How FEAR Affects Your Brain, How To Strengthen Your Immune System & The 3 Important Fats For Brain Health w/Shawn Stevenson EP 1141

“As we grow ourselves, we start to become less influenced by the negativity around us.”Today's guest is Shawn Stevenson, who is a graduate of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he studied business, biology, and nutritional science. He’s the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. He’s the author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show and today we’re talking about his book Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain and Transform Your Life. This is actually Part 2 of our conversation, so make sure you check out Part 1 by going to www.lewishowes.com/1140 You don’t want to miss that one! In this episode Lewis and Shawn discuss how fear affects your brain and body, the simple ways you can start strengthening your immune system, the biggest factors leading to chronic diseases, the 3 most important fats for brain health, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1141Read his new book: www.eatsmarterbook.comCheck out his website: www.themodelhealthshow.comShawn's sources that he mentions:Neuromodulation can stimulate or inhibit calorie absorption - Yale University9 out of 10 healthcare workers hospitalized with COVID-19 have at least 1 preexisting chronic disease - CDC95% of deaths associated with COVID-19 had an average of 4 preexisting chronic diseases and/or comorbidities - CDCObesity, anxiety and fear-related disorders, and diabetes are the greatest risk factors for death with COVID-19 - CDCMore episodes you might like as well:The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,141 with international bestselling author Shawn Stevenson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:28Lewis Howes?

  Maya Angelou said, "You can only become great at the thing you're willing to sacrifice for." And Stephen Covey said, "Only the disciplined are truly free. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites, and passions." Oh, some good quotes today. And my guest is Shawn Stevenson. If you were here for part one, then get ready for part two. As Shawn is a graduate of the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he studied business, biology, and nutritional science. He's the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. He's the author of the international bestselling book called Sleep Smarter that has helped transform my sleep in a massive way,

• 1:10Lewis Howes?

  and the creator of the Model Health Show. And today we're talking about his book, Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life. And again, this is part two of the conversation. So make sure to check out part one as well by going to lewishouse.com/1140. You don't want to miss what we shared there. And in this episode, we discuss how fear affects your brain and body, and really the power of fear on the brain and the body, the simple ways you can start strengthening your immune system today, the biggest factors leading to chronic disease, the three most important fats for the brain health, and a lot more good stuff here. Again, if you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with a friend that you think would be inspired as well.

• 1:52Lewis Howes?

  Just copy and paste a link on the podcast platform, or you can go to lewishouse.com/1141 for the full show notes and share it with people there. Very excited about this episode. In just a moment, the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

• 2:09Lewis Howes?

  You think the mind can control and say, I'm gonna have 1500 calories right now with this ice cream and donuts and nothing is gonna be absorbed in my body. It's going to go out to me and you just manifest, you just decide and declare, no, it's not entering my body.

• 2:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Didn't you fire walk?

• 2:26Lewis Howes?

  I did, yeah.

• 2:27Shawn Stevenson?

  You see what I'm saying? So like, I did it too.

• 2:29Lewis Howes?

  I did it too.

• 2:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Anything is possible. Yeah, and I actually, a friend of mine, she stepped on a coal that was not in the fire pit and

• 2:36Lewis Howes?

  Burned herself.

• 2:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, Jamie Masters.

• 2:38Lewis Howes?

  She wasn't in the right mindset, probably.

• 2:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, she wasn't, she just accidentally, it was like, right there, just kinda like, sitting there for a minute.

• 2:45Lewis Howes?

  Burned her.

• 2:45Shawn Stevenson?

  And burned her. But anyways, we walked across that stuff, man. So hypothetically, it could happen, but here's the thing. Let me, let's dive in a little bit deeper on what that looks like.

• 2:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Aliya Crum, out of Stanford at the time when she conducted this study, she wanted to find out how our thoughts affect our digestion, how our thoughts affect how we assimilate nutrients.

• 3:07Lewis Howes?

  Give it to me.

• 3:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, and this is called the milkshake experiment.

• 3:11Lewis Howes?

  Well, I love a good milkshake.

• 3:14Shawn Stevenson?

  So they blended up a batch of milkshakes and they were all somewhere around 380 calories. And I detailed this in Eat Smarter a lot more, so it might be 360, but I believe it's 380 calories. Now, so all the milkshakes are the exact same amount of calories, they're the same level, in the same containers that they're passing out. Now, here's the thing. They take it and now they put labels on them that they are different amounts of calories. On one set of, on one set of milkshakes, they put that they're 180 calorie sensible milkshakes.

• 3:48Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 3:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, and then on others, they put that this is a 620 calorie indulgent.

• 3:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, but they're all the same calories.

• 3:55Shawn Stevenson?

  They're all the same. They're all the same. And so, here's what happened.

• 4:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, I think we gotta get a little bit of the kind of endocrine biology here with basic satiety hormones, so leptin and ghrelin. All right, so leptin is a major satiety hormone, makes us feel satisfied, we feel we're in our body, we're not ravenously hungry, right? When leptin is level and also leptin sensitivity is a whole other conversation. So we got leptin satiety hormone, then we have ghrelin, which is a bona fide hunger hormone. All right, but it's more than that, it's more than that. It's also has to do with our metabolic rate and other things too. But basically, when ghrelin levels are high, it's driving us to go eat something. I think about it like the ghrelin gremlin, right? Don't feed them after midnight, you know what I mean? So the ghrelin gremlin.

• 4:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Now with ghrelin levels going up, that's gonna drive us to eat, but when they're going down, it's gonna make us inherently feel more satisfied. So here's what happened. The people who were given the indulgent milkshakes that were, again, they were-

• 4:59Lewis Howes?

  Higher calories, same calories.

• 5:01Shawn Stevenson?

  They said, but they thought they were higher. Their ghrelin levels went down three times lower.

• 5:06Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean, they were less hungry?

• 5:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Their ghrelin levels, their hunger hormones went down three times lower than what they actually consumed.

• 5:17Lewis Howes?

  Their desire to be hungry went down.

• 5:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, it went down three times lower.

• 5:22Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy, okay. Just because they thought they were having a lot of calories.

• 5:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, they thought that they were having something indulgent that was very calorie dense. The people who had, the ones that were labeled, you know, 100 calorie sensitive shake, their ghrelin levels barely budged.

• 5:35Lewis Howes?

  It's like they were having a glass of milk and there was like, I need some more, like what?

• 5:39Shawn Stevenson?

  It's like they had water.

• 5:40Lewis Howes?

  Water, wow.

• 5:41Shawn Stevenson?

  And they're like, soon after, they're gonna be-

• 5:43Lewis Howes?

  Pour back up, yeah, yeah.

• 5:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Because they believed that the calories were lower in that particular item.

• 5:49Lewis Howes?

  That's bad, now I wonder, if you believed you had 680 calories, would you actually add on a, is that a half a pound of fat? Or like a half a pound?

• 5:59Shawn Stevenson?

  This is getting into-

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  On a scale?

• 6:00Shawn Stevenson?

  This is getting into the metabolic effects, because it's not just about calories. And we talked about this last time, there are these epicaloric controllers. And I detail all of them in Eat Smarter, I detail them. But we talked about how the type of food itself controls how your body holds on to those calories, or- Or burns the calories off.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:20Shawn Stevenson?

  We also go through how your metabolism work, how the process of fat loss actually works. Like where does fat go? We talked about all that last time. But so there's these epicaloric controllers. One of them is your brain, for example. But also beyond that is your beliefs about what you're eating. Because it's going to change the hormonal cascade.

• 6:39Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, crazy.

• 6:39Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? So.

• 6:40Lewis Howes?

  So give me an example. If I believe what I'm eating is high in calories, is lots of sugar, is, you know, bad for me, and I think this is really bad for me.

• 6:51Shawn Stevenson?

  That's terrible.

• 6:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Shawn Stevenson?

  That's terrible.

• 6:54Lewis Howes?

  So don't, when you're eating this and say, this is horrible for me, um, instead of keep eating the donuts. What should you be doing when you know you have something that's not the healthiest, but you're enjoying the sugar and the cheat of it?

• 7:05Shawn Stevenson?

  That's the thing, that's the beautiful part about it.

• 7:06Lewis Howes?

  Enjoy it.

• 7:07Shawn Stevenson?

  For me, being in this space and why I found, I think, a really great lane where we saw so much success with all the patients that we're working with. Is because that nothing's off limits. Nothing is, we can't, we get into this giving food morality where something is bad. And if you're eating a food that's bad.

