91. Dr. Rupy Aujla: Why Your Kitchen Is More Powerful Than Your Pharmacy

What if the device in your pocket is secretly sabotaging your metabolism, sleep, and longevity? In this episode of Extend, I sit down with Dr. Rupy Aujla, a medical doctor turned lifestyle medicine pioneer who reversed his own heart condition through food and lifestyle changes alone. We explore the "cocaine phone vs. kale phone" strategy for digital wellness, why fiber maxing on TikTok is backfiring, and how to get 10 servings of vegetables daily without thinking about it. He also reveals his three-pillar framework for optimal health. Dr. Rupy Aujla is a medical doctor with over 15 years of experience, bestselling cookbook author of "Healthy High Protein," and founder of The Doctor's Kitchen app. After reversing his own atrial fibrillation through lifestyle medicine, he left the NHS to help millions of people worldwide cook their way to better health through evidence-based nutrition and functional medicine principles. We Also Discuss: The "Cocaine Phone vs. Kale Phone" Strategy for Digital Detox Why Fiber Maxing on TikTok Is Making People Sick The Three-Pillar Framework: Protein, Gut Health, and Anti-Inflammatory Eating How Dr. Rupy Reversed Heart Arrhythmia Without Surgery The "Just One More" Philosophy for Adding Vegetables Why 5-a-Day Was Completely Made Up (And What You Actually Need) Core Protein + Plant Partner + Topper: The New Protein Formula Silent Retreats: Resetting Your Dopamine in 3 Days Morning Light and Movement: The Ultimate Energy Hack Why Your Kitchen Is More Powerful Than Your Medicine Cabinet The Virtual Dr. Rupy AI Coach Revolution Thank You for Our Sponsors: Vitaboom: For supplements you can trust and wellness solutions tailored to your health, visit https://vitaboom.com/ NextHealth: Your destination for cutting-edge health optimization—from IV therapy to hormone balancing. Explore at https://www.next-health.com/ Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/ Learn more about Dr. Rupy Aujla: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@doctors_kitchen Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctors_kitchen/?hl=en Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-doctors-kitchen-podcast/id1316938642

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

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome back to Extend. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Rupy Aujla, a board-certified physician and one of the UK's leading voices in lifestyle medicine and evidence-based nutrition. Dr. Aujla is the founder of The Doctor's Kitchen, a bestselling author of five cookbooks, including his latest, Healthy High Protein. And he's the creator of the Doctor's Kitchen app. His journey into functional medicine began when he reversed his own atrial fibrillation through lifestyle interventions, avoiding ablation surgery that is recommended by conventional medicine. With over 15 years practicing medicine in the NHS system and a master's degree in nutritional medicine, Dr. Aujla has transformed how we think about food as medicine.

• 1:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  His work focuses on simple, actionable principles: getting enough protein, supporting gut health, eating anti-inflammatory foods. These principles can dramatically impact our longevity and our health span. Dr. Aujla is here today to share practical tools for cooking your way to better health, and how to run personalized nutritional experiments to find what works for your unique biology.

• 2:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Rupy, I'm so glad you're here today.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dr.

• 2:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for joining me. So I just have a few quick questions for you.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 2:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Based on what I've heard from you. Just so we can get what the audience's appetite and what we're going to talk about today. All right. So what is a food trend that you've heard about recently that is coming up a lot in what people are asking about?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a very recent food trend called fiber maxing on TikTok. I don't know if you've heard of it.

• 2:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That just sounds uncomfortable.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It sounds uncomfortable. And like, I think it's with good intention because people have learned about fiber, the benefits to your heart health, the benefits to your gut health, the benefits for weight loss. But like any sort of social media trend, they're taking it to the extreme where they're having raw chia, as much fiber as possible every single meal time. They're adding flaxseed, they're adding inulin powder, chukka root, they're adding all these different prebiotic fibers. And look, these are all fantastic for you, but particularly if you're used to a low fiber diet, like most people in the United States, and you transition to a higher fiber diet, you've got to go slow because not only will your gut tell you about it, it will tell everyone else about it as well.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  You're going to be producing a lot of gas, you're going to have a lot of bloating, you're going to have a lot of pain. So fiber maxing is a trend that I could definitely get behind, but I would say try and do it slower, maybe with one new ingredient every single week, and then try and titrate that up to a nice fiber amount per meal.

• 3:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I've learned from you actually is this concept of one more thing. And for me, that one more thing is always a little bit of extra fiber. Because when I'm making, putting a meal together, you know, most of the time you're just like, sure, let me add a little bit more fiber to that. But fiber maxing?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Max on there? It sounds uncomfortable.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Let me ask you about morning habits. What is one thing that you wish everyone would do every morning?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  You know what? I would say it's getting movement and morning light every single morning. So I'm a morning guy, so it's very easy for me to just go outside, have my glass of water. So I hydrate first thing. I will have coffee probably around sixty minutes after waking, just because I I want my natural cortisol levels to rise and then not be artificially elevated by anything that I'm drinking like caffeine. But having that morning light to stimulate your receptors in your brain to get you awake. And moving in the morning, again, something that gets your energy levels up, is just such a fantastic hack. To improve your focus and keep those energy levels steady throughout the day and just wake yourself up out of that sleep.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And the benefit of that is not only for the morning and the day, but it's also for your sleep at night. So you actually get yourself into a sleepy state and you operate within the circadian rhythm.

• 4:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no, that's such a good point. You know, I think a lot of us, and I was a victim of this too, was. I would wake up and I would do the minimal amount of movement I could until I finally got to work. Which is usually like two hours after I woke up. And then I'm finally like walking from my car to the office and and moving around. And you end up getting really low energy from that because you just haven't started your day off right.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  It's weird because people think you have to expend energy when you move, but actually what you're doing is. You're increasing your mitochondria, you're increasing your adrenaline levels, your cortisol levels are also being increased as well. So this is all actually giving you energy. So it's paradoxical to think about, okay, movement, expending energy. And then like having more energy later on, but that's literally what's happening when you move.

• 5:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh, we could dive so much into that, like the calories, the calorie hypothesis.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, it's just, um, you're absolutely right. Like, we're, our human biology is almost like. It it it wants to be moving. You create more energy. It's like a flywheel almost, right? Create more energy, the more movement you have.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, I've been, uh, I I always think about things through the evolutionary lens, right? Like how we are actually designed to move, how we've evolved over millennia. And we are not designed to be doing what we're right now, like sitting down. And actually, I almost think it's like, you know, your inflammation counter sort of creeps up. The more that you're si- sitting down and you almost need to discharge that with some movement. So whatever I always tell people, you've got to move at least once every hour. You've got to be walking, take those meetings outside, expose yourself to the natural elements. And ensure that you're actually sort of mimicking how we're designed.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Because we would have been hunting and gathering over long plains of land, getting outside, getting that vitamin D from the sun. And we're doing the exact opposite right now. So it's just one element of our lifestyle that we can optimize with a few simple things.

• 6:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I feel like you and I have a lot of the same kind of thoughts.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  If anyone's watching on YouTube, you're like my, my younger, much better looking twin right here. I feel like I'm talking to myself in the mirror twenty years ago. But, you know, I've really landed on this evolutionary biology philosophy of health. Where the more you look back at how humans evolved over thousands and thousands of years. It's just ridiculous how over the last fifty years, we've completely flipped that model on its head, right?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We used to move, now we don't move. We used to wake up when the sun came out and went go to bed when it became dark. We don't do that anymore.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The time we eat, like all of these rhythms that we've evolved to coexist with. The rhythm of day to day, the rhythm of the sun, the moon, the universe.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We've eliminated them artificially in our life. And that is a massive contributor to the poor health we see now.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. I feel like rhythms is like a book title almost. Because it's like about getting back into rhythm with how we have evolved. And I had a, a, a friend of mine on the podcast recently, who is an evolutionary biologist. And he, um, he, he talks about this concept called intermittent living. And it's how we currently live in a constant state of grazing. So for example, intermittent fasting, which has become very popular now, is very much mimicking how we would have eaten before. We wouldn't have had snacks all day long. We would have eaten, we would have feasted and we would have stopped and then we would have moved.

