Dr. Casey Means: 5 Early Warning Signs of Disease & What Your Body is REALLY Trying to Tell You

Do you want to be able to detect the early warning signs of disease? Do you want to learn how to manage your stress effectively? Today, Jay welcomes Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford-trained physician, a leading voice in the field of metabolic health, and the co-founder of Levels, a company dedicated to improving health through continuous glucose monitoring. She is also an author, with her latest book, "Good Energy," focusing on metabolic health and its impact on overall well-being. Dr. Means has been featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. Dr. Casey Means highlights the alarming rise of chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, which she attributes to the modern lifestyle and its impact on our metabolic systems. She emphasizes the importance of understanding metabolic health, which she describes as the body's ability to efficiently convert food into energy at the cellular level and encourages us to take control of our health by becoming more attuned to our bodies and the signals it sends. Jay and Dr. Means focus on the importance of a balanced diet, adequate sleep, regular physical activity, stress management, and reducing exposure to environmental toxins. And the inspiring stories and scientific evidence to illustrate how simple lifestyle changes can lead to significant improvements in health. In this interview, you'll learn: How to improve metabolic health How to manage stress effectively How to make dietary changes How to optimize sleep How to trust your own body How to stay physically active This compelling vision for a future where individuals are empowered with the knowledge and tools to take charge of their health, leading to happier, healthier, and more fulfilled lives is attainable. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 02:55 Who Do We Trust with Our Health? 12:12 Become the Healthiest Version of You 18:27 What is Metabolic Health? 25:39 2 Ways Your Body Communicates with You 34:56 The Concept of Inflammation within the Body 40:15 How Does the Health System Work? 51:33 Why Ban Pharmaceutical Company Ads? 56:42 How Banning Pharma Ads Will Affect the Economy 01:02:47 Academic Research Funded by Pharma 01:05:35 Eliminate Added Sugar in School Lunch 01:11:05 The 5 Essential Biomarkers 01:23:10 How You’re Eating Matters 01:24:37 The Benefits of 7000 Steps 01:29:37 What is Social Jetlag? 01:34:51 We Are a Process Not an Entity 01:44:57 Casey on Final Five Episode Resources: Casey Means | Website Casey Means | Instagram Casey Means | Twitter Casey Means | Facebook Casey Means | YouTube Casey Means | TikTok Casey Means | LinkedIn Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health Levels See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 1:24Jay Shetty?

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• 2:37Speaker 01

  The more research, the more spending, the more specialties, the more drugs and the more surgery we do, the sicker we are getting. The confusion is the point. That is so scary.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  She is one of the world's foremost experts in metabolic health.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Dr. Casey means. What is my body afraid of? We have to be asking that question before we reach for the Advil. Something wild that very few people know is that.

• 3:07Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you. In the last 90 days, 79.4% of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel. There's research that shows that if you want to create a habit, make it easy to access. By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier, healthier and more healed. This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you and the world. Subscribe right now.

• 3:51Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place that you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. Today's guest is someone that I've been looking forward to have on the show for around a year now, because I know that listening to this conversation is going to increase the good energy in your life. If you're someone who wants to invite better energy, better frequencies into your life, this episode is for you. If you're someone who wants to understand how you can improve your health, both physical and mental, this conversation is for you. And if you're one of those people who started to think there's too much, there's overwhelming information, there's too much data, there's too much to digest, this conversation is for you because we're going to simplify what our biggest health challenges are.

• 4:35Jay Shetty?

  Today I'm talking to the one and only Casey Means, M D, a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world's metabolic health crisis. Casey devotes her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick. She's been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Women's Health, and many more. Today, we're talking about Casey's book, which is all about metabolic health, called Good Energy. If you don't have this book, you're going to want to read it. As you hear this conversation, go and grab your copy right now. Welcome to On Purpose, Casey Means. Casey, thank you so much for doing this.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Jay.

• 5:18Jay Shetty?

  It's such a joy. As I said, I've been following your work for around a year, probably even more now. And I said to my team, I was like, I need to talk to Casey. I feel like she has insights that we need to understand. And I want to dive straight into it. You talk about, you say this, you say, "Don't trust the doctors." You say, "Don't trust the science." And you say, "Don't even trust me." Who do we trust?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  The answer to that question is that we need to start trusting ourselves. We are living in an environment right now in the United States where chronic illness is rampant across our children, across adults, across the elderly. We know that something is not quite right. We're spending over $4 trillion on healthcare every year, and our population is getting sicker. We're getting heavier. We're getting more depressed. We're even becoming more infertile. Life expectancy is going down. And it seems that the more we do, the sicker we're actually getting. So my call to action for people is that we really need to start trusting ourselves. And what do I, what do I mean by that? We are living in a time where there is information, tools, and technology

• 6:25Speaker 01

  that exists that can give every single person the power to understand their bodies in ways that has never been possible throughout all of human history. There are technologies that let us see inside our bodies every single day, like wearables and biosensors and direct-to-consumer lab testing that can literally answer the question for us, "Am I healthy?" What do I need to do differently to achieve optimal health? And it can sometimes sound scary to say, oh, my gosh, I shouldn't trust the healthcare system, but we've produced miracles. But a key thing we need to understand is that a lot of the miracles that we think of and we think of the healthcare system, they are for acute issues.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  They are things historically like infectious disease and emergencies and traumas where that thing is going to kill you immediately. And when the healthcare system intervenes in that situation, it's miraculous. And when you look at the increase in life expectancy over the last 100 years, it is very much predicated on cures for acute issues, things like sanitation practices, emergency surgeries, antibiotics and the like. But if you if you actually take those causes of death out of the out of the equation, life expectancy hasn't actually changed that much in the past 100 years. Unfortunately, though, in the past 50 years or so, chronic conditions, these conditions that last for years and years and years, they have gone up exponentially.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  This is the things like cancer and heart disease and stroke and Alzheimer's dementia and depression and chronic pain that are just absolutely plaguing our country and are leading causes of death. And unfortunately, in the way our healthcare system is designed right now, as we actually spend more money and more effort on addressing and treating these conditions, the rates of these conditions are actually going up. So a chapter in my book is called Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor. And the point of this is that when it comes to chronic conditions, unfortunately, the healthcare system does not deserve our trust because the treatment of these chronic conditions has been an abject failure.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And I think the easiest way to kind of really paint the picture of all of this and how I've come to this somewhat radical conclusion is actually to just share a personal story, if you don't mind. It's actually about my mother. And I think it really, I think this story is something that most Americans can probably see themselves in. I think it really is emblematic of why our healthcare system is broken and a path forward.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So my mother, her story really starts when she was about 40 and she had me. And I was actually a 12-pound baby. I was born very, very large, one of the largest babies the hospital had ever seen. And my mom had gained about 70 pounds during her pregnancy. And in her 40s, she had a lot of trouble losing the baby weight. In her late 40s, she went through perimenopause. And menopause, it was very difficult for her. She had hot flashes, she had sleep symptoms. The doctor said, there's very little we can do about this. She moves into her 50s, she starts to develop high cholesterol, high LDL. The doctor says, this is very normal for people your age. Gives her a statin, very common medication that's prescribed 200 million times per year in the United States. Later, she gets into her late 50s, she starts developing high blood pressure.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  She gets an ACE inhibitor, also very common. It's almost like a rite of passage these days to get a diagnosis of high blood pressure. She moves into her 60s and her blood, her blood sugar starts rising. The doctor says, you now meet the criteria for prediabetes. But again, this is very common. It's, it's a pre-disease. And he gives her a prescription for metformin. She takes it religiously, again, very common, a medication that's prescribed 90 million times per year in the United States. Then she turns 70 and she's 72 years old and she's taking a hike with my dad. They took a nightly hike outside their home on the coast of Northern California. And she has a really sharp pain in her belly. And it lasted for a few days. So she went to the doctor and the doctor said, this is pretty atypical for you. You've never had this before, let's get a CT scan.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And later that night, she gets a text message with the results of her CT scan. And the results said that she had stage four widely metastatic pancreatic cancer. And 13 days later, she was dead. And this was almost three years ago to the day. And at the time of her death, she was seeing what people would arguably say are the best doctors in the country. She was getting executive physicals at Mayo Clinic. She was seeing doctors at Stanford and Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She was getting quote unquote, "the best care in the country." And they looked at my family when this happened and they said, we are so sorry. This is so unlucky.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And the question I have is, is it really unlucky? And in our conventional paradigm, in our conventional healthcare system in the West, the system that I was trained in at Stanford Medical School, it does seem unlucky. The pancreatic cancer seems almost random and she had all these things crop up and, you know, she was getting standard of care and actually excellent care. She was getting what the guidelines said, the medications, she was taking them, people were turning little knobs on her biomarkers and then the cancer cropped up and it just seemed so out of the blue. She was 72 and actually many doctors would have said she's healthy because she was on all her medications. But the vision that I really, you know, want to put forward and the reason I think we

• 11:50Speaker 01

  need to start trusting ourselves more is that through a different framework, we actually see, as we look at the underlying root cause physiologic connections between everything my mom was dealing with and so many other things that are plaguing Americans today, shortening and torturing our lives, they are fundamentally rooted in the same thing. And that thing is what I present as what I call bad energy in the book, otherwise known as metabolic dysfunction, a fundamental problem with how our 40 trillion cells produce energy to let them do their work in the body. And the beauty of why we can trust ourselves more in the healthcare system is because

• 12:35Speaker 01

  we have tools now to understand our metabolic health in great granularity for ourselves. And unfortunately, the healthcare system, because it is focused on a siloed intervention based system, based on really looking at all these diseases, weeds that crop up that we play whack a mole with, with drugs and interventions, we focus on that instead of actually focusing on the underlying bad energy that's connecting so many of the conditions that we're facing today. And this is science based. This is based on the research. When you really look at almost every Chronic symptom, chronic disease facing Americans today, they are directly linked

• 13:17Speaker 01

  back to metabolic dysfunction. And that is something that each of us can understand with simple tools and simple understanding in our lives now, but unfortunately, is not a paradigm in which the modern American medical system operates. So they are going to miss these early warning signs, like my mom had, the enormous baby, literally called fetal macrosomia, big bodied baby, that is a direct sign of metabolic dysfunction, bad perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms, inability to lose the baby weight, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and ultimately cancer. All of them are connected. So this is really a vision for healthcare about empowerment, about learning to understand

• 14:01Speaker 01

  your own body, about not waiting, unfortunately, for the monumental size of the healthcare system to turn the arrow, because right now, unfortunately, it's not incentivized to. And so it's really up to us to understand this core physiology of our own bodies and work to improve it. And it's actually so much simpler than people think. It's something that each of us can do, and it can really unleash that internal metabolic life force within our cells to help us reach our highest purpose.

