Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program

Do you struggle with chronic health problems like depression, allergies, or skin issues that just won't go away no matter what you try? According to Dr. Alejandro Junger, a renowned cardiologist and functional medicine practitioner, the root cause of these persistent ailments might be right under your nose - in your gut. In this Habits and Hustle podcast episode, I am joined by Dr. Junger as he shares his personal journey from struggling with debilitating depression and allergies to discovering the power of gut healing. He explains that a staggering 99% of chronic diseases are either directly caused by or related to gut health issues. We discuss the science behind how a "leaky gut" can wreak havoc on your entire system, leading to a host of seemingly unrelated symptoms. We also dive into practical tips on how to repair your gut through his innovative Clean Program, which has helped countless people around the world reclaim their health and vitality. Dr. Alejandro Junger is a Cardiologist and New York Times best-selling author. After graduating from Medical School in Uruguay, he moved to New York City to begin postgraduate training in Internal Medicine at NYU and Lenox Hill Hospital. The significant shift in diet and lifestyle soon manifested as symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, allergies, and depression. Becoming a patient within the healthcare system incentivized to treat symptoms vs root cause emerged as a startling experience that catalyzed his quest for an alternative solution. What We Discuss: (01:00) The King of Gut Health (04:15) The Impact of Modern Lifestyle (18:40) Path to Enlightenment Through Spiritual Journey (28:05) Awakening Through Spiritual Experience (33:10) Holistic Approach to Health and Healing (41:29) Functional Medicine Systems and Integrity (55:56) Healing Chronic Illness Through Gut Repair (01:08:46) Healing Gut Repair Program Implementation (01:19:32) Healing Gut Repair Program Discussion (01:30:09) Healing SIBO With Family Constellations (01:37:02) Seeking Healing Beyond Traditional Methods (01:42:14) Clean Program …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: AquaTru: Get 20% off any purifier at aquatru.com http://aquatru.com/ with code HUSTLE Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Dr. Alejandro Junger: Website: https://www.cleanprogram.com/ Instagram: @cleanprogram https://www.instagram.com/cleanprogram/?hl=en @dralejandropjunger https://www.instagram.com/dralejandrojunger/?hl=en

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:07Jen Cohen?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. And today, we have one of my friends, who just so happens to be one of the smartest doctors I know. And he is here visiting from very far away. He lives all over the world. The last couple of years, Dr. I always kept pronoun- again, you just told me how to how to actually say your last name.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Junger.

• 0:28Jen Cohen?

  Junger.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:29Jen Cohen?

  Dr. Junger. By the way, guys, I have the guy who is probably one of the smartest guys when it comes to gut health. He's the king of gut health. His program is called The Clean Program. We'll get into that. But I was saying that he travels everywhere. He lives everywhere. And he's in Los Angeles only for a very short time. And so I was fortunate enough to spend time with you. So thank you for being on the show.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Well, I came to LA to be on the show.

• 0:56Jen Cohen?

  Well, that makes me feel really nice. And that's very flattering. And I don't believe you. I bet you came here for bigger and better, not better shows, but bigger shows possibly.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  I don't know about better or bigger.

• 1:08Jen Cohen?

  I mean, not better, maybe slightly bigger. But nevertheless, I'm so happy to have you. On the podcast, you know what we do every time we have a guest, just to make sure we are very focused and super alert, we take these magic mind shots. And the ingredients are very clean. They're exceptionally good. There's, there's everything from ashwagandha. It's a neurotropic. It's very, very good. It has ashwagandha. It has a little bit of green tea in it. And it keeps you alert. But wait, I want to do it. I'm going to put it on my, my story. So let's do it.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Do you actually feel the effect?

• 1:43Jen Cohen?

  It's so mild, but it's like, it keeps you leveled. It's not like a crazy jittery thing. All right. So what we do in this is we actually, we cheers, like cheers. Say cheers. This is a magic mind. I'm telling you, it's really, it's, it's great. You're gonna like the taste.

• 2:01Jen Cohen?

  Do you like it?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 2:02Jen Cohen?

  It's good, right?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  The taste is great.

• 2:04Jen Cohen?

  Most people are shocked that it actually has a really nice flavor. Okay, so now you're gonna be so focused, you're gonna be so alert.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I feel smarter already.

• 2:13Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna say, I expect to have nothing but the best information come out of that noggin of yours. So, so now that I've kind of coined you as this king of gut health, why don't we just start with like a little bit of your background? Because what I always say to you, and I actually talk about this, is that you are very qualified. You're not, you know, you're not some schmendrick who is on Instagram just touting the latest and greatest. You're actually a cardiologist, plus you're a functional medicine doctor, and you have, you've been schooled and you constantly are educating yourself on things that really heal your overall body, your system, and why I like you so much. So, besides that, can we talk about how you really kind of,

• 2:56Jen Cohen?

  you really kind of honed your program and honed what you feel really are these healing properties?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I was born in Uruguay, in South America. And when I was born, there were no, not even supermarkets there. We used to go with my dad to the market, you know, the farmer's market, and we'd buy and choose our fruit, and we knew the guy that sold us the meat. And so, life was very simple at the time when I was born. Later on, it became very Americanized. But meals were cooked from scratch at my mother's kitchen, and, and we ate all together as a family, and life was simple.

• 3:31Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  And healthy by default. Once I went to medical school and graduated from medical school, I went to New York, I moved to New York to do my postgraduate training. So I started with three years of internal medicine at NYU Downtown Hospital, and then three years of cardiovascular diseases to become a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The drastic change of lifestyle from moving from a simple place like Uruguay, where life was simple and healthy by default, to a fast-paced city like New York, living in hospitals, in a lot of time in the Emergency room, three days in a row, being on call, eating garbage, ne- never eating home-cooked meals.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I remember going to the supermarket and looking at at the bo- boxes and and the smells and and the fact that that you got this colorful box and then you put it in the microwave. And in five minutes, you had something that looked like a meal that my mother would cook. You know, like, like a piece of meat or chicken with with mashed potatoes and it looked like it, right? But it wasn't really.

• 4:42Jen Cohen?

  Right, looked like it is a key word, right?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  I I started eating from the hospital cafeteria, which now I know it's no, I don't know that it's consciously designed, but it is designed to make people sick and as is hospital food for the patients, you know. And when I was on call at night, there were vending machines. And I used to think, oh, my God, these Americans, they figured it out. It's amazing. I was like a I was like an Aboriginal in a in a supermarket, like discovering this new world. I was excited and and admiring all this.

• 5:15Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  But then I started eating these things and I started getting sick. I started gaining weight. I started having seasonal allergies that then became a year-round ordeal. Then I started having digestive problems, you know, bad digestion, bloating and pains and constipation, diarrhea. And then I started getting depressed and I started getting really depressed. So I I couldn't take it anymore. I took three days off. And because I was working at Lennox Hospital at that time, I was almost a cardiologist. I knew everybody. So I knew the head of psychiatry. I knew the head of gastroenterology. I knew the head of allergies. So I went to all of them for consultations.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And I ended up with three diagnoses, severe allergies, severe irritable bowel syndrome and severe depression. And I was and I ended up with seven prescription medications. Now, I get home from my my home, my studio apartment that belonged to a a building that belonged to the hospital, right, for the residents and and and fellows. And I put the prescriptions on on a little desk that I had and I and I said. I know, because I'm already a doctor and I'm already trained. And I know that these chemicals are not going to heal me. They're not going to correct the problem. They're just going to force certain chemistry in my body.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  That's going to suppress symptoms, but it's not going to correct anything.

• 6:42Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Not only that, but the suppression of symptoms sometimes comes with side effects that turn into other symptoms. So I knew all of this, but at that point, at that moment, I had the aha moment that I said, this is not what I want for me. And if I don't want this for me, this is not what I want for my patients. My dream was to help people heal. And, and what I ended up doing is a prescription writing machine. You know, you have, you have five, 10 minutes to see a patient. You, you end up writing a prescription just in case. I don't know if you know this, but many times doctors put patients on medications to avoid a suit, a lawsuit.

• 7:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  You know, because what happens if that, you know, if something happened and you didn't put him on the medication? It's better to put him on a medication, even if he has side effects, but you can defend yourself.

• 7:37Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  In our training, they used to tell us, imagine that you are, when you write your progress notes, imagine you're in court and there's a jury and there's a judge. So you write your, your progress note in that way, that if something happens, you covered all your, all your.

• 7:53Jen Cohen?

  Right. They're covering your own ass, which is, which is the protocol. Because especially in the U S, you can get sued for anything and everything.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:03Jen Cohen?

  So.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  So this was, this was the, the, the world that I, that I ended up in and that made me sick. And I said, nah, I'm going to find my own way. So, so this was, this was three months before I graduated. I graduated as a cardiologist and I started looking for a solution for my problems. My biggest problem at the time was that I was severely depressed. I was actually thinking of. Killing myself.

• 8:28Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And the only reason I didn't even start thinking of the way to do it is because I knew that I would destroy my parents. And as a good Jewish boy.

• 8:38Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  You know, Jewish mama, you know.

• 8:40Jen Cohen?

  You can't do that to your mom.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Kind of do that to your mom and to my dad. And so I'm like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna find my way.

• 8:47Jen Cohen?

  Wait, let me ask you a question. So before moving to the United States and before doing the residency and eating all the foods and and the chemicals and the processed foods, were you, are you telling me that you weren't or never had any symptoms of depression, any symptoms of of allergies?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  I was a Taekwondo champion in Uruguay. I was competing. I was in school. I did really well in school. I had a full on life without any problem. I mean, I had appendicitis when I was a kid, but that was it.

• 9:22Jen Cohen?

  But never any any any signs of mental health issues?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I was the happiest kid on the planet. I was deeply loved by my parents, my sisters, you know.

• 9:33Jen Cohen?

  By your family.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  We had a big, beautiful community. It was like the perfect life.

• 9:38Jen Cohen?

  So would you say that the the system, the food system here, the health system here is so damaged and so detrimental to your health that it's slowly deteriorated, not just your physical health, but your mental health?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Well, that's your conclusion. I'm just telling you my story.

• 9:54Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And my story.

• 9:56Jen Cohen?

  But as a doctor.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:57Jen Cohen?

  Who sees and has had experience, would you say that was not just your experience, but would you say that that would be your opinion? That's what's happening to people all the time? And people are not putting two and two together, so they're using these other, you know, rationales for why they're sick?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I don't fully understand the question, but but but there is a problem with with medicine these days and with the medical system and with the medical business, you know, because it is.

• 10:23Jen Cohen?

  It's a business.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  It's a business.

