture, we're taking our culture with us. And so people are seeing it. People are seeing your culture, the culture of your family, everywhere you go, you're modeling it. That's all I needed. This kid from those circumstances, I just needed to see what health looks like. I just needed, I just needed a glimmer of light from somebody that cared about me. Right? Those things start to add up. Because also, most importantly though, for me to see those things, there was a willingness that I had to turn on within myself.

• 1:21:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Shawn Stevenson?

  I had to stop making excuses and turn that willingness on.

• 1:21:34Lewis Howes?

  And even if you live in a community or a city that has a culture that is not health focused or is struggling to get there because of circumstances.

• 1:21:45Lewis Howes?

  What I'm hearing you say, correct me if I'm wrong, you can change your individual culture and the culture of you and your personal environment of your room, your home, your, you know, the block you're on and the people in your life, but, but it has to start with you. And people in your life may not come on board in that culture for years. You may say, hey, look, this is hurting you and I'm making this change, but they may stay stuck for a while until they see you truly modeling it time and time again to seeing lasting change.

• 1:22:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Lewis Howes?

  It's hard to get others to convert specifically family members sometimes who are struggling the most.

• 1:22:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Listen.

• 1:22:24Lewis Howes?

  And that can be extremely painful.

• 1:22:26Shawn Stevenson?

  If, if you have kids, you already know that this is, it is a, it is a challenge to say the least. And so this is what, what I created this book for was thankfully, again, our life experiences. There's this great quote from my friend, Michael Beckwick. That's my guy. He just texted me on the way in here.

• 1:22:44Lewis Howes?

  Great guy.

• 1:22:45Shawn Stevenson?

  He said that God doesn't call the qualified, God qualifies the called. Life qualifies you for the work or the situation that you are presented with. Where I'm coming from, it would be very unlikely that I would end up in this position. But I spent years, for example, working as a nutritionist and seeing people day in, day out, just like one after the other, doing, you know, I was going to all these big organizations, you know, and then going in and doing these different talks and things like that. But I got to see, and the thing is, some things like all you gotta do is just pay a little attention and you'll get it. I got to see the biggest complaint or perceived challenge that people had in changing their health and to hear from their own mouths. Do you want to know what it was?

• 1:23:28Lewis Howes?

  What was it?

• 1:23:29Shawn Stevenson?

  It was other people.

• 1:23:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:23:31Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. The reason that people had most often was my husband won't, my kids won't, you don't understand, I'm making this for them, whatever. Like there was always pointing the finger and I would get them to point it back to themselves. But also it, it developed these tools to help them to change those conditions. And so with that being said, we have to understand that we know our family better than anybody. But part of that is like, we tend to operate from this one line of communication. The thing that doesn't work with our family members is we keep doing the same thing over and over again. And instead of like, using it to our advantage, especially being a parent, we've got to be the benevolent dictator and not like, democracy is cool, we can get some votes in.

• 1:24:16Shawn Stevenson?

  But also like, creating structures to where we understand like, we are the leader of this family. Yes. And start to leverage psychology and understanding these little lives, or big, you know. I've got my two sons in my house, one's 11, one's 22. He's in his last semester of college. And I know their personalities, and I know what excites them and brings about more joy. And I know what de-excites them and brings about more frustration, right? I know those triggers. And so utilizing psychology, social psychology, to create conditions to where all this stuff starts to work together to change that, that family dynamic and the culture. So how do we do this? I mean, obviously, again, this is gonna be personality-based.

• 1:25:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Number one, we gotta realize our power. But planning out, and this is just the simple thing, I started, I said this is the most important takeaway from the episode, making a decision to have those three family meals a week. How do we do that when this hasn't been normalized in our family, right? How do we do this if most times, if you're growing up like I did, I can count on my hands, Louis, how many times I sat down and ate a meal with my parents. Growing up. Yeah, I'm not kidding, I can count on my hands, right? One parent's always gone, right? And also, it was more like a free-for-all. We eat at the same time, but we just go, like, plop down in front of a TV, video game, whatever. Or if we're out somewhere, whatever. But we would rarely sit down for a meal together, okay? How do we do this?

• 1:25:46Shawn Stevenson?

  I think we would have revolted a little bit, like, they're like, okay, no technology, we're gonna sit down. We're gonna have dinner together, we're gonna have fun. Cause Louis said so.

• 1:25:56Shawn Stevenson?

  That's not the way to go about it.

• 1:25:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. We've got to find, we've got to leverage human psychology, which is something very simple. We don't like things taken away from us unless they're being replaced with something of equal or greater value. Okay, it makes it easier. All right, and also we resist change. You know, our, the human brain is always trying to sync up and create routine and pattern and automate behaviors. And so understand like this might be a little bit uncomfortable, but find some creativity in it. And you're going to have to evoke as a parent more patience, more compassion, more of an attitude of figuring things out. Right, becoming an investigator.