• 7:22Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 7:23Shawn Stevenson?

  What does that say about you as a person?

• 7:25Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 7:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? So I'm eating this bad food, I must be bad.

• 7:29Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. I can't control myself eating this and I'm bad.

• 7:32Shawn Stevenson?

  We get into these really complex psychological.

• 7:35Lewis Howes?

  Shaming ourselves.

• 7:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so.

• 7:37Lewis Howes?

  So when you're gonna eat, when you're gonna eat the not optimal foods.

• 7:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Just enjoy it.

• 7:42Lewis Howes?

  Just enjoy and say, I'm gonna enjoy this, I'm gonna have fun, tastes good.

• 7:47Shawn Stevenson?

  The best time, the best time to eat something that we would consider like a treat or like, you know, we'll just say pizza or.

• 7:56Lewis Howes?

  Ice cream.

• 7:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Cake or donut, yeah.

• 7:57Lewis Howes?

  Is when?

• 7:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Is when we're feeling good. But we tend to do it when we're feeling bad.

• 8:02Lewis Howes?

  It's so true. It's when something's not going well in a relationship or it's something at work, we're like, ah, I just wanna.

• 8:07Shawn Stevenson?

  It tends to compound the issue, you know, but also they can be, if it's done with intentionality, it can be a part of the healing process. That's the thing too, because again, we get so black and white with stuff like, you know, you shouldn't be doing this, shouldn't be doing that. It makes us humans, we don't like rules in a sense. Like it makes us wanna rebel against the thing, you know? And so it can be a part of the process, but we have to maintain integrity. Because for example, carbohydrates, it's really interesting that.

• 8:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And I actually did a master class on this on my show recently, talking about natural clinically proven ways to increase serotonin production in our bodies. And so serotonin is a dual hormone and neurotransmitter. So it has multiple impacts on our endocrine system and on our nervous system. But serotonin is noted to be like this feel-good vibe to it. Like when serotonin is optimized, like a lot of antidepressants target serotonin.

• 8:59Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 9:00Shawn Stevenson?

  They're selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But it's not making you produce more. It's just trying to reduce the metabolism of it so it stays in your system longer in a sense. But that's a whole other thing. So bottom line is this. Carbohydrates actually increase serotonin levels.

• 9:18Lewis Howes?

  Makes you feel better.

• 9:19Shawn Stevenson?

  In a sense. Now, this isn't 100% true across the board, but it's seen in peer-reviewed evidence that having a little whack of some carbohydrates can actually increase serotonin.

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  Little french fries, little, you know.

• 9:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, make you feel, get a little bit of hit of feeling good. So, but we have to put that in its proper place. We've all experienced this, but we think it's a sugar high. It's not just that. It's what it does to your neurochemistry. It's what it does to your hormones. That's really, it's so much deeper.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  What do carbs do to your hormones?

• 9:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, it depends on the type of carbohydrates.

• 9:53Lewis Howes?

  Quality of carbs, yeah. And what time of day and everything.

• 9:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so, but let's be clear. I mean.

• 9:58Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't your brain run on carbs? Like, isn't it running like sugar and carbs?

• 10:02Shawn Stevenson?

  So this goes back to, and I think this is an important place for us to get here, is that the brain, as I mentioned, the blood-brain barrier has a tremendous amount. I think about the blood-brain barrier being like a massively complex toll booth. And at each of the tolls, there's like the best security guard in the world. Like Dwayne the Rob Johnson, or like whoever people want to put in their mind. Maybe somebody really tough, maybe, I don't know, the Hulkster.

• 10:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 10:26Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, I've been watching these A and E, have you seen any of those?

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  I've heard they're amazing, the wrestling documentaries. I gotta watch these, yeah.

• 10:33Shawn Stevenson?

  So maybe it's macho, man.

• 10:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Maybe he's at the toll booth, but he's, they're only allowing certain things into the brain's very exclusive area. Sugar has speed passes to get into the brain. As I mentioned, Harvard researchers have affirmed, your brain will gladly confiscate half of the sugar you consume in a meal. All right? Now, with that said, what is the blood-brain barrier? How does this play into the inflammation? Cold complex, so the blood-brain barrier, it is something that is basically around the blood vessels. It's made from endothelial cells. So, very similar to our cardiovascular system. Alright, so we have the endothelial cells. But the difference with the blood-brain barrier endothelium is that it is massively higher in mitochondria.

• 11:19Shawn Stevenson?

  So, these are these energy power plants in all of our cells that are kicking off ATP. Alright, so these are like the metabolic nuclear power plants in our cells, right? So, your blood-brain barrier has a tremendous amount of these mitochondria. That's another reason it's so hungry for energy, too. To protect your brain, it's running on a lot of energy, it's taking the energy to do that. So, we've got the blood-brain barrier, but the blood-brain barrier is one of the major issues that's getting targeted and broken down by the way that we eat today. So now, stuff is getting into the brain that shouldn't be there. Really? So now, the question is what is causing the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier? I'll give you a few of those things. Yes. And creating more inflammation in the brain. One of them, as we already talked about, is sugar.

• 12:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Rampant amounts of sugar. And I don't, I want to be clear, I'm not trying to demonize sugar. And some people might be like, "You should demonize it." It's a part of our culture. And we don't want to make it so that something is inherently terrible and this treacherous thing, and something else other than is the best thing, alright? So, we know that sugar is not ideal for human consumption, this heavily refined processed thing. We know that, okay? That we can look at things as good and not so good. It's not so good, alright? Now, with that said, the amount of sugar that we're consuming, it can actually kind of create this insulin resistance taking place in the brain, like I mentioned before, and create neuroinflammation,

• 12:48Shawn Stevenson?

  and break down all surrounding tissues. So, and also cause a big fit for the microbele cells in the brain, the brain's immune system. So, what takes place is, it's even systemic. So, diabetes with the rest of our body can cause also off-shooting insulin resistance in the brain as well. But the brain itself, our neurons can can begin to become insulin resistant. And so now, we've got this sugar just kind of roaming free in the brain and tearing up stuff. Alright, so that's a big, big problem. So, sugar, number one. Number two, alcohol.

• 13:23Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 13:24Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, now, again.

• 13:26Lewis Howes?

  Now, you're gonna upset a lot of people.

• 13:28Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm not saying people can't drink, but we just have to be, we have to be aware of this, that specifically, and there's a lot of peer-reviewed evidence on this now, alcohol is a known neurotoxin.

• 13:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Shawn Stevenson?

  And so what it does is, it is able to actually cross the blood-brain barrier. It's one of those things that can cross the blood-brain barrier, which a lot of stuff can't get into the brain. It's able to cross the blood-brain barrier, and one of the, the first thing that happens, though, is the release of endorphins. It makes us.

• 13:55Lewis Howes?

  Like sugar.

• 13:56Shawn Stevenson?

  It makes us feel good.

• 13:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So we know that alcohol is a well-established neurotoxin, but we don't see it like that. It's socially acceptable.

• 14:03Lewis Howes?

  Very socially acceptable.

• 14:04Shawn Stevenson?

  But a significant amount of people actually pass away each year from alcohol poisoning. And they can be perfectly healthy and just have a little bit too much. And it can affect the parts of the brain that are responsible for breathing, that are responsible for, you know, beating your heart. These are some of the ways that we can die from alcohol poisoning. Now, it's very unlikely, it's highly unlikely that that will happen, but we just gotta keep this in place. And as a matter of fact, this was published in the BMJ, one of the most prestigious journals, the British Medical Journal. They found that even moderate drinking can have these very similar effects to accelerating brain shrinkage.

• 14:43Lewis Howes?

  Well, this is what Dr. Daniel Amen has in his brain scans, that I think there was 80,000 brain scan in a test. Don't quote me on that, but that's what I remember, where it's like, he showed the brains without alcohol and with, and I think all of them were smaller, I think, or something like that, like some were way worse than others with moderate alcohol. Maybe it's like once or twice a week, one or two glasses a week or something, shrinkage of the brain. And I wanna find the exact stat of what that is, but, I mean, it's like, if we know this information. Why do we keep doing it to ourselves?