• 10:24Jen Cohen?

  Well, wait, I'm gonna explain the question. My question is, a lot of times when people are sick or they're they have a mental health issue, depression, anxiety, they think, oh, it's because I'm working too much. Or, oh, no, it's because I have this. You know, this circumstantial, it's a circumstantial reason. But would you say that because of the way our we we live as a society with the with the processed food and the drugs and all the other things that it's a slowly, it's killing us mentally, physically, and we're not even conscious of that?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 10:57Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are creatures of this planet, like all other creatures of this planet, right? And if you look at all other creatures of of this planet, except the ones that we domesticated and and make live with us.

• 11:09Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  You look at that, you don't see creatures, animals in the wild and their natural environment with depression or or autoimmune diseases or diabetes. There's no monkeys with cancer, right? Maybe, but it's a rare thing, you know?

• 11:25Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  They live, they they reproduce, they eat, they they when they find food, they fast when they don't, and then then they die. Either an animal kills them and eats them, or they're old, or or or some accident of nature, right? But we are have taken ourselves and put ourselves in this this unnatural environment, right? That not only are loaded with chemicals in the air we breathe, the water we drink and shower with, the medications we consume, the cosmetics we use that are full of chemicals, the cleaning products that we use in our homes, the architecture of our homes, I don't know if you know, but a huge percentage of pollution in the world comes from architecture,

• 12:07Speaker 02

  from from the making of cement, of glues, of of paints. So we are surrounded ourselves with toxic chemicals, but that's not the only problem. We are also disconnected from our roots, from nature. And we live in this in in this world in which our mind has taken over. We're not present anymore and we are and we are and our mind is always imagining either future or past eh eh scenarios which make you either sad or or anxious or fearful or whatever it is. And it and and you're always on a flight or fight mode. All other animals are present. You see a deer. And and you know, they're just present. And if there's danger, they their ears go up and and they look and

• 12:53Speaker 02

  and the danger is just that moment, either they escape or or or, you know, the tiger kills it or not. But but after that, they go back to being present. We are as if a tiger is chasing us after us all day long. So so.

• 13:09Jen Cohen?

  The cortisol is so high in our body.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  The cortisol, I mean, the that is the consequences, that is the the, you know, the the digital print of the chemical consequences of of what's happening. But what's happening is really a disconnection from nature, a disconnection of mind, body and spirit.

• 13:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  And so I got really sick. I didn't want to take medications and I started looking for a different solution. My most problematic symptom at that time was my depression. I couldn't I couldn't get out of bed sometimes and I covered myself. I was I was on call. They they had, they were calling me, hey, are you coming or not coming? I had to force myself. It was it was really bad. So I I said, I decided not to take the medications and see if I can find something different. So I started going to therapists, psychologists, all kinds of things, until I found the concept and practices of meditation with because the the bigger, the biggest problem was that

• 14:09Speaker 02

  that I realized that my mind was always producing thoughts, thinking, thinking, thinking all day long. And I some people even pride themselves, I can think of two or three things at the same time. But that's not something that I was actually choosing to do. It was just happening to me. At one point, I was like, I think I'm going crazy. Why am I thinking of all these negative things? If I had the power to decide, I wouldn't be thinking about this. So who is thinking? Who is deciding these thoughts are in my in my head? I thought I was going nuts. I didn't know that everybody's having the same problem.

• 14:38Jen Cohen?

  Isn't that life, though, right? We always think we're the only ones.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, am I going crazy? I saw people in the in the in the in the subways in New York, speaking out loud to themselves. I said, the only difference between him and me is that he's doing it out loud. And he's a little bit, I'm a little bit better dressed, but that's it, you know. And you see them and you think, oh, my crazy people, you know, but we're all like this. So, so, so when I, when I found the, the concept of meditation, it said that constant thinking, which is mostly negative and repetitive, that goes on and on, that you would actually shut up if you could. This is what meditation can slow down and maybe even stop. And I said, wow, that's what I want.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So I ended up, and this is a long story, longer story, and one day maybe we talk about it, but I ended up in a monastery in India that I, my exchange was going there as the, as a doctor, as a cardiologist. And in exchange, I learned how to meditate and do yoga. And, and I was running this huge, huge ashram in, in, in Maharashtra in India. It's a place called Gurudev Sida, Sida Pith. And it's actually an ashram that has a life enlightened being as a guru. There's a real, a real thing.

• 15:55Jen Cohen?

  A real guru.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  A real guru. And what does that mean? A real enlightened being, a person that's fully present in, in connection, complete connection with nature all the time.

• 16:06Jen Cohen?

  Okay, when you say a real one versus a fake one, how can you tell the difference between a real enlightened being and a fake enlightened being?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Well, that's a whole different conversation, right? Because the truth is that you can only see and understand up to the level that you are at. Up to your level of presence, you can really see. But when somebody is even more present than, than you are, and this is also a trick, because you're comparing yourself with, but, but for the sake of this conversation, if somebody is, you don't really realize, they can appear either stupid to you, because a lot of enlightened beings are very simple. And, and you know,

• 16:46Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  There's nothing going on in their brain, they're fully present, right? It's not like,

• 16:51Jen Cohen?

  Is that like the Dalai Lama?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  The Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, like the Buddha, like, you know, there's, at, at any given point in the world, there are a number of enlightened beings. You know, I've, I've met a, I've met a few that I think are, I mean, I can't assure you, but you can feel there's something, I mean, you could definitely feel a presence. You can, you can see thousands of people follow them, you know?

• 17:13Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  So how do you tell between? A real enlightened being and non-real enlightened being, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a big, it's a big subject.

• 17:21Jen Cohen?

  Number one, they're not on Instagram.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Number one, well, some, some, some may be on Instagram. It's not, it's not about that, but it's the way they behave. They're, they, you know, it's, you, you watch and you see a consistency of, of, of a state. And the reason I believe that she's fully enlightened and, and has, because when you are fully present, you have powers, as it were, right? And now this woman, when I met her, she slapped me on the chest. It's a long story, but the moment she slapped me on the chest, she put me in a state that no drug or plant or, or had before or after even came close to.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  I tried ayahuasca, aubergine, mushrooms, I mean, you name it, what you might. I've tried everything. I've tried, I've tried ecstasies, I've tried, I, every, I, I didn't do it for fun. I, I, I always did it for, for looking.

• 18:21Jen Cohen?

  For searching.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Searching, you know, searching for something, right? For my peace, for my, but nothing. And even all combined had put me in the state that she put me when she slapped my chest. And I cannot even explain it to you and it would, it would even feel weird to you if I, if I tell you, because basically it was like as if there was no body. And, and my consciousness was everywhere. I could see everything. I could, I could, I could read people's mind, people's minds. It was, it was like very.

• 18:50Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Very powerful and, and it changed the course of my life because I realized that that state that she put me in for a few minutes is what actually we came here to earth to be. We came here to learn how to be, not how to learn, but to, to. Be in that state.

• 19:08Jen Cohen?

  Well, I have a question for you, totally side, it's like a side note, but how does one become so enlightened? Like this woman that you're talking about, who is this the most enlightened woman, a guru? How do you even start that process? Like, was she like, what is her background? Where she's even able to become that?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  She was a baby and her parents were devotees of another guru, Mukhtananda. And when she was a baby, they took her to him and he picked her up and he blessed her. And she grew up in the ashram, in the monastery.

• 19:41Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And he, Mukhtananda, kind of trained her. And, you know, she meditated all her life and she, I don't think she ever had alcohol or joint or anything.

• 19:54Jen Cohen?

  She was kind of like, she was kind of like brought up in an environment where that can happen.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:58Jen Cohen?

  What's your opinion? Do you think somebody who comes from our, from like, you know, from Canada, the US, like living our kind of normal societal world now? Do you think they can become enlightened like that? Or that's just virtually impossible? Just on, based on life experience and what like, what they, they're exposed to? Do you think that's even possible?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I think it's possible. I think everything is possible. I think, I think it can happen actually by the grace of God, you know?

• 20:24Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  It just can happen.

• 20:26Jen Cohen?

  Okay. You're not jaded? You don't think it might be?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  That's how some saints, when you read about it in the Bible, they just suddenly became enlightened. So, so there's all possibilities, but the, when I read the scriptures, when I was in the ashram, I used to read all the scriptures. It's hard work, you know, it's, the monks do it and monasteries. That's, that's how, how it's easier. I mean, in L.A., running up and down, going to the gym and having a business. It's gonna be harder, right?

• 20:57Jen Cohen?

  Harder? I think it's virtually impossible.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  The thing is that, first of all, people don't even look for that.

• 21:03Jen Cohen?

  Right. Well, you're too busy. Your brain has probably too much noise in it.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But it's possible.

• 21:08Jen Cohen?

  Like, you need to quiet your brain. But wait, so how long were you at the ashram with this?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  So I was, I was there for a little over a year.

• 21:15Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Year and a half or something.

• 21:17Jen Cohen?

  So what was your day like there? Like, give me the day in the life of what happened.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  So, this is a big ashram.

• 21:22Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  And there was about 2,000 people at any given time. Indians and people that came from all over the world.

• 21:28Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  And.

• 21:29Jen Cohen?

  Is it a famous ashram like?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  It's kind of famous, you know, when the first day that I went there, there were so many famous people, you know? I mean, I don't know if I can name names.

• 21:40Jen Cohen?

  Of course you can.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  McRyan was there, Donna Karen was there. There were, I mean, there was the, anyway, there was a lot of, of famous, and there was a lot of non-famous people.

• 21:49Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  And there was, there was even poor people, you know, that, that, that saved for a year to go there for three days, you know?

• 21:56Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna say, so like, are people going there to find themselves and search for themselves?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Jen Cohen?

  And so these famous people who are going, are they going because they're also in search for themselves? How much does it cost to go to this ashram? That's what I want to know.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Well.

• 22:08Jen Cohen?

  I want the details.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know you want the details, but, but, but, um, that's gonna take us a, a.

• 22:12Jen Cohen?

  It doesn't matter. We can do both. I want to know how much it costs. If I were like, you know, I want to go and, and find myself at this ashram. I want to go for what, a week? How long, how much would it cost me?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  It doesn't cost anything to go there.

• 22:23Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Um, if you take a course, then, like, for example, wh- what happened to me is I took a course called the, the initiation course. And there was like four hundred people there, and I think it was four hundred dollars or something like that.

• 22:35Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And during that course, right, I was looking around. We were in a big hall and there were a lot of people and some people, oh, I'm having this, you know, you know, when you see on TV.

• 22:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  The Christian, the, the, the, ah, people fall.

