Rangan Chatterjee, MD on How to Make Disease Disappear

The developed world is mired in a cataclysmic epidemic of chronic lifestyle illness. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression and dementia — the current leading causes of death and disability — are modern day plagues, killing untold millions annually. Quite shockingly, a full one-half of all American adults currently suffer from one of these diseases, with one in four suffering from two or more. Nonetheless, confusion persists when it comes to what can be done to protect ourselves and ultimately lead the long healthy lives we deserve. Most commonly overlooked in this discussion is the incredible power of our daily diet and lifestyle choices. Choices that when made right can prevent, treat and often even reverse these and many other debilitating chronic ailments. Today I explore this terrain — a common, recurring theme of this podcast — with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, a pioneer in the field of progressive medicine. Regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK, Dr. Chatterjee is double board certified in internal medicine and family medicine and holds an honors degree in immunology. An in-demand lecturer, he created the very first “Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine” course accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners in London, and is the star of the BBC One television show, Doctor In The House where he uses a functional and lifestyle medicine approach to reverse chronic disease. Dr. Chatterjee is also the author of The Four Pillar Plan*, an instant UK Sunday Times best-seller recently released in the United States under the title How To Make Disease Disappear*. He has been extensively profiled in a litany of major media outlets. He hosts the popular Feel Better, Live More podcast (which I will be appearing on soon). And he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio and the HuffPost. Similar to my recent conversation with Dr. Frank Lipman, this is a conversation about the current state of health and lifestyle disease in the modern, developed world. It’s about Dr. Chatterjee's personal course correct — the motivational why behind his decision to segue from a traditional medical practice to the emerging world of functional medicine. And it’s a primer on the crucial role of diet, nutrition, movement, sleep and stress reduction when it comes to health, longevity and disease prevention. As an interesting aside, Rangan is also quite the musician. He even once took a career sabbatical to tour with his band. I was able to talk him into an impromptu performance at the end of the show. So be sure to stick around to the end for his acoustic rendition of The Eagles’ Take It Easy – it’s pretty great. For the visually inclined, you can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: http://bit.ly/richandrangan I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  We exist on a continuum of health. When you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, that started 10 years ago. When you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, that started 30 years ago. As a system, we need to better help people identify when they're not at diagnosis stage, but they're moving up that curve. But, you know, getting people better in real life doesn't come from reading scientific papers. There is a difference. How do you convert that into real, actionable information for people? And that's what I'm passionate about.

• 1:35Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:50Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:53Rich Roll?

  Right now, the US, North America, the UK, in fact, most of the developed world is experiencing this crazy, unprecedented, basically cataclysmic epidemic of chronic lifestyle illness. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, dementia. These are the current leading causes of death and disability today. And what's really shocking about all of this is that a full half of all American adults, 50% of all American adults, currently suffer from one of these diseases, with 1 in 4, 25% suffering from 2 or more of these diseases. And despite all of this, there's just so much confusion out there, even amongst medical

• 2:37Rich Roll?

  professionals, let alone well-intended consumers, about what can be done? What can be done to protect ourselves and ultimately lead long, healthy lives? And the truth is that diet and lifestyle are the most powerful factors when it comes to prevention, when it comes to treatment, and even reversal of these chronic ailments. My name is Rich Roll. I'm coming at you today from a hotel room in Dublin. There's a lot of construction outside my window right now, so my apologies if you're distracted by noise, there's nothing I can do about it. In any event, today I explore all of this terrain, which, as you probably know, is a common recurring theme on this podcast, with Dr.

• 3:19Rich Roll?

  Rangan Chatterjee, who is a pioneer in the field of progressive, functional, and integrative medicine. It's a great conversation, a dynamic conversation, about essentially how we can all avoid these diseases and embrace the lives we deserve. There's much more I want to say about Rangan and a conversation to come, but... Okay. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, MD. Who is this guy? Rangan is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK. He is a double-board certified practitioner in internal medicine and family medicine,

• 4:01Rich Roll?

  who also holds an honors degree in immunology. He's an in-demand lecturer. He created the very first prescribing lifestyle medicine course accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners in London, which basically provides doctors with this framework to apply lifestyle medicine principles in their clinical practices.

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  Rangan is also the star of the BBC One TV show Doctor in the House, where he uses a functional and lifestyle medicine approach to reverse chronic disease. And he is the author of a wildly successful new book called The Four Pillar Plan, which became an instant UK Sunday Times bestseller, and was recently released in the US under a brand-new title called How to Make Disease Disappear. He is the host of the popular Feel Better, Live More podcast, which I will be appearing on soon as a guest, and he's a regular contributor to BBC Radio and The HuffPost. So, this is a conversation that I think in many ways really echoes my conversation with Dr. Frank Lipman.

• 5:03Rich Roll?

  It's about the current state of health in the developed world. It's about what motivated Rangan to course-correct his medical path from a traditional trajectory to this new and exciting and emerging world of functional medicine. And it's a primer on the importance of diet, nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress reduction when it comes to health, longevity, and disease prevention. As a final note before we get into it, I should also mention that Rangan is quite the musician. He actually once took a break from his medical practice to tour with his band, and I was able to talk him into a song at the end. So stick around to the very end for an impromptu cover rendition of The Eagles' Take It Easy,

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  because it's pretty great. So, this is me and Rangan. Enjoy.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  So, I woke up this morning feeling super lousy, on the verge of getting sick. And I almost never, ever get sick, like, almost never. And if I do, when it starts to come on, like it was this morning, I can usually kick it in a day. But it made me sort of knowing that I was going to speak to you today. I was like, all right, well, where am I in the four pillars? You know, and it's like, okay, well, my diet's pretty good. Movement, I'm probably moving too much, if anything. Relaxation, I'm completely failing in that. And sleep, I probably give myself a B minus, C plus right now. Like, it's a great little cheat sheet for taking inventory of where you're at. And it's like, I know

• 6:42Rich Roll?

  I'm overextended right now. My adrenals are fried. I'm exhausted from travel. It's no shock that I wake up and feel lousy. So here I have the good doctor to diagnose me.

• 6:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Have we started, by the way?

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we started.

• 6:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, my God. I didn't realize.

• 6:57Rich Roll?

  We're rocking.

• 6:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, my God. I had no idea. We'd actually started. We're just chatting. Okay.

• 7:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the four pillar framework for me is it's just something I can apply, you can apply, my patients can apply. It's just a simple way of looking at your own health, right? And figuring out which one of these four areas do I need the most work in, you know? Because I think most of us intuitively know, you know, most of us have kind of got a pretty good idea. Actually, you know, my diet's pretty good, you know, but I'm not sleeping so well. And I love it because people get confused and bombarded with health, health information all the time now. You go on the internet, there's a million blogs out there. Often they're saying conflicting things. People get paralyzed, you know, they

• 7:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  get, they just don't know what to do with this information. Half my job as a doctor when people come in is to say, okay, guys, you're confused. Okay, let me try and simplify this down for you. And I know there's a deceptive simplicity to those four pillars. But I think, I really feel it's deceptively simple because I've seen how life changing it can be when people apply those in their own life. And it takes the pressure off people. It's not about a perfect diet. It's not about

• 8:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, the perfect gym routine, it's about doing enough in each area. And I'd like to think it takes the pressure off people anyway.

• 8:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I think, I mean, just for people that are listening when we're talking about the the four pillars, we have relaxation, sleep, movement and food, right? And what's great about the book is that it really is super accessible. And it's like, this is not, you know, you don't have to like, stretch and try to adhere to some kind of protocol that only few people are gonna actually able, gonna be able to master, like, this is like, basic stuff. But I think, you know, when I'm reading it, I'm like, okay, I get that, I get that, I get that, this is like, top level things. But it's that gap between the information and the action where I think most people stumble, it's like, okay, yeah, I know I need to get a good night's sleep.

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  Most nights I don't, though, right?

• 9:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, that's a huge issue. I mean, that's, that's one of the big issues in health. You know, there's all this great information out there, there's great public health messages often, and people aren't following them. Why are people not following them? And I've got many thoughts on that, but specifically, the approach I take with these four pillars, particularly when I was writing the book, is how can I make it accessible to people? How can I write it in such a way? How can I pepper it with real life case studies from my practice? But hopefully, people can relate to and see how just making some simple changes in those four key areas can have such a profound effect.

• 9:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, we can all have a fantastic outcome when we do a 10 day diet of some sort, right? When we exclude everything from our diets, we can feel better in 10 days, okay? Many of us can do that, but I'm interested in what changes can I help someone with that is gonna work for them today in the short term, that's also gonna work for them in one month, in six months, in 12 months? And how can I help them build in this lifestyle change over a period of time? And that really has come from my practical experience. You know, what I put out in the book is literally nearly 20 years of experience of seeing patients, and it's not just what the science says.

• 10:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  The science is important to me. But you know, what's even more important to me is actually what works in real life. You know, what will a busy mother do who feels that they've got no time to look after themselves? And they're just running around just doing, doing, doing for their kids, maybe for their partner, maybe for their elderly parents, they're just go, go, go, right? I'm interested in how can I connect with her so that she feels, yeah, you know, I can do that. And that's why I've tried to make all the recommendations simple and achievable. And I'll tell you, one of the, one of the, one of the most fun things for me that I've, I had fed back to me since the book came out is that people feel that as they're reading it,

• 11:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  that, oh, I want to do that, I can make that change. You know, and that, that makes me excited because I'm not telling people to go on a punishing diet. I'm not telling people to go on a grueling workout regime. You know, I'm, I'm recommending some very simple things. And why I think simple is important because we like, as human beings, we like to feel good, right? If we've, if, if I set the bar low and we meet that, that feels good, you know, I've, I've done what the doc.

• 11:51Rich Roll?

  Right, you create an, you create an emotional engagement with that process where the, where the patient feels empowered.

• 11:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I, I give you a prime example of that is in, in the move pillar. Okay, so just in case people aren't familiar, there's, there's four pillars and it's, there's a quarter on each of them in, in the book. In the move pillar, I talk about all kinds of recommendations, but one of my favorites is something to do with strength training. So I think strength training is very much undervalued in society. You know, we, we don't think about it enough and, you know, your lean muscle mass, independently prediction mortality, it, it absolutely determines for, in a huge part, how we're going to be as we get older. And, and a few years ago, I was in my practice and I'd read all the research on it. And I thought, oh, you know, I'm going to tell my patients about strength training.

• 12:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  I remember this guy came in and I said, you know, it's really important for your blood sugar balance, but also for your overall health, that we do a bit of strength training. And he goes, what does that mean, doc? I said, well, you know, you really maybe do some resistance at the gym, maybe thirty, forty minutes, three times a week.

• 12:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Goes, okay, you know, I'll try. Came back maybe four weeks, six weeks later. And I said, how are you getting on? I said, you know what, doc? You know, I really want to, but you know, work's busy. Uh, the gym's not on the way back from work. Uh, you know, I just not got around to it. And I thought in that instant, I thought, well, what's going on here? You know, I didn't think, why is he not doing what I said? I always thought, I'm not giving him advice in a way that he feels is applicable to him in the context of his life. And in that moment, I came up with this, this five minute kitchen workout, basically, which is, okay, I'm going to need to make it accessible for him. And I literally took my jacket off and I was literally teaching him five moves that

• 13:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  he could do. And I said, I literally want five minutes twice a week. And that was the start for him and literally he loved it. And he, he's now doing, you know, two hours of strength training a week, but you start off with that.

• 13:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd make it super digestible.

• 13:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Super digestible. I had a couple in their sixties recently, same thing. They were so skeptical, Rich. You know, they, they came out of the, of the consultation with me, they can, really? You know, that's what I need to do? And I said, guys, I'll tell you what, I'm going to see you back in four weeks. Please try and do these five exercises in your kitchen, right? You don't need to join a gym, you don't need to change, you don't need to buy any equipments, right? They went away, just a couple in their sixties. And they came out four weeks later and I said, how are you guys doing? They said, Dr. Jassy, we love it. It's changed our lives. You know, we started off doing it in the kitchen, but now we do it every night for 10 minutes on our upstairs landing as we run our evening bath. And I, so I learn from my patients.

• 14:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I love reading the science, but you know, getting people better in real life doesn't come from reading scientific papers. There is a difference. So how do you convert that into, into real actionable information for people? And that's what I'm passionate about. That's what, you know, I. You know, you see all these wars on social media about what the new science says and what the science has, and I read them all, right? But often we just divide people, we confuse people on what they should be doing. And I've tried to come up with a program and a philosophy in this book where it's as relevant to, let's say, a vegan as it is to a meat eater.

• 15:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is as relevant to someone in a low socioeconomic neighborhood, to the CEO of a top company. Uh, sorry, of someone who's a CEO of a company, you know, earning lots of money. Because I've worked in some of the poorest areas in the UK. I spent seven years in a place called Oldham, you know, a lot of people on social security. And I thought, these guys have the right to the same quality health information as you get out here in California, right? And that's, when I was writing the book, I thought, I want these suggestions that I make to work for everyone. I want to bring people together, you know, I want to bring the low carb people with the low fat people, I want to bring them together and go, look, what's the commonality here? What can we all focus on?

• 16:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's a real, that's something I feel very passionate about. And most of the recommendations I make, in fact, there's 20 recommendations, not that everyone has to do them all, I say you absolutely don't have to do them all. If you don't, if you don't like one of them, don't do them. You know, I'm really trying to allow people to personalize it, but 19 out of the 20 are completely free, right? You can't make an argument that they cost money. The one that you can make an argument for is when I say unprocessed diets, you know, you can argue that depending on where you live, depending on your income level, you may struggle to eat an unprocessed diet potentially in certain parts of the country without a bit of money.

• 16:45Rich Roll?

  But you did also, in the book, sort of provide a roadmap for how to do that cost effectively.

• 16:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  I do.

• 16:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think, I think, you know, one of the observa-, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this subject of, you know, our respective silos, especially in the diet world and what you see on social media and the bickering and the conflicting science. And, you know, I'm always thinking like, well, what is the best way to, to navigate this and communicate to the audience in a way that will be the most positively impactful? And I spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring people together, like yourself. And it's tricky, you know, when people get very entrenched in their ideologies and, you know, somebody who's part of the plant-based camp, I see it on all sides and everybody's guilty of it at various times.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  And it's not helping anyone. What it's doing is paralyzing the average, well-intentioned consumer who's just trying to get actionable advice to improve their lives maybe 10%.

• 17:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, you say we're all guilty of this from time to time. And I think as I get a bit older, a bit more experienced, I think actually, you know what? Why does one group have to be right? Why can't many different groups be right for different people? And, you know, we often don't think about the context of someone's life or their cultural beliefs or how they've grown up. And I always, as a practicing physician, I just bring it back to my consultation room. I think, okay, what have I seen? What do I keep seeing? And I've seen the reality is if you talk about diet, for example, which again, we, I think we overly focus on it. And what I mean by that is, I think food is very, very important, but food is much more than fat versus carbs, right?