• 14:29Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that story, too. I mean, hearing that, it's heartbreaking, because I assume you believe it's avoidable. I assume you believe, and what you're sharing here, the vision, is that it didn't have to go that way. And I can imagine with what you know now and what you're sharing, that can be hard to deal with. For anyone who's listening or watching right now, who almost thinks it's gone too far, how much can what you're sharing help reverse certain impacts?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I think one of the best ways that I can actually address that question, and the answer to the question is yes, so much of this is reversible, is to actually share a Taoist statement, which is that living beings are processes, not entities. So we have been very much, I think, in our, honestly, despiritualized Western culture. We've, we look at the body as a thing, a thing that is separate from everything else in the world. And

• 15:35Speaker 01

  A thing that is static and a thing that lives and dies. And the reality of the biology and the chemistry is that that's just could not be farther from the truth. We are a dynamic swirl of matter that's constantly giving and exchanging and taking matter and energy from the environment in a constant process. And the reason this is relevant, the reversal of chronic diseases, that every single day we get the opportunity through our choices to rebuild the next version of this process. And we literally eat 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime, 70 metric tons.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And that is the material from the environment, from the earth, from the cosmos, that we are taking in through eating and digestion to literally 3D print the next version of our body. And when we 3D print a body that has what it needs, that has the right building blocks, the right chemical molecular messengers in food to essentially express a healthy version of the body, we have that. And so I think thinking of ourselves as a process, a process that is constantly making choices to build a healthier version of the body. We realize that we are, we can absolutely have a different vision for our future than what we have today. Our genetic code is, and our cells are there to build and produce and express the healthiest

• 17:05Speaker 01

  version of ourself possible. But health is fundamentally a matching problem. If we match the needs and expectations of the cells with what we are giving them through molecular information of food, through energetic information, through sunlight, through the words we expose ourselves to, through...

• 17:27Speaker 01

  How we interact with those around us and how and the physical signals of exercise and movement. If we give the cells what they're needing, we can express health. So, um, so the answer is absolutely yes. And when you look at the data, what you actually see is that many, many people who are learning about the science of metabolic health and ways that we can shape our diet and lifestyle to improve our health. What we find is that people are putting their type 2 diabetes into remission. People are slowing the rate of how quickly Alzheimer's is developing. People can, of course, reverse obesity. And so it's really about giving your cells what they need and expect to essentially build

• 18:09Speaker 01

  the healthiest version of themselves moving forward. And I would also just add, when I was in medical school, one of the most impactful things that I saw was our histology class, which is the science of basically taking sections of the body, like cut up sections of the body and putting them on slides and looking at them in the microscope. And what you find there is that this concept of like, we live and then we die is actually so false. Because when you look at a tissue, a human tissue under the microscope, what you actually see is that in one piece of tissue, there are cells being born, there are cells dying, there are cells that are aging, it's all happening. And, and I

• 18:49Speaker 01

  think that's actually really hopeful, because I think there's this, um, there's an existential grip of anxiety that lives within us as Westerners. And it's an existential anxiety about death, like unlike so many other cultures, Eastern cultures, Indigenous American cultures, so many other cultures, we are petrified of death. We don't have a curiosity about it. And I think the healthcare system actually really weaponizes our, our profound fear of death against us. Because if you can convince people that you live and you die, and that's it, you can essentially get them to do anything to avoid that fate, which is unavoidable. And it's also just happening kind of all the time. And

• 19:36Speaker 01

  If you can hold a pill, or a surgery, or something in front of them that makes them think, you know, this is my salvation, you can get them to do anything. And another message that I have in the book is that part of our journey in health and our journey in healing is actually to unlock ourself from that existential anxiety and to sort of see what the system is using and what it's using against us to control us, to turn us into desperate consumers looking for anything to ameliorate our existential suffering. And when we rise above that and have curiosity with it, I think we actually make much better health decisions because

• 20:18Speaker 01

  we realize that fundamentally, I think we are eternal, limitless processes in constant continuity with everything else in the universe. And I think frankly, that's just the material reality of it. But I think there's also a spiritual dimension to it, too, that can help us really unlock our health from a sense of abundance rather than from fear.

• 20:39Jay Shetty?

  I mean, that's such a fascinating perspective and obviously one that I so deeply feel connected to and aligned with, whether it's the philosophies of reincarnation, or past lives, or whether it's karma, or whether it's even the simple understanding of as energetic beings, we're constantly, as you're saying, a cell is in motion.

• 21:01Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone, it's Jay here. My wife and I have had so much fun creating our own sparkling tea, Juni. And I've got big news for you. It's at Target and we'd love your support. If you can go out, grab a Juni, you'll be adding adaptogens and nootropics into your life with mood boosting properties aimed at promoting a balanced and happy mind. Through our commitment to our wellness journey and striving to fuel our bodies with the healthiest ingredients, it's been our purpose to make healthy choices accessible for all, which is why Juni is now on shelves at Target. So head to our store locator at drinkjuni.com and find Juni at a Target near you. For anyone who's listening and thinking, Jay, what is metabolic health?

• 21:45Jay Shetty?

  And how does it make sense in my daily life? Like, I think we've heard the term metabolism, and most of us think about it as like, how quickly we burn energy. But it's like, what is metabolic health in a very simple way? And how can we make sense of it as someone who's not educated in the field?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Metabolic health is fundamentally how we convert food energy to cellular energy. So we have, again, like 40 trillion human cells. And every single one of those cells needs cellular energy to function. We have 40 trillion cells. Each of those cells is doing like trillions of chemical reactions every second. And all of those need to be paid for. And they need to be paid for with energy. And that's energy that we convert from food energy through our mitochondria to cellular energy, which is called ATP. And the bubbling up of all of those chemical reactions, all of which require energy to happen,

• 22:45Speaker 01

  the bubbling up of that is our lives. That's what it is. Death is the absence of metabolism. Without that underlying life force in our cells, we'd literally just fall apart and melt. That's what death is. So anything that hurts our mitochondria, hurts our metabolic functioning, is like, essentially, inching closer to the grave. It's like being a little bit dead while we're alive. And unfortunately, right now, 93% of American adults are dealing with metabolic dysfunction. The modern world has changed so much in the past 100 years, on every level. Industrialized, ultra-processed food making up 70% of our calories. We're getting two hours less of sleep

• 23:30Speaker 01

  per night than we were 100 years ago. We are outdoors about 7% of our time in a 24-hour period. We are sitting the vast majority of our time. There are 80,000 or more synthetic chemicals.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  That have entered our food, water, air supply, personal care products. We're also living in this thermo-neutral existence now with no big swings in temperature. So that thermal energy signal to our cells has completely been cut off. We have really little heat, really little cold. We like it at 72 degrees. So every vector of the environment in which our cells are living in has changed. And the message that I want to share is that when you really dig deep into the science, the way that all those changes in our environment are actually harming our health is by directly hurting the mitochondria, that beautiful part of our cell that converts food energy to cellular energy to power our lives. So metabolism is our life force.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Metabolism is the process of creating the energy that powers everything we do, how we move, how we love, how we think, all of it. And I like to think of it actually in like a bigger picture too, and a picture that inspires me so much to want to share about the mitochondria, share about metabolism, which is that if we think of food as the environment and we think of food as this sort of structure in the cosmos, and we also think of food for what it really is, which is, which is plant matter that has taken photons that have traveled 92 million miles through space from a star, hit the chloroplast inside of plants,

• 25:15Speaker 01

  and then has been converted, that photon, that light energy, has been converted into the carbon-carbon bonds of plants. It's literally stored light in these bonds of plants. We either eat that, or animals we eat, eat that. And fundamentally, it channels into us unlocking the sun's light energy in our mitochondria so that we can have the thoughts, feelings, the creativity to spread our light in this world, our personal light, and to reach our highest purpose. And so we are the mitochondria, the metabolic machinery is fundamentally the end product, the machine that unlocks the sun's energy within us.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And something wild that very few people know is that mitochondria are actually light emitting organelles. If you take receptors and put them near the mitochondria, they actually release weak photon energy. So we are emitting light. And what is so devastating about the chronic disease epidemic that is almost entirely rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction, bad energy, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, all the same thing, is that in a sense, it's blocking what I think one of our core miraculous purposes is as humans to unlock light and have the energy and the internal life force to reach our highest purpose.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  So we can talk all day about, you know, insulin resistance and these sort of very clinical terms, but I think it's really important to back up and sort of see that this chronic disease epidemic, which is fueled by our bodies not being able to handle the changes in modernity and a healthcare system, unfortunately, that is fully financially incentivized to not focus on root cause physiology and instead focused on whack a mole medicine. It's not only hurting us, making us have shorter lives, make us have sicker lives, it's actually stopping us from being converters of light.

• 27:19Jay Shetty?

  And I think the natural reaction when everyone hears that, going back to your earlier point, is that is so scary.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Jay Shetty?

  Because if I can't trust the system, if the food has changed, as you said, it rightly has, our modern lives with sleep and social media and technology have taken over. And so I think fear becomes the natural reaction. And I don't think that anyone would be seen as weak for having that fear because it feels like the most natural reaction and response to the state of affairs. And so. When someone's feeling this and they're hearing this and they're thinking, I'm scared. I remember when I was working with a client and something I do when I'm coaching clients is I make sure that we've had all their biomarkers tested, they're working with a holistic health coach.

• 28:09Jay Shetty?