• 8:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Same thing with morning light, for example, we would have got up first thing in the morning, got out of our caves or out of our camps or wherever, and we would have exposed ourselves to light. We would have been constantly moving throughout the entire day. We would have been um uh even intermittently drinking, which is a bit of a sort of a bit of a controversial statement there. But we we wouldn't have been constantly drinking, we would have had to walk so long to get to

• 8:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's so true.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  A a water hole and then hydrate ourselves and then we would have to. So there there are all these like little stresses that we sort of have to reintroduce into our day to day because we live in so much comfort, temperature controlled environments, protected artificially lit environments, and environments of eating which are like completely uh conducive to to to comfort and to never being hungry. And we have to artificially engineer these into our into our lives. And I think that's why things like saunering and cold therapy have become so popular. And you know, there there are benefit to these things, there are benefit to cold shocks.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And the the the sort of resolution of our body when we experience cold or heat, that's where the magic happens. It's almost like exercise is another form of stressor that we have to intro introduce. Because otherwise, we could just sit down all day and order Uber Eats and cars and whatever, and we just never need to move. So this is something that everyone should be thinking about.

• 9:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no, it's so true. And I think if you look at it at a cellular level, even deeper in the cells to your mitochondria, is during those periods of stress that we create um that our cell actually ends up going through a period of regeneration, meaning and our mitochondria do as well. Where whether you're doing a sauna or you're fasting, that's when we clear out the old cells that are no longer functioning well and the old mitochondria that are no longer functioning well and create new ones.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And this is so ingrained in our cellular biology.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And if you don't give our body a chance to do that every day.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Many times a day, it doesn't happen. And then we just build up all this gunk and garbage in our bodies.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  At a cellular level.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Totally. I feel like we're learning a bit more about. The blueprint of our biology and the more we learn and I, you know, I guess people like ourselves have come to this a little bit earlier than others. The more we realize, okay, some of those ancient traditions and those ancient practices actually hold value in modern medicine. And we start, we need to start sort of engineering this back into our lives. So, you know, I'm a fan of intermittent fasting as long as you get enough protein in your, in your day. I think protein is super, super important. Um, and those stressors, it's like this concept of hormesis, which is a little bit of stress. Actually does some good. It's sort of playing out in the, in the biology of, you know, mitochondria in our cells and, and the, um.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Uh, the concepts around rebuilding proteins or tophagy and removing senescent cells. So, yeah.

• 11:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. Um, and the more we learn about this, you know, these are some of the basic cellular processes that lead to longevity. I'm, I'm sure you're very familiar with the article in Cell Magazine about the root causes of why cells age, right? These are the things that we're talking about. We're hitting on a lot of them right now.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, these hallmarks of aging, which, you know, I always forget like the exact ones. It used to be nine and I think it's like 11 now, but. It all comes down to protein misfolding, uh, you know, us not reading our DNA sequence anymore, but, you know, we, we could. Zoom into inflammation, like that's the cause. You can zoom into gut health and that's the cause. You know, one thing that I've come down to is putting our body in the correct environment and it sort of knows what to do. So. The correct environment, like we've been alluding to this whole conversation, getting up early, morning light, moving your body, eating intermittently. Experiencing some stressor, whether that's exercise or cold or heat, you know, maintaining a good emotional health.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Something that perhaps doesn't get talked about as much, um, looking after your gut with a variety of different ingredients, whole unprocessed food. You know, these are all things that align with our biology and the challenge is not actually the information. It's the implementation of these ideas. And so I think, you know, what you're doing with next health and. What I'm trying to do with, with getting people to cook from scratch, that it's all sort of. Of aligned in that same aim.

• 12:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I want to take it a step back and just learn a little bit more about you.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Because I think you have a great story and you're a physician and from the UK.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And tell me a little bit about kind of your career and how you shifted into, you know, your first book was a cookbook.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So, you know, not too many doctors write cookbooks.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So I'd love to hear the story behind that.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. So I've been practicing as a medical doctor for over fifteen years. So I started off in the NHS. And my journey toward lifestyle medicine or functional medicine or, you know, stepping outside of traditional conventional medicine that I was taught in Imperial College really came about because of my own health issues. So I started suffering from atrial fibrillation when I was a twenty four year old. It was during a really long stint of shifts that I was working at in my hospital. My heart started beating irregularly and very, very fast. I was admitted to my own hospital during a shift that I was on. I was parked right next to a patient I'd been seeing earlier that day.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Who was very confusing for this poor lady because this, the doctor that was seeing her a couple of hours before was now parked next to her, connected to a cardiac monitor. So it was quite funny then, but like, I remember this sense of embarrassment when I was admitted and just being wheeled down the corridor to have some of my investigations. And the sort of diagnosis at the time was, oh, maybe it had a bit too much caffeine, maybe it hadn't hydrated properly that day. It was a one off, but actually I would start having these episodes of atrial fibrillation two to three times per week. And therein started my journey as a patient. So I'd, you know, been thrust from junior doctor into patient mode.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And I was still working as a doctor, but I started taking flaconide and anti arrhythmic. I was also on some other medications to reduce my, my heart rate. And I had all the investigations, they couldn't figure out a cause and just sort of bit of background for the listener. Atrial fibrillation has many different causes. It could be as a result of an infection. It could be from a drug use, I wasn't a drug user. It could be from a no particular reason and we we tend to see it in the older age groups. So as a twenty four year old, previously fit and well person, very unusual to have atrial fibrillation. I had the um electro physiology studies, looking to see whether there is a reentry pathway or something structurally wrong with the heart, nothing.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And so I was gonna have what's called an ablation. Yeah. Which is where you have an area around the pulmonary vein where you you essentially burn to ring fence these misfiring cells. And I was one hundred percent gonna have this procedure. I, you know, was about to load myself up on a anticoagulant to thin my blood. And my my mum, who's not a medic, who's not a physician or medically trained, she's just typical Indian matriarch. She was like, you really need to think about your diet and lifestyle before you start with any aggressive interventions. And I thought she was crazy, but I spoke to my cardiologists and they gave me the blessing to try some lifestyle things and they're like, look, you're gonna come back in three months to have this ablation procedure.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  If you wanna play around with food and all the rest of it, be my guest, but like, you're gonna have to come back. So I started changing up my breakfasts. So I outwound the cereals. I was having lots of refined grains in my cereals. And in came sort of leftovers and nuts and seeds and I would make my own bread and all the rest of it. Out went the sandwiches at the hostel canteen. In came sort of me bringing in my own sort of salads with like miso and all these different fermented vegetables. And then instead of having pasta at night, I would like make something from scratch that would actually be my breakfast or the lunch the next day. And gradually I started introducing new things, meditation, improving my sleep, lighter exercise like yoga and pilates instead of like HIIT training.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And my episodes that I was vigorously tracking, rigorously tracking every single day, went from two to three times per week to zero over about a period of a year. And therein lies like the question like, why, why did this happen?

• 17:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  How is this possible? Why wasn't I taught this at medical school? And then, you know, from two thousand ten, two thousand eleven, I just started doing a deep dive into the literature, learning about the gut microbiome, learning about inflammation, learning about mindset, learning about sleep medicine, learning about the importance of movement. And I, I, I got introduced to the Institute for Functional Medicine. I came out over here to come to some of the lectures. I started watching, you know, Mark Hyman and Jeff Bland, like all these sort of like the forefathers of, of functional medicine, talk about this. And I started talking to patients about it as a, as a doctor who was doing family medicine A and E.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  And honestly, Darshan, it was like revolutionary because I started seeing patients improve.

• 17:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I started, you know, really reinvigorating myself with a different way of doing medicine, rather than just reactive sick care. It was preventative, exciting care where people took control of their health, rather than being subservient to whatever the doctor or nurses said. And then I realized, look, I'm getting really late in my clinic. Cause in, in the NHS, we only have like seven to eight minute appointments, right?

• 18:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Seven, eight minutes, wow.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Seven to eight minutes. And you can imagine like someone comes in and they're like, I've got type two diabetes, I might be depressed. I've also got this other social issue. We're like, how on earth can you do this in eight minutes? It's impossible. And I was trying to give them the recipes on top of this. So I realized around this time, like I've got to start like writing down recipes and putting it on a blog.