• 18:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  But good health is much more than just food. And my own personal bias is that when I change my diet, right, my health starts to improve, right? But that's my personal bias because I've had many patients. Who, that wasn't the route they wanted to take. Some of them, like I've got so many patients who've got mental health problems. They didn't want to change their diet, even though I knew that would help improve their, the way they felt about themselves and their wellbeing. They started getting more physically active first. And then that made them feel better. So then they wanted to change their diets. And that's, that, that has almost been pivotal in this four pillar approach, which is, okay, guys, you choose where you want to start. I don't mind if you want to start with food, right?

• 19:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Start there, but if you don't want to start there, that's okay as well. And, you know, I want to make this, you know, this, this book came out a few months ago in the UK, right? And it's doing incredibly well. And I think the reason it is doing so well is because I've really tried hard to, to not talk down to people, not to tell people what to do. Nobody wants to be told what to do, right? And I don't do that and it surprises people, but as, as a doctor, I have never still in nearly 20 years of practice. I've still never told a patient of mine to, that they have to give up smoking.

• 19:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what I mean by that is I feel that my job as a doctor is to have an honest conversation with them. If they come into my consultation room and if they ask me, my job is to tell them what that is doing for their health and their wellbeing. If at the end of that conversation, the man or the, or the woman says to me, hey, doc, I get it. I hear what you're saying, but you know what? I get so much enjoyment out of that.

• 20:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm not going to quit. I feel as a human being, I feel what right do I have to say to him? No, you must give it up, you know? And, and actually I think one of the reasons why I, I tend to get really good compliance with my patients is because I do treat them like partners. I treat them like adults, even if that smoking conversation is just setting the scene for six months down the line or 12 months down the line. When they've thought about it and reflected, we've done a bit of other work and they come back and go, hey, you know what? I might be ready for it now. So I think. You know, I think that side of things is really, really important.

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, finding the psychological button that's going to activate the person. And everybody has something different. There's a different way in with every individual. So you almost have to really take like an inventory of someone when they come into your office to try to determine what is the thing that that I can talk about with this person that's going to catalyze change in them.

• 21:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And do you know what? The hardest thing for me, Rich, was I know how to do that one on one with a patient, you know? Or I'd like to think I do, you know? I think the biggest skill of a healthcare professional is actually how do you interact, communicate with your patient? I think that is the number one thing that actually leads to good outcomes. I don't care how many papers and how many science things you've read. If you don't know how to make it personal and relatable to that person in front of you, it doesn't matter. Really doesn't matter.

• 21:54Rich Roll?

  The system is not set up to encourage that. And that's one thing I want to explore with you. And I want to get into the four pillars and all of that. But I think maybe it would be good to kind of contextualize all of this by establishing the lay of the land right now in terms of what is going on with chronic lifestyle disease in North America and the developed world. Because the statistics and specifically some of the numbers that you use in your book, they're just appalling.

• 22:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  They're beyond appalling. They're unsustainable for every single healthcare system on a financial level. But on a human level, on a just a, on a moral level, you know, chronic disease is affecting so many families and it's causing pain, disability, heartache, premature death. You know, I've gone on record before as saying 80% of what I see as a medical doctor in my practice is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles. Okay, I'm not putting blame on people, right? Because I get it, it can be tricky. Okay, but I'm saying collectively, the way we're living our lifestyles is having a negative impact on the way that we feel. And look, in the book, there's some US statistics, but I'll give you a UK statistic that is frankly alarming, right?

• 23:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this is from 2012. Okay, that in 2012, so what, six years ago?

• 23:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  One report suggested that the UK was paying £20 billion. So that is about 27, 28 billion.

• 23:24Rich Roll?

  Dollars.

• 23:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Dollars, sorry, million dollars on the direct and indirect costs of type 2 diabetes.

• 23:32Rich Roll?

  It's insane.

• 23:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And type 2 diabetes is a fully preventable. In most cases, it is a preventable condition. It is a lifestyle, environmental driven condition. And we're saying we're gonna effectively, if we don't do anything different, we're gonna allow it to bankrupt our healthcare systems. I find it incredibly, incredibly sad.

• 23:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm looking at your book right now. One in 10 Americans currently has type 2 diabetes. Between 1990 and 2013, rates of this disease shot up by an incredible 71% in the US. One of the most dramatic increases of any nation. It costs us $245 billion a year. Half of all American adults currently suffer from a chronic disease with one in four people suffering from two or more. Chronic disease is by a wide margin now the deadliest problem facing America. It's true, it's unbelievable.

• 24:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's, this is for America, this is not just a health problem, this is an economic problem. This is a, you know, I think the US are gonna struggle to be a well functioning economy, a global power, you know, whatever you wanna call it, with this rate of chronic disease. Because it, people don't often think about, is this chronic disease, it's affecting their whole bodies, it's affecting the way that their brain operates, it's affecting their ability to be productive in the workplace, productive and happy and interact with their, with their families, with their work colleagues. And that's the other thing, you know, I see a lot of the disharmony I see in relationships and families. Often it comes down to, you know, not the only thing, but often a key part of that

• 25:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  is that. People don't feel good in themselves. They're functioning day to day sub optimally. They're not functioning at peak performance. So they are, you know, they're having little rows and little little problems with their partners, with their kids, with their work colleagues. And often that's because they're putting junk in their mouth. Right. Which is affecting their brain and their mood. They're sort of only having five hours sleep a night, which is, you know, you know, trashing their brain in the morning when in terms of, you know, you know, yourself, or certainly I know as a father, you know, if I haven't slept well, my ability to deal with the stresses at home and, you know, let things just lie, you know, or when the kids are doing something, it's much reduced.

• 25:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not even close.

• 25:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So a lot of these things are happening because we're not looking after our health. And, you know, I think when we say chronic disease, I think it's always worth explaining that we're talking about things like, yes, type two diabetes, yes, high blood pressure, yes, heart disease and stroke, yes, Alzheimer's disease. But we're also talking about things like mental health problems. You know, the latest statistic in the UK, right, which comes from the Mind Charity, is that one in four people in the UK are going to have a mental health problem in any given year. I just find it an incredible statistic. And, you know, we're still looking for this pharmaceutical model of care

• 26:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  to try and fix these problems. I could tell you, it's just simply, in a lot of cases, it is not working. And here we're in is the crux of the matter.

• 26:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Forty, fifty years ago, what we were seeing as medical doctors responded very well to the magic bullet. You know, you come in, right, you've got to, let's say, you've got a chest infection or a pneumonia, right? You've got the overgrowth of a bug that's causing you this problem. Come and see the doctor, they identify and give you a pill to zap that bug. And then in a week or maybe 10 days, you're better. Right? We can talk about the knock on consequences of that, but that's a separate story. But that worked. Forty, fifty years ago, the bulk of what we see now does not respond to this, you know, one pill for every L model. There's multiple things that are going on and you, it's not just one suggestion you've got to make. You've got to tackle multiple things

• 27:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  in one's lifestyle if you're going to get a result. And, and, you know, those four pillars could have been five, six, seven. I could have expanded it out.

• 27:36Rich Roll?

  Right. Frank's got six.

• 27:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Frank's got six. Yeah.

• 27:39Rich Roll?

  You guys can battle it out. Like, is it four or six?

• 27:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. And the reality is, is that the clash always is, is how can you communicate complex health information simplistically? Not, not, not in a patronizing fashion, but in a way that actually people feel, okay, I get it. I can do that. And I nearly went to five, you know, but I thought, no, I'm just going to stick to four. Like, so I think connection and community.

• 28:07Rich Roll?

  That was one of Frank's, I think. And, and I actually wondered that, especially since, you know, you talk about this or the blue zones and the diet part, and that's such a key component of longevity from those studies.

• 28:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I, the connection piece, I put in the relaxed pillar. So one of my recommendations is, you know, to eat around, reclaim your dining table, right? And it's to sit around at least once a day if possible, to have a meal with someone else if you can. And I bring in, in that chapter, why community is so important. And that really is what I hang it off in the book because you're right, I could have made a fifth pillar all about it. But I also think there's something in keeping it simple, simple enough that people think, I get it. I can do that today. I don't need to wait till January next year to start this big program. This feels pretty achievable.

• 29:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, and I can tell you, Rich, where did that reclaim your dining table come from?

• 29:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because people might go, yeah, well, how's that gonna help with my health? Why is that important?

• 29:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  I I I made a some some TV documentaries for BBC Television where I went and lived with and alongside families to help them with their health problems. And I was very fortunate. I feel very humbled to have had that experience to be invited into people's homes and actually actually see in real life what they do, not what they tell me in the consultation room, but what they actually do in real life. And so many of the families I stayed with didn't sit and eat together, you know, forget about what they're eating for a minute. You know, one of the kids is maybe on the sofa scrolling their their Facebook whilst they're eating. You know, mum might be watching television, but also doing her emails while she's eating.

• 29:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Dad's in another room, the son's somewhere else. And I saw that and I thought, what was the norm? I'm sure it was the norm in the US, just as in the UK, maybe forty years ago, that every dining table, that every room, every house would have a dining table. Now we're knocking them out. We're making room for big widescreen televisions and all this sort of stuff. And I made the recommendation to so many of those families, hey, guys, look, you know, we aren't going to change what you eat, but I wonder if you guys could manage once a day where you sit together and eat as a family. And I saw the profound benefits. Yes, they were eating less because they were eating more mindfully and they were connecting whilst they were eating. But there was this couple who lovely middle aged couple.

• 30:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And and I came back after a few days and I said, how are you guys doing with that? And and the husband said to me, he said, it's incredible, you know, I'm I'm I feel like I'm really connecting with my wife. I'm we're sitting, we never used to sit around and without devices and have our meal. But I'm asking her about her day. I'm learning things that happened. His wife said the same thing and they feel closer, that more intimacy that just from making that that suggestion and. I learnt, I didn't, I didn't learn that in my consultation room. Had I not gone and stayed with those families, I wouldn't have seen that something that I, I thought was relatively normal is frankly not normal anymore.

• 31:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, it's becoming, um, you know, it's gone the way of the dodo. You know, it's sort of thought of as, as antiquarian and quaint and, you know, at this point. But there's so much truth in what you just said. But I think the first hurdle is really getting people to understand on a very basic, elementary, fundamental level that they have control over their health, that the decisions that they make about how they're living their life, hour to hour, day to day, have profound implications in terms of whether they're going to succumb to disease or, or live vibrantly. And I think for a lot of people, that's revelatory and new.

• 31:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's brand new. Even the way I was taught at medical school really didn't, didn't empower us, you know, didn't empower me as a medical doctor with that information because back then we thought our genes were our destiny, right? That's kind of what we thought was going to happen then was we got, as we do the Human Genome Project, we get more and more, we understand that it's all to do with our genes. What, what cards have we been dealt when we come out of the womb? But the last 10 years has changed all of that, you know? And again, the statistics vary depending on who you read, but you know, there seems to be a bit of consensus now that about 10% of our health outcomes for most of us is down to our genes. 90% of it is down to our environment and our lifestyle and that's

• 32:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  incredibly empowering. So I think there is a generation out there who think and have been trained to believe that it's, you know, oh, my father had type 2 diabetes, of course I'm going to have type 2 diabetes. It's nothing I can do, you know? And in some way that plays into the whole emotional piece, which is You know what, I'm gonna keep making these choices because it doesn't matter.

• 33:01Rich Roll?

  Doesn't matter.

• 33:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Dad got it, I'm gonna get it, so I might as well enjoy my life, right? Or that's the perception. And that's the key message I try whenever I speak, whenever I teach doctors, whenever I talk to the public. I'm always trying to say, guys, we've got the control. You know, we've got more control than we think. Uh, just to be clear, there are some genetic conditions that are related to, you know, like even Alzheimer's, for example. You know, there is, there is under one percent of Alzheimer's is due to your genes. Right? Some people are born with something that means it's very likely they're gonna get it, okay? But that is not the vast majority of us. And I think even that message is like a revelation for people.

• 33:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And even if I could, you know, help the, the incredible, you know, people like yourself and other doctors and other, other people who are trying to spread this message around the world. If, if all we do is get that message out there, that's a great starting point. Because here's the other thing, right? Is that one of the things that frustrates me about the infighting on uh, social media and on the internet about a lot of these things, is that many people are kind of saying similar things, right? So to give you one extreme viewpoint here. I don't want, I wouldn't call it an extreme viewpoint, but just to sort of paint the picture.

• 34:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Obviously, there is a lot of uh, animosity between certain groups, whether it's uh, vegan, plant-based versus uh, low-carbon, you know, animal products, you know, for an example. But both groups, right, are saying now that actually we can reverse a lot of these chronic diseases. You know, both groups will say, we can reverse type 2 diabetes. We can reduce our chances of getting Alzheimer's by adopting our dietary pattern, right? So I'm trying to, trying to sift through that and sit just outside it and look at it and go, okay. So compared to 10 years ago, when very few people were saying that we could reverse a condition like type 2 diabetes.

• 35:03Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, you were, that was crazy making.

• 35:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and now we've got this. Coming out from people who may have a different viewpoint on how the best way to do that is, right, but they're all saying, we can reverse this stuff.

• 35:16Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  That I think is a revelation. I think we need to focus on that. Go, okay, great. So I don't necessarily need to be on medication for the rest of my life. I might be able to do something about this. And I find that exciting. And I think that's the message we need to get to people. And then then help them make small changes. So why do people find it so hard? So many reasons for that. You know, there's a lot of emotional reasons behind that as well. But I think if we can make it seem accessible to them, if they feel, hey, you know what, I can do that. Like, one of my recommendations is 15 minutes of me time a day.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Most people, what, 15 minutes, you know, and it's incredible, because that is like a domino effect. You start it off simple, you get people go, right, I can do that. I think I can manage 15 minutes, right? And then that domino falls, you start to feel the benefits, then the other domino starts to come in line.

• 36:12Rich Roll?

  But Dr. Chatterjee, you don't understand my life. I get up at 4:30 in the morning, I got four kids, I gotta get them dressed into school, and then I work two jobs. And by the time I get home at 10:30, 11 o'clock at night, and I gotta try to make a little bit of food for my kids, and I'm just exhausted.

• 36:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  I get it. I understand. So what do you think you can manage? Can we start with five minutes?