  I don't believe that they should be working on their mental health in a silo. And some clients will say to me, they'll say, I don't want to know. Like, I don't want to know. And I'll ask them why. And they'll say, because I'm scared what I'm going to find out. And it's a really interesting part of our society, like you're saying, in the extreme case, that ultimately we're scared of death. But our fear of death makes us fearful of trying to live healthy. Because we don't even want to know that we might have an early stage of a chronic disease or a terminal illness. And so where do we start assessing and reconstructing our relationship with that fear? And with that anxiety that comes with just, I don't know where to start?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Well, a key message I want to share with people is that it's actually so much, so much simpler than we've been led to believe. And the system actually benefits so much from us being confused and thinking that this is complicated, that it paralyzes us. There's been research that shows that close to 60% of Americans totally doubt their choices about the nutritional intake because they are so confused. Every day on social media, I get people saying, I literally have no idea what is safe to eat. They say kale is not safe to eat, oats are not safe to eat, obviously meat is not safe to eat. Basically, there's nothing left.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  And what we need to realize is the confusion is intentional. The confusion is intentional because the confusion essentially asks us to abdicate our internal knowing about what's right to us, what's right for us, to experts. And that's not working, right? Because, like I said, the more we spend on healthcare. The more research we publish on disease, on nutrition, on exercise, the more medical subspecialties we invent. There are now over 42 medical subspecialties. So the more research, the more spending, the more specialties, the more drugs, and the more surgery we do, the sicker we are getting.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  The confusion is the point. And so the more we're doing, the more confused we're getting. And meanwhile, we are being asked to essentially be divorced from our internal knowing and our common sense about what is right for us. If you sit down at a dinner table in front of a beautiful meal, prepared with love, with people you love, and it's from the farmer's market, and it's freshly prepared, you know that is healthy. You know that is good for you. We are now being so confused that we sit down, and we might see the kale and think, oh, my God, but the oxalates, that might hurt me, you know? And you get good sleep, you feel incredible the next day. You walk outside first thing in the morning, instead of getting straight on your computer, you feel incredible. We actually know what is healthy,

• 31:07Speaker 01

  but we have been so put through the washing machine of, you know, the cult of evidence-based medicine, and, you know, trust the experts, trust the science, that we are so petrified to trust ourselves. All you need to do is look at the wild. There is no chronic disease epidemic or obesity epidemic amongst any other animal species in the world. And they have no experts, no research, no doctors, no chronic disease epidemics. And it's because there's an intuitive sense of what to do that we have been told to distrust. So I think there's two main things that people can do to really get back to

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Understanding what their body is saying. So the first is free. It involves no wearables, no tech, you know, no lab tests. It's literally just reorienting to realize that symptoms are a gift. Every symptom you're feeling is a signal from the body. It is a way of the body communicating with you to tell you that it needs something different. When the needs of the cells are met, we have health. And when we do not meet the needs of the cells, or we overburden them with toxins or things that they can't handle, we get illness. So we have been told to smash symptoms. If you have a headache, take an Advil. If you have indigestion, take an antacid.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  You know, if your knee hurts, grab an anti-inflammatory medication. Migraine, it's all about killing symptoms. Instead of looking at them with curiosity, we really need to realize that all symptoms necessarily and fundamentally come from cellular dysfunction. They can't arise out of thin air. They are a result of cells not functioning properly. So when you have a symptom, you need to basically just ask yourself, what is my body trying to tell me? What is my body trying to tell me? And then realize that it's a pretty limited set of things that we can actually go to to meet the needs of the cells.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And one of the frameworks I love is to think of my 40 trillion cells as like my babies. They're like my children and I'm the mother. Like the whole me is the mother and the cells are all my little children and together somehow they make up me. But babies can't speak to you with words, so they cry when they need something. And like any mother or father knows, you just will quickly run through your checklist if the baby's crying. Does it need a diaper change? Does it need milk? Does it need to sleep? Is the temperature off? You fix those things. You run through the checklist. It's not an infinite list. And then the crying stops. And the way that our cells are crying is through these chronic symptoms and diseases that we have.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  And the way that we approach the cells is through the simple things that we can do every day. It's how has the food been? Are we eating the most nutritious, unprocessed, real food that is organic and not covered in pesticides? Are we avoiding the unholy trinity of foods that crush our cellular function? Sugar, refined ultra-processed grains, refined industrial seed oils? Food, got it. Okay, how's my food been? Sleep, am I getting enough sleep? Am I getting enough quality, quantity, and consistency of sleep? Movement, have I been moving? Have I been moving my body regularly throughout the day? Or have I been stuck in a chair yesterday, today, just planted and not moving my body? How's my stress?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Have I been expressing good boundaries? Have I been controlling what I'm looking at on social media? Have I been letting lots of fear-inducing sensationalist media into my eyes? Have I gone to therapy this week? Have I been reading my sacred or inspirational texts that keep me grounded? Toxins, have I been exposing myself to toxins? Have I been using, you know, the synthetic air fresheners and putting all the scented lotions on my body and eating non-organic food and not filtering my water and being around a lot of air pollution? Take stock of that. So you look at really these, these five main controllable pillars of food, sleep, exercise, stress, toxins, and take stock, take honest stock. How are you treating your cells?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  And why are they, why are they crying with these symptoms? So number one is look at your symptoms as a gift. Start to interpret how your body is talking to you, how your cells are talking to. Take honest stock of how you're living and then change course. And I think many people will find that when you do that, you realize, oh my God, there's actually a lot of little things I could be doing. I need to get a good night's sleep. I need to drink some water. I need to have a nutritious meal. I need to take a few deep breaths. And a lot of things actually will get a lot better with that. The second piece is a little more technical. And this is hearing your body through tools and technology that's only been available to us for like the past two to three years.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Incredible technology that can tell us more about our body and the inner workings of ourselves than our doctors have ever even been able to know about us. So this includes things like wearables that can tell us about our heart rate variability, our step count, our heart rate and our sleep. This is biosensors, which are brand new in our world and accessible for the first time ever. And right now, there's really only one main biosensor, which is called a continuous glucose monitor. There will be more in the future. But this can literally tell us an internal lab test of our body, show it to us on our phone, our glucose levels 24 hours a day, and tell us exactly how the foods we're eating and the way we're living and how we're sleeping is affecting this key metabolic biomarker.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And then we now have direct to consumer lab testing where we can see like a hyper granular picture of our metabolic health without even having to like beg our doctor for these tests. So you can really get a sense of whether your body is expressing bad energy and do that through the few clicks of buttons on the computer. So I would argue that it's actually the most exciting time to be alive. And I have nothing but optimism about the future of health for everyone, every single person living. Because through the framework of seeing your symptoms as a gift and understanding the modern tools and technology that exist today and that we have access to,

• 37:42Speaker 01

  we have the potential to actually live the longest, happiest, most vibrant lives, I think, in human history.

• 37:49Jay Shetty?

  I'm glad you went in that direction. It's definitely uplifting and energizing. And but going back to the first one, talking about killing the symptoms, I think you're spot on there, like hearing you talk about that. I'm thinking how easy it is to reach for a painkiller, how easy it is to kill the symptom, as you said. How, what is actually happening when we take an Advil? Like, what actually happens?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, great question. So, an Advil is what's called an NSAID, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication. And essentially, what it's doing is it is decreasing the levels of some of these downstream inflammatory molecules in our body, specifically things like called prostaglandins. And the details actually aren't that necessary to know, but it's essentially inhibiting an enzyme called a COX enzyme that produces these chemicals in the body that are inflammatory. And because inflammation is a process in the body that can, that can create the sensation of pain in our nerves, this can then help.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And I actually think, I'm so, I'm so glad you asked this question because when we're thinking about symptoms as gifts, so often, the thing we reach for to kill symptoms is an anti-inflammatory medication. It is the Advil. It is the Tylenol or the Flexeril or whatever it is. Yeah, the Motrin. And I really want people to step back and think about the concept of inflammation for a second. Inflammation is the immune cells of the body revving up a huge response, essentially a war in the body in response to some type of threat.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Inflammation fundamentally is biochemical fear. And inflammatory conditions are totally overlapped with metabolic conditions. In a way, I talk about in my book, the trifecta of bad energy, the things that actually lead to metabolic dysfunction in the body are three things that I talk about in the book, which are chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and what's called oxidative stress, which is reactive damaging molecules in the body. Together, those all work together to create metabolic dysfunction. And chronic inflammation is one of those things. And if we think of inflammation for what it is, which is The cells of the body being afraid of something.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  What we have to ask ourselves as individuals is, what is my body afraid of? We have to be asking that question before we reach for the Advil. Because we can often identify it very quickly. Maybe it's afraid of the fact that it's staring at war imagery on this device in your hand. Like literally 10 hours a day. That we are literally having to internalize the suffering of 8 billion people through a device that we hold in our hands in our bed. We know that that imagery literally creates chronic inflammation in the body. You talked about this with Michelle Obama, about how we're like, we're having to process,

• 41:09Speaker 01

  like, what was it, like terabytes of more suffering than people had to actually, in one day than people had to process in their whole lifetimes. So that could maybe cause some chronic inflammation. But then going through the rest of the list. Is the fear maybe the synthetic toxic glyphosate pesticide that's covering the food, the Cheerios that you're eating? Is it the fact that you got five hours of sleep last night? And your body's like, holy crap, like, I'm so tired. This is, what is wrong? What is going on? Is it the toxins in the environment? So if we think of inflammation as biochemical fear, and we ask ourselves, why am I taking this anti-inflammatory medication?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Instead of just asking myself, what is causing my body fear right now? It will lead us down such a more empowering path of truly, with compassion, giving the body what it needs to feel safe. As opposed to hitting this system that is trying to help us over the head with a hammer of medication that will not take the fear away. It will only numb the reaction the body is happening, is having to something very real.

• 42:21Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, that's, that's a fantastic on. So I'm so glad I asked it as well. Because I think, I think that's the challenge, right? It's become such a habit. It's become such an automated response to just reach for it. And what's even more worrying about it is this idea that we are disconnecting every time from our intuition, from our...

• 42:46Jay Shetty?

  Communication with our body to communication with all the cells and what they're trying to say. And the more we disconnect, the harder it is to reconnect every single day when you're having that experience. And I feel like we've tried as time has gone on to treat our body like technology. So if my phone is glitching out, I'm not trying to deduce why that is. I'll just refresh the app. And I know if I shut off this app and I reset it and switch it on again, it's going to hopefully go back to normal. And so there's very little areas in our life these days that we ever try to consider the root of the issue, because we don't have to in so many areas anymore. What about antibiotics

• 43:29Jay Shetty?

  and our gut microbiome as well? Because I believe there's a connection there. And I wanted to know for people, and maybe there's others, like I think Advil is very common, and the generics in the United States are very common. But what are those other easy generic meds that we're kind of dialing into that the majority of Americans are that you think are causing this disconnection as well? Advil is obviously one of the popular ones. What are the other ones? Antibiotics came to my mind, but they may not be the ones. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who

• 44:12Jay Shetty?

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• 44:57Jay Shetty?