• 15:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  And maybe we don't know the information and that's why we just think it's socially acceptable. And we're gonna be with our friends, we're gonna have drinks and one turns into three, turns into five, and then we can't wake up the next morning. But why do we do it over and over again? I, I've never been drunk in my life. And I'm not saying you're, you know, I have nothing against people drinking. But if it's hurting the brain, if you're doing it consistently, more than once or twice a week. If you know it's gonna hurt your brain, why continue to do it?

• 15:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, that's a great, you just brought it up, which is, I don't think most folks actually know. We don't know on, we might know on a superficial level.

• 15:50Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:51Shawn Stevenson?

  But we, people, we haven't had the same amount of education in these things. Where it's a part of the culture as much as ignoring health. We're just in an unhealthy state period, but so in this study, they actually used MRIs and uncovered that even moderate drinking over long term causes significant brain shrinkage, specifically the hippocampus, which is the memory center of the brain. Now, it appears that the amount of shrinkage in the study appears to be directly related to how much a person drinks.

• 16:17Lewis Howes?

  Right, so if you drink once a week, you should be fine.

• 16:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, even a couple of times a drink, so moderate drinking would be even, that can be get into the category of we'll say even four to five nights a week, one to two.

• 16:28Lewis Howes?

  One glass of wine or something.

• 16:29Shawn Stevenson?

  Servings of alcohol depends on what it is, right? But for some people, that might be too much. But for some folks, most of the data what we do know is heavy drinking, right? But even moderate drinking, we've gotta be mindful of our, of our brain.

• 16:41Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 16:42Shawn Stevenson?

  We've gotta take that into consideration.

• 16:43Lewis Howes?

  I mean, listen, I'm, I'm not here to shame anyone, cuz I, you know, probably more sugar than anyone should have in my lifetime, and that's my vice, that's something that it's like on the weekends, like I'm splurging on sugar.

• 16:52Shawn Stevenson?

  You just murdered the cookies, you were just, we were just at my house.

• 16:54Lewis Howes?

  Murdering cookies, man, I murdered your cookies. And what I have, like seven, eight cookies, I don't know, so it's like, I'll give myself a couple of days where it's like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And I don't beat myself up for it, cuz I know the rest of the time, I'm not doing that. So, some people might do that with alcohol, and that's fine. Sugar's gonna hurt me or create more belly fat, it's gonna be harder to like get rid of the belly fat, all these other things. And I'm aware of it, so it's like, how can I continue to optimize? How can I continue to let go of that habit? And replace it with something more powerful and empowering for the greater version of myself, for my vision, for my health and happiness. And when I have it, enjoy it, but don't, don't do it too much, you know?

• 17:34Shawn Stevenson?

  But that's the secret too, man, is that we also had an abundance of, of, of real food as well, you know? So at, at my place is where you first like, you didn't just, you, you tried guacamole recently.

• 17:46Lewis Howes?

  I tried it once before with a friend and I was like, wow.

• 17:49Shawn Stevenson?

  You just dabbled in it.

• 17:50Lewis Howes?

  But yours, I like, I know a lot of it, man.

• 17:52Shawn Stevenson?

  You got it. You got that guac in you, man.

• 17:54Lewis Howes?

  I liked it.

• 17:54Shawn Stevenson?

  And, you know.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  Your wife made it amazing though. It was like, I don't think I can have normal guacamole. I think it was like, it's gotta be seasoned the right way, you know?

• 18:01Shawn Stevenson?

  It's an, eat smarter.

• 18:03Lewis Howes?

  Is that the way the recipe? It's so good.

• 18:05Shawn Stevenson?

  So I was very, growing up the way that I did, I never, I didn't know what avocados were. Like I had no idea until I was in my twenties.

• 18:13Lewis Howes?

  Hot pockets of yeah.

• 18:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. So, and I mean, honestly, man, you know, I ate fast food every day. As long as I had like two dollars at least every day when I was in college. Uh, but it also is just in the environment, you know, the closest thing to, to me was a liquor store, then, you know, Lee's Chicken, Domino's, McDonald's, Burger King, uh, Dairy Queen, Chinese food restaurant. But this was like bulletproof glass. Like they're not cooking good stuff for you. Arby's, uh, Krispy Kremes, Jack in the Box. This is all within like a mile radius of my house. And I'm, that's not even all of them. Papa John's, I can go on and on and on. In multiple directions. There wasn't a gem around me. I didn't, that, that wasn't a part of the environment.

• 18:57Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, being from Ferguson, Missouri, that's where, you know, I went up, I spent my, uh, my entire time, you know, in college. And also just even when I got married, you know, we're still in Ferguson, Missouri, Ferguson, Florissant for the majority of my adult years, actually. It's in Ferguson, Florissant. And so we just didn't have, we weren't exposed to what health looked like. The first time when I found out that a Whole Foods existed, like it's so far away from me, but there was only one in all of St. Louis, by the way.

• 19:21Lewis Howes?

  Now you live like three blocks from one.

• 19:23Shawn Stevenson?

  You could, in LA, you can literally throw a rock and hit a Whole Foods. I mean, it's crazy. I'm not used to this.

• 19:30Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing, right?

• 19:31Shawn Stevenson?

  It's, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's upgrading. But the thing is also we can get this conversation of being fashionable. And being about real health because there, there are some, definitely some challenges on what real health is here in this city as well.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 19:45Shawn Stevenson?

  So, but anyways, that's a, that's a little sidebar.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  So sugar, alcohol, which is a neurotoxin, uh, what's another thing that, uh, increases neural inflammation?

• 19:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Another one, and this is really interesting, and this is very timely for this. What I was actually going to lead into was, right now, being aware of what real health is in the prevention and susceptibility to viral infections. Viruses can damage and break down the blood-brain barrier, create inflammation in the brain. I mean, a virus. Listen to this. So, this was published in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in Microbiology. Found that viruses can directly disrupt and damage the blood-brain barrier. But here's what I wanted to share with you, and this is new. I just, I'm sharing this for the first time. This was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. And it found that there's a troubling discovery recently that SARS-CoV-2 is able to interact with the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain itself.

• 20:40Shawn Stevenson?

  What does that mean? How do you get, how do you get out of the brain? That's the thing. Once it gets in there, it doesn't even matter. Like, what is, what are the downstream effects of that? So, this, this virus is able to make its way to, basically traverse the blood-brain barrier somehow. Maybe the blood-brain, and this, for me, I always think of a meta-perspective, like, who are the, what are the samples? Ah, yeah. Right? What is the state of health of the person? What is their blood-brain barrier health? How is it able to traverse the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain? Or is it just this, this virus is this particularly nefarious? You know what I mean? And so, the question is, you know, what do we do about this? In defense, we have to be as healthy as possible. We know that even though the marketing around this is that this particular virus is indiscriminately

• 21:25Shawn Stevenson?

  hurting people, but I, I think maybe we shared this when I talked with you last, I'm not sure, but I think it's an important point. You know, I've got many family member and friends who are in the healthcare industry and even working on the, the front lines. And we, we tend to think that, of course, number one, they're going to be hardest hit. It would be obvious if you think about it. They're around it all day long. Right. And they're, these are just absolutely amazing folks. However, what folks don't realize, and we can maybe put people, the link to this in the show notes for people, because this is what I do. I'm a research scientist, you know, almost 20 years in this, in this space. If you go to the CDC site and you look at who is actually being affected, because with healthcare workers, it is the biggest vocation being affected.

• 22:07Shawn Stevenson?

  If we're talking about job for job by SARS-CoV-2. But what's not shared and what's on the CDC site is that nine out of 10 of the healthcare workers hospitalized with COVID-19 had at least one pre-existing chronic disease.

• 22:20Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 22:21Shawn Stevenson?

  It's not two out of 10, it's not five out of 10, nine out of 10.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  Nine out of 10 had a pre-existing chronic.

• 22:27Shawn Stevenson?

  At least one.

• 22:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:29Shawn Stevenson?

  So it's not indiscriminate, okay?

• 22:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Because we've got, at this point, people have got the PPE, there's still a susceptibility. And the other part is about 75% of them were clinically obese. And it's right there, the CDC is where people, if you post anything, talk about it's getting directed to the CDC, but most people are not analyzing the data on the CDC. I love it.

• 22:49Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:50Shawn Stevenson?

  I love it. But also it's highlighting, again, the thing that's not getting addressed, which is, let's get our citizens healthier.

• 22:56Lewis Howes?

  Healthy.

• 22:57Shawn Stevenson?