• 22:49Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, they're like freaking out.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, there, there were people that, you know, and nothing was happening to me. I was like, maybe I wasted the phone. My mind was, and then by the end of the, of, and then you meditated and then the guru comes and they, you sing with, with her. And then a monk comes and gi- you know, gives a talk and then somebody get, came in and gave a talk of their experience. And when he was talking, something really weird happened. It was as if everything started like getting dark and only, only his face was in my, in my view. And then we're getting closer and closer and then we swapped.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  And I was sitting in the middle of like four hundred people, but my experience at that time was looking through his eyes. And I was seeing this body of mine, I was seeing sitting there in the, in the crowd. And it was weird, right? And. As if I switched places with him. That was the experience that I was having.

• 23:48Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  It was weird. And so suddenly he finished talking and everybody started clapping. And I came back to my body and I thought, and I started sweating and I was so nervous. And so I stood up immediately and left. And when I was going out, people were stopping me. They say, hey, great speech. I was, no, no, it's not me. And so I left and I went to the cafeteria before everybody left the hall. And I'm sitting there sweating and there was this girl who's a famous makeup artist now. Her name is Prema Dubrof. I don't know if you know her.

• 24:21Jen Cohen?

  No.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Patty Dubrof. And she actually lived in the ashram at the time and she was assigned to me as my buddy. Because when you go there, it's not the usual thing, how it operates, right?

• 24:34Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  So they tell you, hey, if you have any questions.

• 24:37Jen Cohen?

  Go ask this person.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:39Jen Cohen?

  Like a buddy.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:40Jen Cohen?

  A buddy system.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a buddy system. So she was passing by and she saw me and she says, what happened to you? So I told her this story. I think, I don't know, did somebody put something in my drink or something? I mean, this was strange. And she says, no, no, this is good, this is good. She's like, I actually think that you should come to the next intensive. And I said, you know, hold on, let me. No, no, no, come, come, come. She grabs me and she takes me down this hall. And we were walking to go to the office. She was gonna ask when the next intensive was, right? But then is when this guru, Gurumay, comes walking alone, which I didn't know at the time. But now I know it's a very unusual thing that she's always followed by like hundreds of people, you know? Everybody wants to be close to her.

• 25:26Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  She was walking alone and she meets us in the corridor and she's like, hi, Prema. Hi, Gurumay, how are you? And she says, who is your friend? And she's like, oh, my friend's Alejandro, he's a doctor. And she looks at me and says, what kind of? And already I was feeling that at the beginning it was like intimidated because she's like this presence, you know? But also very simple and very kind and, you know? It's difficult to, but you could feel, I felt that she knew everything about me. And she says, well, what's your name, Alejandro? And what kind of doctor are you? I said, a cardiologist. Oh, the heart. And she smacks me in the heart. And she, and she starts laughing and she leaves.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  In that moment, I started losing sensation on my feet, my legs, then my torso, then, then, then

• 26:15Speaker 02

  and it exploded and it was like I was everywhere, I was everywhere, I was everything. I had what is called the experience of cosmic consciousness. So I had that experience that you read in books. And I remember everything was slow motion and people were, people were walking and I could, I, I knew what they were thinking. I'm because I, I was them, you know? It, it wasn't like the experience I'm having now, a normal experience. I'm inside my body, sitting in your house, in your podcast, looking through my eyes, talking in the microphone.

• 26:47Jen Cohen?

  But that wasn't what it was going on.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  That wasn't it. I was everywhere, I was everything, you know?

• 26:53Jen Cohen?

  That's so crazy. How long did that last?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  So it suddenly I feel my hand is, is being, you know, tugged on.

• 26:59Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  And it was prema and, and she said, are you okay? Because I was crying, you know, like tears and it were tears of joy. I mean, I never felt such peace and such the state that I was put in or that.

• 27:12Jen Cohen?

  So this place did a lot of good for you.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Well, it changed my life, you know, I, I, I went to the United States from Uruguay, determined to be a cardiologist. I was gonna invent a way of opening the arteries and, you know, I thought I was gonna dedicate my life to that. And I didn't care about that anymore after that experience. I only wanted to be able to be in that state all the time.

• 27:36Jen Cohen?

  All the time.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  I said, this is the possibility that we have. And I understood that this is what we came here for. This is what we were looking for. Of course, when I came back to my, you know, she's like, are you okay?

• 27:47Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And I come back, I'm looking at her, yeah, I'm, I'm okay. And then for, for about two weeks, I would go in and out, in and out of that state. I was living in New York at the time and suddenly I would go, you know, fall into that state. And when I came back, I was taking my, I had a really beautiful leather jacket with, with a, with a sheepskin inside.

• 28:09Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I was giving it away to a homeless guy and, you know, it was like, it was weird. If somebody would have caught me at that time and spoke to me at that time, they would have put me in a mental institution and would have medicated me.

• 28:21Jen Cohen?

  Wow. But what are you thinking? So I thought.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Abraham Maslow, which is a very famous.

• 28:26Jen Cohen?

  What's his name?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Abraham Maslow. He writes about.

• 28:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I know who that is.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  He writes about this, this awakening or.

• 28:32Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Or spiritual experience that seems a lot like mental disease, like, like you're completely mentally gone. And that's, that's what happened to me. And then slowly with time, about two weeks, I just never went into that state again like that.

• 28:48Jen Cohen?

  But weren't you in that state when you were doing the exchange with them back when you were at the ashram?

• 28:54Speaker 02

  So I, that state, I went in and out.

• 28:57Jen Cohen?

  You said for two weeks?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  For two weeks, I was in and out. In, in that state, little time.

• 29:02Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right. But I thought you were staying, weren't you staying at the ashram?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  No, no, I was living in the city and I was driving to the Catskills where these ashram is.

• 29:09Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. So I wasn't understanding. I thought the ashram was in India.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  No, no, this ashram is in New York.

• 29:14Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. I didn't, I didn't know they had an ashram.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  They had, they have ashrams all over the world. There's one in L A too.

• 29:20Jen Cohen?

  Oh, there is?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:21Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. Now this is making more sense to me.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:24Jen Cohen?

  So then when you found meditation and it kind of helped change the way your brain works, basically, and it calms you down.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Well, it changed everything because after that, I ended up going to India as a cardiologist to be the, they put me, when I, when I arrived there, they put me as the director of their clinic. But there's, there was a lot of, of, of other doctors. There were Ayurvedic doctors, there were Chinese medicine doctors, there were chiropractors, hands-on healers, Reiki masters.

• 29:57Jen Cohen?

  All sorts of.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Whoever came to the ashram, whatever skill they had, they put him to work on that.

• 30:03Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  So there were people that were engineers that were working on the lighting system and the water filtration system, you know? It's a community. Everybody's doing something.

• 30:13Jen Cohen?

  It's like a kibbutz, it sounds like.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Sounds like, it's like a kibbutz.

• 30:15Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, it sounds like a kibbutz.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  But, but it's a different kibbutz because in kibbutz, you're, you're just working.

• 30:20Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Here you're working.

• 30:22Jen Cohen?

  On yourself.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So there's made this lots of time for meditation. But I was the medical director of the of their clinic. So what we used to do is we used to put a patient that came in a circle. Right. And we all we were all there. So the Ayurvedic medicine doctor asked some questions. I asked some questions. The Chinese medicine doctor asked some questions. So everybody asking questions. By the end, if you have to examine, we examine. And by the end, we all give our opinion. And at the beginning, I was like, you know, like a woman came with hives all over her body. I wanted to give and he was actually starting to wheeze. So she was having a severe histamine or allergic reaction. I wanted to give her antihistamines or even prednisone. But the the Ayurvedic medicine doctor said, because it was mango season.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And there was there's like three hundred types of mango in the in the in the, you know, it's a big ashram, lots of trees, you know. So we were eating mango all day long and mango juice and mango dessert, you know. So I I are you eating mango? I love mango, said the woman. Okay. And are you eating this? But yeah. So basically, the the Ayurvedic medicine doctor said, she's a pita constitution. And we have to stop all her fiery, pita is fire, we have to stop all the fiery foods. So she stopped all the all the the spices, the, you know, and and the mango. And and she said, she doesn't need any any medication if she does that. And within two days, I mean, the the the first day she left and I was checking on her because I thought she's gonna need

• 31:52Speaker 02

  an antihistamine or or prednisone. But with the dietary changes and a few other in- instructions, there were some oils that she gave her. In two days, she was completely fine. So I was blown away. And that happened to me with all the the practitioners there, right? The Reiki master, the meditation master. Wow. You know, the we sometimes I had to take over and said, nah. There was, I remember there was a monk that came. He was having chest pain and the electric doctor said, ah, we have to take all the foods. He's a, he's a vata. I said, nah, this guy has to go to the hospital right now because he's, he's, he's artery. He, he, he's having an unstable angina, which, which means that there's a blood clot that's forming and unforming.

• 32:33Jen Cohen?

  And See, this is where it becomes dangerous, this whole thing, right? Because when do you listen to you and when do you listen to your Ayurveda, you know, your Ayurvedic doctor? Or your who, Chinese medicine doctor? This is where the rubber meets the road, in my opinion.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yes. So, so that, and that patient, I, everybody had an opinion. I said, we have to drink this herb. I said, no, we need a car right now. And I am actually gonna go in the car with him to Bombay, into a hospital to get a

• 33:00Jen Cohen?

  And it was, it was the right decision.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  It was the right decision because he got a cardiac catheterization. There was a blood clot. There was a severe lesion. They put a stent in, in him and immediately he felt, he felt better and it saved his myocardium. Otherwise he would have had a, a bigger heart attack.

• 33:16Jen Cohen?

  Okay, well, this is my point. So how, if you weren't there, let's say, for example, like I have a lot of friends of mine. A friend of mine right now has been sick for like two weeks. Okay, came back from a very crazy, uh, trip. And, you know, I'm convinced he has a major infection, but he refuses to take antibiotics. Right? Cause he's, he's on the opposite end of the, of the spectrum, right? Like there's people who swing, you know, it's probably somewhere in the middle would be nice, but some people are very extreme. And he won't take anything.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  This is, this is a huge problem today.

• 33:45Jen Cohen?

  This is the problem.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  People take sides.

• 33:47Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  And just like in politics, just like in sports, just like they take sides. So there's people that would never see a, an M D.

• 33:55Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  With a gun to their head. And there's people that wouldn't, would, would never go to a, you know,

• 34:02Jen Cohen?

  A naturopath.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Homeopath or whatever.

• 34:03Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  That's, you know, that's bullshit. The truth is that everything is useful.

• 34:08Jen Cohen?