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• 45:41Speaker 03

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• 46:11Speaker 01

  In a sense, I would argue that almost every medication that we're prescribing for chronic conditions is representing this disconnect that we're having right now. And I'm not anti-medication, but it's the framework that we have. It's the framework that we have that's causing the problem and that actually feeds straight into the pharmaceutical company's bottom lines, but not necessarily into the bottom line of human thriving. And I think all you have to do is just look at the reality of what is happening, which is that how does the healthcare system work? If you have depression, you see a psychiatrist and you get an SSRI. If you have polycystic ovarian syndrome, you see the OB-GYN

• 46:54Speaker 01

  and you either get Clomiphene or birth control pills. If you have high cholesterol, you see the cardiologist, you get a statin. If you have high blood pressure, you see the cardiologist, you get an ACE inhibitor. If you have obesity, you see the obesity specialist, you get Wegovy. It goes on and on and on. If you have diabetes, you see the endocrinologist, you get Metformin. And so the thing that people need to internalize is that...

• 47:19Speaker 01

  In that system, the more of those drugs were prescribing for those symptoms,

• 47:27Speaker 01

  the rates of all those conditions are increasing as we prescribe those medications. This is the definition of unsustainability. This is the definition of at a societal level, this approach not working. Absolutely for individuals, some of those medications will help them. There's no question. There are people I know who have depression, who got on SSRI and they felt a lot better and it gave them the motivation they needed to make the other changes. But because these drugs do not actually affect the physiology that leads to the disease, they just manage the downstream manifestation of the physiology in a symptom specific way. They don't actually help us solve the real problem.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  And in every one of those cases, we know that dietary and lifestyle interventions, which actually get at the trifecta of bad energy, which actually quell and meet the quell those issues and meet the needs of the cell, that in many cases, those work as well or better than the medication themselves. There is good research in Cochrane Reviews, which is an organization that does huge meta analyses of of research that shows that simply exercising 150 minutes per week is equivalent to an SSRI for the treatment of depression. And instead of having a 20 plus percent side effect profile of SSRIs, there's a less than 2% side effect profile with exercise, which is also kind of amusing to think about,

• 48:55Speaker 01

  that the side effect profile is like, you know, feeling sore, right? But it's not like something like gaining a bunch of weight or losing your libido, like what you might have with the SSRI. So you, there are different approaches for these things that actually would not only That's huge. get at those diseases, but also ease the physiology that's leading to these other things. And I think what people, it's both empowering and scary to realize that a lot of the smaller annoying symptoms that we deal with when we're younger, like the the PCOS, which is the leading cause of infertility in the United States, so many people, I'm sure this is happening in your friend group too, like so many people are dealing with infertility and getting IVF. Erectile dysfunction, gout, migraine, chronic pain, depression, anxiety.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  These sort of annoying but non-lethal symptoms are often, they often can be the warning signs of that physiology happening that will become louder cries later. It will become the things, the real diagnoses, like the high cholesterol and the high blood pressure and the high glucose, that then can be the loudest cries of all later in life, which are the things that kill us, which is the stroke, the actual heart attack, the Alzheimer's dementia, the cancer, the chronic liver disease, the chronic kidney disease, the chronic lower respiratory infections, these things, all of which are on the spectrum. They are either caused by or accelerated by metabolic dysfunction. That's a statement of scientific fact that our system, in its intervention-based model, conveniently ignores.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And I think two things I would just mention to kind of help people really internalize this. So people might say like, okay, you're saying a lot here. Like you're saying that gout and Alzheimer's are on the same spectrum and/or that cancer and PCOS are on the same spectrum. But what we need to realize is that the body has over 200 cell types. We have over 200, I think it's 221 different types of cells in the body. We've got, we've got the retinal cell, we've got the glial cell in the brain, the astrocytes in the brain, we've got endothelial cells that line our blood vessels, we've got hepatocytes in the liver, we've got ovarian theca cells in the ovaries. We've got all these different cell types, which very amazingly all came from one cell, which is awesome, and differentiated into these different cell types.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  And like I said earlier, every single cell needs energy to function properly. So if mitochondrial dysfunction, but because of our environment, is happening in the body, based on which cell type it's happening in, the ovarian cell, the astrocyte in the brain, the endothelial cell in the penis, the retinal cell, it can look like almost anything. It's like the great masquerader because an underpowered cell in the brain can look like Alzheimer's, chronic pain, depression. Migraine, depression, anxiety. An underpowered cell in the liver can look like fatty liver disease. An underpowered cell in the ovary can look, can express as infertility.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  An underpowered cell in the endothelial lining of the penile artery can look like erectile dysfunction. A dysfunctional cell can look like a million different things, but these are branches of fundamentally the same tree. And the secret is, which is the secret that I'm on this planet to share, is that if we focus our energy on healing that underlying process, it actually would make things so much simpler. Unfortunately, it would very much change the economic reality of the healthcare system, which is why this isn't being adopted and not happening. But that's not a problem we need to take on. We have the tools to actually, outside of the system, by trusting ourselves,

• 52:37Speaker 01

  get at that root cause, which the system, unfortunately, because it is so large, has no incentive to do. And if you're open, I would love to speak to that for just one second. I'd love to. Like, why the system? Because I think people might say, like, doctors are good people. And wouldn't the healthcare system want us to be healthy? And I think it's really, again, this is not meant to be scary. It's meant to help people understand why they need to take ownership of their own health at this moment in time. And I think it goes back to when I was in my surgical residency. I was training to become a head and neck surgeon, nine years into medical school and training. And I was heading out to start my private practice.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  And the mantra that everyone said to me in the hospital from my senior doctors was, "Get ready because you eat what you kill." And what that means, this very grotesque mantra, it's a euphemism that means your livelihood is dependent on how many surgeries you book and do. You eat what you kill. So you obviously aren't killing, but your, your, your bottom line, your entire income is just based on how many surgeries you will do and how many patients you can see. And right now, the healthcare industry is a, is a $4 trillion industry. It is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States. And it is a business. It's

• 54:05Speaker 01

  a business that's assigned to grow. And based on the way that healthcare is financed right now, which is that we make money when we have more people in the system for a longer period of time, having more things done to them, chronic disease is the ultimate cash cow for our system. There is literally no financial incentive to get a chronically ill patient out of the system, which is why

• 54:32Jay Shetty?

  It's wild.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  acute illnesses are no longer, like those, they're in and out, right? But a chronic disease, and especially a chronic disease that starts in childhood, which is now we're seeing so much more, the most lucrative thing for the largest industry and the fastest growing industry in the United States is a chronically ill child, which we are seeing those rates go up monumentally. 30% of young adults now have pre-diabetes. This was a disease that no pediatrician in their entire career would see 75 years ago. 20% of kids have fatty liver disease. This was a disease we only used to see in, in older alcoholics. It's now the leading cause of liver transplants. You know, kids, of course, are dealing with

• 55:17Speaker 01

  monumental mental health and behavioral crises. The thing to, to, to note though here is that I know probably at this point, hundreds of doctors that I've worked with, and there's not a single bad person I've ever really met in medicine. Like every single person I know who went through all this training, they all went into the system to help people. They all went into the system to do good work and to cure and had the best intentions. But the stark economic reality is that the largest industry in the United States, which is designed to grow, makes more money when we are sick and makes less money when we are healthy. And what that does is create an invisible hand that clouds every element of how we practice medicine in the United States and actually gets all of us and me

• 56:02Speaker 01

  in the past believing that it's all the right way and it's the best healthcare system in the country. It clouds everything from how research is done, how research studies are set up, to how doctors practice, to what we're learning in medical school, to how residency training happens and how the guidelines are written. And so fundamentally, I think just having real eyes open with what underlies every element of the system and how your doctor might not even realize how they're playing a part in this fundamentally intervention-based system is step one for making the decision to take matters a little bit more into your own hands and maybe bring your doctor along with you on the journey. But the reality

• 56:47Speaker 01

  is, is that we have an intervention-based system, the system profits when we're sick, metabolic dysfunction is the root of most of our symptoms and diseases in the modern American world, and it's quite simple to fix.

• 56:59Jay Shetty?

  Talking about young people, and I think that is a great place to start and focus on, because I think we would hope that with all of the technological advancement and healthcare advancement that we'd be setting up, the future generation for success. And in some of the research you share in the book, you also went on to share that 45% of teens are overweight or obese, and 77% of young Americans are too unfit to join the military. And this point really stood out to me. The generation born today is not on track to outlive their parents. And that is a clear sign that there's an issue, because with all the other advancement, that should be clear that we should be able to outlive

• 57:41Jay Shetty?

  the previous generations. And you talk about how there's seven policy changes that you think could be executive orders that would start to fix things tomorrow. And I wanted to highlight a couple of them that I think we could talk about, because I think that... It almost, even if we realize that currently it's in the individual realm of influence that we need to shift, it's healthy for us to understand what those big challenges are. So, one of the, I mean, the first one is ban pharma ads on news outlets. Currently 60% of, I'll let you say, number one, ban pharma ads on news outlets.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  It's hard to overstate how important it would be for the president, the next president coming into office, to just sign an executive order that says, "Ban pharmaceutical spending towards advertisement on TV." The reason for this is very simple. 60% of the advertising dollars that come into mainstream media are from the pharmaceutical industry. And this is, this is the point that just really keeps me up at night. The customer of the people making the news is not you. It's the pharmaceutical company. They are paying the bills. They

• 58:59Speaker 01

  are the customer. You are the product. And so, because the pharmaceutical company is the customer, the information that we are getting from our news sources is going to be shaped to have a favorable message about that industry. And that trickles down into culture. That trickles down into what we believe and what we think is normal. And so, unlike so many other countries in the world that do not allow pharmaceutical advertising on TV, that simple shift would change the way we're seeing and getting information. And they could still, of course, share about medical innovation and drugs, but not with

• 59:44Speaker 01

  a stranglehold on their neck of their livelihood, of the dollars that produce the show. And I think a fascinating thing that you, you notice in culture recently is that independent media, so people like you, people like Joe Rogan, Barry Weiss, people who have independent platforms, what are those platforms talking about? Foundational health.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  They were the ones during COVID who are talking about the things we can do to increase the resilience of the body and they are listened to by way more people than the mainstream media. But what's coming out on the mainstream media that's funded by pharma is a very pro pharma message, very little curiosity about what types of dietary and lifestyle strategies could improve our biologic resilience against things like a virus or otherwise. So it's fascinating to see how independent media is focusing on empowering health message and tens of millions of people are flocking to it. And it is in many cases, I mean, you look at Joe Rogan and others, like just being absolutely demonized and called all sorts of names. And then you look at mainstream media and

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  it's one message every day, all the time, which is that salvation comes outside of us. Salvation comes in an injection. Salvation comes in a pill. And it's actually anti-science to think that the little things you might dilly-daddle with, like be out in the sunshine or sleep or eat healthy food could actually help you. That's the message we're getting. And that's because the customer is one of the largest industries in the entire, in the entire world.