  When are we going to talk about helping to reduce this epidemic, these multiple epidemics? Pandemics is epidemic expanded, kind of, multiple places.

• 23:07Lewis Howes?

  What is the epidemic? Is it neuroinflammation? Is it obesity? What is the main causes in your mind that is hurting us?

• 23:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, we have an epidemic of chronic disease, period. We have epidemics of, for example, an average of 630,000 people die from heart disease every year here in the United States.

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  600,000?

• 23:25Shawn Stevenson?

  630,000.

• 23:26Lewis Howes?

  Die from a heart disease?

• 23:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Heart disease.

• 23:28Lewis Howes?

  And what causes heart disease? Stress, obesity, neuroinflammation, what else?

• 23:34Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a complex disease. It's the number one killer.

• 23:37Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 23:38Shawn Stevenson?

  But here recently, and this is a, this unfortunate thing is that this is a footnote, it's not even talked about. 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 was the headline, almost 700,000 people died from heart disease. It jumped up significantly.

• 23:53Lewis Howes?

  Really? Because of the stress?

• 23:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Because of all things, all of it. Absolutely. Stress, disconnection from, you know, family.

• 24:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, wow.

• 24:02Shawn Stevenson?

  We're eating worse than we ever had prior to the pandemic, because I was there, I was analyzing the numbers right out of the gate, the first couple of months, I was looking at processed food companies. I was looking at their profits. Oh, they're probably. One company was about to go out of, one of the big ones was about to go out of business. And then filing for bankruptcy. Gyms closed.

• 24:22Shawn Stevenson?

  You're getting Postmates or you're getting Uber Eats or whatever it is. Far worse. We are now far sicker and more susceptible to viral infections than when it all started. Because we still have not focused on health. And we can do all the superficial treatments. You know, we can do the distancing. We can do fill in the blank. But we also, because we were in fear, because people were so influenced by what the quote experts were saying. You could have also said, this is an important time for you to really make sure that you are getting your sleep. Because your sleep is a primary controller of your immune system, even with medical interventions. And people taking a, an array of drugs, whatever type of drug they might be, whether it's a oral medication, injectable.

• 25:04Shawn Stevenson?

  And their ability to actually prevent the disease dramatically goes down when people are sleep deprived. When they're sleep deprived, wow. Because your immune system is, it's, it's largely regulated. The vast majority of immune system is taking place, is located in our gut, for example. And one of the things that we've noticed is that there's even a changing of the guard that takes place with our microbiome, even as the day goes on. The microbiome is so easily influenced by small things. I mean, if you, if you sneeze, like your microbiome is gonna make a shift, you know? But when we're sleep deprived, there are some really negative things that take place. And one of the, the studies that I actually mentioned is. They took test subjects and they wanted to see what would happen when they just cross a bunch of time zones.

• 25:49Shawn Stevenson?

  And see what would happen with their microbiome. And so they took stool samples, you know, had them poop in the little nacho basket. That's how we do it. We could send you one in the mail. You could send it and get a stool sample done. But they took stool samples and they analyzed their microbiome cascade. Because one of the things that we know today is that there's a microbiome cascade that's associated with obesity, insulin resistance. So when people in my clinical practice, they can get a, um, a stool sample done, I can get the report. I can have a high probability of knowing what their body composition is just based off their bacteria cascade. Whether or not they're obese. And so, so we know this now. And so what they did was, and these are healthy test subjects, and then they have them cross a bunch of time zones and they retest them.

• 26:34Shawn Stevenson?

  So it was like a 10 hour time difference. And they found that the bacteria basically get this kind of very strange jet lag. And their bacteria cascade started to shift more towards one that's associated with obesity and insulin resistance just in a day.

• 26:50Lewis Howes?

  By traveling across time zones.

• 26:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Just in one day.

• 26:53Lewis Howes?

  So what should we do when it travels?

• 26:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Because also, I didn't mention this, their sleep is disrupted as a result.

• 26:58Lewis Howes?

  They're not sleeping because of it.

• 26:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, so their sleep is disrupted as a result. But the good news is, just by them getting back onto a routine, within a couple of days, it normalized. So we can, we can get better, but we know how quickly we can, things can go wrong. And this is another big part of this equation because there was a lot of pushback happening in the beginning, you know, even with many of my friends and colleagues who are just at the top level of the health space of like, well, you know, we just have to do these superficial things because we can't get people healthier overnight. And here we are, we're going on two years here soon. All right, we're about a year, we're over a year and a half into this. And the conversation has not shifted to getting, what are some of the clinically proven things, simple things people can do to fortify their immune system and help to reduce their risk

• 27:43Shawn Stevenson?

  of chronic diseases because we know that is the number one thing.

• 27:46Lewis Howes?

  What are those?

• 27:46Shawn Stevenson?

  The number one risk factor.

• 27:48Lewis Howes?

  Sleep, healthier foods, fasting, intermittent fasting.

• 27:51Shawn Stevenson?

  I'll give you an example.

• 27:52Lewis Howes?

  More water, what's the?

• 27:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Based off peer reviewed evidence. So researchers at Appalachian State University found that simply just going for a short walk.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  In nature?

• 28:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Instantly, just anywhere, just go for a 20, 30 minute walk boosts your immune parameters, most notably for neutrophils and also natural killer cells.

• 28:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? It's a temporary boost.

• 28:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:12Shawn Stevenson?

  But what if you're doing this consistently? Like, America, make sure that you, you know, you wash your hands.

• 28:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Socially distanced, but also make sure you get in your 20 minute walk today, America.

• 28:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:24Shawn Stevenson?

  We can create an absolute transformation in our culture because people do it.

• 28:28Lewis Howes?

  Get 5, 1,000 steps, right, then through 10,000, get 1,000 steps in, right, something.

• 28:34Shawn Stevenson?

  If that is, if this is, if this is framed as a way to help you to defend your body from this nefarious condition, which it is, we know that the biggest susceptibility, I'll share this with you as well, and this again, it's on the CDC site, 90, 90, over 95% of the people who passed away with SARS-CoV-2 on the death certificate, had an average of four pre-existing chronic diseases and/or comorbidities.

• 29:00Lewis Howes?

  Really? 95%.

• 29:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Not, over 95% had an average.

• 29:05Lewis Howes?

  Pre-existing conditions.

• 29:06Shawn Stevenson?

  And/or comorbidities, so it's not just.

• 29:07Lewis Howes?

  What's a comorbidity?

• 29:08Shawn Stevenson?

  So this is, it could be, they have SARS-CoV-2, but then they also have influenza. They have SARS-CoV-2, but they also have pneumonia, right, so these are all comorbidities.

• 29:18Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 29:18Shawn Stevenson?

  But we know that at least one pre-existing chronic disease across the board is included in that.

• 29:24Lewis Howes?

  Now, what about the chronic disease?

• 29:26Shawn Stevenson?

  What we focus on though, unfortunately, is just the people that are quote perfectly healthy.

• 29:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:30Shawn Stevenson?

  The less than 5%.

• 29:31Lewis Howes?

  And showcasing these people and be like, look, this person died too.

• 29:34Shawn Stevenson?

  And so we don't talk about the underlying issue, which is again, getting people healthier. But here's the thing too, which the, the perfectly healthy aspect, that's all still going to be debatable because you and I can be as healthy as we want to be. If we are in a state where we're really stressed, we're in fear, we are, you know, in a, in a position where we are sleep deprived temporarily, our immune system can absolutely get trampled on.

• 29:59Lewis Howes?

  Heightened.

• 29:59Shawn Stevenson?

  And it's going to increase our risk, our susceptibility to viral infection.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  This is what I was mentioning you about, when I was a kid growing up, my dad wouldn't allow us to, he would turn the TV or he would mute it if there was ever medical commercials on, if there was ever a drug commercial, things like that, or alcohol. He actually would mute or turn the channel so that we wouldn't be susceptible to all the different messaging of the medical industry. If you're feeling this, if you're feeling this, you need X, Y, and Z medicine. And he really believed that that was causing a lot more fear in us kids when we would consume and watch this, this commercial, this messaging, this influence over and up, because it was pretty much every other commercial was like a drug commercial, from what I remember.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  Because he was always, he was always turning it off.

• 30:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Lewis Howes?