• 1:26:35Lewis Howes?

  But I don't have time, I don't have the energy, I don't have the.

• 1:26:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Whoa.

• 1:26:38Lewis Howes?

  Resources.

• 1:26:39Shawn Stevenson?

  That's part of the reason you don't have any of that stuff.

• 1:26:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:26:41Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, is the, the, the lack of this family dynamic and all the peace and connection and health that that brings. So this is a top priority because this factually creates a protective force field around your family. And so with that being said, those three days, let's find a way to make this joyful. Right, and so even in the food preparation part, I give some strategies in this, the kitchen, changing the kitchen culture. Right, so for example, somebody might like to cook, but they don't do it often. What would be an attractor for you to do it more often, right? Leverage your own psychology, would it be like playing your favorite music? You know, Louis loved a salsa, like throwing on the salsa music and like dancing where you're making, you know, hanging out with your loved ones. Would it be putting on a show and bingeing?

• 1:27:24Shawn Stevenson?

  That's what my wife does, she watches Real Housewives or something while she's cooking.

• 1:27:28Lewis Howes?

  I have one of those cities.

• 1:27:29Shawn Stevenson?

  I don't know, you know, but that's like her kind of.

• 1:27:31Lewis Howes?

  Guilty pleasure, it's like her dessert when she's eating healthy.

• 1:27:34Shawn Stevenson?

  And she knows that I'm not, I'm not going to be participating in this, so you know what I mean? And so she'll do that, or she'll talk to her sister, her mom, you know, on the phone while she's cooking, like she's finding a way to leverage the time. Right, and so the same thing, we can invite our kids in to the process. And depending on the age and what they're used to as well, it's going to depend on how they fit into these things. One of the things I'm guilty of unfortunately was, yes, my kids, both of my, all three of my kids are, are really good cooks. So my, my daughter back in St. Louis, but all of my, all of my three kids can cook. But they could be even in more advanced if I would have let them in the kitchen more often. Because a lot of times when we're busy and and my kid will come in, they're like, Dad, can I help? No, not now, buddy.

• 1:28:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Or not now, baby, like, we gotta, you know, I'm trying to just get this done. I started to, I finally recognized this and I start to turn on that yes muscle. Yeah, come help me do this, come chop this up or. Unfortunately, it's because I'm a very data-driven human. I came across a study that showed that most the majority of kids today don't know how to cook for themselves. All right, it is, it's like an endangered species skill set. It's like, it's like woodshop or something, you know, it's like, I don't know, put me in a friggin hammerhead some tools, I'm like a bird house. You know, but, you know, so realizing that, oh, man, like, this is a valuable life skill that I'm taking away from my child being able to.

• 1:29:03Shawn Stevenson?

  And guess what's gonna happen when they don't have that skill set? They're gonna eat mostly ultra-processed. Convenient, fast, first takeout. Again, this is a responsibility as a parent to be able to pass this on and shifting the culture to be able to do it, so. Seems like a lot of work, I don't know if I got a lot of the time or the energy. We don't gotta get into that part, let's just stick with the three meals with the family each week. I like that, yeah. So what can we do to make this more attractive and leverage time? I've experimented. All right, one of the things, for example, that we do is we have, we know that there's gonna be like a post-meal something, a post-meal event. This could be a freestyle competition, this could be a family game, you know, it just, you gotta again leverage the psychology of the of the room.

• 1:29:47Shawn Stevenson?

  And know like, what is gonna make this this connection opportunity more valuable, right? And so a lot of times too, if there's a meal prep opportunity, even inviting them into the the meal suggestion, like, you know, asking my youngest son, like, okay, we're gonna do a dessert tonight, which dessert do you want? After family dinner, oh, oh, all he hears is dessert. Right, right, right. You don't have to have the resistance of like, I can't game with my friend, right? He's like, oh, I love, I love desserts, you know, like, oh, I want that, right? So it's just like these little psychological tools. I love that. And so, again, finding a way. And there's, there's so many cool resources. And by the way, we've got a resource guide with the new cookbook for like, for example, there's these cards that have like these questions,

• 1:30:30Shawn Stevenson?

  like family questions you ask each family member, you know, as we're having dinner.

• 1:30:33Lewis Howes?

  Deeper connection.

• 1:30:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so one of the things we do, and you, you do something similar before we have our meals, we also go around and we share three things that we're grateful for from the day.

• 1:30:41Lewis Howes?

  I love that.

• 1:30:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Right. We've been doing that for years. Right?

• 1:30:44Lewis Howes?