• 36:33Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you think you can find five minutes in your day? And that's the approach I take. You know, these are just suggestions. It's not prescriptions. These are saying, look, I think 15 minutes is a great starting point. But if all you can manage is five minutes, right? And even that fictional lady who, you know, you just spoke about, I bet you she can manage five minutes somewhere in her day, you know? And that's not me being judgmental at all. I'm just saying, I've, I've, I've got patients like that. And what I try to do one on one is find the way in, find what is it that they're doing? Where can I get a bit of traction here? What can I start them with? I've made a deal with a patient before that they're going to do two minutes meditation a day. Right, so I can't do it. They said, I can't meditate, I can't, you know, I'm not gonna have

• 37:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  time, you know, it doesn't fit with my lifestyle. I said, okay, you brush your teeth for two minutes in the morning, okay? Why do you do two minutes in the morning? He goes, I've always done that. I said, yeah, you've ingrained that in a habit. Even if you're busy, you never don't brush your teeth for two minutes in the morning, two minutes in the evening. Okay? He goes, yeah, that's right, I don't. I said, well, how about then, do you think you can manage two minutes of meditation? Yeah, two minutes, sure. And, and we made a deal. I said, okay, I tell you what, let's make a commitment now that you're gonna do that. She goes away, she starts doing that, you know, within about two or three months, she's doing twenty minutes a day. So I very much, you know, this comes from real life experience, Rich. This is, you know, I,

• 37:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, when I look back on my career, and I, I think early on in my career, I really had a real disconnect with, you know, I went to, you know, a very prestigious medical school, I qualified as a specialist, and I moved to general practice, because I was always searching for something in medicine that resonated with me. When I was working in kidney medicine, I thought, ah, I don't wanna spend my whole career just looking at kidneys, everything. I, I always intuitively knew that everything was connected, and I, I felt that we were getting too super specialized in medicine. So I moved, much of my, much of my dad's. Yeah, you come from a line of doctors. I come from a line of doctors, you know, he's an Indian doctor who came over to the UK, you know, they, they value the specialist. Right. His son.

• 38:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  GP? His son had qualified as a specialist, had done all the hard work to get there. I said, Dad, you know, I'm, I think I'm gonna change, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be, become a generalist. He's, why do you wanna do that? And, and I've always now, now that I get it, now that I understand what I love doing with patients, I can look back now and go, that's why I was slightly frustrated. I didn't get that deep enjoyment out of my job that I do today because I just thought I was giving pills out left.

• 39:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, you're a people guy too, right? Like, I can tell that you're somebody who enjoys, basically, like, figuring out what makes other people tick. And that's such a huge part of practicing medicine that I think we lost touch with that is now slowly starting to come back. We're seeing this influx, this rise of functional integrative medicine doctors like yourself. It's become, you know, it's becoming a thing. And yet, it's still very much a small sliver in comparison to the way most people are practicing medicine and the way that most patients experience their healthcare practitioners.

• 39:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's very sad. It's very sad because this is, you know, this is affecting people's lives. You know, it's people are dying early, their day-to-day lives are being hindered because, you know, we're not evolving with the times. The health landscape of the developed world, and actually the developing world as well, is, has changed. So the way we practice medicine also has to change, but it hasn't. And therein lies one of the big problems and, you know, I say, you know, I've created, I was getting so frustrated with this. I thought, okay, you know, I can keep talking about it, I can keep going on BBC Television and talking about this being a problem, but how are we going to start fixing this?

• 40:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  So with a colleague of mine, I created a brand-new course called Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine that was the first prescribing lifestyle medicine course to be accredited by the Royal College of GPs.

• 40:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's great.

• 40:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and we taught 200 docs in the UK back in January. We ran it again in April. And Why that accreditation was important because it gave it a bit of validity. It gave it to other docs who were like, yeah, I can't have, I'm reading all this stuff on the internet. I'm interested, but you know, having the CPD points there for people to come. Right, legitimizes it. It legitimized it and you know, it took, you know, we spent six months working up this course. You know, we're trying to do it in one day, but it's my way of trying to say, look, yes, I've showcased on television that type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, you know, can be reversed in many cases. Panic anxiety attacks can be come, can come down by 70% by making lifestyle changes.

• 41:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Autoimmune diseases, Crohn's, like all sorts of things. I feel like, you know, I've, I've helped showcase that to a mainstream audience on BBC One and in countries all over the world that these conditions can often be reversed, but certainly dramatically improved, right? By making these changes to these four key areas. And I thought, well, that's great, but if the public are watching that, then they go to their own doctor for help in that. But the doctor doesn't know what to do with that. That's where we got a problem. So I thought as a medical doctor, maybe I can, I can, I can be part of the solution by helping to educate a new, a new generation of doctors in what is possible.

• 42:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what I, we end the course with a, me and my colleague, we, we do a role play, right? And, and people love the role play because what we do is we on stage, we sort of go through how a consultation might roll when someone comes in with type 2 diabetes. And the first one is what typically happens, which is, you know, someone knocks on the door. I'm the doc, I'm looking at my computer, you know, I'm typing away, the guy comes in, I barely make eye contact. Um, I'll say, hey, Barry, look, um, you know, you, you, we've got some news for you, Barry. Um, you know, pretty worrying blood results have come through. You've been diagnosed with a condition called type 2 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, you know.

• 42:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  It puts you at increased risk of heart disease, you know, stroke, Alzheimer's, you know, you may start getting nerve damage, we may, you know, some people need to amputate their legs, but don't worry, we've got a great medication for that, you know, so we're going to start you on that today, within, you know, we're going to start you on something called metformin today, normally within, within six months, 12 months, we'll put you on a second pill, sometimes we'll need to progress to insulin injections, but don't worry, we'll be keeping a regular eye on you. And as Barry is walking out in shell shocked, hey, and if you can lose a bit of weight as well and go to the gym, that'd be great, okay? If that is even said. If that is even said, but if it is said like that, what does the patient walk out with? They walk out with, okay, I've got this condition, it's serious, okay, but the doc

• 43:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  said there's loads of, yeah, so there's drugs he can give me, yeah, he only mentioned lifestyle, that's not really that important, because you spent the whole time talking about, about drugs. So I say to people, if we prioritize lifestyle, the patient will prioritize lifestyle. If we prioritize drugs, they'll prioritize drugs. That's, and, and, and so you compare that with Barry coming in, and me saying, hey Barry, look, you know, you know, those blood tests you've recently done, actually a few things have shown up in there, you know, you have a conversation, you say, Barry, look, your blood sugar's a little bit high, and you're actually in the range now, what we would call type 2 diabetes, do you know what that is? I don't know. Well, you explain what it is. You say, hey Barry, look, here's the thing, you will have been doing things in your lifestyle, possibly without realizing

• 44:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  it, for a good 10 years now, that has led you up this continuum, so that you now actually have a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Would you like me to help you understand what those things are, how we can change them, and then hopefully, if we're lucky, we can start turning this thing around? Yeah, hey, doc's judge, yeah, I'd love to, yeah, well, you know, let's talk. Again, I don't want to labor the point, but The whole dynamic is different. Barry goes out of that consultation with some actionable steps, thinking, hey, you know, there's something I can do about this.

• 44:55Rich Roll?

  Right, empowered.

• 44:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, but that comes to our skill as a clinician and also our willingness to prioritize that.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  But in fairness, there also has to be systemic changes to the way the entire system is is set up. I mean, look, you know, doctors are well intentioned. They want to help people. They want to be healers. That's why they get into it. But when the system is constructed such that they have five or 10 minutes with each person, it's it's it's it's set up to fail in that way. So like, I love the fact that you created this this program, but you know, it needs to be across the board in the medical schools, like, from the very beginning, doctors need to be trained in all of this stuff. And systemic changes have to be made that allow

• 45:42Rich Roll?

  for that kind of bandwidth with each patient so that that person can leave with that sense of empowerment.

• 45:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Rich, you're absolutely right. And, you know, ultimately, this is not just going to be the doctor, you know, this is arguably, you know, we need to collaborate more with nutrition professionals, with health coaches, you know. But what I'm what I say to people is, people say to me sometimes, why do docs need this training? You know, why can't doctors refer to the right people? And there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what our job is, you see, because if we don't know, right, okay, we've spoken about diabetes and let's say obesity, right, these are things which are obviously, for many people, related to our lifestyle. Okay, so arguably, we might refer here. Okay. What about conditions like mental health problems? Right? What about something like migraines, which affects, cause

• 46:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  huge disability, you know, huge morbidity across the population? What about these problems? Where we don't automatically think that lifestyle has a role, but I know full well, and I've seen that you can absolutely make a huge impact with these patients with lifestyle changes. Unless we get the training, we're never ever going to be even referring these guys to health coaches or lifestyle professionals to help them.

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you wouldn't even know to do so.

• 46:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  You wouldn't even know to do that. You know, I gave a lecture, it was in Bristol in the UK in January, where for the Royal College of GPs on wellbeing for doctors, because burnout in physicians is a huge problem. And I said to these guys at the start, I said, how many of you with a patient who comes in with a mental health problem like depression, how many of you talk about food with those patients? And about 5% of the room put their hand up. Then I presented some of the science behind it, including, you know, there's this beautiful trial from February 2017 called the Smiles Trial in Australia, very small, okay, but it was a randomized controlled trial, showing that people who followed a modified Mediterranean

• 47:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  diet, these are all patients with depression, moderate or severe depression, they were already on therapy. Nothing of that, none of that was changed, but one group went on a modified Mediterranean diet for 12 weeks. The other group had some sort of talking, social therapy. And at the end of 12 weeks, there was statistically significant remission rates in the group who went on a modified Mediterranean diet. Now, there was only 67 participants, but that adds to the weight of evidence that is already building. And I said, guys, look, how many of you now are going to have this conversation with your mental health patients? And pretty much everyone put their hand up. Because, you know, something that seems so obvious to me is not mainstream knowledge amongst these professionals.

• 48:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  So yes, the training needs to help, you know, this training needs to be compulsory in medical schools. I absolutely agree. And some people said, when we put on this course, they, you know, because everyone's, you know, a social media expert these days is like, you know, this is not enough, you know, you need to get this in medical schools. I agree with all that, but you've got to start somewhere.

• 48:43Rich Roll?

  You've got to start, yeah.

• 48:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've got to start somewhere. You've got to give this movement credibility.

• 48:47Rich Roll?

  The mental health piece is so huge. And I think, you know, I'm interested in your experience, like if you, when you start talking about treating mental illness or things like depression through lifestyle alterations, people get nervous.

• 49:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Right? Because we're just used to thinking of it a little bit differently than we think about physical health. But it is so debilitating for so many people and it kind of lurks in the shadows. And, you know, my experience is in working with lots of people and being part of the recovery community for many years. Is that even when you're amongst people who are very high functioning, who seem like they have everything together, if you can get them in a safe environment where they have an inkling, a slight willingness to be vulnerable, and you just poke them ever so slightly, you'd be amazed at what comes out. We're all dealing on some level with all kinds of stressors and anxieties

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  that are really indicia of our times. Like how we live our lives now is so antithetical to the natural rhythms of, you know, how we evolved.

• 49:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And, you know, there's this theory about sickness behavior, which is, if we think about the body and our stress response system, okay? And let's say in Paleolithic times that we had come down with an infection, okay? So our immune system goes on high alert. So it produces all kinds of inflammatory markers to help us fight that infection, but what it also does is make us tired. It makes us sleepy, it makes us withdraw. We don't take pleasure from things and it almost sends us back to the back of the cave in the dark so we can just rest and recuperate, you know, whilst the body is attacking what it needs to attack.

• 50:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  And a lot of people are speculating that actually is very similar to what's going on with mental health problems. It's potentially an appropriate or an inappropriate response. Well, it's something that was an appropriate response in a different environment, but as the environment has changed, our 21st century living, that response is actually doing us harm now. But it served us very well in the past. And I kind of like that because it really helps me understand why does our body have all these mechanisms at play? Why, why things suddenly start to go wrong with all these different systems in our body and what's changed is the environments? But the other great point you bring up, Rich, is that Lifestyle, you know, what's that got to do with mental health? You know, that's a and and what I would say to that is, and I've got to be very key,

• 51:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  very careful to caveat this is that any chronic disease, even type two diabetes, but let's talk about mental health. There are multiple factors that play a role. It ain't just one thing. So, yeah, you may have huge emotional trauma that needs dealing with, right? But it doesn't mean you can't also get an improvement from optimizing your lifestyle. And it's it's not necessarily one or the other. We're always looking for what is it? Is it emotional or is it physical? Well, maybe it's a combination. And I talk a lot in in in in my book and in my sort of work that I do, I talk about thresholds. Right? We've all got an individual threshold.

• 52:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the way I try and explain is if if if we're born in perfect health, let's say, we start down here in perfect health, we can deal with multiple insults up to a point. So let's say, you know, I don't know, we had a ton of antibiotics as a baby. Okay, we didn't enjoy our school, you know, we got bullied at school. We eat a poor diet. Um, we don't work out. We work too hard. We get very, very close to our threshold. Then something happens, you know, you have a bereavement in the family or your girlfriend breaks up with you. And that tips you over your threshold. That's when you get sick.

• 52:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we think it was the last thing that we need to fix. No, it's you once you push your, once you cross your threshold, you need to start again. It's like in life, you've got one ball, two balls, you're juggling three, four, right? You just about keep everything going. Then someone throws a fifth ball in, everything falls down. And so my approach is about making multiple changes. And so, you know, on the on the last series of Doctor in the House, there was a lady, right? Who had a significantly traumatic emotional event when she was nineteen, right? You know, ended up in intensive care, in a coma. She woke up, she was scared out of her mind. Since then, she had really bad panic and anxiety attacks. Okay, which is crippling her life. And she applied to be on the show because she was desperate. She had tried counselling, she tried antidepressants and nothing was working.

• 53:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  And again, I didn't know if I was going to be able to help her or not, but I thought, okay, what's going on here? Her diet was appalling. You know, she was compensating with the way she felt with junk food and processed food. You know, she was up late on her screens, all this kind of stuff, right? And again, she was very skeptical when I suggested that we would start by changing her diet. You know, there was a huge resistance. Well, you know, you're saying I've done this to myself with the food. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that something significant happened when you were nineteen. But you have, you know, because of the way you felt, you put loads and loads of layers onto that as well, and lots of compensatory behaviors around that. Let's just start. You've tried counselling, you've tried antidepressants, okay? Let's take a different approach. So

• 54:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  we started with her diet, and it was just incredible. By the end of six weeks, her symptoms had gone down by seventy percent. Not a miraculous reversal, but her quality of life had improved immeasurably. And I feel, and towards the end, we then got her to a talking therapist, but she was in a much better state, that she could now access that and deal with that. And, you know, we've got, I'm sorry to labour the point, but you've got to do multiple things in multiple areas. And that's why this is not a book about food. This is why it's a book about, you know, there are many great books on food. I'm not against that, right? But I think, well, that stuff is out there, right? What can I contribute?

• 54:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want to, I want to show people that the quality of your sleep is as important as the food that you put in your mouth. And I didn't know that five years ago. And you may be sceptical of that potentially, but, you know, when you look at the research of what sleep deprivation does to us, you know, I have helped patients reverse or certainly put their toxic diabetes into remission.

• 55:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's something in the book about insulin resistance, the impact of poor sleep on insulin resistance, which I did not know how significant that was. It was cra- it's crazy.