  He was always turning the channel because he wouldn't want us to be consumed by fear. What about the chronic disease, if that's even considered that, of fear in the country and in the world? You know, we could be as healthy as possible, but if you have fear in your mind consistently thinking, "I'm gonna get this," or "I gotta protect myself," what about eliminating fear? How do we do that?

• 31:09Shawn Stevenson?

  I love you. This is why, like, this is

• 31:11Lewis Howes?

  Let's go right to it.

• 31:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Listen, listen, I have not shared this yet.

• 31:15Lewis Howes?

  Bring it.

• 31:15Shawn Stevenson?

  This is from the CDC. And so they were looking at five mil, almost five million, four hundred and eighty, four, four million, eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand, four hundred and forty-seven hospitalized adults and five hundred and forty thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven patients with COVID-19, of whom ninety-five percent had at least one underlying medical condition. But let me tell you the strongest risk, risk factor for death when they actually contracted the virus. The strongest risk, risk factors for death, and this is according to the CDC, and this, these, for folks listening, and even, you know, watching, some of this stuff is seeing is believing. So we've got to put this in the show notes for people to be able to

• 31:56Lewis Howes?

  So go, you can see the actual notes from the CDC.

• 31:59Shawn Stevenson?

  You can see the study.

• 32:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Shawn Stevenson?

  The strongest risk, risk factor for death, number one was obesity, which we've already talked about. Number two was anxiety and fear-related disorders.

• 32:10Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 32:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Number three was diabetes, uh, diabetes with complications.

• 32:15Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh. Fear and anxiety-related issues.

• 32:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow.

• 32:20Lewis Howes?

  That was the number two reason for death.

• 32:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Number two.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Based on the CDC.

• 32:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Number two, risk, risk factor.

• 32:25Lewis Howes?

  Risk factor.

• 32:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Associated with death.

• 32:27Lewis Howes?

  Associated, oh wow, risk factor, okay, man. And how much of that has to do with the brain and mindset?

• 32:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Nobody's talking about this. What happened during the past year and a half?

• 32:40Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 32:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Has our fear levels gone up or down?

• 32:42Lewis Howes?

  Oh, in, in general, up.

• 32:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Exponentially.

• 32:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Exponentially. And this gets into the place of Ethical information, you know, with the media. Wow. And, you know, some folks might have seen some of the exposes done on, you know, some of the news organizations getting caught on like a hot mic, for example, and admitting that they're putting the death toll. The CNN, I think, or something. Yeah, I shared that. I was like the first person. I packaged it up. Now, I didn't do the report, though. Right, right. But I just created like this viral thing because I did some of the science behind what was happening as well. So they admitted to putting up the technical director. Right. Yeah, the death toll ticker on their taking human lives and turning it into a death toll ticker. The anxiety, you see that going up like every moment. He admitted to doing it because it drives fear and it keeps people watching. Oh, my gosh.

• 33:30Shawn Stevenson?

  He admitted it with his own mouth, you know, and so, and also, one of the things I put into the culture very early on, I also did the counterbalancing thing, which is like, we can, I want to be informed, but we don't have to be inundated. Also, share the recoveries. Right. Let's have a recovery ticker. Let's have a people who are, you know, who have asymptomatic, who might have contracted the virus, but they're not sick and they're okay. Their immune system did what it's supposed to do. Let's have that ticker as well. And I put that into culture and the person who was capturing the data, she asked him that, like, why don't you have a recovery ticker as well? He's like, he thought about it for a minute. He was like, well, that's not scary. It's not scary. People won't watch. We need to make money. That's it. We're trying to get eyeballs. If we get it, if we get down to what it's really all about and the corporate

• 34:13Shawn Stevenson?

  interest now, because news isn't news anymore. It's entertainment. And a lot of folks don't realize that nearly every, practically every major news station shares at least one board member with a pharmaceutical company. It's crazy. And the pharmaceutical industry invests billions, billions of dollars every single year into media. Billions of dollars. What are they gonna do? Are they going to recommend, you know, have me on, which I've been on all the major news networks, but people aren't tuning in for that. They're not tuning in to hear me talk about, you know, drinking water and getting sleep. Man. You know what I mean? But I still do that stuff just to plant some seeds. But truly, people are tuning in to be inundated with fear, catch the sports and the weather.

• 34:56Shawn Stevenson?

  And he also shared that they also, 90% of the content that they do is around fear, fear-based content, but then they have a nice story. He says like at the end, and he said this was with his words, he was like, to be like a little bit of ice cream at the end of the, of the pain. Oh, my gosh. To help alleviate the pain, but we're about to hit you with more of it. Oh. And this is the thing.

• 35:14Lewis Howes?

  That's why I don't watch news. I don't watch the news. I might flip it on for a moment to be like, okay, what actually happened here? But I can't consume it for hours. Otherwise, it just makes me feel sick. It makes me feel sad, depressed, frustrated. And I think I'd rather be informed and educated and be able to take action on what I need to do personally in my life, or if there's a cause I need to support, from a place of mission and purpose and intention as opposed to reaction, fear, anger, and reaction. And I think a lot of people have responded with reacting out of a place of fear as opposed to responding from a place of mission, love, solutions, community.

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  And I think if we can start to shift that, we'll just feel better all in all.

• 36:01Shawn Stevenson?

  This is all really pointing to one of the most important takeaways from this conversation, really just in our world today, period, is how we might think that we're controlling the way that we think. We might think that we are making decisions based on logic. But we have very primal programming as well. And we're very, we're very influenced by the world around us. We're hardwired because it's a defensive mechanism. It's helped us to get to this point. We have to be aware of threats. But the way that we live today, it's not normal threats. We're not in threat of starvation necessarily in our culture. We're not, we're not, we don't have to worry about a tiger out there.

• 36:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:42Shawn Stevenson?

  What it really is, it's a lot of manufactured fear. Not to say that there aren't real world threats.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 36:48Shawn Stevenson?

  But the vast majority of people are safe.

• 36:52Lewis Howes?

  Safe.

• 36:52Shawn Stevenson?

  But you would never know that if you ever turn on the news. And so now here's the problem is that when we're exposed to these things, we take it with us. This was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. And people were instructed to watch just 15 minutes of the news. And they were actually tracking their mood disturbances, tracking their metrics. And they ended up having increased levels of anxiety and mood disturbances. But that's nothing. Here it is. The most shocking part is even after distracting them with another activity after watching the news, they were not able to return to their baseline levels. Wow. Of mood. They were, they, they, they picked up that anxiety. They carried it. Mood disturbance and they took it with them. Wow. That's the thing that we don't really think about is that it really does,

• 37:37Shawn Stevenson?

  especially if it's, it gets deep driven. It, it starts to change our, our, our chemistry. It changes our biology. And it also can change our brain because we're thinking thoughts when we're seeing that stuff. How thinking and, and, and things, thoughts really get created is it's like taking something that you don't know and connecting it to something that you do know. So a, a fear thought, a strong fear, it's going to connect with a lot of other fear instances that you have already in your filing cabinet. Other fears. It's gonna stack. It's gonna start stacking. And this is, we tend to see this happen like we place out in relationship context. You know, like if you get into it about one thing, it gets tied to all the other problems that you have with the person. Right. You know, like is this, it's one of the, but we can use that for our good as well and understanding how we learn stuff.

• 38:21Shawn Stevenson?

  And even how I teach, I like to take something that people might be aware of and then connect it to something that is new. You know, so in Eat Smarter, I take people through and teaching them how the fat loss process works by giving an analogy of going to the movies. You know what I mean? So, but on the other side, if we're not aware that this is taking place, that we're getting this exposure of fear, it's changing our neurochemistry and our perception of everything. It's getting, it's coloring the way that we see the world. And it's connecting to all the other fears that we have, not all the other fears, but other fears. Especially when we're talking about imminent death, you know, for, you know, what the media perceives. The reality is very different. Now, this is something that we definitely need to be aware of, be cautious of. Because even the the origin of it is complicated.

• 39:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Like we're still, there was a time where even if you talked about the origin being other than what was disseminated in the beginning, people were getting censored and all this crazy stuff. And we're not having logical, rational conversations about science. That's not science. Science is open. Science is constantly looking, and this is the key. This is gonna sound absolutely nuts. And a big reason why I feel that I'm in this space at this level is because I'm willing to be wrong. Like, I'm coming into it, actually, I'm coming into it.

• 39:37Lewis Howes?

  Hoping you're wrong.