• 18:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And that's where the idea of the doctor's kitchen came about. So it was just honestly a means for me to be more efficient with my clinic time. And then I started like, you know, getting more attention on socials. A publisher came knocking and said, this could be a cookbook. And I was like, what are you talking about? I can't do a cookbook, I'm a, you know, medical doctor. And then there, therein lies the rest of my professional journey. It's like I, I went from cookbooks to BBC shows, to YouTube, to podcasts. I now have a tech company where we have recipes. That align with different health goals, gut health, brain health, skin health, using the latest in nutritional medicine.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I did a nutritional medicine masters and I'm just constantly learning all the time, like from folks like yourself with what you're doing with Next Health. At the, you know, the, the, the next level of like how we do uh cancer screening, prevention. But but all boils down, like it sounds very complicated to people from the outside, right? You know, we're talking about mitochondrial health, we're talking about inflammation levels, we're talking about the gut microbiome, we're scratching the surface with a gut microbiome. We're talking about bacteria right now, but actually we should be thinking about viruses and nematodes and fungi and all these other critters that live within our body. But it all comes down to the very simple principles, eating unprocessed food, moving every day and living in alignment with our circadian biology.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  You know, and magic can happen. So when I look back at my, I'll, I'll get off my soapbox for a second. When I look back at my own patient journey, what did I do? I put myself in alignment with how my body is meant to be. I ate the right food, I started moving, I started improving my sleep. And all whilst being a junior doctor with a, I mean, you, you know what residency is like. It's a crazy schedule. It's a lot of stress. You're learning things on the job. But if I was able to do that, it's, you know, uh, uh, it's, it gives a lot of other people hope that they can do whatever their life circumstances. And this is what I'm passionate about, man. This is literally like my purpose. I feel aligned. I love talking about food. I love creating recipes. That reflect people's backgrounds, like we're Indian.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, I do Indian recipes. It's not just kale salads. It's like Korean food and like Mediterranean and even American food. Can be built and architected within the principles of like what a healthy plate looks like, which is getting enough protein. Ensuring you're looking after your gut and reducing inflammation. Though these are the, the sort of pillars for, for how we should be creating food. So yeah, sorry, that was a long, long origin story there, but yeah, that's how I got involved in this whole deal.

• 21:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Really funny because, you know, it's very similar to my story.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Where I, same health struggles.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Learned about functional medicine. Turn my own health around. I'm like, why are more doctors not practicing this type of medicine? And look, like, we need to have medicine the way it's traditionally practiced.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank goodness, we have pharmaceuticals that can treat really bad things.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 21:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But at the same time, using functional medicine techniques and the things that you're talking about, we can reverse these chronic disease issues. Even atrial fibrillation can be reversed.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  To where you can avoid procedures, you can get off medications.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 21:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And that's the key, is using them concurrently.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And, you know, I know so many people now that have avoided the ablation surgery.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  By using lifestyle. Mona, who you're interviewing with later.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I don't know if you know this, but she had the same story.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  No way, really?

• 22:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, she had the same story.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 22:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  She had a, um, she had a arrhythmia.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  She went and joined her ashram. She was on the table for the ablation and she said, I'm not doing it.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 22:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  On the table.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  That is incredible.

• 22:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And then she went to an ashram and just completely reversed and never needed the ablation.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I'm gonna have to ask her about this.

• 22:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 22:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And anyhow, so what I've found is for something that's a knee jerk reaction.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  For western medicine, which is you have a, an arrhythmia that cannot be controlled with medication. You have to get an ablation done.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's such a knee jerk for us to think that way.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And to put this new mindset in there and the number of dangerous procedures that can be avoided.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Not just for the heart, but the entire body, all those procedures we do. And these dangerous medications we put people on.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's worth a try.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. And especially when it comes to diseases of lifestyle, right? So when we think about type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, these drugs that we have available to us, great. Let's keep them in the box. Let's like, you know, they should be in like glass jars where it's like you smash to like to use them before. In case of emergency. Exactly, because, you know, you know, working as a medical practitioner, and I know, like, once you start someone on a drug, it's only so long until they have to go to the second one, the third one, and then we have to review them for side effects. And we have a really big issue with something called polypharmacy that the BMJ wrote an article about. Many years ago, and I think a lot more doctors are becoming more aware of.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  But before we get to that point, let's put people's bodies in alignment. So because we're not, we're not meant to have type D diabetes. We're not meant to have these issues with our hearts. We're meant to be actually thriving, healthy, energetic individuals. And whilst there is, yes, the process of aging, that can one hundred percent be delayed. So we get better health span rather than just like extending lifespan. So, yeah, there's just so many things that we could be doing as doctors. And the, the other really good thing about it is that it reignites your passion as a doctor as well, as a physician. When you see people actually getting healthier and happier, rather than just on the next drug and the drug after that. Let's try and delay that as much as possible, because I agree with you.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  But you know, as a conventionally trained doctor, these drugs and interventions we have are incredible and they are amazing. But let's like try and delay the use of those as much as possible. And like reestablish people's relationships with their bodies and, you know, these, these, uh, this sort of N of one thinking.

• 24:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly. And you know, um, I think we're at a perfect moment in society right now. Where we've taken Western medicine to a really far degree. The pendulum is so swung all the way towards drug discovery. People making trillions of dollars off medications and hospitals and surgeries and robotic surgery. I mean, there's an incredible amount of technology there, right? And so that's great. Thank goodness we have that in case we have a heart attack or we get diagnosed with cancer. Get hit by a bus. Thank God we have all that, right? But once you put it together with lifestyle interventions, functional medicine, living with your circadian biology. And you make that kind of the other half of the equation.

• 25:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Now you have this incredible system that's there for emergencies, but most people are staying healthy and will never need it in the first place. Yeah, for sure. By utilizing what you and I are talking about. So, you know, rather than these two systems fighting against each other, they're both just, you know, two sides of the same coin.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 25:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Of where we're headed as a society, which is having more longevity.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we're going to add years to our life, but they're useless if we don't add. Functional years where we're enjoying our our time alive, right?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And you know what? I think it's a real opportunity for folks in the UK because we have a universal healthcare system. It's not free. People pay for it via taxation. But the amount of expenditure every single year is going up and up and up. It's over a hundred billion every single year that the UK taxpayer pays into the NHS. Apart from the fact that it is terribly bureaucratic, which is the reason why I left the NHS a couple of years ago. Because it was like, like you were saying, you know, seven to eight minutes, you can't do anything at these appointments. And it was a real battle, uphill battle for me, trying to instigate any change within the system. So I'm trying to do it outside by just getting people to eat healthier.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  But there's a real opportunity to save taxpayers' money and actually make the whole system a lot more efficient by creating healthier people. And it takes a bit of lateral thinking, but it's one hundred percent there because the amount of money that we spend on drugs could be spent on things like community centres where we actually do exercise classes for free, telemedicine, where we actually do like chickens with health coaches. You know, and with AI and automation now, there's a real opportunity to actually expand our current workforce. I don't know if you know this, but like, um, so in my company, we started the Dr. Skishan app uh three years ago now.

• 27:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Great app.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate that. So not only do we create like recipes every single week and, you know, that are geared towards the nutritional medicine evidence on on different health goals. We trained a virtual Dr. Rupy avatar using my voice. And so you can actually have a conversation with me based on all the articles that I've written, based on all the podcasts that I've recorded, and you can ask it questions. Should I fast? What do you think about this? How do I swap this ingredient in this recipe? And like, there is a real opportunity now to to magnify this kind of like personal touch to people's day to day where they don't need to ask questions and try and figure out themselves. They actually have like a mini health coach with them. So what we can do currently with the technology we have available to us is just not being explored as much as it should be.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  And there's cost-saving opportunities as well as life-saving opportunities, particularly, you know, from my. Perspective in the UK and Europe.

• 27:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no, it's so, it's so true. I thi- I think, once again, another part of this incredible convergence of this time period is a technology. And your virtual Dr. Rupy is amazing. I mean, people can, people can learn so much.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And on the fly for what's affecting them in that moment, recipe swaps or, you know, all the things you talk about. I mean, you get answers right away.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Trained on the data from your books.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Your podcasts.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And, um, and by the way, your podcast is awesome, by the way.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 28:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I've been listening to some episodes and, um, you know, um, I think the doctor's kitchen is the name of the podcast, right?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  People can get a lot more great information from there. So I want to dive into some of the topics that I think that you speak really eloquently about. And give people some real take home actionable tools.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah.

• 28:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I think one of the things that you've touched on a lot in your podcast is this concept of, a relatively new concept is that we have our phones now. You know, these have been around for the last 20 years. Apps, I think, have been around for only like 10 years, right?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And in the last 10 years, we have completely rewired our brains because of these apps that are now available to us on demand all the time. Right? And unfortunately, or fortunately, these apps have made our life so much better, more convenient. We have so much available to us all the time. Unfortunately, we are so intimately connected with this phone now for these apps. That it's hard to move away. And some of that is through necessity and some of it is through dopamine hits.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And you give some really good kind of frameworks to think about this and some real, really good actionable steps on how to mitigate some of this damage, right? So dive into that for me.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I realized early this year, so I, we just had a son, my eight month old. And I think I had this realization where I was playing with him and, you know, he's just like crawling. But I was spending time with him, but I had my phone in my hand. I was like, this device is stealing away some precious moments that I will never experience ever again with. This bundle of joy. I mean, he's not always a bundle of joy. He can cry. They hear pooping everywhere, you know, nappies everywhere. So it's a bundle of destruction.