• 55:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's huge. And there was a study recently done where they, they sleep deprived a healthy group. Of people, it's down to four to five hours a night, which is not dissimilar to what a lot of the population.

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  A lot of people, and a lot of people will swear that they're fine with that.

• 55:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  A lot of people will swear they're okay with that, but here's the thing, a lot of the time, so there's two, two points there. When you say people say they're okay with that, if we go back to my threshold analogy, okay, they may find that that sleep deprivation and they, they may not have any symptoms yet. They may be getting away with it, right? But they may be moving up towards their threshold. So they, that sleep deprivation may be okay day to day. They may perceive it as being okay. But then when, when the stress goes up at work, when something happens that they're not expecting, when they lose their job or their mother gets sick, suddenly they're that much closer and they tip over. And that's

• 56:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  why I think, you know, we, we, we exist on a continuum of health, you know? When you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, that started 10 years ago.

• 56:29Rich Roll?

  Right, of course.

• 56:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, that started 30 years ago, right? So we need, as a system, we need to better help people identify when they're moving up that curve, when they're not at diagnosis stage, but they're moving up that curve. But the thing with sleep deprivation, and I've got patients who've come to see me, who's, they have changed their diet. They've read the blogs, right? They've, whether it's plant based, whether it's another approach, they've read all that and they've, they've changed their diet. And I come in and I see them and their blood sugars still aren't coming down. I think your diet's pretty good, you know? And then some of them, super stressed and they're not sleeping. And there was one particular case, 52 year old guy, you know, busy, you know, high performer, executive. His diet was fantastic, but he was getting

• 57:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  so frustrated that he couldn't get his sugar down anymore. And when I started to say, look, we need to think about switching off your computer one hour before bed. We need to do five minutes of meditation a day, right? Just to get you started. His, you know, six months later, his blood sugar starts coming down, you know, because it's not always diet. And That really is the, you know, I'm not trying to say diet's not important. It is clearly very, very important.

• 57:39Rich Roll?

  It's just not all diet.

• 57:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  It ain't all diet.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  And I think that's what get, when, when you get into these silos and these arguments, you know, this sort of implicit message is it is all diet, right? And yeah, diet's huge. It's super important, but beyond that, there's so many things. You could be the most perfect raw vegan, fruitarian, whatever. But if you're bananas and you argue with people all day long and you're an asshole and you don't sleep at night and you're staring at your phone all day long, like you're not a healthy person.

• 58:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you're not. And, and if we go back to sleep for a second, that, that, that study where they, they deprived people to four to five hours a night for, I think, six nights. Okay. They had a 40% reduction in their capability to manage their blood sugar. And the end of that, some of them would have been diagnosed as prediabetic, right? Just from sleep deprivation.

• 58:26Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 58:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think we've got to start bringing this into the equation because you mentioned the blue zones. I talk about the blue zones and I find them fascinating because we can learn so much from them. But when, you know, I know you've had Dan on the show before and, you know, I had the privilege of meeting Michelle Poulain, who's the Belgian researcher, who I think along with Dan helped to sort of coin the term and do all that work. I met him in Gersi last year, which was just an incredible experience, which I'll tell you about actually. But when we look at them and we try and look at the perfect diets, I understand the rationale behind that, but we're looking at populations who are eating well. They're also pretty physically, they're physically active every day. They're sleeping well. They've got low levels of stress and they've got a strong sense of community.

• 59:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So when we look at them, it's a lifestyle. It's the whole piece put together. And when we compare in the West, where we are underslept, we're overly stressed, we're physically inactive and where a lot of us are eating highly processed junk food, right? That's just a recipe for trouble. We can't, I don't think, just take one aspect of the blue zones. We have to look at it all and go, you know, let's, let's try and optimize as many of these as we can. And the other, the other, the other thing I sort of would love to sort of try and get across is, I get it. Life is tricky for some people. You may work shifts, right? You may find it hard, right?

• 59:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  So maybe if your sleep pillar ain't going very well, maybe you need to optimize the food pillar and the movement pillar and the relaxation pillar, you know, you can get to your, you can lower your threshold in many different ways. And I think the blue zones are a prime example of people lowering their thresholds, you know, and keeping themselves very resilient. Cause that's the thing, lowering, keeping yourself away from that threshold doesn't just mean you're going to feel better. You've got more resilience. So when life does chuck you, it's curveballs and that will happen. Nothing stays static. Everything's always changing. You're more resilient to fight it.

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think, you know, it's only getting crazier. I mean, with these, you know, devices in our pockets, it's becoming harder and harder to, to detach, to disconnect. And, you know, what's going to happen 10, 20 years from now? It's going to be almost impossible to unplug at all. And the pace of life just continues to, to get, uh, rapider and rapider. And, you know, there's no, there's no, like, you actually have to work to be bored now. There's just no, there's no reason to ever be bored again. You can be overstimulated during every minute of every waking hour.

• 1:01:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  We, we've lost the art of stillness. We've lost that ability to just sit there and let our mind wander. And actually, that's when a lot of the creativity happens, you know, your, your default mode network, your DMN in your brain, which is where a lot of these creative ideas come from, that goes into overdrive when we're not focusing on a task, when we're just sitting there. You know, just watching the world go by, or maybe when you're going for a run. I I I'm gonna bet that you get a lot of your great ideas when you're out running.

• 1:01:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:01:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Rather than when you're

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  It's the only time where I can just be by myself and my thoughts in nature.

• 1:01:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, cuz you're not trying to sit here figuring it out. I've got this problem. I can't I can't get to the bottom of this. You probably go out for a run, you find, oh, I've got the solution.

• 1:01:48Rich Roll?

  Right. Or when I am grinding it out and trying to figure it out, I'm like, oh, let's see what's happening on Twitter. I'm gonna stare at my phone now.

• 1:01:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, man, I know that feeling. But I say, I I recently gave a talk to Apple in London on wellbeing for their employees. And, you know, incredibly, you know, privileged and I feel very humble to go in there and talk to them. And I actually spoke to them about tech and I said, I feel, I I felt like I was in the lion's den talking about tech and some of the problems, but also how, what a great opportunity they've got, because so many people use their products, they can actually shape the world. Well, you know, they, if they, and I think they do take some of these things quite responsibly. You can actually really shape what people do. But what was interesting, I spoke about my four pillars to them to try and improve their wellbeing. At the end of the talk, this chap came up to me, he must have been in his mid twenties, right?

• 1:02:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  He said, hey, you know, Dr. Chachi, I found that really, really interesting, but can I ask you something? I said, yeah, sure, fire away. It's like if I switch my phone off an hour before bed, what am I gonna do?

• 1:02:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Rich, he was serious, man.

• 1:02:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm not, I'm not kidding you, this is a, this is a kid.

• 1:02:58Rich Roll?

  Panic, panic.

• 1:02:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  He was deadly serious and I thought, I learned a lot that I thought, wow. Actually, for some people, they're so embedded to this, they genuinely

• 1:03:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  don't know what they're gonna do without it. And I thought, you know, I've got two young kids, seven, well, no, now eight, eight and five years old.

• 1:03:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I, I worry about this, you know, as a father, there's always something to worry about as a parent. And I think, what am I gonna do, you know, very soon? Everyone in my son's class is gonna have a phone and he's gonna be like, Daddy, can I have one? And he already asked it for his birthday recently. And, you know, I looked at he thought, you know, I'm not going there with Dad. You know, I know what the answer is, but I worry because I don't want to make my children social outcasts. Yeah, I really struggle with knowing some of the problems I have.

• 1:03:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a legit concern. I mean, I'm older than you, but, you know, I didn't grow up with, you know, I didn't start using a computer until I was in college and that was still many years prior to the internet. So, you know, myself and to some extent yourself, like, we're the last generation of people to know what it's like to be without all of these things. There will never be another generation of humans who

• 1:04:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Never.

• 1:04:08Rich Roll?

  lived through, you know, what it's like to not be on the internet. And so,

• 1:04:14Rich Roll?

  it is tricky, you know, as a parent myself, to try to find that that balance because on some level, we have to accept the fact that that these devices are part of what it means to be fluent in the language of our times. So it's not about like, no, you can't have it. It's about creating responsible habits around it, which is difficult when you're talking about a device that has the addictive potency of heroin.

• 1:04:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, you've just hit the nail on the head. It's not about demonizing these devices and this technology is fantastic, right? It's utterly life changing. You know, we can

• 1:04:53Rich Roll?

  We're having like what we're doing right now.

• 1:04:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  What we're doing right now, you know, or, you know, we could have done this, let's say over Skype, right? We could have been 5,000 miles away from each other, having a conversation because of this technology, which is utterly incredible. And I think what we have to just remember is that this is a new technology, right? We haven't quite yet figured out as a as a human race, how do we use it in a way that it really helps us and serves us rather than enslaves us? And just as we've got like sleep hygiene rules, I think we need technology hygiene rules. We need, you know, what a good practice rules, you know, do we need a bit of tech free time every day? I absolutely believe we need a bit of tech free time every day. But here's the thing, if you've got that

• 1:05:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  device near you, it's very, very hard because they are addictive. You know, and I, you know, one of the sort of recommendations I make is, you know, can you have a screen free Sabbath? Can you have one day a week without a screen completely? Now, I get it, people are gonna Almost be having palpitations at the thought of that.

• 1:05:55Rich Roll?

  What am I gonna do?

• 1:05:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so I say, well, if you can't do a whole day, try with it, try an hour. Start there. I tell you, on a Sunday morning, right? If I go with my wife and my two kids to the, to the local park, right? If I go and my phone's in my pocket, right? It goes something like this. Kids are playing, we're all interacting. Before you know it, I'm just, hey, they're on the climbing. I just have a cheeky little look, you know, what's going on on Instagram? What's, you know, and then before you, yeah, where are the kids? You know, something like that.

• 1:06:23Rich Roll?

  But somebody abducted them.

• 1:06:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, but before you know it, you're drawn into this world because it's powerful. It's engaging. If I make the decision, I'm leaving my phone at home. I have a completely different experience. I'm present, I'm mindful, I'm, I'm paying attention to what's going on. And my kids call me out.

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  You're not panicky and feeling naked?

• 1:06:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, no, I love it, but I've got used to it. I've got used to it. And, and ultimately, my kids, particularly my daughter, she'll call me out. If I'm in the room with her somewhere and I'm distracted on my phone. She's like, Daddy, you're not listening to me, are you? I tell you, that's like a dagger in the heart for me. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm just gonna put my phone off in another room. And so I, as a father, one thing I think is really important is something I really try and adhere to is spend at least one hour a day with my kids when I'm around, you know, without my phone anywhere in sight and not even on. Because I just, that's my strategy. Again, I'm not saying everyone has to do this. I'm just saying I'm trying to figure it out. I'm as addicted to this technology as anyone else is.

• 1:07:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm trying to figure out a way where I can still get the best of it without harming myself and also my relationship with my kids in the process.

• 1:07:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, when you figure it out, let me know. It's hard, right?

• 1:07:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's hard.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  It's really hard, you know, I, I mean, it's like, and I, like, I make my living through this, you know, through, through this ecosystem. So it's even more difficult for me to create, because I can make a justification. Well, this is what, you know, I need to be doing, I need to be, I gotta promote the latest podcast. I gotta da, da, da, da. And, you know, it's not good for me, you know? And so I go through phases where I'm really good and then I lapse. And, you know, as somebody who's a recovering alcoholic, like, it just pings every part of my brain that like wants to use and check out and get that little brush.

• 1:08:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, you compare it to alcohol, but let's talk about food for a minute. People will often say, yeah, I could eat well for a short period of time, then I've fallen off the wagon. I couldn't do it, you know, and it's the same thing with these phones. It's I'm not expecting perfection from people. No, A, it's not my right to expect perfection from anyone, but I'm not, that's not what I'm, I'm trying to suggest in what I, what I do with patients, what I do with, when I speak to the public or in the book, I'm, what I'm trying to do is empower people with information. Say, look, guys, this is what's going on, right? This is going to be having an impact on you. Here are some strategies that you might want to adopt. Why don't you suck it and see? Why don't you try this? You like this one? You don't like this one? Fine, you've tried it, that doesn't work for you. Try this one.

• 1:09:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, one thing I will say is one of the most life-changing things people can do. Okay. Is take off notifications. Right? And I'm deadly serious. You don't need, you know, that's the way you can start taking control of that technology and go, I don't need to be notified every single time someone likes my Instagram post or my latest Facebook article or someone's just retweeted me. I don't need to be notified every time, you know, so all my notifications are off. My email inbox is on manual refresh. So I can look at my phone. I could have 20 emails waiting for me. I don't know. I have to go into the app and I have to, you know, refresh the screen.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then I see, and you know, that's a small step that I think most people can manage. And I would say to people listening this who are tempted to do something, I'd say, start there. Just start there.

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  That's one thing I have done and that, that was life-changing. All the notifications on my phone are off. The one thing where it gets me into trouble though, is when you take notifications off your text messages, because there's an expectation when someone texts you that, that you, that prompts an immediate response.

• 1:10:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Where does that expectation come from?

• 1:10:09Rich Roll?

  Well, I don't know, maybe it's, it's self-generated in my own mind. But I've trained now, like I just, I, I basically, unless it's really...

• 1:10:19Rich Roll?

  Pertinent, I don't respond to text messages right away so that people who text me don't then develop that expectation. But I don't know if you've noticed this, like texting has now become like email. It's like, it's almost like my, I used to just not get that many texts, but now I get so many texts that it's like the same thing. But then I don't think to check my texts because I don't have that little number on there. I don't know when I have new ones.

• 1:10:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Rich Roll?

  It's, you know, I can also grayscale your phone too, which I think is a great thing.

• 1:10:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's that? I'm not familiar with that.

• 1:10:48Rich Roll?

  You, there's a setting where you can go in and take and remove all the color. And so it's just black and white screen. And there's something about the way that everything is colored in a specific way. There's a lot of money in science that's gone into, you know, creating that compulsive addictive response and color has a big role in that. So there's been studies done that when you grayscale your phone, that, that it really tempers that compulsivity.

• 1:11:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  There's a guy called Tristan Harris, who's doing like a lot of research in this right now. He's been kind of doing the podcast rounds and it's super fascinating.

• 1:11:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's super interesting.

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, communication is changing, isn't it? You're saying like text messages are becoming a bit more like emails and it's very hard now to, it's very hard to put those boundaries in now. You know, I try my best to guard my number, my, my phone number with my life, you know, because that then means people have got access to me on a Sunday, on a Saturday, you know, when I'm on family time. And those boundaries have just got blurred now. And, you know, it's funny, you know, I also think that we, we've lost an element of respect on other people's time and their boundaries, not because we're meaning to, but I'll give an example, recently, somebody who's got my number, um, added me to a WhatsApp group

• 1:12:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  of like 15 people, 14 of which don't have my number.