• 1:01:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I mean, when I moved to the States, I was absolutely shocked at the advertising. And I generally, I mean, I don't really watch TV, but when I was looking at some of the ads, it was almost a parody. Like, I was like, this has to be a parody. Like, this, this has to be satire. This can't be real. Because how can you talk about all the benefits? And then when you walk through all of the side effects and all of the potential consequences, may cause death, may cause this, may cause that. And I'm like, this has to be a joke. Like, this, this can't be serious. Like, Ryan Reynolds must be at the end of this advert, and it must be something funny. Like, it can't be real. And it's fascinating to me

• 1:02:06Jay Shetty?

  that it is real and that it has been gotten away with for this long. I wonder, have you ever looked at how, and, and again, I'm not expecting you to know this, I'm just intrigued by it, but have you ever looked at if that happens? If we ban pharma ads on news outlets and those 60% ad spots disappear or reappear with opportunities, have you looked at how that would affect the economy? I'm just fascinated by what a dent it would have on the GDP and the economy and all of that. Because I wonder the cost that they're weighing up in their heads. If, if based on what everything else you've said.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  There will have to be a economic adjustment if and when we hopefully adopt a good energy framework for the future of healthcare. Because right now, there's a, there's a devil's bargain happening between over $10 trillion of industry, the $4 trillion of healthcare, healthcare, sick care, and the six plus trillion dollars of processed food and industrial agriculture, which are a revolving door of financial support to each other.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  You create people who are addicted to ultra-processed foods that take them to their bliss point. They start eating themselves to death. They become customers of the healthcare system. And then the healthcare system does nothing to actually change the root cause of what's hurting them. And they go back to being, you know, going straight to the food. And the chemicals associated with industrial agriculture, the ultra-processed food industry that's creating all this Frankenfood in the healthcare industry is, are in a devil's bargain that all are keeping humans sick. And so, yes, I think that if we really radically reimagine what it would look like to turn the arrow of humanity in a better direction, it's gonna change a lot of these economics. But what I'm really hopeful about is that there's so many incredible companies

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  that are aligning profit with health.

• 1:04:12Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  That's totally possible.

• 1:04:14Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  And one of, one of the reasons that I co-founded Levels Health, which is a company that allows access for people to these continuous glucose monitors that help them understand exactly how the foods they're eating are affecting their own metabolic health in real time, is because it's an, it's an example of a company that As we add more value to people in understanding their health and their own bodies, that's good for the company. Absolutely. And you see this across so many things. You've got the incredible sleep companies happening. You've got Eight Sleep. You've got really incredible food brands that are cropping up, focus on regenerative good soil and low glycemic and no artificial chemicals. You've got meditation apps like Calm. You've got so many things cropping up.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  And I think it's just going to have to be a reimagination of what the economics of this look like. And I will say, like, there have been efforts to try to shift the healthcare system towards a model that aligns human health with profit. You may recall that under Obama, under President Obama, there was the Affordable Care Act. And there was this effort to create what was called value-based care. And value, the definition of value is it's an equation that is outcomes over cost. You want good outcomes for the lowest cost. That would be a high-value intervention. And so the way they set this up, which is amazing, like, because right now it's fee for service.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  You get paid as a doctor for what you do. That would have you get paid for adding value, which is better outcomes over a lower cost. And there's nothing higher value in healthcare than eating real, unprocessed, organic food. That's just the reality. If people eat real food, healthcare costs plummet and do all the other things, sleep and move, et cetera. So this is actually, it's an unfortunate story that ends poorly, but there was an effort to move towards value-based care where doctors would actually get paid significantly more by Medicaid and reimbursed more for their work if they provided good outcomes over low cost. This program got corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Because when I look at good outcomes as a doctor, good outcomes for health, I'm thinking about one thing and one thing only, which is, are the cells of this person in front of me functioning better? Are they functioning properly? Is there a functional cellular biology happening inside this patient? Because if that's the case, they will not have symptoms or disease. Unfortunately, quality in this

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Program was defined by things like medication adherence. So the outcome was actually co-opted to be actually how many of the patients on the doctor's panel were on the appropriate long-term medical therapy. So for instance, for asthma, I remember one of the quality metrics that a doctor could report on was what percentage of their patients with a diagnosis of asthma were on long-term albuterol therapy. So quality got called

• 1:07:21Jay Shetty?

  Compromise, yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Basically like adherence to drug regimens as opposed to what quality really is in health, which is a body that is functioning properly. And all doctors and all people need to realize that a body on medication is not, that's not the, that's not the outcome we want. We want a body that is healed, cells that have healed and that actually become functional. And my mom is literally the definition of, of this problem where everyone, including her and all her doctors, thought they were practicing good, good outcome medicine where she was on all her medications and all her little biomarkers, the little knobs were being turned on her LDL and her glucose and her blood pressure, but her cells never healed.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  And therefore she ultimately got the cancer and she ultimately died very prematurely. So, so that's kind of the framework I would, I would say for, for that.

• 1:08:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. Another one that I want to push out, which I think is in line with what you're saying here is stop federal funding for academic departments who take money from pharma.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  It is really wild. The FDA, which is a government agency and, and many academic centers get up to 75% of their budget from pharmaceutical companies. So you, you would think the FDA would be fully funded by taxpayer money and they would have taxpayer interest in mind, but again, it's no. And They did a, they did a report where there were over 181 million dollars of conflicts of interests reported, essentially research, academic researchers taking money from industry.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  And these are academic and NIH researchers. And so, right there, it just changes who we're working for. And so, I think if people are going to accept federal dollars paid for by taxpayers to do research, or to do anything touching health, it cannot also be taking money from industry, because then you end up having split interests.

• 1:09:32Jay Shetty?

  Wow. Yeah, I mean, it seems so obvious. Like, it's almost so painful to even think that these basic measures that seem like easy, easily drawn parallels can't be stopped.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Jay Shetty?

  And they haven't even got close.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Well, when you think about the realities of it, and why these things haven't happened, in almost every single state in the country, the elected representatives, a huge percentage of their constituency is employed by food, farming, or healthcare. So, anything to rock that boat is not going to be politically advantageous. And this is why someone like RFK, I think, is really gaining a lot of momentum. The most popular independent candidate, I think, in the last 100 years, because he's actually just saying a lot of this stuff plainly. And I genuinely don't think it's ever going to work to try and get some of these things through Congress, because there's just so much compromised interests. I think a lot of these things would have to be just straight executive orders from the president to say,

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  "We're going to make these changes, because the direction America is going is, it is not good."

• 1:10:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. It would be great for someone to do a real analysis on how you switch to build purposeful, profitable companies.

• 1:10:44Jay Shetty?

  And and what that looks like as an economy, because I think people get so scared, people who are motivated by money and and power and control get so scared by what happens if you suddenly switch it, not realizing that there are so many purposeful, powerful ways of doing the same thing and and in ways that actually help people. You're the other one that I wanted to pick out, and there's seven here, I'm only picking out a few. The last one I wanted to pick up was to eliminate added sugar from the National School Lunch Program.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:13Jay Shetty?

  Which feels like it should be an easy one.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:15Jay Shetty?

  Because that doesn't really have any economic downside at all.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  One of the most astonishing things that I think has happened in in public policy in the last 10 years is that when the 2020 to 2025 USDA food guidelines came up for renewal, they happen every five years, the Scientific Advisory Board to the USDA made a strong recommendation to lower the percent of added sugar in the diet from a recommendation of 10% of calories coming from added sugar to 6% of calories coming from added sugar. This seems minor, but that's a 10% of our calories to 6% of our calories is a big deal. The USDA rejected their Scientific Advisory Board's recommendation to lower, saying that there was not enough scientific evidence.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  And this has monumental implications. We are literally saying that two-year-olds, these tiny little bodies, can get 10% of their total calories from added sugar in the face of a world in which 50% of American adults have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, conditions directly related to sugar, and our bodies inability to process more sugar. And 30% of young adults now have prediabetes. And we're saying, we're not only saying it's okay, we're recommending that 10% of our calories can come from added sugar. This is, I mean, truly, I think this is shameful.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  And I I don't understand why every endocrinologist in the country isn't using literally every platform they Possibly to can to say, this is crazy. We need to be saying in America, no added sugar. This does not mean fruit. This means refined industrially processed sugar that's added to our food, which is close to 60% of the things on our shelf and that is absolutely wreaking havoc on our biology. With that compassionate framework towards our cells, if you think about what's happening with our mitochondria, sugar, which turns into blood glucose, it floats around in the body and the body has to do something with that. The body has to process it. And normally,

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  if you have the right amount of glucose in the body, the cells would take it up out of the bloodstream, the mitochondria would convert it to cellular energy to power our lives. But because of all the factors in our environment that we've talked about that are ravaging the mitochondria, not only is the mitochondria broken by all those things, the sleep, the toxin, the toxins, the sedentary behavior, but we are overwhelming the body with like 50 times more sugar than it's ever had to deal with in human history. And so imagine someone coming to you and saying, I need you to do 50 times more work today than you've ever had to do. And you're already going to be depleted because you're structured.

• 1:14:08Jay Shetty?

  That's a great perspective.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's what's happening to each of our cells every single day with this added sugar. And so what does the body do with it? The body says, well, the mitochondria can't process it. So we're going to block the cell from taking that glucose up. We just need to block it. That literally is insulin resistance. The body's saying, we can't do it. We are so broken and you are overwhelming us. Please stop. That's insulin resistance. The body blocking glucose coming to the cell. So of course then, blood sugar level rise, which is happening in 50% of American adults, 30% of teens, and so many more than that. But that's what we know. That's the ones that have been diagnosed with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. And then

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  With that extra sugar floating around that can't get into the cell, what does the body do with that? It has to do something. So it does the best it can. It converts it into fat. It 3D prints that glucose into triglycerides and fat. And now 74% of Americans are overweight or obese. So it all makes sense through this lens of we gotta just get back to the basics and stop literally having public policy that's essentially the root cause of how we're just totally overwhelming our bodies with these things that they cannot process. And they're saying it as loud as humanly possible. 74% obesity and overweight, 50% type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. Why in God's name are we recommending 10% of calories to come from added sugar?

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  So that needs to be an executive order. Reduce it to ideally zero or 6% like the, the scientific advisory board said, and absolutely do not serve it to children in federally funded school lunches.

• 1:15:51Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favorite podcast. Choose a seller or Northeast Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one hour workout to build strength, burn fat and build

• 1:16:36Jay Shetty?

  muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/OnPurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision making, and that extends to the practical stuff too, like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are, and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.