• 30:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Only four more years.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yeah. He's a, he's a bundle of joy and a bundle of destruction at the moment as well. But I remember having this, this moment. I was like, gosh, this is, I'm addicted to my phone. And I had Johann Hari on my podcast a couple of years ago. He wrote this incredible book called Stolen Focus. And it was all about the gradual degradation of our attention span over the preceding few years because in part of digital devices that are engineered to steal our attention. And it was a bit of a penny drop moment for me then, but I, I don't think I fully appreciate it until I had my son and I realized that these moments are being stolen from me.

• 30:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Can I ask you a quick question on that? Because I wanted to just make sure that we give people examples of how is this device engineered to steal our attention?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  So everything, like, let's take a typical social media app, right? So not only is it trained on what your preferences are and what your likes are, but also subtle nudges to the algorithm that you are interested in a certain subject matter. So it will register that you like something, even if you haven't tapped that you like it or commented on it. Like, these are sort of high value triggers to it. But if you've hovered over it for more than four or five seconds, it registers the fact that you are interested in whatever it might be, even if you're embarrassed to like double click it, whatever it might be. So as soon as you open the app, it is so good at bringing your attention to something that you, you are genuinely interested in.

• 31:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And what's crazy about this, like for people making content, which I just started doing like a year ago.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Instagram actually reports to you, not if someone, it reports you, obviously, if someone liked it.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Or if someone interacted. That's great. Like you said, that's a high value interaction. But it shows you on all your posts, how many people watched past three seconds.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And they figured out the magic number is three seconds where you've captured someone's attention.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And then Instagram is now training creators on how to keep people's attention.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Past three seconds.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So they've actually figured out exactly how to get you hooked.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  To their app.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 32:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And that's what you're talking about, the engineering.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. And you're literally like, people just say, I'll put the phone down or like, you know, like turn it off or take the app off. You're working against thousands of engineers from the like highest, most privileged universities, the smartest minds in the world. Who are all working on digital design to keep you engaged because you're, the engagement is the currency. It's not how much you spend. It's not how much. The, the number one thing, the number one priority of all these different companies is engagement because they know that engagement can be monetized. Which is why these are the most lucrative companies in the world right now. And so like regardless of like how much you want to fight this app.

• 33:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And whatever app it might be, it's not just social media apps, like every, I mean, even we are like looking at digital behavior techniques to try and keep people engaged. Obviously for good reasons because we want to get people to eat healthier. But we all, we're all in this game and you mentioned three seconds for Instagram, particularly it's even less. It's like literally, we're talking less than a second, talking milliseconds here. So I realized that I was having this issue and the own, uh, there's, there's a number of different ways in the same way an addict can come off a substance. This complete cold turkey and abstinence.

• 33:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Catch you before, before you go into that because I want to, I want to definitely dive into that, but you said one um, really powerful thing to be that I did not realize about this. For example, social media, it goes beyond that three seconds or goes beyond looking at your phone for like ten, fifteen minutes because. You get into these thought loops, right? That lasts way beyond that. So can you talk about that a little bit?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like everything on your phone, particularly on social media apps. It's sort of geared to make you feel that there's, there's a, there's a balance between entertainment and then, and wanting. And, and this, this idea that you are not enough or you're not doing enough can lead to these negative spiral loops. That make you feel pretty terrible afterwards, like. I don't think anyone's had a fifteen or thirty minute session on social media and they're like, oh, great. I'm really glad I spent that amount of time on social media. I feel entertained. I feel better about myself. I feel more positive about life. I feel motivated. I'm gonna do something like, you know, positive. I don't think anyone's had these thoughts. I mean, there are great content creators out there. Don't get me wrong.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  I love your content that you started putting out on social media and the content that I put out, I'm hoping is like, you know, gonna be net positive. But unfortunately, it's mixed in with a million of all this other stuff that we know is engineered to like, just keep you on on the platform. And it's not like the positive affirmation stuff that you actually want to endure, uh, enjoy on your, on your app. So that's where my worry is with with these apps and I, and I think going into the solutions. Yeah. It's either like, you know, pure abstinence or you can potentially moderate it. And there are a few apps like that, where it will cut you off after ten minutes or, you know, it will gray out your screen or give you a reminder that you've been on social media app for a certain.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Those might work for certain people. My perspective is I need complete shutdown from these apps. I need to physically remove myself from the phone as well. And so there is this concept of a kale phone and a cocaine phone. I don't know if you've ever heard of this before. I heard about it from you. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it was popularized by a blogger called, uh, Alex Mack, I think, no, George Mack, sorry. And, um, the concept of you've got a, you've got a cocaine phone and a cocaine phone is nothing to do with the drug. It's all to do with the, the dopamine roller coaster of all the different apps that you have. So you've got TikTok, you've got Instagram, you've got even LinkedIn is like, you know, turned into yet another social media app with the same sort of digital behavior techniques.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Um, and this is just constantly giving you stimulation, stimulation, stimulation. And then you have another phone, like another physical phone that you use out of business hours, right? And this has just got Uber, Google Maps, maybe WhatsApp or iMessage, whatever you wanna use, and that's it. And this is what I've actually started instigating myself now, like. Physically removing myself from the phone that gives me way too much stimulation and wastes a lot of my time and physically putting in like a kale phone with which I use on weekends. And what this does is it enables me to be super present with my kids, super present with my, my family at weekends, which is protected time without the draw of the other phone.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Because I don't know if you ever had this moment, but like whenever you're bored or whenever you're in a queue, what do you do? You pull out your phone.

• 37:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  We're so used to having this entertainment and this constant stimulation that we search for, even when we're paying for our shopping, you know, it's just, it doesn't, it's such an unusual and extreme behavior that has only been learned over the last 10 years. We have the subway system in London. When you go into the subway system in London or you go into a bus, every single person in the face, no judgment. I'm part of that, I'm part of that, that crew. And what I've started doing now is giving myself purposeful, mindful moments where I do not look at my phone. I put my phone in my bag so I don't have the temptation to take it out of my pocket. And I, I will sit and endure boredom because boredom is so good for our brain. It's where we get creativity, it's where we have shower thoughts.

• 37:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  You know, have you ever had that moment where you're in the shower, you're like, oh my God, that's a great idea. It's because you've given your brain space to not do anything and wander. And so this idea of mind wandering is something I think we really need to reestablish a relationship with. And one of the ways in which I do that is with a kale phone at weekends.

• 38:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love this. I'm gonna do this for sure because I feel that, you know, one of the things I did a while ago was take my email app off of my phone and that lasted all of like, you know, a week.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Because, because I needed it.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But I think there's times during the workday, you need a cocaine phone because you're working and you need access to email and things.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 38:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, you're creating content, whatever have you. But having a separate phone for when you're around your kids and your family where you don't have that temptation.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's so crazy because, you know, going back to evolutionary biology, I think about the early humans and by early, I mean 80 years ago.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What did they do when they were born, were born, right?

• 38:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  When they were standing in line or in the subway, what did they do?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They didn't have a phone to go to with apps on it.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They took out a book to read or they just stood there and looked around, right?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Or they had a conversation with someone, like behold, you know, it probably wouldn't happen in London, but.

• 39:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, but all these things have been kind of deleted from society now. And like, you know, we talked about, it's only been the last decade or so.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we forgot what life was like before.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This last decade.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's so important to get back to that and remember that because I, I think that, you know, we're running this massive experiment over the last decade. And we're going to be running it for the next couple of decades and we're going to find out the results in 20 years from now.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Where everyone's attention has been totally destroyed. And kids, you know, especially can't live without looking at the phone.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And I don't want to wait 20 years to find out the results of this experiment because I can't imagine that they're that good.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I've got an A month old now, as I've said, and, um, you know, we're, we're getting asked questions about response to when we're going to introduce screens. And because schooling is very much geared around computer use now, like he's going to have to have a relationship with a screen. But it's like, how do we mitigate that in the same way? How are we going to mitigate his relationship with ultra-processed food? He's going to go to parties at some point when he's older, he's going to have, you know, cake and candies and all the rest of it. How do we, how do we develop a healthy relationship where there's not extreme one way? But it's not extreme the other way. And I feel that the default option right now is the extreme one way of

• 40:30Speaker 01

  as much candy as you like, as much green time as you like, as much, you know, dopamine, all this, there's just dopamine everywhere. And I think, you know, for us, we cook everything from scratch. I mean, I'm, I'm the doctor's kitchen. So I'm cooking all the baby food from scratch and doing all this weaning stuff. And, you know, he doesn't have any exposure to added sugars currently. We're removing all screens, like we don't allow him to use any screens at this point. We're going to try and mitigate that as much as possible through his. Years and I think we just had to be a lot more mindful and purposeful of our kids because otherwise society has moved in a very extreme way and I and I fear I mirror your concerns about how this is going to play out in fifteen to twenty years from now.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Um. And I I also think, you know, the advent of A I and robotics hasn't even, we haven't scratched the surface yet, but this is going to become the norm as well.