• 39:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, I know that I have a cognitive bias. I know that I have cognitive biases towards what humans have done the longest. And so if anything comes up against that, right? So for me, it's just like, okay, well, humans have been been eating real whole foods for, you know, countless, you know, centuries and, you know, thousands of years. And a Twink, now we got a Twinkie, right? So just like, well, maybe the Twink, for me, my cognitive bias is that Twinkie is probably not ideal. But I could be wrong. And I'm open because this Twinkie might, it might have unlocked some genetic, whatever dormant thing where we now we're like, I don't know, we can teleport or something.

• 40:16Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 40:16Shawn Stevenson?

  I I'm open to being wrong, but my bias is there. So but I have to come into it with my bias and look for the ways that I'm wrong. It's hard to do, but it's like a muscle. Eventually, you get to a place where, you know, it's it's beautiful. It's like a joyous thing. And also, when you embrace that, funny enough, like you, you, you don't end up being wrong as often because you're taking a meta perspective. You're looking at all the pieces. And so what I tend to share from is like, what does the majority of evidence say? And this is a big thing, too, and I'm glad I get to talk to you about this and share this. Just about every single thing you can find that has peer reviewed evidence on it, you could find something that says the opposite.

• 40:54Lewis Howes?

  Sure, it's like a documentary that shows like veganism is the way. And then it's like, well, carnivores, only eating meat and liver is the way. You know, it's like there's science and proof and evidence on both sides of the extreme.

• 41:05Shawn Stevenson?

  And everybody, and and each person, each front person forward is going to believe wholeheartedly that their way is the right way.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  They're gonna find the evidence that backs it.

• 41:14Shawn Stevenson?

  And oftentimes, they're not trying to be hurtful or nefarious. That's the, that's the thing. We have to come into it with a little bit more compassion.

• 41:20Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 41:20Shawn Stevenson?

  For for our teachers as well. Because, and I know a lot, I know a lot of these guys, these are my my friends and colleagues. But there's degrees of that, by the way, but also. They've seen, the majority of the time, they've seen incredible results with patients they've worked with. And they're trying to save lives, and it might sound absolutely harebrained and crazy to these other people over here. But that's where they're often coming from it from, coming from that place. Not to say that's a hundred percent true, but here's the thing. I know that there's also a lot of people that are doing their thing and they're not getting the results that the other people are getting. Right. And this is because we're all so unique. There is no one human diet. Right. The only thing that we know for certain is a human food is breast milk.

• 42:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Everything else, we're just experimenting with. You know what I mean? And even, oh, this is a good segue, actually, because people are so... We're inundated with these ideas, for example, like saturated fat being so terrible for you. Human breast milk, there's a massive amount of saturated fat in breast milk. It can be upwards of thirty to fifty percent saturated fat. For building that baby's brain. Now, as we get older, our gates for saturated fat from our food, like I said, we have the blood brain barrier. The gates that allow saturated fat actually go down. But also, breast milk has a significant amount of cholesterol also. And when there's a disruption with cholesterol synthesis for babies from their nutrition,

• 42:47Shawn Stevenson?

  this can lead to long-term degenerative neurological disorders. Cholesterol is incredibly important. So this gets into this conversation of these three primary fats that the brain is made of, that I don't think a lot of people realize. Yeah. So, we've been talking about inflammation, but the underlying thing is really looking at what are the sustainable materials that don't allow for fires to take place in the first place. So, three good fats to help the brain. Three fats. These are three types of structural fats I'm gonna share with you. This is different from dietary fats specifically, but we can get the foundational elements from our dietary fats. So, the human brain itself is primarily water, which we gotta come back and talk about this right after.

• 43:31Shawn Stevenson?

  It's upwards of seventy-nine percent water, eighty percent water potentially. It's the most water dominant organ next to your lungs. All right, it is a water-based organ. All right, so water really matters. But of the dry weight of the brain, all right, so water excluded, the brain is upwards of about sixty percent fat. All right, we are fat heads. All right, but what's, and some people realize this, a lot of people who are versed in health and passionate about health know this already. But what people don't typically know, a very small amount of people know, what are those three fats? The number one, I'm not, these are not in any particular order, but there are three. The first one I'm gonna share is phospholipids. Okay.

• 44:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Phospholipids, it's one of the primary structural fats that the human brain is made of. Phospholipids give our brain cells shape. They give our brain cells strength. They give our brain cells elasticity. Mm-hmm. All right, and these are very important characteristics. We want our brain cells to be strong and robust, to be able to handle damage. Also to be able to generate and support a lot of energy. Right, we want them to be, um, we want them to have an adequate shape to allow the functions to happen. We don't want brain cells, like our brain cells might have, you know, they've got like the glial, these are astrocytes or something. Well, maybe we can talk about this in a minute. But we've got some cells in the brain that might look like this, like star shape.

• 44:58Shawn Stevenson?

  But then this brain cell over here is like, I don't know, looking like an M and M. And it's just like a peanut M and M. It's just like not matching up to the structure that would create robust health. And then also the elasticity, we want the brain cells to be adaptable. And so phospholipids help to support something called signal transduction, which is the brain cells being able to talk to each other, which is kind of important. So phospholipids, now phospholipids are- What are the foods that support- Sure, sure, I'll share that, but I want to share one specific thing because dietarily speaking, bringing in from our diet phospholipids, there's a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, and I map it out in Eat Smarter. This is like a gold standard of clinical trials because we got a specific implement and we're seeing what happens.

• 45:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study found that the inclusion of phospholipids helped to improve attention and reaction time.

• 45:52Shawn Stevenson?

  When people were under stress. So they put them under acute stress and phospholipids helped them to perform better. So they had, they noted subjectively also reduced participation anxiety, right? With the inclusion of phospholipids. Alright, so this is some really cool stuff, so, but these are structural facets the brain is actually made of. Where do we get them? Phospholipids are made primarily out of omega-3, DHA and EPA. Alright, and I'll talk about that in a second. But we can also get them directly from certain foods. You're gonna find them in fatty fish, you're gonna find them in egg yolks, you're gonna find them in oats, you're gonna find them in foods like spirulina.

• 46:31Shawn Stevenson?

  You're gonna find them in, you know, fatty cuts of, just different fatty type foods as well. So fatty cuts of, of things like beef, for example, if it's grass fed. And I don't wanna get into a place of like what's better, you know, a plant, plant version or animal version. I just want, I'm just sharing where you can find these phospholipids. Nuts as well or no? Yeah, certain nuts, also soybeans. And for some people like soy is gonna be like the, the, the, the, the absolute joker or Thanos of this situation. You know, it just depends on the, I'm just sharing where they are. And please understand even with the conversation of soy, I did a full like description and breakdown of the science around soy in the book.

• 47:14Shawn Stevenson?

  What we're, what we've done with soy is not what's been done traditionally. You know, people never ate soy dogs, soy ice cream, soy sandwich slices, soy nuggets. Soy fish. All of that, all of this heavily refined processed soy is more used in cultures, you know, if you look at Okinawa, for example. You know, it's more, a little bit more of a condiment in a sense, you know, like used to make various things. But oftentimes also is, it was fermented whenever it was used primarily too. So that's a whole other conversation, so. Phospholipids is one. Phospholipids, but these are some dietary sources, you could directly get phospholipids. But as I mentioned, they're primarily made of EPA and DHA. These are two types, the Ocasa hexanoic acid and then Ecaso pentanoic acid. So DHA and EPA.

• 47:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Okay, cool. And so, DHA and EPA are two of the most important.

• 48:06Shawn Stevenson?

  These are two of the most important, like today I want people to proactively get yourself an EPA and DHA supplement, specifically DHA. It's that important for you? The reason for this dude, listen to this. And again, working with Daniel Amen over the years and gleaning some of this information, but the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had folks include some DHA supplementation. And just within a matter of months, they dramatically improved their memory. Wow. Explicit memory, so like remembering, you know, events and things like that. And also they were able to improve their reaction time just by increasing the DHA. Now here's the other part, in the Journal of Neurology, they used MRIs to actually look at the brain and they found that people who had the lowest intake of DHA and EPA had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. Oh man.