• 1:17:21Jay Shetty?

  Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Well said, well said. I mean, I don't think there's anyone who could listen to this and not feel completely moved to want to shift in this direction. I mean, I so deeply appreciate not only the energy with which you communicate, but the poignancy of each and every one of the insights. For me, I'm listening just, yeah, again, just feeling like, I hope everyone who's listening and watching, and this is definitely, when you read Casey's book, you realize this, this isn't to make you scared. It isn't to make you fearful. It's to make you feel empowered and pushed in the direction of change,

• 1:18:06Jay Shetty?

  because everything we've been hearing for so long has been doing the opposite. I wanted to talk to you about this, because a lot of people have said this to me. And I just invested in a company called Function Health. I don't know if you've come across them.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  I love them.

• 1:18:20Jay Shetty?

  Oh, great.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  I'm an investor.

• 1:18:21Jay Shetty?

  Oh, perfect.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  We're both investors.

• 1:18:22Jay Shetty?

  Perfect. So I just invested in a company called Function Health. I've known Dr. Mark Hyman for a few years, met the wonderful team, and I was very passionate about how they were allowing people to do, I believe, 200 biomarkers at $500 a year, which to me felt like a great investment. I think one of the things I want to help people with is, what do you do with those 200 biomarkers, results, the blood test, the biosensors? Like, I think a lot of people, again, look at that list, and you're like, well, where do I go from here? Like, where do I start? What do I do? What does HDL mean? What does, you know, HOMOIR mean? What does, you know, uric acid? Like, what is all of this stuff? It's so out of our vocabulary.

• 1:19:07Jay Shetty?

  And like you said, 99% of doctors in the book, you talk about this. 99% of doctors don't understand it or will say, don't worry about it. That's, that's what I've been told as well. Many times before I was able to start getting tested by my holistic doctors. All I was hearing is, don't worry about it. Don't stress about it. It's not a big deal. You're young, you're healthy. And I'm like, I know I'm young and healthy, but I want to stay young and healthy. And I believe that requires a bit more effort than me saying I'm young and healthy. It doesn't matter. And I've learned about early stages for me of LDL, of my predisposition to diabetes because of my heritage. And you know, there's so many things that I'm so happy I know about today, which has reduced my intake of certain things that I love or I enjoy,

• 1:19:50Jay Shetty?

  or I've been addicted to for years, whatever, whatever it may be. So how do people make sense of what to do with those 200 biomarkers?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  The first thing I want to say is that the system again, benefits off you thinking it's really complicated. It is not that complicated. Everything I learned about how to interpret lab testing, I learned after medical school. I learned it doing my own research. And I think that every, every American adult is totally capable of understanding their basic biomarkers. And in fact, we must. And so what I would say is start simple and start free. Every year, if you go to the doctor, they're going to order a very basic set of tests that usually involves a cholesterol panel and a fasting glucose test. They're going to take your blood sugar, your blood pressure as well.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  So a lot of people might be asking, how do I figure out if I have good energy or bad energy? And it's very simple. You start with five essentially free biomarkers. Fasting glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, waist circumference and blood pressure. They generally come standard on a physical. And if you have a fasting glucose less than 100 milligrams per deciliter, an HDL cholesterol above 40 for men or 50 for women, triglycerides less than 150 milligrams per deciliter, a blood pressure less than 130 over 85, and a waist circumference less than 35 for women or 40 for men, and you're not on medication.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  You, by our standard criteria, fit the category of essentially having good energy. That is essentially saying you are metabolically healthy. Shockingly, people who meet all five of those criteria not on medication currently comprise less than 6.8% of American adults. 93.2% of American adults, based on the most recent research, have at least one of those metabolic biomarkers off, or not in the optimal range. So that's just step one, is just know where you stand. And you can literally like, log into your electronic health record right now and get a, get a tape measure for your waist and, and

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  figure out those things. And I think a simple way, just, I'll just simply say kind of what those, those tests mean. So fasting glucose, like I mentioned, if that's rising in the blood, it's a symbol that deep inside your cells, the mitochondria are overwhelmed. The mitochondria are overwhelmed from all the lifestyle things we talked about that are under our control. And they are saying, we cannot process any more of this into energy. Therefore, we are blocking it from coming into the cell. Therefore, it rises in the bloodstream. That's why fasting glucose matters. It is a sign that deep inside the belly of your cell, the cell is overwhelmed and is blocking the entry. So it's rising in the blood. Triglycerides are totally related to that, because when that glucose is high

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  and has nowhere to go and isn't being converted in that miraculous cosmic process to human energy, it converts to fat. So it can be stored. Because the body does not want the blood sugar to be super high. High blood sugar is a problem in lots of ways. It sticks to things and causes dysfunction. It causes inflammation. So the body converts it to fat and stores it in, within cells or in fat cells. So that's what triglyceride means. Triglycerides is basically saying, there is, again, damage within the cell. The cell is overburdened and-

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  We are becoming metabolically dysfunctional, so we have to print fat to take care of this excess that we can't process. HDL is a helpful part of the cholesterol family, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. It's a type of cholesterol lipoprotein, so a molecule that floats around in the blood that actually takes cholesterol from the arteries back to the liver to be processed and excreted. So it's a way of taking cholesterol from where it could be causing problems in the blood vessels and putting it back to the liver. And unfortunately, when the liver becomes dysfunctional because of the way we're living today and becomes filled with fat, do the other, do what I just spoke about with triglycerides,

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  this process of creating the right amount of HDL gets dysfunctional and we start to see HDL decline, and that's a problem. So HDL is quote-unquote "good cholesterol," and when it's low, that basically means that we can't pull the damaging cholesterol from the blood vessels back to the liver. So simply put, that's like, that's a lot of what you need to know about metabolic biomarkers. There are so, so, so many more, but, and then waist circumference, that one's kind of interesting because it's really a proxy metric, waist circumference, for how much fat is around your internal organs. This is the type of fat that we're hearing about more and more called visceral fat. There's three types of fat. Subcutaneous fat, which is the fat you can see.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  It's the fat that, you know, we kind of try to get rid of because we don't look as good in a bathing suit. It's actually not the fat that's going to kill us. You know, this fat, it's not going to kill us. Then there's visceral fat, which is the fat that is around our organs that makes the organs dysfunctional. And then there's intracellular fat, which is literally fat that's built up inside the cell that causes massive dysfunction. Visceral fat and intracellular fat are the two types of fat that are going to shorten your lives, your life, and those are both driven by insulin resistance, that process that we talked about that is fundamentally rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction. So the waist circumference is just a way of basically telling you how much fat is around my organs and therefore, how insulin resistant might I be?

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  And then the last one is the fifth one that I spoke about, which is blood pressure. And blood pressure, again, it roots right back to glucose and insulin and metabolism. As our insulin levels in the body rise, and they rise, again, just let's make it really simple, the cell, the mitochondria is broken. It's not working properly. It can't process the glucose. It creates insulin resistance because insulin resistance, because insulin is the hormone that's secreted to help glucose get into the cell. But if there's an insulin block, essentially, the insulin can't do that job and glucose rises in the blood. But the body's like, oh, no, the glucose is rising. We need to actually secrete more insulin to drive glucose into the cell, which of course adds more burden to the mitochondria. So insulin levels rise.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Well, when insulin levels rise as a compensatory mechanism for this mitochondrial dysfunction and the rising glucose levels, another impact it has is to block nitric oxide production. And nitric oxide is the chemical in the blood that dilates our blood vessels and keeps our blood pressure under control. So hopefully, it's a little complex, but those five things all link back to the exact same thing, which is mitochondrial dysfunction, which is caused by the lifestyle pillars we talked about. So just to summarize, those five simple tests that usually come on every annual physical are the best place to start.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Understand where you stand on those compared to the ranges I mentioned, and that will give you a sense of where you are. And then it's really implementing the basic dietary and lifestyle strategies to give your body what it needs so we can free up the strain on the mitochondria and bring those things down. They will all start coming back in a normal range as you free up the mitochondria to do better work, which we do through our daily choices. Just quickly, speaking to function health, that is like the next level. And that is, if it's something that's accessible to you, I recommend every single person in the world do this if they can, because it's over 100 biomarkers, like you said, for less than $500, less than the copay that you would pay at the doctor's office for like 10 labs.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  And what that will do is actually give you a hyper granular picture of what's going on inside your body and your metabolism. And I mentioned that there are three hallmarks of bad energy. There's chronic inflammation, there's oxidative stress, and there's mitochondrial dysfunction. And the beauty of the function health tests is that they actually have tests that will tell you about each of those, so you can really know what's going on. And beautiful functional medicine interpretations that actually help you understand.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  What they mean. But I think, I think something that's again, hopefully empowering and not too scary is that at the best hospitals and medical schools in America, like Stanford, where I went to medical school, doctors are not learning how to interpret lab tests in a way that will help you be empowered to live a healthier life. We are only learning a very algorithmic way of looking at lab markers in isolation in order to prescribe medications. If LDL is high, prescribe a statin. If glucose is high, prescribe metformin,

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  and so on and so forth. And what's really interesting is that for the biomarkers that we do not have a good drug for, we ignore them, like triglycerides. You rarely hear about triglycerides, even though they are more associated with heart disease than LDL. We only hear about LDL because we have a medication for it. If uric acid is high, here's allopurinol. So we focus on the biomarkers that have a drug for them. And what they don't learn is how to look at the labs in concert with each other to read the tea leaves of what the labs are saying together to tell you about your core physiology. So what I just shared with you about fasting glucose, triglycerides, HDL, blood pressure and waist

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  circumference is frankly, more than what we even learn in medical school of how they all relate back to metabolic dysfunction. And so I think it's just really important for everyone to find the resources, like the book that explains it in clear detail. And you can sit down with the book and your lab tests and understand for yourself where you stand.

• 1:29:50Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And trust me, it's like for anyone who's listening and feeling like it's challenging, I've been learning all about this myself for the past couple of years. And while I could never explain it as well as Casey does, or even begin to try and understand it as deeply as you do, I've noticed how some of these very simple lifestyle changes have shown me big changes in how I feel. And I wanted to focus on some of those with you that you break down. One of the big ones that I've struggled with for a very long time, because I remember Feeling like I had to do this quick and fast forever. You talk about eating slowly, which I think sounds like the easiest, simplest, but underestimated habit. So could you walk us through that?

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  It's incredible. This is also my biggest challenge as well.

• 1:30:32Jay Shetty?