  Everything.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Everything has its place.

• 34:11Jen Cohen?

  But when do you know when to do what?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  The big distinction in, in my understanding is this. When there's an acute problem, Western medicine has incredible solutions, incredible tools.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  For example, if you break a bone or you have, you're having a heart attack, or even if you're having a stroke, something acute, you go to the hospital, you get a cardiac catheterization, you put a stent on, you go to a good traumatologist, orthopedist, who can, I mean, I had a car accident, I had my leg reconstructed, pins and metals and things, you know?

• 34:46Jen Cohen?

  I remember.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And I can use it now. So, so, western medicine is, modern western medicine is incredible for acute problems. For chronic problems, not so much. So they want to use the same tools and solutions for chronic problems than for acute problems. So what do they do? They cut you and they give you medications, surgery medications, and it doesn't work, right? The thing is that of the problems that human beings are suffering from, and I don't know this to be a hundred percent accurate, but just to give you an idea, ten percent are acute problems. Ninety percent of people are suffering, or ninety percent of suffering is caused by chronic problems. And for chronic problems, then you have a lot of things.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  And you, and you, it's an art to combine, right?

• 35:34Jen Cohen?

  It's an art.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  It's an art to combine. And what that experience gave me, it gave me a taste of the palette of healing modalities that exist. I mean, there wasn't every healing modality practitioner in the world, but, you know, there were a lot. There were Chinese medicine doctors, Ayurvedic medicine doctors, chiropractors, and other things that I hadn't even heard of.

• 35:54Jen Cohen?

  Right, but what I'm even going back to when you were telling me when you first moved to the States and they gave you a seven medications for your depression, for your antihist, for your, for your allergies, and for something else, oh yeah, for your IBS, whatever. Like, were there some of those meds that you could have done naturally that would have been okay? When do you, like, you know what I mean? People only know what they know and only have access to what they have access to.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Yes. So, it's changing now, you know, with the, with the, with the advances and the, and the growing of functional medicine, which I know you're familiar with, functional medicine is a new way of thinking about the body, right? Who was created or invented or?

• 36:36Jen Cohen?

  You're thinking as basically the way I see functional medicine is like you're working with the body as a whole, like holistically.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  And an easy way to tell somebody what functional medicine is, I say, it's as if you grab a modern medicine doctor, but you teach him how to think like a an Ayurvedic medicine doctor or a Chinese medicine doctor. So, so what does that mean? That means that modern medicine divides and conquers, meaning there's specializations. They divide the body in organs. You have an eye problem, you go to the eye doctor, ophthalmologist. You have a brain problem, you go to the neurologist. You have a heart problem, you go to the heart doctor, cardiologist. You have a liver problem, you go to the hepatologist. You have a gut problem, you go to the gastroenterologist.

• 37:22Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  It's divided by organs. But functional medicine tells you, like Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and many other ancient modalities.

• 37:31Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  That the body is not really a set of divided organs. Actually, it's a set of systems. So in functional medicine, we think in systems. And there are seven systems, right? And each system has many organs participating in it. And different organs participate in different systems. For example, the intestines, right?

• 37:53Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  They, they are part of the digesting and absorbing system. They are also part of the immune repair and defense system. They're also part of the nervous system. The intestines participate in most systems or all systems of the body, right? And that's where, that's where they, all systems kind of meet, physically meet in the, in the intestines. So that is the big difference between functional medicine and Western modern medicine.

• 38:25Jen Cohen?

  So, okay.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  So if you, if I'm having a chronic disease, if I'm having a chronic problem and I don't, I don't know, I'd rather have both opinions. I would go to a functional medicine doctor and be thought of holistically.

• 38:38Jen Cohen?

  But what hap, I think what's hap, I think a lot of times, because that we just, you know, we just kind of touched upon this at the beginning, but like the medical system, the health system is so screwed up right now. And there's so much money in big pharma and the food system is all screwed up. That like, there's no trust anymore. That's the first thing. People are going to doctors, look what's happening. They're writing a, a, a prescription because they want to say, they want to like cover their ass. They don't want to get sued. Versus like looking at the body as a whole. So people are, people are getting missed. A lot of things are like that are, they're, that are making them sick.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  This goes.

• 39:12Jen Cohen?

  Is being missed.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  This goes back to, to when we started talking about our separation from nature and, and.

• 39:18Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  And so, so when you, when you look at ancient civilizations or, or cultures, you see that the people that were in charge of healing.

• 39:28Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  The, you know, what we would call the doctors now, were not just the doctors. They were also like spiritual healers and, and sometimes the priest and the doctor was the same person, you know, is the healers in the, in the, you know, in the Amazon tribes. It's a, it's a different thing. Medicine today in our culture, in our modern culture, became completely prostituted and, and, and degenerated and distorted by, by interests, right? So you go there, they have five minutes to see you. They're going to write you a prescription. Next.

• 40:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  That's it. Insurance pays, not pay. It's, it's, it's a.

• 40:08Jen Cohen?

  But then also, let me just interject, okay? Because then if you go see a doctor that's not covered, that will have maybe more than five minutes to see you, they are all a fortune. Doctors have now made it impossible for the average person to come see you. Any good doctor worth their salt are now concierge doctors and they are private doctors with a huge price tag. Do you know how many people are being, are, are staying sick? Because they can't afford to see a functional medicine doctor. And by the way, just like to talk about the functional, like that's just M Ds. Okay. Functional medicine doctors are a living fortune. I mean, I go into a doctor's office of a functional doctor. They want to give me seventy seven tests.

• 40:53Jen Cohen?

  Each test is five hundred bucks. By the time I'm walking out of there, it's thousands and thousands of dollars. And I'm not even at the root of the problem. So if I'm who I and I make a nice living. So if I can't afford it sometimes, or I'm like, shit, that's expensive. Like, I don't want to spend that money. I've got all these other expenses. How could people who are making really like just a very fair, like a small amount of money? Do it. They can't. They're making it so you people who are not multi gazillionaires can't afford to be seen or can't afford to be healthy.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  But listen, that's what's happening with modern civilization.

• 41:32Jen Cohen?

  It's terrible.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  It's degenerating not only in the in the in the healthcare aspect, in many, in many aspects. Right? So that's that's we're living now the consequences.

• 41:41Jen Cohen?

  That's a big one. I mean, I think that I don't. I can't think of any other situation where that anything's more expensive. Because if you don't have your health, you have absolutely nothing. So like, who cares? Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  You can have, you can have ten thousand problems until you have a health problem. Then you only have one problem.

• 41:58Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:59Jen Cohen?

  Right? Like, no other problem, like every other problem goes away once you have your health compromised. So that to me, that's why I always say health is wealth. Because without that, you're not, you have nothing. And so how do we like, unless people listen to podcasts and get these like bite sized pieces of information from trusted sources? That's why I'm always saying trusted sources. Because everybody, it's become a cash grab. People are saying whatever they need to say because they're being paid by sponsors, by company, you know, by whoever to push their products, their brands, their services, their telemedicine issues. Like, this is what's happening.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Listen, I I am talking about these things and I and I agree with you and I and and you know, I won't even further to tell you what I think about. I am also here to talk about some some of the of the products that I that I that I so it affect, it it ends up affecting everybody.

• 42:54Jen Cohen?

  It does, but the I'll tell you the difference, okay? I'll tell you the difference. Everyone needs to make a living, but you need to know you're that you're talking to someone who has integrity. And that's the problem. People don't know who have integrity because what hap- a lot of people who are great talkers, who they're great talkers, they're great salespeople, but they don't have the wherewithal to even give you advice on your health or your longevity. The people who are actually sometimes not the best, you know, representatives of themselves or the best orators or the best media spokespeople are typically the ones that I see who are actually the most knowledgeable, have the most integrity, who I like to get my information from.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  By the way.

• 43:35Jen Cohen?

  By the way, you're one of them.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  This helped me really focus.

• 43:39Jen Cohen?

  It did? Good. Well, this is a good example, right? Because like, yeah, like, everybody needs to make money and have brands and sponsors who help them, right? But you have to be discerning who you work with, who your products are, who you're listening to. Like, you're saying yourself, like, you're like, well, I have my clean program.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:57Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, but like, I vetted you. I know you. I I like you.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  I tell you, I tell you one way in which I I myself distinguish between

• 44:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  who is just doing it for business and who, you know, and maybe this is not humble of me to say, right? But my company and my program is a result of my own problems, a solution searched for. I was searching for a solution for my own problems. When I found the solution, which I was I was coming into, I spent the time in India, you know, with

• 44:29Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right. We got sidetracked.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, with all the meditation and the and the and the vegetarian food and, you know, all these. So my symptoms got a little better, right? Then, but when my when I finished my time in India, I had to come back and and go work. So I started working in a hospital again. And again, seven minutes per patient, eating in a hospital. To the cafeteria, running, being on call. Again, my symptoms doubled, doubled down. I was more depressed and more allergic and until one day, some guy that I knew, I had seen ten days before, knocks on my door. He was from LA, a producer, always very edgy and red in the face from alcohol and coffee and, you know? And when I opened the door, he came to visit me and I was like, oh my God, what happened to you?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  He was like ten kilos less. His skin looked amazing. His eyes were white. And he didn't have the redness from the, you know, that characterized him. I said, what happened to you? Did you get plastic surgery? And he said, no, no, no. I come from a detox center. I said, detox? I didn't know that you were on drugs. He said, no, no, no, no, that kind of detox. He said, come, come, I'll show you. And he took me to ten minutes away in, across the highway.

• 45:44Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  To this place called the We Care Spa, where there's a detox center, they, you know, you go there, you juice all the time and you have colonics and you have massages and this and that. And I was blown away when the results came. Come, come. I go there. And it turns out that the owner is an Argentinian woman. I'm from Uruguay. We get it off immediately. She started telling me. I told her about my, my, my issues. She said, why don't you try the program here? I did and my, my depression lifted and gone away. My allergies disappeared. My retinoball syndrome disappeared. And I was like, oh my God, this is, this is kind of magic. I didn't know, I couldn't explain in my medical mind what had happened to me until I found functional medicine.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  And when I found functional medicine and I learned about the detoxification system and the other systems of the body and, and how the gut breaks and how to repair. That's when I said, oh my God, of course, this is what, this is how doing that, that program completely resolved all my issues. So I started studying. And eventually I quit the work in the hospital and I, and I went on my own, on my own path.

• 46:52Jen Cohen?

  So did you use her program, the We Care program?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:56Jen Cohen?

  To base your clean program on?