• 1:12:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And when it first happened, I was, I was, I was, you know, I was like, oh man, I'm on this WhatsApp group now and these fourteen people who don't have my number have now got my number. So they can contact me personally in a way that they couldn't do before. And again, I'm not, it's nothing about ego or anything like that. It's just more, I'm really trying to, trying to guard my own personal time, my, my private space, and I feel that's been taken away from me now. And the person who did it, didn't do that with any malice.

• 1:12:46Rich Roll?

  Right. But we haven't really written the etiquette rules.

• 1:12:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. And that's what I think is, is going to be written over the next few years. And now is what is, what is the right etiquette? Like, as you say, there's an expectation of the text message you should be responding. So you're helping to educate your community, your friends, people who have access to you via your text, you're helping to just educate them a little bit, go, hey, you know, when you text me, I'll get back to you, but it won't be quick. And I think we all have to do that. You know, Tim Ferriss wrote in his, in the Four Hour Work Week, you know, about, that's when I learned about the emails, about presetting the expectation when someone's actually, you know, this email gets checked twice a week or once a day. You know, I did that for a while, then I took it off. And, you know, I'm always experimenting, but it's about changing the expectation, right?

• 1:13:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah. He was, he was here and he showed me his phone and it, it said that he had like eight thousand unread emails or something like that. And I was like, do you read them and then mark them unread? He's like, no, I've never looked at them. And I did an experiment when I was in, as I told you before the podcast, just got back from Italy. I did an experiment where I had a colleague of mine, my assistant, handle all my emails while I was gone. I'd never like turned over my entire email box to somebody else and gone away for like two weeks and not looked at it. And that was a, that was definitely a learning experience. It was great, but it was like for a minute there, I felt very weird, you know?

• 1:14:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Almost like naked.

• 1:14:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's your thing. And, and I think the key, as you say, is that. We don't know the rules yet. We're all trying to figure this out.

• 1:14:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're in the infancy of the most powerful technology that we've ever created.

• 1:14:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  And we're trying to find our way and we're stumbling without the tools yet.

• 1:14:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, this is such such a huge impact on us. I don't think we even realize how big this is. And I'd go as far as saying that this arguably our stress component in our lives and the way we use our technology for many of my patients is arguably more important than the food that they're putting in their mouth. Right. It is to be on the entire time, to wake up and go first thing on that phone. And the noise that comes in from that constantly throughout the day and often it's still going on when we're in bed at night, lying there, still checking everything, no downtime, that is having a huge consequence on the way many of us feel. And, you know, I actually, I think I start the book with a story about this 16 year old boy

• 1:15:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  who I saw maybe six years ago, this chap called Devon.

• 1:15:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  This was in a typical conventional medical practice, you know, in our National Health Service. I have 10 minute appointments and it was a Monday afternoon surgery. Okay, we call them surgeries, they're just clinics, basically, okay, a Monday afternoon clinic. I had about three or four people in the waiting room. I was already running a little bit late. And this 16 year old boy walks in with his mother. I open up the file and I see there's a letter and basically on the Saturday, this guy ended up in the ER because he tried to harm himself.

• 1:15:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  And there was a letter there from the ER doctor saying, hey, Dr. Chasi, look, this is what's happened. We assessed him. He was safe to discharge, but could you please start on antidepressants?

• 1:15:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  So he's there, he's with his mom. I sort of know the family anyway, because I've been looking after them for a period of time. And I thought, okay. What's going on here? Why is this sixteen year old boy from a seemingly well-balanced family that I've never really detected any issues with before, why has he ended up harming himself in the ER department on the Saturday? I just can't stop on antidepressant. I need to figure out what's going on here. I just couldn't do it. So I spent maybe ten, twenty minutes with them and I, I thought, hey, I need a bit more time. I said, guys, look, are you able to come in tomorrow morning at the end of my morning clinic and I'll spend a bit longer with you? And I said, yeah, sure. So they came in the following day. At the end of that, I thought, okay, there's many factors at play here. The one thing

• 1:16:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  really worries me, which is his use of social media and his smartphone. And I said to him, I said, look, Devin, would you be interested in reducing, in me helping you reduce your usage? And he's, well, is that gonna help? I said, well, look, I don't know, but I think, I don't think it's helping your current mental state. Would you be willing to give it a go? And he was a, you know, that low E, and he said, yeah, sure. If you think it's gonna help. So we agreed for the first week that just for one hour before bed, he'd switch off his phone and he wouldn't go on the internet. He comes about seven days later and I said to him, you know, how you doing? And he said, well, you know, Dr. Chasi, I'm, I'm still not great, but I feel less up and down in the day. I'm sleeping better. I

• 1:17:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  just, you know, I've got a bit more energy. Things aren't quite as bad as they were. I said, okay, so you've already seen that that's having a little bit of an impact. What if we increase that a little bit more? And over the next few weeks, we increased up to two weeks, two hours in the evening before bed and two hours in the morning where he doesn't go on his phone. Okay. He's starting to feel better. You get it? Not cured or anything, but significantly better. Then I thought, okay, we tackle that. He's getting that bettered in. I also then went into his diet. I said, hey, what are you eating? It was a typical teenage diet, lots of highly processed sugary junk food, snacking all throughout the day. And I said, hey, Devin, did you realize that actually that food that you eat can have an impact on your mood?

• 1:18:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  He's like, really? I said, look, what happens when you have this food, right? Deadly series. I'm like, you know, when you're eating this food, you know, this high sugar foods, you're going on a blood sugar roller coaster. So what happens? You're having that in the morning before school. Mid morning, your sugar's crashing fast. That's not just an energy problem. That's not just a sugar problem. That is also a mood problem because when it crashes, that your stress response goes up in your body. Adrenaline cortisol go up, right? This will have an impact on your mood hormones. He's like, are you kidding me? I'm like, no, this is what's, this is, this will be playing a role here. So because he understood why I was asking to make the changes, it wasn't just me saying you've got to change your diet. I drew out a little graph for him. I explained to him, he goes, okay, that makes sense. Show me, right?

• 1:18:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I explained what he might be able to do, you know, take some nuts with him for those snacks to keep his blood sugar stable throughout the day, those kinds of things. It wasn't a perfect diet. He didn't go full on Mediterranean, right? He just made enough changes and then he started to improve again. Bit by bit, he's getting better and then I stopped seeing him. Suddenly he doesn't come in as much. I'm getting on with my busy practice. And then I come in about six months later and there's a letter on, you know, as part of my mail, I'm going through, I open this letter and it's from Devon's mum and he says, dear Dr. Chetty, I just want to thank you. You've completely changed Devon's life. He, he's happy at school. He's interacting with his friends. He's joining local clubs at the weekends.

• 1:19:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  He's just, you know, he's just a joy to be around. I just want to say thank you. And I've learned so much from that case, Rich, because I thought, wow. Yes, I think there are emotional issues as well, but simply by tackling two of those four pillars, right? The relaxed pillar where I helped him reduce his social media use by helping him understand what was going on. I helped him improve his diet by maybe 20, 30%. It's not full on, right? He started to be empowered enough to see how that impacted his lifestyle. So this is a 16 year old boy. He was, he was at a fork in the road, right? He could go down one path. I'm on my antidepressants. I've got depression, right?

• 1:20:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's the label I've got. No doubt, he would have been put on a repeat prescription. He could still have been on that five years later. But at that moment, he took another path. He now has empowered himself, you know, really helped him to understand how the environmental choices he makes impacts his mental health. And I very much hope that that's going to keep him in good stead going forward, because if things get tough in the future, he will know, actually, there are some things I might be able to do which are going to help me. And really, this is what I'm saying. This for-profit approach is deceptively simple, right? You know, where's the real medicine? Where's the cool stuff? This is the cool stuff. If you get this stuff right, everything gets better. Yeah, if you're lucky, you can reverse your disease, but you can certainly improve the way you feel.

• 1:20:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pretty much everybody can improve the way they feel, you know, whether you've got a disease or not. If you're just someone who wakes up tired every day and needs sugar and coffee to get you through each day, these principles are going to help you. If you've got diabetes, it's going to help you. It doesn't matter because these are universal. I can't invent the principles of good health. They're the same principles that existed a hundred years ago. I can't come up with a new concept for a book and say, hey, guys, I've got the secret, right? I don't.

• 1:21:27Rich Roll?

  It's the secret no one wants to tell you that you've never heard before. Yeah, I mean, I think the most powerful thing in all of it is getting the lights to go on in the patient, like by making, you know, like a lot of the book is about like, look, let's just, these baby steps, right? And if you can just get a patient to implement one or two of those, the lights go on, they start to make that connection between how they're living and how they're feeling. And then they're invested. And then you're basically catalyzing that person's journey for the rest of their life. They're going to go off and, you know, continue to grow and explore and refine and change and do all of that, you know, on their own, with guidance, of course, from people like yourself.

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  But it's that empowerment piece that I think is so important. And I think it's a fundamental paradigm shift. In the doctor-patient relationship from one of, you know, the traditional paradigm of like, I'm the expert, you're going to do what I tell you. And there's no, we're not, we're not in a partnership here, like, you know, I'm the authority. To, okay, let's sit down and have a chat and like, we're, we, we're a team here. And what can we do together where it just, it fosters that sense of self-determinism.

• 1:22:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's a partnership. It's got to be a partnership between doctor and patient because those days of that paternalistic relationship, they were over, they're gone. I mean, there's still a certain generation who expects that.

• 1:22:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're still, I mean, yeah, most of it is that way still.

• 1:22:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Most of it's that way.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  You're the rarity still.

• 1:23:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I think I've always been slightly odd in the head because I've never seen it like that. I've always kind of wanted to have that partnership, that conversation. I've always.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  But it didn't start that way for you. Like, we didn't even tell the story about how you got into all this.

• 1:23:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I didn't so, well, you know, it's interesting that because I reflect back now on my career and you're right, it didn't start that way, but on some level it did. So, you know, to put it in, in perspective is I qualified for Edinburgh Medical School and I thought I've got all the skills now I need to get out there and make people better. Great, so I've trained for, let's go.

• 1:23:40Rich Roll?

  And make dad proud.

• 1:23:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly, you know, and family proud and all this kind of stuff that, you know, I grew up with and I, I rock up and I'm, you know, doing acute medicine and then within a couple of years, I'm, you know, leading the cardiac arrest team in the hospital and doing all this, all the kind of cool acute stuff that you think being a doctor is all about. But actually I reflect back and I think even then, I don't think I was deeply satisfied. I, you know, I saw how powerful modern medicine can be for acute problems, people walking in through the door, sick, and you give them whatever you need to give them and suddenly they're transformed, just incredible. So you don't really question at the time, you don't even know yourself, hey, we go to medical school really early in, in the UK, we don't do.

• 1:24:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  A degree first. So you know, when I qualified as a doctor, I must have been twenty one, twenty two. Oh, really? Wow, that's way earlier than in the States. Something like that, maybe twenty two, you know, and I, I think now, I didn't even have the life experience to be able to understand what people were going through. But the, the point is, I, I was, you know, I was okay. My career was going fine and I was doing my specialist exams. And I thought, yeah, okay, fine, I'm going to figure this out. Um, you know, and you've alluded to, you know, my, my, my personal story, which is that, you know, I had already moved, made the move to general practice because I was, I really felt that we were just missing the big picture.

• 1:25:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  We were just getting so down rabbit holes in one area without seeing how everything is connected. And I was working in general practice and, you know, we just had a, our first child, you know, my, my wife had breastfed him for the first six months, as per the guidelines. And as, you know, we thought we were doing the best thing. And I'm not saying we weren't doing the best thing, but we were, we were, you know, we're a pretty health conscious family. And we went on holiday to France and the Christmas holidays. And you man, I can, I can still remember it so vividly that we were staying in my, uh, my friend's chalet in a place called Chamonix in France. And they weren't there yet. We were just there and

• 1:25:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  my, my son hadn't been well throughout the day. He'd had a bit of a cold. And for some reason, my wife didn't put him down in his, in his cot, which is in the basement. Didn't feel right. So, you know, maternal intuition, whatever you want to call it, she didn't do that. And um, I remember that she was sitting, it was a big open plans, you know, living room and kitchen. And she was sitting there. And I, I think I had the kettle on and she just called out to me and said, you know, wrong, and he stopped moving. Come, you know, he just shouted out. I just came over. He put, he, my son, his arms had gone back. He was rigid and he just stopped. And

• 1:26:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I thought he was choking. I thought maybe he was choking on his mucus and his phlegm. And you know, my sort of, my medical training was sort of like, okay, so I turn him over. I try to clear his airway. He's not breathing. He's not breathing. It's just, you know, frankly, I tried to clear his airway. Nothing was happening. And in that moment, I wasn't a highly qualified doctor. I was a scared dad and I froze, right? I was just standing there. What's going on? I've got to figure this out. And my wife had said, look, we just got to get to the hospital. So we rush into the car, you know, I almost kill us all because we are on this little slope and the car skids because I'm just so panicked. We end up in the hospital, which isn't very far. And you could see when we got there that the doctors were worried because, you know, for people who don't know, a six month old child can have a convulsion.

• 1:27:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's called a febrile convulsion if they've got a fever with it. That is not actually that worrying. That can happen in that age. He had no fever. So you could see the doctors were really panicked. I said, okay, what's going on here? Why has he got no fever? Because that's, that's the common cause.

• 1:27:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, they were sticking a net, a line in his neck, um, you know, all kinds of stuff. Then he had to be blue lighted down the mountain to the big mountain hospital because we were in a little resort. Did they get him breathing? They got him breathing. They gave him a Disapam to get him going, you know, and stop all that. And I wasn't allowed in the ambulance. I had to follow it in a car. And I was just panicked. What the hell was going on? We, no one knew. They took blood from him. He had two lumbar punctures. You know, we thought we were going to lose him that night. We were absolutely so scared. A few hours later,

• 1:27:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  the doctor comes into the room and he says, um, you know, that's chatting. We know, you know, he's, you know, we know what's happened. Does that, what's happened? He said, he's got a very low level of calcium. And because of that low level of calcium, he's had a convulsion. So what we call a hypocalcemic convulsion.

• 1:28:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, fine. They didn't know why at that point. They just said, okay, this is the cause. So to put it in perspective, the the normal calcium level on that particular test is two point two to two point six. Even if we see it at one point nine, we consider that very low. His was zero point nine seven. So his was tanked, you know, barely compatible with functioning. That's why he had his convulsions. So they gave him an intravenous calcium infusion. You know, this is what modern medicine does best, right? Fix that acute problem. But then what happens, I think about an hour or two later, I can't even remember the time, you know, it's all a bit of a blur. But he said, you know, we now know why he has no vitamin D in his body, he's very, very low. So because he has no vitamin D, his calcium has dropped

• 1:29:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  low. So to cut a long story short, and I'm sorry to have labored the point, it's just it gets quite emotional when I think back and I'm, you know, I still can't clear that that out of my head.