• 41:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah, it's just going to create more comfort, more

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  time where we're not using our bodies, using our brains.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it's it's um, it's it's an incredible time we live in, but we gotta protect, especially our children, you know, my son is now eleven. And he kind of grew up in this decade of discovering how do we, you know, use screens with with toddlers, right? And thank God he was not ten years older and, you know, we had to discover how to relate to social media and I think this, we already know

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  negative effects social media has had on people that have been exposed to it in their teen years. But he he was a child and everywhere we went, you know, at restaurants, people would be handing their phone to their children or their iPad when they came out to their children to keep them kind of babysat at the restaurant.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we were very um suspect of that because we we thought that this could not be good.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But we did it a few times.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I imagine you have to some sometimes, yeah, yeah.

• 42:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Behavior change that occurs when kids are on screens a lot and taking them off of the screens, it's it's nuts, like, you know, getting them off the screens.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 42:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Most kids don't handle that very well.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we decided very early to reduce the screen exposure and not use it at restaurants, et cetera.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And thank goodness, because, you know, we see a lot of kids now that have really bad attention deficit, behavior issues from being on screens all the time.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  I never forget this moment I had, it was about five or six years ago, I was working in pediatric A and E at the hospital that I I used to work full time at. And a mother and a child come come in, I think he's got a tummy ache and a fever and and something relatively mild. She's got her phone, uh, and he's watching a YouTube cartoon. He must have been about four or five, something like that. And in the consultation room that I was working in, the internet was really bad. I couldn't even get wifi. So as soon as they come in, kid's watching the YouTube, he's nice and settled. YouTube cuts out, this child explodes in the clinic room. Yeah, and like, you know, she's, she's really apologetic, he's crying, yada, yada.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  He was completely subdued when he came in. As soon as that YouTube video wasn't buffering anymore and it cut out, my word, it was like World War Three had just broken out. And it was really scary to me and like, you know, I hadn't got kids at that point. I don't have like young um siblings or nieces or nephews. And so for me, it was a real stark moment of wow, thi- this, it wasn't the tummy pain, it wasn't the fever that brought him that much pain. It was the lack of, of screen access. And it just sort of exploded. He didn't have any issues, no behavioral problems at all. Just a, a quote unquote, normal child who just, you know, loves watching YouTube. And I remember it just stuck in my mind, it's like, there's something wrong with the screen

• 44:08Speaker 01

  that is leading to this kind of behavior when it's taken away. Like, if you take candies off, they might moan and scream, that's fine, but like, this was like really out of character, I would say. And I've never forgotten that. And I've just thought to myself then, I was like, I've got to be careful with screens when I have kids one day. Because this, I think, is a, an aftermath and an effect of, of uh almost reliance on digital simulation.

• 44:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely, and you know, it's almost like um drug-seeking behavior in an adult that's addicted to heroin. I hate to say it, I mean, it's like the mini version of that in kids. Because these kids not only flip out when they don't have the device, but they're constantly trying to negotiate more time with the device.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They're constantly trying to like trick you into giving them the device, stealing the device from your pocket. Like, these are, these are all behaviors of people that are, I mean, you know, older adults that love for drugs.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Very similar, because I, I look at it the mini version of that.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You have to protect your children.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes sense from a biological point of view. I mean, like, it might not be as extreme as uh substance abuse, but like the behaviors that, that they do mimic, like, kids are smart as well. They will like, you know, bargain, they'll trick you, they'll, you know, ask the other parent, you know, different like technique.

• 45:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, exactly. Okay, so I love the kill phone.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 45:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You also talk a little bit about how to avoid some electronic use like during the day, in the morning especially.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Can you talk about that a little?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we try, me and my wife are trying really hard to not have our phones in our bedroom at all.

• 45:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  We have an alarm clock instead of having our alarm on our phone. We have everything on plane mode. We shut down our phones at like eight thirty P M. So there's a real good block of time where we don't have any stimulation whatsoever. And I want to make sure that I protect my mornings as much as possible because as soon as you take that flight mode off, you just get messages. And I'm very fortunate to have friends in Australia, America, obviously in the U K as well. And you just get a flurry of messages. And it's almost like inviting like ten people that you know in your room at the same time. And then you flip on a social media app and then you've got like thirty people, forty people, some people you don't know, like, what are you guys doing here?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And so you just have all this like attention grabbing. And, you know, we were talking about mind wandering and creativity. In the morning, your brain is just so alive and it hasn't been, you know, disturbed or polluted with any ideas. This is like prime time for your brain to just breathe and like come up with ideas for the day. And so I try and protect this time when I do my morning exposure to light, when I do my exercise in the morning. I won't have looked at my phone prior to that. I might listen to a bit of music, but even then, like, I'm trying to not listen to music when I exercise as well. I might sound like a bit of a caveman at the moment, but during those times where I'm like working out and stuff and I'm like pumping blood to my brain,

• 47:08Speaker 01

  I'm getting an adrenaline and cortisol bump, you know, this is actually where I'm probably most creative. So I want to protect that as much as possible. And the other thing I did, Darshan, which is a little bit more extreme, is earlier this year I did a silent retreat.

• 47:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  And I was always skeptical about silent retreats because I thought it's a bit too extreme. What are the benefits? You know, is this proven yada yada? But I thought I'll do a three day sort of like mini silent retreat. And just for the listener, there's no writing, no reading, no listening, obviously no talking, no digital devices, obviously. There's very minimal stimulation and you're just sat there with your thoughts. And it's a very scary place to be considering most of our thoughts are injected via the phone or via news or via like external stimulation. So I would say it's the first time in decades that I've actually had this moment where I've just been there with my thoughts and I've had no external stimulation.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I did it somewhere in the UK called the Lake District, which is very pristine and there's loads of nature and all the rest of it. We had like a guided yoga every day, but again, no talking, nothing. And I don't think I realized the benefits of having that three day period during my silent retreat that I I created space in my day to day. I didn't have this sort of like reflex action to grab my phone. I'd almost like reset my dopamine and I can't wait to do this again, honestly, Darshan. It's literally like it was life changing that three days. And I know that a seven or a ten day retreat is going to be even more so to reset my dopamine. Because I don't want to suggest that you have to go from one extreme to the other.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  But this silent extreme actually gave me a lot more awareness of how I need to lean into silent, uh, silentness or like, you know, uh, removal of digital distractions during my day to day as well. And I highly recommend it to everyone.

• 49:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's amazing. I mean, it sounds so uncomfortable. It sounds like, uh, how would I even get through an hour of it, you know? And then I think back once again, evolutionarily, my caveman brother from like a thousand years ago.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This is what they did.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  When they were alone, sometimes they, they would just be by themselves for days and days and days wandering. And they didn't have books. They didn't have digital devices, obviously.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This is what we are wired to thrive in, right?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That is incredible.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  It's it's like giving your brain the space where it can operate. And like I started, I started doing funny things when I was doing my silent retreat where I would just chronicle like all my earliest memories and I would start thinking about things. That I hadn't thought about for years because I gave myself the space to do that. And I'm not just talking about physical separation from it. I'm I'm talking about like space from external stimulation, which is what we're constantly bombarded with. It's one of the reasons why I love podcasting, actually. Because, you know, during this conversation, we don't have any digital devices. We don't have any external sort of conversations. We just have a a face to face conversation. You get to know someone a bit more and like you get to share it, which is great. So, yeah, I I I I think we need to introduce a lot more of these silent experiences

• 50:19Speaker 01

  that you can pepper through your day rather than having to constantly like, you know, go and physically remove yourself from the modern world.