• 48:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, so what they found, the number is, less than four grams a day was associated with accelerated brain shrinkage. Okay, six grams and up had the most shrink-proof brain, so DHA, EPA specifically. So where do you get that? Fatty fish, salmon, salmon roe, but also with phospholipids, same thing, eggs, egg yolks. Yeah. And I learned this from Lisa Moscone, neuroscientist. And she's, I love her because she's looking at the brain and not just like guessing, but she shared with me that in the egg yolk itself, there's 10,000 milligrams of phospholipids per 100 gram of product. It's the most power-packed source of phospholipids. But then also she shared with me that DHA and EPA, you're gonna find far more in the

• 49:36Shawn Stevenson?

  fish eggs than in the fish itself. Caviar. Right, caviar, salmon roe. Yeah. So it's not, again, this is not to say to go out and, you know, drop a heavy buck on some caviar and be like, I don't know, lifestyles of the rich and famous, but for some people that might, that might be the thing. That's the phospholipids, what's number two? So EPA, DHA, so fatty fish, salmon, mackerel, sardines. Got you. We've got. Well EPA, DHA is two. Right, and phospholipids too. I thought it was one, okay, so. DHA and EPA make phospholipids. Got you, got you. We can also get them from our diet. Okay, cool. So, and I'll just rattle off a couple of other ones for the phospholipids because this is important. Also for folks that are vegan, we've got to include everybody. Yes.

• 50:20Shawn Stevenson?

  So, from there, most of the peer-reviewed studies are done using fish oil. Now, that's, there's a little bit of controversy there. But I just want to make that clear that most of these studies are done using fish oil. So, we can also, from here, krill oil. Yeah, I hear that's good. K R I L L, krill oil. That might be a viable option for folks that might be on that borderline with vegetarian. And this, it's a microscopic, keyword microscopic shrimp. This is what whales are consuming, for example, to, to, to create their massive brains. But the reason krill oil can be so remarkable is that it's high in astaxanthin, which helps protect the DHA and EPA and keep it from oxidizing.

• 51:03Shawn Stevenson?

  So, it's really bioavailable and we have peer-reviewed evidence that it works. The step from there that's truly vegan is an algae oil. So, at minimo, I want folks to get that, like today. Because again, if you're not getting in DHA and EPA, your brain is going to have accelerated shrinkage. Oh, man. All right. It is that important for the structural integrity of our brain. Got it. When I was running my clinical practice, I knew how important omega-3s were. We just, we'll just say 15 years ago, 15 years ago. People are coming in, I'm getting everybody on chia seed oil, flaxseed oil, hemp seed oil. I'm getting like, we've got to get these omega-3s in, everybody. But I was missing part of the story. That is ALA, it's not DHA and EPA.

• 51:46Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a, the plant version does not, it's not the structural components of the brain. Okay. But it's so important, your brain can, your body can convert some ALA into EPA and DHA. But you can lose upwards of 90%, 95% of the conversion process. So, you're going to have to be shoveling chia seeds and hemp seeds all day to meet your needs and it's just not. It's not viable. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, this is why algae oil is so important. And of course, I love chia seeds and flax seeds, all this stuff, you can add that stuff in. But don't be mistaken that it's the same thing as DHA and EPA because it's not. Okay. So, that's number one. Is these phospholipids and number two, I want to share with everybody is something called sphingolipids. How do you spell that? That's S P H I N G O lipids.

• 52:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Lipids got ideas. Okay, so it's the second part, the second fatty part of the brain. Second type of primary fats found in the human brain. Okay. So we've got phospholipids, sphingolipids. Sphingolipids really function as building blocks for our cell membranes. Okay, so this is the membrane around all of our cells. And by the way, this isn't just for our brain. It's also our entire physiology. These are important, but primarily for the brain. Right. Especially for the brain, let me say that. So the cell membrane, if we go back to like biology class, which I hated, by the way. All right, I was not passionate about science until I had to figure stuff out for myself. But we're taught that the nucleus is the brain of the cell.

• 53:15Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, this is where all the, where all the, the intelligence is. But working with cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bruce Lipton, who's like the person who really impressed epigenetics into popular culture. He shared with me very early on that in his lab, he was just doing, he was removing the nucleus from cells and the cells just keep doing stuff. They keep operating, they do a lot of their same functions without their so-called brain. Right, so it's called enucleation. So if that's the brain of the cell, why does a cell not die? If I take your brain out, you're dead. That's it. It's the end of Lewis's story, you know what I mean? So it's not, it's not as cut and dry. The membrane, it's brain in the name a little bit, but the membrane has a lot of intelligence.

• 53:59Shawn Stevenson?

  And it's working and constantly assessing the environment and sending data to the rest of the, the body. I mean, the rest of the cell, all the internal mechanisms. So there's a lot of intelligence in that membrane and that membrane, a big part of that is sphingolipids. Okay. So now here's where this plays out.

• 54:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Sphingolipids can literally change the architecture of the cell, of the brain cell. So what that means and why that it's important is what, it can help, it can adjust the cell so that it can do things a different way.

• 54:32Shawn Stevenson?

  And that's important, like what if you need to, what if you have an injury?

• 54:37Shawn Stevenson?

  How does your brain come back? Your brain can find another way. It can adjust because of sphingolipids are a big component of helping to adjust the architecture for the brain cells to still do processes. Alright, so that's sphingolipids. The other big role that they play is in actually cancer prevention because they're regulating cell replication. So cells are supposed to replicate to the Hayflick limit is kind of one of the ways that we look at it. But cancer cells go replicating indefinitely. So sphingolipids help to regulate and check cell growth. And in particular, we're talking about in the brain. So, thank you sphingolipids for that. There you go, okay. Alright, so that's the second type. But sphingolipids also help to make, oh, dietary sources.

• 55:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Eggs, butter, yogurt, eggs again, man, eggs are there again. Cream, beef, funny enough, rice and sweet potatoes as well have some interesting amounts of sphingolipids. Alright, so those are a few sources dietarily. But sphingolipids are used to make something called sphingomelin. Now, this is going to be important for you as an athlete, what we're about to talk about now. So sphingomelin, so myelin is the protective sheath around our nerve transmissions. So what that means is as we do a behavior, right, so the first time that you throw the

• 56:04Shawn Stevenson?

  handball, right, there's a certain way that you did that and over time you got better and better and became more automatic where you can do it from all these crazy angles, you could do it diving, you could do it behind your, you know, between your legs and all the flossy stuff that you do. But the thing is, over time, more, as you're doing the thing, more and more myelin is getting laid down over that nerve transmission, basically insulating it and making it fire faster. Alright, so this is how Steph Curry, for example, the first time he's shooting a basketball versus what he can do today, he's laid down more myelin where the nerve transmission is automatic and he can do it from all these different, anytime, anywhere, right? So same thing with swinging a golf club. It's not practice makes perfect, it's practice makes permanent.

• 56:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, so the more you're doing this thing, you're laying down more myelin, alright? So it's really, really important for everything, not just for athletic performance, but everything that we do. Sure. Sphingolipids help to make sphingomelin, but myelin is combined, the sphingomelin works with the other, the third type of fat that the brain is primarily made of, which is cholesterol. Wow. Right. So cholesterol is the third one. Okay. And this is another. Of the brain. Yes. It's another dirty word, apparently, in nutrition. Unfortunately, because things have become so black and white. But cholesterol is so important for the brain that the brain actually makes it itself. Hmm. The, the brain is the most concentrated area of cholesterol of anywhere else in our body. About 20% of our cholesterol is located in our brain. Wow. It's just making it on demand because it's so important.

• 57:33Shawn Stevenson?

  And cholesterol is actually, um, if we, for me, I'm like, well, how the hell does the brain do it? If it's making its own cholesterol, how does it do it? It's the astrocytes. I, I briefly mentioned them earlier. They're these star-shaped, uh, glial cells. And the, they're, they can be connected to like two million different synapses for different, uh, different neurons and just, they're making some magical stuff happen. But anyways, with these astrocytes are, they're one of the places that we are, that we believe are primarily making cholesterol for the brain. Wow. Because it's so important. And so obviously, building blocks of cholesterol, we can get from our food. But as I mentioned, your brain is primarily making it itself.

• 58:15Shawn Stevenson?

  How, why does this matter? Last piece is cholesterol is a big component. It's primarily working with your myelin. And if you're not, this, this also seen in like, um, uh, MS, for example. Mm-hmm. There's issues there with the myelin sheath, right? So this can lead to different health issues, but also can improve our performance when we have the building blocks to make these compounds. Mm-hmm. So I know this was a lot, but just understanding these different three types of fats, how important they are for making up our brain, our brain is made of this stuff. We gotta get out of the politics about which, which food is, is better than other, what dietary framework? And just look at what have humans been doing the longest? What does our brain require? What are the foundational elements for that? And just focus on what's best for us. Experiment, have fun.