• 1:29:12Rich Roll?

  It's terrifying.

• 1:29:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  And in a nutshell, this is a fully preventable problem, right? My son nearly died from a preventable vitamin deficiency and his dad as a highly qualified specialist, general practitioner, immunology, honors degree, you know, all this kind of stuff, all these labels, right, which I had, I wasn't able to prevent that happening in my son.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  But how would you even know? I mean, if he's breastfeeding, you would be, you would presume that he's getting all the nutrients that he needs.

• 1:29:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  The story gets deeper because ultimately, you know, I now know that, and again, people are going to listen and go, well, why weren't you putting him on vitamin D maybe? And the reality is, is that, you know, that is just not at that time. And even now, it wasn't that common knowledge that a lot of kids need vitamin D, you know, particularly in the modern worlds, you know, there are regulate, there are guidelines that all children need vitamin D drops, you know, and he wasn't getting them. But I've got to say, about four or five weeks before this happened. I was doing some reading, I was coming across this in my own practice and I, you know, I thought, I wonder why my son should be on vitamin D. So what I did is I phoned my wife from work and I emailed her a protocol. I said, hey babe, can you just make an appointment?

• 1:30:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can you just go and see the doctor and just ask? Because we get told, it's drilled into us as medical doctors in the UK, we're not to make decisions on our own family. It's considered bad practice, you're considered too close. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to do the right thing. So she printed it off, she went to see her GP and the GP said, you know, and she knew, he knew that I was a doctor and he said to my wife, you could have just printed, made this up on Word. This is not, this is rubbish, you don't need to do anything. You know, you're doing the best. And so she phoned me and said, this is what's going on. I said, okay, let me do a bit more research. And so I mean, you know, because I, I wasn't confident enough to make that call myself, right? Whereas now with hindsight, I should have just done it myself, bought the drops over the counter

• 1:31:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  and given them to him. But I didn't, right? And, you know, I've gone through years of trying to figure out why I didn't do that. And, you know, having a lot of guilt attached to that, which is a separate issue, but I think quite an important one, because that guilt, see what happens, he's in hospital, he nearly dies, modern medicine saves him. But then I, then I'm reading about vitamin D and I think, well, this is a critical, critical vitamin for your immune system to develop. This is a critical vitamin for his bones to develop. So he was diagnosed with rickets as well, right? A Victorian illness that he's now got in the 21st century. And actually, on a side note, in the UK, rickets is on the rise, which is just incredible.

• 1:31:57Rich Roll?

  Wow, I would not have thought that. I didn't think anybody got rickets anymore.

• 1:32:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  We're going up in the UK every year. I don't know the US stats, but it's going up. And, and, you know, what happened in that moment was that I thought, well, maybe this is the reason he's got eczema. Maybe because, you know, because eczema in some ways related to your immune system, having an element of dysfunction in it. And instead of just putting creams on to suppress the symptoms, it's like, well, maybe this is why he's got it. So I, I felt so guilty about this. That I said, right, I'm going to figure out how to get my son back to optimal health as if this has never happened. And that was my drive, right? I became obsessed. I'd be reading, I'd be going on the internet, be reading about vitamin D and nutrition.

• 1:32:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And as you start reading, you start to come across, I start to come across a whole ton of science that frankly, I had never seen before, that I thought, why do I not know about this?

• 1:32:53Rich Roll?

  Right, that's the shocking thing.

• 1:32:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why do I not know about this? I learned more. I thought, right, I'm going to figure this out. I spent a ton of money, my own money. I started going out to America, I started coming on conferences, on courses with the goal to get him better, right? And I've got to say, I'm very, very thankful that my son is thriving. He's eight now. He's happy. He has no skin problems. He's doing well. He's sporty. He's, you know, I really feel that everything I've learnt has helped me get him back to full health. Okay?

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  So that was, it wasn't just the instance of going to the emergency room and treating it. This was something that, that required treatment over a prolonged period of time to get him well.

• 1:33:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it was how you look at it. Modern medicine would say, well, he had a problem. He had a convulsion. Okay, we've identified that and fixed it. You're discharged now. Good to go. Okay? But we, but we're not looking at what are the implications? How long was he low in that vitamin four? How much of an impact has that had on the developments of his immune system?

• 1:33:54Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:33:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And which that kills me to even think about that, you know? What that might have potentially done already.

• 1:34:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  What I know is that if you think about that threshold concept, even if there has been, you know, an impact from that, which no doubt there, there, there has, I feel that I'm helping him optimize everything else that is possible to kind of mean that that is, it's going to have less of an impact. But here's the key, the science I learnt from trying to get him better, yes, I helped him. Then as a family, we started applying it in our lives, right? Then I started applying it with my patients. And I, for the first time in my career, I felt, I was excited. I thought, I'm getting people better. I'm getting them off their medication. I'm actually understanding what the root cause of their problem is

• 1:34:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  and how to get to it. And it changed my career. And, and I, you know, it's, it's.

• 1:34:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, in some ways, Rich, if this had never happened to my son,

• 1:34:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  would I be doing what I'm doing?

• 1:35:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's that classic thing of, you know, the worst thing that happens to you is the silver lining that, that, you know, creates something beautiful out of it.

• 1:35:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, silver lining for me, was it a silver lining for him? You know, I don't know, but I can tell you.

• 1:35:16Rich Roll?

  He'll be all right.

• 1:35:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  I can, I think so. And I can tell you one thing I'm starting to do now is I'm, I'm really working hard on myself to let go of that guilt because actually that guilt, I think it served its purpose. And I think now that that guilt is hindering my ability to be as good a, good a father as I could be.

• 1:35:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can't keep punishing yourself and wear the hair shirt.

• 1:35:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And he doesn't want that either. He doesn't want his dad to be guilty, you know? And it's, for me, it was that transformative experience, you know? And I kind of ju, I used to justify it to myself. I thought, okay, because of that, I've learned this. I'm helping my patients now. Then I get this BBC One show, this prime time show, which goes out to five million people a week in the UK and then, you know, 70 countries around the world where I can showcase this. So to millions of people around the globe, how no matter what your condition is, we can improve it with these lifestyle recommendations. And I thought, you know, maybe that's his gift to the world. Maybe in some ways that's what was required to give me this drive to do what I do.

• 1:36:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:36:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So, wow, my head's gone, but that's.

• 1:36:20Rich Roll?

  No, no, it's, it's, it's, it's an amazing story and I'm sure he's going to be fine.

• 1:36:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, he is going to be fine. He's, he's incredible.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  In the context of your practice and all these people that you treat and see, like, what is the, well, two questions really, but the first being like, what is the, the number one thing that people struggle with the most? And I know you don't want to like sort of parse the differences between these four pillars because of this, you know, delicate interplay between all of them, but you know, where, where are people going wrong the most? What's the most chronic, persistent condition or stumbling block that people face in your experience?

• 1:36:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. What is the most?

• 1:37:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I think the most common stumbling block. You're right. I mean, I think you've got to take those four pillars individually because in different people, it's going to be a different one. But if I had to really pick one, and this is different from if I'd had come on the show five years ago. I don't even know if you were doing the podcast five years ago.

• 1:37:24Rich Roll?

  I was.

• 1:37:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So if I was here five years ago, I would have given you a different answer. Back then, I would have told you it was food. But now I'd say it's stress. You know, I think the majority of people I see

• 1:37:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  are just stressed out. They're busy. They've just got their brains full of stuff. They're just, there's no quiet. There's no stillness. There's no, there's no respite from the noise. And I'm finding more and more, I'm going there a lot earlier than I used to. So I'd say that's probably the big one for me.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  That's the one that I struggle with the most.

• 1:38:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, me too.

• 1:38:03Rich Roll?

  You know, and yeah, as somebody who's driven and as an athlete, like I just, you know, my whole frame of mind is push, push, push. I can do more. I can make it better. And I just dig myself into a hole, which is why I wake up, woke up this morning, not feeling so great, you know?

• 1:38:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's about saying you can do more. You can do it all right, but you've just got to, you've got to have a stop point. You've got to just, you've got to schedule in these stop points where, because these days, it doesn't matter what you do, your work is never done. There is always something else you can be doing. So I, like, I rather romantically look back to time 15, 20 years ago, and I imagine that people would, and I'm sure I'm overly, you know, I'm sure it wasn't quite like this, but I kind of imagined that, you know, let's say a working couple would come back. And they might sort of have dinner with their children, let's say, for argument's sake. And at some point, the children would go off to bed. And then it would be like, okay, let's chill out together.

• 1:39:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's maybe put the television on. Let's, let's watch something together. You know, there wasn't the ability to go, right, that's done. Now I can get on with more work. Now I can actually open up my work emails. Now I can catch up with what I've not done yet. Now I can get ahead for tomorrow. I don't think, certainly for the largest part of our evolution, we didn't have that possibility.

• 1:39:24Rich Roll?

  No, when you went home, you were home.

• 1:39:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  You were home. Work was at work. You're home now, you chill.

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  And nobody could reach you and nobody would, would unless there was some crazy emergency.

• 1:39:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. So because we've got the ability to do these things, we always feel we can do more. So that's never going to go. Your to do list is never going to be done. If you think you're ever going to tick it all off and you're done now, that ain't happening. There's always something else. There's always an email to get back to. There's always your Facebook to check. There's always a DM you just got on Instagram that you could get back to. You know, it's endless now. Or that WhatsApp group you've been added to that you've got to respond to, right?

• 1:39:58Rich Roll?

  Well, we all have like 20 inboxes now.

• 1:40:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, and people can't get you on one, they get you on another one. So you've just got this constant bombardment. So I think that stress piece, and a lot of people don't realize that that is a big risk factor for disease. But that will even negate you. That will even stop you from losing weight. People can't get their heads around that. But so many, particularly, I've got to say, women, okay? And that's because I'm going from my experience. I'm not saying this affects women more than men. What I am saying is, in my clinical experience, I've seen a lot of women suffer hugely with stress. And, you know, a lot of them are, you know, really caring. They don't, they don't put themselves first. They put their children first. They put their partner first. They put their parents first.

• 1:40:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  They, they do everything for other people and they've got no time for themselves. And what happens is, because they're wired the whole time, their cortisol levels, which are our primary stress response hormone, those levels are high, they're persistently raised. But if they are persistently raised, it means your body thinks it's under attack. So it holds on to weight. And I've helped women. Get rid of menopausal symptoms. I've helped them get rid of their weight problems. When they've jumped from diet to diet for years and they keep hitting a plateau and they think, what's the right diet? You know, this is the wrong diet for me. What's the next book I might? What's, what's the perfect diet? And I say, hey, this ain't a dietary problem. All of these are pretty good diets. Your mind never switches off and just by some simple stress management techniques,

• 1:41:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  the weight starts coming off or the menopausal symptoms start getting better. So stress impacts everything. And, you know, I see it in my practice. I saw it when I did doctor in the house. I saw it in people's lives. And, you know, when I mentioned people sit back and let's say a couple are sitting, watching television in the evening, there's another issue there, which is now, let's, if we play that scenario out, let's say the couple do wanna watch something together. Right? Actually, it's very common now for people to be on their own devices. Cause we can personalize everything. So I don't need to watch what my wife's watching. I can watch my favorite show. She can watch hers. Yeah. So the whole. We're all having our own personal experiences on our, on our own. Yeah.

• 1:42:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we're together in the same room, but we're not together together. Right, we're not having a shared experience. And that actually, that plays out in, in other areas. So, you know, many people come and see their doctor about, you know, their sex life or a lack of intimacy and these kind of things. And the classic cliche now is as a husband and wife or whoever, you know, partner, two partners are in bed together, right? But they're both on their own devices. So that, that, that, they're occupying the same physical space, yet actually they're in their own world, their own emails, their own Facebook messages, their own Netflix shows. And that opportunity for intimacy, that is going as well. And, you know, as a doctor, these things come up into my practice every day.

• 1:42:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  People are complaining about this. And again, this technology is so great on so many levels, but if we don't, we don't rein it in. It's affecting all aspects of our life.

• 1:43:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, it's crazy to think that, but it's so true. I mean, you know, sort of what you're saying on some level is like your device is making you fat.

• 1:43:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:13Rich Roll?

  That's the way to get people to pay attention.

• 1:43:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  That is the way.

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  And then, so you could talk about all the other things, but it really is amazing. These crazy times that we're living in right now.

• 1:43:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  They're crazy.

• 1:43:23Rich Roll?

  Having to deal with all this kind of stuff that even 10 years ago was nonexistent.

• 1:43:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I know. What we want to make clear, Rich, if people listen to this and go, yeah, look, I get all that, but it's just too hard. I'm, I would say, look,

• 1:43:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  maybe something they've heard that we've already spoken about or something they might read about, right? Just pick something small. Just pick something small and start there. Maybe it's simply that you, you are one of these people who go on your phone and in your bed at night, right? What if you didn't bring it into your bedroom? Or what if 20 minutes before bedtime, you thought, okay, I'm just going to put this off now. Okay. Start there. Keep, you know, I live in a house and we keep our phone chargers downstairs, right? And the rule is, but we don't always stick to it, right? But the rule is, is that we leave our phones downstairs, Judge. We don't bring them upstairs into the bedroom, right? Now, I'm human, right? We don't always stick to it.

• 1:44:17Rich Roll?

  Are you on call, though, at times where you have to have the phone nearby?

• 1:44:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, the way I do practice now, no, I'm not. So I don't, I don't need that. But look, I've worked with people who do, right? So I'm like, okay, fine. On those nights, you do it, I get it. But what about the other six nights in the week where you're not, right? Cause we can all make those justifications. So you can make the justification that I run an online business. I've got to be connected at all times.

• 1:44:40Rich Roll?

  Well, you can always make excuses for whatever it is that you're trying to wiggle out of.

• 1:44:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And what the thing is, when we say we're trying to wiggle out of it, I think this is where the empowerment comes in. Because the first, the first thing we've got to do is people have got to, got to want to change, right? They might be listening and going, yeah, you know, but I don't want to do that. You know, if people aren't ready for that. They may, they may buy my book, right? And they may read it and do something for a week, but then they're just gonna put it on the shelf and they'll go back to world habits.

• 1:45:11Rich Roll?

  Or more commonly, they'll buy the book and give it to somebody who they want, they wanna help, without appreciating the fact that if that person they're trying to help doesn't wanna change, it doesn't matter.

• 1:45:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:45:25Rich Roll?

  Because people think that they can will people into that wanting to change mindset. And that is, that's a recipe for disaster.

• 1:45:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Since I got into this world and since I've suddenly seen the light, you know, and trying to sing it from the rooftops at first, I've learned that, you know what? You cannot make anybody make these changes, you know, particularly not your family.

• 1:45:46Rich Roll?