• 50:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I always joke around with people that are having troubles in their relationship. I'm like, just come to my podcast studio. Sit with your wife for an hour and just have a podcast.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's like no one talks to their significant other anymore in this way where you're connected.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 50:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Not distracted and you just kind of sit there and look at each other and talk. It doesn't happen very often.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I love getting back to normal conversations like this that are not just emojis on a phone, you know.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny, like when me and my now wife had therapy like four or five years ago now, I think it was during Covid. One of the things that we started doing was having weekly check ins. Where it's just like, okay, we're going to spend half an hour on a Saturday or Sunday or go for a walk or whatever. And we're just going to check in like, how are you feeling? Is there anything that I've done to piss you off this week? Like, how are you thinking about this? And I would just have like a normal conversation like that. And when you get, you know, really busy in the day to day, she works in finance, I'm running my business. Now we've got an eight month old, like if you don't create time, that time will be sucked away from you. And so we've been very intentional with our like week where we do have a period of time where we do like a mini podcast.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And it's like less formal, but it's like, you know, we do it over a walk or whatever. And we just, we just check in. And I just think for us at least, that's that's a really healthy way to maintain a sane and fruitful relationship. Just having open, honest conversations.

• 51:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's great. That's fantastic.

• 51:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This episode was brought to you by Nex Health, a health optimization and longevity clinic located in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and soon to be opening in Montecito, Nashville, Miami, and many other cities in the United States and Canada. Nex Health is the Apple Store of wellness, where you can optimize your health span and lifespan using cutting-edge technology. I actually founded Nex Health eight years ago to give my patients a place to go get extensive biomarker testing done and provide them with all the tools that I use to get my health in order. The longevity circuit in Nex Health using hyperbaric oxygen, sauna, cryotherapy, and LED light is a game changer. In addition, the doctors at Nex Health measure thousands of biomarkers and put into place

• 52:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  a longevity optimization plan using advanced tools like ozone, plasma exchange, and peptides. Go to www.nex.health to check it out.

• 52:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 53:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  that I'm taking my vitamins and supplements. Go to vitaboom.com and check it out.

• 53:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So I could talk to you forever. So many things and you're so knowledgeable in a lot of fields that can really help move the needle for people. But where you've really dedicated a lot of your life's energy is in reintroducing people to food.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And what I mean by that is, again, over the last couple of decades, our relationship with food has been decimated.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Especially here in the United States where ultra-processed food and fast food has just become a way of life.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, I heard from a friend of mine who's in the construction business that the least valuable room now for Americans in the whole house is the kitchen.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Really?

• 54:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And they're thinking about kind of just eliminating it and just giving people like a sink, a microwave and a toaster oven. I don't know.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  A closet instead of like actual a kitchen.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it's so backwards.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What's happened, you know?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I'd love to hear some of kind of the biggest points that you put out in your book as far as how to think about our relationship with food. And then maybe after that, we can talk about some big picture dietary advice.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Yeah. So, I mean, like when I started my media career and, you know, doing the cookbooks and all the rest of it, I dived really deep into the science and I love it. And, you know, you love it as well. I had this graph in my second cookbook, Eat to Be Illness, where I looked at all the different sort of principles of healthy eating. And they were influenced by things like chrononutrition, like when you eat rather than just what you eat. Polifenols and the science of phytochemicals, all the different thousands of chemicals that we have in fruits and vegetables. I talked about mitochondrial health. I talked about population studies. I talked about the science of fasting, like all these different things. It was all, and it all geared towards these principles.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  And I realized, wow, I really complicated it and I overcomplicated it for the, for the audience. And so that's why with the content I'm putting out now and this book, I've really just distilled all this information into very simple principles that you can apply every time you sit down to eat. And these are the three things, right? Am I getting enough protein at this meal? Are there ingredients that are supporting my gut health? And is the overall impact of this meal pro or anti-inflammatory? If you can answer positively to those three things, you're looking at a really healthy plate of food that will improve your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your energy, your longevity.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  This is all in line with the principles that we know that diet can have an impact on your, on your health. So ensure you get enough protein, ensure that it's gut healthy and ensure that it's anti-inflammatory. How do you do that? Well, you go for unprocessed foods, you make sure you're getting plenty of fibre, you lean into probiotic rich foods. And you eat in a pattern that is largely Mediterranean. What does that mean? It doesn't mean it needs to be Mediterranean flavoured. It just needs to be anti-inflammatory in terms of colourful fruits and vegetables, good quality oils, things like extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds that are healthy fats, avocado and, and pulses as well. So like lentils and beans and stuff. And that's it.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  But like I said earlier, it's like the science is complex, which is what I used to love talking about earlier in my career. The solutions are simple, what I've just said, get enough protein, make sure your gut is looked after and make sure it's anti-inflammatory. Implementation, that's the hard stuff. That is the real hard stuff. How do I do this on Monday morning when I'm running around with the kids? How do I make sure that I don't lose a heart midway through the week? And it's a Thursday and I haven't packed my lunch and I don't know what options to buy when I'm out. How do I figure out what to eat when I'm like at my friend's house and they've just cooked steak and barbecue? And like, there's no like healthy ingredients, like how do you navigate all this stuff? Well, there, there are certain practices that I've learnt over my years of maintaining my health, like fasting. You don't need to eat.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  If you, if you can't find anything to eat, you don't need to eat right then. Like, you know, you've got the biology, man. Like you, you, your ancestors experienced extreme famine that we don't need to now. But you are not going to die if you, if you miss a meal. That's totally fine. If you can't find healthy food right now, don't worry about it. Drink some water, you're good. And then like, you know, just make sure that you, you grab something healthy on your way home or whatever, you know, at home. Whatever you have. So everything that is geared in in my career is is trying to help people find the solutions to what is a very complicated food landscape.

• 58:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Where there's ultra-processed food everywhere and there's healthy food, masquer- things that are masquerading as healthy food that are actually super ultra-processed as well. I mean, most of the healthy supermarkets out here are like full of not great stuff, you know, if I'm honest. So just stick to the vegetable aisle, stick to the uh good quality protein aisle. And and make sure you get and got healthy ingredients.

• 58:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. Now, that's a great principles to live by. And, you know, I'm I'm a big believer in the Pareto principle, the twenty eight principle. I think eighty percent of the time, if you can do this, that's a really great start and it'll lead to you doing it ninety nine percent of the time, you know, and so. I think that um some of the things that I people struggle with is, number one, this concept of um how many vegetables to get in your your diet every day, right? And so, you know, you and I are both familiar with the study that is actually a lot more than we think, right? And so maybe you could talk a little bit about the research around how many vegetables we need, why we need them, and some tips and techniques for people to get them into their diet.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was this famous study, uh, I believe it was published in The Lancet in two thousand and eighteen or two thousand and nineteen. And they looked at the ideal number of vegetables uh per portion or portion per day that stayed off something called all-cause mortality. So any reason for death. They also looked at uh sub fractions of the data, looking at cancer, uh cardiometabolic disease, cardiovascular disease. And everyone's heard of five a day. So get enough fruits and vegetables. Five a day is five portions of eighty gram portions of fruits and vegetables. So greens and colorful vegetables, et cetera. Turns out that was completely arbitrary and it was uh a uh story, a good story.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Cause you know, they, you know, uh, there's nothing wrong with eating fruits and vegetables, but it was a story that was made up by a a food uh and grocery administration to try and sell more fruits and vegetables in America. It was came from the nineteen eighties, I believe. And so there's no science behind it whatsoever. It's completely arbitrary. Turns out, we actually need to be eating anywhere between six hundred and eight hundred grams of fruits and vegetables per day, which is closer to ten portions of fruits and vegetables a day. That sounds like a lot, and to be honest, it is a lot. But if you break it down per meal and a typical eating pattern of three meals a day, it's basically getting three portions of fruits and vegetables at each meal with a snack in between, like an apple or a piece of fruit, whatever.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  And lots of different things counts as fruit and vegetables. So I personally count a handful of nuts or seeds as one of your fruits and vegetables. The reason why is because they contain phytonutrients, these plant chemicals that have anti-inflammatory effects and are really good for our health. They contain things like vitamin E and other minerals as well and other vitamins. So I think they're just as powerful as fruits and vegetables as well. Beans and legumes can also count as fruits and vegetables. So you don't have to think of salad and romaine lettuce and iceburgers when you have fruits and vegetables. In fact, I wouldn't, I would take those out of the equation because they're generally not that nutrient dense. Exactly. I would say you want to go for the dark leafy vegetables. You want to go for things like tomatoes and squash

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  and even starchy vegetables like sweet potato, fantastic. Those can all count as your fruits and vegetables. So a typical breakfast for me would be leftovers, sweet potato hash with corn, maybe some eggs and like a side of like greens. Like I've hit three vegetables right there. Right. And, you know, I haven't really tried, if I'm honest, and that's like counting of three to my ten a day. So just doing that consistently every single day is like really like ideal. And this is where I came up with this just one more philosophy, right? So I did a TED Talk a number of years ago where I talked about the impact of food and why we should be thinking about food as medicine.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  And a concept I came up with was every time you sit down to eat a meal, just think to yourself, can you add one more? Can you add one more fruit, vegetable, nut or seed at every meal? Just one more, you know, so if you're having a casserole, can you add some butter? Nut squash to it. If you're having a salad, can you add some pumpkin seeds to it? Uh, every meal, can you just think to yourself, can you add one more fruit or vegetable? And if you do that, you're gonna get close, if not exceed that nine to ten portions of vegetables every single day. And by virtue of doing that, you're flooding your body with micronutrients. You're giving your body a lot more fibre, you're unprocessing your diet.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  And we know these are all things that counteract cancer cells in your body, reduces inflammation, supports your gut health and can improve your longevity as well. So these are the simple sort of little hacks and little like heuristics that I want people to have at the the tip of their tongue.