• 46:59Speaker 02

  No, no, there are similarities, right? But, but no. After learning functional medicine and really understanding and, and having more and more and more experience, I came to, to, to my own conclusions and, and, and put together. From different sources and I put together my own.

• 47:18Jen Cohen?

  Well, how long has the program been around, the Clean Program?

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Clean Program's been around for, since two thousand, I mean, as the Clean Program.

• 47:25Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, as a Clean Program.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  It's been around since two thousand and eight.

• 47:29Jen Cohen?

  Right, it's been a long while. And where is her program, the We Care? Is that even around?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  That's a spot in Desert Hot Springs, yeah.

• 47:36Jen Cohen?

  I've never, I've never even heard of it.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  It's very famous, all the models go there, all the actresses.

• 47:40Jen Cohen?

  It's called We Care?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So then I, you know, when I learned that, and at the time, I was working in Palm Springs, the heart surgeon in the hospital that I was working, Desert Regional Medical Center, was Dr. Gundry. And he was, he was like the top surgeon in the world and, you know, he invented a way of stopping the heart, which was new, with retroverse cardioplegia, with cold, I mean, the guy is like a genius, right? And, and they had hired, we called him the bionic surgeon because they, he was in La Malinda and they paid six million dollars to transfer him to Desert Hot Springs, they wanted to create, to Palm Springs, they want to create a, like a Mayo Clinic in Palm Springs, and they wanted the top cardiac surgeon, they brought him over.

• 48:21Jen Cohen?

  Dr. Gundry?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dr. Gundry.

• 48:23Jen Cohen?

  Where does he live now? Is he there now?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  No, no, I think he lives in Santa Barbara now. He quit, he quit. But what happened was, he was there and I started talking to him and telling him, and he was like a little bit skeptic, and then his wife had a problem. So I helped his wife with this allergy problem, and he said, oh my god. So he started paying attention. Eventually, he quit working as a, as a, as a heart surgeon, now he's doing functional medicine.

• 48:49Jen Cohen?

  No way, he's doing functional medicine now?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  He wrote a book, you know, about, about the gut, recently.

• 48:55Jen Cohen?

  No, I know, well, I know that Dr. Gundry though seems to be like, he's very business savvy, like, he's like doing all sorts of stuff. He's got like a supplement line.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  I think he's like a super genius kind of guy. He's a, you know, he's a, he's an interesting guy. I, I like him a lot. We went to India together.

• 49:12Jen Cohen?

  I remember that you guys had like a relation, I remember years ago you told me you guys were tight.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  We were very good friends.

• 49:18Jen Cohen?

  I remember, you were really tight. And so like he, cause he now, well, he's on his podcast, his books, but all I always remember. Remember about Dr. Gundry, you know how like people always like remember one thing about something or something that sticks in your head? He says it to, I should never eat tomatoes. Tomatoes are terrible because it has a quality that is very.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Lectins.

• 49:37Jen Cohen?

  Lectin.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  He talks a lot about lectins. He wrote a book called The Plant Paradox.

• 49:41Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Dr. Gundry and I don't agree in a few things.

• 49:46Jen Cohen?

  Is that one of them?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  That's one of them, you know.

• 49:48Jen Cohen?

  What's this whole thing? Why does he hate lectin so much?

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Well, because as a molecule in itself. It's a molecule, it's a, these are molecules that are thought to be a defense mechanism of the plants because plants cannot run and escape from the predators. So, so they manufacture these chemicals that deter, that make the animals that eat them feel bad. Either itchy or allergic or something, right? Or a stomach ache. And some of these chemicals are these lectins. So, so, but I think that focusing on that is a mistake. Because there's also something called hormesis, which is the good stresses in life, right? So some of these lectins are actually cause some stress in the body.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  But the, the adaptation mechanisms that the body trigger and turn on to deal with that are actually reinforcing you.

• 50:40Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:41Jen Cohen?

  Because if someone like me who is highly allergic, I got like, I break out in hives just by looking at certain plants and, and, you know, in a tropical environment, you don't want to see me.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:51Jen Cohen?

  Do I stay away from stuff like that?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  So now, now this is a great way to jump into the, into the, really the meat of what I came to talk to you about.

• 51:00Jen Cohen?

  Okay, I can talk to you about that.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Which is this? I told you 10% of problems approximately, ballpark in my head, that people suffer from are acute. 90% are chronic problems. Now, chronic problems, 99%, if not 100% of chronic problems are directly related to gut, to the gut. And this is why the gut became such a fashionable thing and everybody's talking about the gut now and the microbiome and the, and it, right? Well, thank God, we're putting our attention there because this is true and this is my understanding. In my experience, in my practice around the world, I see people all over the world. I don't have an office. Most people I treat, I treat for free. These people, my ex-wife's cleaner in the UK.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  When I went there and I saw her, and I can send you some videos to edit on the podcast. She had severe eczema. She's such a nice and hardworking girl. And I saw her hands, they were cracked and bleeding, right? And I couldn't help myself. So I went to talk to her. And I said, I think I can help you with this. And she said, okay. So I put her on a gut repair program. And you should see what happened. I mean, it changed her life. And this is a problem she had for years. And then she went to all the doctors that she could in the UK. I mean, she doesn't have access to, you know, a lot, but she, but you know, there is a good health system there. Nobody could help her. They put her on what they call biologicals, you know,

• 52:28Speaker 02

  which are basically, basically immune depressors. Because what happens is many of these, these problems are autoimmune. And your immune system can go haywire and gives you what we see as a disease, right? We understand that this is, but, but the thing is that nature is incredibly intelligent. And we are not born with any information or pre-information or programming to get sick. In fact, the body doesn't know how to get sick. What we see as diseases are adaptation and survival mechanisms that have been turned on for too long. And then they become a problem. That's when we detect them as a disease, right?

• 53:13Speaker 02

  But, but it's not really a disease. And I explain to you with something from my own specialty, cardiology, right? Which is, happens to be the number one killer of people in the world. Heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, right? Coronary artery disease. So what's, what's happening? So this animal, the human being, is now running in like a fish out of water, stressed out of, like high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic inflammation. So the artery starts getting fissures, starts getting

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Little injuries, right? And the body intelligently deposits a little bit of cholesterol. Just like a scab forms when you cut yourself. The scab forms and under the scab, the skin heals. And then when the skin heals, the scab falls and it's healed, right? The same thing would happen in the artery. The plaque of cholesterol would go there. It would heal and then the cholesterol would be reabsorbed. If the injury was just a short term injury. But the injury is there every day. So the cholesterol is deposited every day. Now, eventually, the cholesterol deposits so much that it narrows the passage of blood through the artery. Or it breaks, it bleeds, a clot is formed and you have a heart attack.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  But it's not a disease. It's an adaptation, a survival mechanism. The problem is that we keep on, the injury is permanent.

• 54:38Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  In nature, injury is momentary. You know, they say.

• 54:42Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying. How do you change it?

• 54:44Speaker 02

  The gazelle that's being run by a tiger. You know, the cortisol goes up, adrenaline goes up. You know, blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. There's gonna be micro fissures. But then when they escape the tiger, they go back to being present and eating what nature designed them to eat. And so plaque of cholesterol would deposit, it would heal. And then it would be reabsorbed, right? But no.

• 55:07Jen Cohen?

  Right, I get it. So what do we do to prevent? So your whole thing.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  So what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is that ninety nine percent, if not a hundred percent of chronic diseases are either directly initiated by gut injury or related to gut injury.

• 55:19Jen Cohen?

  So what do we do?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  So what we do is we need to, first of all, when people come to me, the first thing I do when a chronic problem comes to me is I put them on a gut repair program. Even before I get the blood tests.

• 55:32Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  If I send blood tests or whatever tests are needed. So I only send tests when they're really needed. If, or in my opinion, before the blood tests come, many times, already with a gut repair program, by the time the blood results are there and you have the second appointment, the problem is already even much better, completely gone in two or three weeks.

• 55:52Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:53Jen Cohen?

  So before you even do blood work, you work on the gut?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes I do blood work anyways.

• 55:59Jen Cohen?

  Okay, but what you're saying is-

• 56:00Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things to consider, but gut repair is- That's where the Achilles heel of human health exists. And I'm going to explain it to you.

• 56:08Jen Cohen?

  Oh, sorry, this is yours.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I brought a model of a part of the intestine. This is the intestinal wall. And these are the microvilli, right?

• 56:20Jen Cohen?

  By the way, for those of you who are just listening and they're not watching this, Dr. Unger brought a-

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Model, an anatomical model.

• 56:28Jen Cohen?

  And he's showing me with his pointer how and what happens in your gut. Okay, go ahead.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  So the gut, the gut is a tube, right? And the tube has a surface, right? And this surface in the gut is increased by foldings, which are called villi and microvilli. So why does the body, or why did the body evolve to do that? What we think is that it's to increase the contact surface of the intestines, because there's a lot happening there that needs to happen, right? Digestion and absorption, right? So, and life depends on it in nature. Sustenance and food is very important. So the gut is, in all animals, is a really important organ and system, right?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  So what happens is, this surface, if we now get an intestine and iron it out, and we flatten out all this villi and microvilli, the surface of your intestine would be between one and two tennis courts of size. One and a half, I mean, you're little, so probably one and a quarter.

• 57:38Jen Cohen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  I'm a little bigger, so one and a half. Some people have two tennis courts. Surface of an intestinal wall.

• 57:45Jen Cohen?

  So my intestinal wall, everyone's intestinal wall is about two tennis courts.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Between one and two tennis courts, depending on your size and, you know, and age and sex and-

• 57:55Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, and this is what happens. Each- The microvilli has a blood supply system and a nerve and muscle system. This yellow here is the nerves, this artery and vein, and this is the wall. So this is inside the body and here would be outside the body. Here's where the food would come, right? This is obviously a tube, right? And this is just a little part of the wall. So here is where the food comes. This is where the bacteria would live, right? And once it passes, see, there's a one layer of cells here. This one layer of cell is like a brick wall.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Each cell is like a brick and it's stuck to the next cell, the cell right next to it, by cement. This is called the tight junction. Now, why did the body design this wall so hermetic? It's because it doesn't want undigested food or even digested food to go directly into the blood. The cells are intelligently selecting the small broken down. Digestion breaks down proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates into simple sugars and fats into fatty acids. So those little components are the ones that these cells select, absorb,

• 59:19Speaker 02

  meaning they go through the cell, the nutrients, and they're dumped into the blood, right? But if the cells are, the cement between the cells is broken down and there's a gap between the cells, this is what's called the leaky gut.