  It's so hard.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Especially as a surgeon, like I just would wolf food down and research strongly shows that the people who eat the slowest have a four times less likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome than people who eat the fastest. So literally, this has nothing to do with what you're eating. It's how you're eating. So this should be very empowering for people because it's like, even if you don't want to change the actual food, change the speed at which you're eating. And that does change everything. The average American family is eating fewer than three meals per week

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  at a table with the family. Like this is, this has become so normal now that we don't eat with other people. We eat in our cars. We eat while we're walking. We eat on the go. And I think just the key message here is that the more you can invest in sitting down at a table and eating slowly and mindfully, it's literally going to have a profound impact on your core metabolic health.

• 1:31:42Jay Shetty?

  Hmm. Another simple one I think we underestimate is walking. When I saw these studies that you sent through in the research, I was mind blown that simple act of walking could make such a difference.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. There's been research in some of the best journals in the world, like the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, one of the top five journals in the world, that shows that simply walking 7,000 or more steps per day can literally slash our risk of premature mortality, depression, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. And the, the studies, they vary a little bit. Some say above 7,000 steps. Some say between eight and 12,000 steps. But the, the point is, that is really key is that steps, it's not just about the steps.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Steps are a proxy metric for how much we are moving our body throughout the day. And there's been all these headlines like sitting is the new smoking. But I think it's really important to understand why. Our biology, our cellular biology is actually totally different if we are in motion more time throughout the day, even if it's something super low-grade like walking compared to if we sit all day and then just work out for an hour or two hours at night. The reason for this comes right back to the inside of the cell. So in order to take blood sugar out of the bloodstream and use it, have the mitochondria turn it to energy, you actually have to move these channels, these glucose channels from the

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  inside of the cell to the cell membrane. And one of the stimuluses for that moving of the glucose channel from inside the cell to the membrane is insulin. But another signal for that is movement. It's muscle contraction. So as we contract our muscles, we are basically constantly pushing these glucose channels to cell membrane to take up the glucose and process it through the mitochondria. We're stimulating the mitochondria to do work, which they love to do. They want to have a push to do work and they want to then get the glucose in to process it. So a body that's getting up every 20, 30 minutes and walking for just a minute or two, or doing a couple air squats, or doing a couple kettleball

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  swings, or doing a push-up or two, is constitutively keeping the glucose channels at the membrane and keeping the mitochondria active versus a person who sits all day at their desk job and then works out for an hour at the end of the day. Sure, they're going to get that benefit of pushing those glucose channels to the membrane of stimulating the mitochondria, but the whole rest of the day, they weren't. That's fundamentally a different biologic reality in both those bodies. So this is a yes and. Yes, do your workout. Do your Peloton and your HIIT workout or whatever it is. But I would say more importantly is to realize that the human body is biologically programmed to move in a low-grade way pretty

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  much all throughout the day. And if we can give the stimulus of low-grade muscle contraction to the body, it will keep our mitochondria and our glucose control so, so much better. And then, of course, that feeds into these profound statistics that I just mentioned, which is that just a simple amount of steps, 7,000 steps, that's like around three miles a day, 3.5 miles, can literally cut our dementia, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and premature death risk in half.

• 1:35:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, it's a, it was one of the biggest things when I was wearing my glucose monitor, I found that walking after a meal was the best one for lowering my, um, the spike. And I found that every time I walked after eating, there would be no spike. Like it was as simple as that. And it wasn't a long walk. It wasn't three miles after. It was just, as you said, a couple of minutes, just to walk around, just to get that mitochondria moving. So I've definitely seen it as well, and it was so empowering. And just to give people a double dose of this, uh, stats from Casey's book, 50% lower dementia

• 1:35:51Jay Shetty?

  risk, 50 to 70% lower risk of premature death, 44% lower risk of getting type 2 diabetes, 31% or more lower risk of obesity. These are high numbers, like of reduction.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Imagine if this was a pill.

• 1:36:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it would be front page news everywhere. New drug lowers Alzheimer's risk by 50%, but it's walking. And it makes us feel so good too, when we move our bodies. Everyone feels better when they've walked more. So it's, it's not just the walking, it's the, it's, it's, it's really, it's expressing our instinctual nature as animals and as humans, as the only bipedal animal. It's expressing that, it's honoring that miracle of our ability to move by doing it, and we need to.

• 1:36:42Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. One of the other ones that stood out to me that I loved was reduced social jet lag. I love this one.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had not heard of this concept of social jet lag until I wrote the book, but it's fascinating. So, social jet lag gets at sleep consistency, which is one of the three very important aspects of sleep that we often forget. So there's sleep quality, there's sleep quantity, and there's sleep consistency. Quality is basically how deep are we sleeping? Are we having awakenings during the night from something like light or noise in the room or sleep apnea? Sleep quantity is self-evident. It's are we getting enough sleep? And what seems to be the optimal amount for metabolic health is between seven and eight hours per night. But the third is sleep consistency. So this is, are we going to bed and getting up

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  at consistent times day to day? This is another one, like, slow eating that I have really struggled with in the past. And social jet lag is a measure of consistency. So what we do is we look at the days of the week, and you can split it between like, maybe days that you're working and days that you have more leisure time. And you look at the start time and the end time of your sleep, and you compare the midpoint of sleep between those two different phases. So let's say during the work week, my sleep is between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, because I have to get up for work at 6:00 AM. The midpoint of my sleep would be 2:00 AM. And then on the weekends, I stay up a little later, and I sleep from, let's say, 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM. The midpoint of my sleep is 4:00 AM.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  So the difference in those midpoints, 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM, is two hours. And research has shown that social jet lag of two hours or more between different nights of the week confers a doubling of the risk of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, than if that is a shorter window. It's huge. It's huge. So that's sleep consistency. And what it gets to, I think, is a really important point about our biology, which is that we are on a 24-hour cycle as humans, and our circadian rhythms really dictate so much of our biology.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  And our bodies are naturally on a 24-hour clock. We have clock genes. But there are a few ways, through our behavior, that we can entrain the natural clock of the body, which then feeds into the proper expression of so many of our genes and hormones and cell signaling pathways. And there's three main ways that we can essentially tell the body what time it is. The first is sleep consistency. Are we going to bed and getting up at essentially the same time every day? That creates a rhythm for the body that it can just ease into, that entrains essentially the clock for the body. So that's why sleep consistency is so important. The second is meal timing. When are we eating each day?

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  We eat at super erratic times during the day. The average American actually has over 11 eating events per day over the course of 15 hours. That's a lot of eating events. So the body that's expecting maybe more regular times and definitely eating before dark is now getting food all the time totally confuses our clock. The third is when we view light. So this is probably one of the most important ones, which is if we, you know, our, our body doesn't know if it's dark or light outside, if it's day or night. Our cells don't have eyeballs.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  And so we have to tell the body what time it is by exposing it to literal photons. The photons go through our eye, go through the vitreous fluid in the eye. They hit our retinal cells that transmit an electrical action potential to our suprachiasmatic nucleus, which then translates into essentially telling our body, it's morning. That's how it happens. And so it is really our responsibility to show our retina cells direct photon energy. Doesn't mean staring straight at the sun. It means just being outdoors without a window or sunglasses and just being outdoors. And that is a signal that entrains our 24 hour clock saying, hey, it's morning.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  So, so just to summarize here, circadian rhythm is absolutely critical for our metabolic health because so many of our metabolic genes, signaling pathways and hormones are, are on a 24 hour rhythm. And the way that we can essentially create less confusion for the body is by regular signals of what time it is, which we do by sun exposure in the morning and avoiding artificial blue light after the sun goes down, regular meal times each day and sleep consistency, meaning going to bed at night at the same time and getting up in the morning at the same time, which we can measure through the metric of social jet lag. And we really want to keep that, that social jet lag metric less than two hours.

• 1:41:41Jay Shetty?

  You def, that's my two hours, minus two hours. I'm like already going, oh gosh, how did I solve that on the weekend? But. Casey, I mean, you've given so many great practical insights today. I think you've woken us up to the idea of the challenges that exist in our society as well. And what I love where you take this book is this idea of how this isn't just a physical journey. It's not just a mental journey. It's actually a spiritual journey of rising to fearlessness. And I love that you do that because to me, I think often what gets us started when it comes to our health is fear. But it doesn't keep us going, right? We may have the fear of, I need to be healthy because I've got kids now. I have the fear of, oh, I'm putting on weight.

• 1:42:25Jay Shetty?

  I don't want to put on weight. I have the fear of, oh, no, I just got diagnosed with this thing and I really don't, right? So it's always fear that kind of gets us started. But you're actually saying fear is not healthy for us, even on a cellular level. And you're actually encouraging us to rise to fearlessness. How do we build that when some of us think we're manifesting a unhealthy life for ourselves? Or we almost feel conditioned to believe that it's all going to end badly. Or we've had someone we've lost in our life early on and we now believe that will happen to us. Or maybe actually you're listening to this and you've been healthy so far. And all of a sudden you go, well, maybe I'm not healthy.

• 1:43:06Jay Shetty?

  And it's so easy to get into because of how a lot of this information is also presented is that we start to feel like we're just being scared. How do we, how do we rise into fearlessness?