  No, and I'm sure you get, as I do, tons of emails, hey, you know, so my mom, my brother, my, my husband, my wife, whatever, they, they need to understand this. How can I make them understand it?

• 1:45:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can't.

• 1:45:58Rich Roll?

  You can't.

• 1:45:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can't, you just gotta, I say to people, you know, and this is what I try to do, I try and lead by example, you know, not because I'm trying to be an example, I just, I'm just gonna concentrate. I've realized it's enough work to do it myself, right? In this crazy modern world we live in, I'm gonna focus on that. And bit by bit, hopefully people around you will, you know, if they're interested, you might just, you know, spark that little bit of interest. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you one, one place this has, this has played out recently, which is probably not what people would expect me to say, but I, you know, because I've got two young children, you know, now that they're at school, it's always tricky for me to sort of, knowing what I know, you know, I can't control everything about them anymore. And that's just part of growing up, right?

• 1:46:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  But, you know, often there's a culture at schools of like sugary junk food and all this kind of stuff, which, you know, really, on one level, I find very frustrating. And initially, when they, when my son started at school, it would stress me out, like, ah, this is, this is crazy. What am I gonna do? And then my wife and I decided, you know, we're just gonna focus on doing what we do. And at the end of that first year, they went on a school trip and people could bring their treats in for their school trip. So what we did is that, again, we're not trying to make any judgment on anybody else. We're literally, I'm always cautious when we're talking about children, you know? I genuinely believe that every parent is trying to do the best that they can for their child within the context of their life and within their health belief system.

• 1:47:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  But we felt that we wanna keep feeding them healthy, nourishing foods, you know? And we made these, well, I say we, my wife. Let's be really honest about this. My wife made these beautiful fruit kebabs. These, I think there was mangoes, strawberry, it was sort of these colorful kebabs. And he took them in. And then at their lunch break on their school trip, you know, everyone's having their stuff. And he's having his fruit kebabs, which he loves because he thinks that's a treat. You know, I'm allowed all this super sweet fruit today.

• 1:47:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we went to pick him up and his teacher said to us, I was just incredible. You know, I think we're going to institute this now as a practice for school trips. We're going to now do these fruit kebabs for everyone. We thought that was fantastic. And I really learned a lesson that day. I, again, I thought this is incredible, you know?

• 1:48:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  We're not telling other people what to do. I don't feel it's my place or our place to tell other people what to do. We're just focusing on what we do. And that has been observed. And other parents had asked us as well, said, that's incredible. And now other people are starting to adopt that with their children because of what they saw us do. And again, it's that same principle that applies, which is you can't make someone else change. You've just got to focus on doing what you're doing. And it is hard because if you're, let's say, if you have had a health revelation by changing your lifestyle, yet your partner is not, all you want to do is tell them, say, no, no, no, it's, you know, you do this, you do this. But I found it doesn't work.

• 1:48:52Rich Roll?

  No, it doesn't work. And it, it's tough. I'm sympathetic to people that are in that situation. Like I was lucky enough to have, you know, a wife who was super supportive. I don't know that I would have made the changes that, that, that I would have been able to make them or make them stick without that kind of support. So it's very difficult. And on the, you know, the, the thing about kids, I mean, we're very similar with our kids. My wife is an insane cook. She makes amazing food. It's the food that our kids prefer, but we don't make rules with them about what they can and can't do when they leave the house. Like, I'm not that concerned about whether my daughter is going to have a piece of cake at a birthday party.

• 1:49:33Rich Roll?

  What I am concerned about is her habits 10 years from now and what her default settings are going to be.

• 1:49:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 1:49:40Rich Roll?

  And that comes through setting the example and through constant education and using food, the kitchen, the farmer's market, the grocery store, all of that. The cooking, teaching them how to make certain things. It's all like a homeschool recipe to instill, you know, those.

• 1:49:57Rich Roll?

  Those ideals around food that I think are so important and it's about serving the long term.

• 1:50:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and you've got much more experience than me as a parent, you know, so I'm always happy to hear.

• 1:50:07Rich Roll?

  And each kid's different.

• 1:50:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Each kid's different and I'm realizing more and more I need to let go and, you know, you know, at some point they're going to push back and experiments and, you know, you cannot, it's very hard to fight societal norms.

• 1:50:20Rich Roll?

  But if you don't give them anything to push back against, the impulse to rebel is, is diffused, right? So if you're not saying like, oh, you know, this is, if you're, if you're making all these rules, then when they get to a certain age, they're like, I'm out of the house, I can break the rule.

• 1:50:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. And I'm, you know, we've become acutely aware of that recently and really trying to modify our behavior around the kids because of that. And, you know, I mentioned before that I met Michelle Poulain.

• 1:50:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:50:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't know if you've.

• 1:50:47Rich Roll?

  I don't know, I don't know her.

• 1:50:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  But he, it's a he, it's a Belgian researcher who I think went out with Dan. Initially to sort of help do all the research on the Blue Zones with Dan. And I was lecturing with him in Guernsey and Guernsey, they were looking at Guernsey to see, could this qualify potentially as a Blue Zone? I don't know why they've got up to with that, but very kindly, the, the people who were organizing this arranged for me and Dan, not me and Dan, me and Michelle, to go and visit some of Guernsey's centenarians. I remember we went in a taxi and we went to this chap's house, he was 102 years old. I remember we got out of the taxi and I knocked on the door and he comes up and he answers the door, which in itself was amazing to me because as a doctor, I do home visits, right? That's something we still do in the UK.

• 1:51:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, you know, if someone phones in and they can't get in, we go. And obviously it's a self-selecting population. People are sick and, and ill, generally frail, that's why they're calling the doctor. But I've never had one of those patients will very rarely open the door for me. And normally there's a key lock or some, a carer lets me in. This guy rocks up and he lets me in and we go and we sit down and there's a cup of tea made for us and we sit there and we talk. It was really interesting to talk to him about his life and, you know, he said until he was 95 and started seeing doctors, he was great. And once he started seeing doctors, his health went down. Which I found super interesting on one level. But he, he'd spoken to me, I can't remember the name of this thing, but he said, you know, one of his favorite treats was this Guernsey loaf.

• 1:52:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like a mixture between an English cake and a French croissant. I can't remember the name of it. I was really interested. I thought, okay, you know, because I'm trying to work out what's the secret here, you know? And I say, you know, that's great. How often would you have that? Would you want sort of most days or the weekends? It's like, oh, no, that's Chastity. Easter and Christmas. We just have it at special times. Yeah, I can't have that every day. And I thought that's the key. It's not about, and I think this is consistent in all these blue zones. It's not about deprivation. These guys have sweet treats. They don't have it every day after school or every mid morning coffee break at work, right? They have it now and again. It's a celebration time as a treat. And, you know, that's why the recommendation I make in the book is to denormalize sugar.

• 1:53:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? I'm not saying, look, we crave sugar. If you were trying to avoid sugar in this modern food environment, I think you're setting yourself up for failure, really, because it's going to be incredibly challenging, I feel, to long term completely avoid sugar. I think we need to denormalize sugar. You know, it just, it can't be the everyday norm. It's got to be the occasional treats. That's the key with sugar.

• 1:53:24Rich Roll?

  But I think you have to be specific about, um, about what you mean by occasional, because I think people have different definitions. Different definitions of that. And I, and I do think, and I think you'll agree with me on this, that there's something to be said for completely cutting something out like sugar to allow your microbiome to adjust and your physiology to adjust. And there very well may be some discomfort because we are addicted to these kinds of foods. And when we remove them, there's a craving that ensues. But if you can, if you can kind of wait, you know, sort of, um,

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  weather that, you can get to the other side and those cravings dissipate and your relationship to those foods that once triggered you and held so much power over you, no longer do.

• 1:54:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Rich, I absolutely agree. Look, you know, I go through this process. If you want to go cold turkey on it. I I talk people through how to do that because I for me, that's the approach I would take because you you you within four or five days, you start to feel you start to learn how good you can feel and how frankly hooked you are on this stuff. Right. But some people that's too much for. So I also take them through a step by step process that they can take if they want to go more gradually. But I agree, often people will say, you know, I'm addicted to sugar or yeah, but I've got a sweet tooth. You know what? We've all got a sweet tooth. We crave sugar. But if your norm is to have sugar in your cereal, even if you're not adding sugar, that the inbuilt sugar in your cereal and your bread that you have in your sandwich at lunchtime, potentially in some of those

• 1:54:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  breads, and your ready made pasta sauce in the evening, right? Your body gets used to sugar, your taste buds adapt to what you're giving it. I remember a few years ago, when I used to drink tea, when I first started drinking tea, I had sugar in it. I remember giving it up. The first few days, I couldn't stand the tea. This is awful. And then I got used to it. Three weeks later, I was at work and I picked up the wrong cup of tea and it had sugar in it. And I had to spit it out because uh uh something that I could have drunk three weeks previously now felt horrendously sweet to me because our taste buds adapt. Yeah, I've had the same experience. So I I do feel that it's much better to have a period of, let's say, two weeks where you go cold turkey. Yes, you will may well go through some withdrawal symptoms.

• 1:55:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. People don't like to hear that. People don't like to hear that, but you know, we can willpower things for a week or two, right? You know, maybe for four to six weeks, that's harder, but we can willpower for a week or two. Most people can. My big tip for that, not only for that, my big tip in general for making lifestyle change. If people are serious about lifestyle change, no matter what that is, I would say make your home a safe zone, right? If you're trying to avoid certain foods, do not bring them into the house. And and the reason is because In the 21st century, in most places now, if you step outside your front door, you're having to exercise willpower everywhere you go, right?

• 1:56:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  You wanna fill up petrol or gas in your car, right? You've got to walk past all the junk in the petrol station. You wanna go to coffee, right? You know, in the UK, it's like this, you wanna buy coffee, you stand in line, right? You walk past all the panachocolas, all the pastries, all the muffins. You may well have mentally thought, right, I'm gonna say no. You go to pay, the barista will then say to you, hey, sir, would you like a panachocola with that? You know, you're constantly being questioned and pushed. So I'm saying that's gonna be hard.

• 1:56:59Rich Roll?

  No, and yeah, ultimately, willpower is going to fail you over time.

• 1:57:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so don't use up your willpower in the house, right? I know you will come back one day tired, stressed out, underslept, right? And you will crave something sweet. And this happened to me a few weeks ago. I was, you know, going around the country, talking about the book, talking to people, trying to promote health. I was exhausted, right? Sitting there at home, I really feel like something's sweet. I open the cupboards. It's nothing, there's olives, there's nuts. I don't feel like olives and nuts at the moment. And you know what? After a little while, that craving goes.

• 1:57:33Rich Roll?

  You're pissed for a minute and then you're like.

• 1:57:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly, but that's, but that's it. But if you had, if I had that, that, that bag of potato chips then, I would have smashed through it. Because that's how I felt and I really feel that it's such a key point. Control the environments that you can control. You're just, you're setting yourself up for winning. I talk about these, these little glutes exercises that I do with a lot of my patients that really helped me get rid of 10 year history of backache. I do three to four minutes of them a day. Do you know why I do it? I wake up, have a downtime in the morning, I very mindfully and particularly weigh out my coffee beans. I, I sort of, I weigh it all out, a little bit obsessed with it. I pour the water in and then my timer goes on for four minutes.

• 1:58:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  And as the coffee's brewing, my step is there in the kitchen and I do three minutes of glute exercise. So it's inbuilt into my, you know, I keep the stepper in the kitchen, right? Sure, my wife's not a huge fan that it lives in the kitchen, but the point is you've got to set these things up so that you can make the lifestyle change easy. It ain't that hard, man. Honestly, it's not that hard.

• 1:58:41Rich Roll?

  Right. The, the teachable kind of takeaway is construct your environment to be conducive to making the healthy choice. And that's, you know, what you do in your home is kind of a microcosm version of what Dan Buettner talks about in the macrocosm. Like he always is saying, look, you know, we can browbeat people into trying to exercise and eat well, but ultimately you're not going to really solve the problem on like a civic level, on a social level, until you create infrastructures that are conducive to that. You have bike paths and you make sure that there are no, you know, terrible foods in the schools, like all this stuff, so that everything is sort of out of reach. It's inconvenient to make the unhealthy choice and everything is set up to be conducive to driving you towards

• 1:59:26Rich Roll?

  making that healthy choice. And you can do that in your home. And to the extent that you can control your environment at work or at play, whatever, you know, you have the ability to control, that's going to ultimately pay big dividends long term.

• 1:59:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. That's the key, right? But we look at these blue zones and I don't feel, you know, Dan would clearly know better, he spent a lot of time out there, but I don't feel that these guys are necessarily trying to be healthy.

• 1:59:56Rich Roll?

  They're trying to do anything. Their environment is just, yeah, their environment is just conducive to them living long because they have to be moving and they're, they're just living proximate to their family members and they're a part of a faith community. Like it's all just set up to promote that without them having to give it a second thought.

• 2:00:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  They don't need to go to the gym.

• 2:00:12Rich Roll?

  They're not going to the gym.

• 2:00:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. They're just to get around, to get their food, to go and to do whatever they need to do. They need to walk. They're, they're doing this stuff. And that's why I think overall, there are two pieces here. One is the education piece, right? Okay? The education piece is, you know, books like yours, books like mine, so many great books out there to try and help people understand what they might be able to do. But that's only one part of the piece, right? One part of the puzzle. The other part is the environment. Right? Ultimately, the only time we're going to get the real public health gains that are going to transform your country, going to transform my country are when there is infrastructure set up so that people find it easy to make those choices.

• 2:00:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  That, you know, I, I, I posted a photo of this recently on my Instagram, you know, I was in London on the underground and I was in a station and it was, I think, two sets of escalators. And then in the middle, there was a set of stairs. Nobody on the stairs, everyone on the escalators. And again, I, I try and always take the stairs where I can.

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  Always take the stairs.

• 2:01:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And again, I'm not, again, I'm not trying to sort of sit on my high horse.

• 2:01:21Rich Roll?

  I know. How dare you?

• 2:01:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I really not, I get it, right?

• 2:01:24Rich Roll?

  You think you're so much better.

• 2:01:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I really don't. I genuinely don't, man. Honestly, it's not my, it's not my thing that I, but you see it when people come off a, you know, I flew in to LA a couple of days ago. And you get off, you go through customs and everything, and then there's those stairs to the, to the luggage claim hall. And there's an escalator. Nobody's on the stairs.

• 2:01:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've just been sat on.

• 2:01:45Rich Roll?

  I just did that last week. I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 2:01:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've been sat on our butts.

• 2:01:48Rich Roll?

  I was the only one on the stairs.

• 2:01:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, we've sat on our butts for 12 hours. And, and it's easy because we're tired from the flight. It's easy to sit on the escalator, right? And I get it. And again, I'm not criticizing people for doing that, but this is the point about the environment. Even if there was a sign at LAX, right? And we know there's good studies that show in workplaces, if you put a sign on the lift, if you put a sign there that, have you thought about taking the stairs? Yeah, there's a UK paper, I'll send you the link. It's really, it's incredible. It makes a difference. You just get people thinking. It makes a difference, right? I gave.