• 59:37Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  So what happens is everything that's happening outside the body, meaning inside the digestive tube, it's outside the body. Now, now many, many things are just seeping in without the intelligent selection of the body. The body selects only the building blocks, amino acids, fatty acids, simple sugars. But when, but when these gaps are broken and the gut is leaky or hyperpermeable, undigested food starts, no, peptides or proteins start passing.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Through and here in the in the gut is where most we're most exposed to you know, external stuff because you know, your skin touches your clothes and and and the air. And if you're in the swimming pool, the water, right? Your lungs is only what that's that's all the limits between the outside of the body and the inside of your skin, your eyes, your lungs and your intestines. What what's what's happening in your intestines? You're dumping thousands of of kilos in your lifetime of of stuff there that the body has to deal with. So the the body is exposed to external stuff in the gut more than anywhere else.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  So that's why the body deposited or sent all its troops, like seventy, eighty percent of our immune system is in the gut. See see these cells here?

• 1:01:00Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is this is one cell is showing you one cell from the immune system. So there was the immune system is in this in the gut wall, but it's also in the blood.

• 1:01:10Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so let's go into like, so is leaky gut the main reason why people have gut issues?

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Leaky gut and changes in the microbiome are are the gut problems, the gut the gut disease, I mean, the gut injuries or the gut problems that trigger most diseases. And I'm going to explain to you, for example, autoimmune disease, right? What what's happening is the immune system works by recognizing surfaces. It's called the HLA system, human lymphocytic antigen system, right? Antigens are surfaces that your body, each each immune system cells is like a computer and it has like a like a scanner. And it scans surfaces all the time, all day long, and then it compares it with its record.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  And if there's a certain and genetically, you have all the surfaces that are acceptable to you, like your proteins and your muscle.

• 1:02:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  That's that you have them, you have like a code, right? So the the the the immune system scans the surface of what it sees. And if it doesn't recognize it, it attacks. So what happens is When you absorb amino acids into the blood, it doesn't have a surface. Amino acids is a building.

• 1:02:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  But a protein already has a surface. So we have many amino acids together.

• 1:02:31Jen Cohen?

  Okay, you're losing me. So let me ask you a question because too much information.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  All right. So, so, so, so the, the, the immune system starts scanning surfaces. And because this is broken, the gut is leaky.

• 1:02:42Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  It's hyperpermeable. Now the blood is getting undigested food and bacteria and viruses and.

• 1:02:48Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  So it starts reacting.

• 1:02:50Jen Cohen?

  I understand. Well, kind of, but I do understand. The question I'm having is in simple terms, right? Because people who are listening are like, okay, Dr. Unger, tell me how to repair my gut. Give it to me simply, easy, digestible, excuse the pun, how we can repair our gut.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  So see, this is what, this is the problem with the medical world that.

• 1:03:13Jen Cohen?

  I know, it's not simple.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  And even the, in, in even the functional medicine world and every, and, and, and every, every healing.

• 1:03:21Jen Cohen?

  I know.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Modality world that you want to talk about. There is no simple digestive.

• 1:03:26Jen Cohen?

  There's no simple.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  People, here you want the, yeah, boom, boom.

• 1:03:29Jen Cohen?

  Well, no, what I want, you're right.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Give me, give me, give me the, you know, so, so what happened is this. Everybody's talking about gut repair, health and gut injury and gut repair and leaky gut and da, da, da. And everybody wants simple information. So you, so you hear, oh, Akarmancia mucinus, mucinophilus. Oh, and they, they start taking Akarmancia and you say, oh, there's this new probiotic and this, oh, glutamine. So they start taking glutamine. Oh, you have to avoid a, a, a gluten. So they avoid gluten. And there is no integration of, you know, because, because the one, the number one reason, cause of gut injury is actually mental and emotional. It's, it's stress.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Trauma, pain. So, so, so how can I give you a probiotic and, and, and glutamine and, and expect easy answer? It's not like that.

• 1:04:22Jen Cohen?

  That is such a great, I'm gonna, I wanna clip that because I think that's like a big thing, right? You're a hundred percent right. Like when I thought, you know, when I have gut issues, I'm like, oh yeah, acromansia. Or, oh no, why don't you take glutamine?

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  That's the latest, the latest thing. So, so now they detect this bacteria and this bacteria makes this, this mucinous a, a carbohydrate that, that coats the, the gut wall.

• 1:04:45Jen Cohen?

  And they're like, oh, just take a probiotic.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  So you get this, these geniuses that come and they talk to you about this and this and this. And they put, you put a patient in front of them and many times they don't really know what to do.

• 1:04:55Jen Cohen?

  Right. And the problem is, I think, even probiotics, right? Because what my body is missing is not necessarily what your back, like body is missing. So like one, it's not, it's not a one size fits all probiotic, right? And they're like, well, you can't have one that's in the, it has to be refrigerated. It has to not be refrigerated. There's so much information. So before.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  So, so my, my program, the clean program. Let's put it this way. You, most people with, with medium to severe gut injury.

• 1:05:25Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Will not heal completely just by changing a few things and taking a few supplements and like simple thing. Yeah, they may get a little better and you know, but it's not gonna heal completely, right? It takes, it takes more. And that, so that's what the clean program is, it does. It gives you the, the, the parameters and the, and the, in, in many aspects, you know? There's, there's, there's an aspect about anxiety and, and so there's meditation. There's, there's a bunch of things, right? And then, and then also every expert has their, their way of looking at it, right? But, but. Who do I trust? The people that have been at it for the most, for the longest time and that have the best results.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  I have incredible results with my patients because I understood for so many years and I've been exploring for twenty something years now. I've been.

• 1:06:18Jen Cohen?

  So what's in it? How does it work?

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  So for example, when you take glutamine, you have to take it on an empty stomach. You have nothing to eat before. The best way is when you wake up in the morning, nothing to eat afterwards for at least thirty minutes. There's a lot of details.

• 1:06:32Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  There's a lot of details, you know? And if you don't do it that way, yeah, it may work a little bit. You may get a little better. But the type of healing that I am interested in, that really creating the conditions for the healing mechanisms of the body to do their work optimally, because the body can heal of anything. There are no incurable diseases, only incurable patients, those who didn't find the way, right? So you need to find, if you have a chronic disease, you need to find a solid, good gut repair program. And there are a few around the world. I believe that mine is one of them because I see the results. So I created supplements and.

• 1:07:15Jen Cohen?

  How long is the program?

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  To support. Well.

• 1:07:18Jen Cohen?

  How's it work?

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  It has, it's a twenty one day program and it has.

• 1:07:22Jen Cohen?

  Twenty one days? How does a week?

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  There is a seven day program.

• 1:07:25Jen Cohen?

  A seven day.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  There is a seven day program and, but biology has its times. You know, I know we're all in a hurry in this society, but you can't produce a baby in six months. It takes nine months.

• 1:07:36Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  There's certainly, you cut your skin. You can't, you can't, it's not going to heal in three days. It's going to take ten weeks to ten days for the scap to come off and the skin.

• 1:07:47Jen Cohen?

  So then why do you have a seven day program?

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  So, so the reason I have a seven day program is to give people a taste. Because when people hear twenty one days.

• 1:07:56Jen Cohen?

  They freak out.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  They freak out. So what I did is I started going around the world trying to find out what else can I, can I do to accelerate and potentiate? So that seven day program is a little, even a little harder than the twenty one day program.

• 1:08:08Jen Cohen?

  Oh, it is.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's, the twenty one day program has its schedule, which is very easy. It's, it's a liquid meal for breakfast, solid meal for lunch, a liquid meal for dinner. And there's a way to take the supplements and there's a list of foods that you can and you cannot eat.

• 1:08:22Jen Cohen?

  Sounds like a weight loss program.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Well, weight is a result of inflammation anyways. And this is an, uh, and of gut injuries. And this is a way of, of healing and weight comes off. It's a, it's a very common side effect of, of the clean program. Is people lose weight when they need to lose weight.

• 1:08:41Jen Cohen?

  But then you gain, you gain a bath because of your.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  It depends. If you go back to doing whatever you were doing before the clean program, you're gonna go back to exactly where you, where you were. So hopefully after you, you finish the program, and if you do the seven program, the seven day program, then hopefully you will get inspired to, to continue until it heals. And it's sometimes 21 days is not enough either. Some people have to be careful and, and do stuff for more than 21 days.

• 1:09:05Jen Cohen?

  So tell me what you, what, how, tell me what the different, what do you offer in seven days that you don't offer in 21?

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  So what I, what I found out is that, that, that to make the first seven days of the 21 day program a little more.

• 1:09:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Because when you do the 21 day program, it takes five days for some people to start feeling, sometimes you feel worse at the beginning than, and then you, you know, because people that drink coffee every day, they have headaches and people that are.

• 1:09:32Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I remember this whole thing. You got, you won't, you don't let us drink coffee, right?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:37Jen Cohen?

  I remember that.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  So, so, so, and, and people that eat, eat gluten. I mean, everybody is different, but, but you don't start feeling well until, until you're in your second week. And then on the third week, it's like, wow.

• 1:09:49Jen Cohen?

  No coffee at all?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, for, for, and zero coffee. So the seven day program, what I did is I added some Ayurvedic principles and intermittent fasting, so.

• 1:10:00Jen Cohen?

  Oh, God, you said the worst thing you can possibly say to me.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, maybe I can change your mind about that because, because, um, that's really how nature designed things to be.

• 1:10:10Jen Cohen?

  When you say you added some intermittent fasting, can you give me an example?

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  There's a 24 hour period in, in the seven day program that you don't eat, that you only drink tea. And it's it's from from lunch, you finish lunch one day and till lunch the next day, you don't have any dinner, you don't have any breakfast.

• 1:10:29Jen Cohen?

  What do you do when you wanna, like for active people who work out like me?

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Jen Cohen?

  What do you do?

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  For people that work out like you, I tell them not to work out because.

• 1:10:38Jen Cohen?

  You're killing me right now, Dr. Unger.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Well, and this is the problem. This is the problem with, you know, you you wanna be you wanna be the best mother and the best wife and the and the and the and you wanna be in the best shape and you, yeah? But if you wanna fix your gut, you're gonna have to make some changes. You know, if you break a bone, you're gonna have to have a cast for for for some time until until it.

• 1:10:56Jen Cohen?

  It gets better.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Uh, until it solds back together, right? And then you take the cast. So the clean program is like a cast for the gut. And then you have to.

• 1:11:04Jen Cohen?