• 1:03:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I love it. Those are such great tips and you know, easy to implement. Once you start getting into the habit again of preparing your own meals.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I think that's something that, you know, a lot of people unfortunately have gotten away from.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, yeah. And I'm trying to like, you know, create meals that like, you know, three or four ingredients. It doesn't need to be overcomplicated. In fact, like I had some friends over yesterday at the Airbnb that we're staying at, and I just threw together some massaged cavolonera, which is a type of kale, like a leafy green. Massaged that with, um, we had some leftover sweet potato that I'd roasted. I made a very simple vinaigrette with olive oil, Dijon mustard that was low sugar. And, um, uh, oh, I added some white beans. I just roasted some white beans with that and we had some some protein on the side. Just a very simple meal that had three different types of vegetables in.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  It was satiating, it was unprocessed, it was super healthy, it didn't take me that long, they loved it. Because we make it from scratch, it's like, it just tastes so much better.

• 1:04:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah. So talk about how people can add more protein to their meals. Cause I I think most people are not getting enough protein unless you're really thinking about it.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And this is a relatively new concept, which is why why I wrote the book Healthy High Protein, actually, because I used to think protein, we didn't really need to think about.

• 1:04:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The book, I'm sorry.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Healthy High Protein.

• 1:04:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. Is that the book prior to this one?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  No, this is the book.

• 1:04:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, this is the, oh, sorry. Right here, Healthy High Protein.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:04:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Tell us, what are we gonna learn in this month?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I, I, I used to think that protein wasn't the, what people should be focusing on. People should really be thinking about fibre and thinking about unprocessed in the diet and eating more plants. Turns out I was wrong because the protein studies that have influenced our recommended daily allowance were done in the nineteen eighties using very controlled studies called metabolic ward studies. But they were using nitrogen balancing techniques. So for a very simple analogy, it's like what goes in goes out. And it, when you, you hit balance, that's where the, the thinking is you are protein replete. You don't need to consume any more protein because your body is already doing enough.

• 1:05:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Based on the nitrogen balance.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And these are usually typically done over like two to three days. So your body's very good at adapting to different stresses. And one of those stresses is not getting enough protein. Uh, turns out, looking at different studies, using different techniques, uh, where they tr- they trace the amino acids that, which are the building blocks of proteins around your body. We need to eat more protein, particularly if you're over the age of fifty, because your body becomes less responsive to proteins. If you're menopausal, if you exercise more than a couple of times a week, you need to have more protein in your diet. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to be eating more meat. And it doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna give you bigger muscles.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Actually, proteins are super, super important for so many different aspects of our physiology. And so when I get people to think about, uh, eating more protein, I want you to think about having a core protein source at every meal, a plant-based partner and a topper. So core protein source.

• 1:06:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So three sources again, just like vegetables, three sources of protein.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:06:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay, talk about that.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  So every, every, and this will help you with your fruits and vegetables and just one more and all the rest of it. So a core protein source is a protein that has more than twenty grams of protein per hundred grams. So this could be chicken or fish or lean steak. But it could also be tofu or tempeh or even things like edamame. So these are. All things that will give you your core protein, right? You want to have a plant-based partner to that. A plant-based partner could be lentils, it could be beans, it could be azuki, black beans, turtle beans. These are all great sources of fibre. They have some protein in, not a great amount, usually less than ten grams per hundred grams. So that's not good enough to be a core protein source. But it will give you a little bit more complexity in your meal and it supports your gut as well.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  And the third thing is having a topper. So a topper could be like a nut or a seed, it could be sesame, it could be a mix, like omega three mix. It could be some sprouted pumpkin seeds. Like, these are all fantastic, different like ways in which to give texture. But also they have a bit of protein, in fact, like a handful of shelled hemp seeds, which has got all nine essential amino acids in. Will give you around eight grams of protein.

• 1:07:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Which is phenomenal.

• 1:07:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Just throw a handful in and everything.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Half of that and everything, exactly. I have that sometimes as a snack when I'm feeling hungry. And it's got also the, you know, the fatty acids, the anti-inflammatory compounds, some vitamin E. Exactly. I love shelled hemp seed. I put it in my smoothie and everything. So if you have that, each meal, you've got a core protein, you've got a plant-based partner and you have a topper. You're gonna get enough protein at your meal, right? You don't really have to think about the macros and measuring your chicken, all this kind of stuff. Because I, I was kind of like that at medical school when I was trying to get my six-pack abs in six weeks. And you know, all you end up eating is just like lean chicken and brown rice and broccoli. It's so boring. It's like. That we don't want people to be eating that way. You want people to enjoy their food and get more complexity and have enough fibre and eat anti-inflammatory food.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  So core protein source, plant-based partner and a topper.

• 1:08:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, that's, that's awesome structure there. And I think you mentioned something just briefly, but I want to expound on is like, protein has many, many effects throughout our body.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:08:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Besides just, you know, for keeping muscle on, right?

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And so, you know, the protein leverage hypothesis, what you talk about is number one, protein is going to keep you from being hungry throughout the day.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So leveraging protein to manage your hunger, first meal in the morning, I think, is extremely important.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  To get that in as well. But yeah, maybe you can talk about, besides muscle.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What are some of the other effects that protein has on our biology?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Totally. So when I, when I talk about protein, I think I like to use the analogy of Lego. So the beauty of Lego, when we used to play with Lego, is that even if you only had like twenty different types of Lego pieces, as long as you had enough of these pieces, you could build anything from a toy car to like this magnificent spaceship, or this lovely studio that we're sat in right now, right? Could be all be made out of the same twenty different pieces of Lego. Well, Lego are like the building blocks in the world of toys. In the same way, proteins are the building blocks in the world of biological materials. So protein in its simplest form can be amines hormones, for example. Things like insulin or insulin growth factor made out of proteins. They can also be enzymes.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  They can also be folded into different helixes and that can form collagen. They can form macrostructures like bones. They can be carrier molecules like lipoproteins. You know, all these different structures in our body we don't think of, but these are all made out of proteins. And when you start realizing that, you realize, oh, that's why when you consume protein or diet, only twenty five percent goes to your muscles. The vast majority of the protein that you're consuming is going to all these other physiological processes in your body, these different biological materials. And so I want people to, to think about protein and, and move away from meat and muscles to more like, okay, this is the foundation, the building blocks of your body, right?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  So when you consume protein in the morning, you're replenishing the amino acids that you've broken down overnight. Cause overnight your liver is super active, it's rebuilding proteins, it's this primary job. It's super, super important to be aware of that. But from a pragmatic and practical standpoint. When you get enough protein in the morning, you're signaling to your brain that you are satiated. Because protein is so important for all the reasons that I've just mentioned. If you're not getting enough protein, your brain's telling you to go out and go get some more food.

• 1:11:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  So if you've had refined cereal, you've had something that, you know, has had no protein whatsoever. You're still hungry. You might not feel it, but in a couple of hours' time. You will, your brain will signal to you, you're still hungry and you need to go and eat. Which is why people find themselves in this, this issue of like, okay, I've eaten loads at breakfast, but I still feel hungry. And therefore you've got to go snack and then you've got to go eat some more at lunchtime. So you end up over consuming calories and, and energy, which is what leads to weight gain. So this protein leverage hypothesis is ensuring that you are satiated from a protein perspective first thing. Will signal to your brain via GLP one that you don't need to consume anymore.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  And it will suppress your appetite such that you are naturally in calorie balance, or in some cases calorie deficit if you need to be. Which will maintain your weight. So it's, this is why I'm such a big fan of having protein at breakfast. It's super, super important because it maintains focus, energy, and it ensures that you're going to be. Uh, instead of on this roller coaster of, of constant hunger signals throughout the day. It ensures that you're going to have a steady energy and, and you, you're going to eat sufficient for your needs rather than over consuming.