• 59:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Share, teach, have a good time and let's get our families healthier.

• 59:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. A lot of information here and you have even more in your book Eat Smarter. Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain and Transform Your Life. Make sure you guys get a few copies of this. There's more in stock now. We, as a community, everyone sold out on them quickly, bought them. So you gotta make sure you guys buy a couple more of these. If you want recipes, if you want the research, the science, everything. If you want to learn the guacamole that I had and enjoyed for the first time in my life. It's in here. It's amazing. Lots of good stuff in here. So, thank you for putting this. You have to give me some of these notes that I can put in the description on YouTube as well. So that people have the kind of the footnotes for all this stuff. So I have a lot more questions, but I think this is a lot to digest for people.

• 59:49Lewis Howes?

  So we'll leave you guys with this, unless there's anything else you wanted to add here for this interview.

• 59:55Shawn Stevenson?

  I mean, the big thing for me is, you know, I'm so grateful for you, man. Like if people who haven't had the chance to actually hang out with you and to, you know, to eat guacamole together, like you are the real deal, man.

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  Thanks, brother. Appreciate it.

• 1:00:08Shawn Stevenson?

  You're such a great human being, you know, with the biggest heart. And the thing that I admire most about you is that, you know, you're passionate about learning and connecting. You are the most incredible connector of humans that I've ever met as well. So many great people in my life because of you. And being here with you today, for me, is just a big part of the mission that we both have, which is to get people feeling empowered.

• 1:00:31Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Right now, when there's so much information that is disempowering. And help to not just balance it out, but to create a tipping point to where we can really become healthier as a culture where it's not the exception, it's the rule. And I believe that we can do that in our lifetime. It starts with us. The education is one thing, but it's finding a way to fall in love with it. You know, finding that thing that connects with you. It might be through food. That might be a bridge. It might be through dance. It might be through handball. It might be through, you know, it might be through sleep. Maybe you got a passion, like you found a passion for sleep. But we've got to find a bridge to get our citizens healthier because truly we, right now, we're the sickest society in recent human history.

• 1:01:13Shawn Stevenson?

  And we're also, with all of our advances, this should not be the case, you know. But what it really is, is just... Creating the bridge for people to get educated, to feel empowered, and to make this the norm. So I just wanna ask everybody to make sure that they, you know, take something and apply it. We don't wanna just be human filing cabinets.

• 1:01:30Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:30Shawn Stevenson?

  And also, share what you learned with somebody else, you know, look out for somebody, give them a word of encouragement. We can use that more than ever today.

• 1:01:36Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, and I think the greatest thing you can do is be the example for people around you. By setting the example for yourself, how you show up, how you change your habits, how you change the way you think, the way you talk, the way you take care of your health, the food choices, the activities you take on. Doing that will inspire people around you, start asking questions, hey, you look like your energy is different, you're more magnetic. So start attracting people by your example, I think that's a great way, and make this the standard, not, you know, what is it, sixty, seventy percent is obese right now, it's like, how do we, let's get that to fifty percent, and then let's get it even more. That would be incredible, if we could reverse this, um, I guess this, what is this? What do you call this, an epidemic?

• 1:02:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Multiple epidemics under one umbrella.

• 1:02:21Lewis Howes?

  Chronic diseases, obesity, all the fear, all this stuff, right? It's just like, if we can reverse some of these things.

• 1:02:27Shawn Stevenson?

  We're so much, we're so much better than this.

• 1:02:28Lewis Howes?

  We are.

• 1:02:29Shawn Stevenson?

  We're so much bigger than this.

• 1:02:30Lewis Howes?

  We are.

• 1:02:30Shawn Stevenson?

  But we have to realize it.

• 1:02:31Lewis Howes?

  Is it just laziness, you think? I feel like we know, eat better, like, don't eat this, we should eat this, workout, I feel like people understand that. Is it, do you think it's laziness?

• 1:02:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Isn't that, that word is, is very flam- infla- um, inflammatory. Even that word is inflammatory, because absolutely can be a component, but where does this come from? You know, it's the, it's the low energy from the way that we eat, it's the low energy from the lack of movement, it's the low energy from the messages we're taking in, you know, there's so much right now that is unfortunately designed to keep us in that low energy state, you know? We, people know about, you know, this, there's been big movements now towards having a better relationship with social media. You know, this film like, you know, The Social Dilemma, for example, and demonstrating how people are behind the scenes. Working to control you and keep you distracted from being your greatest self.

• 1:03:21Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 1:03:21Shawn Stevenson?

  So, we can't just say it's this one small thing. It's really a societal issue.

• 1:03:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Shawn Stevenson?

  And we have to, it still goes back to empowerment. Because people, we tend to think that we are making the decision about being on our phone. For example, all day, you know, but in reality, there are forces that are working to keep you separate from your.

• 1:03:38Lewis Howes?

  There are some influences for sure. So you gotta, you gotta protect your mind, protect your habits and everything. Make sure you guys get a copy of this, get a few copies, give it to some friends, spread the message of health, wellness, all the good stuff, eat smarter. Shaun, you shared your three truths in the previous episode. So if you guys want to see Shaun's three truths, check it out there. But your final, before I ask your definition of greatness, I want to acknowledge you for constantly showing up, man. You're one of the most dedicated researchers I know in this space. Constantly obsessing over the research, the science, finding the holes in the information out there and then giving us the answers. So, this thing is chalked with pages of Cliff Notes at the end with all the research as well, citations and everything. So make sure you guys check this out. Again,

• 1:04:21Lewis Howes?

  appreciate you for always showing up, man, and being a, you know, being a representation, the way your background, the way you look, your attitude and how you can kind of attract more people to this information as well. So, appreciate you. My final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:04:39Shawn Stevenson?

  My definition of greatness is just going off of what you just said, being the model, you know, being the example. The greatest example that you can give, the greatest way to teach is being it.

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:48Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, because when you walk into a room, you are a demonstration, you change that energy in the room that you walk in, as we talked about earlier with that tube Taurus. You know, so being the model and you can help to uplift and bring a light into dark places, you know, and also as we grow ourselves, we become less influenced by the negativity around us as well. I know you've noticed that in your evolution too. You know, so you can really become impermeable to a lot of the craziness that's going on. So really, work on yourself, build yourself up, become the best version of you and let that speak. And speak volumes of you before you even step on the scene. So that's for me, that's the, that's the definition of greatness is being the model,

• 1:05:29Shawn Stevenson?

  being the example and also accepting that you don't have to be perfect in being that example. Just be in process, just be working towards getting better because there's always going to be somebody who is at a, at a, at a more trying place than you are right now. You know, so just being that example, because just one person, if you're just five steps ahead of somebody with your health, you can help and reach a hand back and lift that person up.

• 1:05:53Lewis Howes?

  That's it, my man. Make sure you guys get the book, check out the Model Health Show YouTube, podcast, social media, whatever, link up below. Sean, my man, appreciate you, brother.

• 1:06:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Thanks, man, love you, bro.

• 1:06:03Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Again, if you enjoyed it, please spread the message of greatness to a few friends. Just text a few friends right now, this link, lewishouse.com/1141 or copy and paste the link on the podcast platform that you are listening to and get the word out there so we can help more people improve the quality of their life. If this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button right now so you can stay up to date and notified from some of the biggest interviews and topics and conversations on how to help you achieve greatness in your life, right here on the School of Greatness. Click that subscribe button, leave a review. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you enjoyed from this episode. So leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts as well.

• 1:06:45Lewis Howes?

  And I want to leave you with this quote from Tony Robbins, who said, "The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body, the more efficient your body, the better you feel and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results." If you're listening and you're subscribed to this show and you want to learn how to achieve greatness, you want to produce more outstanding results in your life and whatever that looks like for you. And that's what this is all about, optimizing your health first so you can have more energy, more focus, more clarity, less distractions, less stress, less anxiety and really have an optimal life. And that's what we're all here to do is have that joy, that fulfillment, that love that we all seek to have on a consistent basis. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are so loved, you are worthy and you matter.

• 1:07:30Lewis Howes?

  And I'm grateful for you for being here today. And you know what time it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.