  Good analogy.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  And then you also have to understand that there is a whole energy distribution system. Let's call it that way. There's the energy that we all know about and everybody's talking about, which is the energy that mitochondria produce, where the A T where ATP is is is a is a the result of the burning through the Krebs cycle of of sugar, right? But there's another type of energy that we don't really understand in the Western world. That is the one that comes into your body when you when you sleep. Why do you, why can you be exhausted one day? You go, you have a good night's sleep and you wake up and you're full of energy. Where is that? Is that why the mitochondria were not working when you were exhausted? Now they're working. It has nothing to do with mitochondria. It's a different type of energy.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  This is the energy that Chinese medicine understands way, way more, right? So these energies, the ATP that's produced by mitochondria and this other energy that we don't understand very well, right? This energy is used for all your functions during the day, right? And repair and defense and it takes a lot of of of energy to use that. If you're gonna spend that energy exercising and working out. It's the repairing.

• 1:12:17Jen Cohen?

  I understand.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  You know, so you divert.

• 1:12:20Jen Cohen?

  Totally, I get it.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  You're diverting your cash flow into into other things that are not what what what needs to be done.

• 1:12:26Jen Cohen?

  True. In full transparency, do you and do you remember transparency? Do you remember years ago, you sent me the clean program? I think it was like the seven day program and he wanted me to do the program. And I was like, I remember now it's all coming back to me. I was like really nervous because I love food. I didn't and I wasn't allowed to drink coffee. So I gave it away to my friend and she did it and she loved it. She thought she really like felt great, like she really did. She thought it was a great program and I totally forgot about this. And when I said that you're coming back on the podcast, she's like, oh, my God. Are you going to get one of those clean programs? Can I have it? Because I'm like, yeah, maybe you will.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  I sent you one.

• 1:13:06Jen Cohen?

  I mean, I don't have it, by the way. I think my neighbor stole it because it comes in a really or some or Amazon.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  I'll send you another one.

• 1:13:12Jen Cohen?

  Can you send me like two?

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  I can send you three if you want.

• 1:13:15Jen Cohen?

  Three, okay.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  You can do it with friends.

• 1:13:17Jen Cohen?

  I want to do it and I'm going to give one to her.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Jen Cohen?

  Because I I promise her, but why no coffee? Like, why is coffee bad for you and your gut? Because there's so much, like, there's so much data saying that coffee is actually could be healthy.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things that are not good when the gut is broken. That are completely fine when the gut is is repaired.

• 1:13:39Jen Cohen?

  So once the gut is better again, you can then drink coffee.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  You can then reintroduce certain things.

• 1:13:45Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  You cannot go just back to what you were doing before, but you can reintroduce certain things.

• 1:13:49Jen Cohen?

  But what if your gut isn't necessary?

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  What's the problem with coffee? There's many problems with coffee.

• 1:13:54Jen Cohen?

  Okay, tell me. If it's not mold, if it's if it's a really high quality, organic coffee.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Okay, so so that's the first problem, that it's not organic. Most coffee is totally polluted and full of chemicals, right? So that's one problem. And and so that one, one of the reasons I take people out. But even if it's organic and really good coffee, the coffee is an exciting. It's it's stimulant.

• 1:14:17Jen Cohen?

  Stimulant, yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  Right? So so it depletes, eventually depletes you of of of energy. And then you become dependent on the stimulant effect.

• 1:14:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Some people kind of function if they don't drink coffee in the morning.

• 1:14:29Jen Cohen?

  Or

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Or cannot go to the bathroom.

• 1:14:32Jen Cohen?

  That's what I was gonna say. It makes you like, people who are constipated, like if you don't, if they don't drink your cup of coffee.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Why? Now, now, let's go back to, let's go back to, to the gut. So imagine there's a little nerve inside every microvilli. There's trillion, I mean, I don't know how many, but billions probably of microvilli in, in the, in the, in the one, one or two tennis court surface, right? And imagine, imagine this with a little nerve in a tennis court. One nerve next to the other, next to the, it's a huge nervous system. There's more nerve cells and neurons and dendrites and synapses in, in and around your gut than inside your, your brain.

• 1:15:14Jen Cohen?

  Well, that's why they say the gut is your second brain.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Well, second in the chronology of how we've been talking about it, but, but in terms of importance for your life, I don't know if it's the second. They're all important, right? Because this one has to do with, with mentation, ideation, you know, speech, vision, right? But this one has to do with, with the intuition and, and other functions that are really important, right?

• 1:15:41Jen Cohen?

  Tell me other ones.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Other ones like, like temperature regulation, mobility of the gut, you know, so it ends up being, because this, these muscles contract and they are the ones that, and these are muscles too, they're the ones that cause peristaltic movements. So the, the food is pushed from the up now from one end to the other. So you need that in order to make good poops, right?

• 1:16:06Jen Cohen?

  Right. And if you don't have a good.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  So if the nervous system is, is busy doing other things, like adaptation and survival mechanisms, because there's a mess, there's a broken, there's a broken gut, there's a lot of antigens, there's a lot of surfaces coming in, undigested food, good bacteria, bad bacteria, it doesn't matter what, because we have good bacteria in the gut, right? But if those goes into the blood, it's not good. Even if, even if, if it's good to have them in the gut, it's not good to have them in your blood. So when, oh, when, when that happens, oh, there's a huge reaction. An adaptation mechanism, the body is now in survival mechanism.

• 1:16:43Jen Cohen?

  Okay, wait, wait.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Survival mode.

• 1:16:45Jen Cohen?

  What about fruit when you're repairing your gut?

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  So there's certain fruits that are okay, there's certain fruits that are not, there's a, there's a whole, and in my book, it's explained really well. And each food that I take out from the twenty one day program, there's a reason for, right? So there's some fruits that they're not allowed during a gut repair program.

• 1:17:05Jen Cohen?

  Like?

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Like oranges, like citric, lemons are fine, but oranges are not fine.

• 1:17:10Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Because a lot of people have some kind of negative reaction, adverse reaction, some, some. And it's not always the same, it's not, it's not a, an allergic reaction necessarily, but you know, these are triggers. These are, these are, they're, these are, these are some of the nutrients that these plants have, that these vegetables have, or these fruits have, that may not allow the healing of the gut completely.

• 1:17:36Jen Cohen?

  Okay, another one that we should say.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Example bananas, I don't allow bananas in the program because they, they actually constipate you a little bit.

• 1:17:43Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  You know, so, and then there's vegetables that are not allowed, like, like eggplants are not allowed.

• 1:17:49Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  The eggplants are not allowed because they have certain nutrients that are pro-inflammatory, right? Like solanine in, in, in, in eggplants and tomatoes have some lectins, so there are.

• 1:18:04Jen Cohen?

  So no tomatoes on this plant?

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  So no tomatoes on this plant, on this plant, no nightshades.

• 1:18:09Jen Cohen?

  No nightshades?

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, and then no, obviously no gluten, obviously no processed food. So every, everything has to be real food and not food like products.

• 1:18:20Jen Cohen?

  How about protein like chicken, beef, like animal protein?

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Completely fine if the chicken comes from running in the, in the fields and eating worms and, and, and, and little bugs. As opposed to chickens that are, never see the sun or, or the, the light of the day and are, you know, cannot even run because they're, they're in this, in this.

• 1:18:39Jen Cohen?

  So free range?

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, free range.

• 1:18:41Jen Cohen?

  Do you say free range or do you say organic in your program?

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Free range antibiotic and hormone free.

• 1:18:47Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, because the hormones and the antibiotic.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  The most, the most similar to wild game possible. And wild game is even better. Which means animals that are, that are living the way that nature designed them to live. Same thing with cows.

• 1:19:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  If you're gonna eat cows, then be them grass fed, free roaming, happy cows and not cows from, from feedlots with, fed with grains and given antibiotics. So, you know, and if, if, if it's fish from the, from the sea or the rivers, not from, from fish farms where they give them all kinds of chemicals as well.

• 1:19:27Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:19:27Jen Cohen?

  For the 21 day program, you're not at, there's no intermittent fasting on that. You have your shake, your meal.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is, there is a 12 hour window that you have to respect 12 hours between the last meal of one day and the, and the first meal of the second day of the next day.

• 1:19:43Jen Cohen?

  No snack.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  As minimum, at minimum 12 hours. Why? Because it takes about eight hours to finish digestion and absorption. And then when digestion, because what happens is this, digestion takes a lot of energy.

• 1:19:56Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  That's when you have a big meal, you kind of fall asleep, you know, get tired, right? So it takes a lot of energy for, for the body to digest, right? So, so when digestion is happening, other functions that require a lot of energy have to be slowed down because there's a lot of energy being directed to digestion because digestion is so important. In, in, in our history, we didn't have food available all the time. So when there was food, evolution took, took the.

• 1:20:26Jen Cohen?

  That makes total sense to me. What about, like, what are some symptoms that people could have to know if they even have, even if they have a gut that needs repairing? That maybe are not so obvious besides stress.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Most people walking around in the modern world have some degree of gut injury. I, I'm convinced that there's really almost no one with a completely healthy gut.

• 1:20:53Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, because it's inevitable. We live in, we live in this world. We, we, we do get stressed. We have it time to, so you're looking at your watch. We have things to do. We had, and we're exposed to chemicals.

• 1:21:04Jen Cohen?

  I was looking at my watch because I was saying, oh, my God, I hope I'm not like going like you must be. I've been talking to you forever.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm, I took your.

• 1:21:12Jen Cohen?

  I know, you could talk for another five hours, right?

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  So, so, you know, you have to rest your digestive system. So you take away the foods that are difficult to digest. You take away the foods that cause triggers in the body. And you reduce the work of digestion. That's why we have a liquid meal for breakfast and a liquid meal for, for dinner in the 21 day program. And then the, the lunch is, is regular food, but only real food with no chemicals. And there's a list of foods that you can and you cannot. And, and it's basically the five big ones are no dairy, no sugar, no coffee, no alcohol, no gluten.

• 1:21:48Jen Cohen?

  No life, number six.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's so much life, you know, I'm, I'm now running retreats. I guide retreats.

• 1:21:54Jen Cohen?

  I know you said that.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  I take people to very natural environments and I take a lot, bunch of other healers with me. I have a very medicine doctors, a massage therapist, some biohackers that are really good. I, and I bring all of them with me and we, we gather about thirty, thirty, forty people in these places. And we put them on the clean program and they also have all these other therapies. And that really accelerates healing because that's the other thing is we're busy. So, yeah, you, maybe you're avoiding, maybe you're eating right and you're avoiding the, the, the things that you need to avoid. And you're taking the right supplements and it's still not going to work. Why?