• 1:12:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So well explained. I mean, this is, protein is so, twenty five percent goes to your muscles, seventy five percent to physiological processes.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So that's why your brain is like craving protein.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And, but the craving of protein is really just a hunger signal. And if you don't have any protein around, which you're saying you'll reach for the nearest ultra processed snack. And you're still going to be hungry. You might, it might cut off the GLP signaling like for the immediate moment, but it's just going to come right back.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:12:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And you're right, you know, everyone who starts adding protein to their breakfast, almost universally when I find. Is they start losing weight because they're not as hungry throughout the day.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is the thing. And that's why I'm a, I'm a really big fan of, of having a high protein, high fibre breakfast. Because both fibre and protein will contribute to the release of incretin hormones that will signal to your brain you're satiated, you've had enough food. Because when you realise just how important protein is, it's no wonder your brain's going to signal to you that you're still hungry if you haven't satisfied your protein requirements. And everyone's threshold for protein stopping their hunger is is different. And generally, we look at it on a weight basis. So the current recommendations internationally are zero point eight grams per kilogram of ideal body weight per twenty four hours.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  It takes a little bit of math to figure out exactly what your protein requirements are, but I think it's worth doing a little bit of arithmetic. So, and we're both Indian, so we love a bit of math. So, uh, I would say the minimum is one point two grams per kilogram of body weight per twenty four hours. And that's based on ideal body weight. So if you're overweight, let's say you're a hundred kilos, but you should be at eighty, you want to do the math on eighty. I would say for optimum benefits, if you're over the age of fifty, if you're postmenopausal, if you exercise, you do resistance training, you want to be looking at close to one point six. One point six grams per kilogram per twenty four hours can be quite hard for a lot of people to hit. And this is where you may benefit from having a bit of like, you know, a protein shake or like a high protein snack.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I think nuts and seeds are really good for this reason as well. But primarily, you want to be getting your protein from whole foods rather than supplemental forms. The the benefits of one point six to two or two point two, I think, can be there. I would say it's definitely there if you're a bodybuilder or you're an athlete. But you want to be really careful of not going into a severe calorie surplus, which could actually lead to weight gain over time. And this is where I feel a lot of people fall into the trap. Because the benefits are probably marginal above that point, unless you have like a an issue with malabsorption or you're not absorbing proteins correctly. But if you're trying to do this on your own, I think going for those higher protein amounts will unfortunately push out other healthier ingredients into your plate

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  and potentially get you to overconsume food in the form of energy that can lead to weight gain.

• 1:15:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, makes sense. So there's a sweet Spot that every person needs to kind of individualize for themselves.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we talked about this earlier. I'm a big believer in tracking. I think hunger is a great way to track as well. If, you know, I don't think you're getting enough protein if you're still hungry throughout the day.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And then after that, I have people track their skeletal muscle mass. I get a lot of my patients a grip strength dynamometer, actually.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's such an easy thing, it's cheap, it's like fourteen dollars.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Track your, your strength as well, which there's a lot of factors in there. Protein is one of them.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But I think as long as you're keeping skeletal muscle mass on and building skeletal muscle mass, you're not hungry.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You're probably getting to that point where you can not overconsume the protein. But to your point too, I think eating protein first, first meal in the day.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Even, you know, prior to eating any carbohydrates in every meal, I think that's really helpful for reducing the total caloric.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:16:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Intake and also creating the space to get enough protein in.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think it's that, that latter point you just made about creating the opportunity of getting enough protein. Cause I need to eat a hundred and forty grams of protein per day, right? If I'm not getting enough at breakfast, that, that means I'm really having to load a lot of protein in my lunch and my dinner. And even for someone with a big appetite, that's quite a lot to consume in those. So you want to look at breakfast as a real good opportunity to consume enough in your total daily intake. And if you miss that opportunity at breakfast, and unfortunately we have a lot of low protein options in the form of cereals and bars and granola. And, you know, even yogurts can be quite low, depending on what brand you use, then you're really missing out on getting that total amount.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  And I think to, to your point about grip strength and, and strength in general as we age, sarcopenia, I think is going to be the defining disease of our time.

• 1:16:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  And the, the European Working Group on sarcopenia, they, they recently, I think it was a two thousand and eighteen study. Established sarcopenia as a primary skeletal muscle disorder, right? It's something of which the primary cause is aging, but there are secondary causes as well. Malnutrition, malignancy, um, malabsorptive states, et cetera.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Is something that can be staved off with enough protein, but also primarily by resistance training. That's probably the biggest lever that we can pull to stave off sarcopenia. And we define it as a lack of strength.

• 1:17:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  A lack of muscle mass and muscle quality. The latter two are quite hard to determine, which is why I think those those grip strength diameters are really good proxies for overall muscle strength. You can also do like an MRI of of the thigh and I think that's like correlates quite nicely with the rest of the muscle in your body. So I I and and you might think of sarcopenia as the older patient in a geriatric ward in their seventies who's just had a hip fracture. But actually, I think about sarcopenia in my own. So I just turned forty this year. And I'm thinking about sarcopenia now because I'm at the peak of like where my muscle box could be. And I actually need to start packing on like save it like putting money in my pension.

• 1:18:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  So I can utilize that as it unfortunately will naturally degrade over time. So I want people to start thinking about sarcopenia right now, like as early as your thirties, you're really thinking about sarcopenia. Because this is literally like the the analogy is your pension.

• 1:18:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  And getting a good sort of pension bank requires two things. It's protein and resistance training.

• 1:18:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  And mobility and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, those are the two primary levers.

• 1:18:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's such a powerful way to kind of tie everything together here is that, you know, you need a lot of all of this. You have to protect your brain, you have to protect your muscles, you have to protect your gut bacteria. But all of it comes down to some simple habits, like the ones you've mentioned today. Three different kinds of vegetables, three types of protein at every meal, you know, doing some resistance training. I think everyone can achieve all of these goals when you boil it down to a few simple daily habits. Because I know your mission in life is to spread that. It's kind of like the overarching theme of what you talk about.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I'm glad we ended it there. I wish I could talk to you for hours and hours. I'm definitely gonna, we need to have you back for sure.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Josh. Yeah, I'd love to.

• 1:19:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love the message you're putting out there in the world. This book, Healthy High Protein, is your latest book.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is my, this is book number five now. So I've done five cookbooks. This is by far my favorite because every recipe has got not only the the protein amount, but also the fiber amount and the number of plant points as well. So they're super easy. And yeah, you can get it in America now, I believe as well.

• 1:19:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it's not just a cookbook. I mean, it's it's an educational book as well.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But I feel like you're hiding the education of the recipes there too.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  I love to just like, you know, you you feed it into the recipes themselves. But like, yeah, you're right. The front, I talk about these three pillars. Why you need to get enough protein, why you need to look after your gut, and why you need to reduce inflammation. And just trying to super simplify it for folks and then just, you know, practice that with the enjoyment of cooking some some healthy, delicious recipes.

• 1:20:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love that. And your app is available as well in the United States globally.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The Doctor's Kitchen app, right?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And what's next for you?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:20:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Besides trying to raise an eight month old.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think besides from that, I think I want to spend a lot more time in L A. I've only been here for three weeks now. We're we're here for a month in total. I'd love to do a lot more on YouTube. So we're we're growing our YouTube channel and doing more cooking videos and that kind of stuff. And I think the tech company and the A I virtual doctor rupee that we have on the app, I really wanna, I see the the potential for that expanding. So, you know, everyone can have a little doctor rupee in their pocket to like, help them when they're at the grocery store, or when they're like catering for a dinner party with some of their friends and some of them don't eat gluten, or they don't have an allergy to certain nuts or whatever, you know, help them like if they're looking at a cupboard or like some ingredients in

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  the fridge, what can I make with this? Those kind of things, I really feel there's potential for A I to help in these situations. And I'm hoping that Doctor's Kitchen app is going to be at the forefront of that.

• 1:21:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Thank you, Josh. I appreciate it.

• 1:21:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Can't wait to have you back and continue the conversation.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.

• 1:21:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You're welcome.

• 1:21:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.