• 2:02:22Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 2:02:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I gave, um, so my UK publisher Penguin, right? So a few months ago, I gave them a wellbeing talk. The whole Penguin in London, I went to talk to them about the four pillars, basically. And they, their offices are on the eighth floor of the building. So every time I've gone there, I get escorted up there. Everyone takes you to the lift. And at the end, I made them a challenge. I said, guys, look.

• 2:02:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Obviously, you guys personalize this to your own lives, but there's an opportunity here. You all work on the eighth floor. You've all been at this talk. It's much easier to make change in groups and communities together. What if, those of you who were able to, you know, what if from tomorrow morning, not next week, not next January, what if from tomorrow morning, you all try to help each other take the stairs each day? You know, how would that be? And there was a, you know, there was a, there was a mixed reaction, a little bit, but people are like, okay, you know, that sounds pretty reasonable. Well, I tried this, right? The next day, all of them took it. All of them took it. Okay? A hundred percent of the people who attended. Four months later, eighty-five percent of them were taking it four times a week.

• 2:03:33Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good. I would have thought the attrition would have been higher.

• 2:03:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really?

• 2:03:38Rich Roll?

  No, I would, the drop off.

• 2:03:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Rich Roll?

  Meaning, yeah.

• 2:03:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, again, I was surprised, but, but that goes, that, that plays, that, that really teaches us how, how much of a role community plays, because if it's left up to an individual, that, hey, you go out for lunch and you have to come back and you say, ah, let's take the lift. What if your colleague says, yeah, I know, but why don't we just take the stairs? Right? When you do it in a group together, you start to make those changes. And I've, I've got emails from so many people in Penguin telling, hey, I didn't realize the impact it had. I've, I feel better about myself. I'm more productive in the afternoon. My relationship with my wife is better since I started doing that. I'm sleeping better. And I'm not kidding you, this is not me exaggerating how powerful these changes are. It's these little changes, bit by bit, these small changes become our new habits.

• 2:04:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  These new habits become our health. You've got to start somewhere and it doesn't matter, you know, they, these guys won't change in their diets. Right? All these guys did, right, was take the stairs together four times a week. It's eight blocks of stairs.

• 2:04:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And people are emailing saying all these kind of great benefits. And what that does, that then makes them feel better, then they want to make a dietary change. Or then they think, you know, I wonder what else I could do. Maybe this fifteen minutes of me time isn't all woo-woo. Maybe I can actually do this. And, and that's why I'm, I'm passionate, say, one-on-one with someone, I will try and find a spot that I can really connect with them, where I think, okay, you know, and find something that they can agree with, you know, agree to with me. The, the difficulty I had with writing a book is I really believe in a personalized approach. So I thought, how, how the hell do I write a book for the general population? That personalizes it. And the way I've tried to do it is by give people options,

• 2:05:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  give people so many options, real life options, right? Not that I fabricated, but that I have seen over nearly 20 years that patients have reported back telling me, this works in my life, right? Not what the the research paper says, yeah, that's all in there, right? People want to read the research, I can give them that. But what I think I'm most proud of is that this book is making people want to make lifestyle change because they think, yeah, I can do that. Wow, I relate to that person he's just told me about. Man, I'm going to start there. And it's been out for a few months in the UK and it's just, it's, it's really transforming the way people are thinking about health, you know, the four pillar framework is almost,

• 2:06:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  it won't quite go as far as saying it's in common parlance yet, but a lot of people are talking about it. A lot of doctors, a lot of healthcare professionals, a lot of nutrition professionals are raising the concepts in their little 10 minute consultation and then giving them the book. I had a psychiatrist contact me last week, a psychiatrist saying, hey, Dr. Ch, can you talk to your publishers? I've actually bought 30 copies of your book and I've given them to 30 of my patients, but is there any way we can get a discounted rate? Right? Because this is not just about type 2 diabetes and obesity. This is about mental health problems, this is about gut symptoms, this is about migraines, insomnia, depression, you know, it's about all these things. These are the chronic diseases. This is what I'm seeing day in, day out as a doctor.

• 2:06:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this is what I'm seeing, that frankly, a one pill solution, it ain't working. For the book, these people, they ain't working. And I'm sorry to go on, I've just, I know this works, I've seen this work. And I just want people to give it a shot, give it a chance.

• 2:07:00Rich Roll?

  The beauty of it is the accessibility and, and, and, and the fact that the ask is so digestible. It's like, what is the, what is the one thing that you can change? What's the tweak that doesn't take up any time and doesn't cost any money? That can ignite you and get you engaged in your life in a different way? And allowing that person to explore that, take ownership of it and go on their journey.

• 2:07:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:27Rich Roll?

  So the call, the really the call to action, and we got to, we got to land this plane. The call to action to everybody listening is, you know, what does that change for you? What is that, what is that one small thing that you can agree to? That can begin to catalyze that shift?

• 2:07:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, absolutely. It really is about that one thing. That's the start. And, you know, I mean, I don't know, Rich, what would be the one thing be for you?

• 2:07:51Rich Roll?

  I think for me, I mean, there's a whole, there's a litany of areas where I could use some improvement. But I think, you know, I have challenges around eating food late at night that I know negatively impacts my sleep. I have issues about turning the devices off, you know, within a given timeframe before going to bed. Those are two big ones. And I have a tendency to push myself too hard in, in work and in play. That leaves me depleted. And so I don't carve out, I get uncomfortable when it comes time to carving out like relaxation and reflection time.

• 2:08:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And I'm not dissimilar to that, if I'm honest. I mean, I've recently, particularly since I've looked at all the circadian within research from, from, excuse me, from California on, you know, not eating too late at night, which is just incredible. I've really tried to limit that, but I struggle to carve out time for myself. I will sometimes, you know, particularly when traveling and your time zones are all off.

• 2:08:54Rich Roll?

  You're all messed up.

• 2:08:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  You start looking at devices. But I wonder, I mean, I know you're interviewing me, but I'm just, I can't, it's like this whole, what I do in a consultation is I say, well, okay, these are things you're struggling with. Perhaps I can also commit to something at the same time. And maybe for the next seven days, we can sort of make a commitment to each other. We're gonna try and do this one thing. And I have done that with patients before. So if you want, I'm happy to.

• 2:09:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What are we gonna commit to here?

• 2:09:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  What about devices before bed? I mean, how do you feel about that?

• 2:09:26Rich Roll?

  I can do that.

• 2:09:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  What do you reckon? What's achievable?

• 2:09:29Rich Roll?

  Achievable. Um, 90 minutes before bed.

• 2:09:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  You think 90 minutes?

• 2:09:35Rich Roll?

  I think I could do that.

• 2:09:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah?

• 2:09:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's what I call a no tech 90. Are you, are we gonna do it?

• 2:09:39Rich Roll?

  We're gonna do it.

• 2:09:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, I will also commit to a no tech 90.

• 2:09:42Rich Roll?

  Is it doable for you?

• 2:09:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is. I think so. You know, it's, I went through a really good patch a couple of months ago. I was doing it all the time. And then I've fallen into a few bad habits, but this has renewed me. This has been like, okay. I made a commitment to Rich, I'm gonna do it, so I think I can do it as well.

• 2:09:56Rich Roll?

  All right, we'll check in with each other.

• 2:09:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and anyone who's listening and wants to let us know if they can do something as well, they should let us know, right?

• 2:10:02Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, for sure. Like, well, yeah, why don't we make it a hashtag or something?

• 2:10:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, hashtag no tech 90.

• 2:10:08Rich Roll?

  No tech 90. All right, that is, there you go, no tech 90.

• 2:10:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let us know when you hear this, let us know how many people are doing it, not in the 90 minutes before bed, do it the next morning.

• 2:10:17Rich Roll?

  Right, cool. Um, final question, and then I'll let you go. Uh, and I ask this of, of all doctors that come on the show. If you woke up in a parallel universe and you had become an American citizen and been appointed to become surgeon general, what, uh, what changes do you put in place?

• 2:10:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know what, I should have prepared an answer like this, I've heard your podcast so many times, and I have just not, so, um.

• 2:10:45Rich Roll?

  I mean, on a, on a kind of, whether it's regulatory or legislative, like, what kind of systemic changes would you like to see in health or the practice of medicine?

• 2:10:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  I would say that culturally, I'd like legislative changes that prioritize health. So I would like it to be almost in legislation that schools and hospitals don't sell junk food. Right, don't stock junk food.

• 2:11:13Rich Roll?

  Let's start there.

• 2:11:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Even that would be transformative. And, and another, I guess, systemic change would be to really push companies and this culture, particularly, I think you have it in America more than any other country, this, you know, this work hard, constantly be on call, always be available on your phone, always be available. We need to take a leaf out of like a German company, I think Volkswagen did this recently, where their employees and physically cannot access their emails in the evenings, weekends, and on holiday time, they're just locked out. Right? And again, it may not be Volkswagen, I think it is, but one of the German companies, and it's very common in Europe now for this to be implemented. I think that would be a huge thing in very America, if that corporate culture would change where we accept, hey, you're going home now.

• 2:11:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  I do not expect, my boss does not expect me to answer an email till 8:30 tomorrow morning when I'm back at my desk. I think even that, because I think many people have got that expectation. They don't want to lose their job, they're like, oh, I need to reply to my boss. Even those small things have a huge impact.

• 2:12:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful, man.

• 2:12:18Rich Roll?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:12:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Rich, the pleasure's been mine. I'm just such an incredible honor for me to be here. You know, 5,000 miles away, I'm going up and down the country on the train to London. I'm often listening to your podcast. I'm often learning a lot from what you glean from your guests. So I just want to thank you for the opportunity to come and talk to myself. Thank you.

• 2:12:36Rich Roll?

  Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's very cool to hear. Excited for you. Excited for the new book. The book is in the UK. It's The Four Pillar Plan. You can see it here on video. And in the US, they have changed the title. It is How to Make Disease Disappear. Why'd they change the title?

• 2:12:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  They've Americanized it. It's got to be more-

• 2:12:56Rich Roll?

  It's a totally different cover, the whole thing.

• 2:12:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  The content's the same.

• 2:13:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the content's exactly the same. So depending upon where you live, those are the titles. Pick it up wherever you buy fine books. And come back and talk to me sometime.

• 2:13:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'd love to.

• 2:13:10Rich Roll?

  Cool. If you want to connect with Dr. Chatterjee, what's the best place to do that?

• 2:13:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  We say Facebook or Instagram. It's @DrChatterjee. It's probably the best place to get hold of me. And we can have a conversation on there or possibly my podcast, Feel Better Live More Podcast. People can listen to that as well.

• 2:13:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can get that on iTunes and all the places.

• 2:13:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Get it on all the usual places, yeah.

• 2:13:29Rich Roll?

  Cool. Are you doing any public speaking events that are open to the general public?

• 2:13:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whilst I'm here?

• 2:13:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, well, by the time this goes up, is there like a schedule on your website or anything like that?

• 2:13:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, we're putting it on the website on DrChatterjee.com. It's also on my Facebook page, facebook.com/DrChatterjee. There's an events section there where all my events are there. So yeah, I love speaking to the public. So if you want to come along, please do.

• 2:13:54Rich Roll?

  Awesome. And final thing, are you going to take us out with a little guitar? We didn't even talk about the fact that you're a touring rock star.

• 2:14:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, man.

• 2:14:03Rich Roll?

  You like took a, you took like a sabbatical from your medical practice to tour with your band?

• 2:14:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  I did, yeah.

• 2:14:08Rich Roll?

  What kind of music do you play?

• 2:14:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so that was a long way back.

• 2:14:13Rich Roll?

  What's the name of your band?

• 2:14:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I did it under my own name, The Solo EP. It was under Rongen. It was when I, back in the days when I had long hair, you know, I did my-

• 2:14:21Rich Roll?

  Did you? Did you have long hair?

• 2:14:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  I did, yeah. I feel pressured. I don't know what to play. Do you want to, what I'm in-

• 2:14:27Rich Roll?

  It's up to you.

• 2:14:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I'm here in, I'll say what feels right. I'm here in the hills in California and yeah, this will be a cover. Is that good with you?

• 2:14:40Rich Roll?

  Good.

• 2:14:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Feel free to sing along, man. You don't want that.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  I've been wandering down the road, trying to lose some of my love. Seven women on my mind. For the one who want me to, the one who stole me at once, so she's a friend of mine. Take it easy, take it easy. Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  Lighten up, while you still can. Don't even try to understand. Just take a place to find your stand and take it easy.

• 2:15:34Speaker 02

  Well, I've been standing on a corner in Winston, Arizona. Such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, someday have a look at me. Take it easy, take it easy. Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

  Lighten up, while you still can. Don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand and take it easy.

• 2:16:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Put a jet lag in the voice.

• 2:16:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Man, I've not played that in a few years, Rich.

• 2:16:32Rich Roll?

  Alright, man, that was great. Little Eagles for California.

• 2:16:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, that's what I felt like.

• 2:16:38Rich Roll?

  Awesome, man, thank you.

• 2:16:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Until next time, buddy.

• 2:16:41Rich Roll?

  Alright, peace.

• 2:16:44Rich Roll?

  Multitalented, that Dr. Chatterjee, what can I say? Hope you guys enjoyed that. Hope you got a good education, a good overview on how you too can sidestep these chronic ailments, avoid becoming a statistic, and live a long, healthy life. Do me a favor, share your thoughts about this conversation with Rangan himself. You can find him on Twitter at DrChatterjeeUK, DrChatterjeeUK on Twitter, and also at DrChatterjee, DrChatterjee on Instagram. Make a point of picking up his new book, The Four Pillar Plan, if you're in the UK. If you're in the US or North America, pick it up. It's called How to Make Disease Disappear. I have links to those books in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for this episode.

• 2:17:28Rich Roll?

  And while we're talking about show notes, make a point of checking them out. We put a ton of time into them. They're essentially like a syllabus to extend your experience, your learning, your edification of this podcast episode beyond the earbuds, and they're awesome. If you would like to support my work, the easiest and best way is probably to share this show, whatever your favorite episode is, with your friends and on social media. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or on Google Podcasts on their brand new app, if you're an Android user. Leave a comment on the comment section on Apple Podcasts. All of this really just helps with the show's visibility, helps extend reach and audience, which helps me track and book the best guests for you guys. You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com/donate.

• 2:18:12Rich Roll?

  And I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for video work. This entire podcast is on YouTube. And for editing that video and for graphics. And theme music, as always, by Analema. Thanks, I love you guys. See you back here in a couple of days with a brand new Coaches Corner with Chris Howth. And until then, go easy on yourself, reduce that stress, eat right, sleep well, move much, and love more.