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  I'll tell you a story. In this last retreat in Argentina, there was this woman that, just like you, intelligent, does a good, who has a, a, a good living, knows a lot of people. So she can see many specialists. She has money. Yeah, very smart woman. She comes to me. She, for years, she's been having digestive issues. And lately, like two weeks before she came to me, she was diagnosed with SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, right? So, so the story is that she gets. Like crazy and wakes up in the middle of the night and and she's constipated. I mean, she has many, many other symptoms of SIBO, but they come and go and it's confusing. So when I sat down with her and I started talking with her in functional medicine,

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  we do our history taking in a different way. We start when they were born, you know, were you born by C-section or natural birth, which is already a difference. Did you were you breastfed or not? When you were little, did you miss school because of lung infections, ear infections, throat infections, did you get antibiotics? And then at some point in life, there's a defining moment where things change. For some people, it's an accident or surgery or their mother died or they had a traumatic event of some type and life changes, right? So when I got to that point, I realized there was a heavy history, a familiar thing with her father and who had died.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  And I could see, because I'm really focused when I'm talking to her, I could see that the moment we got to that point in the history taking, even her, her way of expressing herself, confusion. So I looked at her, I said, listen, I, I see two huge problems here. I'm not sure about your diagnosis of SIBO. I see that you're constipated. She was pooping every five, six days, which is a big problem. So I have this, I buy here in L A and I smuggle them to Argentina. These bottles called implantaramas, which are like a little colonic machine that you can take with you. Right? So I take them there and give them to the people. So I gave her one and I instructed her to do a coffee colonic.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  It's a little bottle.

• 1:24:48Jen Cohen?

  At least she gets coffee.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  With a tube, you put it inside your butt and then you, you pump it up and, and the thing goes. Either water or water and coffee or coffee, right? So for her, I, we needed some coffee because she, I mean, severe constipation. I said, and maybe what you, what you need to heal is a trauma. And it's like an intuitive thing because I just saw her get so disturbed after she was telling me about this family problem, right?

• 1:25:15Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  It happened to be that the next activity in the retreat was family constellations. And I don't know if you know what that is. I was explaining to you before we.

• 1:25:24Jen Cohen?

  Well, yeah, tell what is family constellation?

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  So it's a it's a therapy mode in which a therapist, in this case, is a psychologist, gets the whole group of people and says, who has a problem that they want to explore, right? Some people come, they put in the middle of the circle, and he starts asking in a very particular way about the problem. They text what the problem is. And then, so then let's say the problem is the father and the sister. So then they choose somebody to represent the father and somebody to represent the sister. And they go into this thing, and the way that they're guided into this conversation, they have to speak, even the ones that are representing them, they have to say what they feel. Something happens. I don't know.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  She went into the family constellation. She had a huge breakthrough of something that happened with her father, you know? I didn't go into it very, very deeply when we were talking because, you know.

• 1:26:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  But we're, but, but so she went into that. She had a huge breakthrough, went to her room, had a coffee enema, had the best poop of her life, and the next day, flat as a board, zero symptoms. She was completely fine. For the next five days, she was, she, she, zero symptoms. Something that hasn't happened to her in three years, being four days in a row, five days in a row without symptoms.

• 1:26:47Jen Cohen?

  Do you think it was the family constellation or was it the coffee enema?

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  I think it's a combination. I think it's a combination. That's why I'm saying that sometimes even the clean program, which is a great, or any gut repair program, I mean, I've found a few that are really good around the world. There's, there's, there's ones that I really like. There's a guy in Argentina called Nestor Palmetti, and he has a center with people who go for retreats as well. He's way, way more strict and, and, and limiting than, you know, he's vegetarian.

• 1:27:16Jen Cohen?

  Then yours, but yours is very strict and limiting.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  I won't say that.

• 1:27:21Jen Cohen?

  I know, it's all relative.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  It's all relative, and but him is, you know, but I really respect this guy. He's he has great results. He's not even a doctor. He was a journalist who was very sick himself and then started studying. And then, you know, when when detailed journalists go into something and they learn, they become amazing.

• 1:27:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  He has the information like, wow. So so so there are some some out there, right? But but a good gut ripper program is many times good by itself, but many times you need other things.

• 1:27:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  So some people.

• 1:27:55Jen Cohen?

  I'm gonna try your retreat. I want to go to it. You told me I can go.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you you you'll be my guest.

• 1:27:59Jen Cohen?

  Next March, you said.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  There's the next one. We're planning on March 30 in Uruguay.

• 1:28:05Jen Cohen?

  Not exactly a hop, skip and a jump away from here, but I'll go. How long is it? Five days, a week?

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  The retreat are seven days, yeah. And the flight from here is maybe from L A you stop in Miami and you and then you go to Uruguay. So it's five hours Miami and then eight hours Uruguay.

• 1:28:25Jen Cohen?

  That's far. Wow.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  It's far, but it's gonna be one of the best experiences of your life.

• 1:28:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm very interested in these things, especially when it's not like, you know, what's happening outside of the U S is very fascinating to me, right? Like, I love you learn so many different, like, you meet all these different people, healers, doctors.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Listen, listen.

• 1:28:46Jen Cohen?

  The caliber is crazy.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  No, listen to what happened to me. And and and this is this is why I am an optimist. And I believe that things can go no back to how they were. But I'll tell you the story and then and then we define. I had a car accident that you know about.

• 1:29:02Jen Cohen?

  I remember.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  And I just told you about they have to fix my.

• 1:29:04Jen Cohen?

  That was how many years ago was that, though?

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  That was seven years ago.

• 1:29:07Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  And and it broke one of my heart valves. I had to have open heart surgery to change one of my my aortic valve, which is the most important valve. Anyways, it was a disaster. And one of the things that happened is there was compression of my L three, L four, right? Lumber.

• 1:29:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Number three and number four. But if I show you the M R I, you don't even need to be a doctor. You can see the L three and L four are kind of destroyed and inflamed and white on the on the M R I. And you can see the discs are barely even existing. The bone bone and bone are kind of touching, right? So I tried to avoid surgery since.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I've been having bad back pain for five years. Lately, it was in, I mean, it was, it was really bad. It really limited my life. So I get, I get to Argentina and my sister had met this woman who is a, a neurosurgeon, radiologist, and, and, but she developed a way, a functional way of, of dealing with, with the body, right? So, so it's called BAM biomechanics and you can find it on, online. She's on Instagram. Her name is Teresa Salasada. When I met her, I, I kind of playfully said, oh, you're also a radiologist. Yeah, yeah, also I have a patient who's having back pain. Check, check out the MRI. So I showed her my MRI. So she said, hmm, you know, there is two very obvious lesions.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  Here she pointed to the obvious lesions, which the surgeon at, at Mount Sinai in New York was going to operate and fuse those bones, right? So this is obvious, but you know, the back is, the, the MRIs are very gossipy. They, they give you too much information and sometimes from gossip, you know, from thirty gossips that you get, one may be really important. So, look, these are all the problems. They say, if I don't see the patient, I, I can't really tell. So I say, I am the patient. So she started examining me, making me move and, and she said, you know what? I think I can help you. Then when the retreat ended, I went to see her and her mentor, who's an eighty-four year old surgeon, Tato Peva, unbelievable guy, eighty-four year old neurosurgeon who, who still plays competitive basketball.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  And I, when, and when I met him, I felt like I was in an Indian monastery. He's like this very present guy. And, and he saw me and he said, I think I can help you by injecting ozone in the disc space between the vertebrae, right? So I went there and they did the procedure and my pain is completely gone. Now that guy, he's old school. I said, how much do I owe you? He said, I don't charge colleagues. So, so what I'm saying is there are still people around the world that are, that are in it for the right reason and, and, and it's not a fortune to see them. And, and, and I see a lot of these people and I see, I see more and more.

• 1:31:56Jen Cohen?

  But you know, that you're, number one, it's very few and far between. You have to, it's like a, it's like a. It's like a precious stone. You have to really, really look and dig for it, like a diamond, right? Like, you don't find them very often.

• 1:32:11Speaker 02

  Seek and you shall find.

• 1:32:13Jen Cohen?

  Well, I mean, you do that, too. You help people all the time for free, but most people don't. And so, seek and you will find. Okay, well, I'm gonna keep on seeking. I found you.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Seek and you shall find. Listen, it sometimes it finds you. When I was at the retreat, I went there to help people. And I ended up being helped myself.

• 1:32:30Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  You know, so, so sometimes you seek and you find, and sometimes it finds you. But, but you have to be open and you have to ask and you have to, you know, you have to question.

• 1:32:41Jen Cohen?

  You have to ask.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  You have to question things. You have to inform yourself.

• 1:32:45Jen Cohen?

  I totally agree. All right, Dr. Unger, I have to wrap this. What, where can people find more about your program? You?

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  Instagram, D R, Dr. Alejandro Unger. That's my Instagram handle. Also, Clean Program has an Instagram page.

• 1:33:02Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  Or CleanProgram.com. Or you can read one of my books. I have three New York Times bestsellers and a fourth book that didn't make it, but Clean, Clean Gut, Clean Eats, and Clean Seven. Those are my, those are my books. You can, you can start there.

• 1:33:17Jen Cohen?

  Four books?

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  I've, I've written four books. Three of them are New York Times bestsellers.

• 1:33:21Jen Cohen?

  What happened to the fourth?

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  I don't know, you know?

• 1:33:23Jen Cohen?

  Listen, I mean.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  I didn't, I didn't put much attention on promoting it.

• 1:33:28Jen Cohen?

  Well, I mean, I, I know you're the real deal and I, I love that you came on the show. And guys, if you have not, if you have any gut issues, if, and even if you don't think you do, it's a great thing to even do.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  The thing is, the thing is with the gut.

• 1:33:42Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  It's very tricky, because symptoms may appear far away from the gut that may seem unrelated to the gut.

• 1:33:49Jen Cohen?

  Like I said.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  Like depression, like allergies, like skin problems, rashes, allergy problems.

• 1:33:56Jen Cohen?

  That's what I was saying to you earlier. A lot of these things that may, you think it may be something else that's causing it. A lot of times, it starts in the gut. So if you can clean up your gut, excuse that pun again, clean up your gut, you can be surprised at how much better you feel. So I would definitely check out the Clean Program.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Repair your gut, repair your life.

• 1:34:17Jen Cohen?

  Wow. You should put that on a sticker. Maybe that could be your next book, your fifth book.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  Well, I'm writing up something about the mind now.

• 1:34:24Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  Clean mind.

• 1:34:26Jen Cohen?

  Clean mind. I like that. Anyway, thank you for coming on the show.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Always, always a pleasure.

• 1:34:32Jen Cohen?

  Always a pleasure.