  I love this. I want, I want people to get this book because I think this is going to change the game for a lot of individuals and families. It's Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. Uh, make sure you guys go pick up a copy, get one for a friend, you know, all that stuff. It's the companion cookbook to Eat Smarter, which is a national bestseller, featuring a hundred family-friendly recipes that are mouth-watering delicious recipes to help you boost your metabolism, up-level your energy and start living a happier life. And with what I heard, 43% obesity in the U.S., uh, you know, 80 something percent of unhealthy metabolism, uh, in the U.S., this is a powerful solution for a lot of people

• 1:31:25Lewis Howes?

  these days to come together, create more harmony, more family, more friendship, and be healthier in the process. Make sure you guys get Eat Smarter Family Cookbook.

• 1:31:35Shawn Stevenson?

  So where people want to go is to eatsmartercookbook.com. And right now, as of this recording, we've put together something really special to add on because as Lewis is saying, I love this about you is that what about the argument side? Well, it's not just going to be from my perspective because this year we're putting on the first annual Family Health and Fitness Summit.

• 1:31:56Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, let's go.

• 1:31:57Shawn Stevenson?

  And you're going to be able to hear from some of the leading experts in health and fitness in the world that have kids and how they're able to handle things like

• 1:32:07Lewis Howes?

  That's great.

• 1:32:07Shawn Stevenson?

  preparing meals with a busy schedule, with dealing with picky eaters, with saving money on groceries, the list goes on and on. We got people like Leila Ali.

• 1:32:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:32:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Undefeated boxing champion, but she also won, won the show Chop, the Cook, Cookie Show, twice.

• 1:32:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:32:23Shawn Stevenson?

  I've eaten with Leila several times. Oh my goodness, so good. We got Gabby Reese as well. We've got Dr. Will Bolswitz. We've got Dr. Daniel Amen. Oh, man.

• 1:32:32Lewis Howes?

  Where's this gonna be?

• 1:32:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Some of the people. So this is gonna be a virtual event.

• 1:32:34Lewis Howes?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:32:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And people get access to it for free.

• 1:32:36Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:37Shawn Stevenson?

  When they preorder the book. It's a $297 summit ticket and you get that for free.

• 1:32:42Lewis Howes?

  EatSmarterCookbook.com.

• 1:32:44Shawn Stevenson?

  That's right. Eat Smarter.

• 1:32:45Lewis Howes?

  You just gotta get one of those books and you get the summit?

• 1:32:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Eat Smarter Cookbook. Just one copy.

• 1:32:49Lewis Howes?

  Dang.

• 1:32:49Shawn Stevenson?

  You get free access to the summit. We're also doing a 25K Health and Fitness giveaway. You get registered for that. So many cool things.

• 1:32:56Lewis Howes?

  And we can, you can go right now and get it and you'll have access to all that stuff.

• 1:32:59Shawn Stevenson?

  That's right. That's right. This is just, this is just for the preorder. Alright, so definitely take advantage of this now. And the summit, again, I'm very excited about this because we're bringing together more voices and more powerful people in this community to create a movement of health and wellness, to really shift it so that health is normalized in our culture.

• 1:33:18Lewis Howes?

  That's why everyone needs to get EatSmarterCookbook.com. Go there, get a, get a book or two. Give it to a friend, family member, someone who likes to cook, someone who wants to get into cooking. Um, make sure you guys get a few copies if you can. EatSmarterCookbook.com and follow you everywhere, man. You're, uh, The Model Health Show is a powerful resource. Twice a week now?

• 1:33:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Lewis Howes?

  Twice a week now? I won't say thanks to me.

• 1:33:43Shawn Stevenson?

  For years, man, you've been telling me.

• 1:33:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Uh, make sure you guys go to The Model Health Show. Um, you're everywhere, Instagram, Facebook, all the places. We'll have it all linked up as well, uh, in the description, but get the book. Eat Smarter Cookbook. We'll have an image popped up on the screen. We'll have it in the description. So much more we could talk about, man, but I, I want people to go take action there. Hundred family-friendly recipes to boot, help boost your metabolism, up-level your energy and start living a happier life. And if people want, uh, to hear your three truths and your definition of greatness, we'll link up the previous episode where you share those things. Sean, I'm grateful for you, man. Grateful for your heart. Appreciate it. Acknowledge you for. I don't know anyone that researches as much as you. Maybe there's like a handful of people

• 1:34:30Lewis Howes?

  that do the research and find the studies and speak into these things the way you do. So I really appreciate the depth of knowledge around a lot of challenging topics and things that aren't always as they seem. One thing isn't always the way it is because it might have a few other things you have to go down the rabbit hole to understand the whole picture. So appreciate and acknowledge you. Thank you. Grateful for you, man. Bless you, man. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel

• 1:35:13Lewis Howes?

  on Apple podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.