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  I'm a big believer that the best health arises when our cells are living in an ecosystem that feels safe and believes in abundance and is fundamentally rooted in joy and awe. Because our cells hear every single thing that we're thinking through our hormones and through our neurotransmitters, they know. They know if there's a threat and they know if there's something to be afraid of. So I think it's one of our greatest jobs as humans to create an environment, just like we would for a baby, of a sense of safety. And I think a lot of people might say, oh, my gosh, that sounds impossible. The world is crazy right now.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  But this might, you know, sound dark, but I actually think, again, it's like a very hopeful message, like. The reality is that we are all going to die. That is unavoidable. That is the only thing we can be certain of. And so, living in constant fear just doesn't really make sense. Like, living with curiosity and awe and appreciation and actually really diving down that spiritual journey of exploring what this life and this whole death thing really means, like, to me, that leads us to this sense of starting to really realize that,

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  like, fundamentally, we are, we are part of this eternal, infinite, limitless cosmos. We are not separate from it. We are totally connected. And that's like, super awe-inspiring. And if our health journey can be rooted in that, rooted in the sheer miraculousness of us being alive at this moment, of us having consciousness, of this statistical near impossibility of being here and wanting to honor that. And I think, I think that's where all really good choices come from. In many spiritual frameworks, we, we talk about attachment as the root of suffering.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Being attached to things being a certain way is the root of suffering. And it's interesting, as this plays into sort of our American culture, like, we think about, what is one form of attachment is cravings. Like, cravings are a form of attachment. We want something, we have this insatiable desire for something specific, and we want to eat it. But what so many spiritual traditions throughout history have told us is that, you know, nothing in the material world can actually reduce our suffering, except connecting essentially with Source, with God. And, and so, and that's my framework. That's what I, I do believe that. And so, some might say, well, if that's the perspective, that just connecting with God and connecting with Source and Spirit, whatever you want to call it, and channeling sort of

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  the divine within us, that we are a part of and totally interconnected with, if that, then why do we have to do all this healthy stuff? Like, why do we have to, like, eat healthy and this and that? And I think it comes down to the fact that... As we make the healthy choices, as we eat the healthy food, as we get the sleep, as we move our bodies, we are creating the form of the body, the structure of the body that I think has an easier time connecting with source. That resonates, yeah. And if we are essentially channeling that source energy and duality, duality is the root of the suffering.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Duality is that we were part of the spirit world and we came into this body and we forgot, we forgot that we are part of that. We forgot that we are pure love. We forgot that we are a piece of God. If the forgetting is from that duality when we were born and the purpose of getting back to essentially bliss is remembering, I think it's, I personally think it is easier to remember when we have a body that is really functioning properly. And so my spiritual journey is rooted in the choices every day that build this radio tower. I am the radio tower, the sensor, to try to connect with that.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  And when I'm doing the healthy habits and the bio hacks and the protocols and all this stuff, like whatever you want to call it, it's actually in service of building a structure that can channel that in the most open and clear way. Absolutely. And I think that, that's just my perspective. And I think that, but I think it's just really realizing that it's, it's bigger than just these, these like, the books and the hacks and the optimization and the, and the micro things and, you know, how much zone two training to do every day and all these things. Like if we root this journey in a bigger picture of basically striving for this bliss,

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  I think that it can really help motivate us. And then remembering that Taoist principle that we're a process, not an entity, this is why we actually have to do the health behaviors every day. Because we're, every day, we're rebuilding that radio tower that can connect with source. Every day, we're building that sensor. And so you want to keep doing the habits with good food and good sleep and movement and reducing the toxic stress and the toxins in the environment, because you're rebuilding that half of the duality, the body, every single day. And

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  When that structure gets hurt and dysfunctional, we get the depression and we get the anxiety and we get the fear and we get the diseases and it ends up being distracting, you know, from this. So that's something that really motivates me when it comes to, and that alleviates a lot of the fear for me. But I think we just all need to understand that when we are emotionally sensing fear in the body from any source, from the news, from our childhood trauma, from the email we got, whatever the fear is, anytime we're experiencing emotional fear, it's translated biochemically into the body through hormones, neurotransmitters, that fundamentally the

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  body has to respond to. The body is going to respond to that fear, even if it's emotional, and that will divert our resources towards defense rather than thriving. So each of us needs to take honest stock of what emotionally, psychologically is causing fear in our lives and work to set the boundaries to limit it, whether it's our fear of death, our fear of some inner wound that happened in childhood, intergenerational wounds, whether it's your relationship with your coworkers, whether it's the news that you're watching of wars thousands of miles away. And you must work to limit it because the more fear that your body is experiencing,

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  the more you're diverting resources away from thriving. In the book, I talk about the true biochemistry of this and how actually fear and loneliness directly in scientific studies leads to all three hallmarks of bad energy, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction. So that's our job as humans. Our job is to overcome the fear. We want to have healthy fear. We don't want to walk across the street without looking. We want to have healthy acute fear. We do not want to have chronic fear. And the world we're living in wants us to be afraid, profits off of us as being afraid because afraid people are going to hide, they're going to be quiet, they're going to look

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  for salvation outside of themselves in industry, and they are certainly going to buy any product that they think is going to alleviate that fear. So it's our job to take stock of that and do the work to create a sense of safety for all those cells inside our body.

• 1:51:13Jay Shetty?

  Casey, thank you so much. It's been such a joy talking to you today. And I hope that everyone who's been listening grabs a copy of Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. I want you all to have a happier, healthier, more healed life. And this book will unlock that fearlessness, which I think is such a core, yet unique aspect of what we're all missing. I hope that this is an episode that you'll revisit. I hope it's an episode you'll share with friends and family. Maybe you'll listen to it together again and deduce which insights. I'm moving away from this episode, feeling extremely inspired to recommit to my health journey. There are so many things I'm thinking about over the last couple of weeks that maybe I haven't been as mindful with.

• 1:51:58Jay Shetty?

  Maybe I have made mistakes on and want to reconnect with. And Casey, we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five or a fast five. These ones have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. Casey, here's your final five. What is the best advice you've ever received or heard?

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  What I think of when I think of best advice is actually, it was the motto of my high school, which was an all-girls school. And the advice or the mantra was every girl has something to say. And I would like to broaden that to every person has something to say. I think that we're living in a world, again, rooted in fear, where people are self-censoring themselves and stopping themselves from expressing what is deep inside their heart, because they are afraid of the repercussions of rejection, of being canceled, of having mean comments online. And fundamentally, this self-centrship that I'm seeing really rampant, it's rooted in a scarcity mindset.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  And it is representative of a block of flow of energy and inspiration through us. And I think that in many ways, it's blocks of energy flowing through us that is fundamentally the root of so much of the health issues that we're facing today. Literally metabolic dysfunction is the block of that sun energy flowing through our cells to create human energy. And so, anything we can do to keep the flow open, through the healthy, good energy habits to improve metabolic health, through speaking authentically.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  In what's our hearts, whether it's in a journal or to your loved ones, or doing things to just move flow through our body, our blood, dance, you know, move, shake, do whatever you need to do to get things moving. But I think that mantra, every girl, every person has something to say feels really resonant now, where I see a lot of people hiding the truth in their hearts because they're afraid of the repercussions because of the public digital world that we live in.

• 1:54:00Jay Shetty?

  Well said. Second question, what is the worst advice you have had or received?

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  The worst advice I've ever heard is all good things in moderation. I think that this phrase that has become so ubiquitous is actually representative of a real leak in principles. There are things that we do not want in moderation, in our bodies, in our temple, especially in our children's bodies, refined sugar, pesticide-covered ultra-refined grains, the 80,000 synthetic toxins that are in our food, water, and air that might be in products that we think are good, all good things in moderation. I think we need an intense reinvigoration of courage,

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  of people saying what's right and what's wrong. We're afraid to say what's wrong right now. While literally around us, Rome is burning. Our population is getting increasingly sick at every age and as adults. We need to have the moral clarity to say, don't eat this. Don't put this in your body. It's not good for you. And people are becoming afraid of that. And so I think all good things in moderation is representative of lack of clarity that is hurting us.

• 1:55:18Jay Shetty?

  Question three, what's the first thing you do in the morning and last thing you do at night?

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  Well, to be totally honest, the first thing I do in the morning and at the end of the day, every single day, is I roll over and I tell my partner how much I love him.

• 1:55:32Jay Shetty?

  I love that.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Every single day, I'm just being totally honest. And I think

• 1:55:35Jay Shetty?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  I think starting every day with love fundamentally, you know, gets me tied into what I think our true nature as humans are as part of this incredible universe, which I think the core frequency of the universe is love. And so I think anything we can do to start our days with love, whether you have a partner or not, a pet or not, it's expressing love in some way, whether it's to a person. Gratitude for this beautiful life that we have, something that expresses the vibration of love, which I think fundamentally is the vibration that keeps us as healthy as possible.

• 1:56:11Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Question number four, what's a lesson you wished you learned earlier?

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  The lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier is to make decisions with my body instead of with my brain.

• 1:56:23Jay Shetty?

  That's great.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  In the Western culture, we are so focused on thinking our way to decisions. And I think my life has transformed when I have more felt my way to decisions. I think the body has such intense, innate wisdom and intuition and connection with all of source. But we need to slow down from the distraction industrial complex of our world to be able to hear it. And once I've tuned in to what my body is telling me every day, that upset stomach, that little sense of what's right and wrong, everything has become easier.

• 1:57:06Jay Shetty?

  That's fantastic. Fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  I think the law that would help bring to fruition the world that I really want to see is to create widespread economic incentives to return to a more natural form of agriculture and farming. So eliminating the pesticides and creating an incentive structure for farmers that allows them to cultivate the earth, our mother, the soil that we come from in a way that is respectful and really respects the complexity of the ecosystem which humans live, which soil, which all the microbes in the soil live. We've decimated our soil. We've killed soil.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Soil is a life-giving and living organism that is now dead because of the ways that we have. Manage the earth since World War II with industrial agriculture, with mechanized tilling, with synthetic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. And because we've killed the soil, we're actually killing ourselves. And I think that gets to like the broader point, which is, I think, maybe the key point I would want to leave the listeners with, which is that it's that connection that really is what's going to heal all of us. Like, we are living in a system that promotes silos.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  And that's not working because we actually are in not only an interdependent living system between soil, plants, animals, and humans, but we're in an interdependent cosmos. And so as we move and create, hopefully, laws like this that move us from silos to the connection, I think we are going to get so much healthy. We need healthier. We need to realize and really internalize the connection between most all of the symptoms and conditions we're facing today and their fundamental connected rooting and metabolic dysfunction. We need to realize the totally interdependent connection between soil, humans, air, water, and light.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  And the the foundation of planetary healing is not going to be carbon capture. It's going to be respecting the interdependent relationships between all things on the earth. Third, we need to realize the connection between humans in loving in-person relationships and that that is a foundation of the safety ourselves need to be as healthy as possible. And I think lastly, I would just say we need to understand that connection between life and death and an eternal process that we are a part of and that has nothing to fear. So fundamentally, laws that promote the idea of connection reduce the siloing that's hurting us and ultimately help us thrive from within.

• 2:00:01Jay Shetty?

  Good for Casey. Thank you so much for joining me on purpose today. Everyone who's been listening or watching, make sure you tag both Casey and I on Instagram, on TikTok, on X, whatever platform you're using with your key highlights, the practices you're trying out, the habits you're going to implement, the shifts and changes you're making in the lives of your own and the people that you love. Casey, thank you once again. It's been a joy and an honor and I am so happy that you're leading this mission and pushing it in the way you are. It's so powerful and very grateful that we spend this time together today.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Thank you for all, all the light and incredible good energy that you are spreading in the world. I so look up to you Jay and I'm so grateful to have been here. Thank you.

• 2:00:42Jay Shetty?

  Thank you Casey. Thank you so much. If you loved this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.

• 2:00:55Speaker 04

  Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable.

• 2:01:03Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:01:19Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped growing? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 2:01:24Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:01:27Speaker 06

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 2:01:28Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.